Carl Lavin: The Business of News

Evidence Melts in Ice Sculpture Theft: How Media Groups Can Share Great Stories

Carl Lavin — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 19:39:05 +0000

Drudgereport linked to a CBS Boston report on a Salem Patch story. AOL and HuffingtonPost did not. (Click for a closer view.)

It’s a “Hey, Martha!” story, a story that will make one person at the breakfast table yell out, “Hey, Martha, look at this.” It could go national or global.

If you work for a Gannett, a Scripps, a Patch, a Digital First Media newsroom or some other company with dozens or hundreds of websites, shouldn’t that be a simple matter of sharing with your colleagues?

How do you help your colleagues know about your great work, re-publish it themselves, or link to it?

Midday on Thursday, I noticed that AOL and HuffingtonPost were missing an opportunity to feature work by a Patch writer, a writer from a division of the same company.

The AOL homescreen has dozens of hedlines in rotation, but right now there is nothing pointing to the story of the melted evidence in the ice sculpture caper. There is “Star Tells How She Overcame Bullies” and “Brothers Inherit Collection Worth $2 million” — each pointing to posts from HuffingtonPost. (By the way, would a better hedline be “Estate Leaves Brothers $2 Million in Comic Books”?) The HuffingtonPost home page has a similar assortment. A quick search for “Salem” and “ice” turns up nothing about this Patch story on HuffPost.

One of the greatest connoisseurs of the “Hey, Martha” genre is Matt Drudge. Every day on Drudgereport.com he posts tightly written hedlines that link to big breaking news and political developments, but also a hedline or two pointing to bizarre, funny or just compelling “Hey, Martha” news. On two other sites, Fark.com and Reddit.com, readers submit similar posts. Fark editors pick articles to feature. The Reddit community votes for articles. In both cases, the homepages collect eye-grabbing links and can send tens of thousands of clicks to publishers. Fark and Reddit are not sites for readers who take offense readily or who take sarcasm or hyperbole as literal statements of truth. All three sites are good indicators of what stories are stirring conversation and drawing national audiences.

What interests me is the opportunity gap many publishers face, the gap between the national audience a publisher could collect for its own properties and the audience that it actually does collect. For awhile on Thursday, Drudge linked to a CBS Boston report based on a Salem Patch article (see screenshots). Let’s not debate the merits of the melted evidence story. Assume that a Drudge link, even one that’s up for a short time, is enough verification that this news has national appeal.

Why doesn’t the company that owns Patch, AOL, recognize the value that Drudge sees? Why doesn’t HuffingtonPost, an AOL division that links to almost anything hot, recognize and link to its own company’s original work?

Why does this happen more often than not at other large media chains? Gannett doesn’t have a big portal like AOL, but it does have USAToday.com and the websites of another 80 newspapers.

A Lee paper, the Sioux City Journal, has a story about a chicken McNugget that looks like the portrait of George Washington that is on the quarter. (Yes, you can buy it on eBay.) Should the dozens of other Lee papers each put up a link to it? A quick review of the Lee-owned St. Louis Post-Dispatch site, found nothing. A Gannett paper, the De Moines Register, does have the AP version of the McNugget story. That’s the one featured on Fark this afternoon.

Does any of this matter? Is there something you and your company can do about it?

One proposal I’ve made in conversations starts with Twitter. A media company can decide that editors will use a special hashtag and tweet to notify partner sites about news that could be of compelling interest beyond one market. Editors who think they have something that can go big can tweet the hedline with a company hashtag (#LeeShr #GCIShr). Other editors could have Twitter search set to surface those hashtags and hedlines.

If you have video of Jeremy Lin winning the state basketball championship for his high school team or an article about a high school killing a student’s editorial that accuses administrators of a “pro-Christian” bias there should be a way to let the rest of your company — and the world — know about it.

What works in your shop? Add a comment or send me a note to carllavin@gmail.com.

Pinterest for Journalists: For Notes, Community and Staff

Carl Lavin — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 00:16:03 +0000

A staff directory for your newsroom.

Want to publish a visually appealing directory of local churches, of your staff, of products made in your community? Want to do it very quickly? Pinterest makes that possible. Want ideas on how to use Pinterest to engage readers and create valuable content? Keep reading.

