The online team believes that video is going to continue to be a bigger part of the news Sentinel’s package as we go forward.

Recording, editing and deployment tools are becoming better, faster and more convenient.
Our audience is going to continue to be more oriented toward video. Our audience is also going to be more able to share video with us.

We’ve thought about a wide variety of possibilities for the Sentinel, including a list of potential video assignments that we’d like help shooting from our audience – you shoot it, we share it.

Our video viewership has grown dramatically in 2011. In less than six months, our YouTube channel has received more than 425,000 views. We’ve had another 125,000 on our website.

We embed video on article pages, on a variety of web pages, tweet our video posts and add them to Facebook. We also find relevant YouTube video for a variety of stories, or add collections of video for breaking news stories (tsunami collection). We’ve also added security camera video clips to some of our crime stories.

When something dramatic is witnessed in this day and age, it’s more and more likely to be caught in pictures or video. Which brings us to the read of the day from The New York Times: Upending Anonymity: These Days the Web Unmasks Everyone.

The Sentinel online department is looking for one good intern. Can you code? Know HTML/CSS? We’d love to find a young coding star. But we’re also open to smart, talented people looking to get a start in the online news world. Are you an aspiring social media guru? Want to gamify the Sentinel site? Have an idea for a Santa Cruz-specific multimedia project? Can you report breaking news anywhere at any time via smartphone? Video/photo skills?

Possibilities are unlimited. Please share this post with smart students you know who are still looking for an interesting summer opportunity. To apply, e-mail us a resume and cover letter: tmoore@santacruzsentinel.com.

We’ve taken a break from the Sentinel.com blog, for the past four months, but we’re be back on to keep you updated on all things in the works for the Sentinel online.

Among a small handful of updates and changes, we’ve added a Linked-In sharing option to article pages.

In the world of social media, we’re branching out a little bit, having added Foursquare and Yelp accounts. We’d like to get our reporters to start checking in at the places where they’re covering events. For now, we’re adding restaurant reviews (it’s food day in the Sentinel every Wednesday) to Foursquare and Yelp pages.

We’ve had a handful of people ask about iPhone and iPad apps. We’re going to have them at some point, but we’re a little short-handed in the software engineering department here, so waiting for overall corporate solution, and taking suggestions, helping hands from the community.

Want to collaborate on a news app for the Sentinel? Drop me a note.

For now, you can read the Sentinel in a wide variety of formats on the iPad, including an e-books version of the E-Edition. It’s not bad, but not optimized for all the things an iPad does, either.

But our social media strategy is also a big part of our mobile strategy. We’re going to make sure that you find the content our staff is putting together every day with the apps you already use on your smartphone.