For several weeks now I’ve been posting on The Daily Tar Heel’s new Tumblr blog. The idea was borne out of my experience with my personal Tumblr and through this Q&A with the man behind the Newsweek Tumblr.

So far I’ve used the blog to share DTH cartoons, photos of weird goings-on in the Quad, reader comments and national stories about higher education trends. It veers more towards the light-hearted, although I have used to to respond to complaints about our coverage I saw raised in other Tumblr blogs.

What I like: Mostly, it’s ease of use. These are things I come across throughout the day, and they don’t always have a place elsewhere. In the past I’ve thrown similar-style blog posts up on our campus blog, but it’s not well-suited for a quick quote, photo or link. And sometimes that’s all that needs to be shared.

I’m not so sure how this fits into our overall strategy, or whether it serves any purpose.  Even if it does, I’m not sure if it’s something that is worth devoting limited time and resources to. We’re steadily gaining followers, and we’ve gotten a good deal of traffic from links posted to Twitter, but whether readers get anything out of it is another question. Undoubtedly we’re reading a different type of audience than we typically do though, so the question becomes then how to get them to dailytarheel.com. And that I haven’t figured out yet. Any suggestions?

I’ve used the Journalist theme for a long time, and I still like it a lot. But I wanted to try my hand at modifying PHP code myself on a bare-bones blog theme. It took me the better part of the afternoon and evening, but I’ve finally got the site to where I’m happy with it.

Note: I know absolutely no PHP, so this was kind of an exercise in trial and error. Here’s the theme before I started tinkering with it. I got rid of the horizontal “about me” bar first, and then started playing around with the colors.

Changing the title’s color was easy, but the various links throughout the page are governed by seperate sets of code, and I still don’t quite understand each one. Something that was easier than expected was changing where the “Filed under” and “Tags” features appeared. They used to be at the top of the post, but I was able to separate them from the “post date,” “By” and “comments” features and move them to the bottom.

Overall, I like the new look, and mostly I’m just proud of the (minor) tweaking I was able to do myself. The more I messed around with the code the more it made sense, but I’ve obviously just started.

Related, but in a round-about way: I’ve decided to put both my delicious and Publish2 feeds on the site. I used to just have delicous, and I’ve been grappling with which service to use because I like them both. From here out, articles tagged with delicous will be interesting articles, and stuff tagged with Publish2 will be journalism related. Happy reading!

I had planned to write about The Daily Tar Heel’s experience covering Election Night, but State & National Editor Ariel Zirulnick describes it so well, and the night was really hers:

The night was the embodiment of the expression “fly by the seat of your pants.” But somehow we managed to make every deadline of the night and finish the entire paper half an hour early.

And not only was the paper product superb, but we broke new ground for the paper with our election blogging. We had more than 160 posts in about 20 hours. We had reporters riding along  in the shuttles  that UNC Young Democrats ran to the polls, sitting outside polling sites, chatting up students in line at Alpine Bagel, scanning news sites and checking in at local boards of elections throughout the day. We had audio and video posts. We mobilized a staff of about 100 to deliver news to UNC students that, for the most part, they couldn’t get anywhere else.

I couldn’t have been prouder of our blog. It was one of those things no one knew how it would turn out, and it had the potential to be a colossal flop. I think it’s greatest achievement was that it involved as many editors and staff as it did in producing a strictly online product. And it’s one they were proud of, not something that was going online because there wasn’t room in the paper.

I think the challenges newspapers face in getting support for new technologies are best overcome by jumping headfirst. Hardly any of the reporters knew what they were doing that day when they started out. Few of the editors had any idea how it would turn out. But ultimately it all came together.

There were lots of things that, if we did it again, we’d know to do better. There were lots of things we weren’t doing then, knew we should be but still were limited by staff and resources. But for what we sought to do – tell the story of Orange County of Election Day – I think we succeeded.

I’ve spent most of today fixing up this blog and adding new things. I joined LinkedIn and del.icio.us, and re-examined my Twitter account. Social networking, beyond Facebook, is new and while I get its importance, it isn’t something that is thrillingly exciting. I’m trying to get the hang of things, so bear with me.