Blogging forward

Looks like we're muddling our way to a couple things web-wise in Santa Cruz (it's been raining nonstop since the conference, so we've had a little time).

We've figured how to promote a Sunday story, how to pop photos into the "latest local scores" hole, worked on some kind of a system for updating the scores each night. I started a blog today (zero views!), and assistant SE Mark Connelly gets going tomorrow. Those are up at santacruzsentinel.com/sports.

The Sentinel site has a forum started, to which we'll add a sports thread, promote it from the sports front, hope to get more action from that in the fall.

Hoping to get some audio posted with a story this week about a local longtime play-by-play guy.

I've met with our web people and talked about several projects to work toward, including databases for calendars and recreation listings, and ultimately scores, standings and stats for local high school leagues. Also plan to get reader/viewer votes for athlete of the year packages at end of the school year.

Met with staff today, most of whom seem at least interested, some enthusiastic about what's possible. Here are my notes, which went out to the staff and were generally talked about today, for what it's worth (feel free to borrow, delete, or laugh at them).

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As we go forward, our focus on internet will continue to be more important to us, more of a service to readers, more important for the company financially, more essential to being relevant and competitive, more fun (and probably more work) for us. I’d encourage everyone to think in terms of how your work can be put to use on the internet, to look at what works for us and what works on other sites, and to learn/train in the technology used for our site.

A few things in the works:
In addition to someday being able to put up agate, to put up photos with stories, and getting parentheses to appear, here are a few things we’re shooting for within the next couple weeks/months, The idea is to focus on the things that have the biggest impact for the least amount of effort.

Live scores, probably the most useful and unique thing we can do now, No one else is doing it. Everyone should know how to update the live scores section, and it should happen every night. Ideally, the slotter updates every score we receive. At a minimum, we should keep the biggest games in mind. For every game meaningful enough for us to staff, reporters should call with halftime updates and final scores. For the very biggest games, we can do more, a live running commentary is possible, as long as we’ve got the internet connection.

How to update scores:
1) From the Sentinel intranet home page, click: Mid Day Update Admin. That takes you to the following site:
http://midday.santacruzsentinel.net/administrator/ (you can access that site from anywhere you’ve got an internet connection).
2) Username: admin; Password: CACRU
3) Under the pull-down menu: Content, choose content managers, then choose ‘latest sports scores,’ then choose ‘latest sports scores items.’ This takes you to a page where you click: “Latest sports scores.”
4) This brings up a dialogue window, where you can edit what appears on the site under “Latest sports scores.” After updating, click “save” icon at top right of the page.

It’s also possible to post photos immediately in the same site:
1) Photographers need to provide a quick 72 dpi image, Lovejoy is always up for doing it, plans to do so on every assignment.
2) From dialogue window, click the ‘edit/modify image’ icon (third from left above the text field)
3) Browse to find the photo, probably in GWIP_sport
4) Click upload, then OK. That takes you back to the original dialogue window. Add text below photo for cutline info.
5) click ‘save’


Blogs. Everyone will get one. That will mean spending a little time, on the subject of your expertise, especially during your season, keeping a running conversation with readers. Ask them questions, ask for advice, for their opinion, point them to interesting links/discussions, let them know what you’re working on, especially talk about issues of the day. I’d say this is a daily, 15-minute, type of activity, but will lead to story suggestions, feedback.

Landing pages - We’ll work on setting up pages for columnists, etc. that will link to their blogs, archives of columns, related articles, etc.
The idea is that if we’re writing about a subject and someone is reading on the web, we should offer that person reasons to stay, explore the site more. Eventually, we’d like to have landing pages for outdoors, Watsonville (possibly other communities/high schools), football, baseball, basketball, other sports, with links to schedules, standings, stats, results, archives and photos. Much like Mbaypreps. Ryan and I will work on a basketball page, and we’ll build other templates from there.

E-mail to readers: At some point, I’ll start sending a daily e-mail to readers about what we’re planning for the days ahead, or what they should check out in today’s edition. I’ll also be able to send e-mail to readers about a breaking story, or a big upset.

Databases:
In time, we’ll work on putting schedules, stats, results, Breaking Away, etc., into databases. This might mean that instead of typing in incopy documents, we’re entering info on web pages, standings, stats hopefully will be updated immediately, then we’ll export to publish that stuff in the paper.

Promos, photo galleries, slideshows are all fairly easily accomplished. Mostly, requests and ideas should go through me. But Kim O’Keefe in back is the person who helps us get all of these things done. My plan is to learn the interface as much as possible, so we can quickly change the look/feel/content of the sports front.

The future:
Coaches input their own scores, especially for community events, lower levels
Readers send in their own photos
Reporters can post audio
Video ... .
Podcasts
Polls
Saxotech ... the new system. They’ll start planning that in June, it’s a fairly long process, and detail-oriented to set up what we want from the sports section front/home page.

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Also, this is funny: