We will get you the news as it happens
At about 3 p.m. today, the most read story at dailytarheel.com was “Gray-Little named new provost,” a story written Feb. 9, 2006 by my friend Colin Campbell. Why in the world would that be so popular in 2009?
In four words: Gray-Little becomes Kansas chancellor.
The news broke on Twitter at about 2 p.m. that Provost Bernadette Gray-Little was going to be named the new chancellor at KU. This means that people came to our Web site looking for the news and couldn’t find it. So they searched. And that story is indeed the closest match.
This coming year at the DTH, we are going to make sure this doesn’t happen.
Our newsroom, like many others around the country both professional and collegiate, has historically been focused on the print edition. Our reporters were on top of the story. We were planning on getting the information as quickly as we could. We just didn’t do as well as we could have at getting the information where you could find it.
This is unacceptable. We need to have the news you want, when you want it. We’ve done well on this before, particularly with the bomb threat that evacuated central campus this spring. We had the information up several hours before Alert Carolina did.
But we want to be the first place you turn when you hear that something’s going on. Getting whatever information we have on breaking news online as quickly as we can is the most important part of that.
One way we can easily do this is to get more readers to our Twitter feed. We can get information posted there a lot quicker than we can do anything else. But we know that the first instinct of our readers is to go to our home page. Right now, it’s still mired in the edition mindset. We’re going to blow that up. The home page will be an ever-changing place reflecting your needs and wants at any given time.
Today showed that we still have a ways to go. But we will get there.
Welcome to the editor’s blog!
Hey guys. I’m going to use this blog to shed light into the DTH newsroom: explain trends in our coverage, lay out our long-term initiatives and respond to reader questions. Just holler if there’s anything you’d like to see! Read my personal blog to learn more about what I’m up to. And follow me on Twitter.
