The Day is the first thing we publish on the blog each morning. It sets the tone for the rest of the day and offers readers a little bit of information and a little bit of entertainment. It’s also a way for us to speak directly to our audience. Having a morning post is way to communicate with readers, to say, “Here we are!” each morning and to establish personality. It’s a great teaching tool for developing a blogger voice, so we’ve liked having students do it. But, on a blog with a strong editorial presence, a person at the helm who is the voice and guiding force behind the blog with a distinct personality, this should really be their domain. Basics The Day should go up no later than 10 a.m. This may mean you need to write it the night before. And it should be ready for us to give a final look at by 9:30. It should be written in a conversational tone — don’t be afraid to push your style a bit here, and be funny or irreverent. Not when your news of the day involves a murder or other heavy news, of course. When appropriate. The basic structure goes: several sentence intro, either introducing the theme of the day or being generally conversational, then three to five links covering neighborhood news. The intro can talk about general interest topics, like city politics, Coney Island, Lindsay Lohan or Paul, the World Cup Octopus. The links should all directly relate to the neighborhood. Set up a google reader or your preferred feed reader system to scan for links. Twitter can also be a great source of stories and links, and a way to keep your finger on the pulse of what...

As with many things on The Local, with comments we have to hew to several guiding principles, the first being New York Times standards, the second being web best practices. In this case they largely overlap. Here is the official New York Time Comment Policy. We follow this very closely — every comment is moderated and we evaluate based a variety of objective and more subjective measures, including language use, general tone and how productive the comment is to the conversation at hand. We DO NOT modify comments in any way. To do so makes us more legally responsible for them, so it’s all or nothing. The bottom line for NYT policy is that comments should move the conversation forward and that is definitely a best practice to keep in mind at all times. On a non-Times blog tho, loosening the restrictions on non-name-calling obscenities could be considered. Also, one place where The Local diverges is in cheerleader-type comments. On The Times, if 100 commenters say “Aw, the CUTEST” to a post about kittens, only the first such comment will be approved — the following comments are not moving the conversation forward. On The Local, we will post every single comment that says “congrats!” to a post about a local student who won a scholarship. It’s a community site and well wishing builds community. We have four basic types of commenters on the blog: happy, upbeat folks who say nice things when they see their neighbors on the Local; super neighbors who like share information and ask questions about what’s going on in the neighborhood (lots of overlap in the first two categories); old school grumpers who read the Local but sort of hate us, and thus point out every mistake no matter how...

Social media is crucial to building a loyal following and is a great way to expand your readership and add voice to your blog. Though there are many different social media tools and strategies, at The Local we’ve focused in on the two biggest, Twitter and Facebook. Twitter: This is a place where we you spread content, reach out to other organizations and media outlet, and readers, and establish our voice. Don’t be afraid to be funny on Twitter and to comment on our content. First off, tweet your first post of the morning; at The Local we start with The Day, the morning link round-up. Make sure the tweet includes as many @’s at the organizations linked to in the post as possible. If there is a question in The Day (example: “what are you doing to stay cool? Tweet at us,” tweet that part of the day)—asking the question in an easy way to get @ replies. If you get a reply, re-tweet it. Schedule out tweets of the links in The Day for half-hour intervals through out the day. Be sure to @ at the relevant organizations. Link to their page directly (the link used in The Day, not The Day link). In order to schedule, download and install TweetDeck (or another app of choice) and create an account. Then add The Local’s twitter. You can also create lists in a Twitter client app, to watch, say food news, or local politicians. Sticking to a schedule for this (11:00, 11:30, 12:30, 13:00 – TweetDeck uses military time) creates a frame that you can tweet around for re-tweets or other oddities. This way the tweets are paced. Example. A story goes up at 12:18. You’ve scheduled links from The Day through 1...

For three years, The Local has held a three-day free journalism workshop for Brooklyn teenagers every summer. This year, Lindsay Kalter interviewed Indrani Sen about the process of planning and executing the workshop, for an article she published on the International Journalists’ Network. The full, unedited interview is below. 1. How many participants did you have? We had 14 participants this year, which is twice as many as last year. We made a big push to promote the workshop on Facebook and Twitter, as well as on the blog itself. We also reached out to organizations that work with young people, and to high school journalism advisers. We ended up with so many applicants that we had to close registration for the class (though we have invited those who didn’t make it into the workshop to a teen journalism meetup this week). Most of the teenagers who took the class heard about it from a friend, teacher or relative who saw the listing and forwarded it along. 2. In The Local’s description of the workshop, Brooklyn natives were strongly encouraged to attend. How many locals participated compared to those who came from afar? All but two of our teen participants live in Brooklyn (the other two live in Queens). Half of the students live in or near Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, the neighborhoods that our hyperlocal blog covers, or go to school in those neighborhoods. 3. What was an average day like during the workshop? Which aspects of journalism were primarily discussed during the program? We spent the first day focusing on basic journalistic values and practice. We talked about the elements of a news story — ledes, nut grafs, quotes, etc. We discussed interviewing, note-taking, coming up with story ideas. And we...

News stories are structured differently from essays, poems or short stories. It’s useful to understand the pieces that make up a news story, and learn the terms we use to describe these elements. HEADLINE: The headline is like an advertisement for the story. It attracts readers while telling them briefly what the story is about. LEDE: All journalistic stories start with a lede (pronounced like “lead”). The lede is the first sentence or two of the story, and it leads the reader into the story, hooking his or her interest. If you don’t get your reader interested, they’ll skip right over your story and read another instead. There are many different types of ledes – straight, anecdotal, historical, and the list goes on. Usually, the lede is the fact, moment or tidbit that you find most interesting about your story. We say “Don’t bury the lede,” meaning, don’t hold out on your reader by saving your most interesting information until halfway into the story – hit us with your best shot up front. Think about what facts have the most “news value.” Journalists use the image of an “inverted,” or upside-down, pyramid to remind themselves that the most important and newsworthy information should always be at the top of a story, and the rest of the information goes in order of most important to least important. NUT GRAF: The nut graf is the main point or the “nut” of the story. “Graf” is short for “paragraph.” It should tell you all the basic information about your story. The Five W’s and H – Who? What? Where? When? Why? How? WHO? Who are the main characters of the story? Who is the story about? WHAT? What happened? What is the story about? WHERE? Where does...

Here’s a crash course in news reporting ethics, which you can hand out to your contributors: Don’t ever lie or misrepresent yourself, in posts or while reporting. Always identify yourself as a reporter to anyone you’re interviewing for a story, and explain where the story will be published. If you feel they don’t understand they’re being interviewed for publication, make every possible effort to explain this to them. Don’t take freebies, goods or services from anyone featured in a story. (One exception to this, depending on the policy of your news organization, is “press tickets” for events which you’re covering — but only if you’re actually covering the event that the ticket is for.) Don’t report on people that you know personally in straight news stories. In personal columns or opinion pieces, if you have a relationship of any kind (family, friend, enemy, lover, business associate) with a person mentioned or quoted, make sure that relationship is clearly disclosed in the piece. The difference between fact and heresay: If you’re presenting something as a fact, make sure you’ve seen it to be true with your own eyes or it’s widely accepted and documented as the truth (for example, Barack Obama is the president of the United States). Otherwise, check it out. (There’s a saying in journalism — “If your mom says she loves, you — check it out.”) And don’t forget to attribute any information that you can’t establish yourself — for example, “Police said the suspect robbed the store.” Just because something has been printed in another news source, doesn’t mean it’s true. When referencing information from another news source, be sure to cite and link to the news source. This is partly to give the other publication credit for the reporting, and...

