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?

I’m blogging this week from the University of Georgia in Athens, where I’m attending the Management Seminar for College Newspaper Editors. I love Athens, and I really love getting to meet all of these other college newspaper editors from across the country. We have different challenges depending on the size and structure of our papers, but we face a lot of similar issues as well. Getting perspective from others in the same boat but who are outside your own newsroom is nice.

My plan was to do Twitter updates throughout the day, and I did two (here and here), but by and large felt guilty pulling out my phone while these professionals were giving up their time to talk with us.

We heard first from Edward Miller, the managing editor of The Newsroom Leadership Group and author of “Reflections on Leadership.” I really enjoyed the definition of leadership he gave us (from Truman): “Leadership is getting others to do what you want them to do and liking it.” When he asked for definitions from us, many described it as simply leading a group towards a common goal, but as he pointed out, getting people to do what you want is easy. It’s getting them to like doing it that’s difficult.

• Ways to motivate: Ask “How did you do that?” and “How can you help us teach others how to do it that well?” when reporters do commendable work;
• Give feedback, but make sure you set goals that are measurable, and work towards increasing skills/competence;
• For difficult conversations, ask questions such as “What do you do well?” “What would you like to do more consistently well?” “What’s in the way” “How can I help?”

Then we heard from Selwyn Crawford, assistant metro editor at The Dallas Morning News, who talked about defining “news” so that it is diverse for our audiences (and diverse in more than just racial terms, but representative of all the voices on campus).

• Who cares about an issue? What do people care about? Why do people care?
• “I hear all the loud folk … but what is it we aren’t hearing?” – In response to one editor’s question about how to give equal coverage to the Democrats and Republicans, especially the McCain campaign, which really didn’t have a presence on their campus during the primary. Don’t accept that just because a segment of the population is quiet, that means there’s nothing to cover – often that means there is something to cover that’s being overlooked.

Next, Michael Schwartz, manager of editorial training for Cox Newspapers and COXnet. He addressed recruiting, training and retaining staff. This is a huge issue for us at the DTH. We started last fall with the largest incoming group of reporters (150+ new), and lost a significant amount even by the end of the semester.

We identified a lot of the major problems college newspapers have with this – recruiting a diverse staff (which is not unique to college papers at all), finding people with the necessary skills (the DTH is committed to being a teaching paper, but in some areas, we really don’t have the skills to teach things that we’d like the paper to be doing), combating a lack of interest (this is not so much a problem for the DTH, but a lot of the smaller, non-daily college papers seemed to struggle with this), and trying to offer incentives to get people to join (again, our reputation means this usually isn’t a problem in getting people on staff, but it is a demanding job that isn’t cut out for everyone, and too often we offer too little to convince people to stay). I really enjoyed hearing what other papers do to combat these problems, and we discussed those as well.

• Form a recruiting committee (At the DTH, we had hoped to hire a recruitment editor, but no one applied. In the past, this task fell to writing coaches, without much success. We’re hoping our new adviser will help with this in the fall.)
• Staff testimonials (why is joining the paper a valuable experience?)
• Open houses (and not just to recruit, but throughout the year, to demystify the paper and make it more open in general)

Lastly, we heard from Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, who talked about legal and ethical issues. I took media law last semester, but I still really enjoyed this session and thought it did a good job of really focusing on the big issues college editors deal with on a day-to-day basis.

Which was all followed by a show-and-tell of sorts, where 64 of the editors passed around copies of their paper. There’s a good mix of papers here at the conference, from tabs to broadsheets, and weeklies, twice-weeklies, thrice-weeklies and the dailies (5x a week). From informal discussions with the other daily editors, I think the DTH’s circulation is the largest, at 20,000, but as was pointed out, we also distribute off-campus, which many of these papers don’t do. Regardless of size though, we’re all still dealing with the same issues, and I think we all take it as seriously. It’s a really committed group of editors who are here this week.

Tomorrow I’m sitting on a panel talking about covering the unexpected, when tragedies (or any breaking news) hits. It’s a little weird being in Eve Carson’s hometown and talking about how we covered that awful day and the weeks afterward. I’m really proud of what we did as a paper, but it’s a learning experience I wish we hadn’t had to have.

I’m going to try to do more Twitter updates tomorrow; we’ll see how that goes though.