Link: Storify wrap-up of #OCFair tweets

In a regular story, wrapping up the last day of the Orange County Fair, I was able to use social media to add valuable information to my story.

The first big help was in finding a person to talk to about this year’s fair. Rather than going to the fair and wandering around aimlessly looking for an interesting person, I looked up the OC Fair Foursquare mayor. I asked her via Twitter if I could interview her for my story and she agreed. She turned out to be a fair employee, a bartender, who attended all but one day of this year’s fair. She’s also been to the fair every year since she was a small girl. One hour later, I had a story with great insight provided by the fair’s “mayor.”

I also used Storify to bring in some interesting details from the fair’s last two days. The tweet quotes show the human side of the fair’s final weekend – as told by its attendees.

During a weekend reporting shift we started seeing reports of an Orange County man who died while rappelling down a waterfall in the Cleveland National Forest. In the first step, I reported the basic information available from the San Diego Fire and Coroner departments. Very little information was available on a weekend, as many possible relatives of the hiker were not available and the Forest Service was not available. However, I was able to use social networking to find more information (and I don’t just mean Twitter and Facebook). I searched the web for information on the hiker and was able to find his online hiker profile on MountainProject.com. The information helped tell the story of Pack’s hiking experience before we were able to talk with his family.

Link:

During the holiday time I found that several readers were sharing photos of a double rainbow to our shareoc inbox and on Twitter and Flickr.

Our science reporter was out for the holiday, so I filled in and posted reader photos and comments about the double rainbow, along with links to previous rainbow stories.

Two interesting notes. One, once we started a slide show of rainbow photos other readers were quick to submit their own photos. Two, the readers’ whose photos were used are now frequently sending in breaking news tips and interesting photos.

Link: Round-up of tweets about San Diego earthquake

Link: O.C. residents roll with the quake

I was working a Sunday night cops reporting shift when suddenly the building started shaking. A normal Sunday shift turned into a quake shift. While the building kept shaking I tweeted this: “Wow – #earthquake felt here in Santa Ana at the Register. Still feel it movin. Details to come.” Once the shaking stopped, I sent another tweet linking to the USGS quake information page and sent a text message to the breaking news SMS subscribers. I sent more tweets – retweeting others’ tweets and asking for damage information, personal stories and user-generated content. In some cases, I found user content on Twitter and asked if we could use it. I sent this tweet asking for us to use a video of pool water splashing during the quake — the same video you see that we were able to embed in this main quake story.

Without Twitter and people geotagging their tweets via mobile devices — my coverage would have been 25 percent as valuable. I was able to round-up tweets about the quake – specific to Orange County.

My favorite piece of reporting was my round up linked above and titled “O.C. residents roll with the quake.” The quake did little to no damage in Orange County, but it still created interesting stories. Editors were asking me to go drive around the county and look for stories. I was able to prove with this round-up of four stories that Twitter is a more effective tool (in some cases) than driving around and looking for stuff.

Somewhat similar to a weather map I created, I used some in-between project time to build a multi-layered earthquake map.

This is, from what I could find at the time, the only Google map that contains accurate fault locations, historical earthquake data and live-streaming recent earthquakes. To create the map I hunted down all the data, edited some layers in Google Earth, and fed in some information to Google Maps via Google Spreadsheet mapper and built the multi-layered map.

I was working a weekend cops desk shift when a small brush fire started in the Cleveland National Forest. No matter how small a brush fire starts a news organization should be alert because all fires start small. Thankfully this fire was extinguished after a few hours, but at least we were prepared to cover the story if the fire got out of hand.

An almost-drowning off the shore of Laguna Beach turned into a narrative on the rescue. While working a cops weekend shift I was able to interview people and write a full story about how the girl was saved.

I was working on a project to better serve the communities of Orange County during the spring of 2009. During my time in the Lake Forest office I filled in as the Rancho Santa Margarita reporter for two weeks. This time gave me a chance to work alongside the reporters I was coaching. This story illustrates the human side of a development proposal.

I worked as the web reporter and editor during President Barack Obama’s visit to Orange County on March 18, 2009. I organized online content, helped with web publishing and live-tweeted on the Register’s @OCReggie account. The link above points to a wrap-up of my live tweets about the event.

Part of the fun of being on the Register’s web team is finding gems of interest in web analytics. I was able to share that interesting information in a wrap-up of top content for 2008. In year’s past wrap-up coverage was always editor’s picks of the top stories. My article was a chance of showing the web side of things along with some reader picks such as the top stories dugg on Digg.com.