On Monday I had lunch with Mark Russell and Anthony Moor of the Orlando Sentinel. Here are some notes from that meeting.
Like many of the other newspapers/journalists/media I have met with they are slowly taking steps to embrace this new medium. How many of the newsroom staff are using RSS or blogs to assist with stories? Almost none. But that's something they are going to work on changing.
On the web side they're moving towards integrating external RSS feeds into their content offerings. These external feeds will be topic driven, i.e. business feeds in the business section. The next step would be to integrate the branded RSS reader that the LA Times is beta-testing.
The Sentinel has created a few blogs utilizing TypePad for special projects. The most recent was a Shuttle Discovery Blog to cover the return to flight. A staff reporter live-blogged the recent launch attempt. If you look at the blog you'll see they were posting quite frequently. They had quite a bit of traffic to the blog but asked how I thought they could expand their readership of an event-driven blog such as a shuttle launch. My two quick suggestions were:
1. Utilize Technorati Tags: Recent events such as Live8 and the London terror attacks have shown that information on breaking news can quickly be found via Technorati and other blog search tools. News junkies and bloggers know to use these new tools since they search the 'live' web. The Sentinel should determine the optimum tags for their shuttle posts, i.e. shuttle, NASA, spaceshuttle, etc.
2. Crosslink with other Blogs: Yes it's a basic principle of blogs, but when you tell a newspaper to link to another content source that might compete with them, they usually don't jump right on it. The day before the shuttle launch they should do some searches to find out who else might be live-blogging or providing other good content, then link to them. Chances are, those blogs will link back. I found this to be true during my Super Bowl live-blogging Experiment.
There are a few other things they can do as well, but we don't want to give away all the goods just yet :-)
Another topic was the lack of permalinks for their articles. Currently the URL for a story posted online will no longer work after 14 days. Like many newspaper sites, their content goes into a pay-for-use archive. I can understand why they would want to keep the archive revenue stream. Other papers keep the URLs active, but still require payment to view the archived article. The Sentinel's position is that they would need to see a significant number of inbound links from blogs or other external sources pointing to old articles to justify making a change in their content management system. I think they're in a catch-22. They will probably never see a large number of links to old articles because bloggers won't point to them in the first place. If I know the URL will die in 14 days I won't point to the article. It's sort of a 'build it and they might come' situation.
On the subject of citizen's journalism we discussed a few of the current projects that are going on around the country. One traditional model is to appoint/select or identify local bloggers that can contribute content. Most of these contributors are volunteers so they may not always be a reliable content source (or workforce to use that term) to sustain a long-term project. My view is to use the power of the network. Take a recent local story. A young child died while riding Mission Space at Disney's EPCOT. Perhaps the citizen's journalist that can contribute to this 'Orlando' story is a person from another state or another country. Do a blog search for "Mission Space". What if you found a blog post from a tourist that was there the day of the tragedy? Local news does not always need to be provided by local news.
Other topics included podcasting, social networks and other web 2.0 issues. Overall it was a great discussion, and one that we will be continuing.
