The NYTimes has a story today about how media outlets are dealing with a new trend: People “video snacking” at their desks at lunch.

It’s an interesting phenomenon I haven’t heard of before. Though, apparently several newspapers and TV stations, as well as big online ventures like Yahoo/AOL, are responding to this increased noontime demand for fresh video.

The midday spike in Web traffic is not a new phenomenon, but media companies have started responding in a meaningful way over the last year. They are creating new shows, timing the posts to coincide with hunger pangs. And they are rejiggering the way they sell advertising online, recognizing that noontime programs can command a premium.

In 2007, a growing number of local television stations, including WNCN in Raleigh, N.C., and WCMH in Columbus, Ohio, began producing noon programming exclusively for the Web. Among newspapers, The Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk, Va., and The Ventura County Star in California started posting videos at lunchtime that have young journalists as hosts and are meant to appeal to 18- to 34-year-old audiences.

The trend has swept across large as well as small independent sites. Yahoo’s daily best-of-the-Web segment, called The 9 and sponsored by Pepsi, is produced every morning in time for lunch. At MyDamnChannel.com, a showcase for offbeat videos, programmers have been instructed to promote new videos around noon, right when the two-hour traffic spike starts.

I was unaware of this jump. Granted, reporters/newsroom staff here are only sent the basic stats report e-mail for each day. So I don’t know the exact numbers for each hour. But our traffic very clearly seems to spike around 8/9 and then again at the end of the work day. I’ll have to look back through a few days when I’m at work again to see if this midday trend holds true here. If it does though, it begs the question of whether we should and how we should cater to that demand? And if it doesn’t, it still leaves open the question of whether we could compete for this attention, and of course, how.

The first reporter at my paper starts posting around 6 a.m. daily (8 a.m. weekends — but both shifts seem ungodly early when you’re the one on them), and throughout the day local and state, and sometimes big national, stories are posted. On bigger news, the No. 1 slot or the No. 5 slot (that is the top slot w/a photo or the top slot sans photo) will get swapped out or updated and timestamped breaking news. Often, those stories are among the most read. After the 4 o’clock meeting each night, they post a PM Update with four or five teasers for the top stories in tomorrow’s paper. That is also usually well read.

But if there’s a group of people or even a growing appetite for a noontime video/news bite, it’s worth considering what type of demand that is (seems from the NYTimes story that lighter fare is popular) and then how to cater to it. (Wow, so many food cliches.) Here’s some very preliminary ideas I have off the top of my head, or as Carl (former prof/Stater adviser) used to say: I’m thinking out loud here…

• A noontime round up of odd news off the wire. These are generally short, and pulling out three or so each day would probably be a cinch. People like weird stories. If you want this to be video, grab one of your more camera friendly staffers and get him or her to quickly tell the stories. Throw in a few stock photos/screen grabs/whatever for effect if you want.

• A midday news synopsis with very brief (think news tickerish) bits about the stories we’re working on or even the biggest national stories — with links to more details for any stories that are already posted, of course, even if it’s a link to CNN. This could easily be paired with a noon-time 2-minute newscast. I don’t think you need glitzy here, down and dirty headlines could suffice.
• Maybe like our PM Update a Midday Update. Promote the top stories, video, galleries, forums, whatever on your site to let other people know what their peers are reading. Kind of, “Here’s what’s generating the biggest buzz on (your site).”
• Get an employee who’s always finding cool stuff online (there has to be at least one) to do a round-up of stories, videos, Web sites, whatever people are talking about online today. Maybe it’s just a quick round-up of the top stories on other sites, like YouTube’s most popular item or whatever is out there on Digg or just whatever cool or crazy news/fun item he or she stumbles on that day. This would probably work best as a blog that you promote or cross-post at noon each day. I’m thinking kind of an “in case you missed it” blog. Something along the lines of Clicked over at MSNBC, with a dash of USA Today’s On Deadline or a more focused version of Pop URLs. I could spend hours following all those links. The benefit of doing this locally (instead of Clicked, etc.) would be it would focus the local audience on the same items. Fostering that communal experience, “Did you see…?”, and community conversation on the comments.

I’m sure there are plenty of other more innovative and effective ways to capture that noontime media consumer. Those are just some initial thoughts. I’ll have to look around to see if anyone out there has come up with some cool ideas. If you know of one, pass it my way.

I spent a good chunk of yesterday/today trying to figure out how to get the J&C on the school closing contact lists of area districts.

Living in the Midwest, school closings and two-hour delays (a term I’d never heard of until I moved here) are fairly common. In the fall, schools without AC sometimes cancel class when temperatures/heat index top out in the 90s. In the winter, snow drifts out in the county or a not-so-impressive-or-efficient street crew in the cities can keep schools closed several days a year.

