Madison Taylor


From the editor's desk

Archive for the 'Coming soon online' Category

Coming Sunday, our online survey (hey, you can win money!)

June 5th, 2013, 11:31 am by

I was sitting at a table on Tuesday during one of two back-to-back meetings. Coffee in one hand, pen in another and mind miles away on a beach somewhere on the North Carolina coast. The subject at the moment was about our website, namely ways to generate content users simply can’t live without.

Well, perhaps it’s not that drastic. Let’s just say we want to provide the kinds of interactive features, stories, videos and photos that people will be interested in enough to come back again and again. Perhaps they’ll even invest in a subscription online.

At this point, I had an epiphany. We didn’t have enough facts at our disposal to make an informed decision about any of this stuff. After all, I said, there is no website at the moment that I return to with any frequency — and absolutely no content short of iTunes that I pay for online.

Ad director Mike Little suggested conducting a quick survey among users at www.thetimesnews.com.

We immediately knew it had to happen.

So we’re asking for your advice, hopefully looking beyond what the little girl states repeatedly on those cute but damned effective AT&T commercials. Yes, we already know you want more.

 

Promotions director Michele Terry compiled a survey with a few points of potential interest listed for our online audience to evaluate — from least interested to most interested. But these items are mainly guesses compiled by a few of us in-house. Look at those as starting points. We also have areas on the survey for users to write their own ideas for cool or useful items that could be future fixtures on our site.

That’s what I’m most interested in seeing — what users actually want or might find helpful. Look for it on Sunday at http://timesnewshosting.com/sections/WeWantToKnow/. People who participate will be in the hunt for a few prizes, including a top gift of a $100 gift card.

Why are we doing this? Well, it’s no secret that newspapers around the nation are going to what we call “paywalls” in our industry. That’s a system in which newspapers charge for content on their websites. All are created with certain variations. The New York Times, for example, allows a certain amount of web visits at no charge. When that maximum is reached, users are shut off until they pay for some level of service sectioned off by day, week, month or year.

Dozens of newspapers around the nation already have paywall formats of some kind, including the nearby Greensboro News & Record and Raleigh News & Observer. Next week, the Washington Post will roll out its paywall.

Our owners, Halifax Media, said last year that paywalls would be coming to its 30-plus newspapers in 2013. Some of our sister publications in Spartanburg, S.C. and Wilmington, have already done so. We will be following suit sometime in the early fall or slightly later. At this point, I’m not sure what the launch date might be.

Also at the moment, we aren’t sure exactly how our pay system will be constructed. What we do know is that our content has to be very good in order to draw paying customers and keep them coming back again and again.

Like I said, we already know we need to offer more. But what do users want more of?

That’s the $100 question.

Premature arrival: It’s a … web site!

September 25th, 2012, 1:38 pm by

The first thing to know when making massive changes in a web site is that stuff happens.

Earlier I posted that Sept. 27 would be the drop-dead date for our site, www.thetimesnews.com to switch over to a hosting mechanism operated by our new owners, Florida-based Halifax Media. Well, the drop-dead date isn’t so drop dead after all.

It’s actually earlier.

Yes, users of www.thetimesnews.com, should notice some changes in our website starting on Wednesday. When, though, is anybody’s guess. I asked that question today and was told “anywhere from six hours to two days.

Heh.

So, starting at around 10:30 a.m. Wednesday  the transformation to a new home for our website begins. But our online audience might not notice any differences for several hours or more. It takes some time to make the switch, according to the technicians overseeing the procedure. I’ll have to take their word for it. When I pursued further explanation I felt my eyes start to glaze over during the response, which is what happens when I’m confronted with highly technical issues such as the balk rule in baseball and the notion of a simultaneous catch in the NFL.

Here are some things to know about the change in the short and long term.

– The website address will remain the same.

– The move is mandated by the change in ownership. In July, the sale of the Times-News and other North Carolina and Florida newspapers owned by Freedom Communications, Inc. to Halifax Media became final. Freedom agreed to house websites for its former properties until the end of September.

