Creating a Web-centric newsroom
Now that we’ve shared a few our our ideas, let’s see yours! With the above video in mind, put the information into action. In the upcoming weeks:
Week 1: Plan a brainstorming session. It can be in your newsroom or on a camping trip or at an editor’s house. Make it fun and have lots of food. Make a list of all of the best ideas for how you can better implement the Web in your newsroom. It’s important that everyone is involved in the process.
Specifically, figure out how to (1) Start a Web-first workflow for all articles to be posted in a 24-hour news cycle, and (2) Generate Web-specific content like videos, slideshows and Twitter/Facebook/SMS updates. You can start a staff blog this week and write your first post about the ideas you brainstormed.
Week 2: Help every editor and reporter set up Google alerts for their section or beat as well as create a Twitter account to reach out to readers. At every budget meeting, require an aspect of every article pitch be based on feedback from readers on the Web. Start to build a strong community with your audience online and make sure it’s a two-way dialogue.
If you already have a Twitter account, this can be the week when you set up a system for publishing your editorial calendar for public feedback.
Weeks 3-6: Get out of the habit of updating your site once a day after the newspaper is printing. This is a huge step, so you’ll have to start slow. During this week, try not to post your articles online at 10 p.m. See how early you can post everything (and subsequently tweet the headlines), then figure out how your staff needs to shift roles to have a continuous flow of news throughout the day. This could mean changing the hours of your copy editors, changing deadlines for reporters and training everyone how to use the CMS.
Week 6-9: Really take control of live and breaking coverage. This can be as simple as posting event recaps (e.g. sports games, debates, concerts) online within a few hours after they’re over, because that’s when people will be looking. During those same events, post pictures and tweets that your readers will be interested in, and make sure to keep an eye on feedback from your users too.
Do they have questions? “Is #46 on the bench?” “How many people are at the concert?” Answer those questions. For breaking news like fires, robberies or protests, post as much information as you can as soon as you can. If it’s incomplete, that’s OK — but be accurate. Post updates as you go. Be sure to tweet the information too.
Week 9-12: After your staff starts to get comfortable with the Web, take on a big project like creating a system for an open editorial calendar, a continually updated news wiki or an iPhone app for readers on the go. All of your projects will feed on the other skills you’ve acquired: covering breaking news, thinking Web-first and encouraging community involvement.
Last but not least, report back! Let your peers know how your experiment went and what lessons you learned.
Great tips and suggested work flow.
I actually passed this along to my coworkers, mentioning only that as professional journalists, they shouldn’t bother passing their work through a copy desk or editor to get it online. It’s probably a good practice early on, but in the long run, if you’re going to be a new media/social media journalist, you should generally be comfortable posting without a net.
I love to see someone put the timeline you constructed into practice. (Kinda makes me want to be back in college.)
Hey Paul, I’m glad you found this useful! This is our point too– it’s easier to pull off these kinds of experiments in college and students should be doing it more. If they can prove it successful in the college newsroom, then they can carry it into the professional newsroom. As someone out of college, does that sound feasible?
Thanks for sharing the link with your co-workers. We’ll definitely blog about any success stories from the suggested timeline.
This is awesome. I’m forwarding this to various editors at the Spartan Daily.
Any tips (or role models) for weeklies that want to use the Web and Twitter between issues? How are they keeping students interested in picking up the weekly? Regular features that are still print-first… or what?
Hey Bob,
Part of the philosophy behind web-first is that print is going to eventually fade away, so you’re preparing yourself for that inevitable demise by leveraging the web now, before it’s too late to catch up. So I wouldn’t necessarily use social media as a tool for getting people to pick up the paper.
That being said, I do realize that it’s too early for many to make that full transition.
Is your only online content the same as print content? If so, that’s the first thing you should re-think before worrying about web first. Get unique, timely content online in between issues.
One idea for keeping readers interested in print would be to do Twitter trivia. Tweet questions about something that they could only find in print, like a sidebar infographic. Give a prize to the first person to at-reply you with the answer or run a little house ad with a photo of the winner. That’s one simple way of integrating social media into print readership, but it’s not a very strong one.
Again, the focus of using the web isn’t to get people reading print, but to prepare yourself for the day when they stop reading print.
Lauren,
This is excellent. I’m sending it to my editors tonight- these are some of the big principles I’m trying to push in our newsroom (Central Michigan Life). Right now, the biggest weakness is linking to content on the Web, but my hope is all of us get better at doing it. We have an entire semester to get better.
I’ll be keeping up for updates.
I’d like to chime in that I think there still is value in a print product. If I were running a publication that had a print product, I wouldn’t let one get in the way of the other. Rather, I’d leverage the characteristics of both. For instance, with a weekly, the time-sensitive news should almost certainly run on the website first in whatever length it needs to be. Longer-form features that aren’t so time sensitive could be published at the same time online and in print (similar, I imagine, to what happens today).
My interpretation of the video as we were working on it was also that the web can be at the center of a workflow that publishes to both mediums. For instance, with the longer-form features, you could have reporters write blog posts that serve as iterations of the story, manage the editorial workflow and planning with your open source CMS, and then synthesize that content for the long form print piece.
Hi Lauren,
Neat ideas, but you’re preaching to the choir. I didn’t mean to suggest anyone should just use the Web just to promote a print weekly. I assume weeklies will use the 24/7 Web to post breaking news, get feedback, make the news a conversation, and be more valuable to readers. But if there is still a weekly paper, instead of repeating the same news in print, are campus weeklies doing something new?
Are they following the http://CSmonitor.com model with more depth, more “why it matters” stories, becoming more interpretive, more magazine-like with longer articles, or trying more creative visual design (http://en.akzia.com/), more color, infographics and layouts that take advantage of the larger “display” of a double page spread?
I’m just curious what’s already going on… and plan to point a couple of local editors at this discussion.
Oh my gosh! Who does your video production!? It looks wonderful!!
You are guys are kicking ass. I love to see this come along so well!
@Jeremy: The insanely talented Lauren Rabaino.
We’ve been working pretty hard on trying to move from the aniquated print mindset too. Last year, I was the online editor of The Gargoyle, Flagler College’s student newspaper, and now I’m the Co-Editor. We’re shifting our focus from print to online, cutting our monthly 8-page broadsheet from last year to a 4-page tabloid.
We’ve got a pretty small staff, which is a major obstacle, but I think the biggest roadblock to overcome is getting everybody on staff (myself included) out of the print-minded rut and into the shorter news cycle (we’re aiming for weekly before 24-hour, just because we don’t have the staff size for daily).
Another thing we’re trying to do is to get writers to think about the whole presentation of a story, how to visually present it with photos/videos.
We’re using our print to promote our online as well. We’re cutting story-sizes down and placing small house-ads. A huge part of transitioning, I think, is getting your audience on board too.
-Matthew Boyle
Co-Editor
The Gargoyle, Flagler College
gargoyle.flagler.edu
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