Posts filed under 'Web first'
January 8th, 2008
I sent around 10:25 p.m. today the note below to staff who worked to feed rrstar.com today …
I wanted to share with all of you, for sure … if I missed anyone, please pass along …
You all kicked butt today. Thanks for the hard work, especially on the photo galleries and videos. We gave our readers a lot of great stuff today. And as a result of all the hard work today pushing content to the Web, our print readers will get a treat in Wednesday’s paper. Definitely worth more than the 75 cents they’ll pay at the racks.
To get a quick glimpse of all you did, check out the special report page. Of the 506,529 page views so far today, 278,425 were of multimedia. That’s awesome. Our staff photo galleries did extremely well. The day-of gallery generated 100,000 page views today alone. The “aftermath” gallery got 35,000 page views. Our readers’ tornado photo gallery got 88,000, and readers’ orchard photos have gotten 9,000 so far today. That means photos got 232,000 page views today (through 10:20 p.m.).
I can’t remember traffic like this. Well done.
Thanks,
Anna
January 8th, 2008
We now have a special report on the Boone tornado. You’ll find several photo galleries (the most popular content you’ve clicked on in the last two days), videos (I’m even yelling at one staffer) and stories. As of 5:50 p.m. Tuesday, we’ve gotten more than 416,000 pages today alone. That’s incredible. More than half of the page views have been on tornado-related content.
December 10th, 2007
Tried a different approach when reporting today about the threat at Northern Illinois University which closed the campus. Instead of “writing through” the main story every time we had new information, we instead added information to the top of the original story, changed the headline and updated the time stamp. That way, readers could get every tidbit we posted in reverse chronological order if they wanted. You can see how we did it here. Or click on the thumbnail below to see how the story was played on the rrstar.com front page.
November 18th, 2007
Interesting — and long — article by Terry Heaton about how the media should post news and information as it happens. Adopt a news-now model where the deadline is always now. Lots of newsrooms live by print-cycle deadlines. That can’t be the culture in our newsrooms much longer.
November 17th, 2007
Made it back to Rockford on Tuesday evening and played catchup at work Wednesday-Friday, so I am just getting a chance to write about my trip to Canton now.
I had a nice time in Ohio, where I got to talk again about Web-first publishing and see our former managing editor, Jeff Gauger, who is now the top editor at The Canton Repository.
I made it to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, too, and got to see all my beloved Packers who are there. Even the football Brett Favre threw to break Dan Marino’s touchdown record was there. I had my photo taken with Brett. Uh, Brett’s jersey and football.
November 12th, 2007
Arrived in Canton last night and will head over to the Canton Repository in about an hour. I’ll get to see my former boss, Jeff Gauger, again. He left the Register Star this summer to be the top editor here in Canton. I’ll talk to his staff and journalists from The Times-Reporter, The Independent and The Suburbanite about the benefits of posting news to the Web and not waiting for the next day’s newspaper. I gave this talk in Boston a couple weeks ago. I am excited to do it all over again.
November 5th, 2007
I had a great time in the Boston area last week, talking with fellow journalists about pushing to get news content on their Web sites and then publishing those stories and photos in print later.
I was in Framingham, Mass., about 30 miles west of Boston. On Thursday, I talked with journalists who work for daily newspapers about Web-first publishing. We had such good discussion that I had to whip through the second half of my presentation. On Friday, I met with weekly newspaper editors and reporters. Both groups have their own sets of challenges, but the the basic messages I heard were the same.
How do we do this with the resources we have? We talked about deadlining stories throughout the day. Many papers deadline stories for print publication. At morning papers, stories usually are finished in the early evening. Many of these stories can and should be done earlier in the day. That way, we can post the stories when Web traffic is higher. In Rockford, online traffic is strongest during the day, Monday through Friday. Traffic picks up starting at 6 a.m., peaks at noon and starts to drop after 6 p.m.
We talked about resources, too. How do you do a quality newspaper and Web site with the same resources? It isn’t easy. The idea is to post content all day long and take the best stuff you posted to the Web today and publish it in the newspaper tomorrow. The work you do for the online product ultimately benefits the print product, too. Online readers get information when they want it; print readers get more analysis the next day.
I’ll give this spiel one more time next week in Canton, Ohio. That’s where our former managing editor, Jeff Gauger, is now executive editor.
(Maybe I’ll have some time to visit the Pro Football Hall of Fame, where my beloved Brett Favre will one day be inducted. A side note, Jeff is a major Seahawks fan. And only one notable Seahawk (Steve Largent) is in the Hall of Fame. Mike Holmgren will be there one day, but odds are he’ll go in as a Packer coach. Take that.)
November 1st, 2007
while this presstime article doesn’t mention the register star, it mentions our old online content management system, saxotech, and our new one, zope.
the story is about systems built to give readers what they want. it’s clear this is a work in progress.
October 30th, 2007
I fly to Boston tomorrow to talk with fellow GateHouse journalists about Web-first publishing. Web first is journalism jargon for putting news when we know it online and then taking those stories and publishing them in the newspaper the next day.
I sometimes — OK, probably often — drive my colleagues crazy with questions like …
When can we get that story online?
Do we have more on this overnight crime?
That press conference ended an hour ago. Where’s the story?
Getting stories online timely and with accuracy is important to us at the News Tower. We use the Web because it’s the best platform to deliver news immediately to our readers. With the Web, we continue to be the primary source of news, information and advertising. And as my co-workers know, this is a topic I am passionate about. So, I am excited to head out to Boston, my first trip to the East coast.
I am not as excited about the traveling part. I dread is getting on that plane. I’m a lot like B.A. Baracus, the character played by Mr. T on the ’80s show “The A-Team.” B.A.’s buddies gave him tranquilizers each time they had to get him on a plane. Wish I had some of those suckers.
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