On with the list.

Tools I can’t live without:

Twitter. Obviously. Not only the service itself, but the huge assortment of third-party apps you can use with Twitter to really maximize its usefulness. Services like AudioBoo, Twitpic, Twitvid, and now Post.ly (which is quickly becoming my favorite) really make the Twitter experience – and the social experience – rich and satisfying.

I’ll break down these services:

AudioBoo: Simply the best option for posting brief audio clips online. Think of it as a micro-podcast. Uses include breaking news alerts, quick interviews, movie reviews, How-to tips (any kind of tips really), event coverage… the list goes on. Take a look at their Featured Boos to get a good idea of how folks are using it. The beauty of it is how easy they let you embed and share your Boos – if you can share or embed a YouTube video, you can share or embed a Boo.

You can Boo via their gorgeous iPhone app (it works just as well with an iPod Touch, but you’ll need Apple’s headphones/mic combo to do so.); You can upload or record a Boo right from your PC, and they now offer an app for the Droid as well (from reading the user reviews there, the app may need some tweaking still.) I love AudioBoo.

TwitPic: This service is a bit more subjective, depending on what you’ve got for a cell phone. Those of you with a spiffy smartphone have a lot of photo options such as YFrog or Tweetphoto. Personally, I hate YFrog because of its slow loading times, sometimes photos don’t load, and the site is too “busy” for my tastes.

For my part, I adore TwitPic. It works with any phone that takes photos, is as easy as emailing to a special address, and can handle large bandwidth loads well these days. I have a Virgin Mobile pay-as-you-go phone. I’d love a Droid or iPhone, but right now, both are cost-prohibitive for me. But, my little Virgin phone has served me well. I’ve used it extensively on vacations, for everyday ‘OMG look at all the snow!’ pictures, and I’ve done a little reporting for the paper with it.

Twitvid: I cannot get over how simple it has become to get video out there so quickly. Twitvid is just one of a number of excellent services out there, such as Qik and 12Seconds and Posterous (more on Posterous in a bit). Twitvid happens to be easiest for me to use because again, I don’t have a spiffy-cool smartphone. For those of you lucky people who do, Qik is awesome because you can also freaking STREAM VIDEO right from your phone. How cool is that?

But I use my trusty Flip Ultra, and upload to Twitvid as soon as I’m back at my computer and bingbangboom it’s uploaded and out there. The website allows you to post from your camera, from your phone, you can email it, or record from a webcam, and the ability to share the videos across multiple platforms is a plus.

Cover It Live: I cannot say enough wonderful things about Cover it Live. I’ve had so much fun with this amazing software for a long time now and tried many different ways to make it useful for my paper. It’s perfect for covering breaking stories, interviews, debates, live events (similar to radio doing ‘remotes’ on location), Q&A’s, and really just look at their site for more examples.

My newspaper’s owners require us to moderate the hell out of everything which can be a huge hindrance. But Cover It Live makes this dead easy without making people feel like they’re being moderated. The producer sees each comment before it ‘goes live’ and can choose whether or not to let it through. If a participant is trusted, the producer can allow them to comment unmoderated.

Cover It Live has so many features that will rock your socks. Feed in Twitter updates via user or hashtag, stream live video, you can drop ads in, upload photos into the chat, polls, a newsflash/scoreboard feature, replays, live editing (to fix all those pesky typos on the fly), and so much more. Here is the full feature list. Seriously, if I had to recommend one service (apart from Twitter ) it would be Cover it Live.

Posterous: This website is really amazing. As of today (January 21st, 2010) it has gotten even better with a new edition that I will talk about in just a moment. First, Posterous makes posting a blog, a video, an audio clip, or pictures so simple my grandmother could do it. Ok, maybe not my grandmother because she’s never touched a computer, but really, any technophobe would be able to handle this. All they need to know how to do is send an email with attachments.

That’s the beauty of Posterous. It magically takes your email attachments, be they audio, video or JPGs or just plain old text and turns them into slick blog posts which you can then share across a whole slew of popular platforms.

For a newsroom, Posterous is turning out to be an ideal way to gather user-generated content from your readers. By giving them a special email address associated with your paper’s Posterous site, readers can simply email you their bad weather/cutest puppy/sports photos and videos. You have full moderation control as well. The only drawback I have found with Posterous so far is that because it’s email, be prepared to deal with spam.

