Links and slides for workshop on digital enterprise stories

I’ll be leading a workshop today on digital planning for enterprise stories at the Excellence in Journalism conference in Nashville.

Much of the workshop will revolve around the questions for planning enterprise stories that I blogged about earlier this year.

Other links relating to the workshop:

Five Satins: A ‘Sunday’ story published digitally the Monday before

‘In the Still of the Night’: Five Satins recorded biggest hit in New Haven church basement

Sunshine Week project showed digital-first enterprise approach

Sunshine Week project

10 steps toward a mobile-focused culture for your news organisation

Denver Post’s Chasing the Beast

Denver Post’s The Fire Line

Nola.com’s then-and-now Hurricane Katrina photos

ProPublica Patient Harm Facebook group

Gettysburg 150 app

Cost of Dying app

Daniel Victor’s post on infusing community contribution throughout the reporting process

Carrie Jewell-Dugo project, story by Paula Ann Mitchell, photos by Tania Barricklo, design by Ivan Lajara, using Creatavist

Ed Stannard and Angi Carter interactive map on Yale’s tax-exempt property in New Haven

I’ll probably update this with some more examples. I welcome any you might want to suggest, whether by you, colleagues or competitors:

My #EIJ14 workshop this afternoon is on digital enterprise stories. Welcoming last-minute examples of excellent digital enterprise.

— Steve Buttry (@stevebuttry) September 5, 2014

Here’s my first update, a Spundge from Buffy Andrews of the York Daily Record, explaining a variety of digital tools.

Here are my slides for the workshop (also subject to updating as I get more fresh examples):

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Digital-first enterprise projects by the Bangor Daily News

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:

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Sunshine Week project showed digital-first enterprise approach

Digital First Media’s Connecticut newsrooms did some old-school watchdog reporting in their Sunshine Week project this spring. But they took a digital-first approach in planning and executing the project.

This post is mostly going to be a guest post by Viktoria Sundqvist, investigations editor for the Register Citizen and Middletown Press. Vik and Michelle Tuccitto Sullo, investigations editor for the New Haven Register, led the project, published in March. They started planning the project and did the reporting while I was in Connecticut working on Project Unbolt and I made a tiny contribution.

This was a traditional watchdog reporting project in many ways:

• The project held local police accountable, checking how well every police department in Connecticut followed the state’s Freedom of Information law.
• The work involved shoe-leather reporting, with reporters from DFM’s newsrooms visiting every police station in the state to ask for records that should be public (I checked the town of Plymouth).
• The reporters wrote a big newspaper story about their results.
• The project had impact, forcing changes by police departments that were revealed to be violating the law.

Here’s how the project took a different digital-first approach:

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How a Digital First reporter should approach statehouse coverage

Credit: Free images from acobox.com

An editor asked me to outline how a Digital First statehouse reporter should work.

I see nine themes for the digital emphasis of a statehouse reporter:

1. Live reporting of events.
2. Community engagement around the issues and events of the Capitol.
3. Reporting breaking news and enterprised scoops as the stories unfold.
4. Curation of content from other sources.
5. Enterprise and daily reporting based on analysis of data compiled by state agencies.
6. Video reporting of interviews and news events.
7. Mapping.
8. Digitally focused enterprise reporting.
9. Beatblogging.

I’ll elaborate on them, but need to acknowledge up front that I’m not involved directly with statehouse coverage now, so some statehouse editors and reporters could certainly explain any or all of these points better than I could. This continues the discussion I started last month with a post on the workflow of a Digital First journalist.

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