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. 

My internship at The Salisbury Post ended last Wednesday. I came courtesy of the Peggy Allen community journalism scholarship through the J-school at UNC, and I had a wonderful summer working at the Post. I couldn’t have hoped for more. My time there made me further appreciative of the type of journalism community papers provide.

The newsroom wanted to hear from me about the future of journalism and what I learned at the editors conference I went to at UGA in July, so we brown-bagged it and talked shop during lunch. 

I don’t think anything I talked about was particularly revolutionary. I talked about tools journalists are using to help them with their work – RSS readers, Twitter, social networking sites, SproutBuilder, Dipity and a few others. I talked about my goal for the DTH – buying multimedia kits with audio recorders, microphones and Flip video cameras for reporters to use. 

I couldn’t have been happier with how the conversation went. It was the perfect example of how newsrooms can utilize those with different skill-sets to teach others within the newsroom. As an intern, the reporting and writing skills I learned from watching and working with these journalists couldn’t have been beaten. And they can learn from the technological skills I have as a 20-year-old. 

All around the table were journalists who recognize the industry is changing and who want to learn the online skills now needed. There were no curmudgeons at this table. 

After lunch, the Post’s online coordinator, Brad Thomas, and I helped nearly everyone in the newsroom set up a Twitter account. I helped Managing Editor Frank DeLoache set up his Google Reader with RSS feeds. Sports editor Ronnie Gallagher set up a Facebook account.

The atmosphere in the newsroom was electric. Everyone (@frankdeloache, @kathychaffin, @RonnieGallagher, @gayparee and @DeirdreBPS) spent the rest of the afternoon updating Twitter and learning how to use it. I tried to answer questions best I could, and I promised I would type up a glossary of Internet terms and programs they can use. Brad even created a Twitter account for the paper itself. 

It’s only been a few days, but they’re still using their accounts. They’ve even gotten other Post staff to set up accounts. I’m really excited to see as they realize what I realized earlier – how helpful Twitter can be, and the sense of community it creates.

And it’ll help us keep in touch now that I’m back in Chapel Hill, where I’ll spend this year as managing editor for print at The Daily Tar Heel. I’m looking forward to the year and watching the paper grow under Editor Alli Nichols.

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.”

Today’s a slow news day in Salisbury (the highlight so far was a report on the scanner of gunshots in a home … that turned out to be fireworks). The newsroom is basically empty – just education reporter Sarah, county government reporter Jessie and me.

Sarah came to the Post a few weeks before I did. Now, her old roommate is leaving the paper they worked at for a job (with a higher salary) in PR. This weekend, another friend (who is getting married and moving to Charlotte) announced her plan to leave newspapering for a PR job. Sarah’s a lot like me – hard news junkie – and says she’s in newspapering for the passion, not the money. But we like to eat and sleep under a roof, too.

Sarah: Jessie, have I told you how all my friends are leaving newspapers to go into PR?
Jessie: I would say that they’re smart.