Wow, the blog "Scooping the News" started a new feature today and included the Knoxville  News Sentinel/knoxnews.

In the new feature, Scooping the News said,  "we grade U.S. daily newspapers' Web sites in five areas used to measure innovation. Newspapers with a minimum print circulation of 100,000 will receive scores. This new feature will show which newspapers are leading the way in the online arena and which ones are lagging behind."

In addition to knoxnews, the others were the Lexington Herald-Leader, the Miami Herald, the Los Angeles Times, and the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

See how they stack up.

We did, I think, some innovative coverage of Bonnaroo this year. I recapped some of what we did on my personal blog.

(Cell phone photo by Lauren Spuhler at the Bruce Springsteen show at Bonnaroo.)

We launched news headlines on digital billboards today. The headlines stay up for eight seconds and then rotate with five other Lamar Advertising clients before repeating.

The headlines, either for knoxnews, govolsxtra or the print edition of the News Senitnel, appear on six billboards on I-40 and Kingston Pike out west, Clinton Highway and Maynardville highways in the north, and Chapman and Alcoa highways in the south.

There's room for about 33 characters, including spaces, much shorter than Twitter's 140.

Let me just start by saying that I haven't been to a concert in I don't know how many years!! Walking into Thompson-Boling Arena felt like being in one of those big warehouse dance clubs with people screaming and dancing everywhere and the band wasn't even on the stage yet.

I am not a fan of Phish, I don't dislike their music either, but as I stood there shooting my video for work I couldn't help but feel the excitement of all the fans and I thought to myself "how would it feel to be standing here listening to Tina Turner right now?" and I totally understood the craziness around me. The fans are literally what make an artist!

Oh and while I was standing there shooting my video, arms up high holding a not so light camera, a staff member told me that I have the best job and I do agree with him.

Here is my video, hope you enjoy it whether you're a fan or not! Also, see the related story.

Continue reading ...

Last week, we put up a poll about the comments on knoxnews.com to see what our readers thought of the dialogue we started back in May regarding mean, inappropriate comments on our articles. As of 3:30 pm today, the poll has over 1200 votes. (To put this into context for you, we normally get around 300-500 votes in our homepage polls.)

I was surprised to find that most respondents (37%) didn't see anything wrong with the comments on our site - or at least not enough to make any changes. Our online staff receives several emails per day suggesting the removal of comments and I've heard from a few people (here and there) that they're so tired of the prevailing attitude in the comment section that they no longer even read them. Of course, the sheer number of comments on stories every day proves that these people - the non-participants - aren't the norm. However, the next-highest number of votes (26%) want to abolish comments altogether.

The May 19th APME roundtable on online comments spawned a great deal of chatter among the knoxnews players. With a site redesign coming soon, we're working hard to implement some of the suggestions that came out of the roundtable discussion. But, clearly the discussion needs to continue.

Says our fearless leader, Jack Lail, on the subject:
 

We have identified five broad areas around which we think we can take action from internal training to technology changes. We already have had a lively discussion with our newsroom managers on what is acceptable and we'll be launching some technology changes in early July with a site redesign.

Don't be wary of voicing your opinion here. Your words don't fall upon deaf ears (or blind eyes, as the case may be).

Every year, C-SPAN offers a selection of the graduation season's college commencement addresses. Who's on the list this year?

Ellen DeGeneres, Google's Larry Page, Africa Educational Fund's Susan Mboya and Knoxville News Sentinel columnist Sam Venable.

See Venable's speech to University of Tennessee communications graduates.

A group of citizens meeting on the evening of May 20 in Knoxville over sandwiches and sweet tea might be end up influencing how news sites across the country view and manage comments.
 
Hyberbole? Maybe. The meeting has become a launching point for discussions about how to manage comments  more effectively at the Web sites of the Knoxville News Sentinel as well as at the E.W. Scripps chain of newspapers, which owns the Knoxville newspaper. Its intent is to also spark discussions at news sites across the country and, perhaps, beyond.
 
The discussion was organized by The Associated Press Managing Editors and the News Sentinel as an "Online Credibility Roundtable" and was funded in part by the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation.
 
Online producer Erin Chapin and Lauren Spuhler have created two videos, which you can see here, that condense the discussion. (The videos have also been posted to YouTube to expand their reach.) We have the complete session available as an audio mp3 file.
 
