Archive for the 'Participants' Category

User-generated fibbery

Sunday, February 24th, 2008

Ken Otterbourg, managing editor of the Winston-Salem Journal (where I was working before I came to Denver), has a tale of an awesome photo of the lunar eclipse that a reader submitted:

A reader submitted that photo, which looks great. But, when the photo editor was readying it for print, well, the image told a different […]

Quote of the Moment: Community

Sunday, November 4th, 2007

Stumbled on this at Peter Van Dijck’s weblog
Sites that put “community” in a separate tab most likely think of community as an add-on to their business, not as core to their business.

Question: What are some novel ways to get the newsroom involved in the web site?

Thursday, November 1st, 2007

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 […]

The Denver Post’s up for three Online News Association awards, and now all our problems are solved!

Monday, September 17th, 2007

Snark aside, my employer the Post is up for the General Excellence (medium site), Breaking News and something else relating to our business columnist Al Lewis. That’s terrific, and it comes from the work of our team and Al Lewis. On another Al Lewis-related note, he wrote an excellent and semi-snarky column about leadership […]

Like many newspaper-dot-coms, the Washington Post has trouble with the basics

Thursday, July 19th, 2007

It’s cute that the Post wrote a story about its new ‘hyperlocal’ effort (
In Push for Local Readers, Post Unleashes LoudounExtra.com). But, in an article clouded by links on a page cluttered with them, nowhere is there a link to the site-in-mention, LoudounExtra.com.

Now I’m not saying everybody oughta be perfect. But, with one of the […]

Had to write this: Social sites grow one member at a time

Tuesday, June 5th, 2007

“One member at a time” is not the same as “your subscriber base,” and should not be approached in the same (one-)way.
This paragraph matters big-time to the one-way media, and so does the post behind it:

Strong social sites build value one user at a time. If one user finds value, then they’re much more likely […]

Five ingredients for a see-through newspaper

Sunday, April 29th, 2007

It took me about a year to turn “transparency” from a word with nasty connotations to a word with positive ones. The internet gives a great new landscape for transparency. Here are a few places newspapers could start:

Create an index of your corrections that include the correction made and a link to the original article […]

Chicago Tribune tries the YourHub model of local

Thursday, April 19th, 2007

The trib launched a community site today, triblocal.com. It looks like what a newspaper thinks would work for the model of community participation, and in the write-up the Tribune gives the site they mention TribLocal takes its cues from YourHub. The article also includes choice phrases like “taking a tentative step into a brave new […]

How much do readers really understand?

Monday, April 16th, 2007

The answer: it varies. The problem is it varies a lot.
I was in the middle of writing a guide on writing a guide for online news content (how meta) when this came across the radar:
The editor of the Greensboro N.C. paper spent time interviewing loyal, 7-day subscribers to the paper last week. More than […]

Maybe nobody in the newsroom wanted the job…

Sunday, April 15th, 2007

Update: TBO.com’s Rusty Coats explains what happened: “the timing of this job appearing alongside layoff news is coincidental.” That information makes the meat of this post irrelevant. Which is too bad, because I already posted it. This is my first experience with the “shoot-first” blog practice, and if I keep on top of my stuff, […]

Copyright 2006-2008 Joe Murphy