Pinterest boards are web pages that display collections of images. Once you join Pinterest, you can build these boards by selecting, or pinning, images from any web page. You can organize your board around themes in your community, around colors, people, seasons, or collections of objects.

Journalism.co.uk called Pinterest a “virtual bookmarking system that can be used by newsrooms to curate and share news.”

The International Journalists’ Network listed seven ways journalists can use Pinterest, including storyboards, photo displays, and finding trends with the Popular on Pinterest search feature.

The Wall Street Journal used Pinterest to post as-it-happened news of Fashinon Week. The fact that the Journal used Pinterest to cover breaking events drew coverage from Nieman Journalism Lab: WSJ Covers Fashion Week Fashionably.

A young journalist in the United Kingdom, Elena Cresci, who is among the demographic group that uses Pinterest the most, wrote a blog post about Journalism and Pinterest:

The site is an absolute goldmine for lifestyle journalists, but I’m not sure it’s somewhere to find hard news, not yet at least. Here we have a very specific demographic (18-34 year-old women) and it’s one I happen to fit very neatly into, as do Seamless readers. Once I get my next sewing project finished, I’ll pin it to the site myself and see how things pan out from there.

Hard news is winning display space, and not just for Fashion Week coverage. The Mercury News is collecting Bay Area Mug Shots on Pinterest.

Lists or directories work so well with this very visual tool that I expect newsrooms will find even more ways to with with Pinterest. The Mercury News lists staff writers and columnists from its business news staff on another Pinterest board. In Pennsylvania, Buffy Andrews of the York Daily Record, lists the features staff from the Daily Record/Sunday News on a Pinterest board.

As I said in a November post, there is value in bio and contact information about journalists. We will move faster to build strong relationships between our newsrooms and the communities we serve if we use every tool we can to help our communities know about us.

There are 10 million people signed up to use Pinterest and it is growing fast. That’s one reason journalists should be there — audiences are there. Another reason is to cover what your community is doing on Pinterest — to provide guidance and tips to your readers. A third reason is to use the very inviting and simple pinning system to co-create with your audience — to build a board together.

Here are ~~three~~ six ideas any local newsroom can use to engage community members and create compelling content with Pinterest.

1. History. Andrews in York is already far along in using Pinterest to display her own finds and reader submissions on this board showing historic views of York, Pa.

2. Made Here. I took a few minutes yesterday to start answering the question for my hometown of Canton, in Stark County, Ohio: What is made in Stark County? My next step is to invite others in the community to contribute more images.

3. Meet your public officials. We used to run a list of public officials, municipal, state, and federal, with photos and contact information, in zoned weekly sections of The Philadelphia Inquirer when I ran the news departments there. I haven’t seen anyone use Pinterest for this, but if it works for a staff directory, it can also make a handy visual directory of officials. Here’s a sample page from a research group that collected social media profile info on public officials from each state (click for Ohio public officials). Wouldn’t a Pinterest board listing information about the public officials in your area be a service for your community?

After this went live, thanks to everyone who tweeted, shared and pointed to other examples, I collected additions to the list:

4. Artists. Make a board of local artists (by medium, if numbers warrant). Show their work and some profile information. Ask the community to contribute examples.

5. Who’s that? Track down some high school yearbook photos of celebrities in your area — the mayor, the TV news anchor, the high school principal. Make it a contest to ID the photo. You can do the same thing with baby photos. For a local market, it will produce a version of this 17 Magazine feature: Celebrity Yearbook Photos. See this Think Progress board of the school photos of the presidential candidates.

6. Political spending. How can you visualize a level of spending for a political campaign? Think Progress published this board, of campaign spending, visualized: Luxury Hotels Of The Romney Campaign. Did another politician leave the state or the country for a fact-finding trip? A Pinterest board can be used in much the same way to illustrate spending for trips billed to taxpayers. August in Chicago, anyone?

How are you using Pinterest in your reporting? How are others in your newsroom using it? Leave a comment here or send me a note: carllavin@gmail.com.

Social Media Lessons From Muscatine: Start With the Hashtag

Carl Lavin — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 02:23:17 +0000

A global leader’s visit adds a cymbal crash to the rhythm of local news set by vandalism, business openings and wrestling tournaments.

For the editor of The Muscatine Journal, Chris Steinbach, the cymbals come together on Wednesday. That’s when Xi Jinping, the Vice President of China and the man slated to be the country’s next leader, makes a return visit to Muscatine, Iowa. Xi’s first visit, as a junior official, was in 1985.

