BrianManzullo.com

An ode to CoPress… and a look ahead

Brian Manzullo — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 11:30:44 +0000

It was a little more than a year ago when, as online editor at Central Michigan Life, I was tasked with reconstructing cm-life.com from the ground up.

Since we were one of dozens of student newspapers that used College Publisher, we first considered upgrading from 4.0 to 5.0, which would effectively redesign the site and give it a fresh look. But because of several limitations with this move and other opportunities out there, we put that on hold, rode out the rest of the spring semester and used the summer to explore our options.

That was when I came in contact with CoPress, a group dedicated to building student newspaper Web sites, for the first time.

We first heard about CoPress when CMU colleague of mine, David Veselenak, met Greg Linch at a Society of Professional Journalists engagement in Indiana earlier in the year. Once David told me about it, we examined their offerings and, to put it simply, we were excited. I remember looking at sites such as the Miami Hurricane and imagining the possibilities for Central Michigan Life — having full control of our content and where it is played to best serve our audience.

One summer later, we were able to make that a reality. Our site was redesigned in time for Back-to-School launch. The impact was staggering; Web advertising jumped 300 percent, traffic jumped about 10-15 percent (particularly on our non-production days since we publish thrice weekly) and we introduced live chats, livestreaming, extensive multimedia projects and much more to our site.

None of this could have been done without the help of Daniel Bachhuber and the rest of CoPress.

The end of an era… or is it?

On Feb. 16, CoPress, comprised of a team of young and extremely intelligent journalists and innovators, announced it was closing down operations.

In a word, I was shocked. As a young journalist and five-year veteran of a student newspaper, I take pride in college-level work and realize the importance of the education one can receive in a student newsroom. That is where journalists are born, where young minds are cultivated and where the curious grow hungrier. We all start there and, in some way or another, it impacts the way we view journalism and how much passion we have for it.

People rarely look at journalism these days with optimism. On paper, it’s for good reason. But it means we, as young journalists, have another job to do. With work in this field growing thin, buyouts numbering and news organizations closing, even, never has it been more integral for these student newsrooms to move forward and embrace a life off the printed pages. And it all starts with their Web presentation and their multimedia and social media efforts online.

This, for Central Michigan Life and for dozens of other student newspapers, was where CoPress came in. While I’d like to think that I, along with the help of several other journalists at Life, were instrumental in putting together cm-life.com, I remember asking dozens of questions to Daniel, to the CoPress forums and trying to get feedback from everybody I could during the summer when developing the new site.

It is impossible for me to imagine where the site would be without the answers I received.

One thing that CoPress did that I always appreciated: It built a network around itself with other student journalists willing to take the next step. When you had a question, were looking for input or had an issue to discuss, you could talk to dozens of people with your passion rather than just two or three. Participation is essential in journalism, and it’s especially essential if you want to become better at serving your community. CoPress made that easier. It wasn’t afraid to extend the discussion elsewhere and take ideas from other student journalists.

Where we can go from here

Now that CoPress is closing down, I feel that it’s all the more important that student newsrooms and journalists committed to moving forward and transitioning to modern-day news-gathering stay connected, network, help each other and set an example for the rest of the industry.

So many student newspapers have made incredible strides over the past year with their Web presence. For example, I love what the Minnesota Daily has done with its Facebook application and the Mustang Daily with its hot topic pages. Student editors, reporters and programmers alike should come together regularly and discuss these ideas. Show off your latest project(s) and idea(s), critique others and discuss important issues and questions.

Of course, this is already being done to some degree in several places. On Twitter alone, Monday’s #journchat, Wednesday’s #wjchat and especially Sunday’s #collegejourn chat are great starts. My hope, however, is more student journalists get involved with these and engage with others. I’m particularly encouraged by the student journalists nearby at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Mich. Two of them are running a Web site, College Newsroom, that seeks to talk with other journalists on issues. I saw several others in Monday’s #journchat. That’s the type of involvement we need more of.

To those at CoPress: Thank you for everything you’ve done for Central Michigan Life and dozens of other college newsrooms, and good luck. I’m really looking forward to interacting with you guys and working with you as we try to make journalism better.

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Tip sheet for aspiring journalists, Twitter page and other things I’ve been working on

Brian Manzullo — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 13:00:40 +0000

It’s been awhile since I updated this, so I thought I’d write up a snapshot of what exactly I’ve been up to the past month or so.

On the online front, we have an online editor at Central Michigan Life — Dave Veselenak, who was managing editor last fall. This makes it a lot easier on me to focus on playing the editor in chief role — managing the staff and making sure the paper looks good and has good journalistic content. But it also helps to have another mind thinking Web an how we can use it to our advantage.

