DFMies
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A judge said: "Really thoughtful use of expanding crowdsourcing from Geofeedia to social media searches to pinging students."
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Joining us to discuss the coverage are Miriam Velasquez, Gina Dvorak and Chuck Bennett.
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Tell us how you used digital tools to engage so many students, parents and teachers from so many school districts and to curate their coverage of graduation events.
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To be honest, graduations is a topic that students and their families engage on their own. What we set out to do was to capture that. -
We used Geofeedia to zero in on graduation ceremony locations to find social media happening around the times of those ceremonies.
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Our initial goal was two-fold: to have a photo gallery in place for almost every ceremony, and to create a Storify to promote each gallery and capture a snapshot of the social media that surrounded each ceremony.
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From the staff photos perspective about 3 years ago I got a list of all the graduations in our market and the time they were going off. We were getting huge numbers on our High School football galleries so decided to try shoot as many graduations as we could. The staff was numb by the end of it but we had huge numbers of page views. Last year Toni Sciacqua noted about 500K from the south bay and decided it should expand to all of LANG. I think the Daily Breeze and Press-Telegram hit about 60 this year. -
While there were a few ceremonies that were very small and yielded very little if any social posts. But in total, our digital team produced 142 Storifies; and our photo staff along with Miriam's help, created 184 photo galleries. Lots here: www.dailybreeze.com
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Any funny stories that emerged from all this curation?
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Once done, we repackaged a lot of our coverage and were able to sustain reader interest for a couple weeks using themes, like "Mortarboard fashion" and creating valedictorian galleries. photos.dailynews.com
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Yes, there was one funny story...
There was a streaker at one of the graduations: www.dailybreeze.com -
Moving along to the Midwest, Paul Kampe and Megan Semeraz used social media and other digital tools to find sources when no one wanted to talk about the firing of the women’s basketball coach at Oakland University.
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One of the judges’ comments: “The goal of any journalist is to right wrongs and give a voice to the voiceless. In that regard, the Oakland Press reporters did an excellent job of exposing the inappropriate behavior of a college basketball coach against a person of a different religious faith.”
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Paul and Megan, tell us about how digital tools helped you find sources and tell this story.
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This was a pretty old-school investigation, but we did incorporate some social media.
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I've been following many of the players on social media prior, but began paying closer attention once this all went down in June.
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We wrote one story entirely off of Twitter. The coach stayed quiet on Twitter for a long time, but I wrote a story about how she talked about her own religious beliefs before that. We've spent a significant amount of time doing background checks on various people, finding records of things, looking through digital files. Almost everything was done via Google searching, minus our FOIAs. -
Moving to the Northern California cluster: In conversations about journalism, we often use city budget stories as the example of something boring to cover. But budgets were both interesting and important in Chico, and Ashley Gebb’s coverage told important stories about the city’s financial mess.
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Players have done quite a bit of "subtweeting" as the kids call it, since their former coach got the ax.
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. As Editor David Little said in his nomination, “In late June, a Grand Jury report confirmed the scope of the city's problem and blasted the city for its efforts to hide the problem. By the time that report came out, our readers were not surprised -- they had already been informed by Ashley's watchdog reporting.”
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Here's one of nearly 20 stories Ashley wrote about the city budget mess: www.chicoer.com
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Ashley, tell us about the impact your stories had in the community.
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High community interest at city council meetings had previously been limited to talks about plastic bag bans, new Walmarts and noise ordinances. But now, finances lead citizen outcry and are getting attention they merited long ago. The public is paying more attention and starting to ask hard questions themselves. Some are even calling for council members’ resignations. -
My council stories are now among the most read of any in the paper and as I live-Tweet the bi-weekly meetings, I have an growing group of followers (nearly 20 new followers this last council meeting alone!) who want to know what is going on if they can’t make the meeting or understand what’s happening. Other impacts include Tea Partiers picketing council meetings, the unexpected retirement of the fire chief, and community members rallying to save a children’s park shuttered by budget cuts.
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Here's my Tout about our coverage and its impact - www.tout.com
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Here's what one of the judges said: "Ashley's coverage of Chico's budget session and council meeting was thorough from beginning to end — during which time, it bears noting, she also managed to still get a story — a compelling one — published online that night about the meeting. It was clear Ashley did her homework, and made sure readers were up to speed in time for the big budget meeting."
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Yes, the 15 1/2 hour budget meeting has been one of my council meeting highlights of the year.
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Let's move on to the Texas/New Mexico cluster, where Lindsey Anderson reported on U visas, a law enforcement tool that many people don't understand but she explained thoroughly.
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One of the judge said: "eading her story with a compelling example that cuts immediately to the point of U visas, Lindsey grips you from the beginning of her report and doesn't let go until she's walked through every angle a complex issue that mixes the immigration debate with public safety."
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Whoops! Cut-and-paste error. That should read: "Leading her story with a compelling example that cuts immediately to the point of U visas, Lindsey grips you from the beginning of her report and doesn't let go until she's walked through every angle a complex issue that mixes the immigration debate with public safety."
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Lindsey, can you share your Tout with us, and tell us how you learned about this story and the challenges you faced in telling it?
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I was looking for a story to write through our nonprofit partner New Mexico In Depth, and knew I wanted to do something about women who are immigrants ...