Freedom Center of Community Journalism Excellence announces Shining Stars

IRVINE, Calif.–Oct. 22, 2008–Freedom Shining Star winners have been announced for the third quarter, awarded by Freedom’s Center of Community Journalism Excellence. The five winning associates exemplify innovation and leadership in Freedom's content transformation.

Congratulations to these Shining Stars:

— David Allen, The Star, Shelby, N.C.

— Kevin Ellis, The Gaston Gazette, Gastonia, N.C.

— Jon Lansner, The Orange County Register, Santa Ana, Calif.

— Lance Edwards, KFDM.com, KFDM-TV, Beaumont, Texas

— Laura Griffith, The Telegraph, Alton, Ill.

David Allen received the most votes from the Center of Excellence team and will be invited to the 2009 Freedom Content Meeting.

All five Shining Stars will be rewarded with a trophy, a gift from the Freedom Store and recognition on company sites, www.Freedom.com and FreedomNet. The Stars may also take part in training and mentoring opportunities.

"Hats off to our winners," said Lee Lerner, Director of Freedom’s Center of Community Journalism Excellence. "Our nine nominees this quarter are incredibly talented. The contest was close, with all of our nominees receiving multiple votes. These exceptional associates are leading Freedom in its interactive content transformation."

Because only five associates are selected as winners each quarter, Lerner recommends that managers re-nominate worthy candidates in coming quarters.

Following are the nominations for each winner, as well as our Honorable Mentions. Again, congratulations to Freedom's Shining Stars!

DAVID ALLEN, The Star, Shelby, N.C.
I would like to nominate Shelby Star reporter David Allen for the Shining Star award. He single-handedly shot and edited more than 35 videos in the quarter. This is in addition to the stories and photos he produced.

David also built an interactive storm map that located every storm in our county in 2008. Click on a location and the map pops up links to all stories and photos of that particular storm. David is our go-to guy for chasing storms. In one case, he watched the radar, determined where a storm would hit, drove there and waited for it to hit. And it did. In fact, where he parked the car was right beside where a barn roof was ripped off. He wrote the story, posted updates, shot several dramatic videos and took photos and posted them all online as well.

With one storm, he posted 20 online updates in 90 minutes. His stories led the newsroom in September with 90,253 page views.

One day while driving home, a car exploded near him. He jumped out of his car, shot video of the explosive fire, took photos and moblogged them directly to his blog, wrote the story and posted it all online.

I've never seen a reporter as enthused about online initiatives as David. In the case of a man shooting himself to death while driving and then hitting another car, David got there so fast he captured video of police finding the gun the man used.

He encourages other reporters to shoot video. He will teach other
reporters how to edit video. He found a way to produce our first animated video (I'm still not sure how he did this). He has taken our video editing to a new level of sophistication. He's a true multimedia reporter.

For all these reasons, I strongly urge David's inclusion as a Shining Star for this quarter.

— Nominated by Jon Jimison, Editor, The Star, Shelby, N.C.

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KEVIN ELLIS, The Gaston Gazette, Gastonia, N.C.
About dawn most mornings, Interactive Editor Kevin Ellis begins his day at the magistrate’s office gathering warrants from overnight arrests. He calls agencies checking for overnight news. Before most people have left for work, Kevin has updated GastonGazette.com with stories like: peeping tom arrested; Belmont man robbed with hammer; and distraught mother unearths infant’s grave.

Throughout the day, he continues to update those stories with new information. He constantly updates the site with breaking news, and he
studies when to time postings to get the most page views. He sends out
breaking news e-mail alerts frequently and looks for hooks to attract
attention – anything from the Dow plummeting to Clay Aiken’s big
announcement. He not only keeps an eye out for Gazette news, but also for the Shelby Star.

Here’s an example of what Kevin does when a big story hits the Gazette:

The death of popular local Harley Davidson dealer, Click Baldwin, who
wrecked his bike in Montana:

—Kevin began with posting a breaking e-mail alert of Click’s accident
including a map of the crash site and a link to a video of the crash in Montana.

—Updated the story and sent out breaking news e-mail alerts when Click
died.

—Included a plea for photos and memories of Click.

— Created online slideshows of those photos.

— Created a Legacy page for hundreds of friends across the country to
leave memorial messages.

Result: Not only did we realize the highest page views and uniques during the online coverage, we received lots of messages from users across the country praising us for keeping them up-to-date on the loss of their friend.

Getting others involved
Kevin’s daily e-mails to the newsroom keep everyone current on online
numbers, what we are doing that is effective and how we can improve. He has held training sessions about writing headlines for the Web, how to post and upload videos.

For the past several months, Kevin held a competition among reporters with a $50 gas card as the prize. One month rewarded the reporter with the highest number of page views, another focused on utilizing our available interactive tools.

The Shining Star
The proof of Kevin’s performance is in the numbers: Gastongazette.com
broke the 2 million mark in page views in August. Our unique visitors are up 57 percent YOY; repeat visitors up 57 percent YOY. Kevin was listed as the 11th highest user of Onset for posting to the Web in Freedom in the September report.

— Nominated by Hunter Bretzius, Editor, Gaston Gazette

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JONATHAN LANSNER, The Orange County Register, Santa Ana, Calif.
Real estate blogger and columnist Jon Lansner isn't just a Shining Star. He's an endless meteor shower — who keeps bombarding us with countless ideas to propel us into the online world and beyond.

Jon has studied his audience and learned what they want. That has made him the top performer among ocregister.com's bloggers — No.1 in page views and comments. He has logged 1.7 visits per unique visitor vs 1.22 for other blogs. That means “Lansner on Real Estate” gets 40 percent more return customers than the "average."

Jon also wants to see others succeed and is unselfish and unrelenting in helping colleagues develop their blogs. His entrepreneurial spirit and quick adoption of new technologies is worth the award in itself but among his achievements:

— Set up RSS feeds for other bloggers to help increase page views and
visitors

— Developed and championed the idea of more links across the newsroom. He has helped us perfect the “mashup” — a simple blog technique to round up all related links.

— Applauds and builds on the success of others. For example, Hang Nguyen's Retail blog was full of links. Jon saw her success, coined the term "Hangars'' and convinced others to follow Hang's example and collect a list of links for the bottom of each post.

— Showed others how to post slideshows on their blogs, increasing page
views.

— First to pitch in on weekends when news is breaking. For fires,
earthquakes, a car wreck and a massive phone outage, Jon has covered news.

— Looks for ways to work smarter. Discussions he helped foster led to the automation of the Money page.

— Puts himself on TV and radio on a regular basis to promote ocregister.com

— Has set the bar high for what a blog can be. He totally gets it. Short newsy posts. Longer, thoughtful posts. Breaking news. Posts at LEAST three times DAILY to his blog and has taught others how to do the same. He also regularly posts to the other Money blogs. Plus, he still writes a column for Web and print.

— Understands that success can be measured in more than just page views. To that end, he created a comprehensive set of Omniture reports to help all bloggers/editors identify missed opportunities and areas of focus.

— Nominated by Chris Meyer, Deputy Editor, The Orange County Register

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LANCE EDWARDS, KFDM-TV, Beaumont, Texas
Lance Edwards, KFDM's Interactive Content Producer, works tirelessly on kfdm.com driving “viewsers” (Kingsley Kelley will happily take credit for coining that term) to our Web site. He goes beyond seeking our daily news coverage text and video and looks to create special pieces for the Web.

Edwards has created pages for every high school in the viewing area for information about their sports teams; but he went further and made it accessible to users so that they can create content for their school's page.

He often creates special video additions to our coverage taking raw video from news stories and making Web-special content. He has found ways to engage users in our Pluck forums (FaceTime on kfdm.com) and encourage additional discussions. He is a champion of the Web site in the newsroom and has the entire staff posting information and breaking news on the site.

Southeast Texas faced threats from two hurricanes in September. While the weather events themselves led to additional page views, Lance reinforced our brand by making sure every aspect of our coverage made a significant contribution to the Web page. Viewers e-mailed from around the country, and indeed, around the world thanking us for our online coverage and streaming newscasts because the information we provided was not available from any other source, including our in-market competition.

