Sentinel.com blog

We’ve been working on a several new items this week.

You’ve likely had a chance to check out the back to school series, which started today and continues through the weekend. It’s a good look at the challenges facing area schools in the wake of $43 million in cuts the past two years. Check out some of the photos and an interview with Santa Cruz City Schools Superintendent Gary Bloom in this slide show.

The high school football jamboree will be held tonight. We’ve updated our football page, set up a Santa Cruz County football twitter account, launched a live scores window and we’ve added a Santa Cruz County football record book. Did you have a big game back in the day? Make sure your name is in our database. Sentinel reporter Jim Seimas did all the legwork and research. (Reach out and tell him it’d be OK to update his blog for the first time in more than a month).

Jim did shoot a little video for us last week. We posted the Aptos moms taking part in football scrimmage yesterday.

The other thing we’ve been preparing is a Facebook commenting widget. The idea is to see what kind of response we get to article commenting using Facebook. Some news organizations (CNN/Money, the Huffington Post, Tech Crunch) have found that Facebook users are a little less anonymous, a little more responsible to friends and family. And by integrating article comments and Facebook, we hope to expand our social media presence, reaching friends of friends who might not otherwise see what we have to offer. It might be nice if the tone of our comments thread was a little more constructive, too. Let us know what you think.

This photo just in – a 400 pound pumpkin grown in Watsonville by Joe Abellera, ripening nicely for the Santa Cruz County Fair.

(Photo contributed by Paul Furlong)

Sentinel arts and entertainment reporter Wallace Baine is working on a story about the Aug. 19 death of Michael Been, lead singer of the Santa Cruz band, ‘The Call.’

According to the Call’s official website, Been died Aug. 19 in Belgium.

Sign or view a memorial guest book for Michael Been.

It’s Friday night, and we know we’re a little early, but we’re in training for Santa Cruz County high school football season.

Longtime Sentinel sports reporter Jim Seimas is busy attending practices and talking to coaches.

Today, the online team dove deep into Seimas’ statistical archive.

Seimas has been keeping meticulous records and they’ve been used in a wide variety of ways over the years, but the online team thinks these stats need to be liberated.

So they’re on the way to a Sentinel.com sports page near you. Here’s a sample of what we’ve got in mind:

These aren’t official, haven’t been double-checked and will be updated over time (let us know if you see glitches), but we’ve got a ton of information to share.

When the season begins, the sports department plans to have live scoring updates, photos, slide shows, occasional video and all the stats and stories. We also plan to open a season-long scoreboard. Fans, coaches, team managers and bench-warmers are welcome to text updates through twitter (#sccfb) – or to log on to the site and share photos, observations, good-natured taunting, encouragement and occasional debate.

The Sentinel reporting staff has been working on a handful of shark stories this summer.

This week, our Fish Rap columnist Allen Bushnell relayed a report on a kayaker who went face-to-face with a shark. It wound up our top story on the website for three days.

Today we had a short story on an abundance of shark-chewed otter remains washing up on beaches of Norther California.

Earlier this year, Capitola beaches were closed after several shark sightings.

Today, we received this photo from Tracy McAvoy:

We’re checking on the photo and the story, but Tracy said the shark was found Thursday at Hidden Beach Park, alive, and that his dog was curious about the creature. Stay tuned for a few more details.

Here are a few more links to Sentinel shark stories:

If you’re a fan of sharks, you’ve probably already watched Chuck Patterson’s video from San Onofre, ‘Me my shark and I,’ posted last week. (It’s received nearly 2 million views this week):

Me my Shark and I from Chuck Patterson on Vimeo.

Recording artist Lady Gaga performs during a stop of The Monster Ball Tour at the MGM Grand Garden Arena Aug. 13 in Las Vegas. The singer is touring in support of the album, ‘The Fame Monster. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

Tomorrow’s Guide will include Sentinel reporter J.M. Brown‘s review of San Jose Lady Gaga appearances.

