media maven / By Marcy Burstiner

Sea of Links

I get annoyed, though, reading newspaper stories over the Internet. That’s because so few news organizations seem to understand the great capabilities of electronic publication. It’s not just that readers could (or should) be able to get stories updated constantly but each story could be so much more useful than the print paper.

Back to Bev’s fish. In the print paper Neil Tarpey told me that the California Department of Fish and Game doesn’t keep official records. But on the Web he could have linked me to mrriver.com. There the reader could discover that Bev’s fish isn’t anywhere near close to the world record, as Jack Tragis of Unalaska Bay, Alaska, reportedly holds that record with a fish that weighed in at 459 lbs. Yikes! Not only that, but interested readers would learn the records for other fish as well, such as bigmouth bass, tuna and salmon.

Not one newspaper website in the area does a good job of providing links. Reporters need to learn how to do that. Consider all the stories that Driscoll and Thadeus Greenson have done on the Blue Lake Police scandal. For those who follow every story, the background info is tedious to read. You just want the update. On the Web, you can keep all the background out of the story. Instead you provide a one sentence reference and link the reader to past stories. But to prove really useful, the paper needs to open up its story archives for free. HSU students, faculty and staff can pull up the stories for free via electronic news archives accessed through the school’s library. Why make your local readers pay for something a student from San Diego can read for free?

Writers can embed all sorts of useful links in stories. Consider some stories the Eureka Reporter ran Saturday. A top photo showed a photo of a boy and a dog for a story about the visit of a rescue dog to North Coast Learning Academy. The writer could have provided links to the California Rescue Dog Association. A story on upcoming beach cleanup could have provided links to more information on the California Coastal Commission’s Adopt-a-Beach program and it would have been great to link to a Google map of the different beach cleanup locations. A story on Congressman Mike Thompson, who is up for reelection this year, could have included link to the Federal Elections Commission so readers can see who’s been giving Thompson money for his reelection campaign.

Or consider a Times-Standard advance for the North Coast Open Studios tour. It had a nice photo of a sculpture by James Smith of Third Eye Sculpture Works and gave the address for his studio. But I wanted a map of all the studios, with examples of the different art works on display at each location. It isn’t as if the T-S doesn’t have time to pull this stuff together. Events like the beach cleanup and open studios are scheduled months and months in advance. A daily newspaper has to start thinking more like a monthly. Begin thinking in June about October events and pull together some nifty multimedia for them. Let the breaking news people think one minute at a time. All others should have their eyes on future events.

Another way of making a site more useful and interactive is to directly engage readers. There’s a new term in journalism called crowdsourcing. That’s when the news organization announces to readers that it plans to research a particular topic and invites readers to be part of the reporting process by helping to gather data and other information. This can be done through electronic chats and discussion forums. Rather than a disconnect between reporters and readers, this type of interactivity creates a strong bond between the news organization and the community. In a world where corporations own the newspapers we read, it’s a way of putting the community back into our community newspaper.

1 2 SHARE