Lance lives for kfdm.com. He is the primary reason Freedom can budget kfdm.com for 3 million page views per month and we can exceed it, and why we lead the broadcast division in engagement, yet we have the smallest market base of all the television stations.

Lance Edwards has made the KFDM brand a sign of excellence across the
World Wide Web and should be Freedom's Shining Star.

— Nominated by David Lowell, News Director, KFDM-TV, Beaumont

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LAURA GRIFFITH, The Telegraph, Alton, Ill.
Laura Griffith, Alton’s Web news editor, is our Shining Star. She has been a leader in our transformation, spearheading the video and multimedia effort.

Laura has trained staff on posting to the Web, blogging and shooting and posting video. She holds weekly meetings to update staff on how The Telegraph is doing on the Web. She gathers stats from corporate and explains Web traffic to fellow staffers in a way they can use to improve.

Here’s what else she has accomplished since becoming Web news editor:

— Laura oversees the posting of Web content, making sure to include links, maps and other multimedia. She helped extend reach on the Web by creating and maintaining a Telegraph MySpace page, by creating a Twitter page and feeds that pull in our latest stories, by creating a Facebook page and application for The Telegraph, by Digging stories to get them out to readers.

— She has created a number of widgets at widgetbox.com that pull RSS feeds from our site and our blogs to our MySpace page. She has gone so far as to put those widgets on other outside sites and monitor hits on those.

— She has actively worked to "friend" and recruit people to "follow" us on these social networking sites. We have at least a new user or two per day. Laura posted news stories at thetelegraph.com to explain new features and invite readers to make the most of them online. She started a blog called Insider's Look that is another way to tell readers about these features. And she has started a "how-to" video series online to teach people visually how to use new features.

She started a Telegraph page at YouTube.com for posting videos to our
blogs until WordPress and Brightcove can get along.

She started working on promotion videos or little commercial shorts we
will be able to add to our news videos when we want to promote a feature on the site. She has put a promotional Telegraph commercial on our MySpace page.

Laura has started a weekly Web cast called First Edition where she reads upcoming headlines to tease the online and print editions. Also, she is active on Pluck and interacts with users and encourages staffers to do so. She monitors comments and removes those that violate the user agreement.

Laura has worked to revamp the navigation bar at thetelegraph.com and has worked to make the site easier to navigate and more user-friendly.

— Nominated by Dan Brannan, Editor, The Telegraph, Alton, Ill.

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HONORABLE MENTIONS:

AARON AUPPERLEE, Desert Dispatch, Barstow, Calif.
Aaron Aupperlee is our city editor and our Shining Stars nominee. Because we're essentially the smallest daily in Freedom, he also reports and films video for our Web site.

Aaron has taken the lead in training for our company, teaching staff members with no video experience and teaching them everything they need to know to film, edit, and produce video content for our Web site. From his assistance, a reporter and our sports editor have produced video content they wouldn't have been able to do otherwise.

Our small, isolated desert community has no television news competition. What we produce is pretty much the only video news to serve Barstow.

It is safe to say we would not have any video content for our site without him leading the way and providing training right now. He works exceedingly hard, putting in hours of overtime to help make our tiny newspaper competitive online. As a result, candidates for reporter positions at the newspaper see our site and are ultimately surprised to find out how small we are, given how much we offer online.

And of course, his training benefits Freedom as a whole. Given that we tend to hire newcomers to the industry, this training is giving them tools that will benefit both them and any newspaper they may move to (such as a larger Freedom newspaper), as they move up in the industry.

— Nominated by Scott Shackford, Editor, Desert Dispatch, Barstow

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ALLISON GUALTIERI, The Sedalia Democrat, Sedalia, Mo.
I nominate Allison Gualtieri as The Sedalia Democrat's Shining Star for the third quarter of 2008.

