Reformer802 re-design

Thirteen months since its inception, and after a month of re-design effort, I'm ready to re-launch the Reformer802.com landing page (possibly the page that brought you here?).

The new page is more static, featuring automated RSS feeds from the various blogs we've labeled as part of the "community." This allows bloggers to focus on their own blogs instead of promoting each post on their own blog with another post on the Reformer802 home page. (I will admit, I borrowed the concept from several other sites, but tried to give Reformer802 it's own look at the same time.)

I'm attempting to categorize the blogs by theme, and took great effort to retain the page's minimalistic appearance. As the community grows, so to will the list of blogs. Most important, in my view, was creating a page that was dynamic and constantly changed, to make people want to visit and revisit the page to see what's new.

There are still several tweaks to work on in the coming weeks, but I hope this new look leads to new community writers interested in sharing their thoughts and opinions with the general readership.

Livestreaming continues at Reformer offices

Following our recent success with livestreaming, we'll have two more candidates stop by the Reformer offices on Thursday -- Wendy Wilton, candidate for state treasurer; and Emily Peyton, independent candidate for Vermont governor -- to meeting with the editorial board and our political beat writer.

Learning from the past session(s), we'll try some new/different camera angles. I'm also hoping promoting such meetings further in advance will prompt questions from the community. My biggest concern is that while the timing of such meetings -- typical early to mid-afternoon, or late morning -- isn't quite as convenient to members of the community, who are more than likely at jobs at those times. Still, following the livestream the interviews are saved into our YouTube Channel, so people can still benefit from them even if they can't interact.

Coming up next week, Rep. Peter Welch may be stopping by the offices. And several other candidates have left messages to set up meetings. It looks to be a busy month-and-a-half before the November elections!

Experimenting with Storify

Earlier this year, a representative from Digital First visited the Reformer offices to talk about various social media tools. One of those tools was Storify, which day editor Bob Audette has been experimenting with on his blog.

I finally put together an account for the Brattleboro Reformer (www.Storify.com/BrattReformer), and today put together a piece on the Bartonsville Bridge for the website. Storify allows users to bring together various elements from multiple sources to offer readers a multimedia presentation from multiple angles.

Before providing a link to the piece, here's a little background as to its development:

We originally planned to have a reporter on the scene to put together a story, but his car broke down and he missed the event. However, photo editor Zach Stephens did get photos from the ceremony, which we used in print to go with an Associated Press story on Tropical Storm Irene memorial events around the state. (I should mention, for those who don't know, the Bartonsville Bridge was an historic bridge in Rockingham; a resident captured the moment the bridge was swept away by flood waters last summer, and that became one of the more striking images from Irene.)

This morning, Zach told me that he had also shot video from the event, already live on our YouTube channel. That, with the photos, and the video from the flooding ... the pieces started to fall into place for a more substantial online offering. That's where Storify comes in: those above-mentioned elements, plus a few more pieces I tracked down online, and we were able to present the equivalent of story, only not in so many words (pardon the pun).

Check out the finished product here.

Certainly this will not replace traditional reporting, but I do enjoy it as a new way to tell stories to readers, and look forward to it becoming a more regular part of our weekly routine.

(One thought I had was to use it as a weekly online wrap-up, as a sort of editor's picks or week-in-review. We shall see ....)

Special project on Tropical Storm Irene

After about a month of work, a special section I put together for the Reformer's coverage of Tropical Storm Irene and the subsequent floods is live at www.Reformer.com/Irene.

The site is the first time I've been able to incorporate elements from every aspect of news coverage the Reformer is engaged in: there's general reporting (news analyses, features, archive articles, columns, etc.); multimedia (videos and slideshows); and social media (links to Facebook and Pinterest coverage, a Twitter widget). The page will update daily, with new and/or exclusive content.

My hope is to provide readers with a destination point for any and all coverage related to Irene and the floods. Enjoy!

Who says there’s no more jobs in the industry?

A new report from Neiman Journalism Lab today shines a light on the new Digital First Media project Thunderdome. (For those who don't know, DFM is the umbrella under which the Reformer now resides.)

The idea behind Thunderdome, as Adrienne LaFrance puts it, is to "create a new infrastructure that will serve hundreds of local newsrooms still burdened by inefficiencies borne of a bygone era in journalism."

(Read LaFrance's entire piece: "Still without a team in place, Project Thunderdome gets a surprise test drive.")

In short, this means centralizing some similar aspects from the family of newspapers. Why have 50-plus editors in 50-plus newsrooms build a page of national or international news, when you could have one person build one page and share it across the 50-plus newsrooms?

Personally, I think this is a great idea, as it frees up local journalists to focus on local news gathering, production and publication. Of course, the one issue faced with such an idea is that, while a 30- or 40-page large-scale newspaper in an urban market may have a lot of room for that type of shared content, small-scale, small-market newsrooms sometimes struggle with fitting enough outside-the-area news as it is, with so much space dedicated (and rightly so) to local news.

Nonetheless, I wanted to highlight a little more of LaFrance's piece, and encourage everyone to see how the idea behind such a project becomes a valuable tool to all newsrooms.

"Not only are news organizations actually hiring these days, they’re looking to fill new positions. You could, for example, apply to become the first ever SWAT Leader at Project Thunderdome. ... with a slew of new job listings just posted (and more to come), Thunderdome’s day-to-day operations are beginning to take shape.

"The SWAT Leader, I’m told, will be a newsy jack of all trades. Someone who can report, write, edit, and produce. Someone who’s willing to parachute into a faraway town on a moment’s notice. Basically someone who is up for any assignment, and has the skills and enthusiasm to dive in head-first.

"That last part is essential for anyone looking to join the Thunderdome team, which will require a basic startup mentality: Be willing to work, play, try, and fail in eight different ways a day. Then show up to work with a smile, ready to do it all again the next day."

The bulk of the article covers the Colorado theater shooting from earlier this month. While in print we relied on Associated Press' coverage of the tragedy, online we were able to offer unique Digital First content via one of my new favorite online tools: Storify. (See the screencap on this post.)

I'm sure this will be the first of many (potentially exciting) new developments from the Thunderdome project. And, in the end, if it allows us to offer readers better news coverage, either of national, international (have you seen our 2012 Olympics coverage?) or -- most importantly -- local news, then that's all that matters.