Type-B personalities
The daily edition of The Spokesman-Review will never have enough room to hold all the stories we wish we had room for, or all the information we’d like to share. Not in print, anyway. But online, we’ve got room to spare.
The blogs at www.spokesmanreview.com touch on everything from entertainment and politics to the way this newspaper covers your community. There are more than 20 of them, written by editors, columnists, beat reporters and readers. They give us a chance to broaden our daily report and a way to add features you only find online.
Deeper coverage
Our longest-running blog, Movies & More, is an online home for columnist Dan Webster. You’ll find his byline in 7 and IN Life every week, but Dan’s beat could fill far more. His blog gives him space to post clips, reviews, interviews and anything else he comes across.
It’s an extension of his beat, only with greater depth, more pictures and links.
Our newest blog, Campus Commons, also takes advantage of extra room online. Reporter Shawn Vestal posts notes on higher education around the region, getting news out quickly and gaining a chance for immediate feedback.
Readers also get a better understanding of what informs Shawn’s reporting on the pages of the newspaper.
Interact with you paper and other readers
Editorial writer Dave Oliveria writes one of our most-visited blogs, Huckleberries Online. He spends a lot of time nurturing the online community there, and with an active comments section, many of his posts spark wide-ranging discussions.
Dave is also a prolific linker, pointing readers to dozens of sites to explore every day.
Many of our other blogs are open for comments, including those from sports reporters Glenn Kasses and Dave Trimmer.
They want to tap into the area’s college football fan base, expanding our WSU and EWU coverage, and just maybe finding a few news tips along the way.
Multimedia makes for different coverage
In print, The Spokesman-Review is limited to pretty much just text, pictures and illustrations.
The Internet, though, lets us bring audio and video into the picture. Colin Mulvany’s Video Journal is home to regular features that capture life in our community, and his audio-enhanced slideshows have chronicled the devastation from Hurricane Katrina.
Columnist Cheryl-Anne Millsap also posts regular audio clips of her Home Planet column, and Sound Wave’s Isamu Jordan is always adding free mp3 downloads from the local music scene.
Transparency – how we make a newspaper
Three blogs work together to give readers insight into how we do journalism at The Spokesman-Review.
Ask The Editors has been around the longest; it’s a place for our top editors to directly answer readers’ questions.
The Daily Briefing provides an inside look at the discussion and decision-making during our news meetings.
And in News Is A Conversation, we’ve invited eight readers to talk about our content – what they like and, yes, what they hate. It’s part of this paper’s commitment to be responsive to the community it covers.