Digiwatchdog » Entries tagged with "Chicago Reporter"
The end of our journey: A summary of our findings and recommendations for revamping the Chicago Reporter’s digital strategy
After weeks of hard work and thorough research, our quest to improve the Chicago Reporter’s digital strategy concludes this week. We have conducted audience research, redesigned the Reporter’s website through wireframing and usability testing, and formulated new methods of data visualization that we believe will attract many more readers to the publication’s investigative coverage of race and poverty. What did we find out from our research? Here are some of our key findings (which you can investigate in full here): The Reporter currently has a practically non-existent online audience. Most readers arrive through search engines and leave after one page view, never returning to the site. The Reporter’s blog hosted on ChicagoNow provides the only frequently updated content from the publication, but it’s not bringing traffic to the Reporter’s site. In fact, it’s … Read entire article »
Filed under: Wrap-up
4 sites to help make your Drupal dreams come true
As our team continues to work on revamping the Chicago Reporter’s website, we have encountered several Drupal-related questions along the way. Those issues have ranged from the basic structure of a Drupal site to more specific concerns, such as how to create an event calendar in the CMS or how views, blocks and nodes can work together. Luckily our Drupal consultant foresaw this potentially treacherous phase in our site building process and recommended a few websites that we might visit if we run into roadblocks. Sites like the four below gave us a much clearer picture of how Drupal works and what it will take to accomplish our web development goals. Drupal should be your first stop if you have questions about how to build your site. Drupal has an excellent section … Read entire article »
Filed under: Web development
Sneak Peek at The Chicago Reporter’s Revenue Plan
We’re not ready to completely lift the veil on how we’re going to boost The Chicago Reporter’s revenue, but we’ve been discussing the issue for the past few weeks. In lieu of a plan détailé, here are three main strategy points we are working from: 1) Diversification This is one of the few buzzwords in the English language to actually have some meat behind it. The consensus among experts is that for non-profit news organizations, it simply will not cut it to rely on a handful of foundation “sugar daddies.” For one thing, they are themselves low on sugar. But they’ve also become much more conscious of impact and return on investment. Because there are fewer readily available impact metrics for journalism, foundations want to know they aren’t the only ones on … Read entire article »
Filed under: Media business, Sustainability
The Trouble with Drupal Taxonomies
If you’re delving into a content management system you inevitably run into the problem of taxonomy. How would you like to categorize your content? I mention this because the Chicago Reporter is in need of a taxonomical overhaul. We’ve (the Community Media Innovation Project team) decided to stick with Drupal, but after looking over the Reporter’s organizational system, we’ve decided to alter it. First, there are a few decisions we’ve made: To disallow users to manually enter tags unless trained with a detailed style guide. Nothing is messier than a list of tags submitted by different people. One person writes ‘children,’ another writes ‘Children,’ and a third writes ‘kids’ (not to mention all of the other variations, including typos). Before you know it, tagging has lost all meaning. A style guide is good. A … Read entire article »
Filed under: Web development
Newsflash: Reporters rely on data!
New research shows that modern journalists rely heavily on database reporting to tell their stories, but their reporting is entirely reliant on what government leaders decide to make public. In a report done by the Reynolds Journalism Institute at Missouri School of Journalism, journalists from around the country said they turn to data provided by government sites three to four times a week. They largely said they were able to find what they wanted, but many … Read entire article »
Filed under: Investigative journalism