Blog Archives - tripp j crouse

This tornado loves you ...

4/30/2013

The new job is going really well, while my personal life has been a weird tornado of activity.

I don't feel like I've hit my stride with the social media gig, but I'm getting closer as our Facebook audience is up, our list of Pinterest traffic continues to grow and our Twitter feeds slowly but steadily increase followers.

I still haven't gotten to produce much, other than shooting some street photography on the side. (Some of the results you can see via the Photo tab.)

In other news, I left my roller derby league of five-plus years and I couldn't be happier about the decision ... even if it wasn't totally mine. I've had a good week or two away from all the crazy and egos, and it's meant that I can focus on things in my personal life.

I'll be heading over to Iowa City on a weekly basis to skate with them.

My house is a state of constant activity lately. My basement flooded in the giant rain storm we had and I'm still managing to find things I need to throw out, dry out and clean. On top of that, I'm having work done on my attic to turn it into another bedroom/living space. And my house is a wreck, so I have to find some time to actually clean the thing.

I started dating again. I haven't had a lot of luck in the last two years, but so far so good.

First week on the job, in the bag

4/13/2013

I wrapped up my first week as Social Media Editor at the Quad-City Times and it certainly was an eye opening experience.

The change of pace is drastically different, as I notice time flying by even faster than when I was working on the desk. I credit that with the fact that I actually enjoy what I'm doing and look forward to heading into work.

I lucked out right away when we had an early-morning car accident - a head-on collision between a car and an ambulance - that resulted in a fatality, which resulted in several views on our Facebook page and referrals in 4% range. Typically traffic sits in the 2% range. By the end of the day that fatality picked up 9,000-plus views.

The second day we managed to get the ID of the high school student who was killed in the crash. That traffic rocketed early on Facebook and surpassed the 10,000-plus mark pretty quickly.

We're sitting at 25,829 likes and I'd like to increase that. I don't know what the logistics would be of increasing our likes to 30,000. The difficulty lies in Facebook's terminal mentality. The website doesn't really want you to leave, and so link outs aren't encouraged.

We also started to implement a slideshow gallery on qctimes.com that includes our front page with a link to a list of Times vendors and machines. We posted an album of front pages on our Facebook page as well as on Pinterest.

Our Pinterest traffic is increasing. We started with 282 followers and are now up to 303, which is a trend that I hope continues. I started several new boards including the Front Pages, News Stories and a QC Varsity board.

I changed around the cover photots and moved various boards around to try and highlight some of our more important boards. I want to keep the number of boards semi-limited. We're sitting at 17 boards, and I might increase it to about 20 in a week or so, but I'm more focused on filling some of our under-utilized boards. I still have some space in the Family Fun board, and I also want to fill out my News Stories board.

Twitter has also experiences some rejuvenation. I talked with a couple of Times Twitter users and worked out a few strategies for increasing traffic and followers. One reporter was retweeting headlines for us, and while I'm sure it was generating traffic, I convinced him to try and find a new angle or a fresh look to include with his tweets. We already have automated feeds that grabs headlines and retweets stories for us, so I didn't really feel that we needed the same thing from one of our reporters. He seemed to really appreciate the feedback.

I'm hoping to restart some of our older Twitter accounts, including the once-popular @QCvarsity account. Instead of giving it to one person to retweet from, I'm going to open it up to all of our prep reporters in the hopes that we get some great coverage. Another account that we have is @QCOpinion, which is currently an automated feed that grabs headlines from our online Editorial page. I'm hoping that if our editorial editor doesn't want to take it over, that I'll take it over. It's certainly something we can promote and we have tons of online interaction between comments, letters to the editor and various chat opportunities.

The derbz

4/7/2013

We are having a going away party for my roommate today and I should be cleaning ...

Part of my extracurricular adult activities is as a skating official with the local roller derby league, the Quad-City Rollers. Last night I was the Head Ref, a position that requires coordinating all the skating officials but the non-skating officials, as well as setting up the track.

We had a few hiccups, but for the most part it went OK.

The bout was a double-header, a B-level bout and an A-level bout.

Skating for 100-plus minutes is grueling and reminds my body of what it was like when I first started doing this.

But in the end if all came together relatively smoothly and you get to see everyone's hard work pay off.

RIP Roger Ebert

4/5/2013

‏As some of you know by now, one of the biggest movie fans in the world passed away Thursday. Roger Ebert was 70, had battled one bout with cancer that took his lower jaw and left him unable to speak, and had recently announced Wednesday that the cancer had returned. The man was pretty public about his fight and without the power of speech he turned to writing and social media to spread his message. I might have to go pick up his books when I get the chance.

Here is what some of the Twitter-verse had to say:

@edgarwright
"This is my happening and it freaks me out". Roger Ebert wrote the truly incredible Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls. He is beyond a legend.

‏@anamariecox
Pulling up Ebert's column on getting sober pulls up an over-loaded server error. I think he would appreciate that. http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/08/my_name_is_roger_and_im_an_alc.html …

‏@OldHossRadbourn
"If you're going to assemble ball players in a corn field, you need Old Hoss. This film is garbage." -R. Ebert on "Field of Dreams." RIP.

‏@jessieopie
RT @suntimes: It is with a heavy heart we report that legendary film critic Roger Ebert (@ebertchicago) has passed away

I grew up watching Siskel and Ebert and being glued to their chemistry and banter back and forth. We didn't even have a VCR or the money to go watch movies, but I was captivated by all the films that were out there. My cinematic experience at that age was simply the film clips they showed. Even after Gene Siskel passed away, Ebert carried on. I managed to see the man once at his annual film festival hosted in Champaign, Illinois, and I followed his reviews and tweets well through his cancer. He leaves behind a huge legacy and certainly inspired me to think critically about films.

Learning Curves

4/5/2013

Yesterday was day two of my first live practice of the new Q-C Times budgeting processes and the Total Content Management System. (Keep in mind that I had a day off to completely unlearn most of the stuff I was supposed to know.)I spent a ton of time on the phone with one of three different designers at our Regional Design Center, and it made me realize that there's a serious communication gap.

The main thing is that our budgets have to come from one source, or there has to be way to access an open-source document that constantly gets updated.

I inadvertently sent a budget that had "dated" material on it, which confused the designers, while also giving our obits layout person a story that was budgeted to run in the paper elsewhere (even though it wasn't slugged to a page).

I also got voted down on allowing a copy editor to have a read on all stories that go over to the RDC, even though we are having headlines that aren't appropriate for print or stories without subheads. We had a murder plea follow-up that needed a subhead, but it wasn't provided.

I'm seriously hope that my previous two nights aren't a reflection of things to come for the new job, but my editor assures me I should only have to work one shift a week in the short-term until the system and the desk editors all get up to speed.

I'm really excited about the new job. I need to start a binder of all my social media notes and Web pages, so that I can start compiling my old Tips&Tricks handout, and putting together in-house training sessions we call "Lunch & Learns."

I big focus early on is to get reporters back into some good habits as far as tweeting, and hopefully sway some of our staffers to jump on the Pinterest band wagon and start pinning some great articles and photos.

Hopefully once the transition smooths out, I can start to focus on a multimedia project I have my eyes on.

My three-month plan thus far is a couple of tip sheets, one or two Lunch & Learns, and perhaps the start of a multi-media project. I'm also hoping to get started on a social media column/blog over at the Times. And I believe there's a local LinkedIn group gathering sometime this month. I'd also like to set up a seminar outside the Times, perhaps at a local venue, in which I can talk a little bit about the Times and social media as a way we're connecting to our readership.

Keep Calm and Pin It

4/4/2013

One of my big goals as Social Media Editor at the Quad-City Times is getting various reporters and editors used to working with Pinterest.

Pinterest use has exploded exponentially since it was created, particularly thanks to the DIY crowd.

Food recipes, home decor and health/beauty tips drive a significant amount of traffic to the source material,
and are frequently Liked and Repinned by other Pinterest users.

I'm listing four tips to continue to engage your Pinterest followers.

1. Don't go changing the title of your Pinterest: Short of people actually knowing who you are, this is the easiest way for people to share your board with others. Thi becomes the identity of your board and changing it risks losing potential new followers.

2. Swap out your Board cover photos periodically: Changing your board covers occasionally lets followers know you care about your content, and it freshens up your boards giving your followers a new visual look when they look at your boards. Choose a board cover that conveys the content of your Pins and that's visually interesting. Some Pinterest gurus suggest changing your board covers every couple of weeks, but the hardcore users will change things up about every week. It depends on how many people are following you.

3. Maximize your your board presence: Under each board cover photo: On your board page, each board has a title, a cover photo and the first four Pin photos in that board. Rearrange your board pins so that the top four most helpful or interesting pins are engaging your followers. This too can help freshen up you Pinterest.

4. Don't go overboard on the number of your boards: Too many boards create clutter and confusion. Your Pinterest board functions like a Web page: Can users find what they need? How far do you expect them to scroll to get to what they want.

Some sites to check out:
http://www.quicksprout.com/2012/02/06/the-marketers-guide-to-pinterest/

http://www.rank-it.eu/social-media/4-tips-to-arrange-and-handle-your-pinterest-boards

A return to sketching

4/4/2013

The new job isn't going to have much designing to it outside of moving widgets around on a Web page.

After more than 10 years of page design and working with Quark and Indesign and Photoshop and Illustrator, I won't be doing much of that anymore.

It kind of makes me sad, because design has been such a strong influence in my life and it's a majority of what I know. Still we all have to transition sometime in life and if I want to find a career outside of second-shift copy desking, there is no time like the present.

I plan on keeping my sketchbooks around. You can see some of my early work by clicking on the Sketch tab. But I'll post some work here, too.

You can see some of the early workings in my style in the first pic. I've never had a refined style and I probably never will. I've always liked to draw and the sketchbooks are a way to get some of the crazy ideas out of my head and on to paper.

I fell in love with the "Bad Moon," an icon for a clan of orcs in Warhammer, and the image has stuck with me quite some time. You can see the evolution of that image in the second pick. A little more 3-D and better detail. I can't remember from where the tentacles came, but I'm guessing there's a strong influence from Tim Burton's "Beetlejuice" and the cartoon spinoff series.

You can even see two characters I have been working on developing for sometime, "Smiley" and Lilith, the crab-handed bald girl spewing tentacles in the third picture.

If I get the time I'd like to work up a painting of the middle picture, but I need to get back into drawing again. Without having a visual element to my work life, maybe I'll get some time to focus on the sketchbook again.

Heavy lifting

4/3/2013

The Quad-City Times is moving forward with some pretty big changing, particularly the use of a regional design center to layout a bulk of the design work and heavy lifting.

Ideally this should free up a lot of the newsroom to focus on exciting online content and to hone what we're producing in the print edition.

I got my first full taste of the new total content management system, which functions a lot like our previous one, so most of us already experienced with it only stumbled upon a few bumps.

However, the staffers who haven't worked with the online CMS much are experiencing some growing pains.

The biggest issue we seem to be having is our budgeting process. We don't have a simple way of compiling sluglines into one form. And since many reporters and editors aren't familiar with the system, the major workload is falling on those of us already familiar with the system to compile all the available photos and sidebars, make sure they're slugged correctly and get the RDC the budget on time.

The hardest part for me is to remember all the little tiny steps that have been added to facilitate the communication with the RDC and make a story for the Web available to the print edition.

I've got the day off today, so we'll see how much I forget when I go back into work tomorrow.

A new frontier

4/1/2013

Today, we started training on some new web-based software that will essentially drive our online and print products.

It's always super scare to learn a new way of doing things, but when it's based on a system you are used to, it helps make the transition much easier.

Several of us are already trained on how to operate our Content Management System, which helps us operate and manage our online presence at qctimes.com. This made the two-hour training today a snap, and afforded me an opportunity to help some of our older city desk editors with learning the new system.

Only time will tell whether these changes will help benefit. Let's just say I'm cautiously optimistic.

About Me

Tripp J Crouse (Ojibwe, descendent of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Chippewa) has worked in print journalism and broadcasting for 15-plus years, and currently represents Alaska and serves as 2019 chair of the Station Advisory Committee for Native Public Media, a national organization that offers support services to Tribal and Native public radio stations. Tripp is also a member of the Native American Journalists Association and Alaska Press Club. Prior to working at 90.3 KNBA in Anchorage, Tripp worked at KTOO in Juneau and the Quad-City Times in Davenport, Iowa.

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