Heritage Media teaches media skills in Michigan communities

Michelle Rogers leads a workshop for the community at the Heritage Media-West Community Media Lab in Ypsilanti, Mich.

Heritage Media-West in the western suburbs of Detroit is providing an excellent model of community engagement.

From Heritage’s new Community Media Lab in Ypsilanti, Managing Editor Michelle Rogers and her colleagues lead workshops for the community to help people in their community tell their stories more effectively using blogs and social media.

“The main focus of the lab is to teach technology tools and reporting skills to members of the community so they can share their voices and document the important events, traditions and news in their communities in partnership with Heritage Media,” Michelle explained in the blog post linked above.

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Digital First newsrooms will hit the road in mobile community media labs

We’re getting ready to take some of our Digital First Media newsrooms on the road.

Four newsroom vans will roll into neighborhoods in the coming months, loaded with the equipment and people of community engagement projects.

We will launch the Mobile Community Media Lab projects in Connecticut, the San Francisco Bay area, the Twin Cities and York, Pa.

Digital First Media announced plans today for 12 community newsroom projects that will engage our communities in a variety of ways. In addition to the four mobile labs, we will be launching university partnerships, remodeling newsrooms to provide space for the community and planning special projects in our existing space.

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A workshop on digital storytelling, especially liveblogging

I will be leading a digital storytelling workshop for Heritage Media staff and bloggers, with a special emphasis on liveblogging.

As a demonstration, we’ll feed tweets with the #dfmliveblog hashtag into a liveblog.

Here are some storytelling examples I might use:

• York Daily Record’s Finding Their Way Out
• Heritage Media’s tornado coverage
• TBD’s #wheretheyserved
• Las Vegas Sun’s Do No Harm
• ESPN’s A Man Obsessed
• The Center for Public Integrity’s Dangers in the Dust
• Des Moines Register’s Parkersburg tornado map
• NOLA.com’s Last Chance multimedia project
• Startribune.com’s 13 Seconds in August multimedia project
• New York Times’ Faces of the Dead and Washington Post’s Faces of the Fallen
• A data visualization project featured on Visual.ly.
• ARTE’s Prison Valley
• PBS’ America at a Crossroads
• New York Times’ Climbing Kilimanjaro
• Detroit Free Press’ Respect

In the afternoon, I’ll be discussing thinking and working Digital First with another Heritage Media newsroom.

Here are my slides for the digital storytelling workshop:

I don’t use slides for the workshop on thinking and working Digital First, but here are some slides I used to use with that workshop:

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Michigan tornado coverage shows off Heritage journalists’ digital skills

My Digital First Media colleagues at Heritage Media faced a huge breaking news challenge last week when a tornado ripped through Dexter, Mich.

The Heritage staff’s performance illustrates the range of breaking-news techniques that journalists use in covering disasters today. As Managing Editor Michelle Rogers explained in her blog post about the coverage:

As a group of weekly publications in print, it has been an ongoing challenge to get our audience to realize we’re now a daily online. I think the tragedy of the tornado served as a reminder to readers that they don’t have to wait until Thursday to get their local news, and we were happy to oblige, providing breaking news coverage, from news stories, Storify compilations, photo galleries and videos to Tweets and Facebook posts, and SMS texts to email alerts.

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