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?