Here are a couple of stories from The Local that use quotes particularly effectively: “Victim of Ingersoll Shooting Was a Young Father,” by Kerri Macdonald, 3/17/2011 “Mixed Reactions to New Sports Bar Near Planned Arena” by Kyle Thomas McGovern, 8/18/2011 Here are some basic guidelines on quoting: Quotes should go up high – Voices bring a story to life. Don’t lead with a quote unless that quote is the best quote ever and completely self-explanatory. (Most reporters find the elusive quote that is strong enough to lead a story only once or twice in an entire career!) What to quote: strong language, utterances that convey emotion, quotes that deepen the reader’s understanding of the facts What not to quote: basic dull information, quotes that have lies or wrong information in them (unless you’re pointing out that the info is wrong or a lie), quotes that are confusing or hard to follow For the most part, if you mention someone you spoke to in your story, they need to be quoted, not just paraphrased or partially quoted. Don’t “clean up” people’s quotes by fixing their grammar or erasing traces of their dialect. At the same time, AP style is to only very sparingly use words like “wanna” or “gonna,” and only really in features when you’re trying to convey something about the person. Otherwise, take these contractions as a pronunciation of “want to” or “going to.” Set up your quotes by explaining any context or mentioning anything referenced in the quote. For example, from Kerri MacDonald’s story above: Ms. Rivera Vasquez, 21, was home when she got a call with the news that Mr. Vasquez had been shot. “From right there, I knew it,” she said. “He was dead.” Start a new paragraph most of the time...

The best reporters return from every assignment with a notebook stuffed with quotes, information and sensory detail — the raw material we need to build a story. But how do we fill those notebooks? One of the most difficult skills for new reporters to pick up is also one of the most basic — note-taking. Every reporter has his or her own systems for note-taking, which start with some nuts-and-bolts decisions: Reporter’s notebook or steno pad? Ballpoint or roller ball? Shorthand or cursive? To record or not? Try a few combinations and figure out what feels most comfortable for you over a long day of reporting. In 2007, I asked some professional journalists to explain their note-taking systems and offer tips. Please add your own in the comments below! Taking Notes: A selection of tips and advice from working journalists (Compiled by Indrani Sen in 2007) Ann Givens, Newsday reporter: A journalism professor of mine once gave me this tip, and I’ve used it here and there: Before you go out on an interview, prepare a handful of throwaway questions in addition to your good ones. Then, when you’re behind in your note taking, toss out a throwaway question and just let the person talk while you’re finishing up writing. But I think the REAL skill that everyone develops over time is just the ability to know a great quote when a person says it, and then just tune everything else out while you get it down. I think we all tend to feel like we need a zillion quotes when we’re out in the field, but when we get back and write, we realize we only need 2-3 for most stories. So the trick is catching the great ones, and then not worrying...

The quickest way to lose a reader is to start an article with this lede: “A meeting was held yesterday.” And yet meetings — of local political bodies, school committees, citizen advisory boards, community organizations — are where a lot of local news happens, and they’re the bread and butter of hyperlocal news coverage. The challenge is reporting the news, not the meeting. Even experienced reporters sometimes struggle to find news at a dull municipal meeting, so getting your reporters and community contributors to do it can take some coaxing. But if their reporting process is solid from the beginning, your job will be much easier. The New York Times reporter (and now City Room editor) Andy Newman wrote up some excellent guidelines for community members covering meetings for The Local when he ran the blog. He kept them pretty simple, appropriately, for citizen journalists, and we sent them out to community contributors before they covered a story. For student and professional journalists, there’s a bit more to covering meetings. Andy’s guidelines are below, and I’ve added a few more guidelines and suggestions: Dear Community Board Meeting Coverer, Please Do: * Take good notes on anything that pertains to or affects the neighborhood, including names of speakers. * Take at least one excellent, or at least usable, horizontally oriented photo. * Write up the proceedings as concisely as possible. Bullet-points or narrative, your choice, but please keep it below 600 words unless something earth-shattering happens. * Spend some time beforehand reading other meeting posts we’ve published to get an idea of how others have approached these assignments. Examples here, here, here and here. * Feel free to question officials afterward if there’s anything you don’t quite get. Better to look clueless to them than...