Posts Tagged ‘ Tools ’

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.

0
15
Jul

The best tools ever.

The best part of my job is being able to take advantage of some great tools to make my newspaper better. The two best tools so far have been Twitter and Cover It Live.

I’ve had a Twitter account set up for The Independent for some time now, and it’s been slow, but we’re getting followers now. I set up a feed to post latest headlines to it and I left it alone. I love stuff that runs itself. But now that our Twittership is growing, I want to bring it into the newsroom and have our reporters do a little microblogging. I’ve been using it every so often to pimp some promotions (not too often though, don’t want to get spammy) and now I’ve got a new account set up to promote a music tournament the paper is doing, where I will be tweeting music trivia and tidbits, as well as news about the tourney.

The Twitter thing seems to be taking off here in Nebraska as I just participated in a Q&A with the Nebraska Press Association who was curious about the use of tools like this. I hope it takes off around here. I noticed some of the local TV stations are on the Twitter bandwagon so that’s a good sign. I’ve gotten great feedback from readers about it as well.

And Cover It Live. How I love this tool. I want to take it out for dinner, it’s so cool. I’ll even pay. We’ll be using it again during the previously mentioned music tournaments, for weekly chats with the reporters and editors who are involved with it. I’m not sure if it will go over as well as it did when we liveblogged our redesign, but if even a few readers pop in to talk about some of the matchups, I count that as a success.

The best thing about these tools, and others like it? They’re free. F to the R to the EE. How can anyone not take advantage of these powerful mediums to improve their paper? How can any journalist not see the benefits? I read a lot of comments and blogs from the curmudgeon brigade wishing for the days of yore – but how does one make them open their eyes and see that their Online departments are there to enhance journalism, to strengthen it, to improve it and strengthen its reputation among an increasingly technologically savvy world?