One thing we’ve done to begin the semester is built a Twitter page. Now, when you click on the Twitter icon on the right side of the CM Life site, it takes you to cm-life.com/twitter, a page that 1) shows a feed of the Twitter list “@cmlife/staff” and 2) centralizes all accounts for CM Life and its current editorial staff. I realize the “What we’re saying” box is obnoxiously big, but we haven’t quite figured out how to code the widget to float it right just yet. (If you know, tell me!) But the main goal, obviously, is to promote Twitter like we promote Facebook with the Fan Box — make it noticeable, and make sure people have a convenient outlet to engage with you.

Other things we’re covering, or will cover very soon:

We’re using a new landing page: University Budget, which covers all stories this semester relating to CMU’s budget, which is expected to be cut anywhere between 3 to 9 percent within each cost center.
We’re increasing use of the Digital Roundtable, our live chat series. At 8 p.m. Thursday, we’re bringing in CMU’s Police Chief, Bill Yeagley, to speak with us and with readers who wish to log in. We’re hoping to bring in interim President Kathy Wilbur, President-designate George Ross, Athletic Director Dave Heeke and more as the semester goes on. The more public officials, the more discussion, the better!
Hopefully, we’ll finally get e-mail editions going again. This was popular with our readers when we ran College Publisher 4.0 and one of our biggest caveats when switching to WordPress. But it looks like we can move forward with that.
We’ve had the Text Alert feature on our site since it launched, but I’m hoping to promote that a bit more and using it a bit more often than we do right now.
Coming soon: A Central Michigan Life iPhone app? Time will tell on that one; Some of us at CMU are looking into the possibility. We do have a mobile version of the site, but not an effective one.
I’m still working on the CM Life Online Handbook. The goal is to have it done and printed before I graduate. It’s basically going to be a comprehensive guide on using WordPress and the CM Life site, strategies and how to work with it in conjunction with multimedia and social media. About 10 pages of it are done, quite a few more to go.

* * * * *

Another thing I did, particularly Monday, is write up a quick tip sheet for aspiring journalists in CMU’s journalism program (mainly new CM Life reporters). It’s important for us in particular to build up young talent because we have a lot of senior graduating in May (including me). So I wanted to come up with some general tips on how to move ahead, how to get better and what should lead to internships and jobs. I didn’t get too much into the meat of being a journalist (such as investigative work and things like that), mainly because that instinct should come over time with class work and experience. I just figure these are things journalism students can work on right away in building a brand, staying ahead on the field and such.

I will update again pretty soon on some other things. I have to catch up on Google Reader one of these days, anyway!

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Eight things your college newsroom needs to change (if it hasn’t already)

Brian Manzullo — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 22:49:58 +0000

I spent a lot of today thinking about my college career and how the times have changed. In particular, Central Michigan Life has changed a lot in the 4.5 years I have spent there as a young journalist. Philosophies are different, mentalities are progressing and new trends are taking form while old ones are dying.

This year has been a real transition year for CM Life, and it’s going to continue into the spring. It got me thinking about what college newsrooms need to be doing and, in particular, what old mentalities need to be brushed aside. I know I’ve probably forgotten quite a few things here, but these are the eight main points that came to mind (will update with more if need be):

1. Requiring those employed in your newsroom to be journalism majors (or even minors).

My hope is no college newsroom in the country is doing this. Some of CM Life’s better writers and editors over the years were not journalism majors. And these days, it is best for young journalists to focus their class concentration in other areas (political science, philosophy, psychology, English to name a few) than to spend valuable class time on journalism. Your real journalism education comes from working at your student newspaper, not by taking a class on the upside-down pyramid of writing a news story. And chances are, your professors could still be living in the old, traditional journalism world that will not prepare you for when you graduate.

2. Not encouraging young journalists to get experience in other areas.

Your college newsroom should encourage every young journalist to get experience in any platform, whether it is a reporter wanting a crack at photography/videography or a videographer looking to work with Web site management. Remember that one of your goals as a student newspaper is to train young journalists in ways classrooms could never do. Don’t be afraid of inevitable mistakes. Give everyone a shot at experience they could use in the real world — a jack-of-all-trades journalist is the journalist that will get the internships and jobs.

3. Having one person — your online editor — post all content and conduct all management of your publication’s Web site.

The days of the Web being an afterthought in your college newsroom are over. You should have a Web-first mentality and work flow across your entire newsroom — for starters, have your news editors post news stories, your sports editors post sports stories and so on. And all of them need to be thinking about SEO’d headlines, keywords, tags and excerpts. They could use that Web experience for their resume, anyway. As for your online editor, keep him or her and have them focus on other tasks such as community building via social media, aggregating stories and multimedia together and conducting live chats and discussion.

4. Maintaining a strict policy on reporters and editors participating in the online comments section.

Wondering why your comments section is turning into a ghetto of spam, personal attacks and other statements and accusations that provide little toward an intelligent discussion? Much of it may have to do with that ban you’re placing on your young journalists posting in the comments section. A few things happen when you allow employees the freedom to post: More questions are answered, more statements are clarified and, more importantly, your loyal readers are given more incentive to participate in the discussion. Knowing other people are passionate about the discussion and are reading what you have to say is the ultimate incentive to participation on key issues and stories.

5. Using social media (Twitter/Facebook) as nothing more than a regurgitation of your online stories.

These are your community platforms — especially in college, where every student and their mother is using Facebook. Don’t use these tools to “stay hip” and just link to your stories. Incite discussion. Answer questions. Clarify statements. Provide quick updates on developing stories. Encourage readers to post content, photos, etc. on your Facebook fan page. One great way to encourage these uses is by using your print publication to promote (i.e. select several tweets to print for “Tweet of the Week,” something we’ve done at CM Life every Wednesday publication). After all, chances are, your print product is your best promotional tool for your online product.

6. Waiting to post time-relevant stories until the next morning to coincide with print publication.

In this fast information age, I don’t want to wait until Wednesday morning to find out what happened at a 2 p.m. Tuesday event. I don’t care if you’re planning on the coverage making your front page — your story needs to go up when it is relevant, and that means when it is done and edited, not scheduled for the following morning. If you are that worried about your print publication being “spoiled” by your online presentation, find other ways to keep your print publication relevant. (In the case of the event, have the reporter write a second-day perspective piece… or put something more relevant on your front.)

7. Refusing to aggregate and link to outside sources in your stories online.

Pretending there is no outside world on your Web site is not a way to go about making your online product successful. Give your readers a chance to learn more from other sources and to take in other perspective on the story at hand because, for one thing, it’s safe to assume they have a broad interest in what they are reading. Watch NYU’s Jay Rosen’s explanation on the ethic of the link for more on this. One easy solution? Require your reporters to include two links with every story they write, in addition to quoted sources. Your goal should be to give your readers everything they could possibly ask for. Every unanswered question/clarification is a failure for a journalist.

8. Looking at a “finished” project and saying, “It’s good enough.”

Here’s a general one for you. If you find yourself saying “It’s good enough,” it’s probably not good enough. Always look for ways to make your college newsroom better, internally or externally. You are in a field of study that practically requires people to adapt and change on a consistent basis. What works now may not work three months from now. Stay on top of that, look for new ways to make progress and, most of all, get better at informing the public by whatever means possible.

* * * * *

This is by no means a comprehensive list. There are a lot of little things college newsrooms could change, if they haven’t already. Have ideas? Please leave me a comment, or tweet it at me. I’ll be glad to add any other submissions you have.

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Central Michigan Life’s five Web goals revisited

Brian Manzullo — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 12:30:09 +0000

Earlier this semester (on Sept. 16), I wrote a blog post detailing five major goals I had for Central Michigan Life’s new Web site and its integration into our newsroom.

For those new to my blog, we launched a redesigned cm-life.com on Aug. 20, switching from College Publisher to WordPress’s content management system, with the help of CoPress. Since launching the new Web site, we have been working as a staff to take advantage of what we can do online and how we can build community using today’s technologies rather than putting too much focus on our print product.

Overall, it’s been a successful semester in terms of getting everybody used to the new Web-first mindset. We’ve had much more real-time stories and breaking news posted and, to some extense, an expanded multimedia presence. We’re also making strides in the use of social media, although we are addressing a few shortcomings in that area with the addition of an online editor next semester. But more on that later.

Here are each of the goals I set in September, and their progress:

1) Building a Facebook following and taking advantage of it.

The first part of this goal was the easiest. We began the semester (mid-August) with a little more than 100 fans on our Facebook site. When I posted my five goals in mid-September, we had 463. As of writing this post Sunday night, we have 2,014.

Our staff (including our advertising side) made a decent effort into getting people to fan our Facebook page and trying to reach goals of 1,000 and 1,500 earlier this semester. But what really worked was having the Facebook Fan Box on the Web site, in decent view (see the photo). Part of building a new branch of your Web operation is making sure people know about it, and this definitely put it in prominent view for many of our Web viewers.

