ENTERTAINMENT 2.0: Assembling a team and sharing content

It's time we shared our powers.

As a company, we all publish those juicy stories trending on the AP entertainment wire. We’re great at previewing movies, and publishing which celebs were arrested on drug charges over the weekend.

But, as a company, we also produce some really good original entertainment content too. And a lot of that content is less land-locked than news (film, music, celeb interviews, DVD and video game releases, etc). So, why aren’t we sharing that and leveraging our resources as best as we can?

I mean, really. Aren’t you sick of seeing film reviews written by The Seattle Times and AP run in your weekender section, knowing there must be a writer somewhere in our company who just wrote a review of the same movie? I am.

Between our editors, writers, freelancers – and even Community Media Labs – we have a lot of solid content to work with and re-purpose.

Why not syndicate our critics and columnists across the company? Why not work together so we don’t have four different properties writing the same DVD release capsules, and five others writing the relatively same opinion about a new album in stores this Tuesday?

And I may be totally wrong (Cooper?), but it’s my understanding that paid freelance articles can be re-run by any of the companies properties at no extra fee. I know The Mercury in PA has a regular freelancer who churns out great high profile celebrity interviews features every week, and I’d love to post them on NHRegister.com with due credit.

That’s why I want to establish a legitimate network of our entertainment/features/life editors so that we can all be in contact and share relative interviews, reviews, and exclusives. Not to mention problems we are struggling with and (*ahem*) ideas to overcome them.

I’ll be fishing around all of JRC’s websites for next few days to see what I can find, but I would like to hear from all entertainment, life and features editors in the company too – to establish this content network. If you’re an editor or publisher at a smaller property but still publish original entertainment content, you’re part of this too.

Send an email to cmarch@nhregister.com with your name, your position, your Twitter/Facebook, and – if you like – your thoughts on this. Or in the interest of full transparency – do that stuff in the comments.

Think of us as The Avengers. Assemble!

ideaLAB UPDATE: Entertainment 2.0 and audience development

[Editor's Note: Pardon the brain dump. Updates and reports will be significantly more organized in future, linking to previous posts as more illustrated examples. But seeing as how this is my ideaJournal's first post and all this info is relative to the report, the dump I deemed necessary. -c]

It has been 30 days since the 18 inaugural members of the Journal Register Company ideaLab convened around a table to handpick “problems” and goals for conquering within a 30-day window. You know, just to get the coal burning.

While many of the labmeisters (sorry, can’t get into calling ourselves ‘labbers’) elected to focus on faster and more comprehensive news coverage, I chose to focus on re-evaluating the way we handle and cover entertainment as a digital first, print last media organization. Or to “update” the way we cover local music, arts, events and such as a keystone for new audience development.

I’ve done a good job – I think – evaluating and scheming on ways to move the needle forward, but a shameful job building anything physical to show for it yet. Here is why.

1. You can only grow so many apples on a tree that still has a lot of growing to do. And our apple trees have a lot of growing to do. So while I want dearly to focus on strengthening the content that interests me most, I’ve spent my ideaLab time these past 30 days training and answering more immediate calls to action because I found it more necessary to strengthen skill sets and serve the needs of the audience that currently exists first. Most notably by…

2. Experimenting/establishing best practice(s) for covering a high profile court case, digital first style. Right now, New Haven’s big story is the trial for a triple homicide that took place three years ago. It’s a case with a lot of attention, but it’s a very special case for the media which we – and other local TV and newspapers – have been taking full advantage of. We’re permitted to bring in laptops, netbooks, or iPads as well as cell and smart phones and cover the case with words, as it unfolds. In other words, if you’re on the ideaLab, you can bring your entire lab into the courtroom with you.  It’s fascinating watching us all adopt and adapt new practices – as an industry – on the fly together to cover this. Just search hashtag #Hayes on Twitter to see the whole patchwork of it. We have live tweeted from every day of the trial so far. We only planned to do the first week, but the trial’s attention and page hits haven’t waned, so we’ve continued at it, as has the rest of the media following the case. For me to have not involved the ideaLab mindset in this case would have been a failure on my part.  [sidenote: bummed to have not seen anyone using the iPad for court sketches, still just paper and pastel]

How have we treated this case differently than we would have just a year ago?

• WEB PAGE FOR ALL RELATED COVERAGE: First, I worked with the beloved Web Edits team (props @ Dawn) to set up a page to house all the content we generate from this case which is expected to last four months: www.nhregister.com/petitslayings. All stories that show up on this page are ‘tagged’ in townnews as ‘petit’. All videos that show up in the video gallery widget are tagged appropriately. All photos in the photo widget are uploaded appropriately via mycapture in a designated album. This page updates itself based on how we tag things. It’s simple, but a very valuable resource for readers which we’ve linked on the homepage and from many of the stories.

• ABSOLUTE LIVE COVERAGE: There is (1) a designated court writer covering the story as we traditionally would (Randall Beach – and doing a great job at it): sitting in court every day, taking notes and writing the day’s story so far at lunch and filing to the newsroom electronically, and re-writing at the end of the day for next day’s print edition. (2) A second reporter spends full day in court as well, writing and publishing every raw detail in the court room live, as it happens in bursts of 140 characters at a time via Twitter. The duty has been shared by myself, reporter Luther Turmelle and metro editor Ed Stannard depending upon our schedules. We have been treating it as note taking, but in a live setting with an audience. (3) a photographer waits outside with the rest of the major media to grab pictures/video of key folks leaving the court house. Before settling on Twitter, we were going to use Cover-It-Live with Twitter integration, but ended up going Twitter since that’s where rest of media was. And it’s simpler set up and cleaner, easier reader experience. Better yet – I stumbled across a Twitter tool site called Tweetizen that allows you to live-embed any Twitter feed or hashtag and users can interact and tweet right there from your site, instead of having to go to Twitter to follow your coverage. For example – here’s one of the #jrcidealab. When embedded, this keeps audience on our page instead of redirecting to Twitter. And that’s the name of the game. Plus it keeps things simple and understandable for those who don’t get (or dont’ want to get) Twitter.

• VIDEO – and FAST: This past Friday, a surprise impromptu press conference happened at lunch time. And a second response press conference from the victims’ family happened after court let out around 5. While all the usual TV cameras were there to grab both spots for the evening news with their big, expensive and clunky cameras, I was there to point my iPhone  and capture it the way any citizen journalist would.  And I filed the videos completely mobile – by uploading them to an APP on my iPhone called DROPBOX and setting the file to share with our photo department, who then processed it and slapped it up online asap. Go to dropbox.com to set up an account and learn more about it and how you can “share” files. It’s more user friendly than using an ftp, in my opinion, and awesome for filing from an iPhone. [HOWEVER! Here's something you need to keep in mind for shooting video on your iPhone. If you shoot it vertically - it comes out vertically - meaning you get a lot of black frame space once uploading to the web. So don't hold it like you hold your FLIP cam. Hold it horizontally. Although, it does play fine if shot vertically - just looks weird - so we used my horizontally challenged debacles. ]

• EVIDENCE: Much of the evidence used in the trial has been released to us for publication, including photos, 911 calls, and surveillance footage. We’ve been posting it as we’ve been getting it on a single “evidence” page for readers to review on their own. http://is.gd/fvfJH

• TWITTER IDENTITY CRISIS: The only thing we’ve been struggling with throughout this case is the use of Twitter handles – or more specifically, what is our Twitter strategy when it comes to using it as a tool for coverage, as opposed to traffic and marketing. The first time I tweet-covered a day of the case, I felt it made sense to use my own Twitter account to tweet (@loudercmarch) something live, the way it makes sense for a reporter to stick a byline on a story or a tv reporter to say ‘[name], reporting live’. But word came down that I should use the master nhregister instead of my pretty ol’ mug, so we’ve used that since, though I haven’t agreed with it. We all agree it lacks organization and coherence by using our ‘umbrella’ (or editor) account (@nhregister) to cover live, since that account’s purpose is to direct traffic back to nhregister by posting breaking news bits and sharing interesting links through out the day. One of our twitter followers unlovingly called what we were doing “Hayes trial spam” and unfollowed us. So what this told me is I need to draw up a master strategy for how to use twitter as a news organization, from top to bottom. This is still a far cry from focusing on better entertainment coverage, but it is a significant focus on audience development. I feel it’s important to teach the right and left hands how to move in this digital first court, before we start teaching it how to dribble.

3. Our entertainment editor position was open this whole time. And as an online producer with immediate obligations to news and advertising, it’s been hard to shake the entertainment desk to it’s core without having someone there to shake. However, The Register Citizen‘s Jordan Fenster will take the seat starting Oct. 4, so I’m looking forward to hitting the ground running with him when he gets situated.

I’ll reserve future posts in the coming days for writing more about what I am looking for in terms of help and feedback to do local entertainment 2.0, as well as my vision of twitter strategy; this “report” is simply a 30 day update on what I’ve been doing and hopefully establishes a place where we can have some open discussion and dialogue on the ideas and problems that we need to focus on to build Journal Register Company 2.0.

Cheers,
-c