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.

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.]

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]

What do people who have never met you before think of you? What is your reputation like online; where stories you’ve written mix in with party pictures others have taken? How do you control the public’s perception of you as we move into a new era of digital communication?

This was the topic of a session I led at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg Florida on June 29, 2007 for the 2007 Summer Fellowship for Young Journalists.

ACTIONS YOU MUST TAKE

• Buy your domain name
  

  (e.g. LauraFries.com). If it’s taken - figure out a variant for your branding.

• Pick your byline/brand and stick to it - across all social networks and websites.
  

  “I started blogging at Journerdism and linking my ‘network’ and brand as Will Sullivan and Journerdism. It took a long time, but eventually I rose in google ranks and now am the #1 spot, and peppered throughout the rest of the list.”

• Set up a portfolio site.
  

  This is a must. Even a Blogger-powered site is better than having no online presence at all. Keep it updated with a current version of your résumé, and an archive of all the work you’d like employers to see. Make sure you have clear, permanent contact information near the top of your site. Link heavily to online examples of your work and mentions of you in the press. Be the definitive resource on who you are professionally.

• Google yourself - and set up Google Alerts
  

  You wanna know what people are saying about you - set up a Google Alert with your name so you’ll always know.

MANTRAS TO LIVE BY: Never Work Invisibly (Digital Resumes)

• Think permalink.
  

  My rrésumé is always at http://www.laurafries.com/about/resume, my worksamples are always at http://www.laurafries.com/about/work-samples/. This way, an employer who stumbles on the link *years* later will still have access to my most recent stuff.

• Create living résumés
  

  Update your résumé as you work, linking to your newest projects.
  ex. Laura Fries’ Worksamples

• Stymied? Ethical Quandry?
  

  If you’re doing high-level journalistic decision making - document it. Treat it as an opportunity to answer one of those dreaded interview questions on your own time. When the question comes up in real life, you’ll be able to answer cogently since you’ve thought through your answer - and you’ll be able to send the link out to the interviewer later as a followup. Even if you made the “wrong” decision, employers like to hire folks who can think.
  ex. Blogging the AltWeeklies.com Redesign; Sketches of AltWeeklies.com Redesign
  ex. Best of 2005 sketches & site mocks

• Have a great idea that you can’t implement?
  

  Story package not realistic on deadline? Editor kill your idea? Turn your idea into an “ideas for journalists” essay. Take the energy you could have wasted bitching at the bar, and use it to enhance your digital résumé. ex. “Podbop” for alt papers

• Count on websites failing
  

  Save hard copies of your work; re-post in full your story text, images, video. Newspapers do not respect permalinks - many archive or password protect your work. Never assume because you can link to something today that it will still be there when you want a potential employer to see it. Screenshots are your new best friend.

• But still, keep links to your work
  

  ClaimID is a great resource for aggregating links of your work.

MANTRAS TO LIVE BY: NetworkED, not Networking

• Maintain top-of-mind-presence
  

  What is this business card you hand me? The old-skool Rolodex is cool, but it doesn’t keep you in constant contact with folks. Interact where they are online and off.

• Create and use presences on multiple social networks to create top of mind presence
  

  Bill Couch added me as a friend on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Vimeo, LinkedIN, Flickr, and probably a few others I’m not remembering. When I interact on these networks, I’m likely to get updates on Bill’s work - maintaining top of mind presence or brand ubiquity.

• Meet people in real life - solidify acquaintances with digital connection.
  

  Go to unconferences, meetups, anything that will let you shake a hand with someone. Invite people to these events via your social networks.

• Think micro-contact
  

  Micro-contact makes it much easier to send the big email - “Have a job for me?”

  ex. I read this article I thought would interest you. I just wrote up something or other, what do you think of it? Or, the all powerful - I read about what you’re doing/what’s happening at your paper - followed by a pertinent question.

• Participate in forums
  

  Whatever your focus is - typography, photography, education reporting - find online communities of relevance to your work and participate in them. Build a name for yourself - create an audience for your work; create a communication loop between you and potential sources.

MANTRAS TO LIVE BY: Be available

• Communicate permanent contact info
  

  Is that first job your last? Yeah, didn’t think so. Make sure people have a permanent way to get ahold of you.

• Email signatures - make ‘em work for ya.
  

  Give folks multiple means of contacting you.

• Volunteer for journalism organizations
  

  As a reporter/blogger for conventions, a judge in contest, an organizer of Meetups. You will meet people, learn skills, and get job offers.

• Don’t be afraid of non-paying opportunities
  

  Sometimes, the experience and connections you’d gain is worth more than a check.

MANTRAS TO LIVE BY: Use your Journalistic Curiousity to Keep Learning Bout the Web

• Web users are fickle creatures
  

  Online communities shift rapidly to sites with better functionality (utility) for them. Pay attention to user trends; and figure out how you can incorporate the latest technology into your journalism. (Reading Laura’s Web Publishing blog is a great place to start; at Web.aan.org.)

DIGITAL ETIQUETTE

Digital is Forever: There are no right or wrong actions. You are simply establishing a brand/professional persona – make sure it helps get you to your goals.

• Communicate permanent contact information
• Don’t send editable documents like Word or InDesign files – only PDFs
• When emailing headshots, send reasonably sized files unless specifically asked for high-res (400 wide max, 72 dpi is a decent size). If possible, check out the context that the headshot will be running in, and size the image accordingly.
• Use SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to your advantage. Sites with a lot of traffic (like Poynter.org) will always show up, make sure your contact info is up to date on those.
• Email etiquette – Don’t ever send an attachment without a message; don’t ever send an email without a subject; don’t ever send an email without a signature line demarcating clear contact info; don’t send attachments without a file extension.
• Emails are forever. Be careful who you talk shit about; always be professional.
• Don’t assume that your sensitive content is safe. Drunk Facebook pictures and bitchy MySpace emails can find their way outside of the password-protect realm.

Credits

The following rad journalists and web nerds helped contribute to this session.
Will Sullivan – Journerdism.com Nerd in Chief – PalmBeachPost.com Interactive Projects Editor
Olivia Cobiskey – www.cobiskey.com, Sauk Valley Newspapers, staff writer
David Cohn - (digidave.org)
Steve Shanafelt - Arts & Entertainment Editor, MountainXPress
Albert Franquiz - Director of Radness- Miami Herald
Larry Clow - Journalist extraordinaire

COLUMBIA HEIGHTS, Washington, DC, June 20, 2007

Pandemonium.

Lights flashing, a spiral of screaming, hysterical phone calls, a flash fire - combustible Columbia Heights - ignited.

It was a war zone, ground zero - not a neighborhood, not even anything physical - hate.rage.fear.heat, low hanging, oppressive smoldering chemicals, waiting for the spark, flash point fire.

I got off the metro at the Columbia Heights stop at around 8:30pm June 19, 2007.

The explosion was before me: complete chaos, nearly 25 cop cars, blocking 14th St. NW, lights blazing, satanic disco, and everywhere people screaming: into cell phones, at cops, at each other.

Sirens, screams, and DC’s inescapable heat.

Near me, a woman screamed the story into a phone; she was shaking, near hysterical: Two teenage girls had been fighting, the cops had arrived to bust things up, and then [allegedly] taken the arm of a bystander - a teenage girl, a ‘chile’ - and busted her head against a car and started roughing her up.

From there it had exploded; everyone screaming at everyone.

I whipped out my camera, shaky from the 4 hours of sleep I’d managed to snag on my way back from Portland, through Phoenix, Vegas and finally DC.

Get that the fuck out of here! Get on with yourself! Don’t point that at me! screamed one woman - I’m not! I’m taking pictures of the cops! ((I’m on your side! - I didn’t say - I’m press! - I didn’t say!!)) - Keep walking! Keep walking! she screamed, and I did, because I was tired, and this was not my fight.

I could have circulated, taking notes, more pictures, trying to get the story, but I knew she was right. The story was what that woman was screaming into her phone - not my transcription of it. People talk about citizen journalism, and they talk mostly of the elites - white soccer moms contributing play by plays of their children, pictures and videos galore; lawyers posting nuanced descriptions of the latest city council development.

But this - sweat, fear, alleged police brutality, raw emotion, a neighborhood terrorized by gunshots and intermittent police presence that now was as frightening as the drive-bys murdering 13 year olds - this is the stuff that “citizen journalism” should be made of, not yuppies posting restaurant reviews.

A search of Google News turns up nothing about last night - a terrifying night in Columbia Heights - my community message board has nothing.

Background on the Columbia Heights violence:

• Columbia Heights Shootings Cause Alarm, WashingtonPost.com
• Three Shot, One Killed, Columbia Heights, LauraFries.com
• In Face of Losses, A Fight to Save Area, WashingtonPost.com
• ‘Ghetto sun’ burns bright, Columbia Heights, LauraFries.com
• Teen Charged in Youth’s Slaying in ‘Shooting Melee’, WashingtonPost.com

The Washington Post has written some amazing pieces about Columbia Heights violence recently, but it’s impossible for one reporter to capture everything - and never with the intensity of last night, with women screaming the story into their phones and the muggy night air.

This is the story of the summer.

If I was the editor of a local publication, with reporters at my disposal, this is what I’d do.

I’d send my people out into the community for the summer. It would be their job to make friends with trusted community leaders, in the churches, community services, and schools. It would be their job to comb every source: every community newsletter, bulletin board, barber shop, church social and blog where citizens were spreading the news themselves. It would be the reporter’s job to earn trust and build sources.

From there, I’d ask them to deputize community voices - precocious writing students, the empassioned families of shooting victims. Give people the means of telling their own stories. Give people hope - that when something truly horrible happens in their community, that they have the means to document it; that [alleged] police brutality doesn’t begin and end with a rough shove onto sizzling summer concrete.

I’d set up easy ways for citizens to contribute their stories - a voice mail box where they could tell the story as it happened, an easy way to email the pictures that nearly everyone was snapping on their cell phones last night.

