At Beatblogging.org they're chronicling the growth in our schools blog since the Dallas Independent School District discovered it would have to lay off hundreds of teachers to close a multi-million dollar budget gap.
Fischer and Hobbs have been able to greatly increase traffic to their blog while also encouraging more conversations in the community. They have done this by giving people unprecedented information and new level of coverage during a crisis.
The post also gives Hobbs props for her liveblogging using CoverItLive.
BeatBlogging.Org is giving props to our education team for their efforts (as part of the BeatBlogging experiment) at covering the fiscal meltdown there.
The blog has seen more than a 100 percent increase in page views to be exact. The two have been covering the districts developing financial crisis in real time, and people have responded by coming back to the blog over and over again, while also leaving hundreds of comments a day.
(Thanks Jason Sickles)
Romanesko discovers a truth about journalism that is already being played out on the Web:
"Now that information is so plentiful, we don't need new information so much as help in processing what's already available," writes Philip Meyer, author of "The Vanishing Newspaper."
Web edtiors have known this for a long time. The jobs we are hiring for in Web journalism are centered on organizing, editing and curating content -- not so much on gathering it.
There were no oracles at ONA08 this year, but five Dallas Morning News reporters and editors heard a number of enlightening ideas that we might put into practice as we transition to a digital future. Surprisingly, many of the takeaways centered on changing our culture, not tools or technology.
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From Lost Remote:
Yahoo has taken the wraps off APT (formerly AMP), its new display ad platform that has been under development with the newspaper consortium. In a nutshell, sites on the platform will be able to leverage behavioral data across Yahoo and the network to improve ad targeting. Agencies and advertisers, in theory, will spend on the platform because of its scale, simplicity and deep reporting. APT has been in testing with SFGate.com and MercuryNews.com, and now it will expand to A.H. Belo (us), Cox Newspapers, the MediaNews Group and Scripps Newspapers before fully launching next year. More info on Yahoo’s APT site right here.
AJR has a nice explainer on the meaning of the Semantic Web. Key definition:
It uses smart programs to tag and link to information across mediums, providing context and depth to stories without much human intervention.
We are working, as are many news.coms, to plug in an automated Semantic engine that will parse our content, label it by topic, and place it in a heirarchy, like a virtual card catalogue. Believe me, this is 'gotta do' stuff. My recent PowerPoint presentation on the subject of data strategy is here. Starting at slide 17 I try to explain how the Semantic Web will unlock our articles and make them more valuable.
Technorati, the blog indexing engine, ranks blogs. They also have a bunch of data on them. They're releasing their annual "state of the blogosphere" report, which is worth a looksee. TechCrunch gives us the headline:
The more you post, the higher you are likely to rank on Technorati.
AJR has a terrific write-up about Twitter. Besides giving my organization some props for using the platform successfully, it also points out the new ways other news organizations are using it. Let me emphasize "new" as in "more innovative than The Dallas Morning News."
Here's a challenge: This is so easy to do, and costs essentially nothing, so let's get ahead of the curve!
When blogging isn't fast enough, but you want to keep people in your blog tool, CoverItLive tool is an interesting plug in.
USAToday used it to cover Treasury secretary Paulson's presser. They combined live blogging of the event with analysis from one of our economics reporters. Also they used it here for the President's presser.
The Post says they used it for live convention coverage, and DMN staffer (and Astros fan)Chris Buckle experienced it 'live' at Chron.com for an Astros game.
So... free lunch to the first dallasnews.com blogging team that test drives it for us. And if you're a dn.com user and you experience our effort, holler about how it was.
Victor Godinez has a bill of particulars on bad decisions at the Rocky regarding Twitter.
First, in its coverage of the Democratic presidential convention, a reporter accidentally used a profanity in a tweet, and other reporters were told to quickly throw up their own entries to push the post with the offending word off the main page.
Then, not content with that blunder, the paper dispatched a reporter to the funeral of a three-year-old boy killed in a traffic accident caused by an illegal immigrant.
He says ignore them.
You see, the problem with curmudgeons and complainers is that its so easy for them hijack any discussion. For not to deal with their very grave concerns is to make you look careless. That’s the rhetorical trick: “You could be wrong, it could go wrong, answer me that!” And if you don’t? “Aha!” Well, the hour is far too late and the state of the industry far, far too desperate to waste time with these sideshows. They had their time and the objections needed to be addressed in that time. But I haven’t heard fresh objections in a few years. What I want to hear instead is fresh ideas; we must have more of those.
Poynter's Steve Outing explains how breaking news is moving from blogs to feeds -- often using a provider known as Twitter, here: The Twitter Disaster.
The BBC and CNN have been using Twitter for a while, and at The Dallas Morning News, we have registered a Twitter name (Dallasnewscom) but we haven't yet put it into practice. We will experiment with this in 2008.
A post at BeatBlogging.org reveals how Dallas Morning News education reporter and blogger Kent Fischer used the Web for an A1 story. Fischerexplained how his Friday cover story unfolded a day earlier on his education blog and continued after print publication on the comments section at dallasnews.com.
Among the nuggets:
- He posted to his blog after a teacher emailed him
- His post prompted a reader to forward him some district documents
- Fischer posted a memo with a "quick and dirty" translation
- A flood ofcomments followed, and after the story published on A1 the next day, more people commented on the Web version of the story.
"In this instance, the blog really paid off, in that readers tipped us off to a good story that was still mostly obscured from the public," Fischer told BeatBlogging.org.
Writes Andy Bechtel:
As Henry Fuhrmann, the senior copy desk chief for the Web, told meon my first day: "Editing for online is like drinking water from a firehose."
And:
What should the centerpiece on the site's home page be right now? In 30 minutes? An hour? What news merits a post on a reporter's blog, and what is worth a full-fledged story? Or is there a difference? Which stories should allow reader comments, and how do we handle those comments on stories? The answers are evolving as the medium evolves and challenges our news judgment.
Among the otherlessons learned:
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- Prepare to work hard
- Be flexible
- Understand search engine optimization
On the HuffPost, witer Steve Rosenbaum suggests
If the idea of journalism is that people can question authority, debate issues and ideas, and expose wrongdoing and misdeeds - then the emergence of blogging, micro-blogging, podcasting, vlogging, and lifestreaming all begins to look like a new golden age of journalism.
In Newspapers need to pay closer attention to online comments Robert Niles admonishes reporters and editors to join the fray on the comment threads that develop from their articles online. Romanesko's summary:
"No one with authority stepped in to admonish the rude, correct those who posted wrong information, or to respond to those who had questions about the story," writes Robert Niles. "Reporters and editors need to stay engaged with a piece so long as people are commenting on it and linking to it. Otherwise, they are squandering their chance to use that amazing content as the foundation to build the communities that can sustain market success online."
Jeff Jarvis chronicles the buzz over a recent report in On the Media about comments-on-articles. It's worth a looksee at Dear Bob, considering the fact that we're 'turning on' comments later this week.
You caused a lot of discussion in your OtM piece about comments — and that discussion itself — in the comments on WNYC’s blog, in the comments on mine, and in blogs elsewhere — is an object lesson in the value of the conversation online.
...leap into this conversation, draw on the generous sharing of knowledge and viewpoints of people in it, take lessons away, and share those.
(From Romanesko:)
That's what the Tribune's Bill Adee tells Michael Miner, who writes about the ugly comments posted on chicagotribune.com about violinist Rachel Barton Pine. Classical music critic Marc Geelhoed says this was a "puerile, pathetic discussion. ...Essentially, I'm arguing against the websites used by publications serving as places where people can make any comment they wish and expect that no one will find out who said it."