Brianne Pruitt's Page

We currently have a Web reporter who works three days a week, from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. One of his main duties, besides creating multimedia projects, is ensuring that the Web site is updated during the evening, when no one is here. I should mention, we're an afternoon paper, so most of us are here from about 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. or so.

So the Web reporter keeps the site fresh at night. But, will that really drive traffic? Does the presence of new news on the site encourage more folks to visit at night… Continue

What is your newspaper/news organization doing to promote staff bloggers? Excerpting in print, adding to bylines, house ads, etc.?

We've begun some staff blogs, but aren't really sure how to promote them. They aren't doing very well, but we also haven't promoted them — at all.

So, what do you do? Does it work? How have you built a community around your blog? Is anyone else out there struggling?

Also, what kind of page views are you getting, compared to rest of Web site, or circulation, or wha… Continue

What is your newspaper's policy on staff blogging? Are staff bloggers compensated? How about time management? Do you have to work it into your current schedule, or do you get a break on other work to make time for blogging? How about beat blogging vs. personal-interest blogs? Can you tell we're having time-management issues with our staff bloggers!?! Anyway, let me know how your paper does it, so I can get an idea of how to work this out. Thanks!

We are currently in a hot debate about posting copy to the web without any editing.

We're not talking full stories, we're not talking on a daily basis, we're talking every so often, when there's breaking news, posting up a short on it right away, while someone edits the full story, when there's only one reporter in the newsroom.

We're an afternoon paper, so at night there are very few people around. We do schedule at least two folks in the newsroom most nights, but sometimes (like during vacat… Continue