For years, when you woke up in the morning and looked out the window to a “marshmallow world,” you ran to your TV to catch the school closings ticker at the bottom of the local news station. Maybe you turned the radio on to the local radio station. Either way, the last place you looked or would ever think to look would be the newspaper stuck in the snow drift on your front porch.

Now, you don’t need to open your door to access the newspaper. And we can get the school closings posted online as fast if not faster than the TV stations can program them to scroll.

We’ve been working on training, for lack of a better word, local schools to call us since I got here. But nobody yet made a concentrated effort to get it done. When you have more than two dozen districts, let me tell you, it takes awhile to find the right person and get in contact with them and then figure out a system that works. The schools in this county are pretty good about calling. The superintendents/their designees often call me when they have cancellations. The outlying counties, especially those on the fringe or those with their own smaller town papers, aren’t as good. Yet. I’m working on it.

I had to actually pause when one of the outlying superintendent’s replied back to my e-mail that he would be glad to call us. But he said, it likely won’t be helpful since the decision is usually made when it’s too late to get in the paper. Yeah, I wrote back, but there is no deadline for the Web.

It’s a process. We’re working on finding ways to get the news in faster (for example, our morning reporting gets in at 5:45 a.m., so we have nothing posted between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m.) and figuring out what news we should get up (everything?). And while we’re working on training the districts to give us a call/shoot us an e-mail, we’re also just as much training our readers to rely on us for that news.

My greatest weakness as a writer, and I suppose reporter, is my propensity to over-report. I’ve always been like this. I always end up with 10x what I actually need. It’s a good thing to have too much, or at least, better than not enough. Right?

Turns out, not always. But man, it’s a hard habit to shake.

Part of it is my approach to stories. Sometimes, I guess, I’m like a kid in a candy store; my eyes are much bigger than my stomach. I can think of 10 great angles to every story but need to work on narrowing it down to one angle at a time so I can better focus. Then, I can come back and hit some of the other angles separately, which my editor says (probably rightly) would better serve our readers. I’ll also be less likely to be paralyzed/overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of work to be done.

Focus has always been an issue of mine. Not just the “man I can’t focus with the scanner, the TV, the phones, e-mail and the other dozen reporters constantly chattering,” which yeah can be difficult, too. But focusing a story that I’ve over reported can be daunting. What doesn’t make the cut? What great story remains untold for another day? How many unanswered questions are OK? And how many of these questions, which I have indeed answered in my reporting, are the story chatters going to call me out on tomorrow because they didn’t make it to print?

I guess, to use another food-related cliche: I sometimes bite off more than I can chew. Which leads to “indigestion,” when it comes time to report and I end up chasing down angles I don’t use or need, or when I’m stressed trying to pull together a single coherent story from 10 story lines. (Oh, and throw in phrases like “hold to cover” or “12 inches” or my personal favorite, “a charticle out front and the impact inside,” and this makes the process that much more complicated.) By better focusing my ideas (there we go with focus again), I guess it would help me focus my reporting and hone in on just the specifics necessary to tell *this* story. As I said before, I can come back to the other angles. Sometimes, I forget that.

Worst of all? This tendency is compounded by something I really, really, really do need to get over. ASAP. That is, I can’t write until I’ve reported. Until I know who I have talked to, what they’ve said, who can be grouped together, what data opposes what or supports whom, where each piece fits together with the whole. This helps me discover gaps in my logic or my reporting. But I’m told actually writing as soon as I’m reporting each piece would do the same, probably more effectively, and writing earlier would help lead me down the path in a more narrow and, get this, focused manner.

I can bang the story out, usually, once I have all the ducks in a row. Sometimes, on more in-depth or bigger pieces these ducks take on the form of a rough outline, usually scribbled on a post-in stuck to my monitor. But like I said, I tend to over-report, so it’s more complicated than that. I have to sort out the ducks, decide which ones make the cut, which get relegated to the file cabinet, which to the trash and which bits actually make it through to the story I file and ultimately, the paper/Web site. If I had fewer ducks or was better as picking the ducks early on, this step would likely be easier. I wouldn’t have to “kill my darlings” so often. I’d also have more drafts, which would allow more revisions until I was pleased with exactly how it was phrased and ordered.

The other problem with over reporting? It takes time. Time isn’t really a luxury I have when writing two or so stories a day, plus any online updates that may pop up. It isn’t a luxury I’m likely to ever have. So managing what time I do have is paramount.

