A failure to communicate

The part of Jason Halley's presentation at critique Wednesday that seemed to strike a chord for almost everyone was his direction to communicate better. Complaining about something not happening doesn't solve the problem, he said. Everyone needs to take responsibility for communicating the need, the progress and the delivery of every story and every piece of art.

Communication has always been a problem in newsrooms (except in newsrooms of one), and the lack of communication has actually seemed to get worse as fewer people are in the office at any given time and email and texting have taken the place of face-to-face contact.

Halley's suggestion was to use the phone, and it's a good one. But there can be other systems in place that would help everyone make sure all the elements of a story are available when it's time to post a package to the Web or slap it on a page.

My suggestion is to make a sharable runsheet in Google Drive not unlike the daily assignment board I once used in a TV newsroom. A runsheet for The Orion, though, would include plans for a week or more, rather than a single day. Here's what it might look like (click to make it larger):

The EIC, managing editor, photo editor, web editor, video editor and section editors would all share the spreadsheet and add assignments as they are made. Each day is represented by two columns, one with a story slug and the other with the staffers assigned: reporter/photographer/videographer/artist, etc.

The editors could choose to share the runsheet with members of the staff, with or without the ability to edit it. The advantages would include:
- a visual representation of sparse days for Web content that could be addressed early
- an assumption that stories can be due any day of the week
- instant communication about staffing for each story
- a plan for promoting stories through social media
- a virtual invitation for reporters and photographers (and artists and videographers) to talk to one another about their assignments
- A constantly updated snapshot of what the print paper will have available each week.

One person, probably the managing editor, would be responsible for hiding or deleting the previous day's columns so the current day's schedule is always in the same place, on the left side of the screen.

I think if everyone on staff would check a runsheet like this at least once a day, a lot of the communication that isn't happening could start happening. Worth a try?

Webcast gets closer to perfection

The almost-daily webcast at theorion.com really didn't miss a beat during the transition from fall to spring semester despite an almost-complete staff turnover. It's getting closer to what I'd like to see day in and day out.

This morning, the 'cast had a classic story line-up -- breaking news, sports interview, weather report -- tied up in a neat 2-minute, 20-second package. Production values were excellent! The sound and lighting problems that marred some of the shows earlier in the semester have been cleaned up, and anchor Lacey Vaughn and weather reporter Allison Weeks have learned to relax and present a comfortable and conversational report.

Annie Maize's energy and preparation have resulted
in professional sports reports on the webcast.

Annie Maize's softball team interview combined good questions, good pacing and good use of stills as b-roll to present a professional package. And I can almost feel Annie's energy coming through my computer screen!

It's clear to everyone who has been watching the webcast video editor Nick Kinoshita and his group have put a lot of effort into shaping up the show. I like the odds that they'll be able to continue to produce a consistently excellent report every day.

Two suggestions:
- Simplify the writing to make it more conversational and easier to understand. A broadcast story should not sound like the same story in print. (I wrote a how-to about this earlier this year.)
- Have video or at least photos for every story. Think how much stronger this morning's lead piece about the fires on Sixth Street would have been if viewers could have seen images of burned couches and porches.

And the winners are...

The features section turned in the names of 111 people they convinced to download the new Orion app this month. The staff gathered at Woodstock's on Saturday to collect their prize: a pizza party. They are (from left) Section Editor Katrina Cameron, Nicole D'Souza, Chantal Richards, Christine Lee, Cierra Goldstein, Liz Bowen and Zach Coyle.  

On pace for a Pacemaker?

The 2012 Pacemaker contest book arrived in the mail last week and it didn't have shots of The Orion or theorion.com on the pages that showed the winners. Both were nominated for Pacemakers (an honor in itself), but not making the winners circle got me thinking about what the paper and website need to do to get back there.

Helpfully, the Pacemaker judges provided some general comments about this year's winners at the beginning of the online section that can be used as a guide. I've converted their comments into a checklist:

__  Recognizes the importance of a newsy website
__  Combines timeliness with strong writing
__  Does not simply reflect the print newspaper's content and publication schedule
__  Provides web-based content such as liveblogs or video
__  Feeds tweets into the website (the most consistent example of truly digital content)
__  Has clear writing
__  Has strong photography
__  Has clean design
__  Engages the audience (one website had 48 comments on a particular story).

I think most Orion staffers would agree this year's theorion.com can put checks next to a lot more of those items than last year's could.

Still, I'd like to suggest that editors (and not just the online editor) should print this list and tape it to their computer monitors. That way, they can be thinking all the time about how to keep pushing theorion.com toward excellence.

A word (or two) about headlines

As more stories are being published on theorion.com before they're published in the paper, I'm noticing that the percentage of Web-friendly headlines is increasing at the same time.

By Web-friendly, I mean headlines that will direct someone using a search engine to a story that matches the keywords in the headline. Someone searching for a story that includes information about Gov. Jerry Brown, for example, will probably type Gov. and Jerry and Brown into Google or Yahoo! or Dogpile. If the headline on a story includes those three words, the more likely it is to show up near the top of the search results along with a link to story.

The more good keywords a headline contains, the more likely it is that a searcher will find his or her way to the story under that headline.

Often, that means that a headline written to match space requirements in the paper newspaper or that's built around a pun or a play on words is a bad headline for the Web (search engines really have no sense of humor). That should also mean that editors who are putting a story that has already been published in the paper should rewrite the headline to make it Web friendly.

Weekend reporters and editors step it up

Lots of compliments all around for theorion.com's reporting this weekend, especially the sports staff, which stepped things up to another level with its game coverage.

The most fun and satisfying effort for me were the dual Twitter posts at the end of the men's basketball team's game against UC San Diego, which the Wildcats won on a last-second three-point basket.

Beat reporter Brett Appley captured the excitement on the court with his Tweets, and Online Editor Dan Reidel chimed in by using the Orion sports @-tag to supply additional details in the closing second of the game. Brett did a really nice job, then, of describing the unbelievable finish in his game story.

In addition, Price Peterson posted same-day stories about the rugby and softball games, and Emily Duran pitched in with her coverage of the baseball team's opening weekend series sweep.

Other good moments this weekend:
• Capturing Chico State's version of the Harlem Shake in both video and still photos (including an especially good mini-slide show by Brett Edwards).
• Terrific action shots of the men's rugby match, again by Brett.
• Nice review (by Zach Coyle) and photos (Meghan Silva) of Saturday's performance of "The Love Seat Diaries" posted on Sunday.

As a bonus, all three were smartly featured in the photo rotator on theorion.com home page.

Decisions, decisions: Editing video stories

I was so pleased to see a video piece on the webcast this morning about what Chico State's response would be if a Virginia Tech- or Sandy Hook-type shooting happened on campus. The Huffington Post just ran a story that says one-in-four campus police departments report they aren't equipped to handle a similar shooting.

So the webcast video hits just the right note in its third paragraph by asking: "But how prepared is our school?"

The rest of the story, though, wasn't written very effectively, mostly because it was longer than it needed to be and didn't have the video footage it needed to tell the story well.

Here's the script (as I was able to transcribe it from the video):

1:10

Recent shootings across the nation have struck fear in schools everywhere.

The Cross-Cultural Leadership Center held an open session about gun control last week here in Chico.

But how prepared is our school?

(University Police Chief Robyn Hearn super)
IQ (:22): “You’ve got something going on inside a building…

OQ (:47): “…in the event of an emergency.”

For the last three years, Chico State campus has implemented an emergency P-A system that consists of 30 loudspeakers that can alert students and staff in case of an emergency anywhere on campus.

U-P-D has more than one training session each year in different buildings around campus, and also the Chico State campus emergency response team consists of 20 volunteers from Chico State faculty and staff.

They’re certified in C-P-R and First Aid in the chances that there’s an emergency.

You can read more on this story tomorrow in this week’s edition of The Orion.

The story violates the number-one rule about writing for broadcast: keep it simple. Viewers need to understand a radio or TV story the first time they hear it, so ruthlessly trimming copy to a story's bare essentials becomes essential.

In theorion.com story, the writer and producer needed to be a little more ruthless. Here are some changes that would have made it more effective:

- The first sentence could be streamlined just a little to say "Recent shootings have struck fear in schools across the nation."
- The first bit of non-essential detail is the second paragraph, a meeting held last week that isn't directly related to the point of the story: how prepared Chico State is for a campus shooting incident. It could be replaced by something more pertinent (the Huffington Post statistic would have worked) or been dropped altogether, with the key sentence adding the "where": Is Chico State prepared for a similar tragedy?
- At this point, I'd have moved the Hearne sound bite later so the information about the loudspeaker system could introduce it: Over the past three years, the university has installed an emergency P-A system (video of the speakers here). Thirty loudspeakers can alert students, faculty and staff to an emergency anywhere on campus.
- That would be followed by the most essential part of the Hearne bite: what people would hear and when. For me, it would start with (:29) "It might say something like...." and end with (:43) "..right now." At 14 seconds, the actuality from Hearne gives the viewer an expert who supplies important information about what would happen in an emergency without unnecessary context.
- The rest of the story can be summed up in a sentence and then superimposed as bullet points over a still photo of the bell tower.
Chief Hearne says:
     • Campus police also offer emergency training once a year
    and
     • Faculty and staff volunteers trained in C-P-R and First Aid are available in an emergency.

After adding "(A) recent report shows about a quarter of university police departments in the U-S aren't ready for an armed attack" after the lead, the story clocks in at 46 seconds, about 24 seconds shorter than theorion.com version and much clearer.

The only thing missing for me, then, is a close that says something about how effective or ineffective these preparations might prove.