– Since the sale to Halifax was finalized in July, offsite technical support personnel have worked in overdrive to get nearly a dozen sites ready before this week’s deadline. Members of the Times-News interactive staff, headed by digital director Roger Creasy, have spent the past three weeks training on the new system and building content features within it. Still, not everything will be ready by the time the site become live.

– Our archives will be incomplete for a few days or even weeks. Interactive and newsroom staff members have posted stories to the new site for the past two weeks to ensure that stories and photos will be available when the new site goes live. But items posted on www.thetimesnews.com last month, last year and beyond won’t be there right away.

– The most visible changes will be in terms of how the site looks and in the navigation. Our most popular features will continue, including the Alamance County jail mugshots and blogs.  We will continue to offer our replica edition. Obituaries will remain under Legacy.com, and  Facebook commenting will remain.

“Our primary content, the content we are producing right now, should all be available and OK,” Creasy said. “We prioritized this in terms of local news, sports, columnists, etc.

“One exception will be blogs. We are still working on them now. They should be complete (Wednesday), probably not at the target launch time, though.”

Some of features that won’t be immediately visible are those hosted by third-party vendors, including classified advertising. Those will be updated after the site goes live. Other features that won’t be available today include:

– Photo contests

– Our Events Calendar

– Reader Photo Hosting

– Some Associated Press content

“The migration of our websites has been a huge undertaking. Many very dedicated folks have committed long hours toward getting this project done,” Creasy said. “Due to circumstances outside our control, the work was compressed into a much shorter amount of time than is normally expected for a project of this magnitude. We completed, or mostly completed, a six-month project in six weeks.

“Things are not perfect. I hope our site visitors will be patient with us. And, that they will let us know of our mistakes, things we missed, and, mostly, what they think.”

– Online readers can contact Creasy by email at rcreasy@thetimesnews.com, online content editor Joe Jurney at jjurney@thetimesnews.com or Taylor at mtaylor@thetimesnews.com.

Don’t hesitate to send us an email. Some things we might get around to right away, but we’ll be keeping a list.

And our fingers crossed.

Thanks in advance for your patience.

 

New! Improved!!! Eventually!!!!!

September 19th, 2012, 7:29 am by

You know how companies roll out something brand new and immediately want to co-brand it as “Improved!” — they always make sure to include the exclamation point by the way.

A screen shot of our beta website under construction. It’s pretty far from finished.

Well, coming soon, www.thetimesnews.com will roll out a new website. And for now I will refrain from adding the obligatory “Improved!” — but I won’t forget exclamation point.

But only for the moment.

Let me explain.

Coming on Sept. 27, come hell, high water, the rapture, basketball-sized hail, a watchable Adam Sandler movie, another win in football by Wake Forest or some other relatively cataclysmic or inconceiveable event, we will unveil our new website. Now usually companies don’t set a hard date for such a thing. We have technical experts in some unknown place put the pieces together under the direction of a team of people here at our office. The process has fits and starts — mostly fits. Some things work, others do not. We test our changes on a beta site. If things don’t appear to be functioning we simply postpone the launch for a day or two. No harm, no foul. We never announced a date anyway.

Not this time.

Our former owners, Freedom Communications, is shutting down the servers that feed the web sites for all of the North Carolina and Florida newspapers it sold to Halifax Media in July. That means offsite techs from Halifax have been in overdrive trying to get nearly a dozen sites up and running by the drop-dead date of Sept. 27 — a time that also happens to be my wedding anniversary. Don’t expect me home for dinner that night, Ro.

For the past couple of weeks our interactive director Roger Creasy has seen his stress level rise to that of a political campaign manager on Election Day. He’s overseeing the transition for our newspapers in the Piedmont and western North Carolina. Many of us have spent as many as eight hours on conference calls in which we have received training for how to place stories, photos and video on our new site.

