Sentinel.com blog

The online team held our first weekly open, informal staff training session Thursday, and it was a big success.

We erased the white board of 2011 newsmakers and posted some pale, inky non-digital suggestions for twitter use:

1. Break news there – use #scsnews to send to our home page
2. Follow people/sources on your beat
3. Be human, interact with your audience
4. Share interesting news from the community
5. Ask for feedback, input on stories you’re working on

With the widget on our home page, article pages, etc., we’d love to see that become a rich multimedia stream that shows what the staff is working on, seeing and hearing, throughout the day.

More importantly, we had one member of the newsroom actually attend the training session: Unlucky Don. He’s unlucky, not because he attended, but because that’s his twitter handle. Assistant City Editor Don Fukui will be letting his followers know about his progress toward winning the lottery on that account. Follow him: @unluckydon.

We consider that a big success – not often any of us get a chance to slow down, stop working and talk about ideas. We’re going to keep doing it. Join us next Thursday at 1 p.m., or schedule your own personal training session. Next on twitter: Dan Coyro.

Also – good reading regarding twitter (and it’s not all about twitter, of course) from the Sentinel’s most followed reporter: @jmpasko96

http://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/tutorials/twitter/

http://www.ajr.org/article.asp?id=4756

Engagement! Twitter is about engagement!

Posted from Santa Cruz, California, United States.

The Sentinel website continued to grow at a strong pace in 2011. Here’s a quick rundown of the year-end statistics:

• We increased page views: 38,168,835 in 2012, up slightly from 38,090,454 in 2010.

In changing commenting systems in late 2010, we no longer required readers to make an extra click to get to story comments. We did away with more than 2.5 million page views because of it, but readers stayed on our pages longer, were more clearly responsible for their comments and our staff was better able to manage the abusive comments and spend more time on making the most of the news.

• We increased unique annual visitors to 5,081,707. That’s up more than 1 million from 4,036,868 in 2010.

We think unique visitors is a better measure than page views in the past year (because the growth is bigger!) and because of the comment change. But data also shows that people are coming to the Sentinel on multiple devices. We launched an e-edition app for iPad in 2011 and we’re launching a news app in 2012.

We also had several big events (the tsunami and Capitola floods) and a couple of viral moments (a story about pot in soda) that brought in a healthy chunk of one-time visitors.

• Through our Brightcove video account, we had 166,529 video plays. On YouTube, we had 519,501.

Video will become a bigger part of everything we do online as it becomes easier to upload, edit and share on mobile devices. We also added a GoPro camera at year’s end, and we hope to do cool things with it. Still seeking daredevils of all sorts to wear the camera.

• We expect to continue to grow and continue to emphasize digital products in 2012.

The Sentinel online staff has added a great producer, Christina Gullickson, and the newsroom staff’s pace of change is accelerating. The company is (still) working on a new content management system that will help us with everything from design to commenting to page creation to print workflow and multi-platform presentations.

Want to get more involved with the Sentinel website? We’ve got internships, a community connections section in development and we’re open to all kinds of collaborations to connect our audience with good ideas around Santa Cruz. Contact us!

Posted from Santa Cruz, California, United States.

On a daily basis, it seems like every member of the news staff is developing new digital skills and tools for reporting, storytelling and sharing.

Copy Desk Chief Brian Pifer opened a twitter account, and is digging into HTML and CSS text books. He’s been styling up stories and pages. His photo posted to twitter of Chris Rene downtown has been one of the most popular among our staffers in the new year.

Pifer, who is always at ease with new tools, programs, software and hardware, also designs pages, manages his staff, is asked to do a million things, and occasionally squeezes in extra time to write about the video game industry and its local connections.

He’s also got a rapidly evolving golf game – demonstrated here at Media Day for the AT&T Pro-Am:

Link of the Day: Digital producer Christina Gullickson gathered up a Storified account of the chatter among Niners fans yesterday. Highly entertaining reading as Niners fans got warmed up, ate, fretted, celebrated, but then suffered a loss just short of the Super Bowl. The good people of Storify posted the account at the top of their home page Sunday night.

Posted from .

We’re going to start using this blog to regularly highlight new things the Sentinel news staff is undertaking to expand its digital audience. We have hit a pace where new things are happening every day.

Longtime, award-winning reporter Jondi Gumz has recently joined twitter: @jondigumz. She’s regularly tweeting interesting news and links on everything from home prices to healthcare and Capitola.

