Top 5 digital tools & techniques journalists need to know right now

One of the best discussion threads among the ranks of the Journal Register Company IdeaLab right now is on the topic of which digital tools and techniques are imperative for newsrooms to know and use, right now. While there are countless tools of awesomeness to tout and explore in the name of journalism, here are the five - in my humbly disruptive opinion - that every person in your newsroom needs to know right now.

Replay: SeeClickFix workshop for newsrooms, bloggers

Very special thanks to Emma Richards from SeeClickFix for the workshop she conducted for the reporters, editors and community bloggers at the New Haven Register today. After the break is a replay of the workshop video and live blog.

If you couldn't join us or have any further questions about how to use SeeClickFix as a reporting and community engagement tool - email Emma at emma@seeclickfix.com. I'm also happy to help fellow journalists and bloggers create watch areas for your beat, custom widgets, and other areas you have questions about. So feel free to reach out to me any time as well.

Emma will be passing along help documents and cheat sheets tailored to journalists and bloggers later this week, so stay tuned for those. In the mean time, feel free to browse the general SeeClickFix help forums.

SeeClickFix workshop for journalists at New Haven Register

I’m pleased to announce that our friends at SeeClickFix have arranged to conduct a workshop at the New Haven Register on the many (many!) ways newsrooms and reporters can use the platform as a journalism tool for community engagement.

The workshop will be conducted next Tuesday, Jan. 24, at 1 p.m. and will be presented by SeeClickFix Online Community Manager Emma Richards. For more on her background, read her entry on the SeeClickFix staff page.

Reporters, editors, web producers, community bloggers and anyone else with an interest in covering or improving their community can participate in the workshop too. This workshop will be live streamed on the New Haven Register website (and here too), and I will moderate a live chat where I'll accept questions, concerns, and requests for Emma from those out there on the internets who can't join us in person.




Video streaming by Ustream

Some of the topics we've asked Emma to focus on include:

• Suggestions, tips and examples on how SeeClickFix can be used by journalists
• How to browse SeeClickFix reports for story ideas and news tips
• How to upload, close or comment on community issues reported with SeeClickFix
• Tips and suggestions for getting public officials more engaged
• Tips and suggestions for encouraging more reports by our readers

These topics were selected by our Journal Register Company Connecticut newsrooms in a survey I sent out last week. So this is what our journalists are most interested in getting out of this workshop.

But why stop there? If you'd like to learn more about creating customized widgets and watch areas, send us your questions in the livestream. Or leave a comment on this blog post, and I'll make note of it to include in the workshop.

6 ways to prevent crime and murder with digital tools

34 people were victims of homicide in New Haven, Conn. last year.

That's a near-record number for the city. And that's a lot for a city of this size (129,559 population, according to 2010 U.S. Census). So I was curious enough to see how New Haven's homicides compared to similarly-sized cities across the country. I looked at the recently released preliminary crime report for the first half of 2011. Of all 30 U.S. cities in the population range of 20,000 - 40,000, New Haven had the most reported homicides from January to June of last year with 18. Hartford was a close second with 17. No other city in this population range had more than 8. Six of those cities had zero homicides.

In talking about this with New Haven Register crime reporter Bill Kaempffer, he warned that the problem with viewing homicides like this - as a statistic - is the conversation shifts to how dangerous a place like New Haven is. He's right. You can't truly know a city by comparing a murder stat or crime rate to that of another community or city.

This is why Kaempffer and I created the New Haven Homicides Report - to go beyond that annual homicide statistic and individually document each victim and crime. Maybe then the New Haven community could draw more informed conclusions about the trends, neighborhoods and circumstances leading to these disheartening pockets of crime, and explore ways to help prevent more from happening.

So, instead of comparing New Haven's homicide stat to Topeka, Kan. or Simi Valley, Calif., what I should be doing is outlining ways newsrooms, police departments and community bloggers can work with their communities to help prevent crime and murder.

Read on for six things you can do now to help prevent crime and murder in your town.

Investigate This!: New Haven Register launches tool for investigative story ideas

When the New Haven Register announced the first changes from it's newsroom reorganization this past fall, one of the changes that received the warmest applause was the re-establishment of the Investigations Team for the first time in more than 20 years.

