Spring Training '07

It's raining/sleeting/freezing over where I am, but at least a few around the Ottaway empire are buried in snow today, so it's difficult to avoid daydreaming of points south. Take a stop over to recordonline.com's Spring Training '07 landing page.

It's as comprehensive a page as you'll find for following the Yankees and Mets preseason, and interacting with the writers and fellow fans.

Try to find a better landing page on the New York metro-area sites. I've not seen one yet. If you do, let me know. It's always good to learn from what others are doing.

The nice thing about what Patrick Mullen, Erik Gliedman and Matt Pepin have done here is that once everyone is on the common platform, this won't be that hard to replicate for the Red Sox in New England, for example, or the A's and Giants out West.

Track the candidates

Sure, you can sign up for breaking news alerts from Seacoast Online, but NH Primary Candidate Appearances are also among their offerings. Sign me up!

Speaking of candidates, coming tomorrow from Seacoast: thenewhampshireprimary.com

Let It Snow

Nice stormy weather landing page from Erik Gliedman and crew.

Pocono also had a nice tactic in their Morning Update to point to some of their existing landing pages:

If you're stuck at home it's a good day to explore this site, which has a lot more on it than just the breaking news. For information about where you live, we've got an entire section. We've also got some exhaustively detailed special reports on everything from gangs in the Poconos to the legacy of Tocks Island Dam to political protection for questionable mortgage practices in the Poconos that will take your breath away.

Cape Cod and Pocono also had a couple of good road condition text alerts, while Southcoast kicked off their school closings text alerts. I'd show them to you, but I'm still struggling with how to get the screenshots that my nifty new Treo program takes for me out of the bleepin' Treo.... Take my word for it for now.

StuandMikey

Here is the car review video Fred was talking about yesterday:

MySpace as a viral marketing tool

As a follow-up to this week's discussion regarding MySpace and other places we need to be playing...

I noticed on my MySpace page today that my "friends" Go! in Middletown and 209 Music in Stockton added blog posts in the last couple of days to their page. Because I have added them as my friends, I see their new material on my personal dashboard:

Voila! Content distribution in MySpace.



I'm guessing that we should add a session like "How to Create a MySpace page and Ways to Use It" to yesterday's brainstorm notes from the Online Editors' conference?

One of the sessions that got cut at the last minute from this week's conference was Ken and I talking about Web 2.0 and how to leverage others' technologies for marketing and content purposes. We talked about it some (YouTube players in story pages, for example), but I'll also hang onto that as an idea for an upcoming conference call/WebEx session.

Wired News: Italy Hails Laundry Text Alerts

In doing some research today, I came across this Sept. item from Wired: Italy Hails Laundry Text Alerts

Julien Buratto and Davide Bongianni..., a project manager and graphic designer respectively at a Milan web company, have launched a website called stendibiancheria.net (Italian for "hang out the laundry") that pairs a mathematical formula with forecasts from weather.com to arrive at a "laundry index."

In late August, just in time for the meteorological uncertainties of fall, they added a free text-messaging service so users know when it's time to high-tail it home and pull in the clothes. About 600 subscribers have signed up so far.

CLearly filling a void in Milan "Jobs to be Done."

Competition watch

AmericanTowns.com
was among the featured sites in a NYT article today (so, too, were our friends at Baristanet) about hyperlocal sites in the greater NYC area.

Among the featured towns on AmericanTowns:
Nantucket
Provincetown
Stockton
New Paltz
Carmel
Poughkeepsie

But click on any state on the AmericanTowns home page, and you can see pages budding for non-featured towns, such as my favorite town, Sandwich.

The Power of UGC

The text alert came across today @ 4:27 p.m. while we were having the monthly call with the Middletown folks. That drew us to the site, where we noticed this comment posted at the end of the article.

Rebecca928
January 09, 2007 03:32 PM
I work for Dr. Luck right across the street from where the accident happend i seen the accident happen and was the first one to call for help. I would like to say that we are all praying that everone makes it through this. I dont know how many people are going to have to get hurt before they do something about this intersection on route 208 and spring mountain rd.Are prayers are with you.

Now THAT is news as conversation with the community.

Some Words of Advice for Small Newspapers

In case you missed it, Steve Outing writes today about 10 things publishers and editors should be doing to keep their heads above water in today's media landscape.

Society of News Design: New Media Quick Course — 2007

Not that anyone has a deep-seeded desire to go to Muncie, Ind., much less in the middle of winter, but if you've got folks proficient in Flash, this course could be a good way for them to take their multimedia story-telling skills to the next level.

FW: Deck Map the Halls

Sharing an idea from Bakersfield via our new friends at Baristanet....

---

From: Debbie Galant
Posted At: Friday, December 15, 2006 3:53 PM
Posted To: Baristanet
Conversation: Deck Map the Halls
Subject: Deck Map the Halls

http://www.baristanet.com/2006/12/deck_map_the_halls.php

We saw this holiday light map over at Bakersfield.com and decided we had to have one of our very own. And the wonderful folks over at Faneuil Media, who made our Tear Down Map and our Java Map have agreed to make it happen. Have some Holly Jolly to show off? (Lights? Reindeer? Inflatable Simpsons? Or just some really classy garlands?) Send us your street address (with town) and a photograph, and we'll include you on the map. Please use this e-mail address: barista.lights@gmail.com and send your photos (low-res, please) in by the end of the day on Monday.

Related...

More to the Story from the Traverse City Record-Eagle

Interesting in-paper marketing tactic from our recently departed sibling in Traverse City:

The print edition of the Record-Eagle often refers to more information about a story that is available online. Watch the print edition for the "More to the story" icon and go online here to view the extra information.

Also note the box in the upper right rail of their home page, which links into the page described above:


It's a tactic used a lot by local broadcast TV stations. I've seen the practice referred to as NewsLinks, but maybe that was just a Belo TV term. It's meant to be one place to collect all of the things you relentlessly promoted in your news broadcast.

If you adopt this idea, don't let it stop you from enhancing your story files. Remember, people increasingly encounter our content via the search engines, e-mail sharing, IM or otherwise (i.e. not via our home page or section fronts), and it is important to lead users from that story to the enhanced or related content you have on that topic.

A Dozen Online Writing Tips - CyberJournalist.net - Online News - Tips and Tools

Someone asked this week whether there are any good online writing resources or training that we could recommend. We came up empty at the time, but I did manage to dig up these tips, written in 2000 by Jonathan Dube, who is now editorial director for CBC.ca.

This post is also a way to introduce the new members of the mailing list members to the existence of this Ottaway blog, in which I share insights and tidbits from our peers and elsewhere about this Internet thing we're trying to wrap our arms around.

New posts get automatically e-mailed to the list.
Some days that's many posts. Some weeks there are none.

A Newspaper Chain Sees Its Future, And It's Online and Hyper-Local - washingtonpost.com

A Newspaper Chain Sees Its Future, And It's Online and Hyper-Local - washingtonpost.com

A must-read, and file it away for future discussions. Many of you have likely heard me advocate a similar concept whenever I am asked how our newsroom workflows might evolve.

Election Day ideas

A quick survey of the Ottaway landscape shows these Election Day ideas in action:

Cape Cod Times: Election Night 2006 blog -- Includes a couple of items on Ted Kennedy voting.

E-mail alerts from Danbury (last night), Pocono (this afternoon) and Traverse City (this morning), touting what's coming tonight on their Web sites.

Voter utility landing page in Medford, plus their ongoing coverage of turnout at the polls.

On-the-fly photo galleries in Middletown: Spitzer and Pirro voting, not to mention their Election Day quiz and landing page teased from the small barkers on the home page.

Ongoing vote turnout coverage in New Bedford.

Election themed Street Talk, a new multimedia feature on Oneonta's Web site.

Election-themed morning update (first time posting before midday?) on the Santa Cruz home page.

Election 2006 landing pages with varying degrees of complexity and features in Plattsburgh, Portsmouth, Stockton and Sunbury.

Crowdsourcing: The New (Investigative) Journalism

You may have already spied the I Want Media links today regarding today on Gannett overhauling its newsrooms for a 24/7 news cycle and utilizing "crowdsourcing" as an investigative journalism tool. If not, check them out.

Here's an additional nugget: The inside scoop on the latter from crowdsourcing.com.

Citizen Media: The High School Years

Clever metaphorical rundown from last month's Fast Company, itemizing UGC tools and enterprises.

www.myspace.com/newstimeslive

Add another to the growing roster:
www.myspace.com/newstimeslive

I also started one for Discover Nantucket last night:
www.myspace.com/discovernantucket

Two more MySpace profiles to check out

Stockton: www.myspace.com/ianhill

Pocono: www.myspace.com/pocono2006

Cape Cod's coverage of the Christa Worthington murder case

Run, don't walk, over to the Cape Cod Online to check out how they are tackling coverage of an ongoing story with national interest happening right in their front yard. The trial started this week.

Landing page to collect all of the coverage and provide context? Check.

Live trial blog? Check. Eric Williams (full disclosure: Eric worked for me in a previous professional endeavor) not only offers his unique style of observations from the trial, but also has in at least one of his posts fielded a question from a reader about whether anyone could attend the trial. Love the interaction.

Special video player just for the trial? Check.
Compelling video, too, which at times reverts to audio slideshow format to combine photos from the courtroom with trial audio.

Traffic? Not spiking as much as I'd expect. I'll have to check back with Editor Paul Pronovost on what kind of promotion is taking place in the paper and elsewhere. If it were me and my universe, I'd be giving it all a big specialized, highly designed treatment on the home page of the site to clearly accentuate and group all of the goodness they're offering. (In my previous life, we were big proponents with a story of this magnitude to dedicating the entire home page -- or at least most of it -- to our coverage. Leverage your strength of the moment, if you will.)