Events kick off with Rusty Coats being introduced as director of tbd.com. Oh aren't we all? He's actually the head of TBO.com out of Tampa.
Other presenters include:
Jim Debth, former GM for Austin American-Statesman Online. (austin360.com, statesman.com)
Patrick Steigman, ESPN.com
Andrea Lynn, multimedia director for Naples Daily News
4:45 p.m. -- Rusty starts with the story of stone soup, in which a stew grows from a simple rock and water to one filled with all kinds of veggies as each person contributes, creating a better and better stew. Mmm, yummy metaphor for user-submitted content, right?
4:50 p.m. -- Tampa's got one of those user-submitted Spotted sites from Morris that they call "Snap." The thing that got the newspaper staff involved was using it with a big Tampa festival called Gasparilla. From the time it took to post a photo to the site and then write a caption for it, there were already 16 to 18 page views for the photo. The egos of photogs really benefit from that instant feedback. So now they love love love to upload. The Snap section got 2.7 million page views in January 2007.
4:56 p.m. -- Tampa made a staff change in October that put all of the weeklies reporting to the online division. What do staff at weeklies and Web sites have in common? "We've all been shit on for a long time," Rusty says. In other words, they're all used to having to do multiple, multiple, multiple jobs. The new Web sites for the community papers are handled directly by the weeklies' staffs. And the weekly staffs post stories throughout the week, as they happen, instead of waiting for ink to hit paper.
5:05 p.m. -- Jim Debth, who now works as a consultant, What is storytelling of the future? He says a story is now text, photo, videos and interactives, Debth calls it News 2.0. That's our second wacky version reference of the conference. (Though there have been many more that I haven't mentioned, believe me.)
5:15 p.m. -- A photo gallery for dogs generated 800 user submissions and more than a million and a half page views. Debth recommends the dog gallery.
5:15 p.m. -- Soundcheck 360 is pretty cool. It's basically one player where clips for local bands are kept in one location. Nice one, Debth.
5:17 p.m. -- Funny name for a quiz about religion. "Test your faith." Clever, Debth.
5:18 p.m. -- The end of Debth's show: "Storytelling of the future? It's now." I actually think that's an important mindset. Stop waiting for the future. It's now.
5:20 p.m. -- ESPN's Steigman has a good way of looking at constant updating: We want to be the first to break the news, the first to react to the news and the first to react to the reaction to the news.
5:25 p.m. -- NBA mock draft, trade machine and fake lottery are all cool tools. Page views surpassed 30 million on the fake lotto. Hard to put that in context since we're talking about gigantic ESPN, but interesting. They basically told the news story via a game. Nice way to learn.
5:35 p.m. -- I'm not a big sports fan, so I didn't know ESPN has its own "pod center" that Steigman says is huge for them.
5:36 p.m. -- They've hired several reporters as full-time bloggers. These people don't write columns, or stories, etc. All they do is blog. "The reaction from our users has been tremendous," Steigman says.
5:37 p.m. -- I've got to pay more attention to ESPN. They do polls, just like everyone else. But then they break the poll results down state by state. It's treating sports with the importance of a major election.
5:40 p.m. -- Andrea Lynn decides to shirk the big screen presentations (the ones all three folks ahead of her did) and instead talks from her seat. It's her effort to be a good storyteller, she explains. The story is Studio 55, a Webcast she says helps the community tell its story. Right now, Studio 55 is appointment viewing, but she said It will grow to be "information at the speed of life." Everyone knows Studio 55, right? OK.
5:48 p.m. -- Rusty asks Andrea Lynn what they find to be the most popular feature on the Naples site. Her answer, as many folks have been saying today, is breaking news. Whatever the topic of the day, it's popular across all the mediums, whether in comments, in stories, video, etc.
5:51 p.m. -- "Get right with God and your legal counsel about this," Rusty warns about reverse publishing user-submitted content. You have free legal reign to let users post online whatever they'd like, but once it gets printed, then the publisher becomes liable. I think most people know that, but you never know. The rate of return on racks for Tampa's new mostly-user-submitted weeklies has dropped since the launch. That's usually a good indicator of success in the print world.
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