Sentinel.com blog

By Christina Gullickson, cgullickson@santacruzsentinel.com

Sometimes we journalists will come across a story that captures our interest on another level. It may not be big news or something that affects a lot of people, but it’s something we really want to cover, something we want to tell our friends about because we’ve been touched or inspired in some way.

For a digital producer like myself (who spends far more time at her desk managing content than getting out in the community meeting people), that turned out to be the case when I tagged along with my colleague Kim White one afternoon last month after she invited me and my little point-and-shoot camera to sit in on an interview with paramedic and firefighter Chris Stubendorff.

As he talked with us in a conference room at the Scotts Valley Fire Department, where he is employed, I found myself gripped by his story and the details of the horrific car accident he survived in 2010. Later, I was able to meet his wife of five years, Rameena, at their home in Aptos where they live with their three dogs. Listening to Chris and Rameena’s story, I got chills, I thought about life, and I became awe-inspired by their perseverance and positive attitudes.

This video was the result of my time with them. I sincerely hope you find their story as inspiring as I did.

Now, I didn’t show it much in this video — because Chris and Rameena focus so much of their energy on trying to have a positive outlook toward the future — but it was clear parts of them are still angry with the driver who caused the crash, as I am sure you can imagine. Rameena gets emotional when she talks about the time they were considering what actions they might take against the other driver and having a district attorney tell her that he “has more rights than you.” (You may find it a small consolation that the other driver was reported to U.S. Immigration and Customs.)

I also found it interesting that, despite help from the Fallen Officer Foundation and the Stubendorffs’ insurance covering many medical costs, the couple accrued bills for other items (renting a hospital bed for home) and necessities (Rameena had to stay in a hotel in Southern California just after the crash) to the tune of about $10,000.

It’s amazing to me — with all the negatives one might take away from that night on Highway 46 and its aftermath — that Chris and Rameena are able to focus on the positives after their lives were incredibly and forever changed.

If you’re curious to know more about how Chris is doing that in his return to duty this coming week, Kim’s article talks about his personal experience influencing how he plans to approach patient care.

Posted from Scotts Valley, California, United States.

On late notice, we invited the Santa Cruz Community Media Lab bloggers to stop by our out-of-the-way office in Scotts Valley and have a discussion about blogging with anyone from the newsroom interested in attending.

It was a cool meeting. We occupied some space on the white board. We had coffee and one of our favorite bloggers brought cookies for us all. The publisher, Michael Turpin, whose new blog will be up and running next week, stopped in.

Reporters Jason Hoppin, Shanna McCord and Vidur Malik joined us. Digital Producer Christina Gullickson organized the whole thing.

And we had a great bunch of CML bloggers:

• Jim Coffis from SLVnews.net
• Christine Candelaria from The Aums
• Elizabeth from Motherhood: A Descent Into Madness
• Mary Andersen from the SLV Chamber
• Angus McMahan from Angus-Land
• Vicki Wees from History Discussions: Santa Cruz Mountains and San Lorenzo Valley

After talking about community connections, possibilities for the CML, the Sentinel and its website, technical advice, parenting, and business models in the digital world, there was unanimous agreement that we would have more gatherings with more members of the Community Media Lab.

I like where this is going, and I have no idea where that is.

Thanks to all the 130 bloggers who are participating!
- Tom

Here’s a short collection of tweets about Thursday’s meeting:

Posted from Scotts Valley, California, United States.

It was with great excitement that we cajoled and argued for the purchase of a GoPro video camera for the Sentinel’s online team. Cool device, cool company, it’s perfect for our community filled with performers and free spirits of all kinds, it’s very Digital First.

It is with great sadness that we say goodbye to our GoPro camera, which is now at the bottom of Monterey Bay. Reporter Kimberly White took it out on a scuba adventure this weekend, likely got some incredible video of the world below the Santa Cruz Wharf, but the camera and Kim’s dive partner got knocked around. No major injuries, although there was some blood, but the camera went to a watery grave, despite Kim’s partner’s insistence on going back in to search for it.

So, we’re crowd-sourcing the rescue of the camera. We’ll provide some reward if you come across it. We always wanted to attach it to a humpback whale, so perhaps that’s in the works.

