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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After weeks of meetings, shooting videos, interviewing both staff members and bloggers, and other extensive planning efforts, we held our first Community Media Lab event last night, welcoming a handful of community bloggers into our new space and starting the first of many discussions to help better our products.

Myself chatting with our roller derby
blogger Marcie Pry.

The night kicked off shortly after 5:40 p.m. on Nov. 10 with a turn out of about seven bloggers – a small gathering, but still good considering this was the first time we had an event like this and a few others couldn’t make it down because of illness or other events that came up in their own schedules.

After welcoming everyone who showed up and offering up some snacks and refreshments, we started the night by showing a video I put together of our staff explaining how our newspaper and the industry itself has changed with the push towards digital. This covered what we’ve seen over the last few years, as well as in recent months with the Digital First initiatives being pushed by our owner, Journal Register Company.

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