Kudos to the Fresno Bee, which is just up the road a bit from us. They had a big breaking news story recently and they streamed video LIVE from the scene.

Looks like they used a camera phone and a site called Qik to actually stream and embed the video on their pages. The video is rough, but I bet there was enough reader interest to scare up a few hits. Imagine using something like this from the scene of a fire or police standoff.

The next step is to wire up a reporter JustinTV style (although Justin doesnt seem to be broadcasting himself anymore) and let viewers watch her/him report live from the scene of breaking news.

I was asked to write up some quick tips for young journalists when it comes to change. Here’s what I came up with.

-Don’t wait for your editor to come up with ideas for new ways of storytelling or reporting. You are the one on the front lines. You are the one who knows where there is room for improvement or where new technologies will and will not work. If you build a reputation with your editor of being innovative, they will be more likely to let you chart your own course.

-Don’t have your own ideas? Well then go to your editor. But pay close attention to what they are suggesting and why. Being able to find new and better ways to do things is going to be a major part of journalism and you need to develop and hone your skills for finding innovation. You can’t just sit back and rely on your bosses to have ideas.

-Go for the low hanging fruit first. Don’t start with a massive project. Pick something you can do on a daily basis first. Then build up to larger projects. That will help you hone your skills. It also will let your editor know you are capable of using your time wisely. Vitally important: If you’re proposing a new approach, make sure it won’t take up more time than it is worth. You have to have the discipline to manage your own time.

-Know your outfit’s capabilities. You need to know enough about your systems (CMS, blogs, etc.) to know if your idea is possible. For instance, don’t propose an all-video project if your outfit can’t host video. Also, by knowing your systems you know what kind of projects would be easiest to do and which get best play online or in print. That will help you position your ideas better.

-Do something new every day/week. Don’t allow yourself to slip into the “same old” routine. You need to push yourself each day/week to come up with something new. It could be as small as adding a more conversational to your story. Or it could be learning to shoot or edit video. The key is to always be growing as a journalist and person.

When I first got the job as web editor I told myself that if I did my job correctly I wouldn’t have a job in a few years. Well it looks like I did it correctly.

Last month we reorganized the newsroom and — at my suggestion — the new structure didn’t include a web editor. Instead I have joined the ranks of content editors. I now run the Breaking News team.

It’s a new challenge. Managing reporters and editing stories is a new, yet old, experience. I still have time to work on web projects, but it has to be squeezed into all the other stuff we do now (blog, post stories, add photos, links, edit video, covering stories, etc.)

I do wish I had more time to spend on building special section pages, developing some database skills and all the other stuff I was able to do as web editor. And there is something unnatural now about thinking about the print product.

But its great to see the entire newsroom doing more and more web first stuff. Something like this had to happen to break us out of the old routine and push us to the next level.

I was checking out the Santa Barbara News Press the other day and came across this wonderfully old school feature. They have a little box that pops up on the homepage when they post news during the day. Looks like it shows stories that are developing throughout the day, as well as the final versions of stories that will appear in the newspaper the following day.

The final versions are labeled “Tomorrow’s news today.” How wonderfully 1999.

Someone needs to sit down with the News Press folks and explain that the newspaper is day-old news to most people under 50. Writing early versions of stories or posting stories earlier isn’t a bonus for readers now, it’s an expectation. Of course, that’s probably not at the top of their list of problems to solve.

Yeah it’s been a while since I posted, but we’ve been hard at work on all kinds of new stuff. One of the areas we’re trying to do more with is databasing. We’ve made a couple in the past few months, using the Caspio site I talked about before.

These were a good lessons in how to organize your data and what kind of search options are best.

Check them out by clicking on the images below.

The first was an officer involved shooting database. We’ve since revised it and added a map to the search, although it still isn’t perfect.

The next was a campaign contributions database that took countless hours of data entry by several folks in the newsroom and quite a bit of time on my end to get it all working within Caspio.

We were turned on to a great site for distributing your video to sites like YouTube, Metacafe, Revver, etc.

TubeMogul.com lets you upload your video to their site and then they post it to up to 12 different sites for you. Best part is they use your own accounts so the videos don’t turn up with any TubeMogul branding. Also they allow you to do some decent tracking on all the different sites.

Right now TubeMogul is still in Beta so they could end up tacking on some sort of ads to your videos or something that makes the site less attractive. But for now they are a good way to get your videos out there without a ton of work. That was a real stumbling block for us. We’ve got precious few video resources and spending them uploading videos to more than a couple sites just wasn’t an option. Now we might be able to upload just about everything to these sites, increasing our reach.

Our page on the trial of Vincent Brothers was nominated for the Outstanding Use of Digital Media (Small) award in the 2007 Online Journalism Awards.

I took a quick peek at the other nominees, which include pieces on hip hop from the Wisconsin State Journal, teenage missionaries serving in Africa from Florida Today and childhood obesity by Roanoke.

We’re kind of the odd man out in this category. The rest of the nominees are classic newspaper “projects” that delve deep into an issue. All of the projects are jam packed with Flash too.

Our site, in comparison, is essentially just a jazzed up section front. Our Flash graphics are not super fancy and in some places they are pretty rough. Also, our story was an ongoing trial that was spread out over three months or so.

It should be interesting to see what the outcome is. If the contest is about who has the snazziest Flash we’re probably not gonna win. If it’s about deep content, that is accessible and includes some innovative features, then we might do well.

For a long time I’ve wanted to put some databases together for our site but always got stuck on the complexities of programming and servers and all that junk.

Then a few weeks ago I stumbled onto this site. Caspio offers a service called Bridge which is basically a ready made database setup. You can upload spreadsheets and let users search a variety of fields. You can also allow users to submit data for a user-generated database. I’ve been working with it for a about a week and there’s still stuff I’m figuring out.

Our first effort was a database of officer-involved shootings. Fortunately we already had the data in FileMaker, so we just did an export, tweaked a few things and uploaded it. Maybe 30 minutes. Then I spent another hour or two learning to make a user interface. And voila, we had a database.

The main weak spot is that Caspio could easily get very expensive if you have a popular database on your site. But that’s a problem I’ll welcome.

A month or so ago they wrapped up the big online poll that chose seven new ‘wonders of the world.’

We decided to rip this idea off and do a local version, the Seven Wonders of Kern County. We put up a blog post asking for people’s favorite local ‘wonders’ and then picked the most commonly mentioned man-made wonders into a poll.

Like our Lost Treasures package of a year ago, this really taps into part of the community that newspapers don’t explore enough. Not everyone is interested in the latest city council story or murder, but just about everyone has their favorite landmarks around town.

I take some time off and miss the latest round of debate over hi-fi and low-fi newspaper video.

I’ve rambled on about this topic at length and won’t repeat myself. I’ll just say this:

We need to get a group of leading newspaper video purveyors to cough up their video stats. Obviously you cannot make exact comparisons. But I am desperately curious if a handful of high end videos rack up a similar ratio of page views/time on site to a site offering dozens of quick and dirty videos.

Maybe I should organize something like this. Any suggestions for high end and low end outfits? Any web stat experts out there who might know the best way to put similar numbers side by side?

Shoot me an email.