Sentinel.com blog

We have soft-launched a new website within the Santa Cruz Sentinel, reaching out the Santa Cruz visitors in a completely new way with “Destination Santa Cruz.”

Built using Rebelmouse to manage stories, photos and social posts from the Santa Cruz Sentinel, Media Lab members and others around Santa Cruz County, we’re linking to the best and latest stories, events and information for visitors to Santa Cruz.

We’re also providing advertisers with a wide variety of possibilities for reaching out to visitors, managing their ad postings through Rebelmouse, and offering to connect local tourism related businesses to social followers of Destination Santa Cruz on Twitter and Facebook.

We believe that anyone considering visiting Santa Cruz will find all they need, including connections to the Sentinel calendar, an opportunity to book reservations and the most recent news about all that Santa Cruz has to offer.
Posts will include Arts & Entertainment coverage from longtime Sentinel writer Wallace Baine on the Muse Santa Cruz blog, the Sentinel’s outstanding food and dining coverage, the Sentinel’s best calendar listings, and links out to great posts from around the county.

Thanks to Christina Gullickson and Shannon Burns for their work in conceiving and designing the site.

The Sentinel reached more than 500,000 unique visitors in the month of February and our sites and apps generated more than 6 million page views.

To advertise on Destination Santa Cruz, call 831-706-3274.

The Santa Cruz Community Media Lab gathered Monday for its February meeting and talked about arts, entertainment and the cultural life in Santa Cruz.

Longtime Sentinel arts and entertainment writer Wallace Baine talked with Media Lab members at Cruzio. (Thanks Chris Neklason!). Wallace has teamed up with Kirby Scudder to build a new blog for the Sentinel – The Muse Santa Cruz with the intention of becoming the hub of arts and cultural information for the community.

Wallace has pushed ahead with the blog, with some tireless work from Kirby to build and populate the site. They’re planning a launch party Thursday, Feb. 28th 6-9 p.m. at the Tannery, and all are invited.

Wallace talked about a wide variety of possibilities for the Muse. Among them:

• A more realtime orientation to updates about the arts community
• Guest blog posts
• Multimedia
• Outreach to the community for photos, writing and video
• Linking out to creative events and reviews around Santa Cruz County
• Stories and photos that appear in the Sentinel printed Guide, which comes out every Thursday

If you’re interested in connecting with the Sentinel’s arts and entertainment coverage, and the Muse blog, reach out to Wallace.

This month marks a year since the Sentinel launched its Community Media Lab project. More than 200 bloggers have become involved in one way or another. We link out to the best posts every day, promote those links on the Sentinel home page, on the Media Lab page, through Facebook and twitter and other social media sites. Sentinel copy editor My Nguyen does most of the daily updates and also attended Monday. The lab’s page received more than 10,000 page views in 2012.

The people and organizations that have joined the project have been unfailingly helpful (among other cool developments, we started a Facebook group where questions are posed and help is given among bloggers on social, technical and other questions). Participants have provided news tips, breaking news photos, front page story suggestions, promoted worthy causes, and more importantly, shared their voices about what it’s like to live, struggle, create and celebrate in Santa Cruz.

Our face-to-face meetings with with members have been enjoyable without exception. Sentinel reporters, editors and photographers who have attended always come away feeling energized and full of the possibilities for their work and network. The project has informed us about the possibilities for collaboration in every aspect of Sentinel coverage.

We hope (and believe) that Media Lab bloggers come away from the meetings with new ideas and a better understanding of what the Sentinel is about.

Thanks for attending Monday to Sentinel Digital Producer Christina Gullickson and bloggers from:

• Positively Santa Cruz
• The Aums
• Motherhood, A Descent Into Madness
• Seasonal Eating
• Tom Jacobs Photography
• Laugh.research.write.run
• Riding Pretty
• Civinomics

- Tom Moore

At the Sentinel, we’re doing more with video almost every day.
Two of our ongoing projects are up and running and gaining momentum. Assistant Sports Editor Jim Seimas and reporter Andrew Matheson have been previewing and reviewing each weekend’s football games.
I have to say, I’m not the biggest fan of video of reporters in a room talking about actual action. But Seimas and Matheson, with help from designer/photographer/video editor Tony Solis have taken this to an art form. Best production values ever for the genre! Have a look:

We’ve also added artist Kirby Scudder as a regular columnist to the Sentinel’s weekly Guide. Along with his column, he also produces a video profile every week of a Santa Cruz artist. We want to help Kirby with his mission of spreading the word about the arts community in Santa Cruz, one of the best in the country. Have a look at the playlist.

One other video note: Photographer Kevin Johnson (with reporter J.M. Brown) has done some really nice work on putting together four videos that help sort through what’s happening with the desalination project in Santa Cruz. We launch that project tomorrow.

Posted from Brisbane, California, United States.

When 15,000-plus runners came to Santa Cruz on Sunday for the 40th annual Wharf to Wharf race, we were ready to meet them. We received more than 40,000 page views on the Sentinel website.

We put to use the following services:

• Twitter – asking any and all to use #wharftowharf hashtag, we added that to the page for continuous updates. Our reporters and photographers also used the tag. Through twitter, we posted photos and video (using the twitvid service) as well as other updates. We were also able to send directly to the Sentinel home page by using another tag, #scsnews. We’ve used an advanced search widget to display tweets from our staff using that tag and always ask reporters to break news on twitter.
• Storify – we gathered photos, video, tweets from our staff, runners and spectators throughout the day, and embedded the collection in the top of our home page. Our collection has received more than 4,000 views. (See below).
• Flickr – We posted staff and contributed photos to the Sentinel Flickr account, where our set has received more than 6,500 views. We took the easily-embedded slideshow and dropped it into coverage and its own article page. We also shared links to the slideshow on Facebook
• Google maps – We updated a map we built long ago to include Panoramio photos from various points along the beautiful race route, shot by Sentinel digital intern Eric Brown.
• Brightcove and YouTube – We shot video along the route. I got to the race early with a smart phone and a Handycam. I tweeted, collected video, sent photos from my phone (DroidX, which went from fully charged to dead in two miles) and then eventually ran most of last four miles of the race (with my daughter in a stroller) while collecting sights and sounds on the Handycam. We posted the video to our site through Brightcove, embedded the video in an article page and have Brightcove set to automatically post to our YouTube channel.
• Instagram (we’re @scsentinel) – we posted just five photos to Instagram, a couple from the race, and a couple of the best from photographer Shmuel Thaler.  We also liked every photo we found for Wharf to Wharf and followed anyone who ran and posted about the race. Our photos received more than 200 likes, we picked up more than 50 followers.
• Digital producer Christina Gullickson orchestrated the show, handling all of the content flowing her way, and she worked to open the doors to user-contributed photos and promoted all our content on the social channels above.
• Sports reporter Andrew Matheson also immediately had final results and compiled his own video, so we had the first stories about the race that were updated in the afternoon
• Two other easy moves added nearly 5,000 views – we posted an early “Wharf to Wharf Information” page and we embedded the results page within our site.

Congrats to all the runners! We probably overdid, but the Sentinel loves the Wharf to Wharf!

Giant Dipper riders scream down the roller coaster's initial plunge. (Shmuel Thaler/Sentinel)

Digital Producer Christina Gullickson (that’s me) is working on compiling a list of some of the best things to do in Santa Cruz County. I’ve had a lot of internal input on things that should make the list, but I want to hear from you, too.

Some of the suggestions so far include “Ride the Roaring Camp Railroad — at night,” “Ride the Giant Dipper at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk” and “Eat a Big Sur slice from Pizza My Heart.”

What “totally Santa Cruz” activity would you suggest to someone who had never been here before — or to someone who’d lived here their entire life?

You can go crazy in the comments and list everything you’ve ever done or wanted to do in Santa Cruz, or you can email me directly at cgullickson (at) santacruzsentinel (dot) com — or you can even tweet at me.

Thanks for your help!

– Christina Gullickson, on Twitter @CGullTweets

Posted from San Lorenzo, 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 Santa Cruz, California, United States.

We’ve heard from plenty of readers that they were interested in an iPad/iPhone app for the Sentinel and we’re working on various possibilities locally. (Want to help? let us know.) And at the same time, there are a variety of corporate strategies in the works for tablet users.

The coolest out there, and the biggest jump forward in technology is a product called TapIn Bay Area, which was launched this week.

You’ll see more of TapIn on our site, but it’s optimized for the touch screen. It’s hyperlocal and regional at the same time. It integrates news, advertising, deals, events, a business directory and user content, and is easily navigatable and searchable and gamified.

Here are a few links to reviews of the new app. Free trials here. (It will cost $4.99/month in the future).

• Ken Doctor: MediaNews’ new TapIn bets on the tablet
• From Poynter: How TapIn plans to master location-based news for the iPad
• From Street Fight: Local news + Google Maps + Social Media = TapIn

You’ll find Sentinel written stories and events from our online calendar all over the Santa Cruz map, but most of the links will send you to the Mercury News version of our content. (We’ll see if we can fix that).

The Penny Ice Creamery in Santa Cruz has created a viral hit. Or at least its video in praise of the recovery act for its help in getting the new venture off the ground has received the attention of the White House.

After the YouTube video went out, it was acknowledged and shared by the White House social media operators and yesterday the Vice President called up the Santa Cruz business and offered his appreciation and an invitation to the White House.

Listen to the entertaining Biden (below), and read Sentinel reporter J.M. Brown’s story.

As the O’Neill Coldwater Classic gets going today, we’re going to be updating results throughout the week as soon as we receive them. We’ll also be posting links, official twitter updates, our own staff photography and video, and sports department coverage.

Enjoy the world class event! The O’Neill crew offers the best live coverage here:
www.oneill.com/cwc/

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.