I both love and hate the emphasis on enterprise reporting here. I love it because I am pushed to constantly assess my beat for these issues worth looking at more in-depth. But I resent it because there’s never enough time to do the stories as well as I think they could be. Maybe I’m a perfectionist. (OK, that’s a big “maybe” and is more likely just “I am.”) But I don’t know. I have written several stories that I liked, but when I look at them in retrospect, I think them merely OK. Nothing stands out. When I look at my writing, rather than being proud of it, I constantly see what I could have or should have done instead. It’s a poor way to live. My sense of accomplishment lasts only as long as I have filed the story and am not on deadline for the next one. It’s really odd because I am such an optimist. But I guess I live in perpetual self-improvement mode, that is I’m always assessing how I did and how I can do better next time. Does this go away as I become even more confident in my writing and reporting? I’m banking on that. I don’t want to get complacent, but I would like to see the good in my work.

Why am I relaying my personal faults here? Well, you all are smarter than I am. (At least collectively.) Surely, I’m not the first person to go through this. I know I’m not, because my editor tried to give me some tips to combat it during my recent annual review (where we discussed some of these weaknesses, but which generally went well.) Maybe some of you much-experienced journalists can weigh in with tips that helped you solve these problems. Here’s one sheet I’ve already found about writing while reporting, which has some good tips to get me started.

So to recap, things to work on now that my rookie year as a reporter is behind me: more focused story pitches, and consequently tighter-focused reporting and writing; following up those big-picture stories through several shorter stories rather than one big piece; writing sooner and reworking/revising more often; confidence that I am in fact doing all right in my job.

All of those are reporting/writing technical issues. Yes, I know. We did talk about some of the other things I’d like to do. I’m going to keep pushing to be involved in things like NPD and to get some multimedia work experience here. But as I’ve told everyone all along, I see this job as the foundation of my career. I need to be a strong reporter before I can be a strong anything else.

What’s really important in all of this, and which I haven’t mentioned yet: I survived. I was scared when I was in school that I’d graduate, get a job and hate journalism. I was fearful I’d hate the city I ended up in or the beat I landed. I wasn’t sure I would like doing this every day, or that I wouldn’t stumble, fall and embarrass myself by even trying. I always left myself the out that I don’t get paid enough to hate my job, and if I didn’t like it, I’d quit and do something else. But, man, it’s been an interesting year. I love it, as much, perhaps more, than I hoped I would. And I’m pretty confident, there’s a whole world out there beyond this city and my beat waiting to be conquered. Once I nail down these basics as well as I’d like to, I’m sure it’ll be ready for me.

“Don’t be afraid if things seem difficult in the beginning. That’s only the initial impression. The important thing is not to retreat; you have to master yourself.”
— Olga Korbut

Everywhere I turn I see Twitter-this or Twitter-that. I even read a post today about how Twitter will come of age in 2008. (I would link to it, but I can’t find it again. Sorry guys.)

I for one am intrigued by the possibilities. Even though last week, a few reporters and I went out after work and somehow we ended up talking about Twitter and they all made merciless fun of me. They don’t get it. I can’t blame them. It wasn’t that long ago I was skeptical, too.

I was off today, and I have been exploring some of the possibilities everyone is talking about.

Recently, I started importing the feed from Meranda Writes and from stumblED. (The latter is my education tumble log, remember that?) I also started following hashtags. Though I’ve only used it once so far to post my #resolutions. I also keep my Facebook mates up to date on my whereabouts by feeding my twitter updates to my Facebook status. None of this makes me a better journalist, per se, but knowing how the technology works is the first step, I guess to commanding it for my craft not just for fun. But even just for fun, me gusta.

Today, I set up a Twitter account, more for my own amusement and use than anything else, that imports RSS feeds off jconline. Of course, I’ll have to see how the powers that be feel about it. But either way, it’s useful for me. It could be useful to other people in the community who use Twitter (including a few who are following me, one of whom I’d never met and happened to run into at a coffee shop this weekend!). I also foresee, if we could establish a sizable userbase, it could be a good crowdsourcing medium or great way to break news quicker/as we get it. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I was just playing with Twitterfeed.

If only I could figure out how to get just a feed of my bylines. (Funny enough, that teacher memories call-out posted now is mine.) But I am not so sophisticated or intelligent enough to get it to feed just my stories for you all (OK, just my mom and maybe a professor or two curious what I’m up to and wondering just how much I’m producing out here). I’m working on it. So far, the best archive for my recent stories is actually Newstin. Check that, I just scanned the page — apparently I can get Newstin as an RSS feed. Wish granted. I love the Internet. My Twitter followers are now in for a treat: an ongoing log of the stories I write. Yay?

Meanwhile, on the JC Twitter account, I can’t figure out a smart way to avoid pulling in stories that are out on multiple feeds. For example, a story on the Purdue feed and on the sports feed about the Big Ten. In fact, I am not pulling in the breaking news/top stories feed because it’s nearly always just the same as the news feed, except for some reason it also pulls in content off our Moms site and occasionally, off the WLHS microsite. Part of the problem is that our RSS feeds (like many newspaper feeds) are wonky. I don’t think anyone actually sits down to think about which 10 stories get pushed out each morning, and only items posted as breaking news AND news during the day get put out on RSS, not the “breaking news” at the top of jconline. (That probably doesn’t make sense to you, but it’s part of the classification you have to choose in the CMS.) So my RSS feed/Twitter idea is only as helpful as those stories it chooses. I wish we had an Opinions RSS feed, because those are popular here, too.

Anyway, to get back to my point, I’m not sure, still, when or if Twitter will “come of age.” But there are certainly lots of cool things going on with it. Here’s a few:

• ReporTwitters (Using the medium to be a better reporter. Sounds like an interesting proposal.)

• Tweet Scan (Search for your own interests, like Apple, or when breaking news happens for fire & California. You get the idea.)
• Hashtags (Tag your twitter posts.)
• Twitterfeed (Import your RSS feeds, or even the RSS feeds of blogs you regularly read, a la ojaggregator. It’s the filter/editor and choosing the best blogs to follow, so I don’t have to.)

That’s just to name a few I use. There are hundreds more and new ones coming each day.

Anyone else know something cool I missed or could use?

I have been taking a deliberate “hands off” and “mouth shut” approach to the 2008 presidential election so far. Not even my closest friends can tell you who I’d like to see enter the Oval Office in 2009. Part of it was I felt it was too early to choose my allegiance, and part of it was, I’m not into talking politics like I used to be.

Tonight, I happened upon some T-shirts supporting the candidate that I really, really want. And it saddens me that I can’t wear them.

I’ve never kept my political affiliations a secret, but I’ve grown increasingly less willing to discuss them. I even removed that slot from my Facebook profile, and unjoined groups I’d been part of more for laughs than anything else. I even removed my “support” for office holders in my home state, Ohio, because it’s fairly obvious to follow that line to my political beliefs.

Do I think all this is necessary? Actually, no. I know other reporters who think expressing any opinion is tantamount to an ethical breech. I don’t think it’s that much of an issue for someone to know I lean liberal, or that much of a surprise. If you ask, I will tell you.

But part of being a journalist is maintaining that objectivity, or at least maintaining professional distance and not giving anyone a reason to question your ability to be objective and unbiased. So by removing those items, I am not showing support to one side or the other. If that makes sense, I can still hold the same opinions without wearing my opinions on my sleeve, so to speak.

A few weeks ago, I was tapped to cover a meeting for a new group whose cause could not possibly have been farther from my own belief system. When I got the assignment, I paused for a second to reflect on it and how it made me feel. I covered it as I would any other assignment. I was neither more nor less critical than I would have been were it a rally for a cause I care deeply about. In fact, I got several e-mails the following day/week from the group’s founders and members commending me for my professionalism and for a fair story. That’s the key I realized when I accepted the assignment: I knew I could be professional about it and reserve judgment for the reader/community member. That’s how I approached it.

Those community members do not know and could not tell from my reporting where I stand on that issue. That’s important. Were I to wear my politics on my sleeve, they would have, rightfully, raised flags. Instead, I showed I could maintain a professional distance both in my coverage of things I am fully in support of and those with whom I couldn’t disagree more.

When I became a journalist, I did not sign over my rights to join civil discourse or to vote and have an opinion. But I did take on the responsibility knowing that I wouldn’t be volunteering for political campaigns or pasting candidate bumper stickers on my car.

The last presidential election was the first I could vote in. Living in Ohio, I had the great fortune of seeing many candidates come through. I did volunteer some time working on mailings for at least one and registering people to vote. I had plenty of T-shirts, buttons and more telling the world where my allegiance lie.

Now, I’m in an entirely different place in my life and career. And though this election is just as important, perhaps more, I know that I won’t be doing any of those things. I never know when I may get called on to cover someone I do support or to handle a story on something I don’t. I have to maintain my professionalism in either instance, and part of that means keeping my mouth shut and my hands off in the political races. No matter how much I want that T-shirt.

“You can learn new things at any time in your life if you’re willing to be a beginner. If you actually learn to like being a beginner, the whole world opens up to you.”
— Barabra Sher