4
26
Nov

Don’t Let Newspapers Die… ?

There’s a group page on Facebook called “Don’t let Newspapers Die” that everyone keeps sending me invites to join. For some reason, I’ve been resisting.

This post is just me trying to corral my thoughts on this, and they will probably seem quite naive to you more seasoned newspaper folks. I don’t have a great perspective on our industry, and I could feel differently if I worked for a major metro hit hard by cuts and buyouts (or indeed if I was a victim of them myself.)

But from where I sit at my little desk at my small newspaper in the middle of the country, I feel like I’m on the cusp of something huge. Well, not just me but all of us who work for this fantastic, scary, rewarding industry. I feel the effects of the Big Names decrying the death of newspapers but I also see the excitement and innovation from people like Rob Quigley and Erica Smith that just thrills me and makes me want to be a part of this change.

Because it simply feels like change to me. Not death. I don’t have anything against that Facebook group. I believe its intentions are wonderful. And I’m truly sad for over 13,000 journalists, editors, circulation departments, online folk, classifieds people, pressroom people – everyone who’s lost their job.

It’s a scary time. But to me, it feels like evolution. I struggle with trying to contain my enthusiasm sometimes because I really want to be a part of whatever’s coming for us, and it’s hard to do when this Big Change slowly taking place has such a high price.

I am no one in particular, and I have no magic fix or wisdom to impart. I’ve just been thinking about all of this ever since I was invited to join that group.

0
18
Nov

Challenges of a smaller newspaper

The awesome, fantastic, cannot heap enough praise on these guys over at Old Media New Tricks shocked me by asking if I’d do a Q&A with them. Not used to that sort of thing. I’m just some chick, you know?

So, I did it and would love to send the little bit of traffic I get their way, so please check it out and leave them a comment – and look around the whole sit – it’s quickly becoming a must-read for me.

I’ve been kicking around the idea of starting a little site to sort of conglomerate tips, ideas and plans for plugging this social media thing into smaller papers. I read so much great info and wonderful advice on Twitter and on other blogs, but a majority of it seems geared toward larger papers and metros with a different newsroom dynamic. If anyone’s interested in collaborating with me on something like that, let me know.

2
12
Nov

Election Day Online Coverage Recap

So how did it go for a small newspaper like mine? Just peachy, thanks! Here’s a breakdown of what we did for online coverage:

1. Liveblogged. I opened up a Cover it Live session for readers to come in and talk about the election. Traffic was steady, and naturally, it really picked up when results began coming in. It was also quite a little test for me to work on keeping my mouth shut because as you can imagine, political discussions can get… heated. I never really talk about my personal views anyway, but I do have them. And keeping the conversation flowing was sometimes difficult to do when I couldn’t “weigh in” myself. Thankfully, we had enough people in it throughout the day that this didn’t happen to me too often.

2. We use Zope right now to publish our website and it’s kind of limiting on what you can do to make something the focus on the front page. I’m sorry lovely, talented GateHouse peeps but Zope just sucks. I feel very stifled with it. We needed a way to update election results quickly and because I had to do them manually, I wanted to have one place to put them. I could have continually updated a Zope story, but it’s just too clunky on the back end.

So our presentation editor created a nice graphic for one Zope story to be the featured story. In the subhead area, we put links to the liveblog (which could also be found by clicking into the Zope story), a link to votenebraska08.com (WordPress blog) which is where I put everything election-related I could think of and would also use for posting results, and I put a Twitter widget up for @theindependent so it was visible on the front page as well.

3. Tweeted throughout the day, and when I started in on posting the results, I would tweet the link to new updates on the votenebraska08 blog. I went this route because I couldn’t get any rss feeds or widgets to work with Zope apart from the Twitter widget. Still no idea why.

I used a lot of widgets on the blog like the Twitter election map, and MSNBC’s election widgets as well as Yahoo Pipes to pull in our own local stories as they were posted (the newsroom ‘Zoped’ stories throughout the evening.)

I was pasting results from the state results site, but man, that was tedious, so I just iframed the page into the blog. I know, iframe – but I was doing a lot of this on the fly and in the midst of a flurry of election results coming in.

My goal was to have one place for our readers to come to get results. Sure they could have gone to the county election commissioner’s office and the state websites to check, but that’s a lot of travelling around the web, refreshing pages over and over. I wanted them to come to the votenebraska blog to get everything they needed, and I used the liveblog to get them to tell me what they wanted to see.

For instance, one person came in and complained that we had no results up for other counties. They maybe could have been a little more polite about it, but I did discover that those results were just sitting in agate on our internal newsroom server and no one put them on the web. I wouldn’t have known that if I hadn’t needed to investigate. So I was able to clean them up and post them to the blog and appease this reader.

So that’s it really. We had great traffic (relatively speaking, I mean we’re a mid-size paper) to the blog and in the liveblog and got some wonderful feedback on Twitter:

Liveblog:
Total Unique Readers who pressed ‘Watch Now’: 376
Total Unique Readers who watched for over 1 minute: 289

Published Entries:
Writer Comments Published: 393
Reader Comments Published: 1014

Votenebraska08.com Stats:
1,917 pageviews in less than 24 hours.

Tweetback:
From: @mrbalcom – Thanks for all the hard work today and this evening. We want you to know how appreciated it is! Great job!!

That makes all the craziness worth it.