Today, Posterous announced the addition of Post.ly which lets you easily upload and tweet your multimedia stuff. Fantastico!

Facebook: Ahhh Facebook. Forget MySpace. Blech. A lot of people have a love/hate relationship with Facebook. But for the purposes of a newspaper, it’s a good idea to be where your readers are no matter what the platform is.

Send your paper’s Twitter updates to Facebook. Let people share photos, videos, or links with you there. Join in on any comment threads that get started. Just like Twitter, the most important thing you can do is interact with your fans/friends/readers.

Don’t have anyone you can spare to manage your Social Media aspect for the paper? Spread it out among the staff. But this is important – don’t neglect it or ignore it if you don’t understand it. It will only hurt you in the end.

Tools that would rock in the newsroom:

A smartphone of some kind: I think every newsroom should equip their staff with an iPhone/Droid/Nexus. One of my coworkers just got a Droid (iPhones are not available in our area) and we’re both convinced that it is the single greatest tool a journalist could have.

As it is right now, I’ve got to carry my Flip, my cell phone and my iPod Touch which normally isn’t a big deal, but as I discovered on a vacation last year, juggling all of that while trying to capture a moment is hard. One phone to rule them all, I say!

Publish2: One of the best ways to collaborate with fellow journalists and aggregate links and stories for your readers. It’s a wonderful tool that I’m having trouble getting my newsroom interested in.

Just take a look at the sheer number of journalists you can collaborate with: P2 Directory

Some of the tools you get access to include a fabulous WordPress plugin, a browser bookmarklet to make sharing easier, widgets, and access to the Publish2 Ning network where you can bounce ideas, ask for help, share your own knowledge with so many journalists it’s not even funny.

Tools I wish I had access to:

iSites: Newspapers need to get on the ball with a decent smartphone app. I know the bigger newspapers have either paid a developer or have one in-house that can create gorgeous apps. I am jealous of them. But for smaller market papers who do not have that kind of budget, iSites feels like a decent solution. There are similar sites, such as DoApps.com, but after sifting through their blog I could find no pricing information whatsoever. That tells me it’s likely very expensive (and if not, why not post your pricing in a visible spot?)

iSites will create an iPhone  app, and beginning in early February according to their excellent live support person, a Droid app right away, and take care of the submission headaches for you. For a flat fee of $25, You get a lovely app fed by your RSS feeds. You can categorize by feed and if you wish to monetize it, you can pay a reasonable $99 per year fee and include AdMob in your App. I really like this solution and I’m hoping to get it approved for my newspaper.

Let me know in the comments what tools you love, what tools you wish you could use, and which ones would rock your newsroom!

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

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.

There was some pressure from above to do something with the show. Either change it up or kill it. We decided to do both. We could not seem to grow our viewer numbers. We needed big numbers to show advertisers to sell it and with the format of am:gi, (90 minutes every weekday, occasional guests, too much free-form conversation) we simply couldn’t get enough participants or replays to entice advertisers. The time involved for the two of us who ran the show every morning was another factor.

So we killed it. We killed it a lot.

But there were some awesome things that came out of having a daily conversation and we are now going to take those awesome things and spin them into four separate things that will be so awesome it might just make you explode with, well,  awesomeness.

First thing’s first: We love Cover it Live. We love it so much, we’re using it in all four new ventures. So big giant HURRAY for Cover it Live.

• Breaking comments. One of the ventures we are implementing right now. As some of you know, we’ve back and forth-ed on commenting for a long time. We simply can’t moderate every single comment as decried by our corporate owners because we simply don’t have the manpower. Also, the commenting system that comes with our software is… antiquated. But we really do want to have some form of commenting available. Our solution? We will embed a Cover it Live ‘chat’ on hot topic stories. The ‘talkers’, if you will. We’ll have one for Breaking stories, of course, but we’ll open up the conversation for severe weather, for example, as well. It will be moderated so we’ll remain in compliance with corporate policies, but we’ll at least be offering some way for our readers to engage and talk about a story.

• Live Coverage. Another “spinoff” of am:gi will be live coverage. Our highest replays ever came from the day George and I went to Husker Harvest Days. George manned am:gi,  I went roving around, sending pics from HHD to Twitter which fed into the show. We learned that the people, they like this! Hopefully with the help of the Verizon MiFi (ohpleaseohpleaseohplease) and Cover it Live, we will continue to be a presence at events such as Black Friday, Expos, and the biggie: the State Fair’s first year in GI next year. The MiFi will let us not have to worry about whether the event has wi-fi and allow us to be pretty flexible. Plus it’s just cool.

• Newsmaker Interviews. “Newsmakers” will be a spinoff of our guest segments from am:gi. We will do simple interviews and Q&A’s with people in our community who are in the news. We’re shooting for two per week. We will solicit questions from the community ahead of time (using email, a submission page, a Google Voice number to leave question) and during the show. The real value for this is in the replays and in the reverse-publishing.

• Ask the Independent. Ask us anything. We’ll find the answer for you. Need to know how to contact a City Council member? We’ll get you numbers. Want to know where the money to move the State Fair came from? We’ll get that info for you. We may not be able to help you find your socks, but we can tell you which color looks best with khaki trousers This show will be once a week and we’ll take questions via email, our Google Voice line, and a submission page on our website – oh and live during the show, time-permitting.

So those are our four spinoffs. The timesuck and manpower is lessened, but we feel the potential for advertisers is a lot bigger than it ever could have been with am:gi.

Don’t get me wrong, we loved am:gi and we met great people and discovered a little about what our community was talking about. But now it’s time to take those lessons and try the next thing. I’m very excited about these ideas.

The main thing we’ve learned is that we still enjoy it. Very important.

Over the months we have refined how we run it and we have tried several things to see what works and what doesn’t. It’s nice to have that sort of freedom. For instance, we moved our chat time from 9am-10:30 to 9:30am-11am. Yes, we go for a full 90 minutes. This may change over time, but we found that a shorter show sometimes hinders a discussion that’s just getting good.

I was asked recently for advice on how to run a daily CiL show, so here’s how we roll:

• We have two people run it each morning: a host, @georgeayoub, who is our senior columnist and me. I act as the ‘gatekeeper’ although I jump in and promote things, answer questions, provide links to stories we’re discussing, and a bunch of other things.
• We schedule guests as often as we can. We scored a bit of a coup when the mayor of Grand Island agreed to be a bi-weekly guest on the show and she’s been a real firecracker Other guests have included City Council members, educators, various board members, the Governor, a couple of state senators, and our own reporters. This week is Education Week on the show and we kicked it off with our education reporter as Monday’s guests, then we have three teachers for Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday from different grades and schools, and we’ll end the week with the Mayor.
• When you have a guest, take advantage of Cover it Live’s ‘Queue’ function. We spend the first 30 minutes of the show building up questions in the queue so they will be ready for the guest who arrives at 10am and answers them for 30 minutes. The final 30 minutes we will either carry on the discussion, or resume one that may have started before the guest arrived. We’ve discovered that very often, the guest will stay longer than the allotted 30 minutes and answer more questions. We love when that happens
• Our host will usually ask the guest the first question and ask them to tell us about themselves. Then we allow one question through at a time, allowing the guest time to answer thoughtfully. Sometimes this creates ‘dead air’ if the guest types slowly. But we fill in by letting the readers know some topics of upcoming questions, or reminding them of other things we’re promoting.
• When we don’t have a guest scheduled,  we try to have  a specific newsy topic to go over, but sometimes we do end up with a sort of free-for-all discussion on several topics. But that’s okay. Great discussions and good information can come out of that. So don’t be afraid of free-form days now and then.
• We do our best to keep our readers on topic. We’ve had several readers try to change the topic in mid-discussion by throwing out a ‘How about those Cubs’ type of comment. Of course, I don’t mean they want to talk about the Cubs, but often a reader has many trains of thought leaving the station at the same time and they try and drive all of them into our discussion at once. This is where gate-keeping and private messaging abilities built into Cover it Live comes in handy. Many times I will just send a quick private message to a reader asking them to try and stay on topic or tell them politely that we’ll move on to another topic if time permits.
• What about readers who get… worked up on a hot topic? Well, just put your jackboots on and moderate them. Try and let them know privately that personal attacks etc will get them nowhere, and failing that, simply ignore them. Try to keep your cool – not always easy to do – and be as polite as possible. Use your best judgment if you think a reader is getting out of hand.
• If a topic warrants, run a quick poll. Example: When the awesome John Hughes passed away unexpectedly, it came up in the show. So we ran a ‘name your favourite Hughes film’ poll which generated some nice, nostalgic discussion.
• Finally, archive, archive, archive. So many times we’ve wanted to go back and check something and our archive has been invaluable. Cover it Live offers an enterprise archiving system that you can use, but we had already set up amgishow.com. I just chucked up a WordPress site, used some plugins for the calendar/upcoming guests and I post each day’s show on there. We have learned that people who cannot be with us in the mornings will read the replay almost daily and it is much appreciated.

So what are we doing to generate revenue? Here’s where it gets a bit sticky. We want to have sponsors. Our numbers are better than when we started, and we’ve got street cred, and respect as being a good source of information. Feedback on it as been phenomenal and we are appreciated in the community. But our viewer numbers are slow to grow and I think it’s down to the time of day we’re on. Weekday mornings when most people are working isn’t conducive to growing a large audience. I don’t know how daytime TV does it. So it’s hard to “sell” us for sponsorship. We average over 800 viewers per week and some weeks are better than others.

Right now, we’re running a huge treasure hunt and giving away prizes each morning on the show using trivia and it has produced a spike in our numbers. So I’m wondering if we offer drop-in ads through a show for a lower price than say, a banner ad, and the sponsor also offers a gift card. I wonder if that would fly when the treasure hunt is over… Hard to say.

I think if this format was done in a larger market (and maybe it is, I’m not sure) than viewer numbers would be higher and sponsorships more likely.

People have told me that there is no time to do this sort of thing. An hour and a half out of a reporter’s day can be a lifetime. I don’t know what to say about that. We’re lucky to have someone like George on our staff. He’s well-known in our community, and we’ve got a small Online department that I live in so I can run the technical stuff. It’s a squeeze on our schedules, but somehow, we just made it a part of our day and it works.

So there you go. Next time someone asks me how we do this thang, I will be able to point to this post. Thanks for reading!

My main reservation – and forgive me George and Jack (semi-co-host) who may or may not read this – was the fact that we killed a daily newscast because it took too much time to do. For those two, a daily 90 minute chat would be even more of a time suck than our newscast ever was. But bless their cotton socks, they still wanted to try this.

My other reservation was the Troll Factor. The fellas have high hopes of our endeavour being a place for good discussion on the news topics of the day. A sort of coffeehouse conversation that the town mayor, or city council member may stop in to from time to time. As the longtime (and often long-suffering) admin of our forums and moderator of our story comments, I also know that the town crank might also show up and get everyone all riled up.

So it was with some trepidation that I got on board with the plan.

I’m happy to say that we’ve been doing the chat for two weeks now and it’s exceeded even my curmudgeonly expectations. We have had a troll or two, but because of Cover it Live’s method of previewing comments before they go live, we’re able to respond to them or squash them if we need to. But for the most part, the discussion topics have ranged from downtown improvement (a hot topic actually, requiring a couple days devoted to it), wind energy, the big State Fair move and other local stuff. It’s turning out to be exactly what George and Jack hoped for.

There’s been a learning curve though. Some things we’ve learned:

• Don’t have a bunch of staff in the chat talking to each other if you can help it. It can put people off from joining in.
• If you have do have a couple staffers in there keeping the flow of conversation going, try to coordinate your comments, either by yelling across the newsroom, or using the private message function in CiL. This will prevent them from making the same comment or asking the same question at the same time
• You should have someone acting as the ‘Gatekeeper/Greeter’. At the Indy, this is my job. I watch incoming comments and allow them through, watch for trolls, and also for regulars who have returned. The regulars get to post without moderation. If you’re new, I may have you wait for that privilege until I can be sure you’re not going to spout obscenities or drag the conversation off topic. I also try to welcome new people as they come in and make it feel comfortable for them to join the conversation (I know it can be intimidating for some people.)
• I also throw an ad into the chat every 20 minutes or so Right now we just have house ads, but we’re working on selling ads/sponsorship for this.
• Today, we had our first guests in to talk. I learned the best way to handle that is to not do any ‘allow posting without moderation’. Everyone had to be moderated first because 1. The font colour/format helps the guests see a new comment 2. allows me to let the guest(s) answer each question before seeing the chat flooded with other questions and 3. puts the kibosh on the trolls.
• Find a spot somewhere to archive all of the chats. For this case, I set up a quick and dirty WordPress blog to house them: http://grandislandblogs.com/amgi. This way, anyone – a regular perhaps – who missed it can go see the replay.
• Use the quick polls, twitter feeds, scoreboards, newsflash options, video feeds – all the bells and whistles Cover it Live offers because I’m telling you, they’re freaking awesome.
• If the discussion is on a topic in the paper that day, make sure you link to it in the chat a time or two. But also, don’t be afraid to “link out” of your paper’s site as well. It’s okay
• Try to keep each chat session to one or two topics, but it is okay to let the conversation flow naturally as well. No need to be a Topic Nazi.
• Set realistic goals for it, not lofty ones. Otherwise you set yourself up for disappointment. For example, don’t say, “Let’s aim for 300 unique readers by the second month.” Instead, aim for getting one guest in a week.
• Don’t be discouraged by slow days. Not every chat is going to fly. Persevere.