We've developed some plans and are exploring some other options as a result of the Roundtable. We'll be talking about those in the coming weeks. From time to time, we'll post updates on this blog about our steps to improve comments as a result of the Roundtable.
 


This was the first of a series of Online Credibility Roundtables APME will be holding this year on various issues.
 
The Knoxville Roundtable participants were:
 
William S. Rukeyser, magazine industry veteran.
 
Loida Velazquez, Hispanic community leader.
 
Bill Shory, WBIR News Director.
 
Tom McAdams, a Knoxville attorney who defended news site comments in a court hearing.
 
Deena Christian, whose daughter's brutal murder has been heavily covered by the media and discussed in comments.
 
Rusty Coats, head of the Scripps Interactive Newspaper Group.
 
Mike Arms from the Office of the Knox County Mayor.
 
Indya Kincannon, Knox County School Board Chair.
 
Becky Hancock, a community leader critical of Web site comments.
 
Chuck Jensen, a business owner who is one of the most active commenters on the Knoxnews Web site.
 
Leroy Thompson, developer and Black community leader.
 
Randy Neal, pioneering Knoxville blogger who runs the community site, knoxviews.com.
 
Brittany Fulmer, daughter of former UT head football coach Phil Fulmer.
 
Bob Benz, COO Radiant Markets, and moderator of the session.
 
Jack Lail, Director of News Innovation at the News Sentinel.
 
Jigsha Desai, News Sentinel Online Editor.
 
Jack McElroy, News Sentinel Editor.
 
Tom Chester, Director of News Operations for the News Sentinel.
 
Bruce Hartmann, News Sentinel Publisher .
 
Elaine Kramer, representing APME.
 
Also, observing the session was Patrick Beeson, content manager at the Scripps Interactive Newspaper Group.



A media panel I was on recently was asked why newspapers even have comments in a time of dwindling newsroom resources since comments are taking an increasingly larger slice of time for many editors. Why not instead focus more on doing great journalism?
 
It's a good question that I didn't answer well that day. The answer, I think, is that comments ideally create a discussion for the entire community, and newspapers historically have given form to a community, both by defining and shaping it.
 
But comment areas of news sites aren't afternoon teas with manners and scones. They sometimes turn mean and hateful, racist and intolerant, and generally nasty.
 
The discussion at the United Way on May 20 was an attempt to find some possible ways of making comments a true conversation. Some truly good suggestions and insights came out of it.
 
Here some links to coverage or reaction to the Roundtable.


And here is a link to an online comment reading list. This is what a graphical view looks like of the comments on one of our most commented stories earlier this week using the Wordle.net site. Will Austin, business intelligence manager for the Scripps newspaper Web sites, generated a list of the top 25 commenters on knoxnews and GoVolsXtra.
 
We invite you to join the continuing conversation in the comment area below.
 
(The photo by Jack Lail shows Erin Chapin videoing the Roundtable.)

I'm fascinated by Top 10 lists. Most popular baby names, most popular pizzas, whatever. So Will Austin, business intelligence manager at the Scripps Interactive Newspaper Group, piqued my interest with a list of the Top 25 commenters across knoxnews and GoVolsXtra as of today.

You might find the list interesting as well. User IDs listed below are ranked by the number of comments made since we went into the our Ellington/Django content management system in June 2007.
 

Number of Comments	Username	Date Joined
8,040	TommyJack	08/29/2007
7,348	pdhuff	06/07/2007
7,328	cjensen	06/08/2007
5,953	tngeoff	06/05/2007
5,831	papabob	07/06/2008
5,653	sjt18	07/10/2007
5,638	UTfan4life	01/08/2008
5,341	AmpTrap	04/25/2008
4,570	Sherry	10/07/2008
4,221	invisiblekid	06/05/2007
4,177	gonner	08/28/2007
4,008	General_Watermelon	02/12/2008
3,648	mainchannel	06/06/2007
3,646	murrayvol	06/05/2007
3,475	marc_ash	06/05/2007
3,331	powellvoter	08/27/2007
3,275	Paone	07/05/2007
3,179	shipperman	06/05/2007
3,120	johnlg00	06/05/2007
3,050	holdPeterBiggs	04/09/2008
2,923	IdentityTheftVictim09	04/16/2008
2,814	ctownvol	12/18/2007
2,758	TouchdownTN	07/11/2007
2,699	Colliervol	06/28/2007
2,587	oldoldtimer	09/12/2008

Here are some useful links if you want to explore the issue of online comments further. These were collected as part of our APME Online Credibility Roundtable on Comments that was held May 19, 2009 at the United Way of Greater Knoxville offices.

