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?

I’ve experimented with various ways to embed Flickr slideshows into blogs before, but by far the easiest way I’ve found is above. Simply click “info,” and follow the prompts to generate your own code. Watch this slideshow for an overview.

NERD NOTE

1. Use your Flickr display name as your “username” … i.e. “Association of Alternative Newsweeklies” vs. altweeklies.
2. The code autogenerates at 500 pixels wide. Simply adjust the height/width parameters to fit your site.

[via RobbMontgomery.com]

The slideshow above was part of a presentation entitled “Blogging for Journalists” I gave at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg Florida in July 2007 for the 2007 Summer Fellowship for Young Journalists.

During the UNconference “Blogging for Journalists” during the Portland 2007 AAN Convention, I sketched two flow charts that later turned into this presentation. (Thanks to participants for the healthy discussion!)

Last week’s presentation posited the following:

1. The production process for creating online content for newspapers is, for the most part, extremely convoluted and cumbersome, inhibiting what newsroom staffers are able to accomplish online.

2. Setting up a blog is ridiculously easy. Since anyone can do it, everyone has. Many newsroom-produced blogs do not use the medium well; creating illogical editing/production workflows, or giving folks better suited to column-writing blogs of their own.

3. Let’s not waste time critiquing the flaws of existing newspaper-produced blogs. Instead, let’s consider blog software a storytelling tool - how can we employ this tool to further our journalism?

We then went around the room, positing scenarios, and brainstorming possible uses of blog software for journalism.

Is your newsroom considering starting a blog? You might find “Conversation Bullet Points for Starting a Newsroom Blog” helpful.

Create Digital Listening Posts Using RSS Feeds - It’s Easier Than It Sounds

Go to soccer games, Jan Leach recently urged a room full of students at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. You never know the stories you’ll overhear folks talking about.

Leach, former editor of the Akron Beacon Journal, spoke to the power of “having a life outside the newsroom” - being present in the community, and having one’s reporter ear constantly tuned for stories.

In a digital age, let’s expand upon that theory - let’s create Digital Listening Posts.

3 Steps To Creating Digital Listening Posts

1. Sign up for Netvibes.com.
2. Spend some time adding links to local sites and bloggers.
3. Check your account periodically to scan for story ideas.

Here’s more detail.

1. Netvibes.com is an RSS aggregator [wiki definition]. Think of it like TiVo for news - you add a feed, and the webpage automatically fetches updates for you. If you’ve visited Google News before, you’ve seen RSS feeds in action - that site is populated by feeds. [Oprah-style intro to RSS feeds]

Your “start page” on Netvibes will offer you some beginning options - little boxes (widgets) that allow you to search for content relevant to your beat.

For purposes of demonstration, I set up a “Columbia Heights, DC” page, which pulls information about my neighborhood. (It’s easier for me to evaluate newsworthiness in my own ‘hood than in a randomly selected city.)

2. Adding links to quality local bloggers will probably take an afternoon’s worth of your time. Treat local blogs much as you would a community newspaper - a place for story ideas, trend spotting, or source-finding. Use technorati.com, a blog search engine, to search for local blogs. Metropolitan-themed blogs tend to link to each other; look for a blogroll to find similar themed blogs.

3. Check your Netvibes page regularly to find story ideas.

What Story Ideas Did I Find?

Image Search

• Interior photos of an extremely nice renovated house in a rough neighborhood; potential sources for articles on gentrification, or an architectural feature.
• A DC Bilingual Public Charter School; which could be the beginning of a profile, or a piece on funding issues.

Adding Blogs, I found …

• DCCabbie.Blogspot.com is a veritable treasure trove of story ideas. This outspoken (and often profane) blogger writes about an underground bar called the BUNKER he’s been going to since “this Russian chick started the joint over ten years ago,” and Ethopian cab drivers who save up to buy mansions at home. Lots of story potential here.
• Mr. T in DC’s Live Journal reports a man in his neighborhood who walks around with a grocery cart, stealing Sunday papers. Does he resell them? Where, and why? That’s a feature I’d like to read. [Mr. T is also exceptionally active in the online Columbia Heights community, posting frequently to the community forum and moderating the neighborhood Flickr group; he would be a good source to cultivate.]
• A WMATA Riders’ Advisory Council Member (DC Metro/public transportation planning organization), keeps a blog of transit developments - a useful source for transit beat reporters.
• For more ideas on using YouTube to find local stories, see Cathy Resmer’s post Finding and Using Local Content on YouTube.

YouTube searches revealed …

• An ‘94 “Illuminati Pedophiles in Washington D.C.” video - good perhaps for a feature on the subject, or a larger piece on the second life YouTube can bring to archival documentaries.

That’s a quick look at the current info in my Netvibes. Like all story tips, it’ll take some old-fashioned shoe leather journalism to see if any pan out.