News-Record.com

I have several suggestions for the direction of the News & Record's Web presence.

First, the entire site needs a redesign. The current design is incredibly busy and discombobulated so as to render fast navigation virtually impossible. All of the boxes in the third column on the homepage aren't even aligned. And what's with the weird TriadCars bumpout graphic?

Second, let's keep all content up-to-date. The sports section online has a link to the series of stories on the update to Forest Oaks. That happened over a year ago. Surely it doesn't deserve the second highest spot on that page.

Third, photo galleries. The Web is the place you can publish many of those photos that don't get chosen for the printed newspaper. Instead, the News & Record's site is woefully short on multimedia. Sure, there's the section of links tucked way down at the bottom of the page, but no one finds that unless they're looking for it. I just clicked the photo gallery link and was brought to a list of the photo galleries for 2004. Strange that they all were grouped in a two-month span and apparently nothing photo-worthy happened in the first half of the year.

On that topic, fourth, the Web site desperately needs more interactive, multimedia content. The NY Times' online site does a great job of this. Frequently, I find slideshows or audio presentations linked beside related stories. These days, lots of people have broadband connections. Utilize that bandwidth! Multimedia online adds a dimension that is impossible to create in the printed paper.

Fifth, allow comments on stories. Right now, the only interaction requested is whether you found a particular story satisfying. I don't even know what the means, but it surely doesn't make me want to give any feedback. Why not allow blog-style feedback for regular news stories posted online?

That's all I can think of for now. I really want the News & Record to have a great Web presence. You're making steps, but they're way too small for right now. I'd be happy to come up with more suggestions if you'd like. Feel free to e-mail me.

Jason, thanks very much for your suggestions. Without going into details, I'll just say we're PAINFULLY aware of some of the limitations you describe. I'm content, not programming, but I'm told a lot of our limitations are attributable to our software, which is being replaced in a couple of months. Among other benefits, this will allow us to put ALL our stories online every day, as JR has mentioned in his blog, and not just selected ones. And we plan to do that.

Thanks very much for your suggestions; they're exactly the kind of thing we're looking for.

Put all of your content on line, please, including photos. Local bloggers like to link to you, but often there's nothing to link to.

For example, today I wanted to link to that fantastic photo of the UNCG graduate on the front page of the B section, but couldn't.

Second, keep it all on line for as long as you can. Like forever.

Third, get your old issues, as far back as you can afford, on line, too. The ability to google old Greensboro news will increase Greensboro's sense of itself.

How about a regular Foreign Correspondent?

As we witness the demise of small and even big city newspapers, I fear for the future of all locally produced print media. Perhaps the N&R of the tomorrow will exist as digital content only. This would dramatically reduce overhead and allow focus of resources toward news gathering.

I fear also for the blogosphere. I am seeing very few comments to articles. There is a lot of content to cover. The great thing about the N&R is the editing of content so that I am presented with a concise representation of important news. That will not change in the digital form.

I don't have the time or inclination to create my own blog. Perhaps issue based blogs will exist due to their intrinsic importance, but I fear personal blogs will go unmaintained and simply add to an already bloated blogosphere.

It's a brave new world and I certainly don't have all the answers. Common sense and pragmatism have served us well in dealing with new concepts. I don't expect that to change either.

I donno, more poetry maybe?

I'll ponder it a while and get back to you...

Chewie suggested bloggers in print and I agree, but why not add guest bloggers to the N&R blogs? It could be a one day a week thing and I would expect the N&R to edit or at least "loosely approve" the guest's posts before posting them online.

I use guest bloggers on my web-log as a weekly feature. Since doing so I have turned my slowest day of the week into the most read and judging from my own experiences guest blogging anywhere they'll have me, it has helped my readership over the long term.

I told you I'd be back.

Go to Delaware Online and live the dream. On a smaller scale, see Savannah Now.

Oh, and I don't just like Delaware Online because I'm from there. They've got game, baby.

For the hundreth time replace Doonesbury with Bruce Tinsley's Mallard Fillmore or at least give it equal space.

How about a telephone call in. Say call it the Bloop line, transcribed published, unedited , the next day. Talk about your community involvement. The Charlotte O. has a clever Q & A forum called " Glad you asked : Ask Jeff Elder Anything ". Nothing wrong with stealing a good idea .

Most major regionals have a guest book with their online obituaries. Have you noticed ?

Jerry Bledsoe might consider hiring on as your Ombudsman. That is if you ever give the propsition serious thought .I didn't think so.