• Comments on news stories a double-edged sword
• Comment Is King
• Dialogue or Diatribe?
• What Type of Web Commenter Are You?
• Editors explore issues surrounding Community Conversation; 'We want to reinforce importance of engaging people in a dialogue,' says Carroll
• Poynter Forums on Washington Post editor's defense of comments
• Listening to the Dot-Commenters
• Improve this post with comments
• Social idiocy, the video (I thought the text version was more inane)
• Billie lives in the small town at the end of the story
• On comments on news sites
• 10 Ways Newspapers Can Improve Comments
• Why Newspapers Shouldn't Allow Comments
• Anti-Semitism and the Madoff Scandal; Comments on Florida Newspaper Sites
• How Big Corporate Newspapers Fail Community (and a little about why)
• Nine Hundred and Twenty Five Comments about Cannonballs on the Side of a Road/a>
• Hartford Courant Forums: "Incivil" or Just a Really Loud Conversation?
• A Few More Good Thoughts on Anonymous Comments
• Newspapers try to maintain civil, intelligent conversations with readers
• In further defense of uncomfortable comments
• Study finds gap between editors and readers in ground rules for online conversations
• 19 Qs and As from ASNE's story comment webinar
• A Kentucky paper's pre-Internet reader comments
• Fiery Forums
• How to make story comments better
• A case to watch
• Editors add 'referee' to the job description

A wordle.net (see larger version) look at the comments on the most commented story on knoxnews.com on May, 28, 2009.

Knoxnews and WBIR in a Google fight.

Type in two keywords to have your own "Google fight."

Knoxnews online producer Lauren Spuhler won two first place awards in the large newspaper category of the annual journalism competition sponsored by the Tennessee Associated Press Managing Editors and the Tennessee AP Broadcasters.

The awards, announced Saturday night at the TAPB-TAPME awards banquet in Nashville, honor the best journalism work done on the air, in print and on the Internet in Tennessee during 2008.

Spuhler won the video category with "Who killed rose Busch." Online producer Erin Chapin was second with "Flight of a Lifetime."

Spuhler won the multimedia category along with staff writer Morgan Simmons for a year-long series on Appalachian music called "Songs of Appalachia."

In the best Web site category, Knoxnews was second to the Tennessean.com and Knoxville.com, redesigned and relaunched in late 2008, took third.

Full list of newspaper awards.

Full list of broadcast awards.

Congratulations!

Are you in our new GoVolsXtra group on Yahoo?

Subscribe to GoVolsXtra

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A column on ABCnews.com by Michael S. Malone discusses the many kinds of commenters out there.

After reading his column, I could immediately identify similar commenters on knoxnews.com.

Some types he identified:

The Troll -- Everyone knows this guy (and it's usually a guy), who intentionally visits sites in order to stir things up, provoke a furious reaction from other posters and then disappear. Classic examples are the Free Republic types who visit Daily Kos and vice versa.

The Droll -- The mainstay of all fun sites, this poster regularly tosses out clever comments, plays on words, one-liners or amusing pictures. There are a lot of these characters on places like Fark.com

The Relentless Pol -- Posters who can't join any discussion without immediately using it to make a political point, i.e., "The current lack of sunspots is the direct result of the Bush administration's failed policies."

Read the full post. Then come back and share your observations below as to how you would identify some knoxnews commenters.

CSPAN used some video from our Nokia N96 cell phone shot by online producer Lauren Spuhler in this televised segment on the Tea Party tax protests across the on Wednesday.

Spuhler did most of her videography of the Knoxville gathering at World's Fair Park with our regular video camera, but shot a few minutes with the cell phone's camera as breaking news via Qik.com.
 

I've had a little trouble accepting the end of my internship. I guess I'll have to stop bothering everyone and make room for the next intern now. Don't be surprised if I try to continue to show up at 10 every Tuesday and Thursday and act like I'm supposed to be there.