Where we will continue to work on next semester is in the second part of the goal — taking advantage of Facebook. While we made sure to update the page regularly with stories and discussions, it wasn’t as consistent as it could have been, and I’d like to see more interaction among users in terms of not only conversation, but also posting links/photos/etc. Part of that is going to come from giving our readers incentive to interact with us on Facebook, so we have to tap into what they want to see and talk about.

2) Start bi-weekly CoverItLive discussions featuring public officials and/or student representatives

While we never got the ball rolling on the bi-weekly part of this goal, we did begin using CoverItLive on the news side, calling it the Digital Roundtable. We held one discussion Oct. 5 with our Student Government Association President and Vice President, and we held another two weeks later with three administrators — our Dean of Students, our Director of Student Life and our Director of Academic Advising and Assistance.

Both discussions went fairly well, despite being late in promoting both prominently in our newspaper. There were some big issues to discuss in both, particularly involving CMU’s new tailgating policy, a hot topic early in the semester, and even other lesser topics such as campus sidewalks and grade distribution reports.

The addition of an online editor next semester (David Veselenak, one of the brighter young journalists I know, coming off a semester as managing editor) will help in scheduling these Digital Roundtables more often, at least bi-weekly. I tried scheduling a couple more before the end of the semester, but they fell through late. One of the first roundtables we will have will ask readers what they want to see out of CM Life. Using it as a feedback tool, hopefully, will help us better serve our community.

3) Build a “Hot Topics” area with pages centralizing the biggest campus issues.

We were able to accomplish this goal a couple times this semester, but not in the way I originally anticipated.

Because of the controversy that heated up from CMU’s first home football game Sept. 19, in which the new tailgating policy caused an extreme dropoff of students at the main tailgate lot, I decided to make CM Life’s first landing page surrounding that ordeal. We placed the landing page links below our second row of navigation buttons (News, Sports, Vibe, etc.) and linked to it from our latest tailgating stories.

We found the page to be a success — according to Google Analytics, the page earned 3,646 pageviews since it was created Sept. 23 (see right), ranking #16 in pageviews on our site.

The second landing page we created involved alleged plagiarism on a National Science Foundation grant CMU was awarded in 2005. The page was created in mid-November and has earned 1,402 pageviews thus far. My thinking for early next semester is to create a landing page involving CMU’s operating budget (we had a bit of trouble and another that may surround CMU’s new president, George Ross. The hope here, as mentioned in September, is to make it easy for our readers to find content involving hot-button issues such as these. Another one that may come up is a possible search for a new football coach, with so many rumors surrounding Butch Jones and other vacancies.

4) Build a community photography site, allowing users to upload their pictures and review others.

This is the only goal we had difficulty making progress on. A lot of it had to do with how to go about making the Web site — whether to create a new domain name for it, whether to use WordPress again, what plugins to use, etc… and with a crunch on our budget and advertising revenues struggling (like it is with most, if not all, college newspapers these days), it probably is not feasible to devote more money to creating a sister site.

However, this idea won’t be abandoned. Any way we can get our readers to interact, we will experiment with. Facebook is one way to do it (as long as we promote it and, again, give readers incentive to post photos). We also could use Flickr in some way, like the Mustang Daily, Cal Poly’s student newspaper. And we’ll continue to look into building that sister site and see if it is, in fact, feasible.

5) Get the entire staff involved online.

This was probably our biggest success at CM Life, especially as the semester progressed. The way the newsroom was set up in the fall, every editor had a responsibility to post stories, breaking news, columns and multimedia rather than have an online editor do it all at the end of the night. All of us showed improvement in making sure stories were presented the best they could and that headlines, excerpts and tags were done well to take advantage of the Web’s ethic. The challenge from here is getting new editors involved and catching them up with working the new cm-life.com, but that should not be difficult at all.

More and more of our reporters are also linking to their sources and showing transparency in new ways, which is a welcome progression. Getting everybody on staff involved online is integral to giving our younger journalists the experience they need and the preparation necessary to survive in new media.

* * * * *

So that’s our progress, in a nutshell.

So where do we go from here?

I’ll create another list of goals in January for the spring semester. There is still a lot we can do to work with our Web operation and expand it even further. Over the next three weeks, I’m going to write an online handbook for the CM Life office, detailing not only how to post every kind of story and multimedia, but also how to write effective SEO’d headlines, generate tags and use aggregation to your advantage. (And more, of course.)

Overall, though, the fall semester was a good start for cm-life.com. It’s always a challenge to move into something new and incorporate a new mindset into a newsroom previously focused heavily on print. From here, we just have to keep going, like I mentioned in September. It’s going to take a team effort to keep our Web operation effective and ahead of the curve.

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When it comes to consuming news today, Google Living Stories gets it

Brian Manzullo — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 23:09:19 +0000

Another encouraging development for today’s journalism is coming from Google.

I had a chance to check out Google Living Stories, still under development in Google Labs. It basically creates landing pages for some of the big topics locally/nationally, aggregating to news stories, displaying a summary and timeline of events and more. As of right now, it only carries Washington Post and New York Times stories but, so far, it’s an impressive effort and is doing what more publications need to be doing with their Web presentations.

Below, to the right, is a good example of one of the landing pages — it chronicles the Washington Post’s coverage of the 3-9 Washington Redskins.

What makes this work so well in today’s journalism? Paul Bradshow describes it pretty well: “It is built around the way people consume content online, as opposed to how they consumed it in print or broadcast.” Basically, it takes advantage of what the Web does so well for journalism: convenience, linking, converging and connecting. People today don’t search by story like they did in a print newspaper 20 years ago — they search by topic. If I am a Redskins fan and I wanted to follow the team, its games and its in-season moves, I can go to the Living Stories site and get all the stories I need from the Post, the timeline of events and look at stories relating to a particular subtopic (On the left, if you click “Legal Disputes,” you can also see the latest on the controversy surrounding the Redskins team name). The site even highlights new content and fades out content you’ve already read.

Convenience at (nearly) its best.

My hope is the Google Living Stories feature grows, obviously. It may take awhile because of all the questions to answer (Bradshaw brings up advertising and how much of the page is constructed automatically). The interface could get better — elements on the pages are either too heavy or too light (for example, the headlines of the latest stories and the “conversations” button could use more weight or my eye to catch them). The conversations feature, available on the health care page but not on the Redskins page, is so unique in how it presents discussion, it deserves better play than where it is currently found. My eye needs better direction.

But my biggest hope is Living Stories converges other publications, outlets and even blogs. For example, a landing page on the Washington Redskins should include more coverage than just the Washington Post. I want to see other perspectives, reactions and opinions regarding the team’s latest games, roster moves and more. ESPN does this, but only to a certain extent. But what ESPN also does is show the team’s calendar of games, its place in the division standings and the team leaders in a nutshell, something Google Living Stories could do for its sports teams landing pages.

Another idea would be to converge social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Create a hashtag or use a current one, and curate all tweets on the subject. Create a page on Facebook and create more discussion. Reach out to other audiences, in other words.

I’ll keep watching Google Living Stories, though. I like where it’s headed, and I think more newspaper Web sites need to consider putting plans such as this in action for their biggest topics and issues, and even link out to other perspectives. Make your site a better source for everything your audience could need and more.

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The short-lived Detroit Daily Press seemed doomed from the start

Brian Manzullo — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 05:13:09 +0000

I get pretty excited anytime something new or innovative happens in the field of journalism. Recent example include Google Wave, the Texas Tribune and even AnnArbor.com, to an extent.

The Detroit Daily Press was not one of them. Click the link for further proof.

The journalism screen of death.

For those of you unfamiliar with the venture… brothers Gary and Mark Stern, who are longtime publishers in Detroit and elsewhere, came up with the idea of launching a 7-day home delivery newspaper since the Detroit News and Free Press cut delivery by four days. The Daily Press, based in suburb Royal Oak, published its first edition Nov. 23.

However, by that Friday, production of the Daily Press was postponed until Jan. 1 because of complications in circulation and advertising. It took less than a week. And it’s not even certain if it’s coming back.

No offense to the Stern brothers or anybody employed by the Daily Press; I’m sure they are hard-working people and meant well when attacking that niche in the Detroit market left open by the two big newspapers. But this venture reeked from the very beginning. And my beef has little to do with the supposed circulation/advertising problems, which is a tremendous oversight in itself (the Press was on pace to lose more than $1 million in less than two months!)

The screen above and on the right is what you see when you go to detdailypress.com, then click on the “Delivered 7 days to your door!” advertisement plastered on the page. It is this type of screen where modern-day news organizations go to die. You can’t gate your Web presence like this and expect to stay in operation. Especially if you have DetNews.com and Freep.com to deal with. Journalism is moving fast toward the digital world and, if you want to be a successful news operation, you have to keep up with it. Asking for my subscription number when I go to your Web site is not the way to do it.

Again, I realize the niche market the Daily Press is trying to nab. It is going after the population still seeking 7-day delivery, mainly an older audience. So its primary news delivery is via print. That’s great and all, but what are your long-term goals? Do you expect this operation to stay afloat in 10 years?

