The water’s fine

Q: How does tweeting an event differ from, say, live-blogging an event? Is there a difference?

A: I’ve never live-blogged an event, but I feel the principals of it vs. Twittering are similar. You’re trying to do updates as quickly as possible and as thorough as possible as the time allows for. Twitter imposes an additional space restriction because you only have 140 characters. You’re required to focus in on the key points.

Q: Do you think that something like Twitter is going to alter in any way how news is broken, does it fit in with the 24-hour news cycle of TV news networks and Web sites?

A: I think Twitter’s already altered how news is broken. The earthquake this summer was broken on Twitter before the Los Angeles Times had anything. And it’s not just Twitter that’s changing how news is broken – Wikipedia had Tim Russert’s entry updated to include his death before any news organization released the news. Social media in general makes it a lot easier for non-journalists to break news (and for journalists to break news). Twittering doesn’t give the full scope though – it’s great at announcing the news but hard to fit context into the space allowed. One of my favorite Tweets is this one by @lonelysandwich: “To be fair, if CNN could get away with HOLLYF**K EARTHQAKE!!!1! as the extent of its coverage, they’d likely have scooped your a**, Twitter.” (** mine).

I took photos at the Obama/Biden rally in Greensboro in between Tweeting. I’m trying to photograph more so I feel more comfortable with it.

The campaign set up risers for press to Obama’s right and straight ahead. The DTH didn’t get riser space, but were among the many who were allowed up in shifts. In general, it was more of a hassle up on the platform, because volunteers kept yelling different things about who was/wasn’t allowed up there, and TV cameras, poles and people got in the way. Although on the ground I wasn’t really tall enough to shoot Obama through the crowd. I moved around a lot trying to get pictures, but most didn’t turn out the way I wanted them to.

My favorite picture I took Saturday is actually this one of a boy watching the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University drumline:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and running mate Joe Biden spoke at the depot Saturday. Both men emphasized the economy. “We can’t have another four years like the last eight years,” Obama said.

From the press risers overlooking the crowd of nearly 20,000, I was struck by the number of supporters taking cell phone pictures and videos of the speech. Search on Flickr for Obama and Greensboro, and a fair amount of photos from Saturday’s rally are posted. These amateur photos add to the wealth of content from the traveling press corps and the in-state crowd that showed up to cover the event. Greensboro’s News & Record has a really nice slideshow of photos from the rally (and audio and text of the speech), but there’s no interactive feature to let reader’s submit content. It only goes one way.

The event was also another try at live-Twittering an event. I liveblogged the first presidential debate with DTH State & National Editor Ariel Zirulnick on Friday, but Saturday I Twittered for myself and not the DTH. I didn’t have my computer with me, so my updates were text only, which limited my speed. And I don’t get Tweets sent to my phone, so I wasn’t able to see or respond to all the @ replies I received until I got back to the office. That made it very much a one-way street.

I think my strategy – Tweeting mostly one-liner quotes with a few describing the atmosphere – worked better for this style of event than for the debate the night before, when all of America was watching and didn’t need the blow-by-blow account of what they watching. In that case, more analysis would have been appropriate.

The DTH plans to liveblog other election events this semester via Twitter, and I’m looking to experiment with different Tweeting styles to see what works best. What do you think? What do you want from live Twittering from an event?

This made my day:

I’ve always loved weekly papers — what they may not have in breaking news, they more than make up for in cogent commentary, in-depth analysis and local color.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t want a daily paper. And, sadly, though the N&O is cutting everything in site to save money, it just isn’t cutting it for me anymore. Dwindling resources and a clear shift to covering Cary in favor of Carrboro or Chapel Hill leaves me wanting more. Searching for news of a Board of Aldermen meeting online last spring, I happened upon an article in the Daily Tar Heel. It was well-written and thorough. And it got me looking more and more at the student paper, whose City Desk is doing some fine reporting hereabouts.

