norton, brian

Lots of great links to share tonight. These are some of my favorites from this week. The Publish 2 link assist in WordPress makes this very easy to pull off.

TBD.com screenshot
Poynter/TBD.com
Some very cool screen shots from @TBD. Lively, vibrant and yet well organized. I love the Long story short part.

YouTube – The Decision….PART DEUX!

YouTube | Aug 6, 2010
Congrats to Anthony Tolliver for signing with Minnesota. Classic AT vid. Good things happen to good people.

Coming (Very) Soon: TBD.com
News Channel 8 / TBD | Aug 6, 2010
Extremely excited to see @TBD when it launches next week. Such a great, creative crew. Fun stuff.

How The Guardian is pioneering data journalism with free tools
Nieman Journalism Lab | Aug 5, 2010
Great read on The Guardian’s data journalism blog. They do amazing work with mostly free tools.

The Evolution Of The Journalism Job Market: We May Be Headed Into A Golden Age
Business Insider | Aug 3, 2010
Golden Age of journalism on the way? Honestly, makes sense to me. Communication is key now.

Dana O’Neil: The Shot and The Effect at Northern Iowa
sports.espn.go.com
Great read about UNI and the impact that beating Kansas had on the athletic department.

Airline pilot to jetski from London to New Zealand on “the ultimate ride”
www.gadling.com
I couldn’t imagine riding a jetski 12 hours a day from London to Auckland. Those Kiwis are adventurous.

Cancer victim tried to pack a lifetime of mothering into two years
Dallas Morning News | Aug 1, 2010
Wow, talk about a powerful read. This really helps put life into perspective.

Media Cache – Norwegian Newspaper Taps Into Web’s Efficiencies – NYTimes.com
NYTimes.com | Aug 1, 2010
I dislike the loss of copy editors, but some interesting thoughts on newspaper/online split from Norway.

Conference expansion has been a wild and crazy ride for all involved – from the schools involved to the journalists covering the situation. With Nebraska’s official move to the Big Ten on Friday, it placed our sports department right in the middle of the fire. Our online sports team (two of us with some advice from Nick, one of the ASEs) is still relatively new (we only official took the reigns over posting our own content about a year ago) and, with our coverage this week, I feel like we finally found our footing.

We’ve had a few other opportunities before (Dana Altman to Oregon and the hiring of Greg McDermott at Creighton) but there had always been some issues with our coverage. Either we were slow to get the story or we didn’t spend the time planning how best to present the information. This time was different, although to be fair this was much easier to see coming.

So what did we do:

• We built a page to house all of our conference expansion information
• On that page we have a Publish2 widget that shares links from across the country. It’s been fun linking to some of the great work being done on the subject
• We hosted an all-day (well 10 to 6) live chat/blog on Friday during the meat of the news. This was the second time we’ve done an all-day chat (the first was on Signing Day in February). The first few hours were largely readers chatting, then when the actual news broke we switched to a live blog format (almost no reader questions at that point).
• Lee Barfknecht broke the story early on (although I believe KC Star beat us by a little bit).

Overall it was definitely a success and I look forward to seeing the site-wide numbers when all is said and done. The chat was extremely successful with over 21,000 readers joining in at some point during the day. It was a lot of fun to interact with eager fans all day and they were very quick to thank us for our coverage. I think this went a long way in improving the view of our staff on online (along with our daily chats as well).

Now I don’t make this post just to toot my own vuvuzela. Sure, I am proud of what we accomplished. But, with that said, we could done a better job as well. Some things that could have been better:

• The conference expansion page only launched on Thursday (and I only came up with the idea on Tuesday night).
• Our main story was not updated for awhile after we got the initial scoop.
• Not having message boards really hurt us, considering the interest in the live chat. Ideally the message board could have been used for chatter and rumors/speculation from readers and the live blog could have been used to better curate the news. Plenty of readers loved the chat, but a lot were turned off during the first few hours when it was just a chat room (with some news sprinkled in).

Any suggestions on how we can make our breaking news coverage better? We are always looking for ways to improve.