* * * * *

I apologize for the lack of updates. The last month has been busy, as usual. But the end of the semester at Central Michigan Life is just about here (minus a GMAC Bowl tabloid we’re releasing Wednesday), and I have an exam and a project to do this week before winter break begins.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to update a few times over the following three weeks. Stay tuned.

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When news organizations use – and abuse – social media

Brian Manzullo — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:30:21 +0000

I finally had a chance to join in #journchat on Twitter last night. It is a conversation among journalists that takes place from 8 to 11 p.m. EST on Mondays in which @journchat, the moderator, introduces questions (some of which come from other chatters) for journalists of all concentrations to discuss.

The fourth question was this: When is social media NOT the answer for your industry?

Like many of the #journchat questions, this one got me thinking. Despite the obstacles a news organization faces in terms of creating a social networking policy, there are very few disadvantages to social media in the journalism industry. It’s yet another way to reach out the Web, connect with readers and aggregate your content.

But there’s still a strategy involved. In my mind, one of the bigger disadvantages for news organizations using social media is when they abuse it – that is, when they post content recklessly without thinking about how to get more people to click and read.

Hence, my response:

“When news orgs spout 20 tweets to news stories at a time, thinking people will actually click on all of them.”

See the example on the right (the best I had at the time of writing this). While I greatly respect the staff at The Bay City Times from visiting its newsroom several times, its Twitter usage could use some work. It tends to roll off between 5-10 tweets at a time to its news stories throughout the day, particularly in the morning. Not a good strategy when you’re trying to connect people with your content.

You should aim for people constantly clicking and retweeting what you link to rather than simply hooking your account up with, say, Twitterfeed and plastering the site with consecutive links. As a Twitter user with a short attention span, the more consecutive links I see, the less value I see in each. They’re just Web updates.

Back to the #journchat. Fellow journchatter Sue Anne Reed brought up a point in response, when I said the “Twitter abuse” is a problem: “If ppl are annoyed, they will unfollow. It’s a great barometer on whether you’re doing something right or not.”

That is true — to an extent. I haven’t unfollowed @BayCityTimes. Therefore, I raise this question: If I’m following @BayCityTimes but not clicking any of its links, how much value is there in me being a follower?

This is why, I think, follower counts are overrated. Following on Twitter is a click of the button. That’s it. It is easy, particularly for new users, to start following people and not interact at all with them, whether it is through replying to their tweets, retweeting or clicking on their links. Unfollowing somebody takes more legwork, and most people don’t care enough to do it.

Want to truly gauge how effective your Twitter account is? Track your bit.ly links, for example, and see how many retweets you’re getting on your stories.

Furthermore… while I see a place for news organizations having Twitter accounts and centralizing content on the Twittersphere, I still don’t think it’s the most effective way to connect readers with your content (see my earlier post on giving Twitter “the human touch”). You have to put a face behind the tweet. It comes right back to personal branding and putting yourself on ground level with your community.

During a staff meeting last night at Central Michigan Life, I asked every reporter and editor to begin using Twitter, if they haven’t already. The benefits of using Twitter as a journalist is a topic beaten to death. But another benefit is to put extra faces behind retweets of @CMLIFE work. Every click counts.

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Behind the scenes of 24MP: Covering our city, Mount Pleasant, in 24 hours via multimedia

Brian Manzullo — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:10:33 +0000

I meant to post something on this earlier, but never got around to it until now. As you can see from sporadic updating since late August, being editor in chief at a student newspaper can be a tiring job, and it leaks into my out-of-office life a little bit, too.

But anyway…

On Oct. 14, the staff at Central Michigan Life unveiled an unprecedented and extensive multimedia collaboration: Coverage of the city of Mount Pleasant, its faces and places over one full 24-hour period, midnight to midnight. See below, which also is in the link to “24MP.”

This was an idea we had for a while. Our Presentation Editor, Matthew Stephens, pitched it about a year ago, maybe longer than that, after looking at a 24-hour project that the Daily Northwestern and North by Northwestern collaborated on a couple years ago. They used all video in telling stories of different faces and places for each hour of the day.

Our aim was to take it a step further and incorporate more than just video — we also completed photo galleries, Soundslides projects and a Vuvox presentation — and turn it all over within four days to create one collaborative multimedia project that effectively captures Mount Pleasant over one full day. Which, I can tell you right now, was no easy task. (NOTE: It would have been nice to get a domain for it and host it separate from our site, like the 24-hour Northwestern project, but it wasn’t in our budget.)

So how did we put it together?

