Because The Daily Tar Heel’s strategy next year involves social media more than ever, we felt it would be helpful to establish a policy to guide reporters on how to use it. My goal was to create a policy that emphasizes the value of social media while sets some standards so as not to embarass the paper.

In general, we plan to trust our reporters to know what is acceptable and what is not. We’re going to accompany this policy with training at the beginning of the year on how to use social media.

10 rules for using social media:

1. Use your own name and photo. If you using your account for DTH reporting, identify yourself as a DTH reporter in your profile.
2. Tell your editor if you plan to tweet as a DTH reporter. Likewise, let your editor know if you plan to livetweet something.
3. In general, do not post something online that would not be appropriate to run in the paper or on dailytarheel.com.*
4. You must disclose yourself as a DTH reporter to potential sources the same way you would if you were meeting face-to-face.
5. Do not disclose political affiliation on profiles and do not write about your political preferences in updates.
6. Do not criticize a colleague’s work.
7. Promoting your work via social media is encouraged.
8. In the interest of transparency, staff meetings are considered open unless otherwise stated.
9. It is acceptable to “friend” sources, but do it evenly. For instance, if you cover the Chapel Hill Town Council, if you wish to follow one member on Twitter, you should follow all of them.
10. Respond to people who contact you via social media. If you aren’t the appropriate person to answer their questions, refer them to whoever is.

In making this list I looked at several professional papers’ guidelines on social media. Most missed the mark with the limits that they placed. I want to make it as easy as possible for readers and sources to contact DTH reporters and place a high premium on transparency. My experience with social media is that it’s expanded my reporting capabilities and made me more responsive to our readership, and I wouldn’t want to limit other reporters.

Feel free to comment with suggestions/improvements. I’m also interested to hear if other college papers have social media policies or are looking to create them.

*Added after a suggestion from Jason Spencer.

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?

On Saturday, a committee will pick the next editor of The Daily Tar Heel. I hope to be that person.

This has been my dream job for longer than I can remember, and it would be the highest honor to serve the paper in this capacity next year. I’ve learned a lot this year as managing editor and have a lot of ideas about what we can do to make the DTH better in print and online.

I could not have a worthier opponent. I know the paper will be in good hands regardless of which of us gets this gig on Saturday.

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.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and running mate Joe Biden spoke at the depot Saturday. Both men emphasized the economy. “We can’t have another four years like the last eight years,” Obama said.

From the press risers overlooking the crowd of nearly 20,000, I was struck by the number of supporters taking cell phone pictures and videos of the speech. Search on Flickr for Obama and Greensboro, and a fair amount of photos from Saturday’s rally are posted. These amateur photos add to the wealth of content from the traveling press corps and the in-state crowd that showed up to cover the event. Greensboro’s News & Record has a really nice slideshow of photos from the rally (and audio and text of the speech), but there’s no interactive feature to let reader’s submit content. It only goes one way.

The event was also another try at live-Twittering an event. I liveblogged the first presidential debate with DTH State & National Editor Ariel Zirulnick on Friday, but Saturday I Twittered for myself and not the DTH. I didn’t have my computer with me, so my updates were text only, which limited my speed. And I don’t get Tweets sent to my phone, so I wasn’t able to see or respond to all the @ replies I received until I got back to the office. That made it very much a one-way street.

I think my strategy – Tweeting mostly one-liner quotes with a few describing the atmosphere – worked better for this style of event than for the debate the night before, when all of America was watching and didn’t need the blow-by-blow account of what they watching. In that case, more analysis would have been appropriate.

The DTH plans to liveblog other election events this semester via Twitter, and I’m looking to experiment with different Tweeting styles to see what works best. What do you think? What do you want from live Twittering from an event?

This made my day:

I’ve always loved weekly papers — what they may not have in breaking news, they more than make up for in cogent commentary, in-depth analysis and local color.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t want a daily paper. And, sadly, though the N&O is cutting everything in site to save money, it just isn’t cutting it for me anymore. Dwindling resources and a clear shift to covering Cary in favor of Carrboro or Chapel Hill leaves me wanting more. Searching for news of a Board of Aldermen meeting online last spring, I happened upon an article in the Daily Tar Heel. It was well-written and thorough. And it got me looking more and more at the student paper, whose City Desk is doing some fine reporting hereabouts.

Read them over for yourself and make you own judgment. For my money, it’s worth the walk to the Carrboro Mini-Mart to grab the DTH. This “New” Reliable provides better daily coverage than the Old Reliable. (Adventures in the Local Economy, Sept. 18)

The DTH opens its doors tomorrow to about 150 journalism babies. Recruitment is over, we oriented them Saturday and tomorrow many of them will be working on their very first stories/photographs/graphics/pages/etc. I expect lots of questions along the lines of “How do I dial out on the phone?” “Where do I type my article?” and “What’s my deadline?”

All of the editors, who have been putting out the paper these last four weeks with a bare-bones staff left over from last year, are incredibly excited about this batch of new staff. As inexperienced as they are, they are manpower. 

But all of the editors are a little scared too – everyone feels a great sense of responsibility to these new staff. Last year we hired 185 new staff (we hire everyone…), but by the end of the semester, less than half remained. The DTH isn’t for everyone, and there’s a weeding out process. But we also lose a lot of talented folks that we end up wishing hadn’t weeded themselves out.

We hired a news adviser for the first time this year. We’re behind a lot of our peer-newspapers in hiring an adviser, and part of what we feel Erica can help us with is with retention. She’ll be meeting with every single new staff member at least once this semester formally, and is going to serve as a writing coach/internship-search-resource/calm voice. 

Erica is going to really help where new staffers fall in the cracks. It’s not that desk editors don’t want to be a resource, but sometimes they don’t have the time or the experience themselves to really serve as a help. And hopefully Erica can help our editors be better editors. She’s there for us, too.

Here are my goals for helping new staff transition to the DTH:

• I’m going to learn their names. All 100 and however many of them there are. As a freshman, there was nothing more exciting for me than when management called me by my name. Or said hi to me when they saw me outside the newsroom.
• I’m going to be patient when answering even the most seemingly obvious of questions.
• I’m going to explain every change I make when editing. I think editing should be a conversation. My best editors have always edited that way, and as a reporter, I think you learn better by talking it out. And I think I edit better this way, too.
• I’m going to make a big deal to them of getting their stories in the paper, especially on front or page three. I cut out every single article I wrote freshman year and taped them to my dorm wall. Seeing your name in print is a really big deal.
• I’m going to find something positive to say about something in everything they do.

The Daily Tar Heel is making its switch to College Publisher 5 tonight. One of the features we’re introducing with the new site is a static corrections page, a la New York Times style. Previously, we’ve published corrections in the article and published the corrections individually, but we haven’t had a single page to view corrections.

For the print edition, I keep up with our corrections, so I volunteered to compile the ones so far and put the html links in to make it easier for our Web editor. I did it in a text document, and wanted to see what it would look like, and make sure the links worked. So I put it on TWF.

I was just trying to see a draft … but I clicked publish. And thus, the RSS picked it up despite my immediate deletion of the post.

I’ve learned my lesson – as Andrew Dunn said, “You can’t take the Internet back.” No more “practicing” on the blog …

I’m taking an online journalism class this semester with Ryan Thornburg, a DTH alum who was in charge of the Iraq war and 2004 election coverage on washingtonpost.com.

One of our ongoing assignments is to blog about a specific topic related to the elections in N.C. My plans are to follow student newspapers, mainly college, and how they’re covering the campaigns:

But in an election season that already has charged the youth vote, college newspapers would be remiss if they didn’t cover the campaigns. Already, papers have sent student journalists around N.C. to cover politico’s appearances, have snagged interviews with candidates for state office and have localized the party’s conventions in Denver and St. Paul, Minn. And when it comes to state elections, student papers might be a reader’s only source of information about the candidates. How they cover the elections matter. (N.C. Youth Vote, Sept. 4)

I’m really hoping that following this will help with our own election coverage at the DTH. State & National Editor Ariel Zirulnick has so many ideas of what we can do and is blogging about the election for the paper, and our efforts are increasing daily as the election draws closer and closer.  I’m going to try for my class blog to be light on DTH news, mostly because I want to focus on what we can learn from what other papers are doing. I’m also particularly interested in how student papers are embracing technology to cover the election. At the MSCNE conference I went to this summer, papers outside of N.C. have big plans, and my fingers are crossed that we’ll see really innovative ideas here, too.

The first DTH of the year is online and in stands now. It’s a good feeling, looking at the 26-page behemoth knowing how hard all the staff worked last week to put it out and knowing all the hard work they’re still putting in for Tuesday’s 34-pager.

Right now I’m most excited about our recruitment efforts. We manned a booth at Fall Fest, the annual start-of-year celebration where student groups court new members, and have a recruitment page on the Web site, complete with a video about the DTH from our multimedia desk. Editor Alli Nichols is at the journalism school’s convocation right now, making her pitch for the DTH, and I just sent an e-mail to the hundreds who signed up for our listserv. We’ll meet with the first group of interested students this Thursday.

I’m interested in what other student newspapers are doing to recruit this fall. It was a big topic of discussion at the MSCNE conference I went to this summer, and we all brain-stormed ideas for how to best recruit. We’ll be going to various classes to make pitches, we’re holding interest meetings, promoting it heavily on the Web site, using informational e-mails and have even got a few recruits from Twitter. What else can we do?