Read them over for yourself and make you own judgment. For my money, it’s worth the walk to the Carrboro Mini-Mart to grab the DTH. This “New” Reliable provides better daily coverage than the Old Reliable. (Adventures in the Local Economy, Sept. 18)

The DTH opens its doors tomorrow to about 150 journalism babies. Recruitment is over, we oriented them Saturday and tomorrow many of them will be working on their very first stories/photographs/graphics/pages/etc. I expect lots of questions along the lines of “How do I dial out on the phone?” “Where do I type my article?” and “What’s my deadline?”

All of the editors, who have been putting out the paper these last four weeks with a bare-bones staff left over from last year, are incredibly excited about this batch of new staff. As inexperienced as they are, they are manpower. 

But all of the editors are a little scared too – everyone feels a great sense of responsibility to these new staff. Last year we hired 185 new staff (we hire everyone…), but by the end of the semester, less than half remained. The DTH isn’t for everyone, and there’s a weeding out process. But we also lose a lot of talented folks that we end up wishing hadn’t weeded themselves out.

We hired a news adviser for the first time this year. We’re behind a lot of our peer-newspapers in hiring an adviser, and part of what we feel Erica can help us with is with retention. She’ll be meeting with every single new staff member at least once this semester formally, and is going to serve as a writing coach/internship-search-resource/calm voice. 

Erica is going to really help where new staffers fall in the cracks. It’s not that desk editors don’t want to be a resource, but sometimes they don’t have the time or the experience themselves to really serve as a help. And hopefully Erica can help our editors be better editors. She’s there for us, too.

Here are my goals for helping new staff transition to the DTH:

• I’m going to learn their names. All 100 and however many of them there are. As a freshman, there was nothing more exciting for me than when management called me by my name. Or said hi to me when they saw me outside the newsroom.
• I’m going to be patient when answering even the most seemingly obvious of questions.
• I’m going to explain every change I make when editing. I think editing should be a conversation. My best editors have always edited that way, and as a reporter, I think you learn better by talking it out. And I think I edit better this way, too.
• I’m going to make a big deal to them of getting their stories in the paper, especially on front or page three. I cut out every single article I wrote freshman year and taped them to my dorm wall. Seeing your name in print is a really big deal.
• I’m going to find something positive to say about something in everything they do.

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 …

I’m taking an online journalism class this semester with Ryan Thornburg, a DTH alum who was in charge of the Iraq war and 2004 election coverage on washingtonpost.com.

One of our ongoing assignments is to blog about a specific topic related to the elections in N.C. My plans are to follow student newspapers, mainly college, and how they’re covering the campaigns:

But in an election season that already has charged the youth vote, college newspapers would be remiss if they didn’t cover the campaigns. Already, papers have sent student journalists around N.C. to cover politico’s appearances, have snagged interviews with candidates for state office and have localized the party’s conventions in Denver and St. Paul, Minn. And when it comes to state elections, student papers might be a reader’s only source of information about the candidates. How they cover the elections matter. (N.C. Youth Vote, Sept. 4)

I’m really hoping that following this will help with our own election coverage at the DTH. State & National Editor Ariel Zirulnick has so many ideas of what we can do and is blogging about the election for the paper, and our efforts are increasing daily as the election draws closer and closer.  I’m going to try for my class blog to be light on DTH news, mostly because I want to focus on what we can learn from what other papers are doing. I’m also particularly interested in how student papers are embracing technology to cover the election. At the MSCNE conference I went to this summer, papers outside of N.C. have big plans, and my fingers are crossed that we’ll see really innovative ideas here, too.

The first DTH of the year is online and in stands now. It’s a good feeling, looking at the 26-page behemoth knowing how hard all the staff worked last week to put it out and knowing all the hard work they’re still putting in for Tuesday’s 34-pager.

Right now I’m most excited about our recruitment efforts. We manned a booth at Fall Fest, the annual start-of-year celebration where student groups court new members, and have a recruitment page on the Web site, complete with a video about the DTH from our multimedia desk. Editor Alli Nichols is at the journalism school’s convocation right now, making her pitch for the DTH, and I just sent an e-mail to the hundreds who signed up for our listserv. We’ll meet with the first group of interested students this Thursday.

I’m interested in what other student newspapers are doing to recruit this fall. It was a big topic of discussion at the MSCNE conference I went to this summer, and we all brain-stormed ideas for how to best recruit. We’ll be going to various classes to make pitches, we’re holding interest meetings, promoting it heavily on the Web site, using informational e-mails and have even got a few recruits from Twitter. What else can we do?

The last part of our day included a tour of UGA’s independent student paper, The Red and Black. I have a friend who used to be on the R&B and it’s one of the college papers I follow the most, because of the similarities between UNC, UGA and our two papers, but I’d never seen the office.

They own their own building, which is great, but of course presents its own challenges (taking care of maintenance work on your own, for example). It’s a pretty two story building that’s slightly off-campus at the top of a lovely hill. Their ad staff works on the first floor, and editorial staff is on the second floor. You can see the newsroom here.

What amazed me is how clean it was. At the DTH we have Halloween/Christmas/Valentine’s decorations from 2+ years ago that have never been taken down. This in addition to piles of papers (often trash) and general junk. Also, our well loved couch that has had oh so many sleep on it. Even just the individual decorations desks put up, whether it’s cutting out good articles and hanging them, or pictures of staff or whatever. The DTH feels very lived in, and there’s no mistaking it for a college newsroom. Still, I’m sure The Red and Black, when it isn’t the middle of the summer (when even the DTH looks lonely), is a much, much livelier place (is it even possible for a college newspaper to not be?).

The sad news of this endeavor was the disappointing news about College Publisher 5 from Ed Morales, the Red and Black’s editorial adviser. College Publisher 5 has basically been promised to us (and all the other college newspapers who host with them) as a sort of Web Jesus. It’ll post stuff for you! You can click and drag! It’s so flexible! It’s amazing.

Apparently not (No surprise – they also said we’d be switched over this summer … which is now this scheduled for the fall … which surely will be pushed back even later before it’s all over). But everyone was so excited about CP5 because really, there is a lot of room for improvement. From what he said, their experience testing it out, they found that it took almost 4 times as long to post because all of the automation has disappeared. The automatic posting apparently isn’t there yet.

Only one paper in the country, as I understand, is on CP5 now fully, and I’d really be interested in hearing their experiences. Most of the papers here are on CP, and as Morales pointed out, that’s really because there is no other good option now for college papers. Juliette Mullin, the Daily Pennsylvanian managing editor and I talked about this, and we’re both frustrated, but also don’t see switching away from CP as an option. The DP has talked about switching to Drupal, but her concern is continuity, and finding staff year to year that can maintain a site on their own without the system in place with CP. And as Andrew learned, learning Drupal isn’t easy either. The Savannah Morning News Editor, Susan Catron (a DTH alum!), said their paper has been hosting on Drupal and is very happy with it, but again, I don’t see our staff now having the skills to build and maintain our own site. And hosting on WordPress, as some papers do with great success, isn’t practical for a paper like us in the event we get huge traffic one day (Taheri-azar, Eve Carson, etc).

So for anyone who’s working with it now, how’s CP5? Is it as bad/good as we’ve heard? Can it walk on water, or does it sink?

I’m blogging this week from the University of Georgia in Athens, where I’m attending the Management Seminar for College Newspaper Editors. I love Athens, and I really love getting to meet all of these other college newspaper editors from across the country. We have different challenges depending on the size and structure of our papers, but we face a lot of similar issues as well. Getting perspective from others in the same boat but who are outside your own newsroom is nice.

My plan was to do Twitter updates throughout the day, and I did two (here and here), but by and large felt guilty pulling out my phone while these professionals were giving up their time to talk with us.

We heard first from Edward Miller, the managing editor of The Newsroom Leadership Group and author of “Reflections on Leadership.” I really enjoyed the definition of leadership he gave us (from Truman): “Leadership is getting others to do what you want them to do and liking it.” When he asked for definitions from us, many described it as simply leading a group towards a common goal, but as he pointed out, getting people to do what you want is easy. It’s getting them to like doing it that’s difficult.

• Ways to motivate: Ask “How did you do that?” and “How can you help us teach others how to do it that well?” when reporters do commendable work;
• Give feedback, but make sure you set goals that are measurable, and work towards increasing skills/competence;
• For difficult conversations, ask questions such as “What do you do well?” “What would you like to do more consistently well?” “What’s in the way” “How can I help?”

Then we heard from Selwyn Crawford, assistant metro editor at The Dallas Morning News, who talked about defining “news” so that it is diverse for our audiences (and diverse in more than just racial terms, but representative of all the voices on campus).

• Who cares about an issue? What do people care about? Why do people care?
• “I hear all the loud folk … but what is it we aren’t hearing?” – In response to one editor’s question about how to give equal coverage to the Democrats and Republicans, especially the McCain campaign, which really didn’t have a presence on their campus during the primary. Don’t accept that just because a segment of the population is quiet, that means there’s nothing to cover – often that means there is something to cover that’s being overlooked.

Next, Michael Schwartz, manager of editorial training for Cox Newspapers and COXnet. He addressed recruiting, training and retaining staff. This is a huge issue for us at the DTH. We started last fall with the largest incoming group of reporters (150+ new), and lost a significant amount even by the end of the semester.

We identified a lot of the major problems college newspapers have with this – recruiting a diverse staff (which is not unique to college papers at all), finding people with the necessary skills (the DTH is committed to being a teaching paper, but in some areas, we really don’t have the skills to teach things that we’d like the paper to be doing), combating a lack of interest (this is not so much a problem for the DTH, but a lot of the smaller, non-daily college papers seemed to struggle with this), and trying to offer incentives to get people to join (again, our reputation means this usually isn’t a problem in getting people on staff, but it is a demanding job that isn’t cut out for everyone, and too often we offer too little to convince people to stay). I really enjoyed hearing what other papers do to combat these problems, and we discussed those as well.

• Form a recruiting committee (At the DTH, we had hoped to hire a recruitment editor, but no one applied. In the past, this task fell to writing coaches, without much success. We’re hoping our new adviser will help with this in the fall.)
• Staff testimonials (why is joining the paper a valuable experience?)
• Open houses (and not just to recruit, but throughout the year, to demystify the paper and make it more open in general)

Lastly, we heard from Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, who talked about legal and ethical issues. I took media law last semester, but I still really enjoyed this session and thought it did a good job of really focusing on the big issues college editors deal with on a day-to-day basis.

Which was all followed by a show-and-tell of sorts, where 64 of the editors passed around copies of their paper. There’s a good mix of papers here at the conference, from tabs to broadsheets, and weeklies, twice-weeklies, thrice-weeklies and the dailies (5x a week). From informal discussions with the other daily editors, I think the DTH’s circulation is the largest, at 20,000, but as was pointed out, we also distribute off-campus, which many of these papers don’t do. Regardless of size though, we’re all still dealing with the same issues, and I think we all take it as seriously. It’s a really committed group of editors who are here this week.

Tomorrow I’m sitting on a panel talking about covering the unexpected, when tragedies (or any breaking news) hits. It’s a little weird being in Eve Carson’s hometown and talking about how we covered that awful day and the weeks afterward. I’m really proud of what we did as a paper, but it’s a learning experience I wish we hadn’t had to have.

I’m going to try to do more Twitter updates tomorrow; we’ll see how that goes though.