I’ve almost finished up my first week at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and I’m finally settling down a bit in Little Rock.
I’m here for roughly 10 weeks doing general assignment work. So far I’ve covered a town meeting in Wrightsville (an unsuccessful attempt to replace the mayor who resigned a few weeks back), the ubiquitous Memorial Day travel story, a North Little Rock housing employee charged with rape while on parole for a 1980′s murder conviction), and various police briefs. (I’d link, it’s subscriber-only.)
I’ve had a great time in the newsroom so far. This is my first time working in a metro newsoom – my past two internships were at community papers – and the dynamics are definitely different. The DemGaz hasn’t been spared from budget woe and layoffs (they’ve had two rounds this year, the second this month), but the atmosphere here is much more positive than in other newsrooms I’ve visited. There is apprehension, but not yet depression, when the future of journalism is discussed.
The Washington Post ran a piece yesterday about the DemGaz’s online strategy. I think the point at the end, that each newspaper must find what works for them, is a useful one to learn, and what we’re emphasizing at the DTH.
And one thing that’s unmistakable is the quality of reporting and writing at the DemGaz. That’s something that’s important no matter the medium.
I’m excited for the rest of the summer.
Filed under:internships | Tags:Arkansas, Democrat-Gazette, Little Rock
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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.
Three to 5 inches of snow is predicted for Chapel Hill on Tuesday — exciting because of how rare snow here is and because it’s a chance to try some collaborative journalism.
Inspired by the recent efforts in Washington state following flooding, I’m really interested to see what Chapel Hill’s online community of journalists and residents can do. In situations like this, where news organizations have a public service responsibility, it makes no sense not to do as Ryan Thornburg suggests: ”Collaborate on commodity and breaking news; Compete and crowdsource on analytical and accountability journalism.”
I plan on Twittering (@saragregory), uploading photos to Flickr and saving other weather-related articles to Publish2. I’m going to use a #CH-snow hashtag for it all. If you’re in Chapel Hill/Orange County, I invite you to do the same and see what we can come up with collectively.
And of course, it’s quite possible — it being the South, after all — that nothing will happen, and grocery stores will sell out of milk and bread for no reason.
Filed under:social media | Tags:Chapel Hill, Flickr, Publish2, Twitter
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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.
You see, your local news station will keep you up to date when there’s blood on the sidewalk or a new report on how lettuce can give you eye cancer. And cable news will recap big national stories and provide 24/7 coverage of the latest missing co-ed. But only a newspaper reporter will dig through the mayor’s garbage on your behalf.
Public Policy Polling’s most recent poll (conducted Sept. 27-28) shows that younger N.C. voters aged 18-29 haven’t decided who to vote for beyond the presidential race.
The number of undecideds is higher among that age group than any other in the gubernatorial race between Republican Pat McCrory and Democrat Bev Perdue and in the senatorial race between Republican Elizabeth Dole and Democrat Kay Hagan. In that age group, 18 percent say they don’t know who they’re supporting for governor, and 14 percent don’t know who they’re backing for the Senate. By comparison, the undecideds in the presidential race at that age is only 5 percent.
Tom Jensen, who runs the poll, writes that overall the numbers suggest about one-third of the electorate is up for grabs in the next four weeks. And since so many young voters are up for the taking, that could bode well for the candidates who can attract that youth vote.
Several are campaigning this weekend to that end. There’s a Students for McCrory Web site and students were Pit-sitting for him at UNC-Chapel Hill on Friday. N.C. State’s The Technician reports that McCrory is campaigning at a barbecue before Dole tailgates with students before the N.C. State football game Saturday.
The ultimate arbiter of all things youth – Facebook – breaks the candidates’ Internet support down as follows (as of Oct. 3):
Rachael Oehring, a DTH writer for Diversions, asked me to respond to some questions about Twittering for a story she’s writing for a features class. I’ve already posted about my experience Tweeting this weekend during the presidential debate and at an Obama/Biden rally, but I thought I’d include my responses here:
Q: You live-tweeted the Obama rally the other day, and I was just wondering how you got the idea for that? Were there other people in the press area doing the same thing? How was the experience of being at the rally in the first place, and what was it like sitting there texting while Obama was speaking?
A: I decided before the rally that I wanted to live-Tweet it. Until this weekend, I’ve chiefly used Twitter socially vs. journalistically. I wanted to try live-Tweeting an event to see what would work and what wouldn’t. I live-Tweeted the presidential debate with the DTH’s State & National editor, Ariel Zirulnick, on Friday, and learned a lot from that. Our Tweets were too much of a minute-by-minute run down of what was happening, which, with so many people watching the debate, wasn’t needed. In retrospect, we both wished we had included more analysis. I think that my Twittering from the Obama/Biden rally was a good mix of “This is what he said” and crowd reaction. I wish I had brought my laptop, because text-Twittering limited my speed.
I didn’t see anyone else in the press texting, and I kind of felt weird being the only one. Some in the press had laptops and they could have been Twittering, but I didn’t see one way or another. I haven’t seen the result of anyone in the press twittering the rally.
Q: How do you think a technology like Twitter fits in with traditional news outlets? This might be a bit of a stretch, especially since the DTH is pretty open to new technology, but how do you think other papers will utilize this technology? Do you think we’ll reach a point where there will be a bevy of press twittering updates at press conferences and events and such?
A: I would love to see traditional news outlets embrace Twitter more. There’s a balance to strike, because by and large the public hasn’t embraced Twitter, so the audience this form of reporting is directed at is small, but as a story telling form I like it. It’s bite-sized information that I can choose whether to receive or not. Many of the newspapers that have embraced it seem to have embraced it as another way to distribute news as an RSS alternative, but I think robot-Twitter accounts have their limitations. What I enjoy about Twitter is connecting with the other users. At its core, Twitter is simply social networking, and when newspaper’s don’t have that interactive element between their Twitter and their readers, I think readers are more likely to lose interest. I would love to see the press Twitter updates at meetings etc. Its another way of reporting, and then journalists can go back to those “notes” to write the story, which ideally is more nuanced and analytical than Tweet updates.
Q: How does tweeting an event differ from, say, live-blogging an event? Is there a difference?
A: I’ve never live-blogged an event, but I feel the principals of it vs. Twittering are similar. You’re trying to do updates as quickly as possible and as thorough as possible as the time allows for. Twitter imposes an additional space restriction because you only have 140 characters. You’re required to focus in on the key points.
Q: Do you think that something like Twitter is going to alter in any way how news is broken, does it fit in with the 24-hour news cycle of TV news networks and Web sites?
A: I think Twitter’s already altered how news is broken. The earthquake this summer was broken on Twitter before the Los Angeles Times had anything. And it’s not just Twitter that’s changing how news is broken – Wikipedia had Tim Russert’s entry updated to include his death before any news organization released the news. Social media in general makes it a lot easier for non-journalists to break news (and for journalists to break news). Twittering doesn’t give the full scope though – it’s great at announcing the news but hard to fit context into the space allowed. One of my favorite Tweets is this one by @lonelysandwich: “To be fair, if CNN could get away with HOLLYF**K EARTHQAKE!!!1! as the extent of its coverage, they’d likely have scooped your a**, Twitter.” (** mine).
Filed under:ideas, social media | Tags:Twitter
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I took photos at the Obama/Biden rally in Greensboro in between Tweeting. I’m trying to photograph more so I feel more comfortable with it.
The campaign set up risers for press to Obama’s right and straight ahead. The DTH didn’t get riser space, but were among the many who were allowed up in shifts. In general, it was more of a hassle up on the platform, because volunteers kept yelling different things about who was/wasn’t allowed up there, and TV cameras, poles and people got in the way. Although on the ground I wasn’t really tall enough to shoot Obama through the crowd. I moved around a lot trying to get pictures, but most didn’t turn out the way I wanted them to.
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?
Filed under:social media, The Daily Tar Heel | Tags:Flickr, livetweeting, Twitter
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