Superbowl hangover makes tame news meeting

Video Journal has a couple new pieces by Brian Immel, one of which is a narrated audio slideshow of snowstorms much worse than we saw in past weeks. Video Journal traffic and blog traffic in general has increased significantly in the past few months according to our Google site stats service.

Get the Flash Player to see this video.

Maps to you

Editor Steve Smith and reporter Jim Camden have been getting reader feedback about the voter turnout vs. plow schedule story on Saturday, which ran on Feb 2 with two maps side-by-side .

At least one reader accused the newspaper of suggesting the city was basing its plow schedule on voter turnout.

The headline in the print version was “Plows go where voters live.” Headlines are always written in present tense, and this headline was like any other in the world of headline protocol. Readers took this one differently though: “Plows always go where voters live” vs. “Recently, plows went where voters live.”

The story is only about recent data. For more on this, er, the story that goes with this headline, here’s the full text .

Photo sales

If anybody remembers the preview posted on DB of the photo sales site , the site is now ready for use.

The photo department used to do this completely offline (remember the circumhorizon arc by Brian Plonka? That was a big hit ), but now there’s a cart-based system where you can pay with a credit card and search by photo, name, subject or even photographer’s name.

Editors discussed promoting this site through online or print version:
- Putting it in the left-hand rail/strip of the front page, as a regular feature (“furniture,” as we call it, or as city editor Addy Hatch calls it)
- Linking to it and promoting it on the web site
- Is it too presumptuous to promote it in the print version of The Spokesman-Review?
- In the past, the editorial department arranged for ads
Adding a url into the photo caption of the print version, although senior editor Carla Savalli calls it “uncomfortable connection between journalism and commerce.”