07newsroom

Living Legends, Lessons From a Postal Stamp Prompt

Who in your area should be on a stamp?

What's the point of of questioning the audience? In your newsroom, when you ask a question across your site and social media platforms, do you have a metric for success? Is it 20 responses? 200? Somewhere in between? 

Do you know what brings more responses -- time of day, wording of question, amplification by repeating across platforms? Is someone in charge of keeping track of what works and what doesn't and issuing guidance?

If you typically ask one question a day and generate 100 comments or responses a week, what can you do to increase that by a factor of 10? Who in the newsroom has suggestions for steps to take that might make that much of a difference?

Asking a question is not a resource issue -- it takes two minutes to go to Facebook and ask "what should we cover today?" or "how are we doing?" 

It does take a few more minutes to monitor your activity and make adjustments so that week by week you engage more readers.

The Objective A highly engaged audience that is regularly creating content, a newsroom that initiates discussion, readers who react to news by spending time with your brand. 

Measures of Success Comments, likes, clicks, page views, new questions, discussion threads -- and journalists who repurpose those discussions into articles or posts for a website or a print product.

Who's doing it well? Here's some evidence from a postal prompt about what works and what doesn't. If you have not asked a "who should be on a stamp" question, today is a good day. (Short url's included to ease sharing.)

The Indianapolis Star in one day had 17 Facebook likes and about 80 comments on a survey: who from Indiana should be on a stamp? Who will it be? Time for Indiana living legend on postage stamp | indystar.com http://bit.ly/nD5tYm Note the large photo of a favorite son.

The AP asked on Facebook and received 96 comments in the first day: http://on.fb.me/potHOi They amplified the request with a Twitter prompt that did two important things: directed people to Facebook and seeded the question with some possible answers from top names trending on Google search: Twitter / @AP: Interesting ideas of who belongs on a stamp — Wangari Maathai? Chuck Norris? — are on our Facebook page http://bit.ly/oBJFIAThe AP tweet to 500,000 followers had two dozen retweets: https://bitly.com/potHOi+

The Tennessean asked on its site and across social media feeds for local living legends worth featuring on a stamp. From the managing editor's Twitter feed @megdowney: I vote John Seigenthaler. @Tennessean. Which living TN legend would you want to see on a stamp? http://t.co/FQYiUpmI

Seeding the conversation with a few names seems to work. The Des Moines Register drew 50 comments on Facebook on the first day with this prompt:What living Iowan should be on a stamp? The U.S. Postal Service has changed the rules to allow living people to be honored on postage stamps. So -- who would be your Iowa choice? (Around the newsroom, suggestions included Hayden Fry, Slipknot, Fred Hoiberg, Shawn Johnson and Captain James T. Kirk.)  http://on.fb.me/nrxUyi

A post on the Register's site had a bold call out asking readers to go to the Facebook page to answer: Who do you think should be first living Iowan on a stamp? | DesMoinesRegister.com http://bit.ly/pkeFDu

Lauren Wilbert List, a community producer for the Times-Picayune website, Nola.com, received more than 20 comments when she asked the question: Which living person would you like to see on a stamp?  http://bit.ly/oakFyw

The LA Times fashion writer set up a survey: Poll: Which living face of fashion belongs on a U.S. stamp? - latimes.com http://lat.ms/nMFfTf

There were 89 comments in a day and a half on this Florida news site, and note that the writer included an email address for readers who wanted to add a suggestion without leaving a comment. Does that mean there will be a followup? What living American would you like to see on a stamp? Let us know - St. Petersburg Times http://bit.ly/p4ll6k

How many news organizations will do more than just collect a few comments? The Postal Service is inviting official submissions. Here are the official stamp criteria from the Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee http://bit.ly/nfjDx4

This is an opportunity to keep the conversation going, to solicit a list of names, to put out a poll, to narrow the list to the top five, to formally submit the names on behalf of your audience, and to report back the status of the request. The requests can be segmented by geography or topic area: who would be your metro area choice? your state choice? who would be your choice from among local sports stars? fashion stars? business stars? civic leaders? entertainers?

Each one of those points is an opportunity for deeper audience engagement. 

What is working for you? 

Covering a Disaster: Lessons From Reno, Part 2

Lessons from Beryl Love, @BerylLove, editor of @RGJ, the Reno Gazette-Journal, from Beryl's tweets on #ASNEchat.  Beryl managed his newsroom's coverage of the plane crash at the Reno Air Race. After I posted some lessons from Reno based on my own reading of his newsroom's posts and tweets, Beryl added important details in the chat. I distilled these five lessons from his conversation.

1. Dedicated staff. Beryl wrote: "Staying on top of UGC required someone's complete attention." He added that the best image of the crash came from a spectator (first photo in this gallery). One person focused on user-generated content will help the newsroom find and distribute great content from readers. Beryl added that the newsroom worked hard to contact and confirm the identities of people sending in information but that reporters and editors were "merciless aggregators" when confirmation was not possible.

2. Sign up for CoverItLive. "Using CoverItLive to automate aggregation and publishing twitter updates in real time" was a big help, Beryl tweeted.

3. Social media super users. Know and follow the active social media users in your market. A hospital used Twitter for real time announcements about the number of patients from the disaster who were being treated there. If you curate Twitter lists of active feeds and monitor those lists for news on normal days, you will have that tool at the ready when disaster hits. From @BerylLove: Very interesting to me...

4. Live updates. Use Twitter for fast, live updates during news conferences. Beryl said his team made no effort to link these live update tweets back to his newspaper's website. Break the mindset that every tweet or Facebook post has to include a link back to your site.

5. Plan. Finally, Beryl added: "We are updating our breaking news plan to better define roles." Devote a planning meeting to what roles everyone will play during a disaster. Be flexible, but have an emergency plan that is updated to work with today's social media tools. 

Vaccinations, College Rankings and Back to School Night: Tips for Editors

Vaccine The Republican debate in Florida sparked new national debate over the safety and effectiveness of vaccines for pre-teen and teenage girls that prevent cervical cancer. (Short url's included to help with sharing.)

That discussion can extend to your Facebook page, site or Twitter feed. Some sources of independent information: CDC - Reports of Health Concerns Following HPV Vaccination - Vaccine Safety http://1.usa.gov/qvmBFJ

American Academy of Pediatricians releases statement on HPV vaccine http://bit.ly/rjipnE

What do lawmakers, parents and doctors in your community say? Who should make the decision if, or when, a child is vaccinated? What are the vaccination rates in your community?

Play Nickelodeon encourages children to get active by going dark for three midday hours Saturday, Sept. 24, for Worldwide Day of Play, supported by ‘Let’s Move,’ the President’s Council On Fitness, Sports and Nutrition and the National Park Service. (Hat tip Mike Allen, Politico.) Build a conversation around "play." How many hours a week did you play when you were growing up? How many hours a week do your children play? Favorite game, outdoors? Favorite game, indoors? 

Football How can readers join the conversation with your staff experts? Try Skype. That's what the Plain-Dealer uses to connect fans to the newsroom. From the Cleveland.com Facebook page: Got a question for Tony Grossi, Mary Kay Cabot or Dennis Manoloff about the Browns? Our Skype lines will be open from 10 - 11 a.m. to take your questions. http://on.fb.me/mTddVj

Local Colleges The Cincinnati Enquirer noted how local colleges fared in U.S. News & World Report rankings: http://on.fb.me/nCXD7D The USNews rankings, http://bit.ly/qEfXnW, and similar rankings from the Forbes College Rankings, http://onforb.es/rt0PP6, can be used to prompt discussion. Do readers agree? What is the hidden gem in your area that these rankings miss? What local college is riding an out-dated reputation? What do families look for when they make decisions -- what information do they use to rank colleges for their students?

Tweet for talent Good use of Twitter by a top editor to recruit community photographers: Carole Tarrant (@caroletarrant) RT @theburgsNRV: We're looking for people who shoot photos of h.s. sports around #nrv. Give us a shout at [email protected].

Back to School Night Knees to chest, folded into tiny chairs, parents endure the annual ritual of back to school night in the hope that their involvement will help their children. Teachers sum up their philosophy of education, grading system, and classroom rules in neat seven-minute presentations. 

Some ideas and possible prompts that can stir conversation about Back to School Night:

*What would you miss most if Back to School Night was canceled?

It happened in one NJ town: http://bit.ly/r0S27a

*Do you know how to reach your child's teacher -- by phone? by email? Ellicott City: Back to School night opens lines of communication - baltimoresun.com 

http://bsun.md/oxBGGh

*Did you join the PTA? Why or why not? Back-to-School Night Basics | Scholastic.com http://bit.ly/qZcCrX

*Has your child's teacher explained how much time is expected for homework each day? Questions to Ask at “Back to School Night” | Power Moms Unite  http://bit.ly/rb6TmJ

*Do you plan to volunteer to help in the classroom? Back-to-School Night Basics - Back-to-school prep | GreatSchools http://bit.ly/qGxRUM
A content and social media plan around some of these questions encourages conversation, helps parents and educators share tips and information, and builds community. What is Back to School Night like in your area?

Do you like social networking? There is a job for you.

Forbes.com is looking for an Assistant Editor for a social networking project. Our audience and our contributors are C-suite executives around the globe, brought together through the CEO Network, Forbes.com’s “gated community” for chief executives.

The assistant editor will prompt discussion, cull the most incisive posts and comments, post timely and relevant questions; commission, write and edit commentaries, and use social networking tools to bring together the broadest possible audience of these top executives in a way that encourages them to contribute to and find value in this part of our site. You will be responsible for the day to day running of the Network and will be part of the Forbes.com newsroom, which reaches 20 million unique visitors a month. You will report to the editor of our Leadership channel.

Writing, editing and social networking skills required, as is a proven interest in the people who run companies and the issues facing them.

Send resume, cover letter and references to [email protected].

Your photos -- On BBC.com

How does the BBC cover the ice storm in the Midwest? With reader photos, uploaded to bbc.com. The BBC makes it easy and includes some posted photo guidelines, including this:

Each picture will need a caption.

Who, what, why, where and when is a good place to start when gathering information for the caption, but where possible quotes from those pictured and a description of how you are feeling will help bring the essay to life.

We don't need many words - no more than 40 per picture.

They use reader-submitted videos, too.

Advice for a student newspaper

A student newspaper editor asked for advice. Here's my response.
Five steps:
1. Include your audience in the conversation. Ask for comments and print the comments (in paper and on line). Ask your readers to help you pick the big topics of the year. Ask them for ideas about what's right at your school and what needs to be changed. Follow up on their suggestions.
2. Speak truth to power. Find the decision makers. Ask them to explain their decisions, step by step. Go to the top. Ask detailed questions of the people in power about the operations of your school.
3. Uncover the news, don't cover it. Stay away from announcements. Find out things that most people don't know. (Example -- What percent of your school's graduates who go on to college take remedial math? remedial English? Is there a breakdown by which teachers they had in high school? if not, why not?)
4. Respect your staff. Be generous and public with praise. Criticize one on one, with the door closed.
5. Seek outside help. Bring in speakers from your local professional newsrooms. Ask experts to critique your paper. Tour your local paper or TV station.
Good luck

I don't know the digital plan for this newsroom, but I do know that many student papers are not on line or lack multi-media presentations. It's great to see student journalists best the field in these areas. I know the students understand the digital life.

Pockets of hope

The people at the Citizen Media conference kicking off the ONA meeting in Toronto are from independent web sites and from start ups but also from big media companies. Jennifer Carroll at Gannett gets it. Rob Curley with WashingtonPost.com gets it. Steve Yelvington with Morris Communications gets it. Experiment, get a conversation going with the community, balance hot news with evergreen content, balance work by pros with work by amateurs, make the tech side highly functional. Test, teach, try something, evaluate, make it better. Hire tinkerers. Use Flickr. Aggregate. Make connections.

Give thanks for sugar-free Red Bull

Rob Curley talked for about six hours to two diverse groups from The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Daily News, and philly.com: executives, reporters, web people, photographers, editors, ad sales folks, producers, tech gurus, graphics experts. He inspired, he amazed, he energized. He demonstrated what can be done and he demonstrated what can be done to make money. He drank a lot of Red Bull. A Curley intern, Amanda Finnegan, who was traveling with him, said it's a good thing that stuff is available sugar free.
Curley's Seven Commandments (as I distilled the six hours):
1. Own breaking news, and make sure your audience knows it.
2. Go hyper-local, deeper than you ever imagined. Don't just build a container, fill it. (Plenty of photos of youth sports? Yes!)
3. Database like crazy.
4. Multimedia overkill.
5. Evergreen content. Examples: Mark Twin (for Hannibal, Mo.), KU sports history (Lawrence, Kan.)
6. Platform independent: paper, web, sms text to cell phones, X-box, Wii, I-pod and more.
7. It's a conversation. Leverage the wisdom of the crowd and make sure the audience is participating.

What scares him -- or what inspires him? Facebook. (I had some satisfaction that our Philadelphia Sports News Feed group on Facebook, after one week, is up to about 120 members.) In the afternoon, Rob paid our own Jennifer Musser-Metz a great compliment. He said he was a new reporter when he first found Black Hawk Down on The Inquirer's website -- with source documents, bios on the people in the story, reader comments, multimedia. "This is journalism on steroids," Rob remembers thinking. That was when he decided to become an online journalist. We had a chance to applaud Jennifer again for making all that happen.

Beyond Red Bull, how is Rob's work powered? One force is internology -- the power of committed, hard-working paid interns, including Amanda. Who calls 300 restaurants to ask each of them 20 questions (children's menu? hours you serve meals? vegetarian choices?) Who shoots dozens of digital stills? Who covers the county fair? The permanent Curley staff is five full-time editors-producers-developers. Amanda is one of about 11 interns on the Curley team at Washington Post-Newsweek Interactive. Her training, from Cabrini College in Radnor, Pa., is on display in this student project on war.

And the tech power? In Kansas, in Florida and in Washington, Curley uses Ellington CMS. Here's the person to contact: Dean Royal toll-free at 866-454-5774 or [email protected].

Special thanks to Adrian!

Curley, Loudon Extra, and HuffPo comments

Welcome to Rob Curley's latest project: Loudon Extra, a hyper-local feature of the Washington Post. It's hyper local only in contrast to the huge reach of the mother paper. Loudon County is not one small community with one stop light and one high school. It's diverse and spread across a vast area. But the Extra project is meant to bring local search and local information to users and to involve users in keeping the site current. The ratio of pro content to am content is expected to start at about 99:1, but that could change. Right now data is at the core. From the welcome page:

We are currently building searchable databases of building permits, homes sales, and many other publicly available records. We also will be covering high school sports like this area has never seen.

I like the house of worship lookup and the web cams. The section's story about the launch reviews Curley's history increasing page views at other publication and asks a core question about the Post effort:

Curley's revamping of the Lawrence site gained national attention because of the audience it attracted. In 2000 -- before remaking its site -- the Lawrence paper got 14 million page views, said Ralph Gage, chief operating officer of the World Co., which owns the paper. In 2006, that number had grown to 247 million, and the site booked about $2 million in revenue. The population of Lawrence is about 80,000, and the Journal's circulation is 20,000.

Page views at the Naples Web site are up 17 percent in the first six months of this year compared with 2006, when the site was revamped, said editor Phil Lewis, with unique monthly users up 26 percent. The Web site is responsible for more than 10 percent revenue, Lewis said, which is above the industry average.

The question has always been whether a major metropolitan newspaper can successfully run a hyperlocal site like this, and how both local and national advertisers will react.

Those examples of page view increases can be enticing. More from the business story (on the data example 07newsroom discussed in this February post):

In December, Gannett Co.'s Asbury Park (N.J.) Press dumped three huge public-record databases onto its Web site: local property sales and ownership, and state employees' salaries. By May, the paper had added searchable databases for local crime, school test scores, state deaths and public school employees.

In December, the paper's Web site recorded 1.5 million page views. By May, the site was averaging more than 5 million page views per month, according to data from a Newspaper Association of America study, with a high of more than 9 million page views in April.

Curley is also known for welcoming user-generated content. More from the Loudon Extra welcome page:

We also will be adding a powerful community-publishing section to the site, allowing readers to share their stories, photos and videos.

No sign yet that the material shared -- or posted -- by readers will be filtered, tagged or rated by readers, too. Various models exist for this, including the Digg model (users can add one positive -- or negative vote), the Plime model (users can increase their own rating, and thus their own voting power), and -- starting today -- the HuffingtonPost model. [update Freedom Interactive will go live next month with their own version, with SiteLife software from Pluck.] Paul Berry, the chief tech officer of HuffPo, explains all:

We've added a commenter profile page which includes your bio and lists all comments you've posted. To add a bio, simply click on the Your Account link on the upper right hand corner of every page.

We also have a new I'm A Fan Of feature which lets you vote for your favorite commenters. They can also vote for you. Your fans will be listed on your profile page. We'll soon be able to alert you when your fans comment on stories and when your favorite bloggers post on the site.

But we're most excited to announce a new initiative where we will choose one commenter a month to become a featured blogger at HuffPost. Yes, a blogger! Reading through the comments on our site, we realized that our readers are an underutilized resource – smart and opinionated. Our decisions will be based on how many fans a commenter has, how often their comment is selected as a favorite and our moderators' favorites.

Even Paul's dad is "a blogger!" Now Paul is making it possible for others to try their hand. Who wouldn't be excited? The wisdom of the crowds, unleashed. And for the crowds in Loudon County, the power of local journalism has also been given free rein. May success blossom in many gardens.

Raising a newsroom's digital IQ

I'm collecting some learning tools that have helped me. This video, The Machine is Us/ing Us, is a hit. Other suggestions welcome.