This week, we launched a new tool aimed at making it easier for the community to work with our investigations team and send us news tips.

We've created an Investigate This! submission form for readers to send us investigation tips and ideas that warrant a closer, more in-depth look. All submissions go right to the source and are reviewed by the team. The tool can be found at the bottom of every article on newhavenregister.com, below the Fact Check tool. Simply click it and fill out the form.

In addition to the tool, Investigations Editor Michelle Tuccitto Sullo will oversee our newly launched Investigations Blog (which also features the Investigate This! tool). Follow it regularly as she and our community engagement team may appeal to readers for crowdsourced information or other data on a topic currently under investigation, such as our in-depth look at missing person cases in Connecticut.

So what are you waiting for? Tell us what you want investigated in your community.

What are your thoughts on the new submission tool? What are other ways we can open up our newsroom and investigative work to you and the community?

Join us in improving our Connecticut towns next year with SeeClickFix

This week, Journal Register Connecticut newsrooms created custom SeeClickFix widgets that ask citizens from across Connecticut to propose New Year's resolutions for their town next year. The goal is to harness suggestions from citizens, and spark discussion, on how to improve their community in 2012.

What makes this process different from regular use of SeeClickFix is the pledge the New Haven Register, Middletown Press and Register Citizen are making with this project. In January, we will review the issues reported through these widgets in the towns we cover and select some of the most popular issues with the most 'fix this' votes and track their progress throughout 2012. In towns that do not have partnerships or much engagement with SeeClickFix, that means we will serve as a watchdog for the SeeClickFix users and report regularly on what needs to yet be done to get these proposed issues resolved.

But we can't cover all the resolutions for the towns in Connecticut. So here's my invitation to all the other news outlets, newspapers, TV stations, bloggers and active community members who cover and care about any community in Connecticut -- JOIN US! The more who help, the more we can resolve.

Heck, why stop there? You hear me, America? #OccupyTownResolutions

You can very easily create your own custom SeeClickFix widget for your town to participate and embed it on your site. To steal a line from the quotable Ivan Lajara, "It's so easy, even an editor can do it."

Read on for a step-by-step tutorial on how to make your own widget for our Town Resolutions project.

How to make a New Year's resolution for your town with SeeClickFix

The New Haven Register, Middletown Press, and Register Citizen are teaming up with SeeClickFix to make some New Year's resolutions for your town come true in 2012.

We've worked with SeeClickFix to create custom widgets for our websites that display Town Resolution proposals from the entire state of Connecticut. We'll be reviewing these submissions for the next two weeks, and after Jan. 8, we'll select some of the most popular resolutions that garnered the most 'fix it' votes on SeeClickFix, and track their progress throughout the year with regular news reporting by staff from New Haven Register, Middletown Press and Register Citizen.

Here's the submission form for the New Haven area:

How digitally engaged are our elected politicians?

There are 187 elected members in the Connecticut General Assembly. 151 in the House of Representatives, and 36 in the Senate.

Each one of them has a government-supplied email address. But how many of them actually respond to the emails they receive? Better yet, how many of them even check their inbox? Assistants don't count.

If a recent experiment of mine is to be taken seriously, the answer is not many. About 24.

We know they are busy. But we elect them to represent us, and with all the technology and social media tools we have here at the dawn of 2012, there hasn't been an easier time in the history of politics to connect with and communicate with the people you represent on a large scale.

According to Facebook, the social networking site is home to more than 800 million active users. I'm curious how many of those are elected officials that use it as a tool to reach and engage the communities they are responsible for.

After New Haven Mayor John DeStefano announced his proposal last week to allow non-citizens to vote in the city's municipal elections, I composed a short poll for the New Haven Register and emailed it to every single member of the Connecticut General Assembly. Since they will be voting on DeStefano's proposal next year, we wanted to report to our readers the state legislation's stance on this controversial issue.

I embedded a Google Spreadsheet fed automatically with their individual responses on the Register website so readers could see responses as they were sent back to us.

So, how many responded? Only 6 the first day. We have 24 at the time of this posting, with a handful of new ones each day that passes.

The Christmas Mix-acle 2011

Christmas and music are among my favorite human spectacles. So it's only natural that I make Christmas mixes instead of cards or cookies to share with my friends and family every year. Which is handy, since my music collection is far more impressive than my scratchy handwriting or my apartment's unpredictable oven. So without further adieu, here is this year's Christmas Mix-acle. (And for those new to this, you can check out Mixacles from Christmases past too.) Merry Christmas.

If you have any requests for next year, say so in the comments.

All files are .zip files with mp3s. Read on for tracklistings.

The Christmas Mixacle 2011

The Christmas Mixacle 2010

The Christmas Mixacle 2009

The Christmas Mixacle 2008

The Christmas Mixacle 2007

Comment Violation Test: How to handle comments about a black murder victim

The topic for yesterday's Comment Violation Test was Joshua Komisarjevsky - and it revealed that the New Haven Register needs to consider defining in greater detail how we handle comments that celebrate or promote the death of another person and how we treat convicted criminals, particularly ones with a jury-approved death sentence.

Today, I want to take a look at one of the Register's most heated comment topics.

Dallas Boomer became the 32nd person murdered in New Haven last week. He was black, and a lot of the comments about his murder focused on that. Some were blocked, some were allowed and some were very difficult to call.

Review these comments and tell us what you would do if you were the moderator. If you find that they violate the New Haven Register Comment Policy, block it. If not, allow it.

Please note, some of these comments were deemed very offensive.

Comment Violation Test Results: We don't agree on Komisarjevsky comments

The jury for Joshua Komisarjevsky agreed last week that the death penalty was the most appropriate punishment for his crimes against the Petit family. But when it comes to handling online comments on this topic, it seems we are a hung jury.

As of the time of this writing, my comment violation test from yesterday has received 22 responses. If you haven't taken the test, but still want to -- SPOILER ALERT -- I'd recommend not reading this post until you've done so.

Let's take a look at how your votes compared with our moderators.

Comment Violation Test: Would you block or allow these comments?

To delete, or not to delete. That is the question.

The New Haven Register recently changed its comment policy in November so that every comment would be held for review by the newsroom before being posted to its website.

The comments our editors have been blocking from the website are ones they find violate the following rules of our newly established guidelines:

The Register does not permit:

• Hate speech
• Personal attacks
• Profanities
• Irrelevant sexual references
• Libel
• Spam

Going into this new process, we knew there would be challenging comments that aren't an easy "okay" or "foul." Especially, when the comment is on a heated topic or sensitive story, like the Joshua Komisarjevsky trial.

And that means we can't ever close the book on our comments policy. Like the United States Constitution, we need to continue exploring, evolving and addressing these guidelines with our readers in a democratic way, amending it as necessary.

So, lets take what we already started a bit further now.

What do you think about the following comments from this recent story about Komisarjevsky's jury recommending him for the death penalty?

The comments appear exactly as they were submitted to us, and some were kept from posting - but I won't tell you which ones. I'm not interested in whether you agree or disagree with what each comment says, but am curious on what you would allow as a comment moderator of this story.

There isn't anything spelled out in our guidelines which forbids the celebration of the death of another person. Should there be? Should it be different for people convicted of murder in court, such as Komisarjevsky? Your responses in this survey can help us determine how our moderators should approach these tough-to-call comments. You can also view how others responded after you complete the survey.

My new blog

Well, it's official. I've been named Assistant Managing Editor for Disruption of Journal Register Company's Connecticut newsrooms.

How can I possibly outlive a title like that? For starters, I figured I needed a more professional blog than the one where I complain about trivial things (that I stopped updating) and the one where I upload downloadable mp3s of awesome bands to rave about trivial things (that I stopped updating).

I have a great fascination and respect for how digital media has affected disrupted the business of traditional media -- particularly the news biz and music biz. Here, I will be writing, reporting, testing and theorizing about all that noise, and what instruments we need or can use to make lasting music of it.

And certainly, I plan to write and open up about the disruptions and innovations we're working on in Journal Register Connecticut. Hope you follow along, and join in the conversations I plan on having here.