December Meeting Minutes

Thanks to Philly.com for hosting us.

Philly.com

• CHRIS KREWSON WELCOME (doesn’t work for philly.com)
• Yoni Greenbaum worked at Gannett and DJ
• Bob McGovern
• Been in 1601 for about 7 months; 1 flr
• Adv, biz dev, content and tech groups on this flr all wking together
• More efficient $ maker thanks to integration; allowed them to be more agile/aggressive
• Experimenting
• Philly.com content – refers to web producers; manipulation of content
• Content is still housed in the newsrooms
• Big J journalism (chris) v. Small j journalism (Yoni)
• Chris worked at mcall; wrote for a year; produced content (including web video), etc.
• Philly.com staff decides positioning of the content on the site
• CNN affiliate (picked up two stories today)
• Obsessively check stats – would like to be at refresh on analytics every 15 mins
• 1 of things that has changed is how they use blogs on the site: world series parade; election day (updating as often as 3 mins); throwing more manpower to a local story than just about anyone else
• May start a video game blog; 34 blogs they update regularly
• Coveritlive – live blogging tool using to liveblog
  • Question about concern for crazies in this chat
  • Philly.com provides feedback on chat to reporters
  • Also tell audiences when the chat is going to be heavily moderated
  • Great way to build time on site – ppl spend 20mins+ on site
• Live chats for sporting events garner broad audience – regular visitor from Indonesia in chat during eagles game
• Story budget – budget for space; reporters will oversell to get better spaces/pages
• All news columnists have blogs
• Todd Zandlecki (inky-Phillies) is one of the most converged journalists in town
• Inquirer newsroom tends to break most of the sports
• CK plays on Twitter for the inquirer
• Would love to be more social media in Facebook but can’t figure out how it will make money for them
• Top 7 blogs are news blogs
• News refreshes at least 16 times a day
• Light lunchtime read
• 4PM try to go competitive with local news TV
• #1 web news website in Philadelphia
• seeing growing traffic at night after sporting events
• bulk of traffic at 8am and noon
• “I think our competition is your life” –Yoni
• “After the redesign every compliment came from facebook, twitter or email”
• Happy with redesign looking unlike other news organizations (BBC, etc.)
• Thinking about pushing more out to bring people back in; looking at sprout builders
• Looking to leverage existing technologies, add partnerships/sponsorships
• “I’m staring at the windows2000 logo…and that’s only b/c I inherited the equipment of a former IT staffer. I’m working with the boots of a dead soldier” – Chris Krewson, in regard to resources for equipment
• Pulling in 300,000 uniques (maybe 4,000 from twitter) daily
• Do u look at how different sources hit the site – like maybe smaller groups come from twitter but spend more time on the site…etc. etc. Answer:  yes
• Initially started searching for Philly tips by using “septa” as the key word
• Group thinks that using twitter gives the Inky street cred
• Reference 2005 “unconference” when they all got together at the UPENN Annenberg school and aligned to speak the language of the blogosphere
• Saw Twitter as distribution tool when fire at Strawberry Mansion happened and Krewson saw a tweeter announce it and send a link to the story – filed by an organization in SEATTLE.
• Want to have more nested conversations
• Reporters are another generation – median age, 50’s
• Producing web content

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