That part wasn’t too difficult. At the moment we are posting stories on our current site and the one that is a work in progress. We are doing the latter so users will find content there when they call up www.thetimesnews.com on Sept. 27. The only stories there at first will be those posted over the past couple of weeks. Our archive material will be transferred over later. The goal now is to just get the site up and running by the deadline.

That will be challenging enough.

Right now, we’re working in our office to set up the site. Just yesterday I spent two hours on a conference call that was supposed to teach me how to build pages under multiple headings so users can easily navigate and find stories. This traning reminded me of Algebra classes I took in high school — the same classes that nearly doomed me to a lifetime of failure. Actually,  I think I have a better chance of finally understanding Algebraic equations than something called Metadata Driven Publishing Queue.

Anyway, the upshot is this: We’re pretty far behind in putting together our new website and no matter how much we accomplish between now and next week, it will look like an unfinished product. But there is good news. That’s where the “Improved!” part comes in — note use of the exclamation point.

Our new site will offer us greater power and flexibility in-house to make changes and enhancements on the fly. This is a 180 degree difference from our previous ownership. If we wanted to make any changes in our site under Freedom, it might take weeks to accomplish.

So while we might not be exactly perfect on Sept. 27, we will have the ability to alter that almost immediately. It’s something we begged for under our previous owners– autonomy of our website. Now, we’ll get it. I’m reminded of the adage of being careful what you wish for.

Anyway, I’ll keep folks posted here on what will and will not be available when the new site is up. I can say there will be no changes in some services. For example, we will continue to offer our replica edition via Olive. Obituaries will be posted under Legacy.com. Our Info Center won’t change. Facebook commenting will remain.

And if anyone wants to get a look at what our site will sort of look like, check the Wilmington Star News.

And keep us in your thoughts. We need all the positive vibes we can get.

 

Thanks for the company

July 30th, 2012, 10:42 am by

Well, this might make life a little easier.

That was the first selfish thought that crossed my mind late Friday afternoon when the News & Observer in Raleigh posted a story online with this headline: “McClatchy to end unlimited access to web sites.”

I had to chuckle a little once I opened the file. Not only was the item posted late in the day on Friday during the rush to go home for the weekend — an old government / military trick — it buried the lead. Nowhere in the headline did it say News & Observer, newsandobserver.com or even the blast from the past, Nando.

The lead of the story was more clear but still backed into things a little. Here’s what it said:

“McClatchy Co. announced Friday that metered pay walls will be installed at the company’s newspaper web sites, including newsobserver.com and CharlotteObserver.com.”

While it’s clear and to the point, it’s also phrased very much as a message to the online audience that has come to rely on free and unfettered information via sites managed by the News & Observer and Charlotte Observer. The indirect message is this: “Hey, it’s a corporate decision, we’re not doing this ourselves.”

And I understand why it was done that way.

I couple of weeks ago I posted an item here about plans by our company, Halifax Media, to install a paywall system for its 36 newspapers, including the Times-News. Our site, thetimesnews.com, likely won’t begin to charge until sometime next year and all the details aren’t known — but it’s coming.

And we’re not alone. Company executives estimate that by the end of this year, 38 percent of websites operated by newspapers will have a paywall of some kind. Some charge for specific content, others charge based on amount of use and others have an across-the-board subscriber fee. As the number of print customers has declined and web growth exploded, it was probably only a matter of time before newspapers began to look for ways to augment lost circulation revenue.

Still, people have been picking off free content via media web sites for so long, there are bound to be mini-uproars as the dominoes fall. And paywalls are controversial within our own industry. Digital Firsters strongly believe that newspapers have to be creative in finding ways to generate revenue online via advertising and other sources without charging for content, which they contend will ultimately kill audience numbers. They point to Facebook and Google as examples.

But publishers believe that giving away content online has only hastened the demise of print while also destroying a business foundation online that would ensure the future of reporting, photography and videography.

I understand both points of view.

What I do know is that while some web users won’t be surprised by the inevitable changes, others will be irritated beyond belief and will express themselves loudly.

But it’ll be far easier for newspapers like the Times-News to go to a paywall if our larger neighbors do so, too. Look for the News & Observer and Charlotte Observer to make the switch later this year.

Thanks McClatchy.

 

 

 

 

Building the paywall

July 16th, 2012, 3:23 pm by

 

While I was traveling back to North Carolina from vacation late last month I got an email from city editor Brent Lancaster. All it said was this:

“Paywall in about a year and a half.”

Well, that made the scenery in Pennsylvania disappear for a minute or two.

Brent sent the message shortly after attending a meeting with Michael Redding, the CEO of Halifax Media Group — our new owners. The long-pending sale of the Times-News and other North Carolina newspapers formerly owned by Freedom Communications, Inc. had become final while I was visiting Syracuse, N.Y. and Cooperstown, N.Y. Our publisher Paul Mauney kept me up to date as I toured the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Brent obviously did, too.

What Redding told our people was also what he told my friends in Jacksonville, New Bern, Kinston, Gastonia and Shelby, we will be charging for online content and it won’t be very long before it happens.

I wasn’t surprised by the news. Newspapers have been experimenting with so-called “paywalls” for the past couple of years. People in newsrooms have supported charging customers for web content all along. After all, it’s hard to watch the results of a hard day’s work simply be given away for free.

Media companies, though, have been hesitant to do it. So many companies are giving away content and have from the dawn of the Internet. From the start it seemed the best way to build an audience. And Freedom’s interactive division firmly believed that digital publication eliminates delivery costs, which should eliminate the paywall.

But it was a point of contention within the corporation. So there were test sites at some of our newspapers where paywalls in some form were offered. A few followed the New York Times model — up to a certain amount of stories at no cost but a charge thereafter. I heard no conclusive information about what occurred as a result.

We will  know more about what Halifax has in mind after the system goes into place at the company’s flagship newspaper in Daytona, Fla., in October. But Redding told the gathering at our office that it would take shape as a monthly charge for using www.thetimesnews.com.

I know we’ll hear a lot of static about it from our online audience but from a business standpoint it makes sense. The decline in print revenue has decimated newsgathering abilities at nearly every newspaper in the nation. Offering the services of reporters, writers and photographers is a costly endeavor.

We can’t simply give it away anymore — no one can.

What Redding did say was very positive. Halifax, he said, is dedicated to print journalism but also understands the importance of meeting the new habits of readers. It’s made a huge investment. The company owned one newspaper on Jan. 5. Now it owns 36 with a total circulation of 635,000 daily and 752,000 on Sundays.

So they’ve put a lot of eggs in this basket.

“One question I get all the time is: print or digital,” he said. “I think that’s the wrong question. We’re going to be great at all of it.”

If a paywall is going to work, we’ll have to redouble our efforts to provide local content our customers can’t get anywhere else.

I’m for that.

 

 

Wordsthatruntogether

March 31st, 2012, 1:52 pm by

I got a note via email from Vicky Isley Friday with a question about something that’s been a problem on our website for more than a week — and every so often prior to that. Here’s the note.

We subscribe to the Times News hard copy for the sake of my husband, but I almost always read the online version. For months I have noticed that in the online version text runs together as if someone forgot to use the space bar. I have commented on it once and have noticed others commenting on it as well. I don’t know if it’s a font issue or code issue, but I do know that it is EXTREMELY annoying. Can you please investigate and try to find someway to fix it? I thought at first that it was an issue with reading it on an ipad, but have noticed it on the computer screen as well. It is apparent several times in the story about the children’s museum.

MY TAKE: I wrote Vicky back and let her know that we thought this particular problem was solved. It had occurred every so often for a little while but our tech support people in California addressed it, or so we believed.

Then about a week ago our online posting system crashed. Needless to say, when the system was restored, the problem of words running together returned with a vengeance. Believe me, our stories are typed in correctly. But when we copy the text and insert it into the window in our online software, the computer converts certain words into one. Our suspicion in the newsroom is that it has to do with the tagging system the computer program uses to make stories easier to find via search engines. Notice that usually the words that run together are AlamanceCounty or inBurlington, etc. Once again we have in a request for corporate tech support wizards to solve this problem — but they have not as yet.

What we try to do is manually go in and find the erring words and separate them. Sometimes the people who post our stories forget. Sometimes, we just miss a few.

Believe me, we know it’s annoying. I’m hoping it can be repaired soon.

Thanks for your patience.

 

Disappearing comments? Don’t ass-ume the worst

February 20th, 2012, 9:06 am by

Several months ago, last fall in fact, we changed our online commenting format to one operated through Facebook. It was built to perhaps not eliminate but seriously curb posting by online trolls who lie in wait to ambush otherwise intelligent commenters who have legitimate points of view to offer about a story or feature posted on our website, www.thetimesnews.com.

So far, it’s worked pretty well. The number of intellect-numbing and vicious posts have lessened. There are still people who comment under assumed names — but far fewer than before. By all appearances, it seems that most of our regular commenters are doing so under their real names — which fosters less hateful posting. Our online debates seems to be carried on with a little more thought and less rancor than before.

That was our goal.

In the meantime, we expected the number of commenters to decline — severely at first. That also happened. The good news, though, is that our numbers are picking back up. The trolls we lost seem to have been replaced by people who did not wish to comment before because of poor behavior by others.

Now it may be time to revist some housekeeping issues. The first one is adjusting the profanity filter. When we began our new system we kept the settings on the most restrictive level. My feeling at the time was one of zero tolerance. We didn’t want to encourage the kind of activity that was a problem before. As a result, though, some comments are being sent into an area for moderation by people on our staff. Most of the time, the filter flags posts with horrible profanity that shouldn’t appear for public consumption. But sometimes, the filter gets it wrong.

Machines, what can you do?

Example, one of the words it flags is ass. Because ass is seen as a bad string of letters, the computer system will hold up any comment that includes words like class, association, assignment, etc. Obviously, that’s not our intent. There is no reason to flag posts with such words and hold them in cyber prison awaiting parole.

I’m going to speak to our online folks today about altering the setting so this doesn’t continue.

Other problems in the new commenting format are a little trickier to handle. Facebook is set up so friends can see the posts of other friends the quickest. This hierarchy-style system sometimes does cause comments to disappear and reappear for no apparent reason. We can’t alter that. Also, if you block someone on Facebook, you can’t see their posts.

So everyone is clear, we don’t delete posts. The profanity-laden ones go to a place for approval before they appear in public. If a post goes over the line, we can hide it — but not delete it. People who are Facebook friends with an abusive commenter can still see their posts.

We’re still working on the commenting system in hopes of making it an even better forum for people to congregate and talk. I would also encourage people to monitor the stories the Times-News posts on its Facebook page. Several good discussions are going on there among readers who also participate in questions and polls.

 But when it comes to whether comments are deleted by our staff, don’t assume the worst.

Faces in the crowd … that people want to see

February 15th, 2012, 10:23 am by

For three-plus years we tried to get mugshots of people arrested in the community, what I call “The Faces of Crime in Alamance County,” on our website — something many other newspaper sites have managed with little difficulty over the same time period.

Now, we have a large chunk of them and it’s already proved to be the most popular item on www.thetimesnews.com.

Credit goes to our online content editor Joe Jurney who worked in conjunction with Randy Jones at the Alamance County Sheriff’s Office to coordinate a workable means to get the mugs of people housed at the jail in our hands digitally and on our site. We pursued doing this several years ago when Alex Kreitman was our online editor but a lack of technology and know-how proved to be a stumbling point. It was a thing that had to be relatively easy for handlers on both ends to deal with. Actually getting the mugs wasn’t a problem. It’s a public record. But the format and logistics had to be settled.

We tried off and on over the months and years — sometimes we didn’t think about it for months. Joe recently made another effort and within a couple of weeks we had a working system set with the county.

Joe is still working with Burlington and the other municipalities to get the complete set on a daily basis.

The lure of crime mugs for web users is undeniable and measurable. There’s no guesswork here. Online publication eliminates that. For years editors could only surmise what readers might want based on phone calls or other anecdotal information. Telephone psychics had a better track record at success.

Online, though, the figures speak loud and clear.

Last week we recorded 716,300 page views on our website. Normally, we get anywhere from 480,000 to 520,000 a week. And over the past few months the figure has hovered to the lower end, largely due to an end to anonymous commenting. Our page views via mobile apps and smart phones checked in at more than 113,000 — double our highest recorded figure ever in that category.

Here are the top 10 pages for views last week for our site.

Homepage, 126,271
Obituaries, 98,920
Arrests for Feb. 3-5, 65,362
Arrests for Feb. 7, 45,607
Arrests for Feb. 6, 28,100
Arrests for Feb. 9, 26,724
Arrests for Feb. 1, 26,654
Arrests for Feb. 8, 22,054
Arrests for Feb. 2, 17,859
Arrests for Jan. 31, 15,022

By the same token, last week we took a photo gallery of Alamance County’s brightest students participating in the annual Times-News Spelling Bee. It failed to make our top 30. In a perfect world, I’d rather publish more of our top spellers and fewer of our most wanted. I’d also like to note that just because we publish these mugs online doesn’t mean that some of these folks are guilty. It’s one aspect of this feature that makes me a little queasy and in opposition to using it in print.

So much for wanting good news.

The reasons for the popularity vary. Some want to know who they should watch out for in the community, others are interested in what crime people have committed. And some just want to check out the hairstyles and tattoos. No one looks their best after an arrest — except for politicians like John Edwards or Tom DeLay.

Otherwise, we’re also learning a lot about people in the jail. For example, a bunch just decide not to show up for court appearances. They make up a big chunk of the folks in the photo gallery. There are a lot of probation violations, as well. That’s a story we’re working on in light of recent violent crimes attributed to people out on probation.

Anyway, thanks to Joe Jurney and all of the people in the community who are helping provide this information. Pretty soon we’ll have a display page on our site so all the mugs will be displayed in one place. For now, though, look under Latest Slideshows.

When social media works

February 9th, 2012, 6:44 pm by

The other day I posted an item about social media, mainly that it moves too fast and can simply overwhelm  human common sense.

Now here’s the other side

On the same week the social media orchestrated a train wreck in the coverage of the demise of former Penn State coach Joe Paterno, we got a first-hand illustration of what a powerful and immediate information source it can be.

It occurred on Monday when one of advertising reps, Debbie Piland, called to tell me she  witnessed a man falling — she felt he jumped or tumbled — off the overpass at Huffman Mill Road and onto I-85 / 40. The timing of the incident coincided with rush-hour traffic shortly before 5 p.m.

My first thought was to get the news out and quickly so anyone impacted by the looming traffic problem would know. I posted a tweet via Twitter and a short note on the Times-News Facebook page. I also wrote a paragraph and posted it on our website under “Breaking News” and sent a message about it to hundreds of email subscribers to our news alerts.

From there I monitored the phones and obtained information from our reporter Molly McGowan who rushed to the scene. I posted tweets outlining changes in the traffic situation and whatever information we had. Meanwhile, I fielded reader questions on our Facebook page.

In about an hour we had 12 new followers on Twitter, more than 15 “retweets” and several mentions. On Facebook, the original note was shared 13 times with no accompanying link. It contained 19 comments, including a couple from witnesses. We had seven Facebook likes in 40 minutes. In the hours that followed we had 20-plus more.

It was easily our busiest social media day since we dedicated ourselves to it seriously. It was also a clear sign that if we provide information and quickly, readers will respond and interact with us and each other.

