Sentinel.com blog

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.

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 .

We’ve made a handful changes to the Sentinel home page this week.

We’ve added a breaking news twitter widget to a fairly prominent position on the right side of the page. We’re encouraging all reporters and editors to break news first on twitter, and to send photos, video and audio links through twitter from the scene of breaking news.

To make a little room for our widget, we’ve reduced the number of stories at the top of the home page. We think this will also make it easier for readers to find the best of our coverage. For more local coverage, including all the stories in today’s news section, see our local news page.

Among other projects, we’re working to build a list of Santa Cruz area bloggers on a wide variety of subjects. We will link out and highlight the best content, no strings attached. Submit your blog or website to the list here.

You may know that MediaNews, the Sentinel’s parent company, is now run by Digital First. This is good news for the website. One of the first moves will be to add a little staff to the online department here at the Sentinel (although everyone on staff contributes in many ways to what appears online). Christina Gullickson will be doubling the size of the Online Team, beginning in January.

For more on what’s ahead and what Digital First means for MediaNews, the Sentinel and as a concept, see this week’s blog posts from Steve Buttry.

• How a Digital First approach guides a journalist’s work
• Digital First journalists: What we value
• 10 ways to think like a Digital First journalist

Posted from Santa Cruz, California, United States.

Here’s a widget, which we may add elsewhere on our site, ranking the top five most-clicked twitter posts today.

We have lots of discussion about how we use twitter, what we could do differently and better. We talk about how we can be more real-time, more conversational, more informative from the main Sentinel account, and from our reporters.

We tweet headlines and breaking news and we answer questions from followers as soon as possible. Sports reporters are tweeting scores from every game they cover. We posting our best photos and a variety of blog posts.

But we’re taking suggestions for how you’d like to see us use twitter. Good ideas are welcome.

Posted from Santa Cruz, California, United States.

Here are the most-viewed stories and pages from the Sentinel website from Monday, Aug. 29, 2011:

1. Police: Scotts Valley television repair shop owner arrested after child porn found in store
2. CHP: Campbell woman arrested after DUI crash on Highway 17
3. Santa Cruz police investigate two armed robberies on Westside
4. Decades later, doctor still remembers the unvaccinated child who died
5. Santa Cruz attorney faces burglary, drug charges
6. Cops and Courts, Aug. 29, 2011: Watsonville police arrest man after gang fight
7. Three men arrested in connection with Friday assualt and robbery in Live Oak
8. Highway 9 closed between Felton and Santa Cruz after morning crash
9. Fort Bragg councilman shot, killed after finding pot grow
10. Humpback hangs out off Santa Cruz shoreline

Link of the Day:

Here’s a look at what the New York Times did with Twitter during Hurricane Irene, setting up an account called @NYTLive. We’re looking at setting up a similar account for the Sentinel for big breaking news stories. We also recommend following @sentinelalerts and adding text message alerts for news affecting all of Santa Cruz County.