Gualtieri gave readers a new way to take part in the Missouri State Fair this year with her State Fair blog. Gualtieri posted several times a day during the 11 days of the fair with video, text and still photos. Gualtieri, who grew up in New Jersey, not far from New York City, had never attended a county fair, let alone a state fair. She played up this angle and engaged viewers with her observations and realizations as she navigated the fair for the first time.

She linked the blog with her professional Facebook account, which has allowed her to build networks in the community.

The blog drew a number of comments and suggestions from readers throughout the fair. Fairgoers stopped her on the grounds to thank her for her work and tell her how much they appreciated The Democrat's Web site.

Gualtieri came to The Democrat a year ago to take the education beat and brought with her experience shooting and editing videos that she has shared with staff.

Gualtieri's work with the State Fair blog and her desire to share her online savvy with colleagues have advanced the digital, local, community conversation and multimedia pillars of excellence for online news.

— Nominated by Oliver Wiest, Editor, The Sedalia Democrat

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JEREMY MARR, WWMT/CW-7; WLAJ/CW-5, Kalamazoo/Lansing, Mich.
In this business, we're surrounded by stars. Some twinkle, others shoot off, even more fade. Rarely do they shine. Unless of course, you work with Jeremy Marr.

From the beginning of Jeremy's new duties as Interactive Content Producer, he has embraced the challenge of creating something out of nothing, for both WWMT and WLAJ. He is not only determined to make our sites better, but he pushes everyone around him to do so as well.

Jeremy has a competitive edge that's needed to stand out. In September he ranked in the top 5 Freedom-wide for number of new stories posted in OnSet, with more than 600 posts.

Jeremy is dedicated to making our content fresh, new and first. And more importantly, better than the competition's site(s) in both markets.

He's the "go to" guy for creation of new segments and pages. And Jeremy is a key source of ideas that can be utilized within the newscasts and in sales as well. There is never a problem that can't be solved on his watch, and it's difficult to sandbag the flood of ideas that come from his cubicle. It's truly refreshing and the results of his handiwork are evident in the major increases we've seen in unique users and daily hits over the past six months.

While he welcomes the everyday challenge to do more and create better, his attitude above all, remains positive. It's infectious and, in return, everyone in both news departments have grown to understand the importance of our Web sites and better yet, participate in the daily ritual.

Jeremy also understands that we need to be great (in the book or out; on shift or not) all the time. He's constantly pushing for excellence and leads by example — whether it's shooting himself and posting, creating blogs and/or training and mentoring others who've grown even more interested in the sites simply by experiencing his enthusiasm.

Jeremy Marr is certainly Freedom's Shining Star in the ever-growing internet galaxy we've come to utilize and grow.

— Nominated by Cathy Younkin, News Director, WWMT/WLAJ

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WENDY VICTORA, Northwest Florida Daily News, Fort Walton Beach
I'm proud to nominate Wendy Victora of the Northwest Florida Daily News for a Shining Star award.

Many people who have been around Freedom for the past decade know about Wendy. She has possibly won more awards for writing and reporting during that period than any other associate.

No doubt it would be difficult — even a little frightening — for a reporter with that record of success to take on a new direction and set of duties. But in the past 18 months, Wendy has reinvented her role at the Daily News, becoming one of our key leaders in our effort to be a Web-first, print-second news operation.

More than a year ago, when I asked around for a reporter to volunteer to come in at 6 a.m. to begin building our online morning news report, Wendy is the one who raised her hand. Since then, as our morning news coordinator, Wendy has led the charge to not only build our morning news report, but also to make sure that fresh local news is posted online throughout the day. That effort has also improved the speed of our planning — a critical issue as we work to focus more resources online and fewer resources on building our print product.

This effort has produced significant results.

— In February 2007, nwfdailynews.com generated about 400,000 page views.
— In September, the Web site generated more than 3.1 million page views!

Wendy isn't responsible for all that growth; she's had a lot of help from the entire Daily News staff. But I'm equally certain that we would not have achieved this growth had Wendy not grasped our new strategic direction and led the charge to get there.

Wendy Victora deserves a whole dipper of shining stars.

— Nominated by Patrick Rice, Editor, Northwest Florida Daily News