The project is the biggest undertaking I’ve been part of at this newspaper. To complement the stories, I developed an interactive map using Google My Maps. There are historical photos, aerial photos by S-R photog Jesse Tinsley, markers with information about key landmarks and illustrations by Rick Hosmer, a participant on the expedition.
The map was time-consuming but easy to put together. I didn’t dabble with KML or other more sophisticated Google tools, instead relying on the basic My Maps interface. You can check out a quick tutorial here.
The map has been getting decent traffic and love from my friends at Down to Earth.
Of course, I’m not the only one merging waterways and interactive maps in these parts. Cheney, Wash., resident Ron Hall introduced himself in my comments section and shared this link to his Google Earth aquifer tour. Also check out this profile S-R reporter Parker Howell wrote about Hall and his 3D modeling of Spokane landmarks. Great stuff, and miles beyond what I’m doing. For now.
I previously posted about being a part of a group of eight young Spokesman-Review journalists charged with recommending a reorganization plan for the newsroom.
We turned in our report Thursday and met with senior editors Friday, and Editor Steve Smith posted our report on his blog later that evening. My colleague and fellow group member Nick Eaton has also blogged about our findings. Kate Martin is also following the process on her blog.
Download the report here (PDF). There’s a flow chart at the end.
A few of our major recommendations:
Move to a early deadline akin to an afternoon daily but continue publishing in the mornings. The idea: Start the editing process earlier; relieve bottlenecks on the city and copy desks; foster more enterprise reporting while leaving room to accommodate breaking stories.
Bring all section editors into a central pod in the downtown offices. The idea:Improve communication and planning; encourage decisions on where stories will run based on content, not default categories of sports, features, business, zoned neighborhood news, etc.; reduce after-the-fact regrets about missing a good front-page opportunity.
Create a universal copy desk with shifts staggered throughout the day. The idea: Help our highly overworked copy editors, day and night; free up those delegated to do design on a given night to focus entirely on design, not copy editing as well; have more copy editors around in the day to copy edit stories going onto the Web, thus improving our reputation for accuracy and clean prose online as well as in print.
There are more, along with a more radical set of suggestions toward the end.
I think we issued a highly pragmatic set of recommendations. That may be our report’s greatest strength. A lot of this could be tried without risking revenue streams or requiring huge technical overhauls.
Some might see that pragmatism as these ideas’ biggest weakness. We were picked to investigate this, after all, because we were young and less invested in the existing structure. Aren’t we the Internet generation? Don’t we know that the MSM is a relic industry?
But with the limitations we had, such as not adding staff or completely shaking up content, most of us didn’t see the point in advocating more beats, or going to Web only, or cutting the print paper down to three days a week, or hiring an army of videographers. We didn’t want to waste our time on ideas that stood no chance of advancing.
If you have an opinion, please weigh in, but keep in mind these are only ideas and that we were asked to suggest them. We are not some young Turks aimed at pulling ourselves up at others’ expense. Furthermore, this report doesn’t represent what’s going to happen. Many of these ideas might die at this stage. And please be civil and refrain from saying we are naive; that’s not a constructive response.
With blessings from above, I slipped away for a dinner break with my dad, who was in town briefly. Afterward, I went back to work to help with the Web coverage. We had three reporters and three photographers in the field.
My boss whipped up a slicker version of our slideshow tool, which I fed with incoming images. I figured I was pretty much done after I finished linking up related content.
But the news wasn’t finished. I helped the City Desk by taking dictation from one of our reporters in the field, who fed me details about an emergency of declaration by Gov. Chris Gregoire. I threw it into a file and shipped it to the copy desk, where it had been promised as a breakout on the jump page. It was nice to interact with my former co-workers.
Friday morning I’ll be back in the newsroom at 7 a.m., filling in for our morning breaking news editor. I’m sure there will be plenty to follow up on.
Recently, I took part in a frivolous experiment with seven other people that involved eating only seven ingredients for seven days. It was a nice escape from my usual routine and the reason I haven’t updated this blog much lately (I did my own blogging on the 7vs7 challenge).
The process also introduced me to the online video service Vimeo. For producers, I think it rocks. Here’s why:
Much cleaner interface than YouTube.
Eyeball-friendly stats on your videos.
Exceedingly simple upload and tagging system.
Embeds that are just as easy as YouTube.
Anyway, the 7vs7 gang made ample use of this tool. I had the most fun with the one just below, which I shot with my Sony point and shoot and edited in iMovie. The soundtrack is from Mr. Dick Dale. Feel free to check out the rest of my stuff.
Now I’m in the middle of an 11-day assignment from Spokesman-Review Editor Steve Smith aimed at exploring some of those questions and drafting recommendations for restructuring the newsroom. The goals: to be more efficient and produce a more compelling, consistently multiplatform product.
There are eight of us, all relatively young in a newsroom notably filled with talented veterans. Most of us have come out of journalism school within the past four years. The group dynamic is solid.
This is exciting and scary as hell.
One of the other members of the task force, Nick Eaton, has written about this at his blog. Colin Mulvany, the S-R’s multimedia leader, has also posted. As Colin notes,
It’s strange how the people running newspapers have been talking about changing for most of my 20-year career. Yet, all they’ve really done in that time is tinker under the hood a bit.
We are tasked with doing far more than tinkering under the hood. We were picked, according to Steve, because we have a huge stake in what happens to this industry but little stake in the processes and organization that have driven this newspaper in the past.
[W]e can’t eliminate the print product, we can’t eliminate the new radio initiative, we can’t eliminate the community-oriented Voice sections, we can’t suggest layoffs.
It’s comforting and intriguing to watch other newspapers wrestle these questions and swing for the fences. Most recently, it’s been the Tampa Tribune. It’s shakeup is outlined on Mindy McAdams’ blog, and reporting intern Jessica DaSilva has a great account of the day Editor Janet Coats outlined the changes to the staff.
There has been grumbling within the newsroom and skepticism from without. But many staffers have quietly wished us well, and comments at Nick’s and Colin’s blogs have also been encouraging.
We’re under a tight deadline. At some meetings, we’ve got so many ideas its hard to chart a path through them.
But the biggest challenge is to be systematic, practical and yet visionary. We are supposed to blow up the newsroom, but, as I think we all feel, the model we propose must be functional. And above all, it must keep the newspaper coming off the press, the Web site (overhaul pending) updated throughout the day and our radio broadcasts filled with local content – and make all of this journalism as compelling as possible.
This may be my best, last chance to throw bold ideas into the mix and have them heard. Given the recent explosion of newspaper layoffs and Steve’s not-good-but-could-be-worse briefing Tuesday on the state of our company’s finances, I’m not optimistic that the business I went to grad school to enter will sustain me until I retire.
But now I’ve got a chance to suggest changes to help an enterprise, to quote Janet Coats, “worth fighting for.” I’ll see what I can do.
Two points: First, this map is more affecting than the daily reports on Romanesko or a simple number. Which is another example of why multimedia just makes information crackle.
My news design background is scantier, limited to the B section and wire pages at the S-R and a few A1 design shifts at the Missourian. But I would love to develop skills and a portfolio like Smith’s. It’s one big way I can help avoid becoming part of her next map.
On Monday we ran a story about the Old City Drive in Spokane, an excursion mapped out by the visitors center folks to highlight points of interest and charm in the Lilac City.
The city editor sent me a page of typed directions and asked me to post them with the story. I said OK but thought I’d go one up and replicate the drive in Google Maps. It was quick and the result, below, is embarrassingly plain. But I thought it might add something useful for a few readers.
On Monday morning, I was linking up content and read in the story that there was an online map of the new, longer city drive. When I found it at the Spokane Regional Convention and Visitors Bureau website, I had to laugh: the folks there had also used Google Maps, and it looks like this.
As a vegetarian, summer grilling can sometimes seem limited. Fortunately, with encouragement from my friends, I’ve started a quest to diversify my options.
Not content with freezer-aisle hockey pucks or the quotidian portabella, I’m taking recipes for nonmeat burgers and giving them my own twist.
The action is under way at www.burgerrevised.com. Check it out, and share your ideas!
Last month I posted about story lengths for online news.
The general idea was that shorter is better.
In the meantime I haven’t necessarily practiced at work what I examined there. Then again, I’m an editor not a writer.
Yesterday I came across this article on Slate (thanks Journerdism). It’s been circulating; I even heard a city editor at work discussing it. That, for those in journalism, is amazing.
Basic premise: It’s just length that matters.
It’s style. Short paragraphs. Short sentences. Bullet points. Frequent subheds. Periodic bold-facing of words. Lots of links.
INDEX, Wash. – With little fanfare, Congress has embarked on a push to protect as many as a dozen pristine areas this year in places ranging from the glacier-fed streams of Wild Sky Wilderness here to West Virginia’s Monongahela National Forest. By the end of the year, conservation experts predict, this drive could place as much as 2 million acres of unspoiled land under federal control, a total that rivals the wilderness acreage set aside by Congress over the previous five years.
