Digital Ninja School: An experiment on training 'digital first' journalism

While the lack of blog updates here may indicate I haven't been up to much -- I assure you that's not the case. We've been very busy developing a training program to radically change the skill sets and mind sets of every single position in our Journal Register Company Connecticut newsrooms.

If you work in a newspaper newsroom, you know this transition from a print to digital focused mindset is easier said than done. Much easier. We're talking about learning and applying an entirely different mindset than what many of our journos learned when they were first hired and trained. In lots of respects, it's like sending a traditional print journalist to grad school for further education. This takes a lot of time, willingness, eagerness, money, and experimentation to make this kind of radical change to your business.

We haven't had trouble in the willingness department. That's been very clear. But the time to learn and experiment? Not to mention, money. That's been a problem. Our journalists have been painfully burning themselves out trying to do the whole 'more with less' thing.

That's why we launched the Digital Ninja School program.

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: