When it comes to digital projects, it can be sometimes be hard to evaluate progress. Sure, you can check the growth in your page views, number of visits, and reader comments, but it can still be difficult to know how much of an impact you're really making in your community or the journalism industry as a whole.

Because of this, I have to say I was surprised to take a look at results of the 2010-11 New York State Associated Press Association Awards. In addition to noticing The Record pick up a few awards for writing and photography, I quickly saw that, for the first time in years, if not the first time ever, Journal Register Company newspapers took all three prizes in the awards for Online Content for publications with a circulation under 25,000.

From the AP Award website:
Online content
1st, Daily Freeman, Kingston, Live tweets from the Kingston murder trial, Patricia Doxsey, Ivan Lajara
2nd, The Saratogian, Saratoga Springs, Road to the Title: Saratoga Springs High School Ice Hockey team, James Sherrill
3rd, The Record, Troy, Bringing the World Series trophy home, Kevin Moran, Ed Weaver, Brian Bouyea, Bill Passonno, Tom Caprood, Chris Fitzgerald


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The Record has an exciting new feature for our political coverage - regular interviews with Troy's mayoral candidates Lou Rosamilia and Carmella Mantello answering questions submitted by our readers.

Every two weeks we ask our readers to submit what they would like us to ask the candidates. After the submission deadline passes, we scan through the submissions and select three questions to ask the candidates on camera (we select these only so that we don't repeat a question from week to week or air any personal attacks that may get submitted).

Once the election season kicks into high gear after Labor Day, we plan to make these videos an integral part of The Record's election website.

In addition to providing great video coverage of the election, we think that this will be an excellent way to help build stronger relationships with our readers and encourage them to interact with us more in the future.

FYI, we are currently accepting questions today for the fourth round of candidate interviews in case any of you readers are located in Troy.

Here's a look at our past interviews to date:

There is big news in the city of Troy this week with the start of a double murder trial built on a 9-year-old case that was built for years against two men and nearly went to trial in 2010 before a third suspect was named and linked to DNA evidence at the murder scene, causing the original charges to be dropped against the two former suspects and Michael Mosley to be indicted for both murders.

Opening statements began in the case Monday, May 9 and The Record is providing as much coverage as possible throughout the proceedings.

In addition to a installing a widget listing prior articles on the case going back several years on our TroyRecord.com homepage, we also decided to take a lesson from our sister paper The Daily Freeman and attempt to live-tweet the courtroom proceedings complete with witness testimony.
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From editor Lisa Lewis' blog earlier this week:

"For more than a decade, Record Sports Editor Kevin has worked hard to get Major League Baseball to acknowledge the Collar City for its contributions to America’s national pastime.
On Thursday, the city of Troy gets that recognition when the San Francisco Giants bring their 2010 World Series championship trophy to the Joseph L. Bruno Stadium for a public viewing from 5 to 7 p.m.
The visit is the result of a collaborative effort between Kevin and the Tri-City ValleyCats. Team owner Bill Gladstone and general manager Rick Murphy used their contacts to reach out to the Giants about a possible visit to upstate New York after Kevin and his staff launched a petition drive to get the Giants to bring the World Series trophy to Troy."
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The day we had been waiting for finally arrived Thursday as a ceremony was held at Bruno Stadium to welcome the World Series Trophy to Troy.

Hundreds of Giants fans from the Capital District and beyond lined the stadium waiting to get their picture taken with the historic trophy belonging to the team whose roots began in Troy more than 100 years ago.


Click here to view a special commemorative publication The Record produced to showcase the history behind the visit.

Check out the recorded stream below of the trophy unveiling press conference and a sampling of the line of fans waiting to be a part of the event.
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We fell into bad habits at The Record in recent months and were not keeping a close eye on video production. As a result, we ended on of our weeks with a total of only four videos being produced, despite having seven reporters between news and sports.

To remedy this, we held a staff meeting with all reporters and editors in both the news and sports editorial departments to discuss the need for video quality video production to be part of everyone’s workflow going forward. Several reporters asked questions and walk away with a better understanding about what we wanted to see from them.

Our editor, Lisa Lewis, also added the incentive of a $25 gift card as a prize to the reporter who could produce the most videos over the next month to add some friendly competition to the mix. I made up the leaderboard that you can see above and have been updating it daily to track the progress of video production and so that the reporters know where they currently stand.

As a result, The Record went from producing four videos one week to 17 the next, and a total of 30 last week.

Everyone now seems to have a better understanding about how to handle production moving forward and we'll be keeping a much closer eye on the numbers to ensure they don't slip so much again in the future

The Record hosted another community forum in our Media Lab on April 28 on the subject of Horse Racing Handicapping, hosted by Nick Kling – a nationally-known horse racing handicapper who has worked as a columnist with The Record for around 20 years.

While only seven individuals showed up, Kling made the forum very interactive, asking each member of the audience what they hoped to get out of the event and what specific questions they wanted to have answered before leaving that night. He then took the time to go through sample racing forms line by line to explain a few different ways that one could use the information available to make an informed pick at the race track and even discussed some options for how to go about wagering for those interested.

Despite the small audience, each person who attended the session was heavily engaged for over an hour and a half, with several noting they would have liked to have stayed longer if it had been possible. We also had seven people watching for practically the entire event on our live stream. A recorded clip of that stream is located below.



This was a great example of how valuable engaging your audience can be. If seven people were interested enough to stay at the session for nearly two hours, there's a good chance each of them will come back to a future Record event and even participate in our interactive crowdsourcing efforts down the road.

Now we just need to figure out how to get larger crowds engaged on the same level.

My 30-day project of training newsroom staffers to recruit and serve as contacts for new community bloggers on TroyRecord.com reached its deadline with just over half of the number of new blogs that I had originally hoped to attract in that time period. However, all of the staffers involved learned new skills through this project and believe that they will do well in their recruitment efforts going forward.

By using the resources already compiled by fellow ideaLab members Kaitlyn Yeager and Karen Workman, I was able to pass along easy-to-understand instructions and tips to both our staff members and the bloggers they recruited from our readership without trying to recreate the wheel, so-to-speak, and do it all on my own.

Kaitlyn’s “Blogging 101” presentation, which she had shared previously with me after using it in several of The Register Citizen’s blogging classes, was a great resource for me to have on hand. I used it to go over the basics with staff members on setting up a WordPress blog from scratch and encouraged each of them to send the document out to their recruits as well.

I ended up approaching 12 Record staffers to participate in this project over the last month – each of our seven reporters between news and sports and a few of our newsroom editors as well. As I had originally planned, I approached each employee in either a small group or one-on-one to make sure that I could engage each of them as I outlined the project and address any initial concerns they may have had.

Several of the employees involved had some ideas of potential bloggers ready to go from Day 1 and were quickly able to secure the interest of their recruits and help me get blogs added to TroyRecord.com within a week or two.
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Photosynth is a free online tool available which "synths" several photos together, allowing you to create 360-degree views of any scene you'd like without very much effort.

While you can view the completed "synths" online using both a Windows PC and a Mac once you've downloaded the Silverlight plug-in, you need to use a Windows computer to create each project. This makes sense since Photosynth is a Microsoft-run project.



The first thing you need to do when you're ready to start trying this website/software out is a group of photos which will be stitched together.

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As promised, here are some more of the great tips that I picked up while at the New York Press Association's annual convention last weekend.

When most people think of the social media networks making the most noise these days, their minds instantly go to Facebook and Twitter. Those are the ones you tend to hear about most often in day-to-day life for keeping up with your friends, family, and colleagues, as well as the world.

Growing somewhat in the background for the last few years, but regularly on the mind of business professionals and job seekers versed in the digital would, was LinkedIn, a networking site which now has 70 million members worldwide.

I attended this session, led by Shannon Kinney, with fellow Record editor/community engagement guru Rebecca Eppelmann. As she has already done a great blog post on the information we took from the session, I'd recommend her post on the subject for Read more »

Over the weekend I was able to once-again attend the New York Press Association's annual convention at the Gideon Putnam in Saratoga Springs, a meeting of staffers from mostly weekly publications across the state which gathers a number a great presenters each year to talk about a variety of topics in the field.

On Friday I attended a great session on the effective use of Social Media by Regina McCombs of the Poynter Institute (here are all of her links from the presentation) and walked away with some great tips that I hope to soon be able to incorporate into The Record's newsroom.

One of these was that journalists can develop relationships with their audience via their personal Twitter accounts. This was not new information, as I had heard it and tried to stress it to our Record reporters in the past. However, the example she provided - journalist Jason DeRusha (@derushaj on Twitter) - was especially interesting since he posts the stories he’s working on every morning and gets user input, not worrying about other news outlets competing for the story first.
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Cailin Brown and Rhea Drysdale.

We had another great community forum at The Record on Thursday, Mar. 31 which focused on getting the most out of Social Media.

Rhea Drysdale, CEO of Outspoken Media in Troy, talked about the benefits of using social media for personal branding, using tools for two-way conversations, and using tools like TweetDeck and others to manage data feeds.

Cailin Brown, an associate professor who teaches journalism at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, discussed the benefits of social media from a journalism perspective, based on her experience both as a reporter and professor, including some of what she currently teaches as best practices to her students.

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We hosted our first bass fishing forum in The Record's community media lab last night as part of our on going "Community Forums" series at the newspaper, which drew a healthy crowd of 26 individuals throughout the evening.

Sean Wilkes, author of the TroyRecord.com blog, Fishing Out Loud, hosted the forum and did a great job engaging the audience with data from his own fishing experiences, first account accounts of what tactics worked better for him in different fishing situations, and, especially, the variety of equipment and tackle he brought for a show-and-tell session afterward.

He made it clear to the audience that this was the first time he had given such a presentation, but from their reactions afterward, they would have never known otherwise.
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Here's an update on my 30 day ideaLab project I mentioned previously on growing TroyRecord.com's blogging community by enlisting the help of our newsroom staff.

After just a week, we already have two new blogs added to the website (From Congo to Colonie, and Generation X Mom) thanks to one of our newsroom editors, Siobhan Connally, who blogs about her own experiences as a mother of two on The Record's site as well.

Another reporter is in the process of setting up blogs with two individuals interested in starting their own blogs and a few other staffers have begun reaching out to perspective recruits.

So far, I'd say things are moving along nicely towards my goal of having each newsroom staffer ad two by the end of our 30-day ideaLab deadline. More updates on this effort soon.

As a member of Journal Register Company's ideaLab, I've been tasked with completing a 30-day project to help solve one of the "problems" going forward with a digital-first operating structure at The Record.

I've chosen to tackle the task of growing our community bloggers on TroyRecord.com by training each member of our newsroom to recruit two additional bloggers and act as a contact person for the individuals going forward.

I believe this will solve at least two issues affecting our staff.

First, it will provide training for each staff member involved so that they will be able to walk away in 30 days and confidently say that they know the basics of setting up a blog, as well as how to answer basic questions bloggers may have about their relationship with the newspaper and its website.


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Here are the latest promos for our next set of Community Forums to be hosted by The Record in our Community Media Lab. They will be held next week, on Mar. 29 and 31, focusing on bass fishing tips as well as how to best use Social Media.

If interested, please register using the included links.

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As part of our next JRC ideaLab assignment, I'll be trying to learn as much as I can about Photosynth, an online photo-stitching application that allows you create seemingly 3D images from multiple photos in one location.

This is something that could really make photos for news and sports stories stand out and become more interactive for readers as they page through The Record's website and I'm excited to try it out with the hopes that it becomes part of our news gathering routine in the near future.

Here is an example of a scene assembled using the software (from Photosynth website, not one I shot):



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Monday night brought another successful turnout for the second Irish genealogy forum hosted by The Record in our new Community Media Lab. The subject of the presentation by Lisa Dougherty, a volunteer with the National Archives, was "Finding a place of origin for your Irish ancestors."

A total of 49 individuals turned out, with more than 15 new faces and many of the same people who attended our first Irish night on March 10.

After talking to many individuals after the event, I found that several of them were interested in what kind of future events The Record would be hosting in the location in the future - great news for us looking to engage more of our readership with each of the events that we plan to hold going forward.

Check out a full recorded live-stream of the event below.

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An amazing crowd of just over 50 individuals attended The Record's community-driven forum on Irish Genealogy in our newly-opened Community Media Lab, showcasing what is possible for these types of events in the future.

As I mentioned in my previous post, we kicked our promotion for the Irish forum into high gear after the poor results we had with our initial attempt at a tax forum Tuesday evening.

Using updates on The Record's website, social media accounts, blog posts, and the online event-planning website, Eventbrite, we were able to attract a fantastic crowd of interested individuals for last night's presentation.


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When it comes to trying new things related to community engagement, digital tools, or training our staff members, Jonathan Cooper, Journal Register Company's VP of content has been telling us in the ideaLab for sometime to follow the Nike approach and "Just Do It."

We did just that at The Record this spring when it came to trying to organize community-driven forums and other events in our new Community Media Lab, a room we set up with a television screen with PC hookups, free wireless Internet, and enough space to sit roughly 50 or so people comfortably with a speaker up front.

The first of such forums was planned for Tuesday evening, with a Tax Tips forum led by one of our community bloggers, Kevin O'Leary of Marvin and Company, P.C. in Latham.

We ran house ads in our paper for over a week and a half promoting the event and pushed it out several times via The Record's social media accounts, not to mention pushing it out on several blogs, including this one, and even passing traditional paper flyers around town.


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The Albany Times Union, a Hearst Corporation newspaper, announced Wednesday in an article that it plans two close its bureaus in Troy and Saratoga Springs and "embrace an industry trend toward mobile journalism."

The article went on to state that the change could increase the presence of Times Union journalists in New York's Capital District due to the fact that their personnel would "be equipped and trained to work as mobile journalists who can report and file stories from outside a traditional newsroom".

Further down, they bring up the notion and benefits of "coffee-shop" journalism, mentioning how Journal Register Co., which owns The Record in Troy and The Saratogian in Saratoga Springs, has been "experimenting" with the additions of coffee shops and Internet cafes to its newsrooms.

First off, good for them. It's nice to see media companies come to the realization that having physical remote offices are a thing of the past.

However, the article is a tad misleading in its structure.

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