Question: What are some novel ways to get the newsroom involved in the web site?
I’ve seen it countless times: Reporter wants to help out online. Reporter gets the okay to start blogging. Reporter blogs for a few weeks. Without any comments, or any idea that anybody’s really reading, reporter quits the blog.
Or, there’s video. Or audio. Reporter shoots video, hands it off to online team. Neither online team or reporter have time to produce video. Video goes nowhere.
By my count there are currently six active ways the newsroom participates online:
- Getting online breaking news stories
- Writing blogs
- Shooting video
- Recording audio
- Building photo galleries
- Making interactive graphics
And some of these turn out pretty awesome. The Denver Post’s graphics department produced print-out cut-up fold-together dolls for the majority of the Colorado Rockies baseball team through the course of the Rockies’ World Series run. Including one for the Rockies’ mascot, a triceratops.
But there’s gotta be more. What are some novel one-off ways to get the newsroom involved online? What are some new ways to get newsroom continually participating online?
January 25th, 2008 at 7:21 pm
Hey Joe. Great question.
How about encouraging reporters, and other newsroom staff, to participate in blogs outside their coverage area. For example, a political reporter could weigh in on the local sports team; a sports reporter may have thoughts on a new movie. Not necessarily as in their own blogs, but as comments and responses to what the beat writers and readers have to say, furthering the conversation.
One of the great things about the newsroom is that you’ll find a lot of people with diverse interests and plenty of opinions, and they’re skilled at putting their thoughts into an interesting sentence or two. Why not tap into that?
For example, there’s a political reporter at a rival newspaper whose a big movie buff - I’d read a few grafs on what he thought of new releases.
I’ve often thought of starting a politics blog, but am partly held back by worries about staying neutral on the subjects I cover. But I also have lots of thoughts in my spare time on sports and music and other interests — if I could write quick hits on those, it would seem a lot less like work and more like fun. And hopefully would keep a conversation going on our web site.
- Jonathan Tamari
January 29th, 2008 at 11:02 pm
Tamari!
I think it’s vital that journos ‘get their feet wet’ in online media, and writing about stuff they don’t do in their day job is a simple way to avoid the problems with objectivity that keep the more hard-news folk from writing.
The challenge here is it could look like the newspapers are “fluffing” their in-house blogs. I’m not sure how you get around that — if journalists participated / read external local blogs it might not matter, but I don’t know how common that is. Do you?
-Joe
January 31st, 2008 at 8:58 pm
Totally agree on getting involved in on line media (especially if you/we expect to be in this business for very long).
I assume that by “fluffing” you mean pumping up the paper’s own blogs to make them look more popular. I could see this being a problem if there was some mandate (everyone has to post twice a week or else!), but if it was a natural part of the conversations and reporters weren’t the only ones commenting, I think it would enhance the discussion. It makes intuitive sense to me, and I would hope to readers, that a newspaper’s staff would feel ownership of their paper’s blogs and would participate in them.
Possibly a way around the appearance of pumping yourself up would be to regularly rotate reporters in as commentors, so it’s not inflating the comments. For example, maybe the movie critic writes two or three times a week, and then another reporter or two do one post each a week. It accomplishes the same goal of using the staff talent as much as possible, potentially widens the appeal of a given blog with different voices.
I do not think many reporters participate in local blogs, not that I know of anyway. Covering state politics, I read a few of the more prominent political blogs each day, but most of them are either very partisan or of questionable reliability. Participating in those could, I think, be seen as a tacit endorsement.