Stephanie Romanski

A while back, my coworker and Social Media enthusiast, Mark Coddington, asked me if I’d participate in a little podcast about making things like Twitter work in a small newspaper environment. We finally sat down to record it on December 18th and I’m really pleased with how it turned out. We had some really good discussion about things like making advice from the Big Boys in larger markets work for the little guys like us and how to get around issues with small staffs, how to make the moula, and what has and hasn’t worked for The Independent.

If you’ve got half an hour to kill, have a listen!

Check it out:

Download

Finally, a breaking news event that I don’t have to feel guilty for enjoying the traffic it brings us.

So, Nebraska and surrounding states were hit by a rather large snowstorm this week and because we had some warning it was coming, we planned some awesome online coverage.

I set up a live webcam using Ustream.tv that simply pointed out our front window onto part of downtown Grand Island and called it our SnowCam. It was on before the storm hit, during the storm, and is proving so popular with viewers from around the world (who turned out to be from the area. The farthest away I heard was a local’s daughter in Germany who enjoyed the cam) that I haven’t shut it off yet. To date, we’ve had over 10,000 viewers and UStream kindly featured us on their front page. Woohoo!

We also had a couple of guys who cam and had a little snowball fight in front of the cam. I was forewarned about it (though I still do not know who they were) and so recorded it and it’s now our second most-viewed video (the top viewed video is of a dog. The dog is awesome and deserves the top spot.)

Next we put up the always-awesome Cover it Live window on our front page where we fielded questions about closings, road reports and  fed all of our Twitter streams with photos and video. We opened up the #nestorms tag to allow readers from around the state to feed into the CiL conversation and we kept the chat going all day. We opened it up again the next day (after the storm had passed and the plowing had begun) and Jack Sheard and Scott Kingsley (Our presentation editor and photographer, respectively) jumped in Jack’s 4WD and drove around town sending Twitpics and road reports into the chat so people could get an idea of what had and had not been cleared. They also stumbled onto a backhoe that was engulfed in flames and got some great shots of that.

I solicited reader photos using Posterous (Thanks and props go to the ever-ahead-of-the-curve folks at the Austin-Statesman) and we got a few cool photos there. I also shot some video using my Flip and TwitVid.com of a couple of drives during and after the storm and shared them in the CiL show.

We had a lot of fun and the stats freaks among us gleefully (and guilt-free!) watched as the SnowCam’s viewers steadily climbed, as our Day One Cover it Live show climbed to over 1,600 views and 390 replays (phenomenal for a small paper like us. To put that in perspective, we were over the moon when our Black Friday CiL coverage got 590 view, our best day ever, until now.) and our Day Two show reached over 700 views.

These are the numbers we needed to be able to show our advertisers that our online coverage of stuff is worth sponsoring, and hopefully that will start happening.

On my way to Norfolk, Nebraska where I was going to be talking to folks in the Nebraska Tourism industry about Social Media, I had to pass through Clarks, Nebraska. I’m trying to find a way to write this post without coming across as a cheesy loser, but here goes.

As many might know, the founder of Twitter, Evan Williams, is from Clarks, Nebraska – population: 361 give or take.

I’ve been a sort of casual “fan” of Evan’s since I began using Blogger when it was still a part of Pyra Labs and I learned the founder was from Nebby. I say “fan” with quotes because I didn’t, you know, follow his every business move, but I loved Blogger and I love Twitter and I think it’s neat that Evan’s involved in both and I think it’s even neater that he’s from Nebraska (in fact, it’s one of the ‘hooks’ I use to try and interest my newsroom into using Twitter).

As I passed through Clarks, it really struck me that someone could come from this tiny tiny place and be innovative and successful. Oh sure, there are many well-known people who have come from small towns to make it big and I applaud them all, but Clarks is close to home. It sounds cheesy as hell, I know, but I had a little moment of inspiration driving through this small farm town.