News-Record.com

Katharine "Kit" Seelye of The New York Times is here today and tomorrow, reporting on the Public Square initiative. If you want to talk to her about what we're doing, shout here or e-mail. She spent about 45 minutes interviewing me earlier this morning and is now talking to other N&R staffers who blog.

I continue to slog away at multimedia editing/production for stories by Allison Perkins and Tina Firesheets that remain in the works. I'm learning as I go, so be patient ... and say a prayer for my co-workers, because I'm going to have to turn around at some point and start teaching them this stuff, too.

Our Inside Beat blog has spun off a new blog called Capital Beat. Written by Raleigh-bureau reporter Mark Binker (who recently moved to that beat from the Guilford County government beat), Capital Beat will focus on state government and politics with an eye toward how they affect us here at home.

Guess I need to check the links in my sidebar and on our home page to make sure they're updated appropriately.

Given all the vitriol in the blogiverse, you don't often see philosophically opposed bloggers engaging in virtual group hugs, but that's exactly what's going on over in -- of all places -- our Letters to the Editor. So if your morning blood-sugar count is low, head on over. :-)

As David Hoggard and others have pointed out, newspaper circulation continues to drop. But as JR points out today, ours is up slightly overall on weekdays, down slightly overall on Sundays and up both weekday and Sunday in our metro-Greensboro primary circulation area.

This is not to say that we're out of the woods. We're not. But it's a tribute to a bunch of hard-working people here, particularly but not exclusively in the newsroom, that we're bucking industry trends ... in a good way.

And, of course, this doesn't change our Public Square initiative.

Stephen Waters, publisher of the Rome (NY) Daily Sentinel, announces his own paper's venture into reader-reported journalism. (Waters also has a personal blog and is a frequent commenter at Jay Rosen's PressThink blog.)

The Spokesman-Review of Spokane, Wash., reports serious allegations, including allegations of sexual abuse, against that city's mayor. The newspaper's investigation, three years in the making, involved hiring a computer forensics expert and former U.S. Customs Service agent "who has helped law enforcement agencies identify pedophiles online ... to confirm that [Mayor Jim] West was the man behind several online identities and to confirm the accounts of the real men" with whom West allegedly had communicated, the paper's editor tells readers.

The word "explosive" gets overused when people talk about news stories, but this one qualifies.

This project goes far beyond the kind of undercover work that ABC did years ago in its investigation of Food Lion, a case that resulted in a landmark lawsuit tried here in Greensboro. Even among long-timers I've exchanged e-mail with, you have to go back decades to find anything that comes close: in this case, a bar opened by Chicago Sun-Times journalists to "sting" corrupt city officials there.

Read Spokesman-Review Editor Steven Smith's note on the coverage. Read the coverage itself. And then ask yourself (and answer in the comments): Were the allegations worth checking out? Did the Spokesman-Review prove its allegations? And even if it did, did its methods cross the line of ethics, in your view? Why or why not?

My colleague Allison Perkins has written Storagepalooza, a neat feature on rock bands who practice in the same self-storage place out on West Wendover Avenue where they keep their equipment. This is one of the multimedia projects I've been working on, and you can see the fruits of my learning experience here.

I'm currently working on another such project with writer Tina Firesheets, and Allison and I are planning still another. Given our limitations on equipment at the moment, as well as my other job responsibilities, two irons in the fire at a time is about the best I can manage.

Lest anyone think otherwise, we're not trying to put Lenslinger and his colleagues out of business. But to make online the integral component of the Public Square that it needs to be, we in the newsroom need to learn how to produce multimedia content that people will find useful and/or entertaining. I welcome your feedback, in the comments or via e-mail.

UPDATE: The co-leader of the seminar I attended in March weighs in:

It's a great start. Now, you're ready to take another big step. Since I don't know what that story will be, I'll offer some suggestions for this story, as if you had a chance to do it over again:

Instead of going linear, put a large photo with inviting text, and link to a pop-up window.

In that popup window, incorporate text, audio and a couple more photos
with the Flash file you did. Text includes the name of the storage
area, the number of bands, etc. Audio moves from from busy street
sounds to band sounds (better to hear than describe in text).

That means in shooting your video that you get a couple of street
scenes with audio -- that gives you the establishing shot (plus a
close-up of the name of the storage area), and moves you (via visuals
and audio) to the inside, where the bands are playing.

B-roll would really liven up your videos and tell more of the story
that's in text. So...how to do this and sync the wide shots with the
music? Get them to play the same song twice -- once for the wide shots
and to lay down one uninterrupted song, once for a whole bunch of
closeups and differents point of view so the readers can see what the
band members see. Also incorporate closeups of things like
soundproofing, what they're drinking or eating, the time on a clock (if it's late) -- whatever visuals fill out the story. Also, if you have the time, hang around and get quick interviews with them, and cut those into the video. After all, this is a story of their rehearsals, and those can be tedious, fun, antagonistic, etc., etc. -- you're really giving readers a glimpse into an aspect of band life that few will ever witness.

Another way to look at this is to look at the band Web sites -- it's
easy to see what you as a journalist/storyteller does differently from
what they do, and what you do that's the same.

One more thing -- in the Flash file, with this I'd either use black as
a background. Or I'd overlap the layers closer together so that they
faded directly into one another rather than fade to the background.

You're on your way! Send me the next one!

OK, she lost me at "Instead of going linear ... " because I don't even know what she means by that.

But I'm going to find out.

Recently I've had a couple of opportunities to talk with other people who are also moving toward open-source journalism about what we're doing, what works, what doesn't, and so on. The only reason I didn't blog about them at the time was because I was swamped. But that worked out OK, because the fruits of those conversations are now publicly accessible.

