Pushing buttons

We ran the "We've got coupons" button on the covers for Thursday's Thanksgiving issues after the button was unfortunately neglected last Sunday, but I ran into a problem this past Sunday when working on the Wausau and Central Wisconsin covers: no dollar amounts. I did not have them in my e-mail (nor did Amy Kimmes, the weekend editor, when I asked her), and looking back, I didn't have them last weekend either, when the button was also supposed to run. (But we did have a specific dollar amount to run for the Thanksgiving issues.) So we ran a generic button instead with no dollar amount.

What is the status of this button initiative? Should I look to have specific dollar amounts in the future (I work almost every Saturday from now through the end of the year, so you can count on me doing the Sunday covers those days), or should I just stick with the generic button from here on out? Is somebody else getting e-mails with the dollar amounts and I'm just not getting them by mistake?

What I'm thankful for

A very big thanks to Kristy, Elizabeth and Tim for working ahead on Wednesday night to get pages started for Thursday. Big props as well to Elizabeth, Andrew and Sirena for all of their hard work paginating on Thanksgiving Day. It made for a very smooth day and we couldn't have done it without the efforts of each and every one of you.

Critique, week two

As promised, here is a quick critique on how we did today promoting our "only online" content today:

On one hand:
1A: Video icon on hunting story was included. Perfect.
1B: A Varsity refer in the rail was a must on this football championship day.

On the other:
4A: The story on the shooting in Point has a gallery (although a couple of days old). Despite the fact that this gallery has been posted for a bit, we could promote to it as coverage of the shooting continues (see my note about the new furniture piece below).
3A: We missed an opportunity to promote a video interview with the winner of the Altrusa award. This wasn't on the multimedia plan part of our online budget, but was included in the budget line for the story. The good news is we did include an embedded link to the video in the online story, and kudos to whomever added it.
GO! page 4: Ann Liebmann's columns and tips are collected in a special section on our site. We should refer to this special section and her blog using the new furniture each time she writes for us (along with the reference in her column tagline).
GO! page 6&7: We missed an opportunity to include an icon promoting a gallery of photos from a 'Nickel and Dimed' rehearsal.

Finally:
1A: The Edgar football story is a good example of a place where the newly created online furniture could be used (I've dropped a copy on everyone's desk). This furniture (glorified factbox/referbox) could point readers towards the existing galleries, planned updates, user gallery or any number of additional "online only" elements.

The 3A feature obit is another good example. We have a somewhat neglected Remembrance special section online. Let's plan to use the new furniture each time we publish a feature obit and promote to obits online and the special section. See the example above.

The question is, how do we communicate what online components we want to promo to each day?

It isn't reasonable to believe that the desk will have, in their heads, a catalog of every video, gallery or extra available online. Is the answer a comprehensive online plan portion of the budget? Is the answer more detailed story budgets that include ties to as many online components as possible? We don't need to refer to, for instance, the Point shooting gallery with every related story, every day. So maybe members of the desk spend fifteen minutes digging for one item to link to on each of their section fronts on the sites each day? Maybe I need to look over the final budget each evening and make suggestions. I'm not sure.

Let me know what you think.

Print promotion for online

We've slipped a bit in print in our promotion to online "extras" like multimedia, story comments, galleries, etc.

A quick look at today's Wausau edition shows the good and the bad:

The ones we hit:
A reference to Everyday Choices online with the Everyday Choices story on our Community page.
A reference to Get Published (without much explanation) on the Life cover.

The ones we missed:
Sinz story on 1A - no refer to Varsity.
Pete's column - no refer to the story online (there was a little conversation on the original update).
Walking club on 3A- no refer to a gallery shot earlier in the week.
Sports - not a single reference to Varsity, anywhere, in the section (which featured a couple of nice prep sports stories).




I can't point to these missed opportunities as a concrete reason our online numbers have dipped in recent months, but these omissions in print certainly do not help.

What can we do? Maybe you have ideas. Post them here.

I think we could communicate more thoroughly through our budgets. We should try to keep all the different layers of our site top of mind. And, on my own to-do list, create a new furniture piece that allows us to promote more specifically to online elements (for example, a piece that could have been used with Pete's column to drive people to the Local News page of our site so they could find the entire story with comments). And I'll be back here, in this blog, with a critique of our efforts, good and bad.

It's Northpoint Drive

After seeing it go back and forth and back again, I asked Linda Taylor how we should identify this certain street in Point. She said Northpoint Drive. Northpoint. One word.

Boxers or Briefs

Okay, fine, the title was a bit of a bait and switch. Nothing underwear related here.

Here is my question to the copy desk as a whole:

How difficult would it be to post briefs (I'm thinking especially local briefs here) as individual stories in Saxotech, rather than one "local briefs" story? I ask because these are often among the juiciest items of the day and often we're dissecting the briefs file and turning them into separate stories online anyhow.

Let me know if logistically you think this could happen. Then we'll proceed. Or not.

— Brian O.

Obit glitch

Although we need to be extremely careful when editing an obituary, we still need to make corrections when necessary. An obituary set to run in Monday's Stevens Point Journal misspelled the name one a leading American company: Anheuser-Busch. The obit read "Anheuser Bush."