Blogging isn't all about technology, but it's a product of it. Anything you do (including guest bloggers, a good idea) should be something I can get only online and has to (again, IMO) tantalize those of us who are online-forward.

I don't agree that all of the print paper needs to be online. I think they're different media and I'd like to see what you do celebrate that difference. Make me want to click your link; challenge me with both information and medium. Do the online part right.

A Q&A is great - specific questions with specific answers and archive them. Have a place to post folks' frustrations with finding things out in GSO and tell them where to find them. Don't reiterate what's in the print edition. Give me online columns with tech, political, social edge of the envelope pushing. Forget comics but give us a "lighter side" of positive and funny insight. Share something good that's happening in GCS and downtown. How about a source to find boards & commissions seeking volunteers (that's up to date and linked to applications/further info)? An online who's who of community leaders a/w/a those that are making a difference but aren't famous (yet)?

The N&R was way ahead of the times with The Depot but it didn't stay ahead of the curve. Is there a commitment to this new feature that will keep it at the forefront?

My $.02.

Merry holidays.

I don't normally post in this guise, but I think it important to let people know where we're going with News-Record.com. I am Operations Manager for News & Record Interactive, the caretakers of the News & Record presence online. We have been planning major upgrades to our online capability for some time but haven't been able to make them due to software limitations. We have addressed those limitations and are preparing a major relaunch of News-Record.com and several other of our websites. With the new online publishing system, readers should be able to comment on any story, view photos that made it into the paper and those that haven't, participate in forums and blogs, etc. The new system is light-years ahead of where we stand currently and we look forward to debuting it to the public. I won't fall into the trap of promising a launch date, but please stay tuned. It's coming.

I'm so glad to see both the local and national attention this discussion is getting. It's refreshing to hear so many voice repeating the mantra, "This is the future. Get on board." As one of the folks in the new media trenches (do a little digging, dear reader), I speak for all of us when I saw that we truly appreciate the support and encouragement of the online community as we work to balance the schizophrenic need of modern news media organizations to be both good public servants and successful businesses.

Keep telling the folks who hold the purse strings that THIS STUFF MATTERS! We can do lots with a little chewing gum and a paperclip, but there are limits.

As far as content is concerned, these are some of the things that I'd like to see.

* Online only content. An online only reporter or two? How about more national sports anyway? Baseball or hockey anyone? I know not having that kind of sports coverage is a big knock against the printed sports page.
* Consider putting all the stories from the newspaper online and then consider NOT making folks manditorily register for the site. I know it's a popular model with a lot of benefits and maybe circulation suffers from having all content online, but I'm not sure there is a strong direct correlation between falling circulation and having material online. I think the decline in circulation is more attributable to national news going online. Just a thought.
* Plenty of good material from many good journalist ends up on the cutting room floor due to lack of space in the paper, I'm sure. How about leaving that copy in place for online? There are no space constraints.
*Ditto for photos. There is plenty of space for photos that never make the paper and there are plenty of talented photographers taking plenty of great photos.
* Give online ALL the letters to the editor. The long versions. Let people submit unedited letters for use online even if they won't appear in the newspaper.
* Content submitted by or stories suggested by readers. News should be a two-way communication. The most important news in any community shouldn't be determined and handed down by a board of editors, but should be determined by those who are involved and concerned directly. Photos can be submitted directly from the community too.
* Digitize the archives as far back as possible and make that content available online.
* Make the newspaper available as a digital download every day.
* Consider making the news available on other platforms like wireless devices. The newspaper is no longer a newspaper, it's an information service that should be platform neutral.
* Syndicate the content using RSS or some other aggregation feed.
* Keep up the good work!

What I find absolutely refreshing here is that you are asking readers to help "build" this blog. My hometown paper has a 'blog' but it's really someone's blog hosted on the paper's site, if you get my drift. And little/no participation. I almost wish we could start with a blank slate and no preconceptions. But we have "our" blog
already, don't we? Missed opportunity.

Carol: Missed opportunity? Hardly. You can organize some folks to press your paper for a more interactive, richer setup. The beauty of online is that it can be created, designed, torn apart and redesigned much more quickly than the print product.

Good luck!

L.

OK, here is an idea:
Create a column that is run and directed by the public. Readers come up with the story ideas and the reporter does them. The story ideas can be submitted online -- and some of them can even been displayed just as ideas -- not all can be acted on. The reporter can then do the stories and keep extra notes about what they encounter and how they did the story. (Why they did what they did, why they talked to a certain person... etc) Anyway, then, you run the story in the paper AND online and run all the extras online. The idea does two things: lets readers see the reporting and journalism transparently and makes them feel empowered to give you ideas. It should make them feel more attached to the paper, too. You'll need a really good reporter to do this --- not a rookie -- because the reporter will need to do some PR work with all the assignment editors in the public. And, you need to be ready for them to do piddling stories because those ARE the ones readers really care about. They don't want Woodward and Bernstein third-rate crap (which is what too many newspapers try to do in an attempt to be seen a journalists with a capital J in the process turning people off.)
Anyway, that is my idea. Good luck!

One more thing: if you use my idea don't EVER use the term open-source journalism again. Ever. It should be banned. Do we *really* need more jargon that sounds like Dilbert dreamed it up?

Jim, as much as the term turns you off, it jazzes some other folks -- at least to judge from my e-mail. That said, there's another reason not to use it, and that is that a lot of people don't yet know what it means.

I *really* like the public-assignment-editor idea. I'll definitely throw that into the mix I recommend. Thanks.

Lex,

i was going to blog about a N&R letter to the editor this morning (haven't yet).

I thought how easy it would be to to that if each letter posted had a permalink instead of me having to point to the letters page and then typing "scroll down, third from the bottom."

I don't want to get into a debate with you Lex, but open-sourced journalism is another one of those stupid buzz words that smart people like you should see coming. It ranks up there with "think outside the box" and "pardigm shift" and "robust" and "at the end of the day."
I really doubt any of your email is attributable to people thinking that open source journalism is a good term -- they are simply being asked for their ideas and they are sharing them.
I can't see *anyone* saying "oh, open sourced journalism, well, sign me up. Here are my ideas" -- it just doesn't work that way.
Why create a whole new name for something that doesn't need it when it's just going to further confuse people?
Also, thanks for thinking I have a good idea. I hope in the end if it is implemented that a reader gets credit for it. Thanks.

How about opening up the budget meetings to the public? Maybe put the top 4 or 5 stories out there every day and let people comment on which they think should be the top story in the paper the next day? I think it would be a valuable endeavor to let the public decide what is and isn't relevant to them.

Jim and Lex,
Take a look at how Idy Fernandez is executing the reader-as-assignment-editor idea at the Miami Herald: Your Stories (http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/reader/).
You might check with Idy and/or Suzanne Levinson, who is managing editor of Herald.com and the editor who pushed the Your Stories idea (slevinson@knightridder.com).
Good luck.

Let's try that link again:

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/reader/

We're working on some open source software to allow creation and management of a blogsphere such as you are describing. Not about content but about code which makes all this possible.
Check out http://lyceum.ibiblio.org/

[quote]>Developed by ibiblio.org, Lyceum is a tool that enables blogspheres. We've got a feeling that our short description of Lyceum might leave some questions unanswered, so we have a full description available. Let's start with a few bullet points:
Lyceum enables weblogs. It is a stand-alone open-source application, written in PHP, utilizing the MySQL database as a backend.
When installed, Lyceum users visit a web interface, register and are custom-generated a personal weblog. That weblog is then part of the blogsphere, a space in which discussion occurs.[/quote]

There is a lot ob BS floating around.
The above is Drupal code pure and simple.

The best flavor of Drupal is CivicSpace at http://civicspacelabs.org.
It was used in the 2004 elections by Ralph Dean and later by the Democratic Party.
It is now funded...but is open-source and development is going at a fast pace.
I am using it at http://foxhuntingworld.com

Have some dedicated blogs to ongoing political issues:

School Board - school issues - parents section, student section, teacher, section, admin section, and Board member setction. Running threads and or hot issues - there is a woeful lack of information and communication from the Board to the community.

City Government - seperate blogs for each -GSO, High Point, Winston-Salem, James Town, Burlington, etc.

These need to be essentially forums - with some rules to keep the focus - where the citizens can ask and receive information. When a need is identified that is not being answered, then the N&R should step in with an investigative report - published both in the hardcopy and on-line.

Your paper has a huge bias - whether you recognize it or not - and needs more transparency on how stories are selected and why - Can anyone with an open mind think CBS didn't have a bias?

Everyone has a bias - it is part of how we deal with large amounts of information and daily events - if you fail to recognize it and let others know where you are coming from - you will lose credibility and trust......

Most major regionals have a guest book with their online obituaries. Have you noticed ?

Lyrics, if you'll look at the report (1/4/05 post), you'll see I took note of online guest books at other papers (Charlotte Observer was the example I noted). Obituaries here are the responsibility of the advertising department, but I've kept them apprised of items like this that I run across. If you're interested in following up directly with them, contact Kathy Lambeth at klambeth@news-record.com.