Throw some community leadership training into the mix

I was recently invited to take part in the annual Sherwood Trust leadership training program:

“This is a skill-based program focused on developing the community leadership capacity of individuals.  The training consists of a structured, 60-hour curriculum that emphasizes an interactive and facilitative style, which draws on the knowledge and skills of the participants as well as the curriculum.”

Curriculum concepts include:

• Social capital and community capacity.
• Personality types and leadership styles.
• Community development models.
• Catalytic leadership model.
• Asset mapping.
• Conflict resolution skills and models for group decision-making.
• Communication strategies.
• Fundraising and volunteer recruitment.

Each year the class selects a community project that they then take from the planning/design process through to completion. I look forward to the hands-on community organizing and hopefully implementing what I learn into some digital projects like the community wiki and our redesign. It’s an opportunity to step away from the laptop and online social networks.

I’m planning on blogging about the experience and hopefully documenting the experience with video starting at the end of January.

Here’s a video clip introducing the program:

Newsroom CMS wish list

Because publishing with our current CMS sometimes feels like typewriting.

I am currently researching CMS vendors for our newspaper. Here I’ve compiled a wish list of features I would like our future CMS to have.

I’m hoping readers will add to this post via the comment section. And if my any item on my list of features needs more details or clarification, I hope that is brought to my attention too. I will update the post with suggestions, etc.

Our current CMS, which is unofficially called Depot, was built by a web developer at our sister newspaper in Yakima, WA. It is built on the Ruby on Rails open-source framework. We decided to go with them after using TownNews for about 10 years. At the time of our switch in late 2009, one of our biggest needs was a paywall. I won’t go into the decision behind the paywall but I will say that we have been able to grow our traffic despite it. I’ll leave a more in-depth analysis of our paywall including hurdles, successes and failures for a later post.

I recently sat in on a webinar with the folks at EllingtonCMS, which is based on the Django framework, and John Hill has volunteered to offer some feedback as he has had some experience with them (thanks John, going to shoot you an email on Monday.) And I will mostly likely ask for a presentation of TownNews’ Blox CMS.

In my following list I will indicate what features EllingtonCMS (E) has at least based on what I took away from the webinar they presented.

I’m hoping to use whatever comments or feedback this post generates to help me and our newspaper make an informed decision. If you’ve got any experience with any of the aforementioned CMS or frameworks, please, please share your thoughts. I also welcome any recommendation for other solutions like WordPress, Drupal and…..

In no particular order of importance:

• mapping/geodata
• tagging
• robust commenting (threaded, voting, etc.) E
• video platform E
• blogging E
• recommended reading lists E
• most read/shared/emailed lists E
• community – registration, avatars, badges, ratings E
• story highlights
• read later/favorite queue
• liveblogging
• social media API integration
• flexible/modular templates E
• data import/data visualization
• email newsletters and SMS alerts E
• mobile and tablet optimization E
• integrated payment system for online/print subscriptions E

 Flickr image by Andrew Taylor.

#WAShooting and the need to have a prepared newsroom

Dave Boardman, executive editor and Sr. V.P. of the Seattle Times Co., stopped by the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin this past week. He now officially oversees our newspaper which basically means that our publisher reports to him in Seattle. This was his first visit in this capacity.

As part of his visit he made a presentation to the U-B newsroom. The topic of his presentation was the Seattle Times coverage of the shooting deaths of 4 Lakewood police officers and the subsequent manhunt for Maurice Clemmons, the suspect behind the shootings. Their coverage was eventually awarded a Pulitzer Prize.

Dave talked about how the Times had a plan – tools, training, leadership and dedication – in place that allowed them to react as soon as the first trickles of information about the shooting came into the sparsely populated newsroom.

Dedication

Dave said that very few calls had to be made to get reporters, photographers and editors into the newsroom. As soon as the news of the shooting hit the public, members of the newsroom began making themselves available.

Leadership

The newsroom leaders responded quickly by creating teams of reporters/editors/photogs to cover the various aspects of the story. One group was tasked the job of getting background information on the suspected murderer. Another teams was directed to compile information on the slain officers. And photographers and videographers hit the streets. Dave himself manned the Twitter feed.

Tools

The obvious one is Twitter. The Seattle Times team quickly settled on a hashtag, #WAShooting, which was soon used by other news organizations and by the general public to reference the Lakewood shooting coverage. Dave talked about how he was on Twitter duty for about 15 hours with the help of an assistant who would quickly verify information that was being disseminated via Twitter. This allowed Dave to clarify and correct misinformation. The ability to do this and to broadcast new details as they became available made a convert of Dave.

Seattle Times also has a very useful intranet site that is accessible by all their employees. It is typically used for inter-company communications but also is used as a way to share files and notes. So during their coverage of the shooting and the manhunt for Clemmons they used the space to share notes and updates. The site also serves as a gateway to a number of searchable databases which were extensively used to identify the slain police officers, Clemmons and his family.

Training

Boardman mentioned that they typically cannot afford to send reporters to training workshops so they often do in-house training – often during lunchtime.

What it all means for the U-B

We need to put a plan in place that will allow us to easily and quickly get informative updates to the community in case of an emergency or breaking news situation. In the recent past, we have relied on Twitter to get update out but unfortunately, those updates have only been visible on Twitter which is of absolutely no use to the vast majority of Walla Wallans who don’t have a Twitter account.

A little over a year ago, there was a police standoff in Walla Walla.  I found myself directly across the street armed with my cell phone (at that point I did not have a smart phone so was only able to post to Twitter via TXT message) and Flip camera. The only people that saw those updates were those in the community that had a Twitter account AND happened to be logged in at that moment AND were also following the U-B Twitter feed. A couple of hours later I was able to edit together a quick video. But that is hardly the kind of breaking news updates that are required and expected by our customers.

We’ve also relied on Facebook but again, despite Facebook’s popularity there are always those without accounts or those that happen to not be connected at a particular time.

I will set up a front page template that incorporates our Twitter feed and possibly some form of liveblogging widget like CoveritLive or ScribbleLive (which we used effectively during the recent mid-term elections.) When the time comes we will be able to easily switch to this template and have live updates appear on  the front page of our website.

In the last couple of years we have held some in-house video training and we may expand it to include mobile and social media reporting tools like Twitter and Facebook.

This will most likely also require our company to purchase some smartphones and/or internet ready netbooks.

First step is to come up with a written plan and ask that upper management sign off on it and make any necessary investments. I’m very confident that it will happen especially after Dave Boardman’s presentation.

We know social media and we must embrace it

Working for a news organization in a small rural town, we have been at the forefront of social media in our small city. We were on Twitter back when there were a total of about 5 results when you did a Twitter search for Walla Walla . And while were weren’t the first company in Walla Walla to jump onto Facebook we were the first to use it as a promotional platform for local businesses and partners.  How many community news organizations can say they have a social media coordinator on staff? And still we find ourselves on the outside looking in when social media workshops are hosted locally.

What to do? Host our own workshop is what to do. In collaboration with the local chamber of commerce we will be hosting an lunch-time workshop presented to local business leaders. I’ll be making the opening presentation and Jeremy Gonzalez will be covering how we are using Facebook, video and Twitter to help connect local audiences with local businesses. I’ll post a follow up after the workshop. What’s that saying? If you can’t join them, beat them? Or at least host a workshop to demonstrate your social media expertise.