The first forum was an e-mail discussion that took place at the behest of Robert Niles, editor of Online Journalism Review. Besides Niles and me, it also included Mike Noe, editor of RockyMountainNews.com, and Lauren Ward, editor of the Bakersfield Californian's reader-written Northwest Voice.

A complete transcript is here.

The other discussion took place just yesterday, when I took part in the recording of a pilot program for Public Radio International called Open Source. It's the brainchild of Christopher Lydon, whom you may know from NPR's "The Connection." The show (which has a blog here) will premiere on May 30 and will be an attempt to recreate the atmosphere of the Web and blogging on the air. Check out that blog; the creators of the show are offering a variety of ways for the public to contribute. And the podcast of our pilot, a 54-megabyte *.mp3 file, can be downloaded here. (The musical interludes you'll hear are for news and station identification.) And let me give a shout-out to Jennifer Curry and the folks at WFDD to thank them for allowing me to borrow their Greensboro studio to take part in the production.

Kit Seelye of The New York Times, who was here reporting a story on the N&R recently, e-mailed to say it has been postponed at least a week, from 5/16 to 5/23. Given the changes in biz/media coverage upcoming at the Times, I wouldn't be surprised if it gets bumped back even farther than that.

Exhibit A.

His argument is so obviously flawed on so many levels that it's not even worth the time to rebut them. Suffice to say that this piece is like one of Bill Gates' right-hand people announcing that computers are bad.

Craig Newmark of craigslist.com says newsrooms still matter:

With all the excitement about citizens' media, it's easy to forget how important current news operations are. We have a lot of journalists there, but also, fact checkers, editors, and so on, and they perform an indispensable function.

I feel that citizens' media complements that, and that professional and citizen journalists will blur together in networks of collaboration.

I'm not sure what I will have to do with this, maybe just encouraging this movement, maybe something financial. ...

He goes on to say that he doesn't even know whether his company would get involved, or just him personally. (He's not the only owner anymore.) At any rate, that vision certainly is compatible with ours.

Barring further complications (and I certainly wish I could, but that's a wish, not a command), our Web redesign will be getting what's called a "soft launch" within the next couple of weeks.

That means that one day we'll just put up the new design for you to see. It inevitably will have problems, glitches, rough edges that need smoothing, and so forth. (For you geeks, think of it as still in beta testing.) We welcome your bringing any and all of these to our attention -- indeed, we're counting on it.

Many of our problems up to this point have had to do with the shotgun marriage of our new Web-publishing system with our existing print-publishing system. As in any shotgun wedding, there are certain incompatibilities, reservations and hesitancies. But every shotgun wedding also features someone with a shotgun, at least metaphorically speaking, and JR wields a mean one. This wedding will be going off, hitches (so to speak) and all. (Just don't ask me which system is the pregnant one. I don't even know which one's the boy and which one's the girl.)

And once we get the kinks ironed out, we'll have a big "public" launch. I'm not involved in promotions, but I think it would be nice if the public launch included a party of some sort. We, and you, have certainly earned it.

Pegasus News has dubbed this effort we, and they, are up to "wedia", as in, "we [are] the media."

Which is fine -- indeed, a crisper name than, say, "citizen journalism," but I had to think about it a second; my first reaction was that it made me think of weeds.

The post goes on to list things that a hyperlocal news business should do. I'm sure we'll be using that list as one of our guideposts, even as we develop some interesting variations on it.

How to fold a t-shirt.

... is working 'til 1 a.m. on a video project to meet a noon Tuesday deadline, only to find that when you stitch all your edited segments together, your painstakingly edited -- and essential -- soundtracks of voice-over narration have disappeared.

I warned you this was going to be a learning experience.

This past Friday I had the privilege of speaking to the Minnesota AP Association's annual awards banquet in St. Paul. This was a fly-up, do-my-thing, fly-back kind of gig, so I didn't get to see much of Minnesota, to which I had never been. It was supposed to be springtime even that far north, but it wasn't cloudy, foggy and damp the whole time I was there, for which my hosts apologized profusely. But my hotel room had a nice view of the Mississippi River, which, that far north, isn't much more imposing than, say, the Yadkin west of Winston-Salem.

My thanks to Dave Pyle, chief of bureau there, for inviting me, and to everyone I met for their hospitality. "Minnesota nice" isn't just a marketing slogan.

If you're so inclined, you can read the text of my speech below the fold. With a few minor variations, what you read is what I said.

Today I'm rehashing how we currently put breaking news online so that on Monday and Tuesday I can fill in for Mike Fuchs, the newsroom's online-news editor, while he takes some well-deserved time off. Obviously we all had hoped to have Publicus up and running by now, but that hasn't happened. So I'm reacclimating myself to the wonderful world of spit, bailing wire, strings, rubber bands, paper clips, duct tape and hamsters-in-exercise-wheels we currently use to post news online, a system I last used more than a year ago.

Lemme tell you, absence has not made the heart grow fonder. And forget the price of gasoline -- have you seen what they're getting these days for hamster chow??

Coming Sunday: Reporter Allison Perkins looks at some local b-boys, and we'll have video online with a b-boy offering explanation of, and commentary on, the moves you'll be seeing.

This was the production I accidentally almost killed earlier this week. The surviving remnant, assembled during a frenzied 2 1/2 hours on Tuesday, lacks all the frills like matching sound levels, neat visual transitions and, well, coherence that distinguished the original, but at this point it's better than nothing. All praise to Allison and videographer Taylor Webster Kevin Lockamy; all criticism to me.

You can preview our redesigned Web site here. For those of you who are techs, think of this as a beta release ... and whether you're technical or not, please give us your comments, impressions, feedback, on both substance and style. (There's a "Feedback" link on the page.)

Sorry for the long absence. I've been dealing with a family emergency, and it ain't over yet.