Sentinel.com blog

We started a partnership yesterday with Santa Cruz Waves. This comes after bumping into great photo after great photo from Tyler Fox’s website on Facebook and Twitter, and then some exchanges about possibilities, and a couple face-to-face meetings. The idea is that we help Santa Cruz Waves promote a uniquely Santa Cruz site, we share some of their work with our audience (more than 5 million visitors in 2011), and help them grow.

The goal of this partnership is to become the world-wide authority on all things surf in Santa Cruz – led by Santa Cruz Waves, supported by us.

It’s exactly the kind of partnership we’re going to pursue in a variety of areas. Photo and content sharing is a start, business and revenue possibilities are part of the discussion. We plan to collaborate in coverage of big events and on breaking news at the beach. We’ll also regularly run Santa Cruz Waves photos in the print edition.

The reason this makes so much sense to us is Tyler Fox. Read his profile. But also, check out the photos and his site.

Interested in similar types of content sharing and exploring the possibilities? Send me a note and/or join the Santa Cruz Community Media Lab.

In the past week, we’ve noticed a good handful of people expressing good feelings, through their social media accounts, about being covered in the Sentinel. We’re going to gather together those tweets and posts and watch the collection grow over time.

For the purposes of this project, we’re probably more likely to find people who are pleased with our coverage, although we realize that’s not always the case.

Want to get our attention? Use this hashtag: #iwasinthesentinel

We’re continuing a project that’s been around as long as our paper has been around.

The idea is to connect with the community.

We’ve been doing that in print in all kinds of ways for more than 150 years. That includes all the time spent by our reporters around the community, all the letters to the editor and guest opinion pieces in print, all the photos we’ve taken and shared. The tradition includes all the kids who grew up with their first job delivering papers.

We’ve been connecting with readers online in a wide variety of ways as well. We’ve offered forums, we link out to all kinds of relevant content in stories, we’re friends with some of you on Facebook, some of you follow us on twitter. More and more of our readers come to us through their mobile devices. We’ll be promoting news apps for Android and iPhone this month.

We’re in the business of connecting our local readers with local businesses as well, with more options than ever before for local advertisers to connect with our growing audience.

Today, we’re adding another piece, launching a page called the Santa Cruz Community Media Lab. On that page, we’re feeding the latest posts from a wide variety of community bloggers. We’ve opened a twitter account: @santacruzcml. We’re on Google+. Want to be involved? Send us your information. For those of you who have been in touch with us and sent information about your blogs or sites, keep talking with us. E-mail when you’ve got a post you’d like considered for promotion and sharing more widely in our print edition.

The project is part of our commitment to being accessible, and our understanding that the news from Santa Cruz County includes more than our hard-working news staff is able to cover. Many of you are spreading the word on subjects about which you are passionate. We want to amplify your voice.

As we get started, we’ve connecting with a wide variety of great blogs, covering everything from food (see the Smoking Whisk), to sports (see Tommy Zaferes’ Living the Tri-Life), photography (Sunrise Santa Cruz), science (UCSC science writers: The Crashing Edge), parenting (The Super Mom Blog), entertainment (Kuumbwa Jazz updates), public agencies (Santa Cruz Police) and some that are personal (James Durbin’s wife, Heidi, shares The Good News). Thanks for connecting with us!

Want to include your blog? Let us know. The same idea is behind the twitter lists and widgets we’ve added to every page on the site. We’ll also be working to display your YouTube channels, tumblr posts, Pinterest projects, Flickr photos and whatever the future of digital communication holds, in the ways you want to say it.

That’s an ambitious project. In some ways we’ve been working on it since the Sentinel started printing papers. And with regard to Community Media Labs, we’re just getting started. Let us know how we’re doing, what you’d like to see, where you want this to go.

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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.

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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.