Four websites down, five to go

With three websites already launched on a new CMS platform, last Thursday (Nov. 4) marked the fourth. And number four was The Blue Mountain Ealge located in John Day, Oregon.

The platform is with TownNews, and so far, so good. We have five websites left to redesign and launch. Our Daily Astorian site is next in line at the end of next week. This will mark the final daily, with only weeklies left to do.

The interactivity should increase greatly on the sites from our old platform and we are surging ahead into the current century by finally having mobile sites. The sites will play up the great multimedia that our company produces and should engage our community on a higher level.

But, like with any new site, we are having our share of glitches and so far the Eagle community is embracing the new site.

Praise given for trying something new

A little national exposure doesn’t hurt anyone. Neither does tooting your own horn from time to time.

I’ve written about our use of the GameChanger application during our state baseball championship coverage in June and on our discovery of this cool app back in May. But this time we got a little plug in the trade publication News & Tech for our use of the app. In the July/August 2010 edition, tucked away on page 49, “New Services Changes Game for Ore.Publisher,” gives a good overview to what this app has done for us.

A link is below to a pdf of the article. Unfortunately, the story is only available through the e-edition on the News & Tech site, so I downloaded just that page to make available.

We hope to use this app to a greater extent next spring and summer. Since we discovered the platform near the end of the spring sport season, we didn’t have a lot of time to really play with it or market it well to our community.

We continually look for great partnerships and resources. It’s always a treat when we are able to implement our great finds.

News & Tech – August 2010 (click for pdf of page)

Society of Professional Journalists publishes Digital Media Handbook

The Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) has published its extensive guide to digital media for free online.

The Digital Media Handbook Part 1 was compiled by members of the SPJ’s Digital Media Committee, amongst them Jennifer Peebles, deputy editor of non-profit online newspaper Texas Watchdog and Jeff Achen, multimedia producer and online editor of US community newspaper website Thisweeklive.com.

The guide covers tips for livestreaming on a news site, writing headlines for the web and using social networks as reporting tools. Topics such as handling user-generated content, working with PDFs and creating interactive maps and slideshows are also included in the 48-page guide.

Society of Professional Journalists Digital Media Handbook, Part I

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