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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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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A bit of an old school post today, but this is almost too interesting to ignore.

A former employee of The Record mailed us a 1937 style book that was used at the paper to dictate proper usage, spelling, etc...much like the AP Stylebook is used by every major news organization today.

Page through a PDF of the short book here and pick out what you find interesting and discuss in the comment section below.

Is there something here you wish we still did? Does anything jump out at you as being particularly odd compared to how things operate today?

Let me know!

Record Style Book - 1937

My ideaLab goal for the month of November is going to deal with metrics, metrics, and more metrics in an attempt to use what I learn to increase our overall page views on TroyRecord.com going forward.

So far, we've been looking at web stats on Omniture a few times a month (usually at the beginning or end of a week) to see how we've been doing, but that's about to increase exponentially.

Over the next two weeks, and continuing going forward, I plan to work with staffers at our parent company, JRC, my fellow ideaLab members, our local digital team (more on that below), as well as do my own research and experiments to determine the best ways we can use the feedback we get from web analytics to increase our traffic.Read more »