Engagement editors workshop

I led a workshop Tuesday at the Daily Local News in West Chester, Pa., for engagement editors in the Pennsylvania cluster of Digital First Media.

(The cluster actually includes the Trentonian and some weeklies in New Jersey, but the editor planning to come from the Trentonian had to cancel. And it includes the Charleston Daily Mail in West Virginia, but they watched the livestream rather than making the long drive to join us in person.)

Thanks (again) to all the participants and to Mandy Jenkins, Ivan Lajara, Buffy Andrews, Diane Hoffman and Vince Carey, who helped me lead it.

If you participated in the workshop, I don’t recommend going through all this at once. I asked you in the workshop to choose one or two things to do this week. I’d read the links and/or re-watch the slides related to those one or two things. And then move on next week to the thing(s) you decided to try next week. I encourage digging into a single topic rather than trying to absorb everything at once.

Here are slides from Mandy, Ivan, Vince and me:

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GatheringPoint and Geofeedia help you find social media by location

Digital First journalists Cathy Hirko, Brittany Wilson and Buffy Andrews of the York Daily Record are doing some interesting work with tools that gather news content by its location.

Cathy used GatheringPoint to make maps of tweets, videos and other social media content relating to the removal of Joe Paterno’s statue and the NCAA sanctions against Penn State. Brittany made a similar map of social media content around the site of the Aurora theater attack (the map is embedded at the end of the story).

Cathy explained:

To help show readers what others were saying in social media at or near the scene of the shooting, we created a social media-based map — via GatheringPoint. The map highlights what others are saying via Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, just to name a few.

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Geofeedia, slideshows, cleaning up and a snake

I’m just doing some aggregation here, pointing to excellent how-tos by Buffy Andrews and Ivan Lajara and a great engagement story by Nancy March:

• Buffy tells how she used an outstanding new tool, Geofeedia, to find social media content from a particular location. This could be hugely useful in covering events or breaking news.
• Ivan provides a great how-to for using Storify to make a slideshow of Pinterest pins. I’ll be trying this out soon. Ivan’s a great problem-solver.
• Nancy tells about a community cleanup project (on Mother’s Day morning!) led by The Mercury in Pottstown, Pa. The Merc is building on the success of its food drive to continue engaging the community in community improvement. Community Engagement Editor Diane Hoffman also has pinned lots of the photos, including a snake, on the Mercury’s In Our Community board.

Source: Uploaded by user via Pottstown on Pinterest

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