Here’s Kim’s account of the final minutes of the GoPro:

“We did a beach dive at Cowell’s Beach, entering the water around 1:30. As we were gearing up on the beach, Chris (my dive buddy) and I were trying to decide who should wear the camera. Since I haven’t been in the water much in recent years, he offered to wear it so I had one less thing to worry about.

We’d been down for about 20 minutes and encountered a lot of surge as we neared the pilings at the dock, and the visibility was less than two feet. We lost sight of each other, and as I was turning in circles to try to find him, I felt something bashing up against my legs and fins (probably a sea lion), all while trying to stay buoyant in heavy surge.

I wasn’t able to find Chris, so I surfaced. I heard a shout and saw him about 10 feet away, so swam up to him and saw he had a huge gash across his forehead. He said as soon as he realized how violent the surge was, he pushed me out of the way so I wouldn’t get caught up in it, then got thrown against a barnacle-covered piling (hence the gash).

We swam back toward shore and as soon as we got back onto the beach, I started asking him questions to make sure he hadn’t gotten a concussion or something. I was so focused on that that I didn’t notice the camera was missing until he yelled that it was gone.

He was determined to go back and try to find it, and I told him not to because it was too dangerous with all the surge and waves. But he said he had to at least try, so he said to call for help if he didn’t surface within 10 minutes. Long story short, he wasn’t able to find the camera. We also wandered among the pilings, hoping it’d washed ashore, but there was no sign of it.

When we got back to the car, I immediately When I went back to the dive shop to return my tanks, I mentioned what happened to one of the employees. He said he spearfishes and can look for it when he’s over there next week (but I’m not  holding my breath).”

We learned a little bit from the camera. We put it on a roller derby ref. We took it surfing and snowboarding. We planned to give it a motorcycle ride on the Tour of California rout. We wanted to make it part of the Santa Cruz Community Media Lab, to loan it out to anyone having unique first-person experiences or good ideas. It was scheduled to take a few laps at the opening day of the Ocean Speedway in Watsonville this month.

We were just getting warmed up. We also learned that we should have put some kind of QR code sticker on it, in case it got lost, or a GPS chip, or that we should have used the right floaty attachment. We’ll get another one, “not right away,” said our publisher.

It was a glorious few months, with a few videos (snowboard adventure video will be released posthumously). Below, you’ll find an emotional look back at some of the places our GoPro went during its time with us. We miss it already.

If you find our camera, please get in touch. It’s likely an A1 story, good karma, and there’s a reward for rescuing our waterlogged friend.

Posted from Santa Cruz, California, United States.

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Here are the 10 most viewed stories and pages from the Sentinel website in February:

1. Santa Cruz Sentinel Photo Contest : 2012 Happy Face!
2. Santa Cruz Sentinel Photo Contest : 2012 Only in Santa Cruz!
3. 15-year-old Aptos girl sliced in fight at her birthday party
4. Santa Cruz pro surfer Anthony Ruffo sentenced to jail for drug dealing
5. Police: Drunken man packs loaded gun at bar, patrons take him down
6. Santa Cruz Police: Woman arrested three times in five days
7. Apple road trip ad boosts Santa Cruz profile nationally
8. Owner of three Santa Cruz markets arrested, Santa Cruz district attorney says
9. New dog leash warnings divide Santa Cruz County residents
10. Ristorante Barolo due for Restaurant: Impossible TV makeover Wednesday

For the month of February, we had 3,294,380 page views, up about 300,000 from January and up more than 500,000 from February 2011.

We had 449,495 unique visitors, up more than 40,000 from January and more than 65,000 from February 2011.

One of our favorite photos from the popular 'Only In Santa Cruz' contest in February.

Among projects, we launched the Santa Cruz Community Media Lab – connecting with more than 90 bloggers on the landing page. But running behind that landing page, we’re connecting on twitter, facebook, google+, youtube, tumblr, and building lists, meeting face-to-face and talking about ways to get more voices heard more often in more ways.

Also in February, we’re breaking more news on twitter. Reporters Donna Jones and Jondi Gumz, relatively new to the twitter world, both went past 100 followers, as did the @santacruzfood. Reporter Jason Hoppin broke news of how much a proposed food truck bill would impact the industry in an attempt to offer better meals for kids. Hoppin broke down the data, built maps, and tweeted them to a wide audience before the story appeared in the paper.

Reporter Jessica Pasko went over 1,000 followers. All our reporters know that news breaks on twitter and that they can tweet what they’re seeing and learning directly to our home page.

In other social media, the Sentinel twitter account is approaching 5,000 followers. We’ve maxed out on 5,000 facebook friends, but we’re adding fans (2,269) and subscribers (nearly 800) daily. Our Flickr account has had more than a half million views in the past year, and we plan to make photos and video a bigger emphasis as we go forward.

Our award-winning sports staff also had one of its biggest months of web traffic, we launched a new version of the weekly Guide section, including QR codes linking smart phones to web pages. And, we’ve quietly launched news apps for Android and iPhone – much more about those soon! And finally, we put a GoPro video camera on the helmet of a roller derby ref.

Thanks for connecting with the Sentinel.

Home / 15-year-old Aptos girl sliced in fight at her birthday party		11,424	0.3%
17.	Verve / SantaCruzSentinel.com: Local News		11,079	0.3%
18.	Mobile Obituaries Pages		10,361	0.3%
19.	Obituaries		9,405	0.3%
20.	Home / Santa Cruz pro surfer Anthony Ruffo sentenced to jail for drug dealing		9,120	0.3%
21.	Home / Police: Drunken man packs loaded gun at bar, patrons take him down		8,242	0.3%
22.	Home / Santa Cruz Police: Woman arrested three times in five days		8,201	0.2%
23.	Verve / SantaCruzSentinel.com: Cops and Courts		8,145	0.2%
24.	Home / Apple road trip ad boosts Santa Cruz profile nationally		7,983	0.2%
25.	Home / Owner of three Santa Cruz markets arrested, Santa Cruz district attorney says		7,918	0.2%
26.	Letters		7,775	0.2%
27.	Home / New dog leash warnings divide Santa Cruz County residents: Rio del Mar beaches remain open af		7,693	0.2%
28.	Weather		7,459	0.2%
29.	http://www.uclick.com/client/scs/gpd		7,208	0.2%
30.	Home / Ristorante Barolo due for Restaurant: Impossible TV makeover Wednesday		7,098	0.2%
31.	http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/santacruzsentinel/obituary-browse.aspx		6,919	0.2%
32.	Local News / Police: Mayhem motorcycle gang members some of 9 arrested		6,709	0.2%
33.	Home / Man stabs wife in face, teen daughter in mouth, deputies say		6,547	0.2%
34.	Home / Police: Mayhem motorcycle gang members some of 9 arrested		6,501	0.2%
35.	Home / Food Network’s chief chef Robert Irvine gives Ristorante Barolo a new look		6,421	0.2%
36.	Home / Two arrested after allegedly trying to retrieve friend’s body from Santa Cruz crematorium		6,291	0.2%
37.	Home / Capitola economy: Vacancies in Mall, Mercantile; Blockbuster closing but new construction on		6,162	0.2%
38.	http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/santacruzsentinel/obituary-search.aspx		6,113	0.2%
39.	Home / Fisherman dies on Rio del Mar Beach after getting caught in riptide		6,044	0.2%
40.	Home / Elderly man falls over cliff near Felton, plunging 250 feet to his death		5,665	0.2%
41.	http://www.santacruzsentinel.com		5,379	0.2%
42.	Home / TV murder mystery to air Monday on Santa Cruz woman’s slain husband		5,176	0.2%
43.	Home / Highway 17 northbound lanes closed for more than two hours Sunday night near Summit		5,090	0.2%
44.	Home / Santa Cruz landlord issued correction notice for roach infestation		5,050	0.2%
45.	Home / Proposed Montessori charter school creates education divide: Parents want choice, while other		5,019	0.2%
46.	Verve / SantaCruzSentinel.com : Cops and Courts		4,972	0.2%
47.	Home / ‘Mavericks’ movie crew returns to Santa Cruz, Half Moon Bay for big-wave shots		4,960	0.2%
48.	Opinion		4,938	0.1%
49.	Home / Woman accused of stealing hundreds of dollars from local nonprofit organization

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Digital producer Christina Gullickson poured through a lot of GoPro video to piece together 45 seconds of action after we put the Sentinel’s GoPro video camera on a roller derby referee’s helmet last week. Enjoy the video!

Can we put a camera on you? E-mail us.

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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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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.

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