Planning began Sept. 27, when the editors held a staff meeting to discuss the target day (Saturday, Oct. 10) and break down the topics over the 24 hours, from midnight to midnight. We mapped out at least one topic for each hour, with about eight different backups that could go in one of multiple spots of the day. Some topics were specific (i.e. football kickoff at noon), while others were simply feature hunts (Island Park at 4 p.m., or even Wanda Dague at 7 p.m.)

Then the editors called a staff meeting Sept. 30 for all reporters, photographers and videographers involved with the project. We assigned reporters and photographers/videographers to work with each other on a particular topic and to get going on planning, making phone calls and having everything ready for the big day. We held another meeting a week later to make sure everyone was on the same page and that all questions were answered.

All of this planning was important because, really, a project like this cannot have a hiccup. Should one reporter or photographer completely forget or mess up a time in this, the rest of the 24-hour project is compromised. So we had to stress planning.

Oct. 10 — the end of CMU’s Homecoming week with the football game against Eastern Michigan — came and went. I made myself on call the entire day should any problems arise and, thankfully, nothing did. We had backups for anything that fell through and, from what I heard from others, things turned out well across the board.

The staff then spent Sunday through Tuesday putting everything together — all 30 stories (we had some hours with dual stories) and 30 photo/video projects. We also had to push two newspapers out in the meantime (Monday and Wednesday editions).

This is where I finally come in. Late Tuesday, once everything was turned in and done, ready for posting the following morning, I began putting together the Vuvox presentation, which you see above. This involved me staying in the office until 7:30 a.m. (after working an 11 a.m. to midnight shift).

This was the first time I worked on Vuvox, so it was kind of a learning experience for me, in that respect. I originally was going to use Flash to centralize all the content. But Vuvox was a lot easier to use and did everything I wanted it to — it effectively visualized Mount Pleasant in 24 hours and singlehandedly linked to all our content through each hour of the day.

Aftermath

Now that we’re about two weeks removed from completing 24MP, there is a lot I can say the CM Life staff took away from completing this endeavor. Here are the three biggest things:

Great things come from effective planning. We were working on this project for several weeks before actually executing it and putting it all together. Furthermore, we had to get about 40 people on our wavelength when it came to 24MP, and we had to make sure all of it was done right — like I said, one bad step for a project such as this and the rest falls.
Some of the best stories come from simply going out there and looking for them. Our 7 p.m. feature on Wanda Dague was some of the best storytelling I have seen from CM Life, and it was not at all extensive. It was a simple insight into a woman many people might not know, but has a lot to tell. Our team, photo editor Ashley Miller and staff reporter Ryan Czachorski, didn’t know who she was when they first walked in.
Finally, the project brought the staff together. A lot of the coordination involved reporter-to-photographer relationships, something our staff has struggled with from time to time. But especially during a time (early fall) when the majority of the staff has not worked with each other all that much, when you have this many people looking to make something great, you are bound to come up with something special. And it can do wonders for the working relationship of the staff.

Really, the entire goal of this project was to get a heartbeat of the faces, places, sights, sounds and overall daily life of Mount Pleasant, Mich., which is a city of 26,675 people and thousands more CMU students. Yeah, Homecoming was going on, but so was a lot of other daily lives. Think of the Muffler Man employee or Cathy the custodian. We wanted to get all the different aspects, and I think we did.

Let me know what you think of the project.

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The Digital Roundtable: The beginning of live chatting on cm-life.com

Brian Manzullo — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 01:36:05 +0000

Mid-September, I talked about one of my goals for the semester being the beginning of live chat discussions regarding Central Michigan University.

Well, we are well under way with it. We wrapped up our second “Digital Roundtable” discussion earlier tonight with CMU’s Dean of Students Bruce Roscoe, Director of Student Life Tony Voisin and Director of Academic Advising and Assistance Michelle Howard. We discussed a variety of subjects over one hour, including the football team, what we’d like to see in the next University President (we currently have an interim), graduation rates for students (in four years or more?), ways to promote the university’s academic programs and more.

Our first one was on Oct. 5 with our student body president Jason Nichol and vice president Brittany Mouzourakis.

So far, the Digital Roundtable is going pretty well (we use CoverItLive). CM Life hasn’t promoted these discussions as well as I would have hoped, but I think it’s a good idea to get our feet wet with this whole thing and look at ways to improve on it. Our next Digital Roundtable will have the desired promotion, I think.

But from doing just two of these one-hour chats, I’m already seeing the benefits of starting these live chats. Here’s three big ones:

Reader input. People getting involved in our chat range from CM Life staffers, current students and alumni, and everybody is pitching in with good questions and ideas. For example, Chad Livengood, a former CM Life editor, pitched a great idea earlier tonight for the university to get more involved in recruiting:
“I have a pretty simple idea for recruitment: Get some of your most enthusiastic alumni together (I’ll volunteer) and professors together and send them out into high schools. Since graduating in December 2005, I’ve sent a few students toward CMU’s journalism program who were contemplating going to Michigan State. I think glossy magazines and admissions recruiters can only do so much to explain individual programs. For journalism, one event that CMU faculty, alumni and current students who attend is the Michigan Interscholastic Press Association’s annual conference. I spoke at this event in the winter of 2008 when I still worked at the Jackson Citizen Patriot and was very disappointed to not see a single representative from CMU’s journalism school with a booth at the Lansing convention center.”
A good connection between the university and students. While not as many students have gotten involved yet with these chats, these Digital Roundtable events provide a convenient way for students to connect with university officials, since not many can always make it out to an open forum. Many have expressed interest in the live chatting when they got involved, which is nice to see. My hope is we can get interim University President Kathy Wilbur in to one of these soon, since she’s starting open forums with students in residence halls.
Story ideas. This is probably one of our bigger benefits as a newspaper. In the first chat with SGA, we were tipped off to the creation of an ad hoc committee to work with CMU Athletics on the controversial new tailgating policy. This led us to finding out the external sound system ban was lifted. In last night’s chat, we came up with a couple nice story ideas: How CMU is working with the expected decrease in enrollment, and (kind of related) the appointment of a CMU representative in Chicago to recruit prospective students.If you guide the discussion correctly, you can definitely mine out a couple really good story ideas per chat. Another great incentive to start them.

If you are the editor of a student newspaper, or an online editor anywhere, I’d recommend starting these discussions. Talk to university officials, student leaders, anybody – get them to join these chats. I mentioned three huge benefits of doing it, but there are several more that could benefit you that I might’ve forgotten about.

I’ll provide updates on the Digital Roundtable, as well as updates on other goals I set last month.

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My aggregation experience: The Michigan government shutdown

Brian Manzullo — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:37:28 +0000

Four years ago, aggregating at Central Michigan Life was virtually unheard of.

Staff policy was fixed on reporters and editors doing the legwork themselves – as in, make the phone calls, cross-reference and analyze. Don’t base your reporting on another newspaper’s reporting. Every story at CM Life required 2-3 sources at least before it could even be considered for publication. That was just part of the learning process.

In these days of Web 2.0, things haven’t changed too much. We still require reporters to get 2-3 sources for stories. But, in cases of breaking news on cm-life.com, especially in big statewide or nationwide stories, aggregation can be key.

Case in point:

Last week, at midnight Thursday (or Wednesday, depending on how you want to look at it), the Michigan government shut down for two hours because it could not finalize a temporary budget nor a final budget for the 2009-10 fiscal year. It was the second shutdown in the last three years for a state that, really, has one of the weakest economies in the country.

Unfortunately, our political reporter(s) weren’t on the story. But I took matters into my own hands (I apologize for the cliche).

The link above will take you to the final product of our coverage. But it started at about 12:15 a.m., when I posted one quick graph on the government shutting down. It linked to the Detroit Free Press story (link’s broken now):

“The state government is shut down as lawmakers could not agree on a state budget by midnight Thursday, according to the Detroit Free Press. Keep checking cm-life.com for more details as they unfold.”

Immediately after posting, I tweeted it, Facebooked it and told everybody to keep checking cm-life.com for updates.

Every update from here on out would be simply aggregation from the Detroit Free Press and other sources. I updated with the consequences of the shutdown, the latest developments, little details and, most importantly, more links. I tweeted every time there was a new update, particularly with the portion of the state budget that concerned students the most (the Michigan Promise scholarship to thousands of students).

This continued for about three hours, all the way until the end of the shutdown. I didn’t talk to one physical source- all information I got was from other reports.

The results?

The story earned our site more than 500 hits on Oct. 1 (the morning it was posted/updated) and was retweeted eight times.
Google News crawled our story and mixed it in with the other government shutdown stories on the Web.
We had 12 comments, several in the early morning hours.
Most importantly: We successfully informed our readers of the state government shutdown as it was happening and its impact on them (mainly college students with the Michigan Promise scholarship money).

Like I said, we still require reporters to get 2-3 sources for stories. Nothing replaces those connections. But the lesson here is this: Sometimes, when you have no sources to talk to, you just need to roll up your sleeves, do your duty of informing your readers and centralize the content other news organizations are getting. Even if you are mixing those links in with sources you’ve talked to.

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