07newsroom

Panoramic photos, spreading the view

     Distinctive visuals grab readers and hold their attention. For decades, Art Shay and other sophisticated photographers with a technical bent have used panoramic cameras including the Widelux for terrific shots. Newspaper web sites are starting to experiment with full 360-degree photography. Check out this stunning audio and visual of a memorial on the Drillfield to the Virginia Tech victims (from The Roanoke Times). Other companies, including VRWay, are posting their own versions. Panoramas.dk collects more examples and information on the story behind the photos. Now, Rob Curley is planning on using panoramas for very local, and very functional, compelling visuals on the new Loudon County hyper-local site on washingtonpost.com (emphasis added):

The site will also have several new features that the printed paper can't match. Rob Curley, WPNI's vice president of product development, takes on a nearly evangelical fervor as he talks up what he's got in store. Whipping out his ever-present Apple laptop and clicking frantically, he shows off a database that includes panoramic photos of every high school football field in the county; click on sections of the grandstands and you can see the sight lines to the field. There will be podcasts of some local church sermons, real-time accounts of high-school games and highly detailed restaurant guides, too. "You want to know which [county] restaurants are open after 11 p.m. on a Thursday? Boom! There you go!" he says, triumphantly displaying such a list.

--- from AJR

Those sitelines might help more news organizations see their way clearly into a future where visuals play an even more valuable part -- both for utility and for grand, eye-catching statements.

A model golf guide

In Chicago, Crain's does it. It's an interactive guide to golf courses and readers can search by state, by city (Crown Point, Ind., for example) or town, or by other characteristics (by par). How much use will it get, how hard is it to build? It seems friendly to users and a good foundation of layering on extra information, including golfer comments.

More software, more models

The Buffalo News has signed on with YourHub.com, giving readers across the Buffalo area a chance to start blogs, post news items, and post video. YourHub started in Denver, a joint venture of Scripps Howard and Media News, with the technical work done by Indigio. Leigh Balcom, sales and operations manager in Bufalo, has been impressed, according to news articles:

“The best thing about YourHub is that it allows people to report on things the newspaper may not,” he said. “Events like Little League games, neighborhood events and even some issues affecting the community.”

The Buffalo YourHub has more than 550 registered users who have generated more than 2,000 pieces of content since the site went live.

“I hired two online interactive managers who go into the community and talk up the product and encourage people to post content,” Balcom said.

There is competition. The Tribune Company devised its own software for TribLocal. And one of the more promising new businesses that is already doing the same thing is Village Soup, which started in Maine. Village Soup is doing so well, that the Knight Foundation is giving it a grant:

VillageSoup in Maine receives $885,000 to build free software to allow others to replicate the citizen journalism and community participation site VillageSoup.

The optimism that shines through this and the other grants is a great counterweight to some of the negativism occasionally heard at industry gatherings. Read more about the other Knight grants, to Adrian Holovaty, to a project on high-tech civic media, to computer students studying journalism, to a journalism incubator in Arizona.

Your digital bulletin board

" "Ultra-local is definitely the way to go. If you promise ultra-local, you've got to be able to deliver it. The number of journalists we have [60] is huge compared with many other regional papers - but, even with that many, we can't deliver ultra-local news all the time. To do it, we're going to need another 500 reporters - we can't take them on, they're going to need to be citizen journalists. They want to get this information out there; we need to say 'yes, we'll be your electronic parish noticeboard, come give it to us and it will be in the Express & Star' - whereas, if you just set it up on your own, you're only going to have a limited audience. "  --- That's Keith Harrison, deputy editor of the UK's second biggest regional newspaper, the Wolverhampton Express & Star

From Iceland to Boston

     A publisher from Iceland is starting a free newspaper in Boston with a heavy dose of user-generated content. Writers can sign up for blogs, photographers can sign up on a designated photo-sharing service, people who shoot video will be invited to contribute, too. If it follows the plans being discussed so far, all this will bubble up from the cyber world and the editors of the print publication will harvest the best stuff each day for the fiber product. A Google news search turns up nothing, but a blog search turns up many postings. For example, the top managers are running a blogspot blog about the project, where this post says (in part): "BostonNOW wants to encourage active participation in our online and print community, so interested contributors will only need to follow a few steps to be considered for the print publication. As soon as the BostonNOW website (bostonnow.com) goes live (scheduled for Monday, April 16; the day before our first paper is published), you would create a BostonNOW account."

Are they testing a new Nokia camera phone? This post shows the view from the BostonNow office.

Steve Garfield at Off On A Tangent blogs about a meetup: "I went to a meeting tonight about the new free paper that's launching in Boston soon called BostonNow. In this picture, Editor-in-Chief John Wilpers is talking to bloggers about how they can contribute to the paper. We had a far ranging discussion with lots of ideas shared from everyone."

Newspaper Innovation has some details: "The paper is financed by Icelandic media company Dagsbrun. Russel Pergament, former publisher of the Boston Metro and Am New York is running the operation. He is also CEO of the American branch of Dagsbrun, called 365 Media USA, which has plans for free dailies in other US cities as well. Chief editor is John Wilpers (Washington Examiner, Boston Globe, the Boston Herald and Boston Metro). Wilpers to PBS: “I was the editor that took it [Boston Metro] from about 150,000 readers to 500,000″."

Cit-J report

"Citizen journalism ranks low on revenues and readers. It ranks high on perceived value and impact. While it aspires to report on community, it aspires even more to build community." --- that's an excpert from a new report based on a survey of 191 community journalism site, each sent 60 questions. Another project from J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism

Hyper-local the British way

It's the "latest local news, as well as details of anything and everything that’s happening in your area. This is your community website, and the content will be driven by you." That's the description from one of the new sites on Gazette Live, an initiative by a British paper to set up very local news and information sites with content provided by residents. Click here for an overview from The Gazette.  Michael Hill is the editor-producer in charge of the project. Here's a report from journalism.co.uk:

"He said 20 volunteers have already agreed to contribute to the sites, which are grouped around postcode areas in Middlesborough.

Mr Hill added that 18 more micro-sites in the town would be launched by July and, if successful, the idea could be rolled out across the group.

He told Journalism.co.uk: "We've set up a content team at the newspaper of people from different disciplines. Someone from the library, a reporter, a former photographer and an employee with IT skills are overseeing what will eventually become 23 sites."

Front Porch Forum

Hyper-local news and discussion boards have a new template, the Front Porch Forum. It started in Vermont, but has a model that can be used anywhere. This will give news organizations a method to fear, copy, or adopt. Ignoring this is not an option.

Beyond the zipcode

The Cincinnati Enquirer (Gannett) has set up home pages for news from each community in its market. They are divided into newsroom-produced items and reader-generated items. Producers or editors prime the pump with contests (i.e., holiday lights). A list of all the communities served is here. Gannett listed m.e. Hollis Towns, among 15 selected for leadeship awards, saying, "Hollis was involved in the newspaper's efforts to expand Get Published!, the launch of 184 Ohio/Indiana community Web sites and the launch of the Data Desk."

Headlines by Zipcode

In Arizona, the Daily Star has started a web collection of headlines by zipcode. A click on any zipcode brings the reader to a collection of stories, and data on home sales and school test scores.