Our numbers have astonished us. For a small paper, we’re averaging about 75 unique readers a day, with 75% of them sticking around longer than a minute. Replays are growing each day as well.

Our newsroom is watching the chat every day as well. We learned that discussion generated in the chat led to some story ideas for reporters when they were in a budget meeting.

We also learned that our session on the local Downtown Business Improvement District issue caused one councilman to cast a ‘No’ vote on the issue after seeing the discussion.

Those two reasons alone make me reverse my position on the whole thing. I’m excited about it, all the way now Next week we will have a Senator in to discuss renewable energy and Nebraska’s Safe Haven law, and in April, we managed to get the governor to agree to join us. Very exciting!

I was tweeting updates as I could catch them (one thing we have to work on is a plan for coverage online. I tweeted info I could glean from overhearing the journos and editors in their huddles, and what I could nick out of Newsedit as the reporter worked on the story. Looking back on it, I wonder if I should have gone out to the protests too so I could tweet updates. But then, I’m not a trained journo. I’m just the online chick who fixes it when a reporter forgets his/her password.)

Anyway, the story ended up spilling into the rest of the week as passions escalated, and non-Muslim workers staged counter-protests. Our comments in each story we put up were going through the roof. It occurred to me that this would be a perfect time to open up a liveblog, using Cover it Live, and invite our readers to come and talk about this issue.

Ohmygosh Thursday was absolutely crazy. I ended up keeping that chat open (and moderating it) for 12 hours straight. Every time I tried to end it, people would come in and start the conversation over again. I also opened it back up on Friday – and while it was a little slower because the fury was dying down and everything was getting back to normal, I still had to wind up the discussion between several people at the end.

I was also able to get quick answers for readers wanting to know more info because I have the best access to the reporters covering the story. And to their awesome credit, they were quick to get back to me with answers.

What did I learn from the liveblog? Most surprising was that I could embed it in Zope Originally, I put it in my newsroom blog which is where people go to answer the daily poll. But I decided it needed to be more prominent, so on a whim, I embedded it as a story on the front of the site. Bingo.

Here are the final stats:

Total Blog Page Hits: 1310
Total Unique Viewers: 902
Avg. Unique Viewer Duration on Blog: 30 min.
Replays Viewed: 49

We used the Liveblog once a week during our Music Madness tournament to “ok” results. The stats above are three times better than all 6 weeks of MM liveblogging, and it was only open for around 20 hours total. That’s phenomenal.

Feedback included:

• Reporter coming back from District Court told me that all of the employees there were watching the chat with great interest, and asked him all about it.
• Late Thursday night, rumours were going around about a riot happening at the plant. The chat was still going, and I got a call from one of the copy desk editors who was watching the chat, and he wanted to let me know our reporter would have details about it online shortly. This is awesome to me because it means that maybe the newsroom will start thinking to include me in the loop when this happens. It means they were paying attention to the chat to see what readers were saying. That more than makes up for the disappointing meeting we had last week.
• Readers were actually disappointed when I told them I had to close it up Friday at 5pm.

I think the newsroom got a glimpse of an awesome tool in use for something more than just for fun. I think they could see the value in it. I think if I’m able to wow them now and then with things like this, my stubborn newsroom may just come around someday.