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Guest Post: Lessons from Obama’s visit

April 26, 2012 in College Media, management, Newsrooms, Politics

By Erica Perel, newsroom adviser, The Daily Tar Heel

President Obama visited the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill campus Tuesday afternoon to give a policy speech on student loans and “slow-jam the news” on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.

The big events happened early in the traditional  daily news cycle: students lined up to get into Obama’s speech starting at 5 a.m. before filing through security. The policy speech happened about 1 p.m., with the Jimmy Fallon taping immediately after. The presidential motorcade left Chapel Hill by late afternoon. Because of the timing — and because political junkies and the vast UNC alumni network would be following events from afar — the student editors at The Daily Tar Heel, the independent student newspaper, knew this story had to be covered online in real time.

Staff posted stories, videos, photographs and blog posts to present the sites and sounds of the day. They used the social networking aggregator Storify to present what people were tweeting. And then used Facebook and Twitter to promote our work and help drive up traffic to about double normal levels.

And it all happened on the last production day of the school year.

Here are lessons from the day. Not everyone will get a chance to cover a presidential visit, though if your school is in swing state, this could be your year. Even so, these lessons apply to almost any big news.

Make a plan, then plan some more

Big stories don’t always give notice. But elections, big sporting events and protests usually do. For the Obama visit, the editors started planning for the day’s online coverage at least two days ahead. There was a staffer in charge of writing blog posts. Someone in charge of getting press credentials. Someone to monitor social media. Etc. The night before, photo editors held a meeting with photographers to make sure they knew exactly what was expected of them in terms of sending photos. Photo Editor Allison Russell said her instructions were simple: She told them their photo coverage had to be the best thing they had ever shot. No pressure.

Make sure someone is back at the office coordinating the effort

We’ve made the mistake before of creating an online coverage plan and expecting it to just happen. But it won’t without one or two people in charge of corralling that effort and taking care of details. That job includes:

  • Communicating with folks in the field.
  • Making sure all content is tagged and weighted correctly so the home page displays well.
  • Editing stories for content and accuracy.
  • Editing pictures.
  • Using social media to promote new content. Twitter is great, of course, but don’t forget Facebook. In the analytics screenshot below, see that much more traffic comes from Facebook.

 Use as many different storytelling avenues as possible, but remember that they have to go up quickly

Stories and photos are easy to post, but videos often lag behind because of the lengthy editing process. In a big news situation, the video needs to go up fast.

On Tuesday, for this video, Multimedia Editor Zach Evans posted what he had early, then re-edited and reposted when another videographer’s footage from Air Force One was ready.

Online Editor Sarah Glen has played around with Storify for big-story coverage before, so she was in a great position to post what was the definitive collection of tweets from Obama’s speech with lightning speed. Sarah worked to collect the tweets through the speech, so it was able to go live immediately. Other lessons from Sarah’s Storify:

  • Search the official hashtag for the event, but do other searches to make sure you aren’t missing good tweets from people who aren’t using it.
  • Include as many picture tweets from people using Instagram or other photo apps as you can.
  • Include a mix of student journalists’ more serious tweets and tweets from non-journalists. Look for people using funny hashtags or otherwise tweeting with personality.

Promote your work and pay attention to analytics to learn what works

Use the obvious avenues to promote content — Twitter, Facebook, email blasts and Google-optimized headlines — as well as any non-obvious tools. But make sure to pay attention to analytics to see how they’re working and pay attention to where traffic is coming from.

At the DTH, staffers use Google analytics as well as Chartbeat Publishing real-time analytics. The real-time analytics are more valuable in this situation, because they can watch traffic go up or down based on the promotional work they’re doing.

The DTH has had Chartbeat, and then the more advanced Chartbeat Publishing, for about 13 months, and have found it to be a tremendous teaching tool. Watching the numbers go up and down helps students understand what drives online traffic. It also encourages them to post more frequently online when they can see how many people are reading it.

Here are Chartbeat screenshots from this morning – a more typical weekday, and from Tuesday afternoon.

 

According to Google analytics, the site had 51,474 page views Tuesday. The previous Tuesday, there were 27,014.

Have fun

Journalists live for these days. Enjoy the ride.

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Abandoning print at a community college: an adviser’s progress report

November 2, 2011 in College Media, management, Websites

Editor’s note: Mark Plenke wrote a message on the College Media Adviser’s Listserv about the transition to an online-only publication at Normandale CC. I invited him to revise and expand his comments and share them with readers who don’t have access to the listserv. This is the result. – Bryan

By Mark Plenke
Adviser, The Lions’ Roar Online

Editors at the Lions’ Roar, the student paper at Normandale Community College in Bloomington, Minn., decided last spring to drop their print edition and go totally online. The decision was difficult because the paper had published continuously since the school opened in the late ‘60s and had a good reputation and a loyal audience among faculty and staff.

The editors had noticed, though, that there just weren’t enough reporters, editors and photographers to do a consistently good job of putting out both a print newspaper and a website. They’d also noticed that the number of newspapers they were recycling was getting bigger despite a dynamic redesign and stepped up efforts at social-media marketing.

So they pulled the plug.

Here’s what happened and what we’ve learned:

  • There were complaints, both during the informal public-comment period last spring when they made the decision and this fall when the news racks stayed empty as school started. But we didn’t hear from a single student; a few faculty said they missed the print paper.
  • The students and I did a good job of letting people know what was happening, including a campaign that used the empty racks (Can’t find a paper?–look online!) to promote the switch.
  • Readership went WAY up. The number of unique visitors to the site is triple what it was last May. The comparison I like the most: Lions’ Roar used to print 2,000 papers and close to half were recycled. In the first full month of school this fall, the website had 2,893 unique visitors and comparable numbers for October (2,821).
  • The key to success was giving up the student fee money that would have been used for printing (about $7,500 a year) to secure a promise of weekly access to the database of student email accounts. The webmaster now sends a weekly update of what’s on the website to every student email box, and we publish the same hyperlinked mini-home page to an employee portal so staff has one-click access to the site.
  • The biggest growing pain was getting students to understand that they weren’t putting out a paper every three weeks anymore, that news had to be covered, reported and posted in a hurry (still working on that one, but it’s gotten a lot better lately).
  • Many more slideshows and video stories are being produced now. It’s no longer a medium for feature stories only.
  • Writers are using more web-friendly forms, especially lists.
  • Blogs have replaced columnists, a really good change in terms of the writing. It’s much tighter and brighter.
  • Students are thinking more visually because it’s the best way to get a story promoted on the home page.
  • Happily, a few advertisers (but none of the national agencies, unfortunately) have decided to go online with the paper.
  • The one minus has been the loss of social time when layout night disappeared, but we’ve started scheduling staff events (a pizza-and-pop party in the office this week, for example) to help replace it.

I’m biased, but I think it’s fair to say the change was a big success. The site has three times as many visitors as it did last spring and at least a thousand more readers than the print paper had each month. I also think the staff is being served well because they’ve learned to report news when it’s still news and they’re broadening the professional skills they’ll need to find a job when they’re done with school.

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Managing in the Digital Age

February 12, 2011 in management, social media, Training

I’m tweeting from the Mid-America Press Institute workshop “Managing in the Digital Age” today and tomorrow.

There’s going to be a lot of talk about social media, analytics, and mobile journalism, and a discussion about app development with folks from stltoday.

You can find details about the workshop here, and follow the tweets using the hashtag #mpinews

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One way not to do online comments (rant)

July 16, 2010 in Community, ethics, industry news, management, social media

Credit cards
Image via Wikipedia

Over the life of this blog, and in my studies of the online news business since 2001, I have seen so many efforts to rein in online comments that my eyes roll when I see a new round of pearl-clutching from news editors and publishers about how nasty commenters are on their web sites.

But of all the efforts, this effort by the Sun Chronicle in Massachusetts has got to be the prize-winner for ways to kill off a commenting community. The SC not only wants readers to register to comment using their real names and addresses, they want users to give up credit card information and pay a one-time fee of 99 cents for the privilege!

The opportunity to post comments on stories on Sun Chronicle websites will be restored this week, Publisher Oreste P. D’Arconte announced today, with posters required to use their real names.

To enforce this change, all posters will be required to register their name, address, phone number and a legitimate credit card number.

The credit card will be charged a one-time fee of 99 cents to activate the account.

Look, I can understand the desire to have a well-functioning, civil community of readers commenting on your web site. I can even understand the desire to have people use their real names when commenting (although I disagree). But demanding that readers give up sensitive financial information and then billing them just to leave a comment on a web site is … well, I can’t use the words I’m considering right now on a family web site.

Of course, if the Sun Chronicle were serious about wanting comments, they could use Facebook Connect. It’s not 100 percent foolproof, but it would tie a comment to a user’s online identity in a more meaningful way and discourage or eliminate “anonymous” comments (pro-tip: when a user puts a name – even a made-up name – in a comment box, it’s not technically “anonymous,” but “pseudonymous”).

More likely, this change will drop the Sun Chronicle’s commenting community to near zero. And if I were an enterprising web denizen in one of the paper’s communities, I’d be busy putting up a web site that allows users to comment on SC-related articles without registering. Just provide headline links to SC stories in blog posts and allow comments on those posts. No need to steal content.

I’ve often gotten the vibe that a vast number of news media professionals hate comments, and would rather not deal with them at all. After all, people on the Internet can be real jackasses when their name is not associated with what they write.

But shutting off comments on your site – or trying to get people to pay to do so – is no real solution. It just drives people to other places on the Internet where they can comment without fearing for their jobs, or their social status, or whatever.

Last year, Va. Tech’s Collegiate Times student newspaper went through a similar type of situation. A campus committee was dismayed that there were racist comments showing up in the comments on the Collegiate Times’ web site. So the committee’s solution was to try to get the news org. to stop allowing anonymous comments by cutting off university funding.

Brilliant!

No mention of, you know, actually dealing with the disgusting underbelly of racism that brings these comments out. Just sweep the problem under the rug so the campus community looks pristine.

The truth of the matter is that managing an online community of commenters is work. It’s like tending a garden. If you don’t put in the work to root out the weeds (abusive commenters), you won’t get the vegetables (cogent commenters) to flourish.

The Sun Chronicle‘s recently announced policy roots out the weeds by digging up the entire garden.

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RTNDA’s social media guidelines

February 4, 2010 in ideas, industry news, management

twitter

Via Al Tompkins at Poynter, here are the guidelines for social media as proposed by the Radio and Television News Director’s Association.

College journalists should perhaps pay special attention to this one:

• Avoid posting photos or any other content on any website, blog, social network or video/photo sharing website that might embarrass you or undermine your journalistic credibility. Keep this in mind, even if you are posting on what you believe to be a “private” or password-protected site. Consider this when allowing others to take pictures of you at social gatherings. When you work for a journalism organization, you represent that organization on and off the clock. The same standards apply for journalists who work on air or off air.

A few weeks ago at the Canadian University Press Conference, I made this point during a session on social media. If you don’t want anything to embarrass you, don’t put it on the Internet, or share it via cellphone. At all. In these days of ubiquitous cell phone cameras, it’s almost impossible to control all access to something that might be embarrassing. If someone feels that they do want to share photos of themselves, they should use a personal account with controlled access. Even then, a photo could be “leaked” through other people who have access.

This is another handy set of guidelines to refer to when your media outlet is compiling social media guidelines.

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Moving beyond breaking news multimedia: now is the time to plan

January 8, 2010 in management, Multimedia views

students

As the new semester begins, I want to encourage you who are working with online/multimedia in your college newsroom to begin the process of planning to move beyond the quick-hit multimedia package this semester.

I try to encourage our multimedia staff at dennews.com to think about two enterprise packages that they could put together over the course of a semester that would really address serious issues of concern to students, faculty and staff.

I’m not talking about the “meet the SGA candidates” package, or the sports season preview, or a year-in-review audio slideshow. No, I mean enterprise, something that takes real digging, journalistic effort, and a team of talented journalists to pull off.

Last semester I put this assignment to my online journalism class. We brainstormed ideas about a month before the end of the semester. I posed the question this way: “What are some really difficult issues that students struggle with here?” Eastern is a pretty typical college campus, so I could probably name some topics you could use:

  • Alcohol/drug abuse
  • Employment prospects upon graduation
  • Juggling work and school
  • Sexuality/relationships
  • Minorities/race relations
  • Faith on campus
  • LBGT issues
  • Military/War issues (students who will serve or have served)
  • Students who are also parents
  • Unwanted pregnancy
  • Mental health/stress issues
  • University impact on town politics

The three teams of students in my online journalism class came up with some pretty good work once they focused on their topic.

I would suggest you take one or two of those topics (or a similarly meaty topic) and break the topic apart into smaller stories, just like if you were going to produce a series of stories for the print/broadcast product. Depending on how many people you have to work with, you could shoot for three, five, or seven different angles/stories.

Then, with each of those smaller stories, figure out how you can present those stories using the unique attributes of the web – timelines, video, audio stories, audio slideshows, animated graphics, databases, maps, etc.

Then start assigning those multimedia elements to a team of people on your staff. Figure out what kind of time, equipment they may need to get each of the parts done. Give them deadlines several weeks into the future. Set a date certain for when the project will be posted online. Check up on their progress. Work on the layout for the “package.”

The point of this is that an enterprise multimedia project is going to take time to produce, just like any significant piece of journalism. And once you get into the flow of the day-to-day of producing a daily or weekly printed product and putting all those one-off multimedia projects together, you’re not going to have the time to come up with a good project, plan it out, budget personnel, and get the work done.

Now is the time to plan for those projects. And when you get them done, let us know so we can share your success with the rest of the college journalism world.