She has tweeted Capitola city council meetings and is building a following, she’s also using the hashtag #scsnews to publish directly to the Sentinel home page and article pages. Great work, @jondigumz!

Posted from Santa Cruz, California, United States.

Recently, we got a rare new piece of gear, but with all the things we’re trying to get done, we haven’t put it to a lot of use.

The gear: A GoPro camera with a variety of straps and snap-on devices that will allow it to go far and wide. We sent it snowboarding in Tahoe on its first trip, which was a learning experience. We’re still trying to get some of the adhesive off of sports editor Julie Jag’s snowboard.

We don’t have a lot of video to show for that trip. Cops reporter and surfer Stephen Baxter has been our next volunteer, and along with his friend Emlyn Stokes captured about 45 seconds of usable footage from their surf trip on New Year’s Day, 2012.

We’re going to keep taking the camera out, until we break it, sink it, lose it, or actually get some cool shots. Here’s our first effort. We’re learning, and we’ll keep adding to this playlist on YouTube. Want to take this camera to a skate park, zip line trip, around the world, or on a motorcycle ride or parachute jump? Let us know. We’re up for it, if you are willing to sign the right waivers.

We’ve made a handful changes to the Sentinel home page this week.

We’ve added a breaking news twitter widget to a fairly prominent position on the right side of the page. We’re encouraging all reporters and editors to break news first on twitter, and to send photos, video and audio links through twitter from the scene of breaking news.

To make a little room for our widget, we’ve reduced the number of stories at the top of the home page. We think this will also make it easier for readers to find the best of our coverage. For more local coverage, including all the stories in today’s news section, see our local news page.

Among other projects, we’re working to build a list of Santa Cruz area bloggers on a wide variety of subjects. We will link out and highlight the best content, no strings attached. Submit your blog or website to the list here.

You may know that MediaNews, the Sentinel’s parent company, is now run by Digital First. This is good news for the website. One of the first moves will be to add a little staff to the online department here at the Sentinel (although everyone on staff contributes in many ways to what appears online). Christina Gullickson will be doubling the size of the Online Team, beginning in January.

For more on what’s ahead and what Digital First means for MediaNews, the Sentinel and as a concept, see this week’s blog posts from Steve Buttry.

• How a Digital First approach guides a journalist’s work
• Digital First journalists: What we value
• 10 ways to think like a Digital First journalist

Posted from Santa Cruz, California, United States.

We were quick to adopt Google+, and like its possibilities, but we were among organization profiles that were quickly dropped.

Google+ added pages yesterday, and the Sentinel is on board. We welcome your ideas about how to put Google+ to best use to help inform readers interested in Santa Cruz County.

Anyone want to see our afternoon news meeting in a hangout?

Posted from Santa Cruz, California, United States.

Our site search is re-indexing after a minor upgrade to the MediaNews content management system MediaNews hardware failure. We’re told this will take 8-12 hours to update, and until then site search is disabled. Thanks for your patience! E-mail tmoore@santacruzsentinel.com if there’s an article you’d like us to find and we’ll do our best to help.

MediaNews note:

Here’s a widget, which we may add elsewhere on our site, ranking the top five most-clicked twitter posts today.

We have lots of discussion about how we use twitter, what we could do differently and better. We talk about how we can be more real-time, more conversational, more informative from the main Sentinel account, and from our reporters.

We tweet headlines and breaking news and we answer questions from followers as soon as possible. Sports reporters are tweeting scores from every game they cover. We posting our best photos and a variety of blog posts.

But we’re taking suggestions for how you’d like to see us use twitter. Good ideas are welcome.

Posted from Santa Cruz, California, United States.

Here are the 10 most viewed stories or pages on the Sentinel website for Monday, Oct. 17, 2011:

1. Santa Cruz Sentinel Photo Contest : 2011 Pets on Parade
2. Head-on crash at Highway 1 and Salinas Road kills two
3. Investigation of shooting death at funeral of another gang member being foiled
4. Young man hurt in solo crash on Freedom Boulevard
5. Family, law enforcement still fighting for peace two years after gang, surf cultures collide
6. Freedom man ID’d as driver of car that fled CHP causing double fatal accident on Highway
7. Two arrested after Pajaro robbery
8. Northbound Highway 1 at Salinas Road reopened at 9 a.m., per CHP
9. Cops and Courts, Oct. 17, 2011: Watsonville produce market robbed
10. Neighbor foils catalytic converter theft

Posted from Santa Cruz, California, United States.