My blog posts when we launched Project Unbolt caught the eye of Anthony Ronzio, News and Audience Director of the Bangor Daily News. Tony wanted to learn more and came to Connecticut for a day when I was helping the New Haven Register unbolt its culture and workflow from print.
We talked a lot about what we were trying to do at Digital First Media and what he and his staff in Maine are doing. (I love how he measures his staff’s performance; if I were continuing at DFM, we might have tried something like it in one of our Project Unbolt pilot newsrooms).
I heard again from Tony last week after I blogged about the digital-first approach to the Sunshine Week project by our Connecticut newsrooms.
I invited others to tell how you’re doing enterprise projects that aren’t driven by print and the Sunday paper. So Tony shared a couple examples from the Bangor Daily News:
Just saw your post soliciting ideas for how-we-did-it digital first projects. I thought I’d zip a couple down to you.
We’ve been pushing the digital storytelling envelope here at the BDN this year, with some great success.
In April, we launched an ambitious 5-part online series about the effected of the back-to-the-land movement in Maine. It was available in its entirety on aTuesday, and was serialized in print through Saturday. So far, over 75K views on the project. We chronicled its construction here.
Building that project created scalable tools that will allow us to do more engaging packages. The first try after the Good Life was this project, Portland at a Crossroads, which had no presence in print at all, and was designed primarily for our mobile audience, using lessons learned from Good Life.
As we go forward, we plan to expand what we’ve learned into more public service and investigative journalism. We’re lucky to have a strong team here that is willing to innovate, thinks about our digital audience first, and works exceedingly well together.
Thanks to Tony for sharing those stories from Bangor. I welcome other stories of how your newsrooms are unbolting.
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Steve:
Being from Maine, I was interested in your post about the Bangor Daily News’s efforts toward digital, particularly aimed (as Ronzio says) at audiences outside the circulation area. Unfortunately, this is what I got when I clicked on the link Ronzio provided for “Portland at the Crossroads.”
Ted
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Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff Trinidad, California 707-677-5222 • 435-760-1707 cell • Today’s WORD on Journalism: http://tedsword.blogspot.com • PeezPix Photography: http://peezpix.blogspot.com • Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PerfesserTed
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You got nothing? If you got something, I don’t see it here.
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Hmmm. Looks fine in Chrome, Ted. I’ll message Tony and see if he knows of problems with it. Would help if you can be more specific. That’s certainly a problem with digital: It’s so many different platforms, browsers & apps.
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Hey Ted! Can you message me with details? (I was the developer who worked on the project). My email is preaves@bangordailynews.com.
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