This blog was archived in August 2007.

Thanks to all of our readers, and an especial thanks to contributor Cathy Resmer.

When the 1-35 bridge collapsed in Minneapolis, Minnesota on August 1, 2007, the staff of the local alt, the City Pages, rushed to convert their existing “Blotter” blog to cover the tragedy.

Editor in Chief Kevin Hoffman explains the project via email:

Why did you decide to use the Blotter to cover the bridge collapse? Why not a stand-alone web-project?
Our readers are used to visiting Blotter for updated daily content, and we knew that all the news in town would focus on this disaster for the next several days, so it just made sense to use our existing architecture and focus our resources on coverage.

Can you tell us how this project came together?
The bridge collapsed during rush hour on Wednesday, after that week’s issue had been published. At that point, we had to figure out how to cover a moving target, knowing that it would be a seven-day-old story by the time our next issue came out. Rather than sit on our reporting, we decided to publish it online and compile the best of it into a package for the print edition next week.

What advantages did the blog medium offer your staffers in developing this story?
Alternative weeklies have historically been at a disadvantage in covering breaking news, because of the delayed publication schedule. But with the Internet, that’s changing. The blog allowed us to file stories in real time, as it was happening.

What has the community response to this project been?
It’s been good. People are hungry for news right now, and our publication often has a different point of view than the dailies and the local TV networks, so the more information, the better.

We noticed that quite a few staffers have contributed to this blog. Was it easy to get folks involved?
Yes, it would have been harder to keep people from getting involved. Staff writer G.R. Anderson Jr. rushed to cover the story soon after it happened, and filed when he got home that night. The next morning, everyone came into work early and just wanted to know how they could help.

Have you seen an increase in traffic?
We saw an increase in traffic by at least 30 percent on Thursday, the first full day of our coverage. We don’t yet have the numbers for Friday, but we’ll be continuing to post throughout the weekend, including a slideshow of images from the scene, so I expect traffic to be higher than usual.

How have you publicized this blog to the community?
We haven’t really had to publicize it. We have a very web savvy audience, and a fairly high Google ranking, so it was more a matter of providing fresh content throughout the day for people to read. Links from other blogs sent traffic to us, and readers even began digging through our archives, finding new relevance in old stories about our transportation infrastructure.

Anything you’d like to add?
Just that I’m very proud of my staff for rising to this occasion.

For continued coverage of the bridge collapse, visit Blogs.CityPages.com/blotter. Photo by Peter S. Scholtes for Minneapolis City Pages.

I joined Facebook a couple months ago, and have been struggling to figure out how to use it to build a Seven Days-centered Facebook community.

I get the sense that creating a Seven Days profile is not cool. It seems like the thing to do is create a Seven Days group, with myself as the admin. I’ve noticed that a few other AAN folks have done that. And AAN also has a Facebook group.

But honestly, I’m having trouble thinking of a name. The group names are so clever! I don’t want ours to be dumb and boring. But I also want it to be intuitive. And I don’t want it to be fake.

Any tips? Anybody have Facebook anecdotes to share?

I have been following the Creative Loafing purchase of the Chicago Reader and the Washington City Paper carefully, because:

1) I used to work at Creative Loafing.
2) It’s a major event in the alt-press, and it’s my job to pay attention to that.
3) CL owner Ben Eason has publicly stated that the web is going to be a strong focus of the new combined company, and it’s my job to know what’s going on with that.

The following list of links to coverage is powered by AAN’s del.ico.us account; it will dynamically update as we find and add new links to our account, so bookmark this blog post if you’d like a resource for coverage.

If you read news on the web, you’ve no doubt noticed that newspapers appear to be split on the subject of embedding external web links in their stories. Some newspapers do it, most don’t.

I suspect that some folks have decided they don’t want to do it, for whatever reason, but I think it’s mainly a question of resources — adding links into stories is really an editorial job. Each link requires some subtle editorial decision-making, and it doesn’t really make sense for web production or marketing staffpeople to do this stuff. You need a web-savvy writer and a web-savvy editor who are invested in making it happen. And I know at struggling alts. it can be difficult to justify spending much editorial time on the web.

But I think it’s worth doing.

Embedding external links allows interested readers to drill down into content if they want. That’s important at newspaper sites. We’re in the information business, so we want to offer as much of it as we can (within reason). Linking also increases web awareness, which in the long-run should increase the quality of web resources available. Think about it — if local businesses and institutions see that people are really using and paying attention to their sites, they may devote more resources to maintaining them (and might think more about advertising online). Links also help improve search engine optimization — yours and theirs.

It’s only been a few months since we started regularly embedding links in our stories at Seven Days — here’s an example of what I mean.

We’re still refining the process, and our linking guidelines. The way it works now, the writers send me (the online editor) the links for their stories each week. On Wednesday morning, after the web production staff uploads the week’s content to our content management system, I log in and manually input the links. This can be a tedious process, especially if the writers (many of them self-proclaimed Luddites) forget to send me their links. Then I have to go out and find them myself. On an average week, it takes me a couple hours to add links to all of our stories and columns.

I think that in an ideal world, we’d all be writing on a web-based system, and the writers would embed the links as they go, and the regular editors (not the “online editor”) would edit them the way they do the rest of the story. But we’re not there yet.

1. Register for NewsU’s “Writing Headlines for the Web” webinar on Tuesday, July 31, 2007 with Eric Ulken and Mike Castelvecchi of the LATimes. $20 investment to drive audience engagement? I spend that much on sushi.

2. Check out OJR’s piece “Hits, page views and other garbage we pass off as audience metrics” for an overview of the changing nature of website metrics. (Hint: Time spent is rapidly becoming an important measurement.)

3. And finally, subscribe to Journerdism.com. Will Sullivan is some kinda link-posting machine; he’s a great source of media news.

[Disclosure: I recently taught a few sessions for young journalists at Poynter, home of NewsU. I know Sullivan through Poynter as well.]

Should your redesign include a social network?

On the surface - an easy answer is yes. You can always make your site more useful to an individual by providing them a login and giving them personalized information. Extrapolate out from that - you can almost always figure out a way to make your site useful to a group of users by allowing them to share their preferences with each other, and building a community from there is a logical extension.

But what exactly should your network consist of? In-depth user profiles like Facebook? Or cursory ‘following you, we’re not friends’ á la Twitter?

Confronted with this question in my own redesign process, I took a step back and created a series of framework questions.

1. What value can you provide to the individual by giving them user preferences?

2. What value can users gain from each other - on a one-to-one level?

3. What can value can an individual gain from a social organism?

Thinking through these questions, keeping your content and your audience in mind - determine what kind of social network is best suited for your site.

Christine Tatum, SPJ president, opened a can of worms recently when she suggested a list of tech items that newsroom journalists should personally own: laptop, phone, audio recorder, camera, video camera, flash drive and microphone.

Surprised at the ferocity of backlash she encountered, she wrote a blog post asking for input from readers.

This quote struck me: “They expect fire but give me flint to make it.”

For capital-budget strapped alts, this is even more painful. In my first newsroom, none of the computers had the same version of MS Word, making editing a nightmare. Purchasing equipment yourself can be impossible on an altie salary. It can be difficult to produce great multimedia journalism with older equipment.

How has the technology - or lack of it - impacted your newsroom? Have you been able to find inexpensive ways to produce multimedia?

Here’s another Slideshare.net find - Andy Sernovitz, author of “Word of Mouth Marketing,” has posted a short & comprehensible slideshow on how to use word of mouth marketing to increase your blog’s popularity.

This is all great advice for any alt-blogger looking to increase the audience of their paper’s blog.

I spent yesterday morning putting together Seven Days NOW (Notes on the Weekend), our weekly email newsletter. We started doing it in January. We send it out each Thursday afternoon, using email manager Constant Contact.

How many of you out there are using e-newsletters to communicate with readers? There was a good thread about this on the AAN web listserv a few weeks ago, and I signed up for some then, including ones from the Chicago Reader and the Orlando Weekly.

But I want more!

Post your email newsletter sign-up pages to this comments thread, so we can all subscribe.

And please use the comments to share your experiences — what works, what doesn’t, where you go for tips or info on best practices, etc. Feel free to post critiques, too.

We started doing a weekend email newsletter because we wanted to highlight Seven Days as a weekend resource. We also wanted to drive people back to our website after the paper appears on Wednesday.

It looks like other papers use e-newsletters as a CliffsNotes version of the paper. NOW is a little different; some — but not all — of the content in the newsletter comes from the newspaper. The spotlights are often different from the ones in print. This means more work for me, but it lets us give more coverage to cool stuff that we like but for whatever reason couldn’t promote in the paper. Not sure this is the best way to do it, but it’s what we’ve been doing.

Interesting features:

• Each week we highlight three or four “staff picks.” We display a picture of the staff person, along with a quote about the event. We also give a link to their past picks, so you can see what kind of events they like. People seem to like the personalized nature of the recommendations. Also proves we’re real people, not a faceless media corporation. Everyone can submit recommendations, EXCEPT for display ad reps, because it could potentially create a conflict of interest with a client.
• We include a list of the week’s most popular stories on our website: We can’t yet show this list on our website, so we put it in the newsletter (we get the data from Google Analytics). People do click on the stories, and readers definitely notice it.
• We feature a personal ad of the week and classified ad of the week: This was the least popular feature in a recent reader survey, but there have been weeks when the classified ad was the most clicked-on item in the newsletter.
• This has been a great way to promote our blogs and video. It makes much more sense to promote online content online, while people are sitting in front of a computer, rather than in the print paper.

Sometime soon I’m going to start adding a link to a “How I Got That Story” 2-minute audio interview with one of our writers. Someone suggested it at the convention.

What other brilliant ideas we should steal?