Staying on top of your game

Oh boy. No one wants to think that the role they spent their entire career perfecting is just no longer needed. And even if it actually is needed, it's superfluous when reflected in the Bible of budget.



That appears to be the way the copy desk is going. Having lots of skills is being ground into the heads of new graduates. They show up to internships with slow-to-embrace-the-new papers and can't believe they are asked to do so little, when they know how to do so much. At least that's the way I felt after graduating and getting into my reporting internship.

But copy editing. Seriously? Joe Grimm, who writes a daily column for Poynter Institute focused today's submission on skills copy editors should have to stay relevant. I can tell you, my frustration is immense with the level of copy editing that happens some afternoons, so I can't imagine a newsroom without a skilled team of copy editors behind the scenes, saving the day.

Media General made a few headlines when it announced last week it would combine copy editing and page design at three eastern newspapers. This is nothing new, or surprising. We do that here. But one may argue that our copy editing suffers. No one has time to spend looking up every single thing in a story, so easily avoidable mistakes, (such as where a person whose name is all over the Internet, really works) become a regular part of our product.

Grimm suggests copy editors brush up their web skills as they are going to need those a lot more than an AP Stylebook before too long. One such suggestion is to learn search engine optimization. Google has a page devoted to dos and don'ts here.


An old friend of mine started doing this work, and the script he's using is directly from this warning page from Google. Basically, it is making your page easy for search engine bots to locate. For those trying to take advantage, the promise is they can get you on the first page of hits on Google.

I think the concept Grimm is referring to is being aware of the ways in which bots find and catalog items on your Web page. Driving up Internet traffic appears to be the way many newspapers are looking to approach the next stage in profitability and information dissemination. For this, I think our paper needs to establish a more defined way to add tags to stories on the Web site. I noticed it's all over the place and appears that copy editors are simply adding whatever tags occur to them instead of adhering to some sort of formula.



Think I'll inform myself on this topic. I'll let you know what I find out.

YouTube or the boob tube?

When I first joined the paper, I asked the boss, "What's the deal? Why don't we put our videos on YouTube to get more viewers?"

He replied that company policy had been for several years not to place any video on YouTube. I think it gets at the principle idea that we want people to pay for the work we produce so they remember its value. As a company policy, not giving content away has taken some getting used to, but I more fully understand the motivation that drives it now.



In this article from American Journalism Review, the author explores why some television news stations put their video on YouTube, and what perceived benefit those stations are getting. In all honesty, it seems a bit disappointing.

If YouTube is giving you minimal amounts of exposure to your audience and not driving traffic to your site, what would be the point? I envision, should a newspaper choose to try posting to YouTube, it would be with the intent to drive more traffic our way.

I think the newspaper may have come up with something a tad bit innovative for our company. While trying to harvest the increased interest in Facebook and at the same time justify spending more on video equipment, the videographer broached the subject once more. "Can we put the videos on YouTube?"

The answer this time was hell, why not. A video of the college basketball coach's milestone win has 202 views. Before we got the new Web site, it was difficult to get anyone to watch our videos. Now the new Web site allows us to use Facebook to refer people back to our site to watch them. It appears to be working.

A new feature on the YouTube page is "News Near You." I don't see any of our videos there, but another regional paper has gone for it.

The digital age is here

We had a meeting of the newly formed "Tech Next" committee. We, the pioneers, will help shape how the newsroom adapts to the digital age. I advocated for a digital voice recorder, something I've been doing for more than a year.

Personally, I don't want to spend the money to get one of my own. I already use my personal camera, laptop, phone and car to do job-related stuff. The only one of those things I get paid back for is a paltry 28 cents a mile on the car. So I don't give sources my cell phone number. (We have "newsroom" cell phones that I'm pretty sure send radioactive waves directly into the ear of their user.) I also have never seen one of these mysterious things. And if you gave it out to a source, wouldn't you have to say, only call me on this once. I won't have it next time you want to reach me.



Anyway, enough about what we don't have and wish we did. The truth is, there is a sudden push in the newsroom to acknowledge the need for a bigger, better web presence. It's true, and it's here to stay. Even the New York Times is going behind a pay wall. (Big news, you hadn't heard?) So its a relief that not only is the newspaper getting with the times and embracing social media, but we're getting serious about a new Web site designed to give us the freedom and tools to create, if not awesome, at least good multimedia packages.




One of my ideas was a quick hit one that got a thumbs up. We have an online edition that people have to pay for. Before I joined the staff, the free Web site didn't even tell readers they weren't getting the whole story, that if they wanted it, they would have to pay for it. For some readers, we just looked like a bunch of jerks who didn't know how to report on anything.

Then we started adding at tag that said "read the full story" in print or online. Online where? So I said, let's put a hyperlink after that sentence that leads to the subscription page. How is that not the circulation desk's most immediate demand? Those people are charged not only with ensuring the newspaper gets delivered, but also that people subscribe and stay subscribers. I don't care whose idea it was. I just hope it works.

That might lend more credibility to my other suggestions.

Why I have a Twitter account

I joined the social networking site Twitter more than a year ago. I read somewhere that Twitter was going to aggregate the tweets associated with the presidential election, and since we were all working that night, and we have the most pathetic excuse for a television in the newsroom, it made sense to be all places at once.

It worked marvelously. The feed picked up the latest and greatest results, people who were watching all the major news networks, informed me even as they learned, which states were going which way, which stations were calling which races, and all I had to do was sit back and watch.

But then I had no more use for Twitter. My account sat dormant for months, until the newspaper I work for announced it would be going live with a Twitter feed. Now that the paper was stepping into the social networking realm, albeit with the hesitance of a mouse unsure that that cat is truly sleeping, I decided to reenter and give it more effort.

Well, the effort came a bit slowly.

This article in American Journalism Review, "The Distribution Revolution," examines why the news industry is embracing Twitter, especially since its effect is hardly quantifiable.

One reason is we need to be able to get our work out there. You can't rely on Google for anything. Every day, the bots have more and more to search. Our newspaper's daily articles seldom catch the bots attention. In fact, they are searchable for such a short amount of time, the only time the articles really get picked up is when they are redistributed by other, more permanent, Web sites.


Yet, the newspaper I work for has not embraced this fully. The paper's Twitter account has what I would say is an impressive 162 followers, but does not follow anyone. In my opinion, the newspaper's twitter feed should have all the people in the community it can find. How will the paper take advantage of the rumblings of the community if its never listening?

In the American Journalism Review article, Robyn Tomlin, executive editor of the Wilmington Star-News, said the idea of Myreporter.com was birthed from a reader question, "Why is a helicopter flying around my house?"

What a great question. And who better to find the answer than someone whose job it is to find answers. And the night editor did know why and was able disseminate the information.



It makes me think of one Sunday at work. A reader called in and said something similar to me, but it sounded more like, "When are you going to put up on your Web site some information about what's going on? There are helicopters flying over my house dropping water."

I can't be everywhere at all times, and granted, it was fire season and I probably should have checked the fire logs earlier, but the reader tipped me off. Now if the newspaper had followed all the tweets of as many people as possible, would someone have tipped me off even earlier? It's hard to say, but its a mentality worth adopting.

The boss said he wants to go Web first, and wants to give readers a reason to look at our Web site at 6 p.m. instead of the nightly news (which isn't about us anyway.) But yet he's not making the push that could make that happen. Web first means distribution first. Competing means being the one-stop shop for news.

It's an interesting time to be a journalist, and I don't mind taking on more and more. We're getting a new Web site soon, and I, for one, am excited.