Tag Archives: St. Louis Post-Dispatch

STL Social Media Guy: Web comment on newspaper site loses man his job

A ‘vulgar’ comment from a man on the St Louis-Post’s Dispatch website, STLtoday.com, resulted in him resigning from his job.

Kurt Greenbaum, online news director and director of social media at the paper, explains how he twice deleted the comment.

“[I then] noticed in the WordPress e-mail that his comment had come from an IP address at a local school. So I called the school. They were happy to have me forward the e-mail, though I wasn’t sure what they’d be able to do with the meager information it included,” explains Greenbaum.

“About six hours later, I heard from the school’s headmaster. The school’s IT director took a shine to the challenge. Long story short: Using the time-frame of the comments, our website location and the IP addresses in the WordPress e-mail, he tracked it back to a specific computer. The headmaster confronted the employee, who resigned on the spot.”

Full post at this link…

But as the site Awful Marketing asks, is this a violation of trust or a newspaper’s privacy policy?

STL Social Media Guy: Lessons for journalists from Dell?

Kurt Greenbaum, director of social media at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, looks outside the sector for inspiration, to a company which took a battering for its online interaction in the past but was recently ranked second in a report ranking the social engagement of 100 brands.

He interviews Richard Binhammer, Dell’s senior manager of corporate affairs ‘shortly after the uproar over the Washington Post’s social media guidelines for its newsroom’: ‘ it was amusing to see how open and engaged a massive company like Dell was willing to allow its employees to be,” Greenbaum comments.

Full post at this link…

CommonSenseJ: Words for ‘Copy Editor’s Lament’

Christopher Ave’s original post can be found here, or have a look at the lyrics here at the Common Sense Journalism blog for  ‘The Copy Editor’s Lament (The Layoff Song)’.

Ave is political editor at St. Louis Post-Dispatch and ‘decided to write a song from the viewpoint of a copy editor losing his job.’

Spanish websites claim top prizes at ONA awards

ELPAIS.com and Soitu.es claimed the first general excellence awards for non-English language sites at the Online News Association (ONA) 2008 awards on Saturday.

Speaking of ElPais.com, the judges said the site was ‘a shining example of how traditional media can blossom in the digital arena.’

“On a bedrock of first-class journalism it has built a brilliant suite of infographics that are rich in information, yet easy to consume,” they added in a press statement.

‘Bearing Witness‘, Reuters multimedia coverage of fallout from the invasion of Iraq in 2003, took the best multimedia feature award in the large sites category, while Adrian Holovaty’s EveryBlock was awarded the prize for outstanding use of digital technology by a small site.

A full list of the winners across the 23 awards and comments from the judges is available through the ONA awards website, but are listed in brief below:

Knight award for public service – WashingtonPost.com, Fixing D.C. Schools

General excellence (small site)– ArmyTimes.com

General excellence (medium site) – LasVegasSun.com

General excellence (large site) – CNN.com

General excellence, non-English (small site) – Soitu.es

General excellence, non-English (large site) – ELPAIS.com

Breaking news (medium site) – STLtoday.com, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Kirkwood shootings

Breaking news (large site) – NYTimes.com, Eliot Spitzer’s resignation

Investigative journalism (small site) – RecordOnline.com, The Times Herald Record (Middletown, N.Y.) “I Didn’t Do That Murder”: Lebrew Jones and the death of Micki Hall

Investigative journalism, (large site) – DallasNews.com, The Dallas Morning News, Unequal Justice, and The Globe and Mail, Talking to the Taliban

Multimedia feature (small site) – GEO.fr, Hidden World

Multimedia feature (medium sites) – STLtoday.com, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Reporting for Duty

Multimedia feature (large site) – Reuters.com, Bearing Witness

Online commentary (small site) – Mark Fiore, MarkFiore.com, animated political cartoons

Online commentary (medium site) – The Bottom Line, DallasNews.com, The Dallas Morning News

Online commentary (large site) – God-O-Meter, Beliefnet.com

Online video presentation – OregonLive.com, The Oregonian, Living to the End

Outstanding use of digital technology (small site) – Everyblock.com

Outstanding use of digital technology (large site) – DesMoinesRegister.com, Iowa Caucuses

Specialty site journalism – WebMD

Student journalism – University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill & Universidad de los Andes, South of Here, and Taylor Hayden, Western Kentucky University, Closer to Home: A Daughter Becomes Caregiver

Topical reporting (small sites) – Azstarnet.com, Arizona Daily Star, Immigration in the Spotlight

Topical reporting (large sites) – USAToday.com, Today in the Sky