I embarked on this internship with questions about myself and questions about journalism. The answers would determine what I would be doing in journalism, and likely even if I would continue working in this field.

I'd say I've been actively passive in my approach to life after college. It's not exactly that I fit the cliché of the aimless student still searching for his calling. I found what I yearned to do a while back. I've always enjoyed writing and I have a fierce passion for objectivity, honesty and, most of all, openness from the personal level to the vastest institutions. Journalism was natural. I've just been hesitant to commit to the field because I didn't understand many things.

My questions of myself were specific. What do I have to offer journalism? How can I turn whatever ability I have into a concrete body of work beyond my vague theory and idealistic desires?

It's not that I don't have an idea of the big picture for journalism either. To me, it's really still the same as it ever was; Watch the government, report objective information relevant to a given audience, and do this in a way that highlights exactly what it means to be human at this point in history. Oh, and sell enough ads today so you can afford to drive to work and do the same thing tomorrow. I always forget that last part because it used to seem so distasteful, but it's actually started to grow on me. I, along with everyone else, feared that the necessity, and recent inability to make money would either end the employment of good journalists altogether, or make the tenets of journalism an afterthought.

My questions for journalism were then also specific. How exactly can this industry survive? Is it possible to make money doing online journalism? Will online journalism ever reach the level of integrity that print has?

My time in the newsroom gave me answers that were a pleasant surprise. Personally I learned that I wasn't too bad at this video reporter thing, at least for a novice. Of course I owe anything I know to the people I worked with. I've always thought of video as secondary to the written word. I've started to realize the potential of video and other multimedia to do things writing can't.

It was the answer to the big questions about journalism's future that brought me the most satisfaction. I know journalism will survive. I know that it can be better than ever. I've come to know these things simply by being around the bright people who are fighting for them. I've been given a glimpse inside the mechanisms of online journalism and it already works so much better than I thought it could.

Yes the future is bright. I wish to make this quite clear. I don't hope the future is bright. The future is bright. I'm not cautiously optimistic about the future being bright. The future is bright. How can I make such claims in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary? Well at the risk of removing any remaining doubts that I am the most pretentious and arrogant intern in history, because I will help make it so, but mostly because there is no alternative.

We need good journalism now as much as ever. The truth is more than a commodity. It is the Carbon of democracy, and it will always be in constant demand. Just as environmental crises are more the birth of superior organisms than the death of obsolete lifeforms, the current crisis in journalism is a birth of a more apt system of information flow.

These observations have not just given me corny, vie en rose-esque predictions, but specific knowledge that I will apply for the rest of my career. I came in knowing what that big picture should end up looking like. I leave with an idea how to begin making the brushstrokes. Also, and maybe most importantly, I've discovered whose work I need to follow to continue learning.

Now for some overt flattery and gaudy thank yous:

Jack: Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to learn more than I could have picked up in a classroom. I very much respect all of the amazing ideas you've brought to fruition at knoxnews.com and your ceaseless energy to do more. Thank you Jigsha for, well pretty much everything, but above all for the genuine concern you have for my development and my comprehension of all you do. And damn, you do a lot. Erin, Lauren and Talid I thank you for answering dumb questions I was too scared to ask Jigsha, and for being so warm and welcoming from the very first day. You guys are so easy to get along with, I could only hope to have co-workers half as amiable in the future.

I mustn't forget to thank Patrick Beeson either. I consider the class he taught to be the most useful course I've ever taken. Though he wasn't involved in my internship, it was his class that really brought about this specific opportunity. More than that, it gave me a reason to begin being optimistic about journalism again.

Thank you to everyone else I interacted with directly or indirectly. I was honored to be even a tiny and temporary part of this staff. For me one of the highlights of my internship was just observing the way real journalists work. I was impressed with every single person in that office, and my only regret of this whole thing was not being more sociable and becoming familiar with more of the staff.

Oh one more small thing. My fellow intern, Lori Thomas, mentioned in her blog entry that she never had to get coffee. Reading that was somewhat perplexing in light of all the tea and coffee Erin and Lauren ordered from me. They said my most important job was to make sure they always had at least half a cup of their preferred beverage at a pleasing temperature at all times. I didn't question them and I figured that I would understand the importance of the lesson somewhere down the road. This does make me wonder though, if they forgot to teach Lori this lesson did they also forget to teach her the lessons about baby-sitting , car washing and dry cleaning? Lori's loss I guess.

Again thank you everyone. I'm in everyone's debt. I only hope my sloppy words can come close to communicating how important and beneficial this internship was for me.

It's time to say goodbye. My last semester at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville is quickly approaching an end, and so is my internship here at knoxnews. That said, the past four months have been pretty exciting, and to be honest, interning with The News Sentinel proved to be quite an enlightening experience. Yes, internships can indeed teach you a lot!

When I first started at knoxnews, my expectations were pretty high. Ever since I started my undergraduate studies in journalism and electronic media at UT, I've had a strong passion for this whole online thing, which is exactly why I wanted to gain some solid working experience in the field of online journalism.

The first thing I really wanted to achieve at knoxnews was to gather solid experience working with a professional online editorial staff. Mission accomplished! Not only did I discover how exactly a news Web site is managed and updated throughout the day, but I also got first-hand experience completing multiple challenging tasks that helped me familiarize with innovative Web tools and software.

So yes, this internship provided me with plenty of opportunities to learn something new and actively contribute to what goes live on the Web. What was the most exciting task at knoxnews? Well, as a movie buff and future film student, I definitely have to go with editing video clips and creating my own Random This videos.

Another thing I really enjoyed at The News Sentinel was the professional working atmosphere. Everyone I worked with was extremely nice and helpful, and my supervisors really showed interest in how I was progressing. Professionalism is always utterly important to me no matter where I work, and I sincerely appreciate the support I received from everybody I interacted with at knoxnews.

Future interns at knoxnews should know two crucial things: keyboard shortcuts and the latest online trends. Diving into this experience with some basic knowledge of what is really going on online makes a lot of things easier. Sure, it may impress your supervisors too, but it will most importantly facilitate your tasks quite a lot.

Before I wrap this up, I would like to take a few lines to thank the people who made this internship a great experience. Thank you Jack Lail (I love Publish2), Jigsha Desai, Lauren Spuhler, Erin Chapin and Talid Magdy. And thank you everybody else I met here during my four-month stay. You guys are extremely committed to this job and wish you the best of luck.

My name is Lori Thomas and I am a junior at the University of Tennessee. I was not even going to do an internship this past semester, but after Jack Lail spoke to one of my classes about it, it became a possibility. After meeting with him, it seemed as though this would actually go

As an intern here at knoxnews, I can honestly say I have never gotten coffee for anyone. The assignments that I were given were useful and were things that actually contributed to the site. Although I did have a fist fight with the scanner once trying to scan pictures into the system, everything here has went pretty smooth.

My supervisors were very patient with me and my many questions. They knew how to fix whatever problem I stumbled into and if they didn't know, they figured it how. It's like, they could take apart the computer if they had to!

Even though the computer can seem kind of intimidating, working here has made it very approachable. I have been taught many things, such as how to upload photos, edit videos, even shoot and produce my own video! After I did this, I didn't know it could get any better than that! Eventually I started doing updates on stories and organizing them on the homepage, which automatically went up on the site. This, to me, was pretty cool because I could see instantly what I had done.

The environment here is a fun one. Everyone is pretty much civil to each other and says "hi" as they walk by, because really that's all you can say in the two seconds it takes to walk a cubical! You get to know your 'section' very well. Being in the online department, these are the people that have taken me in and shown me the how to's. Each person varies on how they do a certain task and so if I didn't understand one person, someone else could show me their way of thinking.

I have grown in my online skills and feel as though I can use these greatly in my future careers. I am thankful for this time and enjoyed it very much.

My advice to future interns is be ready to learn! I wrote down everything they taught me so that after they told me once, I had instructions on how to do that task again (whenever I had to complete it again). Go with the flow. It is easy to just want to do stuff you already know how, but expanding your skills will occur here daily with new jobs you will be assigned to to.

My last piece of advice is get to know the people around you; it is much more fun when you know about them and they know about you. I split my hours up into three days a week so I got to know everyone here significantly.

Good luck to the future interns and thank you to the knoxnews staff. Your way of working hard and timely has set big footprints for me to fill.

The News Sentinel online editorial staff talking about innovating. This was shown at a American Press Institute workshop on March 13, 2009, at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro.