A review of V845

We've been talking up the Hudson Valley group's high school sports effort (http://www.varsity845.com) quite a bit lately, and exploring with some of you the possibility of borrowing elements and functionality for your use (Southcoast has since taken them up on the offer, and is working to integrate some of the scoreboard elements into their high school football coverage).

See below some outside feedback on the Varsity 845 effort.

While projects like this do depend on some technological pieces being in place, success comes only from completing the circle with widespread buy-in and usage by the staff. Matt Pepin has done a superb job of using the technology that Patrick Mullen has provided, and running all-out to make sure the content is filling the platform and building the audience.

Please reach out to Patrick and Matt when you can. They have hit upon an initial formula that can work for you. Lots of audience growth can be derived from consistent and persistent use of online tools to strengthen your timely and interactive coverage of the local online sports scene.

________________________________

From: Pepin, Matt
Sent: Tue 9/25/2007 11:08 AM
To: Vanderhoof, Joe; Mullen, Patrick; Gliedman, Erik; Osenenko, Derek; McGuire, Meg; Mohart, Doug; Polay, Sean
Subject: a review of V845

Everyone ... very favorable coverage of V845 by the New York State Sportswriters Association in the president's blog. Link is here, text is pasted below.

http://www.newyorksportswriters.org/blog/blog-2007-09-22.shtml

Matt Pepin

Sports Editor

Times Herald-Record

Middletown, N.Y.

The 411 on '845': Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill was famously quoted as saying "All politics is local." He was also known for his ability to return to his old neighborhood and recognize people he hadn't seen in years, greeting them by name and attending to them as though they were life-long friends.

Rep. O'Neill got it. He understood that he needed to be attuned to the lives of his constituents. It's grassroots politicking, and it's how he got re-elected time after time after time, though being a liberal, Irish Democrat in Massachusetts certainly didn't hurt his cause.

I'm not sure yet whether the effort will amount to "too little, too late," but newspapers and other old-school media are going the grassroots route as well these days, focusing their newsgathering and delivery on so-called "hyper-local" approaches. Major newspapers and electronic media that used to have multiple foreign news bureaus are shutting them down to concentrate on national and state coverage. Those that used to maintain a presence in New York and Washington, D.C., have been cutting back to focus oin state and local reporting.

And mid-sized daily papers are moving their resources back from the statehouse into the local neighborhoods to recapture readership they've been losing for any number of reasons over the last quarter of a century. And the emphasis is on online operations in pursuit of the young folks.

Translation: This is a swell time to be a web designer or developer with a little flair and imagination. There's a big market for "cool" and "cutting edge" in the online world these days as newspapers court the young readers.

To that end, The Times Herald-Record in Middletown typlifies the "adapt or die" mentality this fall, having rolled out Varsity845.com <http://www.varsity845.com/> . It's a laudable effort that combines old staples -- roundups, game stories, states and standings -- with new strategies such as blogging, video clips, photo galleries and forums.

It adds up to a place in the top three of must-visit scholastic sports sites in New York, alongside Newsday <http://www.newsday.com/sports/highschool/> and LoHud.com <http://www.thejournalnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?category=SPORTS02> .

What makes the site superior? Start with the name. Playing off the area code for the Catskills/Hudson Valley region the paper serves, it's named so as to put a little distance between the new product and print product. Trust me. I spent 11-plus years at DemocratandChronicle.com in Rochester, so I understand how it's a lot easier to design a snazzy t-shirt with the Varsity 845 logo on it than it is to get creative with the Times Herald-Record name.

The site's design -- yellow type on a black background -- is attractive and effective, but that's relatively superficial stuff anyway. Where Varsity845.com really succeeds is its content:

* A simple, useful calendar
* Standings that are generally up to date and accurate
* Chat forums
* Results roundups and game stories
* Video reports and photo galleries
* Links to lists of players and coaches of the year in the respective sports as well as Section 9 champions

Additionally, the staff does the stuff that looks good but involves effort above and beyond what many sites are willing to do. Three bloggers contribute multiple entries each week and three nominees per day are highlighted for their Player of the Day voting.

Taken in total, it's superior to just about anything out there and positions The Times Herald-Record to defend against MaxPreps, Scout.com and other national players that are trying to make inroads into local markets. Publishers across the state should stop by to see how they should be doing it.

Sign Design

I'm sure you know by now how much I love these kinds of contests: Embassy Suites Launches Do Not Disturb Sign Design Contest

You can involve your audience in just about anything you try to do.

Animoto - Remix

So Animoto let me remix the photos, select some as "featured," choose a new starting point in the music, or replace the music entirely. Now it's not as fulyl featured as I might like, but for those just wanting a quick way to create a video-like experience with only photos and a soundtrack -- and the ability to plug it into Blogger, Facebook and other places -- this is not a bad way to go.

Test drive of Animoto

Trying out Animoto (www.animoto.com), a site that allows you to upload photos -- or pull them from Flickr or other apps -- choose some music, and voila... instant video! On this first one, I didn't see anywhere to play with the pacings or transitions. Will go back in to read the directions more carefully now....

User-generated product development

Full credit goes to my wife, Brandy, for pointing me in this direction: Vineyard Vines Custom Department.

Submit your design, and Vineyard Vines will apply it to their products. Sure, you have to order a minimum quantity, but I still love the concept.

The possibilities for similar application to our products is endless:

• Have readers design their own print page from photos they've submitted.


• Cape Cod has Gulliver (befriend him on Facebook!). How about if you have readers design your mascot -- and then turn him or her into an online and marketing personality?


• Run some user-submitted stories in the paper.


• Solicit blog ideas from readers.

What are some of your ideas?

How we measure up on socialmeter

Found via StephKerchner on Digg: socialmeter

Here's a quick look at our scores:
ack.net: 229
capecodonline.com: 4,841
dailytidings.com: 717
mailtribune.com: 3,170
poconorecord.com: 3,059
recordnet.com: 5,600
recordonline.com: 8,105
seacoastonline.com: 9,438
southcoasttoday.com: 9,288

Note: The tally for something called Shadows wasn't loading for me, but neither was its Web site -- and before today I'd not even heard of it.

It's also missing counts for StumbleUpon, Shoutwire, Magnolia, Newsvine, Reddit, Twitter and I'm sure others. Nonetheless, it's an interesting view of our visibility to potential audience in our markets that traverse elsewhere.

Toot Your Own Horn, Why Don'tcha

So for those of you who didn’t see it, earlier last week Hudson Valley joined Cape Cod in getting their work recognized in an Editor & Publisher column.

On Tuesday, Pauline Millard, online editor at E&P (who I’ve written about previously), wrote about the newspapers online bridge database project. Millard used the project to discuss the ongoing coverage of the Minneapolis bridge collapse.

By now, you may be asking yourself ‘hey, how do I get some of that sweet coverage?’ And if you’re not asking yourself that question, let me tell you, you should be. Because while there is no guarantee that it will work, it doesn’t take much to get the ball rolling.

Start by introducing yourself. As you will see in the piece on Hudson Valley, I’m quoted. Now that wasn’t my intention from the outset – I’ve been quoted enough in my life already -- but rather was a result of my being one to approach Pauline in the first place about the project.

All I did was send her a brief e-mail drawing her attention to the project (including relevant links) and explaining why I thought she might find it of value – in this case, an example of how you don’t need a 12-person Computer Assisted Reporting team to do high quality CAR projects.

I then made sure to stay in touch with her, as she emailed me throughout the day with various questions and comments. In some cases I had the answers and in others, I called on people at Hudson Valley to provide the relevant information. And finally, when she said the project would be the topic of her column, I made sure to send her a nice little thank you note.

Now it’s true that a piece in E&P is not like Fark or Drudge and does not result in a large number of visitors, but a piece in E&P or in Romenesko, brings industry attention and the admiration of your colleagues, if nothing else, it’s sure nice to be recognized once in a while.

So next time, give it your own shot, hey you never know just who might write about the hard work you do?

Pauline Millard pmillard@editorandpublisher.com

Wikipedia contest

Ottaway Online Directors and Editors,

 

I am happy to announce a new installment of our audience development contest, this time focused on a specific content distribution idea: How many pages can you wiki?

 

I've mentioned before that opportunity exists with every landing page created -- not to mention listing our sites as geographic resources for the towns and regions we cover -- to sprinkle our links across the wikisphere. So let's focus some effort on doing so, and gain some traffic and an education in the process.

 

Here's a couple of examples where I have added our newspaper.com sites or specific landing pages to the External Links or Resources sections of Wikipedia entries:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nantucket%2C_Massachusetts#External_links

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Bedford%2C_Massachusetts#External_links

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wampanoag_%28tribe%29#External_links

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Hampshire_primary#Resources

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Isaak#External_links

 

Now, I happen to have a login, and you can set yourself up with one too. It will make it much easier to track your progress, because there is a link once you log in that takes you to "My Contributions," listing everything you've added throughout Wikipedia. If you decide to remain anonymous, you will just have to keep track of your entries manually.

 

Note: In the case of the Nantucket entry, where I had also originally added links to a few other Nantucket products, Wikipedia editors saw that as link spam and removed all but one. So I would recommend only a single external link to your your products for each wiki page.

 

And the best part about this contest? Mere participation makes you a winner. Here's how you can earn the prizes:

 

Add resource links to 25 Wikipedia pages, and I'll furnish you a copy of The Wisdom of Crowds.

Add links to 50 Wikipedia pages, and I'll throw in a $25 gift card to the coffee shop of your choice.

Add links to 75 Wikipedia pages, and you'll receive an Ottaway-logoed shirt, commemorating the our 70th anniversary.

 

(75? Am I nuts? Well at 5 a day for the next 16 business days, that'd be 80. Seems pretty doable when I put it that way, doesn't it?)

 

Deadline is 8 p.m. ET, Aug. 31. Grand prize winner will be the online editor that added links to the most Wikipedia pages: A pair of Olympus ME-15 lavalier mics. I know Seacoast needs them for their resuscitated Webcast. I'm sure everyone else can find a use for them too.

 

Fire away with any questions! And good luck!

 

-Sean

 

Facebook Group | Jersey Shore 2007

Advance has got some groups going on Facebook, including one for fans of the Jersey Shore.

I know a couple of shoreline areas where a similar social networking idea would be worth exploring for us.... Tie-ins with Beachcomber and OnCape Beach Guide products come immediately to mind.

Update: I found out about NJ.com's Facebook group from the tippy top of their Jersey Shore Blogs page.

Interactive mapping

Have fun, and get ready to drool: The New York Times > New York Region > Interactive Feature > New York City Transit System Is Crippled by Storm

Feeds: How Much Can You Eat? [ClickZ Internet Marketing Solutions for Marketers]

Feeds: How Much Can You Eat?: I'm with Kristin Darguzas of ParentDish, who was surprised to hear that 120 is a “managable” number of RSS feeds.

I just checked my Google Reader, and I'm at 130. That's after trimming a few real estate ones that I had added earlier this year for product research, but really wasn't reading. There's likely more than a few others I can cull from the list.

I have many sports-related ones (Gregg Easterbrook, Peter King) that I love but seem to rarely make the time to read. I create the same conundrum for myself with books, too. Like last night, for example, I sacrificed my before-bed reading time to spend more time catching up on some blog reading (thanks for the insights, Howard Owens).

No wonder a study is saying we've reached a saturation point with media.

Therein lies our challenge. Tom Heslin, my former colleague in Providence, describes it as competing for media time. I've borrowed the phrase from him frequently since. I conjured up a calculation last year to show local newspaper Web sites were at the time 1/33rd of an ever expanding media landscape. Stop if you've seen me write this or heard me say this before, but success with growing our portion of a person's media time is rooted in reaching that person on the platform he or she prefers -- rather than hoping to draw them to us more than twice a week.

The good news is the expansion of our RSS feeds to comprise all content categories -- not just our top level categories of News, Sports, etc. -- is already in progress, and is one means by which we can gain a greater share of users' media time. That expansion will also enable several other distribution programs moving forward.

Writing a playbook

As I alluded to during the online content call on Monday, we're in the process of crafting an audience development playbook, which like iTunes Essentials mixes, will break down both everyday and unusual content situations into three sets of steps:

1. The Basics
2. Next Steps
3. Go Deep

So, for example, today there is a story in our Cape Cod Times on public defenders still waiting for FY 2006-07 paychecks from the state. We started the day adding it to Digg/Twitter/StumbleUpon/Reddit, and if we had a midday update e-mail there (it's coming, right?) we would have made sure to include it among the highlighted items.

Next, as I pause to write this blog post, I am in the midst of reaching out to public defender blogs -- some local, some beyond -- to offer it as blog material, and make a connection with those bloggers to see if they are interested in receiving periodic notifications from us on stories they'd be interested in and how they'd like to receive those notifications.

There are other steps, too, that we hope to flush out as part of this, and once Version 1.0 of the playbook is completed, will have crafted a resource from which a training program can be developed. Our aim would be to take it on the road to our newsrooms, and as I mentioned Monday, spend some of our online editors conference in January focusing a workshop on specific situations and doing actual distribution and outreach for live stories while we're at the conference.

If you have categories of content you'd like to see included in the playbook, or any thoughts on the concept at all, please give Yoni and I a shout. We're already looking forward to the January conference, and think the practical workshop element will be a great addition to the program. We hope you agree.

StarTribune.com: Bridge collapse

One in an occasional series: Nice landing page for the Minneapolis bridge collapse done by StarTribune.com.

CapeCast IS on YouTube

Shows what I know! Greg was kind enough to point me in the right direction toward CapeCast on YouTube.

PAULINE'S PICKS: Cape Cast Keeps Cape Codders Informed

Congrats to the Cape team for the recognition they received yesterday from Pauline Millard at E&P, who highlighted CapeCast as one of her "picks."

By the way, if you haven't seen Eric Williams' "Hey, Potential Buyer" yet, you're missing out.

Hey, Cape Cod, when are you going to make the daily push of that feature to your YouTube account? No pressure, of course....

AP Ending Its "asap" Service in October

I missed this on Friday. Perhaps you did too: AP Ending Its "asap" Service in October

I came across it via a post by Juan Antonio Giner at What's Next: Innovations in Newspapers. He and I are of a like mind:

A good service, but in our Young Readers Global Report for the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), one of our main recommendations was not to develop “ghetto-sections” for young readers.

They hate this kind of “Guantanamo mentality.”

Some have heard me espouse this before, but it is the many unsuccessful efforts to reach young readers around the industry that leads me to consistently eschew youth portals that we hope to draw audience to, and instead push for distributing content to the audience in a format that makes sense for the medium the audience is already traversing. Two years ago, that was MySpace. Now it's that and a myriad of other sites and platforms, not the least of which is mobile devices.

I also firmly believe this is the only means by which we succeed with personalization, too, because it is not only a strategy by which we reach younger readers, but also how we get at the 91 percent of the online audience that is not coming to us now.

On a more Ottaway-centric note, I had been pushing the AP to allow us to use pieces of asap a la carte, in particular the "Worklife" column (sample), which would be ideal for our employment sections. Thus far, the answer has been no. "Must order all of ASAP to get that feature," they say.

I think there's a light at the end of that tunnel, according to the E&P story: "Elements of the service will be incorporated into the regular AP report."

Remains to be seen whether AP will unbundle features and take a more a la carte approach. Hank Ackerman, our retiring corporate liaison who recently doubled as acting bureau chief in Albany, has indicated that approach is under consideration. Stay tuned....

PoliticsNJ.com Power List 100 | Politics NJ

An interesting idea that could apply for each of our markets as we get nearer the 2008 election year: PoliticsNJ.com Power List 100 | Politics NJ

The list is definitely inside baseball, but readers tend to gobble up just that kind of thing:

In developing our list, we eliminated anyone who currently holds elected office, as well as the Judiciary. We also eliminated the living former Governors, United States Senators, and Bill Gormley: we believe that all former statewide officeholders remain highly influential and well respected. This is an Insiders List. We looked at policy makers, party leaders, fundraisers, lobbyists, labor unions, businesses, and associations and have assembled the ultimate list of New Jerseyans with clout, with an impact on politics and government in the Garden State.

Just How Far Can a Video Go?

As a follow-up to my recent post on the video “sneezing” site Hey!Spread, I wanted to share with everyone the results from just one site.

I uploaded two videos, the “How Not to Break a Baseball Bat” video from Southcoast and latest of the “Golf Course” videos from Pocono and after barely four days on MetaCafe, the baseball bat video has been viewed nearly 300 times and the golf course video about 2,000 times.

Across all the sites that Hey!Spread distributed to, the Baseball Bat video was viewed nearly 600 times and the Golf Course video 2,500 times. And all I had to do was upload the videos just once.

So if you haven’t already, check out Hey!Spread. And, if you have the time, explore the sites it distributes to as they each have their own features, some of which you might find valuable. For example, Blip.TV has its own distribution effort that will further the reach of your videos (they’ll even post to your twitter stream when you’ve posted a new video).

Have fun and if you have any questions or thoughts, give me a shout.

Little League pages

I happened to be at Seacoast yesterday as they launched their Little League All-Stars landing page, and now notice today that Hudson Valley has done the same. Anyone else got a similar page they want to share?

As Howard Altschiller and I were discussing Twitter, he used that as one mechanism to announce the page launch: http://twitter.com/seacoastonline

(And as a reminder, make sure you're linking to new pages from your Site Maps, so that Google/Yahoo/Ask/MSN/AOL can pick them up when you next get crawled. You should enter these new pages into the Google Site Search spreadsheet on Google Docs, so when your user searches on your site for that topic, it gets featured as a Suggested Page at the top of the results. Still confused about the latter? Give me a shout.)

A Video Site That's Nothing to Sneeze At

Ok, so I know you’ve all been hearing about the importance of video and how you should try to post your videos to sites such as YouTube and/or Myspace. I also know that your time is limited, that you have many, many competing demands, so I was excited when I learned that the first video “sneezer” site had been created.

Hey!Spread takes your video and distributes or “sneezes” it to 10 popular video-sharing sites including: YouTube, MySpace, Google Videos, Yahoo Videos, Dailymotion, Blip.tv, Photobucket, Metacafe, Bolt and Putfile – as long as you have registered with each of them (they’re free). While Hey!Spread isn’t pretty, using it is easy.

You complete a simple form including your video’s:

• Title – This should not necessarily be the headline, while that sells the story (if the video was with a story), it may not do a great job selling the video itself.
• Description - Remember to include your site address in the description as a place where people can go for additional information. I found that many video-sharing sites will make links in descriptions active.
• Tags – This is completely up to you and while not all the sites use the tags, most of the larger ones do, so give this some real thought. You might even want to find a similarly themed popular video and see what tags it has.
• Categories – Their category list is pretty basic, so look for the best fit.

You then point to your video file (I found that many of the sites do not accept the flash format, so stick to the unprocessed formats) and move to the next screen.

Hey!Spread then has you enter your usernames and passwords for the video sites (you only have to do this once) and then it takes over. Depending on your connection speed, it might take a minute or two to upload your video. Hey!Spread will send you an email listing all the links once the video is posted. If your video was rejected or there was a specific problem, they will note it there as well.

I tested the service with a couple of files (which is how I learned about the flash format issue) and was pleasantly surprised. Files upload and were “sneezed” pretty fast. And in the time that it took me to visit each of the links the video was already being watched and commented upon.

Some of the sites Hey!Spread reaches will allow you to add additional information about your video, but visiting each site kind of cancels the idea of the “sneeze.”

Make sure that when you do register for theses video-sharing sites to make your sites’s own profile robust – include a photo, your web address and some fun details.

So give Hey!Spread a shot and let me know how it works for you. I think one site that gets our videos out to 10 can only be a good thing, so try to include it in your workflow.

Any questions, give me a shout.