E&P recognizes 530 Media Project; Media Life writes about it

Professionally, it has been a remarkable month for me, and we're only halfway into March.

On March 1, Editor and Publisher, a well-respected trade magazine for the media industry, awarded Record Searchlight | Redding.com and its 530 Media Project (my baby) honorable mention in its annual "10 Newspapers That Do It Right" contest. The 530 Media Project, which provides workshops to the Redding, California, community, is a partnership between the newspaper, Pacific Sky marketing and the Shasta County Arts Council.

Read here about all of the innovative projects and initiatives E&P wrote about in its cover story featuring the Top 10 and those, like the Record Searchlight's 530 Media Project, that received honorable mention.

To have something you helped conceive, launch and oversee receive national recognition is a thrill. And to then have Media Life magazine write about it in greater detail is just as incredible. Read here the article published March 17 in Media Life about our effort.

I think the writer, Diego Vasquez, really understood what we're trying to achieve through community engagement when he wrote, ... "While building revenue streams is certainly important, what’s equally vital at a time of such change for newspapers is staying close to the community. Showing that the local newspaper is devoted to its readers, even when that devotion doesn’t make a profit. Proving that a paper’s interest in the community goes far beyond generating dollar signs. A newspaper in Redding, Calif., has found a unique way to prove that devotion."

While his write-up, part of Media Life's "Reinventing the American Newspaper" series, was awesome, below are his questions and my full answers, for those who want to know more about the 530 Media Project and maybe duplicate or model their own effort based on some of what we're doing.

How did you come up with this idea? The 530 Media Project is the Record Searchlight’s own twist on experimentation Digital First Media had been doing, starting with the launch of The Register Citizen Newsroom Café and Community Media Lab in Torrington, Connecticut, in 2010, and continuing with community media labs and partnerships established in 2012 throughout DFM’s footprint applying some of the principles of the Torrington project. Michelle Rogers, who had worked for DFM in Michigan, launched the Southeast Michigan Media Lab in April 2012. She offered workshops to the Ypsilanti community until the media lab was disbanded in April 2014 at the same time the company dismantled its Project Thunderdome.

Michelle was hired as content editor at the Record Searchlight in July 2014 and among her duties was to promote and coordinate live events and pursue avenues of interacting with audience. She helped facilitate the launch of the 530 Media Project in February 2015 and started a 530 Media Project blog. The number combination 530 represents the area code for the Record Searchlight audience.

In the last year, more than 350 people have attended one or more of 19 free workshops offered by the 530 Media Project. Registration, discussion groups, alerts and reviews are facilitated through Meetup.com. As of March 14, there were 448 members of the 530 Media Project Meetup group. A dozen workshops have been scheduled between March 16 and May 25, 2016. Michelle uses the blog to share 530 Media Project updates, photos, videos and presentations. She also engages with our audience through a 530 Media Project Twitter account and Facebook page. (Michelle Rogers)

How long have you been offering them? We’ve been offering workshops for a year. They range from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Video Basics to Smartphone Navigation and Apps, Blogging 101, Citizen Journalism and Social Media and Marketing for Small Businesses. Michelle also offers one-hour one-on-one sessions. All of the workshops have been crowdsourced, initially through a Google Forms survey on the Record Searchlight’s social media channels and then through a survey offered at the end of every workshop. (Michelle Rogers)

Do you make any money on them? A $10 fee doesn’t seem like much to pay for this. The drive behind offering the workshops is not financial; it’s about community engagement and face-to-face interaction with our audience. The $10 registration fee is donated directly to the Shasta Regional Community Foundation’s Stewardship Endowment Fund. We saw a need in our community for training in areas our staff members were well versed in and it made sense to offer a helping hand. Many of the workshop attendees are older folks who are grateful for the help because they're unable to find it anywhere else in the community. Feedback from the community has been extremely positive. We've heard that this type of outreach is exactly what the community needs as some segments of the population are behind in embracing and using social media in their personal and professional lives. In addition, our workshops have benefited the community as a whole as more conversations are taking place in public on a variety of digital platforms, allowing for more diverse voices to be represented and heard. (Michelle Rogers)

Who teaches them? How often are they offered? Michelle Rogers teaches most of the classes, but staff members have been helping, too. Sean Longoria, a senior multimedia journalist, has taught Video Basics, and he joined multimedia journalist Amber Sandhu and Michelle Rogers in leading Smartphone Navigation and Apps. Managing Editor Carole Ferguson will be teaching GIMP for photo editing March 16. Michelle also has recruited experts in the community to teach workshops. When Michelle is not leading a workshop, she livestreams them using uStream and conducts a live chat using ScribbleLive posted on Record Searchlight’s website, Redding.com, so the audience at home can attend virtually. Livestramed events typically produce page views of more than 2,000. (Michelle Rogers)

What sort of turnout have you had? Turnout ranges from a dozen to 28 at our workshops held at Pacific Sky marketing, one of our partners, which offers a training facility. If the workshop is hands-on, there are 17 computers available for attendees; if the workshop is primarily a PowerPoint presentation with video tutorials, the space can accommodate up to 28. Blogging 101 and a Blogger Fair were held at the Record Searchlight. Some of our hands-on workshops, including Facebook and Twitter Basics, have had waiting lists of up to 17 people. When we see the need, we offer the workshop multiple times. We recently added the Shasta County Arts Council as a partner. Beginning this April, workshops held at the arts council’s Old City Hall facility will be open to 35 people and will be televised on two public access TV stations operated by the arts council. (Michelle Rogers)

How has the program expanded since its debut? The program has been expanded, starting this April, to collect a $10 registration fee to benefit Shasta Regional Community Foundation’s Stewardship Endowment Fund. Previously, the workshops had been free. In addition, the Shasta County Arts Council was brought on as a partner and we’ll be televising workshops held at its Old City Hall facility. (Michelle Rogers)

Why is this a service that is fitting for a newspaper to offer?  We believe newspapers and their news sites can continue to grow and prosper if they continue to focus on outstanding journalism with a community focus. The community -- our audience -- has a passion for local news, but societal changes are impacting how and where the community consumes the news. While some have made the transition to digital and are comfortable navigating current and emerging platforms, others have been left behind. We believe it's our job, through community engagement, to bring those who feel like outsiders or uncomfortable on digital platforms into the fold. It's our responsibility to share our passion for online journalism and show them how, by consuming news online, it's a much more interactive and enriching experience.

At the Record Searchlight, we use a variety of interactive, digital storytelling tools to complement our journalism, from DocumentCloud to embed court documents and ScribbleLive to facilitate live chats, to uStream and Periscope for livestreaming video, and Infogram and Tableau for interactive charts and graphs and TimelineJS for interactive timelines. We offer audiocasts, video storytelling, and databases for deep dives. More tools are emerging and we experiment with them with the intention of elevating our audience's experience as news consumers. If we continue to keep the community's best interest, their desire for local news and information, and the experience they want as engaged news consumers at the heart of what we do, we know we will continue to be successful.  (Michelle Rogers)

What is the value to the Record Searchlight in offering this service? We serve a relatively small and close-knit community, and our brand relies heavily on word-of-mouth. This is the kind of project that turns readers into evangelists, and the impact of that positive experience with us ripples out into the broader community. It has helped to create a more receptive environment for both our journalism and our circulation and advertising sales efforts. Although the newsroom has no direct role in the latter, it’s simply a fact that this project has had positive impact on the business as a whole. (Silas Lyons, editor)