This year I played the part of Santa, intercepting and opening letters bound for the North Pole, and scanning and uploading them for all the world (or at least Garden City) to see. Here were some of my favorites:
This girl only wanted a droid phone… don’t worry about the laptop Santa.
This girl did not know what to write.
Kaci had quite a few questions for Santa.
I don’t know why I like doing these horizontal scrollers so much, but here is another one (still have some art left to add). I found out yesterday that they were doing a sports tab to preview the upcoming winter sports and thought, again, that this would be an easy way to aggregate all of this disparate content (each preview goes to a specific area page on our high school sports site) in one place. I could definitely use more art and probably more stats such as last season’s record, coach, returning players, etc.
I have at least two more in the works.
I am now just over two weeks in to my new job as web editor at the Garden City Telegram and already am I learning a good deal about the realities of working in a newsroom of this size (that is to say, small), the most important of which seems to be, there is no specialization. While it is true that reporters have their beats, when you have three reporters doing the work that five once did, they have to be flexible. It is not uncommon for reporters here to exchange assignments based on availability, and all have either shot their own photographs or video since I have been here.
The same can be said for the editors. Though I am the web editor, over half of my day is spent on pagination and copy editing (this should be changing a bit once an open newsroom position is filled). Another quarter is spent putting stories on the web and maintaining Twitter, Facebook and local forum activity. That leaves just one quarter of my time for training, content creation and producing.
This then, leads to the term I have been hearing so much when asking other web/multimedia editors for advice, ROI. But what I continue to struggle with is what really brings back the highest return on investment and how hard does one push a staff that, in some ways, is already overworked? Are there numbers that say investing the time to develop evergreen databases brings in more readers than steady multimedia content? Does having a reporter in the office editing a video instead of reporting on a second story that day help the digital side? Does it hurt the print side?
Obviously I am learning as I go along, and can hopefully document some of the decisions that are made at the Telegram and their results.
On a side note, I thought it of interest to note, Garden City is home to San Jose mayor Chuck Reed as well as Victor Ortiz, a boxer that I helped film a short documentary of for my video class at Brooks Institute of Photography.
A couple photos from both the men’s and women’s basketball games at the GCCC Thanksgiving Classic last night.
More up on my flickr account and gctelegramphotos.com tomorrow.
