Washington Post names Oakland Press reporter to "best Tweeters" list for GOP primary

Follow Charlie on Twitter @Crummc

Proud moment for our newsroom this morning — our very own veteran political reporter Charlie Crumm was named to a list of top Tweeps to follow for the Michigan primary.
Michigan's primary, as well as Arizona's, will be taking place on Tuesday, Feb. 28.
The Washington Post asked its followers to tweet them their favorite political people on Twitter in Michigan and Arizona with the hashtag #FixList.
@Crummc is, no surprise to us, number three on the list.
Crumm has been providing excellent coverage of the primary for us and having a lot of fun using audio and social media to help him do it.
Earlier this week, he recorded a conversation with one of Romney's campaign members. The resulting story about Romney pitching individual and corporate tax cuts included an audio clip from the interview.
One of the consequences of his recent work with audio is that, well, he's becoming quite popular with the politicians.
"I've got three invitations to conference calls just for today," Crumm said to me Wednesday.
And the number of invitations keep growing, too.
He sometimes puts the audio over photos of the politicians for a quick video, giving something readers to look at while they're listening (check out Romney camp won't predict victory in Tuesday's Michigan primary).
The audio clips have been a hit with WADL too, a new partnership Journal Register Newspapers in Southeast Michigan have with a local television station. The station picks up video reports and news stories for its News @9 broadcast, and Crumm's audio almost always gets play on TV.
He's also had some lighthearted fun with our Facebook fans.
Crumm keeps an eye on CafePress to track which politician's t-shirts are selling the most. On Tuesday, he asked our Facebook fans "If you were going to buy a T-shirt for one of the candidates, who would it be: Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul or Newt Gingrich?"
More than 30 people jumped in to answer and Crumm, tickled with the community's response, wrote the story In the T-shirt economy, Ron Paul leads the GOP field.
And of course, there's also the plain 'ol staying on top of where the candidates are at. This morning, he had a story ready to go by 8 a.m. with the latest updates on where in Michigan to find the GOP contenders.
He's working on a lengthy piece about the primary to run Sunday. We'll use the story to help promote our lunch-hour live chat with Crumm scheduled for Monday — Crumm's agreed to field questions from the community to try to help them arrive at the polls Tuesday as best prepared as possible.
What cool jobs we have.

Keep up with Crumm on his blog, Elections, Politics & Policy.

Reflections on Mid-America Press Institute's 'Managing Change' workshop

Now sitting in an airport restaurant waiting to board my flight home, I thought I'd share some of the highlights from this weekend's Mid-America Press Institute workshop 'Managing Change' in St. Louis.

 - Looks like the next big thing in social media has arrived: Pinterest. Brian Steffens, director of communications for the Reynolds Journalism Institute called it the fastest growing social site yet. I, of course, was beaming with pride for my colleagues at Journal Register Company and MediaNews, who have already begun experimenting with it. Consider me officially motivated to find a Pinterest project for my own newsroom.

 - I absolutely loved Steffens' idea for direct buy advertising (Click on an ad, be taken directly to webpage where you can purchase the product). This leads me to another point ...

 - There was a lot of talk about money and advertising. Glad to hear it. Journalists no longer live in a world where we can sit idly by believing that financial success is not our concern.

 - Bob Rose of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch showed an interesting graphic on traffic - while traditional websites see a daily rise and fall culminating around the lunch hour and dropping rather dramatically on weekends, mobile traffic stays relatively consistent throughout the workweek and weekend. We should start thinking about the implications this has for staffing various shifts, he said, and I agree.

- I left feeling really good about the newspaper and company I work for and a bit amazed to learn that so many newspapers are now experiencing the ugly times we went through a few years back (My surprise not at the tough times, but that the timing of them seems a bit late compared to what I experienced). Not to say it's all sunshine and roses nowadays, but I feel like we're ahead of the game in terms of a rebirth. And I hope I left others feeling like there are brighter days ahead. I believe there are, and I believe every newsroom staffer can play a role in making any day, regardless of hardships and challenges, a brighter one.

Google's Picasa for simple, fast & complete slideshow embeds

I was really just trying to come up with one more way to fit the word 'Google' into a blog post headline before the month ended ... kidding, of course. I would so like to post about some non-Google thing, and I will. But not today.

The first snowstorm of the season hit Michigan last night. It wasn't exactly a whopper of a storm, but it was enough snow to get everyone to pull out their cameras and take shots of their snow-covered lawns and backyards.

We started crowdsourcing this morning on Twitter and Facebook, asking for people to send us their snow pics. People responded — not a massive response — but several folks Tweeted pics of their dogs, yards, wildlife, etc. As community engagement editor, I feel like part of the whole 'engagement' task is to not just get people to interact with you, but to make use of those interactions.

I had five photos to start. Not enough to make a fancy slideshow in iMovie, and I really wanted to be able to include captions. There was some program that we used to use for slideshows, but something about an FTP server and passwords has always been a roadblock in actually using it.

So I turned to Picasa, which is Google's version of Flickr. I've used it for years now and knew it offers links to albums and automated slideshows, so I figured it had to offer an embed code for slideshows too.

It does.

Here's the how-to:
1) Sign in to your Google account, go to "more" and then "even more." Select Picasa when you see it.
2) Upload your photos
3) Make sure you're selected on the album and you should see "Link to this album" on the right hand side
4) Select "Embed Slideshow" — it's an option that only shows up after clicking "Link to this album" 

What I love
It pulls in all the captions you added for the photos. I have Photoshop and run everything through it first, adding captions and stuff. I was so pleased to see that pop up.
I used the extra large size for our website. It came out so nicely!

Here it is, this is the large size  

Don't forget
Let people know you appreciated their interaction and made use of their contributions. I thanked each person who contributed and Tweeted a link to the final story file.

I almost forgot the best part! 
About an hour after embedding slideshow, I had a sixth picture come in. I added it to the Picasa album and crossed my fingers, hoping it would just automatically update the slideshow on our website.
It did. How cool is that? I shared the little success with some of my colleagues.
"You know how awesome that will be when we're covering something on the fly, to have it update like that?" said Charlie Crumm, our political reporter.
So true.

Check out the story file: Send us your wintry photos

More Google Voice examples: 'BackTalk' and soundcloud

I'm happy to share some more examples of how we're using Google Voice.
Click on the headline to view the project referenced.

Trentonian launches audio version of 'BackTalk' 
We call it 'Sound Off' here at The Oakland Press. At the Trentonian, it's 'BackTalk.'
It doesn't really matter what it's called, though — it is consistently one of the most popular items for readers, regardless of whether it's in print or online.
The way it used to work was that readers could call in and leave a voicemail sounding off on issues important to them. At The Oakland Press, we requested only that the caller leave the name of the community he or she resides in.
A clerk then manually transcribes the messages — listening and typing furiously to keep up — and editors select which messages will be published.
The Trentonian is using Google Voice to put a new spin on this project. They're using the Google voicemail account to capture messages, downloading them and then uploading to Soundcloud, which generates an embed code that you can place anywhere in a story file.
Pretty neat.
One note: Editor Joey Kulkin contacted me while working on this with a question about the embed codes offered directly through Google. By clicking on the down arrow next to the message — the same function you use to download the files — you have an option of generating an embed code for that individual message.
I haven't tested out the Google embeds myself, but Kulkin said they weren't working for him. Let me know if you find a way to make them work.

Can the Lions win against the Packers on Thanksgiving Day? 
We are all aware the answer to this question is no.
But before the game was played, we asked readers what they thought would happen.
Normally, I use audio files like this to accompany a slideshow, but we all know how holiday weeks can be — busy.
For this project, we uploaded the audio to our website using the same function you use to upload a photo. As long as the file is smaller than 5 MB, it'll work and play automatically. It is also automatically dropped at the very top of the story, so not exactly my favorite option to display audio.

Readers thankful for family, friends
Oakland Press Reporter Shaun Byron used Google Voice for his Thanksgiving Day story asking readers what they're thankful for.
It was not a hugely popular use of Google Voice with readers, though, and only two people called in.
Because we were having issues setting ourselves up with Soundcloud accounts before the holiday (we've fixed that problem now), we again had to use the media upload feature on our CMS.
Byron made it work by linking to a separate story file that contained the audio responses.
For instance, under a graf about so-and-so, it said something like: "Listen to so-and-so's full response." Then it's one click for the user and the audio begins playing.

Fans sound off about Suh's Thanksgiving Day performance
Michiganians love Lions' defensive star Ndamukong Suh, but no one seems to be loving the Thanksgiving Day play that got him ejected from the game.
Fans reached out in every way they could to talk about the penalty, including calling our Google Voice line.
With my Soundcloud account now up and running, I used that option today to showcase the comments called in.

Get the how-to docs and resources you need to start using Google Voice at your organization

Audio editing tips: 'An aggressive process'

Planning to use Google Voice to put together a multimedia project featuring audio responses from your audience? Here are some tips on editing audio to keep in mind.

"Editing should be an aggressive process," advised Mark Lewis, corporate multimedia editor for JRC. "Cut until you think that losing one more piece would sink the project. As a rule, tighter tends be better." 

Select for emotion
Audio is an excellent way to convey emotion — as a listener, we can hear the intonation of the speaker's voice and understand the emotions driving it. That means audio can be a powerful tool, but in order to capitalize on it, you've got to be selecting for those passion-filled, emotional responses.
Skip over the dry, monotonous responses. If you include them, you risk losing the listener. So no matter how well-versed the response is, it's not worth including if it means driving away listeners.

Keep it short. Really, really short.
We're all familiar with the term soundbyte, but what is a soundbyte, really? I like this sentence from wikipedia that sums it up this way: "A short phrase or sentence that deftly captures the essence of what the speaker is trying to say."
How short is relative. In a video I produced this week, I included a clip of an accident witness simply saying "Ka-boom!" to describe what the accident sounded like. In the context of the video, it worked.
A good soundbyte can be as short as a couple words. Whether it works is all about context and emotion.
Moving quickly from one quick soundbyte to another gives these projects great movement to keep the listener engaged.

Lead with the best
Just as we know to lead our stories with the most engaging information first (and your videos, now that you've all been through the JRC video training, right?), the same goes for audio.
Saving the best response for last is useless if the listener gets bored with the less-than-best responses you led with and ditches before he or she reaches the end.
Keep them engaged. Start with your best.

Reduce redundancies
If you asked five people for their opinion on something and they all gave the same answer, would you include all five answers in your print story? I hope not — space is tight, right?
Apply the same method to audio.
If you have a bunch of responses that are essentially the same, take the most passionate one and cut the rest.
Even if the point you're trying to convey is that everyone is saying the same thing, be selective. Choose the best and get rid of the rest.

Giving credit
I struggled at first with how to give credit to the people who participated — many left their names verbally, which meant I'd have to call back to confirm spellings if I was going to use a scrolling credit screen.
I ended up using their audio instead, selecting the brief second or two it took them to state their name, and using them at the end of the project. You'd hear my voice say, "Today's audio contributors include" followed by each person saying their own name.
Just a suggestion.

Google Voice: 'Great engagement tool'

I'm loving that Google Voice is catching on as an engagement tool. Here's the latest on these projects:

Delaware County Daily Times produces 'Delco Speaks'
After the Philadelphia Eagles recent loss to the Cardinals, the staff at Delaware County Daily Times used Google Voice to ask its audience, "What should the Eagles do now?"
The responses poured in — 60 calls in the first 10 minutes after posting the question.

Here's the finished product:

 

Feedback on putting together these projects
I asked Vince Carey, online editor for Delco, what he thought about using Google Voice.
"I found the process pretty easy, but pretty time consuming," Carey wrote to me in an email. "We got over 60 calls and going through each message before deciding which ones to download wasn't a lot of fun."
He added: "To be truthful, I think it's a fun idea, but can't be done daily."
I agree, this isn't a daily project. I really think the best uses of this tool will be for those big breaking news stories or issues that people are deeply opinionated about.
Getting so many calls will make it more time consuming to go through the messages, but I think it's also a sign that we've done the right thing by engaging the community on a topic that they want to be heard on.
I'm going to post later with some tips on editing audio that should help reduce that message review/selection time too.
And while the process can be time consuming, I found that practice helps. As with everything, the more you do it, the more experience you get and the more efficient you become — the whole practice makes perfect theory.
Steve Buttry, director of community engagement and social media for JRC, recently chimed in on Google Voice too, calling it a "great engagement tool" and asking staff to let him know how it's working out.
Thanks Steve!

Coming up — tips on editing audio
Just like learning how to structure a story, there's some things to keep in mind while editing audio.
Check back tomorrow for some general tips on that.

Looking for resources on Google Voice? 
Lots of information and how-to documents available on the post, Using Google Voice for multimedia projects

Google voice project on scandal at Penn State

One of our sister papers in Pennsylvania, the Delaware County Daily Times, used Google Voice to crowdsource reaction to the scandal at Penn State earlier this week.
They crowdsourced the question using a story file on their website on Wednesday morning, asking their audience whether Joe Paterno should step down.
At that time, the Associated Press was reporting that Paterno would announce his plans to retire at the end of the season later in the day — which he did. Even later that night, though, he was terminated by the board, effective immediately.
The question was posted online just before 11 a.m. Wednesday. In less than an hour, about 20 calls poured in.
I tried to do the same here in Michigan, but perhaps Penn State is just too far removed from us for folks to be passionate enough about the subject to call in. No calls from Michiganians on this one.
The efforts of the staff at Delco definitely demonstrate that the right question about the right story in the right market make this a worthwhile project.
Seriously, when you get about 20 calls in less than an hour, you know you're engaging your audience on a topic they want to be heard on. That's valuable.

Here's the final result:

 

Link, Delco Speaks: Your reaction to Joe Paterno's resignation announcement, then dismissal

Learn how to use Google Voice for a project like this, Using Google Voice for multimedia projects