Fort Myers News-Press, Fort Myers, Florida
Sponsoring news
organization: Fort
Myers News-Press
Location: Fort Myers, Florida
Owned by: Gannett
Founded: 1884
Community engagement initiative launched: 2005
Software used: phpBB for forums and user-submitted photos;
custom-developed web platform
Sparsely populated or dominated by harsh invective, forums sponsored by newspapers haven’t notably changed the landscape of online newspapers. In fact, a number of representatives of news organizations cited bad experiences with forums as something that limited enthusiasm for more public input on the organization’s site.
At the Fort Myers News-Press, something different happened: Forum use thrived, among both staffers and readers. When we asked executive editor Kate Marymont about reporters’ involvement in the forum, she said, “Reporters and editors will jump into a forum discussion to share information. We don’t encourage them to share opinions, but they are welcome to share information.” In May of 2006, they became the platform for readers and journalists to collaborate on what turned into a major story: mismanagement, and perhaps even fraud, at Cape Coral’s public water utility. Ten months later, the paper and readers are still actively digging, and their work triggered an investigation by the Department of Justice and the prospect of significant reforms.
The News-Press’s piecemeal approach – adding forums, adding interactivity to some features, like the newspaper’s consumer reporter column, didn’t seem to be a case of grand strategy with a similarly grand payoff. Instead, it exemplified exceptionally good use of simple, and often inexpensive tools, such as the open-source forum software installed by the newspaper, which now shows over 15,000 posts in its Cape Coral area alone. This strategy of using off-the-shelf tools in innovative ways also shows in what editor Kate Marymont calls the paper’s mojos (mobile journalists), who are equipped with laptops and digital cameras and spend far less time in the paper’s offices and far more time in the field interacting directly with readers and the subjects of stories. In the Cape Coral story, this showed in liveblogged accounts of council meetings held to address the public utility’s crisis. Says Marymont, “We are working to get all of our reporters outfitted with wireless laptops so that meetings are routinely liveblogged. That’s one of our goals for 2007. As we build toward that, our reporting staff is becoming adept at covering events for multiple audiences. By that, I mean a journalist will cover a meeting, fire rapid-fire live reports to our Web site, and produce a story for the daily newspaper. In some cases that person might also produce a third piece for a weekly newspaper or one of our magazines.” Technology has changed how the paper approaches assigning stories, says Marymont. “We do still have assignments, but they are not assignments specific to the printed newspaper. They are assignments to cover an event and produce the right kinds of content for the different audiences of our different mediums.”
Marymont’s discussion returned several times to one of the central issues for many news organizations when they opt to host an online community: how involved should staffers get? Marymont indicates that the News-Press is working it out in practice and has achieved a level of comfort with interacting with readers online.
This has paid off in the paper’s presence in the blogosphere as well. The paper has an impressive Technorati rank of #209, meaning many bloggers are pointing to stories in the paper from their own weblogs. When we asked Marymont how the paper will approach what might be called the extended conversation surrounding the paper on the web, she replied: “I have not jumped into the middle of the online conversation surrounding news-press.com and The News-Press, but probably should. I believe that our job here is to stoke conversation. How can I say that I should remain separate?”
Not all of the paper’s geographically-focused forums and new “microsites” devoted to communities that the News-Press covers have been equally successful in attracting participants. Marymont points out that some are newer, and that the communities also vary dramatically in population size, which leads to disparities in participation on the newspaper’s site.