Hey, it’s what those experts told us would happen.

Go figure.

 

My first time …

November 17th, 2011, 8:03 pm by

 

People who follow me on Twitter — and my hunch is that it’s about a dozen hearty souls wedged somewhere amid the spamming grocers, ice skating enthusiasts, European boat buiilders, BET executives and a dizzying array of of people who seem to work in what is generously called the adult entertainment industry — may already suspect that something a little unusual has been going on at the Times-News this week. Since Tuesday, most of my posts have involved a series of meetings about a new initiative within our parent company dedicated to our newspapers doing a better job of meeting customers where they seem to hang out most these days.

I’m talking, of course, about social media.

For the most part, we’re looking mainly at Facebook and Twitter — the two largest by far. In fact, Facebook apparently has enough users to be the world’s fourth largest country. it already has its own Hollywood movie, for those who might have forgotten. Hard to believe. 

Yes, a lot of folks get news on those sites first. Even more, Facebook and Twitter are spots where people tend to sit a spell, make comments and communicate. Our emerging philosophy is we must meet them there and, well, play nice while providing content, advertising and customer service.

I’ll post more about this later. It’s fascinating stuff. I’m excited to be a part of it. I’m guessing our staff will as well.

But during our talks this week I had the opportunity to try two online productions for the first time. Neither are things I could be arrested for, at least I don’t think so.

First, my colleague at the Kinston Free Press, Bryan Hanks, asked me to take part in his weekly podcast, which was recorded from my office in beautiful downtown Burlington. Inspired by a view of the ice pop factory, Bryan, the managing editor at the Free Press, a fine blogger and sports fan, asked me questions about, well, our social media seminar and what I thought the changes ahead might mean. He had Jon Dawson, a columnist at the Free Press record the audio by speakerphone. We had it knocked in 10 or 15 minutes. Here’s the link. I hope it’s interesting. And no, you don’t have to tell me I sound like Huckleberry Hound.

 So I cleared that hurdle pretty easily. It’s fair to say, though, that Bryan did the heavy lifting. He’s a gracious host. Thanks, dude.

No. 2 on the first time list was our use of a new online storytelling device. It’s called Storify.

In reality, it’s a story aggregation or “curation” service. Users can pluck content from a variety of online sources and tell stories in new ways with a variety of elements. It’s very cool and not too difficult. City editor Brent Lancaster was at the controls of his laptop computer. With a little guidance from ad director Serena Bowman and myself, we assembled an online story about Elon University’s big upset of the University of South Carolina Tuesday night in Alumni Gym.

Brent assembled the elemennts via Storify — Tweets from fans, a link to our story by Adam Smith, a cell phone video of the end of the game via YouTube, and a link to coverage by ESPN. Here’s the finished product. It took us about 20 minutes to do, tops.

 We’ll be doing a lot more of this kind of thing. We’ll also be meeting more of our readers on Facebook and Twitter.

Come join us. I hate to be lonely.

TML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> Coming Soon Online | Madison Taylor




Local Photo Galleries

See More

Local Videos


Superman NSA

Podcasts

See More
Helping kids survive summer vacation

Summer vacation tips for parents who want their kids to stay mentally and physically active from pediatrician Dr. Dipesh Navsaria, who is also a medical director for Reach Out And Read. Image available: photo of a library program for children.

Panic Room: Episode 5

Boston bombings, Sgt. Slaughter, Twitter, and a bizarre smell in the Panic Room are all topics in this week's podcast.

Panic Room: Episode 4

Lizard people running the world, the faked moon landing, arrested hermits, Facebook fatigue, and Burlington's public transportation

News from the AP

NC News

US News

Dateline Washington

World News

US Politics News

Entertainment News

Featured Classified Ads

 


Things to Do

 
  • Find an Event

POLL

What do you think about Edward Snowden, the man who leaked the U.S.'s secret surveillance program?

Show Results

Local Business Directory

Featured Categories

Today's Obituaries