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.

When the Disneyland Resort reached capacity I joined in to help out our reporting staff by collecting interesting tweets about the crowded park. The reporting was fun to do, showed the value of reporting via social networks and brought our audience’s content into our report.

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.

As part of my social work, I am working on reinvigorating the OCRegister’s main Twitter account @OCReggie.

One change is I added two new people to the account’s management crew (we now have eight). This allows for one permanent sub and for one person to be the on-call night and weekends person (alerts are sent by our newsroom editors, but this person jumps in to listen and help people during big off-hours events). The two new people lets us have more people available during disaster times (such as wildfires) and to embed social into the newsroom’s core, rather than just being managed by geeks (like myself) in the corner.

I also sent out my goals and thinking behind the account and I’m following up with staff to make sure the account is less formulaic and more engaging.

Why does OCReggie exist?

• To learn about the community (story ideas, reader-generated content we should include in our publications, topics we should cover, sources)
• To enrich the community (send alerts about breaking news, help people find answers, begin or join in on conversations about o.c.’s daily interesting news and information).

I’d like for us to do more of the following:

• Listening to people
• Talking with people
• Finding story, source, topic and content ideas
• Sending out relevant content – not just OCRegister staff-created content

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.

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.

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).

Link: Video of surfing at the Wedge

I worked with a video producer to change code in our Brightcove system so that people can watch our videos right on Facebook. Being able to post the videos on the Register’s Facebook page (that I maintain) lets people watch the video without going to OCRegister.com. Video pre-roll ads are still attached to the videos, when included.