Reviewing 2014 on my blog

The leading theme on the blog this year was Project Unbolt, which occupied most of my attention the first half of the year. I worked with four Digital First Media newsrooms on their efforts to “unbolt” from their print workflow and culture and produced more than 30 related posts on this blog and more for the INMA Culture Change blog.

The project’s posts drew good traffic, but nowhere near my best traffic of the year. My post introducing Project Unbolt drew more than 3,000 views, and my “manual” linking to all the Project Unbolt posts and my post on how an unbolted newsroom works each drew more than 2,000.

Other notable posts of the year dealt with my professional transition: the closing of Thunderdome by DFM (nearly 4,000 views, my third most-read 2014 post), noting the response on Twitter (more than 2K), taking a new job with LSU’s Manship School of Mass Communication (1,100+) and sharing job-hunting tips (1K+). My farewell to my DFM colleagues was meaningful to me (and to some of them, I hope), but drew fewer than 300 views. A post on preparing for your next job hunt while you’re still working drew just over 400 views.

As in previous years, Twitter was a recurring theme on the blog and one that drew attention. I received nearly 3,000 views for a post noting that editors who aren’t active on Twitter undercut their pleas that their staffs need to innovate. I mentioned Dean Baquet as such an editor and invited him to respond. He was kind enough to respond, warning that social media use could become another bogus “priesthood” for journalism. That post drew more than 7,000 views, my second-most-viewed 2014 post. And it resulted in the busiest day ever for visitors to the blog. A third post on the matter (noting that Lexi Mainland, an editor on the Times interactive desk, had agreed that it’s important to have a top editor active on Twitter) generated another 600 views.

I blogged a fair amount about the New York Times last year, and some of those posts attracted pretty good traffic. An embarrassing Times correction (later named correction of the year) prompted a post about why journalists should link (nearly 2,500 views); a follow-up post about links being a matter of ethics, not just convenience (just over 300); and a later post applauding Patrick LaForge for exhorting his Times colleagues to make better use of links (not even 300).

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Start your day with a laugh: Ivan Lajara’s journalism glossary

Ivan Lajara

You owe yourself a laugh today. So start it by reading Ivan Lajara’s glossary explaining news jargon.

Some highlights for me (many more than this; just read it yourself):

Circulation: An arrow going down.

Conflict of Interest: White House Correspondents Dinner.

Cover Story: The one story that had art.

Editor: Angry White Man.

Freelancer: Reporter without health insurance.

Reefer or Refer: A column by Maureen Dowd.

Speaking of the Maureen Dowd column, start your day with a second laugh: Read Sarah Jeong’s post on four other Times columnists and Malcolm Gladwell writing while high.

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The rough draft of my new blog header

OK, I won’t give you the full witty exchange on Twitter that led up to this, but Ivan Lajara posted the purported “Paint version” of my new blog header:

@ultracasual@jenconnic@stevebuttry beats the Paint version pic.twitter.com/um8eyRtGq0

— Ivan Lajara (@ivanlajara) April 7, 2014

For background, if this is all confusing to you, Gene Weingarten suggested the new blog name, Ivan designed the logo and people gave $725 to the ACES Education Fund to change the name of my blog for a month.

By the way, the fund-raiser is still open, if you want to contribute.

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A new title to my blog: ‘Mmm. Smooth Buttry Goodness’

I struggled to come up with a name for my blog and I’ve changed it several times. But I’ll keep this one for at least a month.

First this blog was “Puttin’ on the Gaz,” back when I was editor of the Cedar Rapids Gazette. Not sure why I settled on that, but I never liked it much. Before long, when I was trying to lead some big changes there, the blog became “Transforming the Gaz.”

When I left Cedar Rapids, I sort of needed to get “Gaz” out of the name, so it became “Pursuing the Complete Community Connection,” a nod to my vision for transforming news organizations but a cumbersome title for a blog.

With the 2010 launch of TBD, I decided on “The Buttry Diary,” working my name into the title as well as the initials of my new organization. Well, Allbritton Communications decided to kill TBD in the cradle, but I kept the name. After all, my name hadn’t changed. And I thought most people wouldn’t notice the initials. And, if they did, I was happy to honor a great news team and a vision that, I’m certain, would have succeeded if we had been given a chance.

I was figuring it would be “The Buttry Diary” indefinitely. Until Gene Weingarten suggested a change:

.stevebuttry should re-name his blog: “Mmm. Smooth Buttry Goodness.”

— Gene Weingarten (@geneweingarten) March 21, 2014

Well, people with my surname don’t make it through junior high without a thick skin. I was Butthead before anyone thought of Beavis. And I was Buttface and Assbush and any number to plays on the part of my name that reminds people of their rear ends. I played along. In my fantasy baseball days, my team was the Kissmy Buttrys (league champions two out of four years before I decided to take my money and run). Posterior plays on my name are so easy to make that few have thought of playing on the dairy sound to my name.

So I decided to turn Gene’s suggestion into a challenge: If people would donate $500 or more to the American Copy Editors Society Education Fund, which provides scholarships for editing students, I would change the name one month for every $1,000 raised.

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Buttrynyms: My self-indulgent attempt to master Tumblr

Tumblr has been an underused instrument in my social media toolbox.

It’s easy to justify ignoring a tool you know is useful, because you have so many tools to use and so little time. But I want to keep learning about social tools and I sort of need to for my job. So it’s always kind of nagged at me that I haven’t done more with Tumblr.

I gave it a try three years ago during the Super Bowl with a Tumblr on trivia about Super Bowl quarterbacks. Somehow that topic caught my fancy back in the 1970s, when I noticed that six of the first eight Super Bowls were won by four different quarterbacks from Alabama (Bart Starr twice and Joe Namath) and Purdue (Len Dawson and Bob Griese twice). So I spent the day of the Super Bowl (maybe the day before, too; I can’t remember) tumbling about Super Bowl quarterback trivia. I don’t think anyone noticed. I got more response to a few tweets this year about quarterback trivia. And besides, that’s kind of a one-day blog. Or at best a couple weeks a year. How could it catch on?

Tumblr works best with visuals and I wasn’t posting photos or gifs of the Super Bowl quarterbacks, just questions. So that was a bust, but I kind of got my feet wet.

I used visuals and was more persistent with my DFM Engagement Tumblr, but again, I saw no sign that people were actually engaging with it or reading it at all. (We’re still engaging; maybe I’ll catch it up sometime and give it another try.)

Colleagues were having success with Tumblr. Ivan Lajara’s News Cat Gifs went viral. Martin Reynolds does a nice job with Rules of Engagement. Buffy Andrews promotes her novels. Zack Harold tumbls his adventures. Mandy Jenkins tumbls her cats and other stuff. But I was pretty much AWOL when it came to Tumblr.

I was amused/flattered by our CEO’s recent reference to me as our newsrooms’ Educator in Chief. Then this week, I was called a honcho and a news futurist blogger (guilty). So I decided to have some self-indulgent Tumblr fun with how the Internet refers to me, noting that I’ve self-inflicted some unusual  titles (with a prod from another CEO).

Please check out Buttrynyms and let me know what you think.

I will try to make it more funny than boastful. I won’t include all of Mimi’s references to me (I make it into her tweets often), though I used a few when I was getting my initial posts up last night.

I welcome your advice. How do I make a Tumblr blog successful? (What is success?) How do I Tumbl better? Where are the best posts with advice for journalists using Tumblr?

I don’t know how often I’ll update (the Internet isn’t talking about me constantly, fortunately). Occasionally I’ll dig up some past references in an attempt to keep it fresh. And maybe I’ll finally master Tumblr.

 

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J-prof’s challenge: Use experience to teach specific lessons, not to bore

A professional journalist’s experience is both essential and dangerous when teaching journalism.

Whether you’re hired as a full-time professor or as an adjunct, your career has given you countless lessons and insights you can share with students. And it’s given you countless irrelevant stories you can bore students with. And the relevance of your lessons is perishable in a swiftly changing marketplace.

This is my fourth post offering advice to Jenn Lord Paluzzi, a Digital First colleague who was hired as an adjunct professor and asked for advice for a first-time journalism professor. I blogged earlier this week about the different ways that people learn and about the types of content you should include in a course. A post by Curt Chandler discussed the importance of examples and of learning how your students use media. I’ll be publishing other posts next week from Kathleen Woodruff Wickham about learning about academia and Pam Fine about grading.

Let’s focus here on how to help students benefit from your experience in the field (which probably is a big reason, if not the sole reason, you got the teaching job). You want to share enough of your experience to give your teaching authority without making the class all about you.

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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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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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What does an engagement editor do? Digital First editors answer

I wrote last week about the work of an engagement editor (or social media editor or some related titles), a fairly new job in lots of Digital First Media newsrooms. Today, I turn the blog over to some of those editors to explain their roles (lightly edited by me):

Karen Workman

Karen Workman of the Oakland Press:

When I became community engagement editor, one of my longtime sources asked me what that meant. This was my response to him:

I care about our audience. I care about engaging them, getting news delivered to them across a variety of platforms, expanding the diversity of voices on our website, making use of their comments and contributions, audience building and in general, making sure we’re fostering that all-important community conversation that is the essence of what we do.

Lisa Yanick-Jonaitis

Lisa Yanick-Jonaitis of the Morning Sun in Mt. Pleasant, Mich.

I find this job to be incredibly exciting so far. I don’t know a journalist who doesn’t say that one of the reasons they love their job is because they get to meet new people and be involved in the community; this job is the ultimate opportunity to be intricately engaged with and inspired by my community. I love the creativity it allows, and I find the “uncharted territories” of a brand-new position motivating and invigorating.

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How to put Facebook Timeline on your branded page

Facebook made Timeline available today for branded pages. My colleagues Mandy Jenkins and Ivan Lajara collaborated on this explainer for how to add Timeline. I guess I need to stop planning to get to Timeline on my page next week.

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A great engagement team: Mandy Jenkins, Martin Reynolds, Ivan Lajara, Dan Petty

I’ve long known that any manager’s success rests with the team working for you. Again, I am fortunate to have a great engagement team.

Mandy Jenkins starts work today as digital projects editor for Digital First Media. In addition, I will be working with Martin G. Reynolds, Ivan Lajara and Dan Petty as regional engagement editors. Each of these journalists brings outstanding experience and skills to the engagement team, and I am excited about working with them.

I was amazed repeatedly by Mandy’s performance at TBD, where we were colleagues. After joining the Journal Register Co. in May, I learned swiftly how widely respected Ivan is throughout the company. Martin and Dan were among the first journalists I met in September after MediaNews became part of Digital First Media, and I quickly came to see what outstanding journalists they are.

The loose organization of the team reflects how Digital First focuses more on working effectively than on silos or organization charts. The regional engagement editors will split their time 50-50 between their regional duties and local duties (for which they will still report to local editors). Mandy will be part of the engagement team, but the digital projects she undertakes will not be limited to engagement. (All four of these editors have skills and experience that go beyond their specific engagement duties, so I anticipate we’ll use them all in many ways to elevate our journalism.)

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Valentine’s Day: A perfect opportunity for community engagement

Update: Buffy Andrews and her colleagues at the York Daily Record will be getting a box of Valentine’s candy soon, winning my Valentine’s engagement project with 365 votes just over 50 percent. But the voting and engagement was strong enough that I’m going to send a second box of candy to the second-place finisher, the Morning Sun in Mt. Pleasant, Mich., which got 283 votes for 39 percent.

Lisa Yanick-Jonaitis tweeted that her newsroom cared most about winning:

https://twitter.com/#!/lisayj_msun/status/169839216140890112

Still, I’m guessing the candy will be consumed.

I also should add that this is not all the Valentine’s engagement that Digital First newsrooms did, just the ones that provided the information for the contest. Delaware County Times mentioned in a Feb. 8 message:

Tonight (Wednesday) on our live-stream ‘Live From the Newsroom’ show, we are assembling our special gastronomic panel to delve into the mysteries of romance for Valentine’s Day, and in particular what food has to do with it. One chef is preparing a rack of lamb and talking about what foods will – and won’t – put you in the mood. … For Valentine’s Day, we are soliciting readers via social media to share the ultimate sign of devotion – a tattoo. Hopefully we’ll have some decent video and stories that take a look at the love stories behind the tattoos.

Reporter Paul Luce elaborated in a Feb. 9 email:

For the Daily Times’ Valentine’s Day Community Engagement Project, we decided to take a fun look at “love tattoos.” Utilizing Facebook and Twitter, we’ve solicited responses from folks who have tattoos of loved ones, or — even better — have had tattoos of loved ones removed.

It has generated quite a buzz on our Facebook page, from which I have gleaned a couple of great sources for interviews for the story. Internet Editor Vince Carey, Assignment Editor Jon Tuleya and myself have been monitoring the Facebook and Twitter pages, using them as interactive tools to converse with readers online — which has been a lot of fun. One reader even went so far as to send us pictures of her tattoos! She has a great story to go along with them.  I’ve also garnered a few more followers to my Twitter account from this process.

In addition, I’ve contacted a laser surgeon who removes thousands of love tattoos each year.

For a video component of the story, we have some videos of a father getting a tattoo of his late son for Valentine’s Day, as well as interviews with the above-mentioned surgeon and others with tattoos of loved ones.

We’re looking to wrap up interviews and video shoots today, and have the project finished by Friday.

I asked Paul for an update Tuesday and didn’t hear back, so I forgot to include it the Delco project. But I looked up the final project to show you that we had more engagement going on than what I included in the contest.

Digital First Media newsrooms have been competing for a box of Valentine’s candy. I offered to send a Priority Mail box stuffed with candy to the newsroom running the best community engagement project centered on the holiday we associate with romance.

Several newsrooms and their communities responded to the challenge with interesting projects. I’d like your help to pick the best one.

Here are the entries, in the order they were submitted (in some cases, I’m combining multiple messages updating the project):

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