Steinbach posts regular to his blog, the Editor’s Notebook, where a recent item discussed a delegation of Chinese journalists who asked how The Muscatine Journal planned to cover Xi’s visit:

I told them we focus our coverage as intensely as possible on what happens in our community and often pay little, if any, attention to what happens elsewhere in the state, nation and world.

But in this instance, I said, the world is coming to Muscatine and we would work to cover it as extensively as possible. In fact, news about Mr. Xi’s visit will dominate our news columns from today through Thursday. And we will cover it live Wednesday at muscatinejournal.com and via Twitter and Facebook. You can follow, and join, our coverage via the social media by searching for the hashtag #xiiowa.

Fortunately, Steinbach’s staff had a Twitter training session last week. Stephanie DePasquale of the Quad-City Times, another Lee Enterprises newspaper, told Muscatine reporters that it is important to listen to local residents on Twitter. If a musician tweets about a new CD, “that’s something that we might want to do a feature on,” DePasquale told them in the part of the social media session caught on video.

Training and planning can take care of only so much, of course. One task many large chains don’t seem to do well is to quickly share content that has national appeal. I’ll be watching to see if Lee tries to do that across the scores of media properties it operates. At the very local end, the Muscatine paper, like most newspapers, seems to lack an almanac entry on its own market. What is special about Muscatine? I didn’t quickly find a piece on the Journal’s site that would allow me to skip a visit to an online encyclopedia. (Even the about us page for the Journal went to an error message when I clicked.)

There are many more signs that the Journal staff, led by Steinbach, is doing a lot right. I count these four important steps: 1. starting with the hashtag (reporters seem to be using both #xiiowa and #iowaxi) and the full-scale social media plan, 2. making the newsroom’s local expertise available to visitors, 3. being open with readers about coverage plans through the editor’s blog, and 4. staying focused on what the visit means to Muscatine.

There’s another lesson, for all of us: when a sister-city delegation comes to visit, be gracious to everyone. You never know how important one of those visitors may be 27 years later.

Solving Readers’ Problems, Building Audience: The Fafsa Challenge

Carl Lavin — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 20:00:58 +0000

The process is daunting. Your newsroom can help.

The Chicago City clerk does it: Fafsa Preparation Assistance. A West Virginia foundation does it: College Goal Sunday. Kentucky did it in 19 towns: Sun., Jan. 29, College Goal Sunday.

A newspaper might run an announcement about a workshop, in Muskegon MI, Reading PA or Knoxville TN.

Why not organize a College Financial Aid workshop in your community? You could organize a virtual workshop, soliciting questions on Facebook, Twitter, through your email newsletter and on your website and providing answers from local experts. With a little more work, you could also organize a real-life workshop.

You may be publshing editorials, op-eds and letters about the rising costs of college, a trend Jordan Weissmann at The Atlantic labled a “surge of tuition rates and student debt that, for many Americans, is threatening to turn higher education into an unaffordable luxury.”

A reader-focused media company can do more than that.

Some editors may be asking: is this our job — to help families pay for college? Think of a related question: is it our job to provide a resource where members of our community can find information they need to solve their most pressing problems?

Newsrooms deepen community engagement by providing a platform for community voices, by providing information that leads to solutions for community problems and by convening like-minded groups to exchange news and ideas. Would a workshop fit that mission?

In Torrington CT and Winnipeg, Manitoba, newsrooms are opening their doors, inviting the community into the room. The Nonprofit Journalism Hub recently examined these two initiatives in an article: News Cafes and Open Newsrooms.

The Winnipeg Free Press News Cafe wants to find a way to reconnect with a younger demographic as well as become more transparent and accessible to the public. The Register Citizen Open Newsroom Cafe wants to help the community become more involved in the journalism process and let the public use the open newsroom space as a community center for gatherings, discussions, and educational opportunities.

Connect to younger people? Provide educational opportunities? Strengthen communities? What better way than to help families new to the process learn to conquer the daunting forms involved in paying for college.

The basic steps for either a virtual or real-life workshop include: announce the event, find a local expert, announce the event, provide a resource box of links in print and online, announce the event, tell families what they have to provide (a W-2, other financial information), announce the event.

For the offline workshop, you need a room, a way to make sure coffee and snacks are available, a person who will be responsible for stocking the room with paper, pens, pencils, and, if possible, an available copying machine and scanner.

In either case, the project is also a way to generate plenty of content — frequently asked questions, profiles of local experts, list of deadlines, process graphic, success stories of families that have reaped the benefit of completing the application, videos.

Keep a list of all the names, contact information and what your newsroom learned. In 11 and a half months, it will make it easier to do all over again.

10 Lessons for Newsrooms: On Accuracy and Apologies

Carl Lavin — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 15:48:35 +0000

It’s easy to point a finger at a student news site that published inaccurate information. It’s humbling to see the managing editor there take responsibility and resign. It’s harder for the pros who run established newsrooms to look in the mirror and acknowledge where we’ve made mistakes. Harder still to share those lessons with our staffs and our community. Editors who takes those steps, however, build trust with readers. There will be time this coming week to carefully review what happened in your newsroom on Saturday evening, what might have been done differently, where you fell short and where you hit the mark.

Jeff Sonderman at Poynter has a good overview of the original error and correction about Joe Paterno’s condition. This post is about the second ring of error, the newsrooms that repeated the inaccurate information. There were many.

As I watched the error and the correct information spread across my Twitter and Facebook feeds and on a range of news sites, I saw problems along 10 decision points, five that came before a news organization published the first, inaccurate information and five more after it was published. In the days ahead, others will describe their own lessons learned. I offer this in the hope that it will inspire some thoughtful reflection — and improved newsroom procedures.

10 Errors, 10 Lessons: What Not to do in Your Newsroom

When You Think You Are Right

1. Limit sourcing. If one outlet reports a development, you have a choice. You can run with that or you can pause a beat and see what others are also saying. On a national story with several established authoritative channels of information (beat writers closest to the topic, family members who tweet) there are many choices.

2. Omit attribution. In the Paterno case, two national news organizations saw the original false report from Onward State and repeated it without attribution or without referencing other possible sources of information. Attribution to what you are reporting is only half the job. A newsroom can convey a signal of caution by reporting and attributing what it does not know. For example: While one media outlet in State College has reported this, nothing has come from the hospital or family members since a mid-afternoon statement.

3. Fail to link. If your reporting is based on a published account, link to it. If it is based on documents from officials that are online, link. Readers are smart. Many of them will follow the link and judge for themselves. Even more of them will come to trust a newsroom that shows its work.

4. Exaggerate. When three national organizations repeat what one student outlet publishes, it may appear that there are many news organizations reporting a development. Careful reading of what is published, however, may show that there is still only one outlet stating that it has independent information. The other outlets added nothing, but merely repeated what they saw. The word “source” is so general as to never be useful. We learned that again on Saturday evening. To many readers, a source suggests someone with direct knowledge. One news outlet reporting what another outlet published does not equal two sources. Finally, the word “confirmed” does not mean “we read it twice.” Combine exaggerations of “multiple” “source” and “confirmed” and you end up with this too-typical statement: “Multiple sources are confirming that forrner Penn State football coach Joe Paterno died today at the age of 85.” (from @TimesHeraldPA)

5. Stop reporting. If you do everything right to this point, you will have told your readers that there is an unconfirmed report of an important development and that other outlets or people who normally have timely information are silent. Many newsrooms went far beyond this, and reported as fact what the student newsroom was saying. In all cases, this is not the time to slow down. It is the time to renew your reporting efforts, to redouble the work of looking for more information, and for telling your community what work you are doing. (Example: We are calling the family and the hospital. We are checking with reporters in State College.)

When You Know You Are Wrong

6. Stay Narrow. At the first indication you may be wrong, broaden your search for accurate information. The indication may be silence (Example: AP doesn’t have this). It may be a tweet from an authority: @sganim, the Patriot-News reporter who broke the child-sex scandal story, @MarkCViera, a sports writer, and @ScottPaterno, one of Joe Paterno’s son, each tweeted warnings within about 15 minutes of the publication of the inaccurate information. When you realize there is a strong chance you have published information that is wrong, go public with the question. Extend your reporting. Look for more and varied sources.

