Here is an email I sent out to everyone that, I swear, started off with just wanting to share a helpful link with them and keep Twitter in their minds:

This is an EXCELLENT resource for the newsroom and using Twitter to research, mobile tweeting, hashtags and more.

http://media.twitter.com/newsrooms

Some of you have Twitter accounts – even if you didn’t know it – and I have your login info and am available *anytime* you want to learn more about this important and really valuable tool. Come find me. And to those of you who don’t have an Indy Twitter account yet (like our awesome new photog), I’d be happy to get one set up for you.

Please consider learning more about Twitter and social media in general – I can sit with you one-on-one if you like. Lately, we are constantly getting scooped on Facebook and Twitter by other media outlets, and while I know it’s important to get the story for print, in today’s media, a breaking story is old by the time the reporter gets back in, writes the story and someone reads it before it’s posted online. Our readers are starting to turn elsewhere when something breaking happens.

Even just a quick tweet saying, ‘Accident at 281 and Webb – details online soon’ would help. We have to shift our thinking just a little bit if we’re going to stay relevant in the future. So that’s why I might seem a little aggressive in this email. I may go into nag mode until I get all of you using Twitter, even just a little

I hit ‘send’ before I could talk myself out of it and for the rest of the day, I went from frustration to elation when one of the reporters I believed was the least interested in social media approached me and told me that her concern wasn’t the technology – it was that she felt she didn’t have access to the technology. Blew. My. Mind.

It’s something I bemoan a lot here. I believe every reporter should be provided with a smartphone – or at the very least, access to a smartphone to take out in the field when needed. We managed to get a Droid that is used by our online reporter/videographer and he often tweets as @girightnow when he’s out. And that is fabulous and that is a LOT more than some small newsrooms get. But some of my journalists are using Razr phones with no texting plans. I mean seriously. Razrs. And while it’s awesome that we have our online guy, we also need our beat reporters to be more involved in tweeting.

So we gave the Droid to the reporter going to a board meeting today to see if she could manage a few tweets – so far she is rocking it and I am over the bloody moon. As I talked with my boss about this yesterday, I learned that we need to make sure the reporters will actually use the technology before we go out and splash a bunch of cash on it. We’ve been burned before (I’m looking at a dusty Zi8 video camera we bought in hopes of having the reporters grab it and go all the time) and so this time, we’re not going to get all excited and get ahead of ourselves until we’re sure they are on board.

The last thing I learned was that our paper’s Twitter/Facebook follower count has reached 1/5th of our print subscribers. That doesn’t include our “audience reach” of course, just the hard number of current subscribers, but that fraction also blew. my. mind.

I think we are finally past the “I don’t get it” stage or the “Who cares what they had for breakfast” stage. We’ve moved onto the “I need the technology first” stage. They get that Twitter and Facebook aren’t frivolous and unimportant. Now they just need to learn how to use them to their advantage.

Today I have two three reporters tweeting – one who had never done it before, and one who usually has trouble getting it to work for him. Today is a good day.

But one of the reasons I justified spending some hard-earned dosh on it was that I hoped it could potentially be useful at work. My publisher has been talking about trying to get a couple for the newsroom and for advertising and so I thought, if I have one and bring it to work with me everyday, it’s usefulness would become apparent.

So far it’s great at telling me the weather. And testing site designs and how they look on it. I’ve been able to show it off a little and everyone agrees it’s a pretty gorgeous little machine, but so many keep referring to it as ‘Steph’s toy.’

At home, yes it’s been something of a toy while I play Plants vs. Zombies on it or watch some Doctor Who on Netflix while I’m on the treadmill, and my goodness, AirPlay is a brilliant app. But here’s a few ideas I have for making this more of a tool at work as opposed to a toy:

• Our mobile web reporter could use it to make submitting stories on the road easier than typing it out on the Droid.
• Any reporter attending city council or school board meetings can take notes easily without lugging a laptop in and with a 3G iPad, no need to worry about available wifi.
• Ad reps can eliminate the need for paper-wasting flyers and packets by keeping various presentations on the iPad to show advertisers.
• Online demos and ad banner prototypes can be shown easily and impressively.

I would love to hear from other newsrooms out there that are either using iPads or thinking about it to find out how they’re being used or to get more ideas on how to use them. Comments are open- Russian spammers piss off please, I’m sick of you.

- written with the WordPress iPad app which is really awesome

I won’t go into all of the red tape reasons we were dragging our heels because it doesn’t matter anymore. We no longer have a videographer. Now we have a mobile web reporter. Essentially, we turned our videographer into our reporter for the web. Do you have any idea how much I’ve wanted such a person in the newsroom? Not only that, but we worked out a way to get him a Droid X, taught him how to turn it into a wifi hotspot and now he can get out there, shoot photos and video and write a story for the web in his car, pop me a text and I can get it edited, photos/video added and have something online before any other news service around here can say, “I didn’t know about that.”

What this means for The Independent is we’ll have a fresh, regularly updated website all day long.I’m so excited I could spit.

Our new mobile web reporter has some learning to do, mind you. I want him to not rely on his expensive video camera all the time that requires a lot of editing/producing time and just grab some video with the Droid for a story that we can put in as plain old raw video. People click that stuff. They don’t need something slick and produced with transitions and title tags all the time. I want him to open up his UStream app and air it live while I embed that into a story and direct readers to it from Facebook and Twitter.

But he’s still learning how the phone works, and for now he’s doing a good job of getting out to stories we might not always cover because we’re shorthanded (like most newsrooms I know.) He needs to be able to find stories on his own now, but he’ll learn that too.  We’ll get there, and I’m so excited about this.

Not only that, I had a meeting last week regarding our direction with Social Media, which is my forté. I am not going to talk much about it just yet, but I will just say that my publisher is *extremely* taken with what the Journal Register is up to….

We had a brief period of excitement when it looked like we might be able to finagle a couple of Droids for newsroom use and I had visions of live tweets from pressers and games and breaking stories. I had fantasies of reporters who finally had that big old light bulb go off when they saw how much their work is enhanced by using a Droid and how effective Twitter is at communication.

Well that got squashed pretty quickly in corporate red tape and well, we have no droids and my newsroom is once again too busy getting their stories in for print (and web, often as an afterthought) to fuss with Twitter. I’m back at square one and it’s killing me pretty good. I just don’t know if I can handle starting at the bottom of the hill again. I’m like the Sisyphus of Social Media. And in the meantime, I see our competitors leaving us in the dust because they’ve embraced it.

Let me just say here that I believe the staff here is phenomenally talented at what they do, and have been doing for years. They’ve got experience, great contacts in the community, they’re creative and they are some of the best. I just wish I could find a way that isn’t patronizing or insulting to reach them and switch on that light bulb so that they see what I’m trying to give them is another way to enhance their work, their careers, and at the same time, make a lot of it easier. I want to help, but instead I feel sometimes that I’m seen as a brick wall they can’t be bothered to climb.

Having said that, we still need a solution to the problem of regularly updated content for the web. We still need to be using Twitter and Facebook and Storify and every tool we can get our hands on to make my newspaper THE place to get your local news.

To that end, we’ve been kicking around the idea of just sending me out with the reporters to do that stuff. It makes sense in a, “Why didn’t we think of that before?” kind of way.  We’re not going to change minds in the newsroom by constantly hammering away at them. Ever been lectured by a parent? Ever tuned them out while they lectured? That’s what happens in a newsroom – well mine at least. So let’s just do it ourselves. I’ve been live-tweeting stuff for years. I can juggle my iPhone, various apps (hello AudioBoo!), cameras and finesse wi-fi in the strangest places. So let’s stop moaning about a newsroom that doesn’t “get it” and just show them. They can still whip out their pencils and digital recorders and write their stories when they get back, and meanwhile, I’ll have continual updates going out instantly, and then Storify them when *I* get back.

I will either piss off my comrades, or they will get to see how this stuff works in action and maybe have a light bulb moment.

What? Why haven’t we done this already?

Well, it’s not like we don’t know how to cover breaking news. We do that pretty well. But it’s time to create a plan that includes social media and some staff that our 140 year-old newspaper is still getting used to using.

For example, we’re ditching our cludgy, GL-2 cameras that require tapes and take two to three hours post-production and switching to Kodak Zi8s with external microphones. We will eventually have three or four (more if we can get them) of these available to the newsroom and we will train and expect our staff to grab them when heading out on a story. Not every story will need video, but the reporters are the best judge as to which stories WILL require video to enhance them and it needs to become second nature to them to remember to grab a camera. We’re lucky to have a couple people in-house who can take that video, edit and upload it for them, but in my opinion, reporters would be smart to learn how to do this themselves. The Zi8s and Moviemaker (or iMovie) are really all you need to get something online quickly.

Our recent experiment with live tweeting has taught some of us how to use an amazing tool like the Verizon Droid to manage a whole new kind of news story. We can’t afford to buy our reporters each a Droid, but we *might* be able to invest in at least two that will be designated for newsroom use. In my wildest dreams, I want every reporter to have a Droid (or iPhone, but those aren’t available here) because I still believe they are one of the best tools a reporter could have in their arsenal. So, I’ve been tasked with coming up with a Breaking News plan that goes from news tip to the very last update. I’ve found a few suggestion online, but it’s pretty sparse. So I’m going to try my luck again with a little crowdsourcing and ask, maybe even beg for advice and suggestions from my fellow awesome journos.

• Do you have a plan?
• What do you include in it?
• Who do you include in it?
• Do you post all updates within one story with timestamps or post multiple stories each time there is an update?
• Do you have someone “corral” all incoming information?
• Do you flow everything through an editor before anything gets posted?
• Do you post “as-is” and make corrections later?
• How big does a story have to be before this plan goes into effect?
• How do you handle the front page of your site? (Does the template change etc.)
• Do you have a general plan or do you tailor it to your organization? Which is best?

Any help would be much appreciated. Comments are open!

I sit next to the scanner. Always tuned it out when I sat further away, and I still kind of do, but when something is happening, I catch it faster. I can also sit at my desk and tune into the conversation happening right now between the City Editor and one of the reporters and try and see if it’s something that can go online. Once I got past some initial clumsy hurdles (software story prioritizing system is antiquated and difficult), I find myself slipping into the flow much better now. I’m losing the shyness that keeps me from timidly asking a photog for art to go with a story. Without going into personal detail, shyness is one of the things I worry most about in this new role of mine.

In what’s become something of a routine, the City Editor will come out of the 10am budget meeting with a story for web right away and will email me some other stories that are coming up later in the day for web. It’s working nicely, but I think it will be even better when I can start going to the meetings myself (time conflict presently with our daily morning chat “show”) . I’m hoping to be able to sift through the list myself and be able to choose. I never felt like I could “be the decider” before but I do now.. It’s really weird to me and hard to explain, but I’m totally digging the new digs

Also, really enjoying being able to nag people into tweeting stuff

Yeesh.

Yes, I do know how to run the software and how to tweet but man, for some reason I was just nervous as all get out. So stop telling me horro stories people My journos are lovely people who won’t suddenly become evil just because I’m going to ask them for a few more updates

In fact the second reporter I asked for an update was just brilliant when she very kindly explained why she’d prefer we hold off putting it on the web until just before 5pm. I was unfamiliar with the story and didn’t realize it was something she really had to work at to get the information, so she wanted to be sure it was our scoop.

I think the journalists here want every facet of The Independent to be successful, including the web. I feel better now that I have some direction on what I can and can’t do during the morning budget meetings, and I’m excited to finally be able to control our site’s content update frequency. I’m going to rock it. I’m going to remember where the bylines go, that Priority ’1′ will bugger up the main package story so only use it if I have a story with a photo, and that the reporters who work here are awesome.

Desk update: I can’t shift desks until next week. Darn.

In this first post, I’ll give some background as to what’s going on and how our newsroom is set up.

We’re a small staff: Five Beat reporters, three Sports reporters and four Copy Editors. In Online, we have two videographers (one for ad work and one for news), a web developer, and a web editor – me. There are two “halves” to our building – the front half containing classifieds and circulation folk, and the back half containing News/Online/Graphics/Sales. So essentially we’re in one big room back here. Except Online has some half-walls.

We’ve fought many a battle to keep them too, because while we don’t deny everyone could probably use some semblance of privacy when they need to concentrate, when you’re knee-deep in code trying to get something working on a website that gets over a million pageviews a month (I know, I know but that’s a good number for us) having constant interruptions even from people passing by your desk makes it really difficult to concentrate.

If I sounds snobby, I don’t mean to. I know that same argument can apply to every department here, but we, in Online, were given the walls when they moved us between the ad side and the news side, and they sort of help. And if I sound slightly bitter about losing them during this move, well, I’ll get over it.

I really will get over it, I promise because I’m excited about the changes occurring in my job. We lost a fabulous copy editor and super person to the last round of layoffs, and so I’ll be moved to his old spot and given extra desk space (which I don’t really need – I work online after all ) and I’m also hoping that sitting in that spot is not “unlucky.” Not that I’m superstitious or anything.

Right now, my job entails a little bit of everything. I manage the “people” side of the website, meaning I handle trouble calls, photo orders, moderate story comments, forum comments, Cover it Live chats, build/manage internal and community blogging, and the past year and a half I’ve become the social media person here kind of on my own volition. I also manage a few client websites from the days when we did web design, and I am a backup video producer (meaning I can shoot, edit/produce and upload videos.) So kind of a jack-of-all-trades in Online. I can design websites and graphics but my job has sort of evolved away from that.

When GateHouse took over my paper, the newsroom took control over site content. We’d hoped that this would lead to a more frequently updated site, but we’ve realized that piling that work onto our print editors was not the right way to go. So my new responsibilities now include: updating the site throughout the day, using a combination of our stuff and wire stuff depending on the timing; working with reporters on updates to post (meaning I can ask them to write a couple paragraphs for the web on any story they are working on – in other words I will be their newest annoyance.)

It just seems to make better sense (and a big ‘Duh’) to have a specific person be in charge of harnessing content for the web rather than putting on those in charge of harnessing it for print; I will also continue to explore, employ methods and train everyone on social media techniques, keep abreast of the latest trends and basically do what I do when it comes to this Twitter stuff.

Part of the change is that I now report to the presentation editor instead of my Online Director (though I’m still getting paid out of that budget). This, along with the move, I think, are the biggest changes that will require me to adapt. I’m excited about my new responsibilities but I’m nervous as well. I hope my reporter friends are willing to give this a try and I will try not to be too much of a pest. But my ass is on the line if we do not have a fresh, updated website throughout the day, and well, when my ass is affected, I tend to get a little whip-cracky. Or panicky – whichever

The changes are supposed to start up this week – at least I’m to be moved this week *sniffle* and I will continue to post updates on how it’s going. I will try to stop being such a brat about having to move – it’s nothing to do with my soon-to-be new “roomies” who are all wonderful people, so much as having to move out of my comfort zone. But I’m not going to sugarcoat. If I’m going to document this merge, I’m going to write how I feel about it as well.

Wish us luck!

I can’t speak for larger papers, or from years of experience in a newsroom. I can only speak as a set of “fresh eyes” on the dynamics of a newsroom in a medium-sized daily. Because I work in the Online Department of my newspaper, I’m going to focus on digital journalism and share some things I’ve learned.

First, don’t be afraid to try new things. Even if the venture fails, there are lessons to be learned. If someone in the newsroom has an idea that seems even halfway plausible, develop and encourage it because it may just be the next popular thing your newspaper will do. The things that catch on with readers can be hit or miss, but it never hurts to try. My paper put out a twice-daily news report complete with an anchor, script and producer for a little over a year. It did not work out, but we have been able to refine the kinds of videos our readers do want to see, and we now have several staff members trained in video editing/producing.

Second, your job will evolve with or without you. It’s up to you to evolve with it or get left behind. This applies to everyone from reporter to editor to manager and beyond. Yes, you may have a shiny journalism degree, but there will always be more to learn – do you know how to pull video off your cell phone and post it on the web? Have you heard of Twitter? Do you understand how Twitter can be used to enhance a reader’s experience? If you answered, “Yes” to any of those questions, great! If not, then you need to get on the ball and evolve. (For a good idea of what journalists should be learning these days, Read Mindy McAdams’ Reporters Guide to Multimedia Proficiency on her blog.)

Third, don’t shy away from interacting with your readers – beyond the letters to the editor. Use your forums if you have them. Read and respond to comments they leave in stories. Get on Twitter and ‘tweet your beat’ by letting your followers see what stories you’re working on for them. Or use a Cover it Live liveblog to cover big, ongoing, or breaking stories, debates, or sporting events. This will give your readers another avenue to your content, drive traffic to your website and could generate revenue by selling sponsorship of the coverage.

At the end of the day, you will be ahead of the game if you can use a variety of tools out there (many of them free) that allow you to engage with your readers. Interaction is a huge key in developing the all-important trust factor that gets them to come to you for news and information and not your competitor.

Useful Links:

• http://www.twitter.com – Twitter – Free
• http://www.coveritlive.com – Cover it Live, Liveblogging tool – Free

Examples:

• The Independent on Twitter
• The Independent liveblog on a breaking story
• Steph on Twitter

Here are her questions, and my answers:

———–

Wow, someone read my blog Thanks! Let’s see if I can be of help to you. The revenue question doesn’t sound like your biggest hurdle, but the awesome website Old Media New Tricks (http://www.oldmedianewtricks.com, @mediatricks on Twitter) had some wonderful responses to this question:

• This effort is more about marketing our brand than a direct dollar-for-dollar payback. If we do this right, our brand is seen as a part of their lives. Besides, these social media tools are (generally) free. We have little to lose by trying.
• If we don’t do this, then we risk becoming irrelevant. This is the way people are communicating at an increasing rate, and we are in the communications business.
• This can be used for good customer service. Social media allows for us to respond to customers swiftly and effectively. It’s hard to measure the effect of good customer service, but it is easy to measure the effect of bad or nonexistent customer service.
• It’s not about making money right now, but this just might make money in the long run. If we don’t plant our flag now and learn to do this the right way, we’ll be behind the curve.
• We can reach an entirely new audience for our product. That’s the holy grail, isn’t it? With the economy the way it is, now is the time to try to reach out to new people.

The rest of your questions, let me take one-by-one.

How do we do it with with a shrinking staff?

I have a newsroom of 6 beats, 3 sports guys, 1 videographer and 2 photogs. They all have twitter accounts. So far only 1 photog and the video guy will tweet. Neither of them have quite got the hang of it yet, but I give them mega points for effort. My paper’s main Twitter account is me. I use Twhirl (twhirl.org) and keep it running in the background while I work. I watch for any updates the newsroom posts, I tweet it immediately. I listen to the chatter in there and tweet anything that will be newsworthy.

To answer your question, you need someone who will be willing to do this. I don’t think you will have much luck getting everyone to do it – yet. I haven’t. But you should find someone in your newsroom, or if you have an online team – a web editor, something – I don’t know how your newsroom is structured. Ours is sort of weird. Ask them if they would be willing to tweet headlines a few times a day. Or it may end up on your shoulders.

You have to build a network too. Someone must take some time and start following people in your area and get them to follow you back. Once you get the ball rolling, it grows fairly quickly especially if you tweet your headlines manually and engage with your followers. But someone simply has to to do it. Don’t expect the other reporters to jump on the bandwagon especially if they are worried about ‘one more thing’ they have to do.

The flipside to the above, is that manually tweeting the headlines isn’t all that time-consuming. At least for me. I tweet a hello message in the morning, answer an @reply or two, and then just tweet headlines I think the readers might find cool, or of interest to them. I include feature stuff, a good letter to the editor, the latest column or blog post from our community bloggers… it doesn’t always have to be a headline tweet. But I find something at random times, tweet it and then go back to whatever I was working on. At the end of the day, I tweet what we’re working on for tomorrow.

How do we get around the current prohibition against posting anything without first getting and editor to read and approve it?

This is tricky if your newsroom is really a stickler about this. The headlines I tweet are ones I can link to, so they don’t go on Twitter until it’s on the site, which means it’s been approved. I will tweet something like ‘Photogs have just been sent to check on a car accident’ or even stuff like ‘The Governor is in our office right now to talk to _____ about his budget plans’ or something. But if you check out my tweets at http://twitter.com/theindependent you’ll get a feel for the kinds of things you can say. And don’t be afraid to retweet your competition too

Can reporters Twitter in an interesting way, and engage in conversations with readers, without voicing an opinion, which is required to do their job? Will this have to be limited to columnists, who can have an opinion?

There are many ways a journo can use Twitter. They can use it simply to network with other journalists and make contacts. They can use it to cover meetings, events and breaking news – just look at how it was used during the Mumbai attacks. Watch CNN reporters on Twitter to see how they are doing it and use it as a guideline. I don’t quite feel qualified to answer this question very thoroughly, and my answer here might not be workable. But there are a lot of comments in this article you might find helpful: http://is.gd/aiRY – but no this does not need to be limited to columnists.

Will it generate sufficient audience to make it a worthwhile use of our reporters’ time?

Yes, but you have to take the time to build that audience. You can’t just start tweeting and expect them to come. You need to pimp the hell out of it in print and online. Reverse publish. Make the latest tweets visible somewhere on the website. Have the staff add ‘Follow Us on Twitter’ with the link to their email sigs. Follow people in your community from your paper’s main feed. Heck, follow people outside the community. I ended up searching for all Twitterers in the entire state. My logic was that perhaps they have ties to my town. And if not, then no harm. They know we exist. Invest in the time to grow the community in the beginning. Once it shows signs of growing on its own, then I think that would be the time to try and pull in other reporters and staff to maybe help out, or start their own account.

——–

Apologies to poor Kari for the length, but I hope it’s at least helpful.