I found this checklist in my archives somewhere, but have no idea where it originated (Bryan, is this you again?). A lot of these things we aren’t doing or are just starting at The Alligator with our three-week-old CMS, but I thought a run-through the list now will make it that much more impressive when I check again in a few months.

Is your web team able to flex work hours, responsibilities and skills?

My team rocks! We have been putting in all kinds of crazy hours to get our new CMS running smoothly and get new articles up each day. We are an assorted bunch with varying skill sets, so we can handle just about anything that gets thrown our way.

Do you need freelancers or others in the newsroom that can sit in and help publish the massive stream of content you’ll have?
(I really shouldn’t need to say this in August 2007 but…) Is your newsroom logistically ready to file and edit for the web before print?

I really wish we had some more hands around the office. The Web site is up before the papers hit the streets each morning, but only just. I wish we could be updating all day, but as a student-run paper, it is difficult to work around classes and other schedules. This is an area we need to work really hard in.

Do you have some sort of tools (forums, message boards or databases) for family/friend contacts if people are missing, databasing opening/closings or any other searchable, community information opportunities?

Nothing yet. There’s only three of us working full-time, hopefully we can get started on some really cool projects soon.

Do you have a breaking news blog ready at the flick of a switch?

Our new blogs should be up next week, and will include a breaking news section.

Does your site have an ‘armageddon’ design? (So that you can drop a package above the fold for massive news with huge images and headline fonts?)

The top story on our front page always has a big headline and a photo, so this doesn’t seem to be a problem.

Is all of your reporting staff skilled in editing and filing remotely for stories, photos, audio and video? Do they regularly do it? (Believe me, working tech support remotely can sometimes be more frustrating that not having any extra multimedia content from the scene.)

Nope. We can do it, but reporters have not been trained yet.

Is your workflow streamlined and standardized so that turning multimedia content quickly is easy?

I’ve been really excited when a reporter or photographer takes the initiative to grab video, audio, or photos. But then my team has to go in early to edit and put things together.

Have you explored the social media tools already available out there so that you can use to connect people with information?

We are working on a Facebook application as well as a Google gadget, but these are not available yet. We do have article tools for sharing with Facebook, Digg, etc.

What about social contributions to maps? What about social sharing of news tips? What about social sharing of photos, video, audio? How are you going to solicit, retain and manage all that social stuff? (An email account and one body probably won’t cut it.)

No, no, no, and I have no idea. But someday…

Even tech issues like, do you have the bandwidth available to handle getting slammed? What can you jettison in times of emergency to make your site move faster? (For instance, Roanoke, cut some of their ad serving during the Virginia Tech shootings to keep the site trudging on.) Have you talked among department leaders about this plan? Who’s mission control? Who’s below that? Is this plan written down somewhere and reviewed occasionally among all the staff?

I’ve never seen the site go down due to bandwidth, though we have been having some other problems with the servers. But minimizing if a rush occurred should be pretty easy. We don’t have any formal plan, my staff and I would make a judgment call and implement it.

So, this checklist makes us seem kinda pathetic. I wish I could give long, glowing, positive answers to every question. I hope that when I go back through at the end of this semester, I can at least stop saying, “Well, no, but we’re working on it.”

I’ve written about editing before, in terms of design, importance, and my advanced editing class. But I’d like to dig back down through some of my notes on diversity, ageism, sexism, bias, ethics, taste etc.

One of the first things that we discussed was verifying stories.

An editor hears about a great story for the next days’ paper. There is only one source for the story and no names, no way to double-check the facts. But oh, god, it’s a good story. And there’s no real reason for your source to lie to you, is there?

But man, does your paper look dumb when readers start calling in. My view on the issue:

There is a risk to be taken if the story is important enough. Otherwise, sit on it.
One way to handle this might be to take advantage of the casual atmosphere of the Internet. Maybe you paper has a blog or a forum. Post your unverified story there, and let the community help you verify or deny it. Or make a space especially for rumors.

Next up: hyper local journalism. This is especially topical with the recent breakdown of Backfence.

One of the things that seems to be left out of journalism classes is basic business sense. While it is important to learn as many different ways to tell stories as possible, the trend of this transition to the Internet suggests that journalists also need to know how to monetize their stories, perhaps how to survive as a freelancer.

Hyper local news sites are breaking down the barrier between “journalist” and “reader”, but dealing with the same problems as every other news site: monetization, advertising, ethics and quality.

The best advice to take from the hyper local trend is “Think like a user, not a publisher.” This is something that must be considered at every stage: from building the site to writing articles, to allowing users to post comments, articles and pictures.

Tomorrow: Stories that don’t get told, journalism and math.

Classes in Review Series
Preview

More important than the “Eight historical mistakes the newspaper industry made” were the eight solutions posted by Howard Owens on Monday.

My picks:

• Fix your classifieds. Make online free, with pay-for-print up sells and enhanced classifieds; make classifieds a social networking opportunity; promote the hell out of the fact that your classifieds still reach more people than any other local alternative.
• Put a great universal search engine on your site, and crawl all content (not just your own site) related to your coverage area.
• Be the platform. Update frequently, encourage participation, add more and broader levels of content, converse with your site visitors.

Then today, Angela Grant threw TV news sites a few bones.
My favorites:

• First, make the sites about the news and not the “talent.” Who cares about them anyways? Not me.
• Ditch shovel ware. Instead of uploading exactly what you broadcast, edit videos specifically for the Web.
• Make all your videos embeddable in blogs and any other site.

But wait, just TV news? Angela’s points apply (almost) equally to all news sites.

Be newsy, be real, be diverse (content, media, etc.), be useful and find ways to make the money without alienating your community.

200 citizens of Georgetown, South Carolina received free D40 cameras from Nikon and a license to shoot.

Nikon used the pictures and the story to create a brilliant advertisement for the D40.

The pictures on display were taken by 8 amateurs, which is supposed to show that the D40 is a great camera in any body’s hands.
Along with profiles of the participants, which include multimedia, is a photo gallery that is comment-enabled.

The whole package almost feels like journalism. Blurring the lines much?

My peeve: the only reason I found this Web site is because I happened to actually watch a commercial. I only saw the commercial once. Why spend so much time on this project and then not scream the URL from every possible medium?

I just thought it was interesting for an advertisement to have such depth.

Two recent events set off a discussion among the journalists whose blogs I read to the effect of: Do journalists need to be programmers?

Adrian Holovaty got a grant to go off and spend his days working on EveryBlock, and Northwestern University got a grant to provide scholarships to computer programmers who want to learn journalism.

Of course, this discussion has occurred in classrooms and newsrooms already, but this was the first explosion on the subject online. At the root, the problem is that in order to create great online content, SOMEONE in the newsroom needs to be able to work with databases (PHP), ActionScript (Flash), and CSS. But newspapers aren’t hiring, or programmers don’t get involved in journalism, or something occurs that prevents the newsroom from having access to someone who can write some code.

Here are some of the opinions that have appeared:

(A lot of people are differentiating between Programmers and programmers, Writers and writers. That’s why I use upper- and lower-cases differently.)

Matt Waite: In 2 separate posts, Matt explains the reasons newsrooms need programmers and who should/shouldn’t be learning it. His position is not that all journalists should learn to code, but that the people who have an interest in both writing and programming can bring more to the table. Ultimately, “Journalism needs all the innovators it can get.”

David Cohn: David, clearly on the side of journalists learning to code, asks where the scholarships are to teach journalists to program, and points out that the hot players in geek journalism are journalists turned coders, not the other way around.

Dan Gilmor: Journalists don’t need to learn to program, they need to learn how to work with programmers.

William Hartnett: “Journalists need to know programming. Not all of us, but some.” He differentiates between Programming and programming, and argues that some programming can be considered journalistic tasks, “clean up dirty personnel records from the school district or parse some messy addresses in crime data from the sheriff’s office.”

Scott Rosenberg: Scott supports the idea of journalists learning programming, but they don’t need to Program. More important, they need to understand the technology available for storytelling online.

Howard Owens: Howard is a journalist/programmer himself. But he recommends that journalists learn new skills that compliment their talents and individual situations. And these new skills should be applicable online. In a later update, Howard says the instead of all running off to learn to code, journalists should “figure out the niche your employer needs filled, and fill it.”

To me, online journalism encompasses all of the aspects of the Internet, be it code or multimedia. I’m not sure you can call yourself an Online Journalist if your Web page is all HTML tables and a few lines of PHP make you quiver like Jell-o. If you don’t feel comfortable writing code from scratch, you should at least be able to edit it.

I’m definitely in favor of a scholarship for journalist/programmers and programmer/journalists. I feel like some journalism students are afraid to learn code because it is associated with, or feels like, math. I’m no math genius, I never got past statistics, and the only math I’ve come across so far is adding up margins and padding in CSS and adding seconds for audio in ActionScript.

I may never be able to build anything as cool as chicagocrime.org. But I enjoy coding, in the same way that I enjoy writing. So scholarship or not, I’ll learn how to manipulate database information, build time lines and maps in Flash, and anything else that looks like a great way to spread information online.

I grew up in Coconut Grove, and my parents still live there. It was a great place to grow up: very little traffic, winding streets, trees and bushes and the best neighbors a kid could ask for.

It wasn’t until recently that I started to pay attention to the adult world in the Grove. While looking for ways to keep up on my ‘hood, I found the Coconut Grove Grapevine.

I don’t have any idea who the blogger is, but I trust the source. Both of my parents are involved in local politics; the facts check out. I’m even pretty sure the blogger is someone they know. Another reassuring point is the amount of community interaction that goes on in the comments. Letters from commissioners and local bigwigs as well as outspoken Grovites have appeared. People I know, know of, or don’t know at all are talking back, adding information and opinion to the mix.

My parents kept me up-to-date on commissioner elections a while ago, but I was only getting their point of view. While the CGG blogger is clearly biased toward the Grove, not all commenters were of the same opinion. I enjoyed getting to see the different sides of issues that affect a place I love, even if I no longer call it home.

This blog is how I found out that my idyllic little oasis is in trouble. Over-development has been a problem everywhere is South Florida, but it never seemed to hit the Grove - until now. I cheered Grove residents on as they campaigned against Home Depot. I kept a close eye and crossed fingers over a project that would allow more condos to be built on the water, obstructing the view and adding unwanted traffic. The Grove lost both wars.

While the Grapevine focuses on politics, I’ve also seen announcements for local festivals and even a “Paris Hilton goes to Jail party.”

For anyone trying to figure out what hyper-local is, this is it. Coconut Grove is a tiny area in big, busy Miami, and is often overlooked by television and print news. This blog doesn’t just keep me in the know, it makes me feel like I’m still a part of the community.

I wish I could be back in Miami for this.

Just a mile from my parents’ home, the festival starts tomorrow and runs through the weekend with storytelling marathons, lectures and performances.

The festival opens with a photo exhibit and includes story telling in Spanish by local and international writers.

Hey Mom, Dad, go take notes for me, please!

MySpace may be a super popular social networking site, but I wasn’t worried when they released MySpace News. I find MySpace to be very shallow and I only have a few friends that use it regularly. As part of their target demographic, I’m not impressed.

So it was no surprise to me when the reports started coming in that their Digg-like news feature flopped.

But the front page of MySpace news shows most stories with zero votes. Two stories have a single vote. None have more than that. Perusing through the various categories shows the same thing - page after page of stories with no votes or other evidence that anyone is visiting the site.

Is this the result of a lack of promotion on the part of MySpace? Or lack of motivation on the part of the users?

Fortuitous gives us seven tips for managing a successful community.

• Take emotion out of decisions.
• Talk like a human, not a robot.
• Give people something they can be proud of.
• Bring users in during community decisions.
• Moderation is a full-time job.
• Metrics spread the work out.
• Guidelines not rules.

Check out the post for a detailed explanation of each.

As a forum moderator and blogger myself, I agree with each of these as important ways to keep any online community healthy and happy. I haven’t had any trouble yet, either here (thanks to Akismet catching all the lovely spam comments) or on the forum I moderate. (I wonder if GTD cuts down on forum trolling, or if I’ve just been lucky.)

I think one of the keys to keeping members of a community happy is to guide conversations. Ask relevant questions and respond to posts with carefully thought-out posts of your own. I think this either prevent the endless opinion war, or else makes harassment obvious enough that no one will blame you for banning a troll.

I finally found a community portal branded to the city rather than a company. DigPhilly looks like a great editorial staff provides a lot of content and news, plus users can import RSS feeds, load photos, videos, multimedia, classifieds, blog posts and calendars. You can even shop from the site.

The design is pretty cool too, with some creative navigation and colors, and I’m definitely diggin’ the skyline. Just tell me where I can get a philly cheesesteak mailed to me, piping hot and oozing Cheese Whiz, and I’m good.