Holy cow, these past 36 hours have been a complete blur.  We launched the new lfpress.com web site yesterday morning and while reviews have been decidedly mixed, I finally feel like we’re on a platform from which we can grow the way we need to.

I’m not going to post a whole heckuva lot right now because I need to get my compass realigned and need to absorb the feedback we’ve received.  What has been amazing to me is how polarizing of an issue this has become.  The response that we’ve received has been all over the map. Some people absolutely love the new design, with it’s wider layout and more intuitive navigation bar; others find it a hideous monstrosity and are calling for my immediate termination.

Anyway, I hope that most of you like where we’re trying to go. We’re far from being where I want us to be but this new site is a good step in the right direction.

@SteveatLFPress

Okay, I’m beginning to get very impatient while awaiting a Mac version of the Livestream.com Procaster solution. For those unfamiliar with our challenges, we have been using a Rogers RocketStick connected to a MacBook Pro to live stream events via the Livestream.com browser-based Flash encoder.

Whether the problem is with Rogers throttling us or with the browser-based Flash encoding itself, we were having more and more problems broadcasting live this spring. So we made a decision a few months ago to hold off on any further live video until Livestream.com released a full-fledged Mac application for real time Flash encoding. (They have a Windows version but we’ve stayed away from it thus far).

I had hoped to see that later in August, and now half way through September we still don’t have it. There were numerous times in the past few weeks where we could have gone live.

Patience is not something I do well.

@SteveatLFPress

Paul Berton wrote this column last month while I was away on holidays, but after having re-read it a few times I can’t help but think that it succinctly captures what it is that we’re trying to do here at The Free Press.

The summer has slowed the pace of progress for us with everyone just trying to make sure that they’ve covered off each others holidays, but I’m hopeful that fall will see us take this initiative to a whole new level, for the betterment of both Londoners as well as this company.

@SteveatLFPress

Two more lanes on the info highway

The London Free Press
01 Aug 2009

The so-called information superhighway, under construction now for more than a quarter of a century, seems to get another lane added almost daily. This week, The London Free Press jumped into one of those lanes, by launching a mobile site —…read more…

Until the events of yesterday I didn’t think it could be possible to be both sickened and proud at the same instant. But that was how I felt as I watch the events unfold in the mortifying case of the Tori Stafford abduction and alleged murder.

On the one hand, as a parent of two young children, and an uncle of four beautiful nieces whom I adore, I was visibly shaken and bordering on nauseous as I learned of the apparent fate of young Tori. This is the most horrific crime I can imagine and having been so close to the story for the past 42 days was at times more than I could handle. Our journalists are consummate professionals but I wasn’t prepared for the emotion of such a case. (The fact that I’m writing this post at 4:00 am speaks to that issue).

On the other hand I felt a tremendous sense of pride as I watched a newsroom kick into overdrive to find and deliver the facts of the story, and to do it’s best to provide whatever analysis could be proffered in a case such as this. Early in the day the team recognized – with no input from me – that these developments would play out largely online, given that a print edition would not come for another 18 hours or so.

So what resulted was a reporter sked (a journalism term for the assignments for the day) that focused heavily on a multi-platform approach:

• Reporters were dispatched with instruction to be involved with readers via Twitter
• Reporters were asked to file stories and photos from their BlackBerries
• Photogs were given direction to get photos and video uploaded from the field
• A live video stream was established in the newsroom with updates provided by Dan Brown, PJ Harston and other editors every 30 minutes to an audience that eventually reached over 8,000 live viewers
• A laptop with Final Cut Pro and a 3G Rocket Stick was prepared so video could be edited and uploaded from the field
• Our crack in-house team got busy aggregating the incoming photos into an expanding gallery
• Despite some legal uncertainty we did our best to offer a forum for often heated exchanges in a live chat room that accompanied our video stream
• We worked with our infrastructure team in Montreal to deal with the overwhelming amount of traffic our site received, nearly double our previous daily record
• We made our best attempt at live streaming the press conference, but internet connectivity just wasn’t there

In isolation none of these initiatives seems overly innovative; however what I watched play out was a newsroom that appreciated how digital and social media tools could help them tell stories. Over the next few days we’ll discuss what we could have done differently; we’ve already realized that we could have used Google Latitude on our reporters’ BlackBerries to mash up a map on our site with real time updates displaying where they were in London, Woodstock and Guelph. But for now that was as ‘multi-platform’ as I’ve seen from our newsroom.

@SteveatLFPress

Journalism changing, not dying

The London Free Press
25 Apr 2009

We set a record of sorts here on Wednesday. Our website, lfpress.com, had 325,000 page views, more than any other single day. Problem is, the previous record was set two days earlier, and I have every expectation the current one will not stand for…read more…

PodCamp brings users offline to meet in person
BY KELLY PEDRO
The London Free Press
27 Apr 2009

London Free Press Nearly 120 people filled rooms and hallways at a downtown London hotel to exchange ideas on new media at PodCamp London. “ I didn’t think it was going to get this big,” organizer Bill Deys said of the one-day event, which took place…read more…

Wow! What a week.  I really don’t even know what else to say. I’m in a bit of a fog right now given the exposure that we are getting for our coverage of the Bandidos murder trial.  Between the fantastic job that Mike Knoll (@MikeatLFPress) and Randy Richmond (@RandyatLFPress) did with the various introductory videos to the amazing work by Jane Sims and Kate Dubinski (@KateatLFPress) from the courtrooms it has been a whirlwind.

A few highlights for me this week:

Topped 800 Followers, closing quickly on 900

We topped 800 followers near the beginning of the week and very quickly climbed to just under 900, this despite the fact that I refuse to follow individuals in London with our @lfpress account. Who knows how many more we could have if we just followed everyone in the city, but as many of you know that does not seem appropriate to me.

Several people have asked me of those 900, how many Londoners are following us.  As most people know, you can go through your followers one by one and find that info, but in my unscientific observation I would guess that 50-60% of the audience is local.  That’s probably typical.

Massive page views of Bandidos Murder Trial

Our coverage of the Bandidos trial is, in our humble opinion, leading all other media outlets.  This despite the fact that Winnipeg and Toronto media outlets are covering the story.  The majority of the alleged murderers were from Manitoba and the majority of the victims from Toronto.

The photo galleries are setting page view records, the videos are setting viewing records and the overall site traffic is up significantly.  And as importantly for me, we are drawing the print and digital media products closer together, using each tool to its fullest potential to document and communicate the events as they unfold.

Each medium has its strengths and weaknesses as a story telling device.  I think that we’ve done a good job this week to use all to their potential to create a compelling multi-media package.

People are clearly drawn by content not technology

A fascinating thing to note was that of the 200 or so new followers that Kate picked up these past 2-3 days it would appear that a good percentage of them follow no one else. You have to pay attention to something like that. When content is interesting enough that people will cross a mental barrier and join a new medium simply to gain access to that content, only a fool would ignore that fact.

History is littered with technologies that were absolutely compelling in their own right but failed for lack of content.  People are drawn by content, not technology.  When people join Twitter simply for the fact that they believe that this is the way to follow live coverage of a trial we must pay attention.

Momentum is a great thing to have.  We have so much more to do, and so many areas to improve upon (site design!) but momentum is in our favour and we have the proverbial flywheel moving at a good clip.  Time to kick it up a notch!

@SteveatLFPress

I had a bit of an epiphany today in thinking about advertising on the web and how it differs from print advertising.

With a newspaper the number of pages printed each day is largely dictated by the number of ads that are sold.  I see the layout thumbnail sheets every day. The editors are told how many pages they will have at their disposal, where the ads will be placed, and how many ‘holes’ they need to fill with content.

With the web that paradigm is flipped.  The editorial side of the business dictates the size of the product, the readers dictate how many ads will be displayed as they surf the site, and sales reps are the ones who have to fill the ‘holes’.

The game has changed.

In print if an ad is not sold, then a page may not get printed.  Either that or editorial has more space to fill.  On the web any time a page is clicked an ad is displayed – whether one is sold or not.  The advertising team is the group challenged with the task of filling the holes.

Couple this with the fact that there are no wasted ads on a web site and this is a big change. (Unlike radio or TV, where an ad at 2:00 AM may not been seen or heard by anyone, an ad on a web site only displays because someone clicked to request a page.)

Some of you may have a ‘duh’ reflex in reaction to this – as if I had just stated that the world is round – but for me it captures succinctly one fundamental difference between print and web.

Now to ponder what that means for sales reps and how it changes the nature of their job.

@SteveatLFPress