I’d have my reporters perform a number of roles - soliciting content from their community, while creating it themselves. Reporters would weave together pictures from the fight, combined with user-contributed audio accounts of the brawl, into slideshows for the website. They would interview community members while encouraging them to contribute content themselves; in effect turning interview subjects into viral marketers for the publication.

And because the community I was trying to serve would have limited access to the web, I’d be sure to create a print-product that my reporters and trusted community members could circulate as they did their jobs of reporting and source-gathering. Even something as simple as a 8.5×11 newsletter that others could photocopy and distribute themselves would serve multiple purposes: 1) reporting the news in a medium that was accessible to the community it was serving, 2) soliciting user contributions, and 3) creating a feedback loop between community and publication.

In collaboration with the community, my reporters would eventually be able to create a number of media products:

• Traditional reporting in a newspaper
• A rapidly-updated website, with professional and citizen content
• A micro-distribution newsletter

It’s a lot of work - no denying it. But if you lived, like I do, in Columbia Heights, afraid to walk home at night, distrustful of the police you [allegedly] see brutalizing teenage girls, hearing the gunshots that are kids killing kids, you’d be happy to find even a 8.5×11 piece of paper on your doorstep, telling you that at least somebody was paying attention, and you had the means to fight back.

Reader questions answered

Via email:

“As Alt-weeklies are moving towards the web, what do job descriptions for editorial-side web editors look like? Web editor being different from IT guy or webmaster/ programmer but an actual editorial role?”

Good question!

What is a web editor?

In the broadest terms, a web editor is responsible, just like a section editor, for the content of an alt’s website.

The key difference between an IT person/webmaster and a web editor is journalistic decision making. A web editor might perform production-related tasks, such as resizing and cropping images, but they should also take on a number of editorial roles.

What does a web editor do?

The boundaries of responsibility between print and web editors vary from institution to institution, but the duties of a web editor might include:

• Uploading stories to the website, or overseeing the folks who do
• Making decisions about the play of content on the site - what stories are given prominence on the homepage or section fronts (Ideally, these decisions are made independent of where stories are printed in the traditional print sections)
• Being a part of redesign teams and new product launches
• Monitoring and moderating comment forums and other user-generated content
• Working with writers, designers, and photographers to create web content, which could range from additional stories and photo galleries to video features
• Being a resource for best-practices web content, helping editorial staffs to learn new skills
• Making “in the heat of the moment” editorial decisions, such as when advertisers demand stories be removed from the site, or writers want to fix a mistake without adding an editors’ note.
  

  How should you handle making corrections to content that’s published online? Check our Editorial Policy.

• Planning, assigning, and editing web content
• Monitoring traffic stats (metrics) to give editorial folks insight into their web reading audience

What skills should a web editor have?

Ideally, a web editor should be comfortable with the web. Experience with blogs, social networking (MySpace, Facebook), popular web applications and a general knowledge of web users’ behavior are all desired, as well as a working knowledge of basic HTML, Photoshop, and content management systems (CMS). A strong sense of journalism ethics and the ability to think critically about emerging technologies are especially valuable.

But the great news is that anyone who is dedicated and hard working can pick this stuff up rather fast.

How can a new web editor improve their skills?

• Read! - this blog and others devoted to online journalism are great places to start - check our links section for recommended reading.
• Network! - Attend as many learning opportunities as possible, and be sure to stay in touch with your new friends so you can pick their brains.
• Experiment! - Teach yourself new technologies in trial batches. Whenever I stumble on a new technology or website, it stays top-of-mind until I find some way to use it. The more you engage with websites and their functionality, the more you will learn, and the more ideas you can steal.
• Watch! - Be a ‘trend sponge’ - pay attention to media trends that work, and think critically about how they can be altered to help your website.

  and of course …

• Question! - Ask lots and lots of questions - of each other via listservs, and emails, and certainly of web.aan.org!

A good read: Further Notes on the New Journalism Skillset

Have anything to add?

What is the role of web editor at your paper?

When Cute Site Names Go Wrong OR Why You Should Test Your Ideas with Broad Demographic Audiences

HuffingtonPost.com debuted a redesign earlier this week that incorporates a “Digg”-esque feature, where logged-in members can vote on stories, indicating if one is of interest to them. The most popular stories appear in a special section of the site.

This model works very well on websites; users like to know what others are reading.

But HuffingtonPost.com chose an unfortunate name for this new feature: “Huff It” (huffit.huffingtonpost.com).

“Huffing” is slang for inhaling intoxicants like glue, paint or aerosol products. Gasoline, lighter fluid, and paint thinner are other common items that get “huffed.” [wiki]

This unfortunately renders much of the new functionality on HuffingtonPost.com rather humorous: “Register or sign in below to start huffing!”

Screenshots

Take Home Message

Cutesy abbreviations for site functionality can confuse readers. In a worst-case scenario, you may unintentionally be incorporating slang into your redesign. Testing your designs out with a broad demographic group is one way to make sure this doesn’t happen to your latest site feature.

More web.aan.org on Arianna Huffington

Illustration by Ben Millen, arcticsounds.com