Now that our Web site is (relatively) stable, it’s time for me to document everything I have done for the generations to come.

I took to setting up a wiki not only for this purpose, but for a few other collaborative tasks as well. I think most organizations could benefit from an environment like this, especially student newspapers where staff members have varying class schedules and may never all be in the same room at the same time. Oh yeah, and there is that whole turnover thing.

If you also decide to go this route, here are a few things you can include to make your job easier:

• Writer’s guides
• Style Guide
• Common source lists
• Staff contact information
• Staff Class schedules
• Job descriptions and advice to pass down to the next holder of the position.
• Tutorials and guide for technical tasks, like uploading soundslides to your Web site
• Workflow diagrams
• Event calendar (or at least the link to one)
• Common files such as logos, templates, and house ads
• Set up a repository for ads to be dropped in the paper
• Where in the office to find X
• Instructions on how to renew your domain and other tasks that may be forgotten in the transition to a new staff
• Guides on how to edit the actual wiki
• Contact information for your business partners such as printers and common advertisers
• Links to web site statistics
• Links to every login page needed
• Links to useful Web sites
• Store all of your paper’s “greatest hits” for examples for new writers
• Contact info for people you need to know such as advisers, business managers, etc…
• Services used by your paper such as Flickr, Twitter, etc…
• Prominent people in the community and their contact information

Hope that got the juices flowin’! Let me know if I totally missed something.

Fresh off of Nashville, members of The Temple News will be attending the College Media Advisers conference in New York City this weekend.

My adviser John DiCarlo and I have been asked to present on the topic of “getting the most out of your newspaper’s Web site” on Sunday at noon. This is admittedly a very broad topic, but I plan to bombard the attending advisers with practical, not abstract, advice. For example I’ll say “heres a tool to use for slideshows” before something like “embrace multimedia”.

Below is a list of things I have already come up with. I came up with these through my own brainstorming as well as rooting through or recalling blogs I’ve read.

I was wondering what would you add? Are there any resources you and your paper use that I didn’t mention?

• Know ad rates for your competition, this includes blogs
• Your site should enable your staff to easily post video, audio, soundslides, slideshows, pictures, and infographs
• Utilize the Flickr slideshow tool (its free!)
• Start a Facebook page
• Make sure your article page is not a dead end (credit to Ryan for that one)
• Offer an RSS feed for AT LEAST news and sports.
• Use all of your properties to refer each other, i.e. blogs, newspaper, video, the web site etc…
• Make sure your article page title is your headline (and other SEO advice…)
• Publish web comments in the newspaper
• Use the web to promote and make “evergreen” content such as dining guides
• Make sure article pages have a print view
• Take full advantage of tagging systems to lead readers between a columnist’s articles or a series you are running
• Have an “online only” section so readers can see the content they missed
• Have no registration, and have the barriers to comment and interact as low as possible (some may disagree, I know)
• Set up a wiki to add to what my friend Christopher Wink would call “institutional memory”
• Don’t forget that your paper’s Web site is still a Web site and should be crawlable by Google and Google News.
• If you have beats, make them each a section of your site with tags
• Make every byline link to all of the writer’s articles
• Some pictures may be black and white in the paper, put the color version online

This list is evolving as fast as I can write in my notebook.

So what’s missing?

Whenever I travel it’s not so much about the destination, but the people. I always hope to meet an unforgettable character and bring a story home.

Nashville didn’t let me down.

It was there the Center for Innovation in College Media held its 2008 hands on training conference. Most conferences have the students hop from presentation to presentation like sheep, while grabbing pamphlets and paying for overpriced food.

CICM worked differently. On day one, we were given a story topic (or you could choose your own), camera, tripod, iBook, and audio recorder and were sent out into the streets of Nashville to gather the content. The second day we came back and edited. The third day we showed off our work and received awards.

I’m glad the conference took a hands approach, as I hear people talk abstractly about journalism all of the time. It was nice to finally get out there and get our hands dirty.

The Sad Six-Stringer

For our story topic, we were going to do a piece on the fame of Tennessee barbecue. We were going to frame it as three boys from Philly who put down the cheesesteak and tried something new. That was until we spoke to a local, who said BBQ wasn’t really a Nashville thing. This left us searching for a new idea, which we found in Mr. Brent Cunningham.

Cunningham was a street performer who had fallen on hard times. He didn’t have a home, his girlfriend had died, and he seemed to just wander the Nashville streets making friends along the way. In a way, a great story fell into our lap. So Saturday, we took video of him playing as well as conducted an interview. He was a mix of friendly and guarded during the whole process. When I originally approached him to ask for an interview he responded “Man, I’m workin’ here.”

After some cajoling he agreed to speak with us, and slowly opened up. After we were done, my parter, Brian James Kirk, asked him for one more song. He looked straight into the camera and played a seemingly auto-biographical tune about a “Sad Six-Stringer”. We didn’t realize this until we viewed the tape later that night, and it gave me the same chilling feeling I had when Johnny Cash performed “Hurt”. You knew there was an underlying message to the song selection. I regretted not getting more of the story out of him, but brushed it off as Brian and I cleaned up and left to hit the town.

Brian and I eventually settled in at a country bar. We ordered our drinks, talking about our story and how we would approach it. At that moment, I turned to my left, and there sat Brent Cunningham. He recognized us, and began to tell us more stories about how he built the very bar we were drinking on, how he could name every musician and their hometown who was playing that night, and even showed us his autographed picture behind him hanging on the wall.

I had no camera, no tape recorder, and not even a pen. Instead, I asked him questions out of simple curiosity.

The next day Brian and I sat down and put the whole package together. After he made the graphics and wrote the text, I whipped up a Web site and helped edit the video. It took us a few hours, but I present to you our submission. I’m really happy with the way things came out, and I’m glad the CICM gave us the chance to do this.

What did I learn?

I must say the most useful part of the convention is not the tutorials on how to use the equipment or software, but having the industry’s best guide you and critique your work. Seth Gitner, Angela Grant, and Bryan Murley dissected everyone’s videos and offered great advice to everyone. If they can give you a “good job” then it makes you feel a little more confident about taking your skills into the market. They also provided an inside look at some of the more forward thinking papers.

But the key points that were made were:

• You have half a second to get people’s attention in online video, make sure your opening shot is an attention getter
• Cut every 2-4 seconds
• Your equipment WILL mess up, and editing WILL be hard. Deal with it.
• Most videos won’t be longer than two minutes
• We have the opportunity to “take video back” from broadcast
• You must learn to edit quickly
• It’s still about telling stories
• It never snows in Nashville, and when it does, people panic

Another perk was the ability to compare skills with fellow journalists. My favorite videos were:

• Who put the Na in Nashville (a great risk that paid off)
  
• Artsy Cafe picks up diverse crowd
• Sole Man (done by three professors)
• Rocky Top (my pick for best of show)
• Check out all of the rest

There’s something different about being surrounded journalists talking about the state of the business and multimedia. It really got my gears spinning in ways that going to class never did. It also really got me thinking about the economics of a shift to multimedia, but that is another post for another day.

So would I recommend the conference?

Absolutely. To be surrounded by fellow students as well as those in the industry in a working environment was well worth it. I would advise, however, that if you are an adviser, you send students who are just adamantly opposed to the concept of multimedia. This conference forced everyone, regardless of background, to come together and produce a great story.

Many thanks to the CICM and all of the presenters, as well as the students who helped us out. A special thanks to Brent Cunningham who, although will probably never read this, made my trip to Nashville one I won’t soon forget and I wish him all the luck in the world (if you’re bored, listen to one of his songs).