OK, no blog posting from me yesterday, but not for lack of trying. I’m staying in a too-expensive hotel (Hilton) that adds to that expense by charging $9.95 for a 24-hour Internet connection. I paid the fee and thought I had 30 minutes or so so write a blog yesterday — turns out it was only about 28 minutes. So a wonderfully crafted piece (at least that’s how I remember it) on user generated content for newspapers drifted untethered into the blogosphere when my connection was abruptly severed.

A brief recap of what I recall from that effort: A visit to USA Today hq revealed that the newspaper formerly known as McPaper is about to unveil a new online presence usatoday.com that will feature more options for user generated content — we call it UGC, a normal non-newpaper person would probably call it content provided by readers.

The debate is over how far to go with UGC — we already have an very active Mail Tribune forum and more comment options in the works. A lot of the discussion revolves around reader-produced news stories, reviews, calendars, etc. That means we newspaper types would have to back off a bit on our Guardians at the Gate role when it comes to news delivery. Probably not a bad thing, although there are some obvious pitfalls for the unwary (with all due respect, do you really want some of the forum posters to be delivering your news?)

But there’s certainly room for more and differing views on our online newspaper site — and our printed newspapers as well. The Web has opened up a variety of new avenues for information providers. Now we just need to get Hilton to take down the detour sign.

So here I sit in Reston, VA., just outside Washington D.C., surrounded by snow on the roads and fog in the conference room. I’m attending a conference that is basically about the newspaper industry’s transition toward the Web and the fog is a bit thick as the assembled editors try to get our brains around both the technical side of the equation and the creative chaos the change will bring to our newsrooms.

An aside: If you thought the Rogue Valley was paralyzed by a bit of snow, you should see D.C. First of all, when they send the school kids home here, they also send home the govt. workers. And, since just about everyone here works for the govt. or provides a service to the govt., that creates a traffic jam from one end of the Beltway to the other.

Meanwhile, back at the conference, we’ve heard today from online editors/managers at boston.com (the Boston Globe) and washingtonpost.com. A lot of conversation about how to get a traditional newsroom to embrace the Web — and about how those two papers have been pretty successful at it. Of course, it’s easier to do when you have 240 reporters, ala The Washington Post, but it’s a cultural shift for the big guys as well as for us smaller fish.

A lot of good ideas offered up today, which made me think there’s no doubt an endless supply of good ideas out there among the people who really know what they want online — you, the online readers. If you have a suggestion about how we could improve our Web site, we’re all ears. You can reply here or e-mail me at bhunter@mailtribune.com.

The snow has let up. Maybe the fog will begin to lift, too.

I’m preparing for an interesting conference that has a direct connection to this blog and to many of the things we’re doing online. It’s called “Leading the 24-7 Newsroom” and the basic thrust is to try to teach some of us old dogs new tricks about how to meld the efforts of publishing the newspaper and taking on new online approaches. Watch here over the next couple of weeks for some outtakes from the sessions.

So the strange events at KTVL-TV yesterday turned into an opportunity for us to stretch our wings — very tentatively, mind you — in using video. By the time the day was done, a disturbed man was in custody after a four- or five-hour standoff with police and we had three videos posted on our Web site.

I doubt we’ll be winning any awards for these — two were shots from a distance of the man’s van parked in front of the TV station and the third was a press conference by the sheriff. But they all added to our total coverage package, and in doing so maybe gave us an insight into how video will best work for us.

What the video amounted to is what we call a sidebar — a bit of information that doesn’t fit in the main package, but that adds to the overall coverage. I suspect that will often be the case. Our main coverage in the near future will continue to be the written word and photos, but video will give us a new dimension that will help fill in the details.

We are just getting started in this new (for us) medium, in fact we don’t even have all of the equipment we need on hand yet. But for a learn-on-the-run event, it showed us the possibilities. More to come as we continue the adventure.