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New School Year: Changes coming to the Daily Eastern News

August 18, 2009 in management, Multimedia views

This week, student journalists at the Daily Eastern News at Eastern Illinois University will begin an experiment to reconfigure the newsroom to better deal with the online future of news.

It’s something I’ve talked about a lot here: getting the copy desk and editors to put stories online, freeing up the online staff to focus on web-only content. Getting print reporters to gather links and prepare their stories with the online component in mind. But the timing for a transition in the newsroom hasn’t been right, until this year.

The online staff, senior editors, and I will lead the entire staff through training in writing blogs, posting items to the dennews.com site, and thinking more about how to add depth to stories through multimedia.

Training sessions begin tomorrow and continue Thursday. We’ll see how things go in the coming weeks and months, but it’s an exciting transition.

I know several student papers have already made this transition. We tried to do this when I first arrived, but the staff wasn’t quite ready. There’s a saying about leading a horse to water that applies here. But the future won’t wait forever, and hopefully this is the time.

We’re still pushing along with College Publisher 4 for the time being, so it’s going to be a little bit more involved than I’d hope.

I’ll update as the semester goes along.

Now if I could only convince them to get rid of the “Daily” in the masthead.


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Don’t be afraid to let your staff leave comments

April 2, 2009 in Newsrooms

There was a time when I’d get upset at reporters and columnists who responded to comments on our news site. My rationale: It was unprofessional and nonobjective. But that was before I understood that the Web is a two-way conversation.

If done appropriately, reporters and columnists can use comments as a means of building credibility instead of diminishing it.

In 2007 I wrote to Poynter’s ethics guru Bob Steele to get advice about this very topic and he said via e-mail:

Most news organizations would not publish letters or online comments written by staff. An alternative is for a staffer to write a guest column but the editor has final judgment on whether it gets published. Your staff member has Freedom of Speech rights but that does NOT guarantee him access to your paper nor your website.

But even in two short years, those rules have changed substantially.

The dynamic of the Web (which has been emphasized in journalism through blogs and Twitter) allows readers to communicate directly with writers.

The discussion that can unfold between readers and reporters adds value to your articles, whether it results in fact-checking (commenters as “watchdogs”), a new angle, or the building of community. And really, why shouldn’t your reporters be able to respond?

Here are a few general guidelines about letting news staff comment on articles:

  • If a commenter presents a question about a fact or issue within the article, the reporter should clarify or answer the question when possible, even if it requires additional reporting
  • Reporters should not argue personal opinions in comments of a news article they wrote
  • Columnists or op/ed writers should, however, have the freedom to editorialize in comments and respond to counterarguments, as long as it doesn’t turn into personal attacks
  • For full disclosure, all members of your staff who respond in comments should clearly identify themselves as members of your news organization
  • All comments from your news staff should be professional and accurate; it’s not a medium for reporters to interject with speculation or rumor
  • Don’t let “professional” throw you off though– comments can  still be personal and casual. Let your reporters be the real people  that they are. Your readers will trust them more

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Multimedia pay scales for college media

September 25, 2008 in College Media, management, Multimedia views

NIU Huskies LogoImage via WikipediaAn interesting discussion popped up on the CMA listserv this week about pay for multimedia work. Some college newspapers, for instance, pay reporters a certain amount per story. They pay photographers per assignment or per photo.

So how does that structure translate to multimedia. Jim Killam, adviser for the Northern Star at NIU shared their pay structure on the list and agreed to let me post it here.

  • Video story (max. 2 minutes)
    Shoot, edit: $15
    Shoot only: $10
    Stories must be posted online for payment to be made
  • Video Catch of the Day (max. 1 minute) [this is a quick personality profile on a random student]
    Shoot, edit: $8
    Shoot only: $5
  • Audio slide show
    Extra $5 above what was paid for shooting the print assignment and slide show
  • Slide Show (no audio)
    No extra: Normal payment made for shooting the print assignment
  • Blog
    $7 flat fee per week (minimum of three posts)

Jim says the structure is still in flux and may change. I noted that the shooting part of the video pay structure was higher than the editing part, even though editing can take much longer than shooting.

I do like the fact that they are paying for blogging, with a minimum required amount of posts. And they put a cap on the time for a video report (2 minutes).

Anyone else got information about pay structures for multimedia work? Is this a good structure? Any suggestions for improvements?

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Online photo request system

April 22, 2008 in Newsrooms, online software, Tech Talk

A few people have asked for screenshots of our online photo request system. Screen shots don’t really do a good job at showing what the system can do so I created this short video.

Video thumbnail. Click to play
Click To Play


click the link to open the quicktime file: APS

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