The water’s fine

Ryan Thornburg pointed out a story in the N.C. Press Association’s September newsletter about The Pilot, where I had a wonderful time interning last summer. By posting more frequently, they’ve increased their online readership by 14 percent in six weeks.

I just went to their Web site for the first time in probably six weeks, and I’m really excited by what I see: It’s a Tuesday (they publish Sunday, Wednesday and Friday), but there are five new stories on the Web not in the print.

When I was there last summer, there were definitely occasions when we published on the Web before print. I covered one meeting in Pinehurst, and we went Web first with it because The Fayetteville Observer reporter was there, and we didn’t want our readers to have to wait an extra day for the story because we knew in the time between, they’d just skip us. I wrote another, more in-depth story for the print edition.

Publisher David Woronoff said that he realized waiting to break news in paper to avoid tipping off competitors was “stupid.” That was something I emphasized this summer at my internship at The Salisbury Post, and something community journalism guru Jock Lauterer grilled in my head: Your newspaper’s Web site is not a different entity/brand/whatever than your print. You’re not scooping yourself by publishing online.

It sounds like The Pilot’s already done a lot to increase online readership, but I thought of a few other things they could do to make the Web site more user-friendly:

• Make the video and multimedia more prominent on the homepage – the blogs and multimedia are listed way down the page.
• On articles, provide dates for when they were published.
• The navigation bars on the left and then lower down the page on the right are bulky and confusing.
• Link to reporter’s e-mail addresses in the end taglines.
• Add a widget so that readers can share stories. Now you can e-mail it, print it, or e-mail an editor, but what about del.ici.ous? digg? etc.
• For stories that also have multimedia, link back and forth between the article and the media. The Pilot did this slideshow of photos to go with this story about a fire at the mill John Edwards worked at back in the day. But you have to search the archives to find the story, and it doesn’t link to the slideshow anywhere, and the slideshow doesn’t link to the article.
• Show related stories. It looks like they’re doing this for the latest stories for the most part, but this later story about the investigation into the fire doesn’t mention the previous articles. This story about a town facing trouble after digging up illegally buried homes does have links to related stories.
• Allow comments on stories. Make folks register, create a comments policy and enforce it, but let the space become a forum. 
• When new articles are published in between print editions, stick a time stamp on them so that people who have been going to the site will be reminded that this is new information.
• The photo gallery has hundreds of photos from community events all over. Give the readers the option to buy copies of the photos. And while you’re at it, give readers a chance to submit their own photos. 

The Daily Tar Heel is making its switch to College Publisher 5 tonight. One of the features we’re introducing with the new site is a static corrections page, a la New York Times style. Previously, we’ve published corrections in the article and published the corrections individually, but we haven’t had a single page to view corrections.

For the print edition, I keep up with our corrections, so I volunteered to compile the ones so far and put the html links in to make it easier for our Web editor. I did it in a text document, and wanted to see what it would look like, and make sure the links worked. So I put it on TWF.

I was just trying to see a draft … but I clicked publish. And thus, the RSS picked it up despite my immediate deletion of the post.

I’ve learned my lesson – as Andrew Dunn said, “You can’t take the Internet back.” No more “practicing” on the blog …

If you followed me on Twitter yesterday, you saw fairly frequent updates via text from Great Hunt for Martha Stewart. There have been rumors that the media-mogul would be the secret guest to visit Kannapolis and the N.C. Research Campus for the last week, and Thursday morning, news leaked that she was in town.

Our campus reporter staked herself out there in the morning, and the Post sent me and a photographer to help in the afternoon. For the first two hours or so, this consisted of me driving up and down the two public roads on the campus. I was on foot when I finally saw the blue Range Rover Stewart was being toured around in by campus founder David H. Murdock. He stopped the car, and she graciously answered a few questions and let our photographer take a picture. I really appreciated the time they gave us.

The Post put its first story on the Web identifying Stewart as the mystery guest around 2 p.m. We posted photos and a short article around 4:30 p.m. A longer article appeared on A1 today.

Today, my editor asked me a philosophical question: By posting the news online saying “Martha’s in town,” did we tip off our competitors when they otherwise might not have gotten the story? The Post’s instinct has been to hold off with exclusives until the print edition. (This summer, after a prominent dentist in town was murdered, I overheard talk in the newsroom wanting to hold off publishing online certain details in the hopes that the TV stations wouldn’t be able to get the same information to break the news on their 6 p.m. newscasts.)

What I told my editor: The printed paper isn’t the Web site’s competition. And it the two products aren’t distinct from one another. It’s the same name! When salisburypost.com posts that Martha Stewart is in town, readers still associate that with the Post.

And as has been said:

If you’re not breaking stories throughout the day on a competitive beat, then even if you have a better story in the next day’s paper, you still got beat. (Media Shift, Dec. 2006)

In the case of the dentist’s murder, the TV and other print competitors got the information we saved through their own reporting. We ended up posting in online before the print edition came out anyways, only this time we followed the other outlets when we could have been first.

The Post, even in the time I’ve been here, is breaking more and more online before it goes to print. Readership on the Web site is making gains, from what I’ve heard, and there’s effort in the newsroom to be “Web centric,” as the buzz-word around here is. But the Post, like other papers, is still trying to adapt. As my editor said, “This is a completely different way of looking at things than we’re used to.”