7. Refuse to Acknowledge the error. Here’s where the student site, Onward State, showed up the pros. The managing editor published a letter acknowledging the error, taking full responsibility. He also resigned. Many professional outlets did not even take the first step. A typical flow was 1. “Paterno dead,” 2. “Family disputes report,” 3. “Paterno in grave condition.” A better way would be a message after 2. — “We were wrong.” One example, from a newspaper’s Facebook page.

8. Keep Quiet about your decision making. It may be enough at first to quickly acknowledge an error and to work hard to publish accurate information. Your community will be left with questions, though. Add a few paragraphs, on your site, in an editor’s blog post, on Facebook, about what happened. Do you have an established process for spotting, confirming and publishing information? For correcting inaccurate information? For acknowledging error? Is there a published set of policies? Does each staff member in your newsroom follow established steps — or decide in the moment? Are you making any changes in policies or training?

9. Don’t Apologize. Here’s where we drive a wedge between the newsroom and the audience. CBSSports was on Twitter for three hours with no more information than that the family disputed the CBS report. Not until 12:30 AM, did the @CBSSports Twitter feed post an apology. It’s a simple phrase, but it conveys a depth of feeling. Many outlets had an inaccurate hedline. Very few said, “we are sorry.”

10. Fail to Follow Up. Not long ago, when I made a mistake and tweeted inaccurate information, I tracked down everyone who retweeted it and sent a tweet with correct information and an apology. The tools we have now allow us to do that. Were there 30 comments on an inaccurate Facebook post? Did you have 100 RT’s of an inaccurate tweet? Message each person. Yes, it takes time. Yes, when you individually contact each of those people, you build trust.

Rest in peace, Joe Paterno. The AP has reported that the family says Paterno died today. There will be many lessons from his life and career. These 10 lessons are drawn from my newsroom experience — decades that included my share of errors — and from watching across several hours as a false report of Paterno’s death spread and was debunked.

Suggestions? Do you have an example that shows how you turned this into a lesson in your newsroom? Leave a comment below, or email me carllavin@gmail.com

New Year, New Carl Lavin Blog

Carl Lavin — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 03:02:15 +0000

I’ve switched to Carl Lavin: The Business of News.

TypePad has served me well. WordPress is right for right now.

A core reality of how business works is the idea of creative disruption. The more journalists and others in the media business learn about that force and the opportunities it presents, the better it will be for us and for our communities.

07Newsroom, my Typepad blog, seemed to be focused on the future when I started it in 2006. That’s where I will continue to focus. Many thanks to Austin Lavin for urging me to take this step and to Seth Lavin who did the work on WordPress, including migrating all the old content — both posts and comments. You can also get to the new blog with www.carllavin.com.

Shorter items are on twitter @FromCarl.

See you on and off line.

Thanks for reading.

News About Jobs News, Facebook Tips, Happy Birthday Roanoke

Carl Lavin — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 03:48:38 +0000

Some thoughts and tips for editors, with short urls included to make sharing easier.

Jobless Rate

New unemployment numbers come out on Friday, Dec. 2. Early in the week, economists polled by Reuters said they expect employers to have added 122,000 new jobs, up from the 80,000 jobs added in October. To keep pace with population growth, about 150,000 net new jobs are needed each month.

A positive number on Friday could continue to help push stock prices higher. A worse-than-expected showing can dampen the post-Thanksgiving rally.

Retailers are adding about 600,000 jobs around the country: 9 Companies Hiring for the Holidays – TheStreet http://bit.ly/tHcKVU

Is it too late to land one of those jobs? Roanoke.com published one set of tips in October: BBB Serving Western Virginia advises job seekers to start the search now for holiday employment | SWoCo - roanoke.com http://bit.ly/vYfgwb

You may spark a conversation by asking readers if they have applied for a seasonal job and if they know of any openings.

In January, The New Haven Register caught up with a job-training program and talked to young people hoping to join the workforce. At the end of the year, it makes sense to catch up with some of those same people to find out how they did in 2011. From the archives: New Haven Job Corps Center holds first Career Week (video) – http://bit.ly/rutk6h

Other possible prompts for this week for your Facebook page, Twitter feed and for your site:

Nationally

*Ask for predictions about the unemployment rate at the start of 2012 (Friday, Jan. 6 will be the first jobless report of the new year).
Will it be lower, higher or the same as the current 9.0% unemployment rate?
*What do readers expect a year from now?
Your area
*Ask readers if they know of any company that is hiring, any friend or neighbor who recently started a job, anyone recently let go.
*Ask readers if they know of anyone who started a business in recent months.
*Ask about support groups: is there a person or group who helped you in a recent job search? Do you have a tip for someone looking for a job?

Layoffs

*With December layoffs common at companies balancing the year-end books, ask if readers have holiday layoff stories to share.

* * *

Two Facebook lessons from Roanoke:

Facebook as Tip Line

Good example from the Roanoke Times page on Facebook of a reader passing along a news tip: http://on.fb.me/t0VL5P

Note that the newsroom responded and included the name of a journalist in the response.

Happy Birthday Roanoke Times!

Facebook is for birthdays, and The Roanoke Times has a message about its own 125th birthday on its page: Good morning! Today… http://on.fb.me/syfcM4

Do you know your newspaper’s birthday? Celebrate once a year on Facebook.

If you have a circulation department with a sense of humor, show them the comment thread from the Roanoke birthday message. It provided me a morning smile.

Buy Nothing or Seek Bargains: Ready for Black Friday

Carl Lavin — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 03:34:53 +0000

Tips for editors, short url’s included to promote sharing.

The group that provided the idea for the Occupy Wall Street movement is also taking aim at shopping with an annual promotion for what it calls Buy Nothing Day: | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters http://bit.ly/tTxB7w. This will be the 20th year that the Adbusters group has run its Buy Nothing campaign on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving and an annual festival of sales kicking off the holiday shopping season.

Background on the editors of the Canadian magazine Adbusters: Kalle Lasn and Micah White, the Creators of Occupy Wall Street: The New Yorker http://nyr.kr/tycsF9

Another group of people is also protesting the extraordinary overnight shopping hours and the sales that in some cases will start at 10 PM on Thanksgiving Day. A petition started by one Target worker in Omaha, Neb., now has 130,000 names on it. Many retail workers and their families don’t want their holiday interrupted: Retail backlash over Thanksgiving night openings http://bit.ly/uhqeVt

A recent consumer survey found that most people interviewed said they would think more highly of retailers that give employees the day off on Thursday: | Mainstreet http://bit.ly/szLkT6. Other surveys show that more than 60% of shoppers are already planning a store trip on Black Friday.

Are they remembering the 2008 Long Island crowd that trampled a worker? Wal-Mart Employee Trampled to Death – NYTimes.com http://nyti.ms/vLvR6u What have stores in your area done to avoid a repeat?

Prompts of the day:

*Is someone in your family working on Thanksgiving?

*Should retail employees have Thursday off?

*What is on your Black Friday shopping list?

*How much do you expect to spend on gifts this year? How does that compare to last year?

*How many gifts do you plan to buy online?

Full stats on holiday shopping: Black Friday 2011 – Deals, Tips and Statistics – TheStreet http://bit.ly/uTbmc8

Praising Newspapers, Praising the Newsroom’s Next Generation: Meet Sara Ganim

Carl Lavin — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 03:58:33 +0000

Sara Ganim has a police scanner on her nightstand. She is one of those hard-working Millenials who caught the reporting bug in high school, worked for her college paper, wrote freelance pieces for her hometown paper and was an AP intern. Then she joined a newspaper with a reporting staff that might have reached 10 in the glory days but now numbers about six, the Centre Daily Times. One of the smallest McClatchy newspapers, it is edited by Bob Heisse, a skilled veteran with deep local roots and a side passion for rodeos.

While covering crime for the CDT, Ganim first heard about child sex abuse investigation touching Penn State. Early this year, she moved to the Patriot-News in Harrisburg, a Newhouse paper edited by David Newhouse. She continued to chase down leads, interviewing dozens of sources.In March, Ganim and the Patriot-News broke the story. Her lede: Penn State football legend Jerry Sandusky is the subject of a grand jury investigation into allegations that he indecently assaulted a teenage boy. The national media may not have noticed the developments then, but they certainly would in November, when the charges were filed. By then Ganim’s work showed she knew every detail and had access to family members and others that would keep her readers on top of fast-moving developments.

This morning, Ganim published a step-back piece that went through the entire timeline: Who knew what about Jerry Sandusky?

