The DFMies: Saluting Digital First’s best

One of the highlights of my tenure at Digital First Media has been hosting the annual awards programs.

I don’t have much time to blog about this (during a connection on my flights home), but we had a wonderful time yesterday and honored some truly stellar journalism by my Digital First Media colleagues. If you missed it yesterday, you can catch the Touts and tweets after the fact from the liveblog.

I was surprised and honored, along with my colleagues Jim Brady, Robyn Tomlin and Dan Shorter, with a video, kind words and beautiful keepsakes of our time at Digital First:

Deserving recognition for @jimbradysp@robyntomlin@stevebuttry & Dan Shorter #DFMiespic.twitter.com/m8DROc1vY9

— Karen Workman (@KarenWorkman) April 23, 2014

With the four of us all short-timers, along with two winners, because of the closing of Thunderdome, it could have been awkward. But everyone handled the situation with grace, class and fun. The only comments critical of the closing of Thunderdome came from journalists who didn’t lose their jobs (and we appreciated their kind words).

Karen Workman, winner of the DFMie for SEO headline writing, thanked the company for firing her. She started with DFM’s predecessor at age 19 and 10 years later, she said, was like finally getting kicked out of your parents’ basement to make it on your own. (And she’ll make it. She’s got a great new gig, which I couldn’t announce yesterday, but she’ll announce it soon and her career will continue to soar.

Jessica Glenza was named DFM’s Journalist of the Year (the judging was before the Thunderdome closing) for reporting she did at the Register Citizen before moving to Thunderdome. She was named last month as Journalist of the Year for small-daily newsrooms, and yesterday collected a second plaque as journalist of the year for the whole company. She was entirely gracious in remarks, not mentioning that the company had fired her, but just expressing her joy at being a journalist. She’ll be fine, too. She starts May 12 as a breaking news reporter for Guardian US.

GUYS!! @JessicaGlenza won overall #DFM journalist of the year!! Woot woot! #dfmies #thunderdome4life pic.twitter.com/dALVXUyOU3

— Karen Workman (@KarenWorkman) April 23, 2014

So proud of @JessicaGlenza, named Digital First Media Journalist of the Year last night for work on Torrington rape case at @RegisterCitizen

— Matt DeRienzo (@mattderienzo) April 24, 2014

Congrats to @JessicaGlenza, this year’s Jounalist of the Year at the #DFMies — smart, inspiring and part of my tribe

— Amy Nelson (@AmyPioneerPress) April 24, 2014

Congrats @JessicaGlenza for winning the digital first media journalist of the year. #Minnesota #DFMies

— Shahid Abdul Karim (@Shahid_Akarim) April 24, 2014

Here is #DFMies rock star @jessicaglenza signing @Jasonplotkin‘s fanboy T-shirt pic.twitter.com/w3OM5R11gL

— Brad Jennings (@bradjennings9) April 24, 2014

If you’re looking for a top-flight journalist for your news operation, you need to move quickly because the Thunderdome team is finding new opportunities swiftly. But send me information on your opening and I’ll pass it along to my colleagues.

We had a great team of journalists at Digital First, in Thunderdome and in our newsrooms across the country. We still have a great team, even with Thunderdome closing. I wish all the best to my colleagues, whatever lies ahead. It was great to celebrate our excellence yesterday.

// <!–[CDATA[

!!!! JessicaGlenza”>@JessicaGlenza is Digital First Media’s Journalist of the Year! We are so proud of you, Jessica. http://t.co/UGukiKthws

— Inside Thunderdome (@DFMThunderdome) April 23, 2014

// ]]>

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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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What’s that rumble? Thunderdome, no longer in the distance

Filling one of Thunderdome’s conference rooms for a Thursday meeting (clockwise): Robyn Tomlin, back to camera, Mark Lewis, Julie Westfall, Karen Workman, Chris March, Jim Brady, Mandy Jenkins, Angi Carter, Ryan Teague Beckwith and my empty cupcake wrapper.

Thunderdome is happening, Baby!

I was in our Thunderdome newsroom this week, and we filled a conference room with journalists and creative energy. Our new curation team was working on a long-term project and some daily work. New politics channel manager Ryan Teague Beckwith was brainstorming convention and campaign coverage with the curation team. Thunderdome Editor Robyn Tomlin was interviewing job candidates. We ate too much cheesecake, cupcakes and gourmet chocolates. Digital First Editor-in-Chief Jim Brady and I told funny stories about embarrassing things we’d done. This is feeling like a newsroom.

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News curation ideas from Digital First’s new team

Digital First Media’s curation team starts work full-time today.

They are taking on a new role for our company, curating national content for use by our newsrooms scattered across the country in 18 states and four time zones. I blogged recently with some thoughts about how news curators should work. We also asked candidates for the positions how they envisioned the team working.

Here, with some light editing, are their responses:

Julie Westfall, coming to DFM from the web operation of KPCC public radio in Los Angeles (a former colleague from TBD), will lead the team:

Curation is obviously a huge part of the future, and that’s exciting. Besides that everyone says so, it’s clear that verification, context and new formats for it are the best ways to utilize user-generated content and the huge amount of data and information that flows during breaking, developing and ongoing news. The way most news orgs do this is still slow, clunky, un-user friendly, and not well-distributed, and that means there’s a lot of space for growth and a lot more ways to engage the users who provide the content. 

Viewing content from a curator’s point of view is among the first ways to move into the mobile world. While these people may figure it all out, the article is not the ideal format for consuming breaking/developing news on mobile, but curating and its tools already give us what we need to start getting beyond that on mobile, and having a curation structure in place already rocking and rolling puts an org in a good position to create apps and take advantage of other mobile-friendly, article-busting storytelling innovations as they come along. Or hopefully as we create them! On that note …

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Curation techniques, types and tips

News curators must collect, summarize, make sense, add value, attribute, link, intrigue and entice.

Digital First Media announced today that Julie Westfall will lead our curation team, joined by Angi Carter and Karen Workman.

I am delighted with our selections for this team and look forward to working with them as they explore and demonstrate what a news curation team should be.

Mandy Jenkins introduces the candidates in her blog. Here I will discuss our expectations for those team members as well as for other Digital First journalists who will curate local content.

Successful curation will make sense on its own if you don’t click through to any of the content you are curating, but will entice many people to click through and read or watch more. Finding and presenting the collected content is important, but effective curation boosts the experience of each of the pieces by presenting multiple pieces in a context that enhances your understanding of each piece.

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How journalists and newsrooms can use Pinterest

As Pinterest grows in use, it grows in value to journalists and news organizations.

I don’t pretend that I know all the ways that journalists should use Pinterest. My Digital First Media colleagues and I are discussing and experimenting with this now and many of them are well ahead of me. But I’ve spent the past few months learning, studying and gathering tips and examples from colleagues, which I’ll share here.

Primarily, I would say that news organizations definitely should explore the possibilities of engaging through a social tool that’s growing as fast as Pinterest. Some of your efforts will generate strong engagement and some will fall flat. But when people are spending as much time with a social tool as they do with Pinterest, you should seek to have them spend some of that time with you.

At least for now, Pinterest seems to be most valuable relating to lifestyle coverage, contests, community information and events and photography. I haven’t seen any indication that it’s useful in breaking news coverage (though that could change, or you might have some examples to show how it’s already being used).

Here are ways that I suggest journalists and news organizations consider using 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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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:

@stevebuttry we care less about candy, more about winning 🙂 #journlistshavebigegos

— lisa yanick-jonaitis (@lisayj_msun) February 15, 2012

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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Community internships: Oakland Press helps bloggers develop skills

The Oakland Press is using community internships to help bloggers develop skills in writing and blogging.

Digital First Media newsrooms are experimenting with Community Media Labs where we network with bloggers who are independently providing coverage of their communities. Through the network, we generate more traffic to their blogs and they provide news and commentary on segments of the community that either supplement staff coverage or bring attention to topics that we don’t cover (and in many cases, never covered regularly).

In the Oakland Press internships, Engagement Editor Karen Workman works with the bloggers to provide a meaningful experience. She provided this (lightly edited) overview of the program.

Our blog internships are tailored to meet the needs of individual bloggers.

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Google+ Hangout helps with video interviews

How is your newsroom using Google+ Hangouts?

In recent months, I’ve seen some good examples of Google+ use in some Digital First Media newsrooms. I asked my colleagues to explain what they did and how. Their responses are presented below, with minimal editing. (You’ll note that I’ve been hanging onto these examples quite a while. I’ve had more blog-post ideas than blogging time lately. I hope to catch up in the next few weeks.)

From Karen Workman of the Oakland Press:

The Oakland Press and The Macomb Daily made Michigan history Thursday, Dec. 22, by conducting the first editorial board meeting with a governor by using a Google+ hangout.

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Include a web link in your Twitter or Facebook profile

Sometimes people who are making good use of a social media platform still overlook a basic step or two. Like including a web link in your profile.

Take a few moments to check out your basic profiles on such social tools as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn or About.me. Twitter allows a single link in your profile. Others allow multiple links (I have lots of links in my Google and About.me profiles and still haven’t hit the limit, if there is one).

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