So we had a bit of a culture clash in a story we ran today in the newspaper on Page 1A about a growing number of fights between girls in local schools and nationally. We ran three photos plucked from YouTube videos to illustrate the issue, but then balked at the idea of providing links to the videos, either in the paper or on our Web site. Why? Well, we had some good old-fashioned concerns about the videos, including:

1. It seemed likely that some of the videos were staged for the benefit of the videographers. We didn’t want to present something to readers in a false light.
2. There was a lot of foul language, F-bombs etc. in the audio.
3. One of the videos was hosted by a .com site that included links to other sites that looked suspiciously like porn (not that I checked it out, mind you!).

Maybe we’re too worried about that stuff, but there is a real ethic in newrooms about setting standards and sticking to them. We don’t think we should be wandering away from that just because we’re participating in a medium that sometimes seems like it has no standards at all.

If you’re dying to see the girls fighting videos, you can easily search for them on YouTube if you’re so inclined.

A reader’s question on this blog asks why newspapers haven’t done more coverage on the liquid natural gas pipeline that is proposed to run from Coos Bay to Malin. I checked our archives and found we have done at least 13 stories (my archive search may have missed a few) on the proposal, which first became public last summer. So we’re averaging about a story and a half a month.

Is that enough? Probably, if you’re an average reader. Probably not, if you have a personal stake in the issue. And that’s not unusual for any topic — there are people who want more information than we can possibly give them. But it’s also an opportunity to use the power of the Web, so if anybody has a good source of additional information, you can let her know here.

Our online forums also generate a lot of good information (and some weird info as well). If you want to start a topic and get people talking about it, check it out.

I suspect our coverage on the natural gas line will ramp up as a decision draws closer. If anybody has any good story ideas, send them our way. Paul Fattig (pfattig@mailtribune.com) is the primary reporter on the story.

I got this question today and thought I’d share my answer with more than just the one person:

The Question:
There have been times when I thought of commenting on stories that have the flag for readers to respond. I haven’t because I find it annoying that the paper requres a responder to register and use a pass word. Why? Persons writing letters and sending them via postal mail don’t have to have register and have a pass word, or do they?

My Answer:
We require the registration and password for our forums so that we are able to restrict — or eliminate — a user’s access to the forums if they don’t follow the rules — in other words, if they don’t play nice with others. We already have that ability with the letters we receive via the postal mail, because we can decline to run them. We do not screen the forum comments, but do remove posts that violate the rules.

If someone persists in posting abusive or unseemly comments, we can block them. As far as I know, that has only happened a couple of times, but it’s a control that we need to maintain for those rare occasions.(And, yes, we know they can get around that block in various ways, but at least it’s one option for us to deal with the very, very few problem posters we run into.)

(I didn’t include this in my original answer, but if you’re not a forum user and you’re worried about the prospect of registering, it only takes about 30 seconds. When you post a comment, other forum users will see only your user name, although the option does exist for you to make more information about yourself available, but only if you choose to do so.)

I’m not so sure that we’re all that close to the demise of the printed newspaper — in fact, I’m pretty sure we aren’t. There are a lot of 50-plus (maybe even 40-plus) folks who are committed newspaper readers and they’re going to want that paper to keep coming for years/decades.

But that still leaves a lot of other folks who would rather get their news/info online and that group will continue to grow, while the avid newspaper reader group will be shrinking through attrition (that’s a nice way of saying we all die eventually). I read a piece a couple of days ago that got my attention. Here’s the pertinent excerpt:

“… Reuters reports on a survey of 1,262 teachers in grades 5-12 conducted in autumn 2006 by the Carnegie-Knight Task Force on the Future of Journalism Education. Apparently, 57 percent of teachers use Internet-based news in the classroom with some frequency. In comparison, a mere 28 percent use daily papers in class. Also, 31 percent use national TV news in class, while only 13% use local TV news in class.

Said one surveyed teacher: “Students do not relate to newspapers at all — any more than they would to vinyl records.”

According to Reuters, “Teachers prefer printed papers, but only eight percent said the newspaper was a student’s preferred choice. Seventy-five percent placed it at the bottom of the student list. …”

So the change is upon us and we’ve got to respond by doing more online (like this blog), while remembering that we still have a lot a readers (a heavy majority at this point) who get their news on paper.

I feel a bit like Gutenberg watching his first work roll off the press, although I suspect he may have been more comfortable in his abilities to print than I am in mine to blog. Nevertheless, off we go.

I’ll start with a topic that’s taking up a lot of our time (and the time of newspaper editors everywhere) and that’s the explosion of technology that’s sweeping over the news business. We’ve had a couple of meetings just this week to discuss where we’re headed in this brave new 24-7 news world — and we still don’t know for sure. But things are changing rapidly: We ran video on our Web site Wednesday and today we’re unveiling our first blogs. OK, I know, I know, we’re tragically behind in the race through the blogosphere, but hey, now we’ve at least moved out of park and into first gear.

I hope this blog will be a place where I can answer some questions about how we do things on the news side at the Mail Tribune, but when it comes to technology and what we ought to be doing online I may be asking more questions than giving answers. We think our online reporting can add new dimensions to how we cover stories, by bringing in other media forms (video, audio, etc) and by involving more people in the conversation. But there are no doubt ideas that haven’t even occurred to us.

If you’ve got an idea, let me know — better yet, share it on this blog and help get the conversation started. All ideas gratefully accepted (OK, maybe not the one about my head ending up in a place where the sun don’t shine.) Let’s reword that to all CONSTRUCTIVE ideas gratefully accepted. Let me know what you think by adding a comment below or dropping me an e-mail at bhunter@mailtribune.com. -30- (That’s a newspaper thing — some old ways die hard.)

» To view the latest blog entries, click here

Editor’s Blog

Bob Hunter is the editor of the Mail Tribune and as such gets a whole lot of calls and e-mails about a whole lot of things involving the newspaper. This blog will give him (and other editors) a chance to discuss some of the issues that come up regularly as well as some of the crazy things that come at us from out of the blue.

Since he’s not here 24-7, other editors will also occasionally add their thoughts to the blog. Readers are invited to join in the conversation by posting their comments. If you have ideas for a topic you’d like to see addressed in this blog, e-mail it to bhunter@mailtribune.com.
[VIEW BLOG]

Sports Insiders

Do you ever look at the Mail Tribune’s sports pages and wonder, “What were those guys thinking?” Well now you’ll have a way to find out just what they’re thinking as members of the Sports Department offer their insights into local sports issues and provide a glimpse into what goes on behind-the-scenes in putting together the daily sports report.

All members of the Sports Department will participate in the blog and we hope you will, too, by posting your comments and giving us feedback on our blogs and our coverage in general. If you have ideas for a topic you’d like to see addressed in this blog, e-mail it to sports@mailtribune.com.
[VIEW BLOG]

Fish Hack at the Fish Wrap

Mark Freeman has brought Southern Oregon’s outdoors to Mail Tribune readers for 18 years, exploring the woods and waters with a mix of everything from hard-nosed investigative reporting to irreverent nose-tweaking of those who deserve it. You’ve read the articles. Now learn the stories behind the stories and other tidbits in this running conversation with “The Fish Hack at the Fish Wrap.” If you have ideas for a topic you’d like to see addressed in this blog, e-mail it to mfreeman@mailtribune.com.
[VIEW BLOG]

The Shakespeare Blog

Bill Varble has been reviewing plays at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and off-Bardway since the late 1990s. He calls ‘em like he sees ‘em, from brickbats to shameless gushing and all the mixed-up stuff in between. He’ll see the OSF’s four opening plays of 2007 in three days starting Friday night and blog when he isn’t writing reviews. He often thinks of reviews as conversations — but one-sided. Now there can be real conversations, with readers clicking on the comment button at the bottom of the blog to join in. They can also e-mail Varble at bvarble@mailtribune.com.
[VIEW BLOG]

The Whole Dish

Sarah Lemon whips up stories on the Rogue Valley’s growing food scene with an enthusiasm that rivals her love of cooking. Her blog mixes culinary musings and milestones with tips and recipes you won’t find in the Mail Tribune’s weekly A la Carte section. When she’s not in the kitchen or unearthing the freshest seasonal produce, she’ll dish on local food trends, products and events. Add your own recipes, tips and ideas to this blog or e-mail slemon@mailtribune.com.
[VIEW BLOG]