The Guide runs every Thursday in the Sentinel print edition, featuring our staff’s take on art, music, culture and all things entertainment related.

The Lady Gaga review will go live on sentinel.com at around 2 a.m. Thursday. Here’s an excerpt:

“I was prepared for a spectacle and wasn’t disappointed, but only half of the entertainment came from the stage. Gaga devotees arrived in their masquerade-ball best, from the masked to the feathered, to the peek-a-boo and the monster-like — or as Gaga simply put it, ‘free.’”

Today’s Sentinel editorial points your attention to recent investigations about what companies are doing with online information.

If you plan to spend much time at all online, and if you’re much into the world of social media, it’s worth reading the Wall Street Journal’s investigative series and today’s editorial in the Sentinel.

On the other hand, the Sentinel website is also busy gathering information about your behavior when you visit. We want to track what interests you, what gadget you’re using, how much time you spend, where you’re coming from, etc., etc. We’re not great about doing anything at all with that information, except being generally informed about how people are using our site.

It would be nice if we did a better job of connecting our online readers with advertising that they might most be interested in receiving. Better still, it would be nice if our site did a better job of anticipating the things that you’re seeking, news-wise, information-wise, photo-wise, consumer-wise. We’re working on it, but not anywhere near the sophisticated level of the Googles and Facebooks of the world.

Every business does as much information gathering from its customers as possible, whether in the online or real world.

Over here on the online side of things, we find the reporting impressive and the subject important, but that there’s not really that much to fear. Most sites want to know more about you, with the idea of serving you better. There are exceptions, but there’s one easy rule for internet users (and this should be shared with every kid everywhere): Consider your online time public information.

Our reporting staff is working on several stories about the Lockheed Fire as we approach the 1-year anniversary. My memory from behind this screen was an incredible outpouring and sharing of community information through the Sentinel website.

Early Saturday morning, we had a hard time getting immediate information from officials and from our staff reporters, so we opened a live conversation window, allowing neighbors and officials to share their experiences through the night.

The result was more than 2,000 comments on this message board, with many people staying through the duration of the fire, posting updates at all hours. We asked readers of the conversation to help us with our map, and we got great response, and one reader who collaborated to help us keep it updated with the latest fire boundaries. The map drew more than 800,000 views.

Our stories tomorrow will help share the human story of the neighbors affected by the fire and how they are doing a year later. From a newsroom and online perspective, it showed us ways that the community can help shape and contribute to live coverage of news events.

Our online coverage included  stunning  photos, video and staff-written stories that were updated round the clock.

Here’s a look back at that live community conversation from a year ago:

For the past two years, we’ve occasionally used coveritlive to host a variety of conversations online. Some sessions have been discussions with experts or public officials after series on gangs or drugs or healthcare. We’ve also used coveritlive to allow users to share information during storms or fires. We’ve also used it as a live sports scoreboard, allowing our reporters (and anyone else) to send cell phone updates directly to the site from events.

Part of the mission for Sentinel.com is to be live and interactive, and we’ve talked about allowing any and all reporters on staff to have a live chat window available to use as they please if it helps them cover an event or share information.

Not a lot of takers so far. Reporters are pretty busy and we haven’t pushed it. But we like the idea of opening a window with the public. If you have a question about our coverage, our website, story suggestions, etc. You’re welcome to ask it here. We’ll answer as quick as we can.

One of my favorite stories of the weekend was J.M. Brown’s piece on Bud Cummings’ secret garden near the harbor. I walked by the garden this morning and Bud was hard at work.

We’ve added Bill Lovejoy’s great photos to the photo blog.

Speaking of gardens, we’re still accepting photos of your garden for our current photo contest. Voting for the best has begun.

Thanks also to freelancer Chloe Lee, who took this video of Friday evening’s protest march to the County Jail:

Here’s a list of links to our continuing coverage of the ongoing homeless protest at the county building: