Editor, revised

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The Spokesman-Review is running a series on the Spokane River by reporter Becky Kramer, who is taking part in a seven-leg raft/paddle expedition organized by the Spokane River Forum.

The project is the biggest undertaking I’ve been part of at this newspaper. To complement the stories, I developed an interactive map using Google My Maps. There are historical photos, aerial photos by S-R photog Jesse Tinsley, markers with information about key landmarks and illustrations by Rick Hosmer, a participant on the expedition.

The map was time-consuming but easy to put together. I didn’t dabble with KML or other more sophisticated Google tools, instead relying on the basic My Maps interface. You can check out a quick tutorial here.

The map has been getting decent traffic and love from my friends at Down to Earth.

Of course, I’m not the only one merging waterways and interactive maps in these parts. Cheney, Wash., resident Ron Hall introduced himself in my comments section and shared this link to his Google Earth aquifer tour. Also check out this profile S-R reporter Parker Howell wrote about Hall and his 3D modeling of Spokane landmarks. Great stuff, and miles beyond what I’m doing. For now.

I previously posted about being a part of a group of eight young Spokesman-Review journalists charged with recommending a reorganization plan for the newsroom.

We turned in our report Thursday and met with senior editors Friday, and Editor Steve Smith posted our report on his blog later that evening. My colleague and fellow group member Nick Eaton has also blogged about our findings. Kate Martin is also following the process on her blog.

Download the report here (PDF). There’s a flow chart at the end.

A few of our major recommendations:

• Move to a early deadline akin to an afternoon daily but continue publishing in the mornings. The idea: Start the editing process earlier; relieve bottlenecks on the city and copy desks; foster more enterprise reporting while leaving room to accommodate breaking stories.
• Bring all section editors into a central pod in the downtown offices. The idea:Improve communication and planning; encourage decisions on where stories will run based on content, not default categories of sports, features, business, zoned neighborhood news, etc.; reduce after-the-fact regrets about missing a good front-page opportunity.
• Create a universal copy desk with shifts staggered throughout the day. The idea: Help our highly overworked copy editors, day and night; free up those delegated to do design on a given night to focus entirely on design, not copy editing as well; have more copy editors around in the day to copy edit stories going onto the Web, thus improving our reputation for accuracy and clean prose online as well as in print.

There are more, along with a more radical set of suggestions toward the end.

I think we issued a highly pragmatic set of recommendations. That may be our report’s greatest strength. A lot of this could be tried without risking revenue streams or requiring huge technical overhauls.

Some might see that pragmatism as these ideas’ biggest weakness. We were picked to investigate this, after all, because we were young and less invested in the existing structure. Aren’t we the Internet generation? Don’t we know that the MSM is a relic industry?

But with the limitations we had, such as not adding staff or completely shaking up content, most of us didn’t see the point in advocating more beats, or going to Web only, or cutting the print paper down to three days a week, or hiring an army of videographers. We didn’t want to waste our time on ideas that stood no chance of advancing.

If you have an opinion, please weigh in, but keep in mind these are only ideas and that we were asked to suggest them. We are not some young Turks aimed at pulling ourselves up at others’ expense. Furthermore, this report doesn’t represent what’s going to happen. Many of these ideas might die at this stage. And please be civil and refrain from saying we are naive; that’s not a constructive response.

I spent all afternoon in meetings and emerged to find Spokane Valley had erupted in flames.

With blessings from above, I slipped away for a dinner break with my dad, who was in town briefly. Afterward, I went back to work to help with the Web coverage. We had three reporters and three photographers in the field.

My boss whipped up a slicker version of our slideshow tool, which I fed with incoming images. I figured I was pretty much done after I finished linking up related content.

But the news wasn’t finished. I helped the City Desk by taking dictation from one of our reporters in the field, who fed me details about an emergency of declaration by Gov. Chris Gregoire. I threw it into a file and shipped it to the copy desk, where it had been promised as a breakout on the jump page. It was nice to interact with my former co-workers.

Friday morning I’ll be back in the newsroom at 7 a.m., filling in for our morning breaking news editor. I’m sure there will be plenty to follow up on.