My plans as DTH’s managing editor for online

Posted: 9 April 2009 | By: | 16 Comments »

Last night I was hired as The Daily Tar Heel‘s next managing editor for online, and I couldn’t be more excited at the opportunity to lead the paper’s transition to online journalism. My goal and @andrew_dunn‘s goal is for the DTH to be at the forefront of reinventing journalism.

We’ve got a lot of changes in store for dailytarheel.com and the newsroom’s online operations in general.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be moving off the College Media Network and onto a Drupal-based site developed by Stunt3. We hope to launch a beta in mid-May, and the fully featured site will replace the beta by July 1.

Starting in August, you can expect to see updates on dailytarheel.com throughout the day instead of just once a day. We’ll do this by adding online and copy staff to daytime shifts. Copy staffers will be writing SEO’d headlines and Web summaries and posting content. Online staffers will be maintaining the home page, using social networking and developing Web features and applications.

We’ll also be introducing a community manager, who will expand our presence online on Twitter and Facebook and who will cultivate user-generated content. Andrew’s already written about the new Innovation team – let us know if you’re interested.

Other features you can expect to see throughout the year on the Web site:

  • A searchable map of on- and off-campus crime
  • Downtown bar and restaurant guide
  • Standalone galleries for multimedia content
  • Regular podcasts, including a daily podcast talking about the major news of the day and what readers can expect in the next day’s paper
  • A recommend function on articles
  • A mobile edition
  • Content grouped by topic, not desk
  • Liveblogging
  • User-generated content
  • A DTH FAQ to serve as a readers’ guide

We’ve started a DTH internal wiki, we want to transfer DTH e-mail addresses to Gmail accounts, and I’m also looking at ways we can do more of our internal planning online. Throughout it all I plan to chronicle here and on a DTH blog what we’re doing so that other college papers can use it as a resource.

Beyond all this, my job is responsible for training staff to understand and embrace the Web. Reporters will be hyperlinking and tagging their own stories, they’ll learn video and audio, blogging and social media. Staff will learn by doing. Teaching these skills will help us accomplish these other goals.

Andrew and I have lots of ideas about what we can do to improve dailytarheel.com. A lot of it hinges on getting good feedback. What do you think? What should our online newsroom next year include?

Filed under: management, The Daily Tar Heel | Tags: , , ,
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16 Comments on “My plans as DTH’s managing editor for online”

  1. 1 Cat W. said at 10:50 am on April 9th, 2009:

    Awesome! I’m so excited for you all, and excited for me about the mobile edition. The mobile edition of The Daily Beast is amazing, and getting CH news like that will be great!

  2. 2 Sara Gregory said at 10:58 am on April 9th, 2009:

    Thanks! I’m really excited about it too. I’ll let you know when it’s up and running!

  3. 3 Daniel said at 5:42 pm on April 9th, 2009:

    Congrats! You should also have two or three developers to actively improve your website so that you don’t have to pay through the roof to have an external development firm do a shoddy job of it.

  4. 4 robert ivan said at 8:48 pm on April 9th, 2009:

    “A searchable map of on- and off-campus crime”

    What is this built on / what are you using?

  5. 5 Greg Linch said at 10:04 pm on April 9th, 2009:

    Those sound like great ideas, very exciting!

    When did work on the beta site begin?

  6. 6 Daniel said at 10:14 pm on April 9th, 2009:

    Also, you should check out the Ideal CMS feature sheet. I think there are a number of good ideas there…

  7. 7 Dreier Carr said at 11:52 pm on April 9th, 2009:

    That sounds very exciting Sara!

    We are in the middle of some very similar plans over at the Technician and I would love to talk to you about your approach and opinions regarding online content and strategies.

    Let me know if you think you could find some time to talk!

  8. 8 dunn, reporter | Two new positions to make the DTH innovative said at 10:13 pm on April 10th, 2009:

    [...] for online — who has already gotten started on a plan to achieve [...]

  9. 9 Max Beckman-Harned said at 10:32 am on April 11th, 2009:

    Some excellent ideas here, and I’m definitely interested to see how the DTH evolves, and I may be interested in being part of the Innovation Team.

    The tech winds at UNC are shifting–with this, various projects in student government I’m helping with, and the slow release of ConnectCarolina, not to mention the UNC website redesign, it looks like UNC’s online landscape will change very significantly in the next couple of years.

    A working RSS feed may be a good first step for the DTH, though. :)

  10. 10 Sara Gregory said at 10:43 am on April 11th, 2009:

    @Max I’ll make sure to let you know more about the Innovation Team when we start pulling it together. We have a basic RSS feed now through Yahoo! Pipes but we don’t advertise it well. (http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=2oWtQvq83RGmLxvKpQt1Yg&_render=rss)

    @Dreier I’d love to talk sometime. I’ll shoot you an e-mail. I met Saja at a conference last year and have a great respect for The Technician.

    @Daniel That’s an awesome list. I’m going to go through the list we gave the developer and add to it with stuff we left off.

  11. 11 Shannan Bowen said at 3:27 pm on April 11th, 2009:

    I’m excited to see the DTH finally become an online-first news organization. I hope you guys will accomplish your goals and make the DTH an example for other college news organizations. Innovation is a must! Good luck next year, Sara. :)
    -Shannan

  12. 12 Prashant K said at 10:46 pm on April 11th, 2009:

    Good choice selecting Drupal as your next website platform! I’ve designed drupal sites before and it can be effectively customized to fit the needs of any website. Also an RSS feed is somewhat ineffective if it only displays the titles of the articles. I’d suggest having full content RSS feeds on the new site. Good luck and look forward to the new site!

  13. 13 Max Beckman-Harned said at 10:33 pm on April 13th, 2009:

    @Sara Thanks! A bit convoluted (in that you’re using Pipes), but if it works…

    I know you’re moving to a new system, but if you had put that pipes link as the on your main Daily Tarheel page you wouldn’t need to advertise it, it’d automatically get picked up by web browsers instead of the broken one. Do you have that level of configurability on your CMS, or is that one of the reasons you’re switching to a new one?

  14. 14 Sara Gregory said at 10:36 pm on April 13th, 2009:

    @Max Part of why we’re switching. I promise, we want good RSS feeds as much as you do.

  15. 15 CitizenWill said at 2:39 pm on April 17th, 2009:

    Congratulations Sara.

    As mentioned, better RSS (I’d be happy to lend a hand or, if the DTH will give me permission, repurpose your content indirectly).

    Creative commons licensing (attribution and share).

    Ditch – immediately – College Media Network. The platform is slow, randomly allows me to log in via Mac/Linux and, apparently, is in the way of innovation.

    Twitter and Facebook are kind of noobish and not everyone uses or wants to use them. Your cutting off potential community commentary/feedback/elaboration if you limit content to those platforms. Solution? At least provide Twitter logs via your ‘blog or, again, RSS.

    Use tagging to manage/link and expose your archived material more effectively.

    Just a few ideas. I look forward to seeing what you have up your sleeve.

  16. 16 first contact « the federal file said at 6:59 pm on April 29th, 2009:

    [...] Another has joined your ranks. I come at the invitation of Andrew Dunn and Sara Gregory. [...]

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