This is the ninth and final section of the Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection.
News does not come last in my Complete Community Connection plans because it is less important than other content. News remains at the heart of what we do and of our role in the community.
But we know how to cover news in print and broadcast and we have made great strides in learning to cover news in the digital world. We must continue learning and changing in this core job as we transform into C3. We will develop our coverage of news in six primary ways:
- Tell what’s happening right now.
- Engage the community in helping us cover breaking stories and community news.
- Engage the community in watchdog reporting.
- Engage the community in deep and rich coverage of sports.
- Use multimedia and narrative storytelling regularly and extensively.
- Aggregate the best accounts of what’s happening in our communities and Iowa.
What’s happening now
News has always been our core job, but the print product didn’t tell what was happening right now. As the Complete Community Connection develops a content team feeding multiple products, we will need to ensure that we are where people turn to know what’s happening right now, whether they turn to KCRG for live broadcast coverage, engage in a liveblog during an event (perhaps with streaming video on the same screen) or check a live traffic or weather map online.
We can develop live-coverage further with audio from public-safety scanners, live cameras from the Department of Transportation, our own news coverage, photos and videos from the community, and community accounts of what they are seeing and experiencing. Iowans will monitor summer thunderstorms and tornadoes, spring floods and blizzards watching KCRG with their computers on our digital products, reading accounts posted by residents and reporters of hail here and funnel clouds there and noting on the map how close they are and where they’re heading. And so on.
Some standing features like the interactive weather map will have mild interaction and use on nice days but become indispensable links in severe weather. We also will provide real-time coverage of routine news, such as posting immediate bulletins or live video or audio of even routine meetings, traffic accidents, police calls and court hearings. Generally speaking, if a news event is important enough for us to send a staff member, we will decide it is important enough for liveblogging.
Community engagement in news
The Complete Community Connection will need to keep a strong group of journalists to cover the news we have always covered — government activities, community events, breaking news. As we divert staff to develop databases, produce multimedia and so on, this group of journalists is bound to grow smaller. We need to focus their work effectively on the most valuable jobs to be done.
We also need to engage the community in telling stories. From blogging meetings we can’t cover (and supplementing our coverage when we do cover) to submitting their cell-phone photos of crashes or fires before photojournalists arrive to supplementing photojournalists’ coverage of festivals and other events, community contributions will provide valuable depth and breadth to our coverage of the news if we solicit them effectively and aggressively.
We need to focus our staff efforts on opportunities where we can create unique content or add value to content that people can get elsewhere. The coverage of every breaking story needs to invite the public to help tell the story: Were you there? Add your account. Do you have photos or videos? Please upload them. What do you know? What have you heard? What should we check into?
Enterprise
For years, our model for enterprise reporting was that our journalists would spend weeks or months working on big investigative packages, then the newspaper would publish pages of content from which most readers would glean a little. One-way reporting will remain part of our public-service job to be done. However, crowdsourcing, multimedia and interactive databases can make investigative reporting both more effective and more engaging.
Revenue opportunities directly associated with enterprise reporting may be limited. But it has strong audience potential, especially as we work at making it more engaging, so it might be a place where businesses interested in traditional advertising will continue to go.
Since the flood, the importance of our watchdog role has soared. We need to investigate FEMA, the Corps of Engineers, the city and other government agencies involved in the cleanup and recovery and tell any stories of waste, corruption and incompetence. We need to watch for rip-offs by contractors and favoritism by public officials. We need to analyze FEMA’s payments and invite the public to check out how much their neighbors received and alert us to incidents of fraud.
Sports
Sports have been important content for newspapers and broadcast and will remain so as we connect the community in new ways on multiple platforms. The Complete Community Connection needs to engage the community in covering the youth sports that we don’t have the staff to cover. And we will engage the community in joining our staff in the analysis and conversation about high school, college and pro sports, too.
In addition to general fan chat, we will engage the fans, players and coaches in telling the stories of the games, asking questions that unlock their expertise (and, yes, at times their ignorance) in the coverage we provide: What was the turning point in tonight’s game? How does this rank in the biggest wins (or most humiliating losses) in Hawkeye history?
IowaPrepSports is off to a good start and we need to continue to develop that as an outlet not only for the work of our journalists, but for the storytelling of the fans, coaches and players. We need to follow the same approach with Hawkeye sports, not just the big sports like football, wrestling and men’s and women’s basketball, but other sports that attract less attention but still generate deep passion. We need to provide a forum where the fans, players and coaches of Iowa State, the University of Northern Iowa, Coe, Mount Mercy, Cornell and Kirkwood tell the stories of athletic teams that won’t draw as much, or any, coverage from our staff.
When we aren’t staffing a game ourselves (a high school game, for instance), we can provide live coverage, inviting a fan from each team to be guest live-bloggers. So the live coverage of the game is these two fans moaning, cheering, criticizing the coaches, trash-talking in an unfolding blog that fans are following in the stands on their cell phones. For Hawkeye games at least, we should supplement our professional coverage with a real-time aggregation of the Twitter feeds of Hawkeye fans tweeting from the game or as they watch on TV.
The opportunities for revenue around sports coverage are considerable: selling tickets for the local teams, reselling fans’ tickets, selling sports team clothing and memorabilia, advertising and selling gift certificates and coupons for sporting goods stores, batting cages, golf courses and the like, downloading schedules and rosters, selling photos and products made from sports photos, selling books or DVD’s of our archived content. Sports coverage also must include mobile and email opportunities: Sign up to have the game stories or features emailed to you or to have quarter scores or lead changes sent by text message, etc.
Storytelling
The Complete Community Connection needs to let our audience experience stories in a variety of ways. The casual user should have a choice of how to experience the story. The interested user should have multiple ways to experience the story as deeply as she wants.
Video (from staff and public), photo galleries (from staff and public), slide shows with sound, steerable virtual reality photography, interactive graphics, podcasts, animations and whatever kinds of multimedia come next need to be tools we use in telling all but the most routine stories.
We need to aggressively develop the possibilities of video advertising online. And we need lots of news and community content to sell video advertising on. We also might be able to generate revenue with occasional DVD sales of related video content (highlights of the sports season, video coverage of the community festival, video coverage of graduations).
We need to provide narrative writing so compelling that it will generate viral marketing — people asking co-workers if they read that story in The Gazette or emailing links to their friends.
Aggregation
C3 doesn’t fear outbound links. We shouldn’t think of them as sending traffic away from our site, but as giving people a reason to keep coming back. Works for Google. We need to provide links to Iowa resources, news accounts, blogs, etc., so we are the place to come for whatever you want to know about our communities and our region. I have written on this subject before, so I won’t repeat that here.
This is concludes the Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection. Please add your suggestions in the comments on any part of the blueprint.
I have looked over you C3 plan. Admittedly, I haven’t read all of it. My question is, is there a section for the local faith community. Right now if you move to CR there is not one place you can go to to find out about the local faith community. The local chamber ignores the issue. I have talked with them, explaining the local faith community is an asset to potential individuals and families who are considering relocating to CR. They haven’t understood or shown any interest. Does the new envisioned online Gazette site take the faith community into consideration. Just wondering. Thanks for your reply.
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Kim,
Good question. I deal with the faith communities in the section on local search: https://stevebuttry.wordpress.com/2009/04/27/business-service-opportunities-local-search/
and the section on congregations:
I’m a former religion reporter and a son of two ministers. I wouldn’t forget the importance of faith in the community.
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