Electric Fishwrap

Yellow pages listings are down, so are newspaper revenues. Enter BizFinderNW.com, an online solution to the yellow pages, by the Spokesman Review.

The Spokane newspaper, which continues to win awards for the dead-tree and online divisions, added another trophy to the case with the first prize for innovation from the International Newspaper Marketing Association.

This couldn’t come at a better time (well, except a few years ago. That would’ve been a better time). Read Poynter’s writeup on the award and the S-R.com.

The twist at Spokane’s BizFinderNW.com, is to offer a listing with address, store hours, a map and a photo for free. Businesses can amplify on the listing or buy a display position if they wish. Like most local search ventures, there is room for user comments, though no news content per se.

This is a great way for newspapers to capitalize on community connections and remain afloat while offering advertising at competitive rates. I hope more news organizations take this approach.

Last year Ron Sylvester blogged for his newspaper’s Web site for the murder of a small-town sheriff (EDIT: Added link). I read along as the trial unfolded, and it was incredibly riveting. But sometimes it took a while for blog posts to appear on the Web site due to editing resources.

This time, Sylvester is covering another murder trial. The copy desk said “no more.”

People are going on vacation. We’re short-staffed. There was no time to sort through my updates each hour.

The trial: Ted Burnett is accused of killing Chelsea Brooks, a 14-year-old girl who was nine months pregnant, in June 2006, during a murder-for-hire.

Like any journalist with a passion, he thought around the problem. He started posting updates on Twitter. Usually his paper doesn’t cover jury selection, but this time they did. It was a capital murder trial. He wanted to know who was going to be on the jury.

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Yay!

Richard Hernandez, creator of multimediashooter.com, decided to redo the site. He also created a top 10 list of what he learned from being hacked:

1. A bottle of Jack Daniels doesn’t bring your site back to life.

2. Don’t take it personally. Boy, did I take it personally. “Why me?” “What did I do to deserve this? I was only trying to share with others.” And so on.

3. It’s usually some dumb-ass kids in Canada, with nothing better to do on a Saturday.
[We know who you are James and Max!]

4. It sucks.

5. Don’t be so dramatic. Yeah RIP was a bit strong.

More from the list on the aforementioned link.

For those unfamiliar with MMS.com, check out the notable multimedia section. If you have way too much time on your hands, this is a great place to get lost.

The Spokesman Review is a paper that I’ve been watching closely because of it’s radical shift toward online media. They didn’t disappoint when a recent snowstorm hit the state. (Interstate 90, the main east-west drag, has been closed on and off for almost a week due to avalanche danger.) Among other things, they made a map for residents to post if they needed help or wanted to offer help.

I know from living in a few snowbound areas that communities really pull together to help their immediate neighbors. Even Loveland, Colo., where I used to live and report, had a volunteer snow shoveling squad who would get up in the wee hours and help people on a predetermined list to shovel out. The map brings this to new heights.

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Our paper just bought three audio recorders. In the waning days of 2007, the managing editor walked up to me and handed me the company credit card with orders to buy audio recorders and microphones and not to go too much over $300. I pushed it to $400 and we got some nice stuff. (Edit: I got three Olympus DS-20 for the newsroom.)

But who is going to use them? When I got here I was the only one who recorded and edited audio. After I bought my Olympus DS-40 I sold my two-year-old WS-100 to a coworker, and she’s been playing with it for a couple of months. I don’t know if anything has been put on the Web yet, but she’s learning and so far very enthusiastic about it.

Anyway, the paper has held one audio training to get reporters and photographers used to the new devices. Only two people showed for the first training, a photog and a sports reporter who already has his own recorder. The second training was postponed due to lack of reporters.

Mindy McAdams has some great suggestions on how to get reporters used to new recorders and also the editing process. I’ve been asked to lead the reporters through the learning process in the next to-be-scheduled audio session with the recorders and I think I’ll try to use this tutorial to ease them along.

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I want to have a regular blog at my paper on my beat within a year. So when the Western Washington SPJ chapter had a training on how to blog, I jumped at the chance.

Sounds silly right? You just write stuff down, tell everyone what you think and post something insubstantial every day right?

No, not at all. Geoff Baker, who writes the Mariners Blog for the Seattle Times, and David Postman, who writes Postman on Politics for the Times, said blogging actually takes up a large part of their day.

Postman, the paper’s chief political reporter, said he almost exclusively writes for the blog and occasionally editors will pull something from the blog and put it in the paper with a header of “Exerpts from the blog.” Blogs are not opinion, at least blogs from newspapers should not be, he said.

“I bring the standards of the paper to the blog, not lower my standard to what is out there,” (I cannot remember which one of them said this, my notes are unclear, but I think either one of them could have said it because they had the same message).

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Everyone knows hindsight is 20-20, and I will try my hand at it for my life.

Ideally I would have learned about multimedia sooner, but I don’t think any of the papers online were even doing it in 1995, when I started college. I am certain that nobody at the college level was even thinking of multimedia as a force to tell stories.

But knowing what I know today, I would have taken the following classes:

• Television broadcasting
• Radio broadcasting
• Web development

I would have done what I could to learn about Flash development. The program was created in 1996, a year after I started at Colorado State University.

But technology has changed a lot since I was in college. Here is what students of today need to learn to be reputable — and hireable — journalists.

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The Shelby Star in Cleveland County, N.C. is far ahead of the tech curve as far as most newspapers go. Their new gadget, the Star Car, is an amazing mobile newsroom.

What is the Star Car?
The Star Car is a mobile interactive newsroom. Reporters drive it to wherever something is happening that you need to know about, turn on the equipment, and they can report live online.

You can even track the Star Car and see where it’s been, and there’s an in-dash camera so you can watch the car as it’s on the way to news! How cool is that? How incredible and innovative!

The Wichita Eagle in Kansas also used some technology to blog about a murder trial — live from inside the courtroom. In this incredible post by the technolo-j blog, the reporter explains his work process during the trial.

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Lately I’ve been on a multimedia bent, but I promise that’s not everything I’ll write about.

Monday I went to a training sponsored by Western Washington SPJ about how to create compelling Soundsides presentations. For those not in the know, Soundslides is a flash-based program where you can combine audio and pictures into a melded project.

The talented Casey McNerthney of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer taught the group of us what goes into a great Soundslides.

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To add to yesterday’s post, here’s a bit from Mindy McAdams’s blog about production times. Basically it all hinges on preparing the reporter adequately before the assignment. Know what you want to shoot and shoot very little and then you have less to go through when you’re in edit phase.