Link: OCRegister Facebook pages
I worked with the Register’s key web and mobile designer, Rick Ho, to create unified branding across the Register’s social media accounts. The first step is the Register’s Facebook pages.
I worked closely with the marketing and advertising departments, OCRegister social media users and our social audiences to use the same branding base for our mobile products and social accounts.
Right as we finished up the Freedom mobile strategy, the iPad was announced.
Our mobile group with a few new people added got to work on figuring out our approach for tablets.
Months later, the strategy and funding were approved by management.
Now the fine design details, specific content plans and workflow changes are now being decided based on the strategy our small tablet team (the small working group included myself and three others).
The key to our tablet strategy is that tablets are a true hybrid medium. At the present moment, tablets represent a perfect blend between online and offline, tactile and digital, involved and lean-back, mobile and desktop. Stay tuned on the latest tablet products to emerge based on this strategy.
I led the design, development and roll-out of a new alerts tool.
The tool is built in the newsroom’s online content management system and it lets users send a breaking news alert to audiences on Twitter, on Facebook, via text message and (ultimately) via push notification.
Before this tool was created, editors would use multiple websites and processes to send an alert – such as that a wildfire had broken out in the forest. The tool auto populates with the best information (pulled from the story and headline) in the best format for each medium. A central bit.ly account lets the Register measure how many people click on each attached link. The new tool’s faster workflow implications also lets us created more niche text message streams for our audiences.
I took the lead on building a new OCRegister mobile website soon after the Freedom mobile project was approved.
The first version of our mobile site had these goals: be built by the Freedom IT department (rather than hosted and developed by a third-party), include multiple photos when included with stories, and add full metric tracking so we can learn how people use the site.
The new site may not be flashy, but it has solved numerous problems we experienced with the third-party mobile site and having access to full metrics has been invaluable as mobile traffic grows.
As part of improving how we engage with audiences and how we serve mobile and social audiences, I am working with newsroom management to change the workflow and expectations for reporters, photographers and editors.
The newsroom’s first large transition during my time was from print-only to web-first. The newsroom’s new movement is to be audience-focused evenly across multiple channels.
The image at left shows the workflow steps for every journalist in delivering to our many audiences (print, web, mobile and social).