This is not, however, just the story of a young reporter who worked hard and shifted the axis of power in Pennsylvania, in college football and at a great university. It is also the story of a family-owned media company, Advance, of a second-generation newspaper editor, David Newhouse, of a publisher, John Kirkpatrick, who understands what a newspaper means to a community, and of a newsroom that has the deep local connections and also the courage to keep going no matter what the potential cost to its own reputation. In Manhattan, Advance is Conde Nast — glittery titles, glossy paper, gleaming office tower. To much of the country — in Springfield MA, in Cleveland OH, in New Orleans LA, and in Harrisburg PA, Advance is the local Newhouse paper. This is their moment, a time when that side of the house is in the spotlight.

Penn State had Paterno, Sandusky, Spanier, Curley and Shultz. Penn State also had Sara Ganim. She learned to be a reporter there. Ganim graduated in 2008 with a journalism degree. Follow Ganim on Twitter. Look at her personal website: http://saraganim.com/

The first image is about a charity honoring a former colleague. Look at her “about me” page:

Everything I do, every story I report, is on multiple platforms.

It’s not unusual for me – in a single day – to take photos, shoot and edit video, write copy, update the web, post to Twitter, and package radio stories.

I can tell stories in many ways, but at my core I am simply a reporter.

I have a police scanner on my nightstand. I fall to sleep and wake up to the morning news. I work 60-hour weeks digging and investigating, chatting up sources, and peeling back layers until I find amazing stories.

She has talked to the mothers of Sandusky victims, to a sister. She is everywhere. In my book, she’s earned every journalism accolade we can give her. The cool part is that she did it through hard work, against a hometown mindset that would put many reporters off the trail . Ganim combines old-fashioned dogged reporter the tools of the modern Swiss-Army-knife do-everything reporter.

Oh, if you have a chance, notice the dates on her resume. Last day at Centre Daily Times, Jan. 18. First day at Patriot News, Jan. 20.

There aren’t many heroes in the Penn State story. Sara is my hero.

Is there a Sara Ganim in your newsroom? Send a note about your hero to CarlLavin@gmail.com

or add a comment below.

Finding Value in Identity: Your Identity

Carl Lavin — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 04:31:10 +0000

Readers find our work across the disaggregated web. Those who want to learn more about the newsroom that produced the content or the reporter who wrote it have a hard time. That is often true on a newspaper’s website. It’s more true across the web, but Google is doing something about it. So are two very different aggregation sites: newstransparency.com and muckrack.com.

Example: Alan Rusbridger (Guardian editor) on News Transparency.

Example: Alan Rusbridger on MuckRack.

MuckRack will be launching a new pro version with even more information about individual journalists, information intended to have enough value that PR people will pay a premium for access.

The Google News information will continue to be free. A tiny mug shot with your name can now run with all your articles on Google News. It will link directly to your Google + feed:

Google will begin integrating journalists’ Google-ized identities into Google News » Nieman Journalism Lab http://bit.ly/t2Mhe5

When your staff distributes an article across Twitter, do they use the Twitter handle of the reporter and

of the publication? When you post an article on Facebook, do you link to the Facebook ID of the reporter?

Some journalists raise concerns: how do I keep my private life private? It’s tempting to be blunt in response: you don’t. We do our dance on a public stage, and anything that might be made public someday, will be. It might be a video ambush. Information about you may become the value a digital entrepreneur presents to customers. In any case, newsrooms can either wait for this to happen to us or take the lead and turn the audience’s appetite for more information into a value we provide.

Mallary Jean Tenore studied the way newsrooms present info about individual journalists:

How accessible do journalists really want to be? | Poynter.http://bit.ly/uoGf4O

She identified the elements of an ideal “contact us” page:

A list of staffers’ names, broken down by department.
All staffers’ names would link to a bio that includes their most recent work, email address, phone number and Twitter handle.
Staffers’ bylines on article pages would also link to this bio. (If the bylines don’t link to a bio, then ideally all article pages would include the writer’s email address, phone number and Twitter handle.)

Do a quick audit of your website and of how you present your work across other platforms. Can your audience learn more about you? What else can your newsroom do to make that easier?

Here are some contact pages, from selecteed newsrooms (note: many are not easy to find on the newspaper websites):

York Daily Record

Greensboro News & Record

(N.J) The Record

Cleveland Plain Dealer

(adding more as I get them — send samples to carllavin@gmail.com)