Editor’s Notebook: Red light, yellow light, green light, go!

Published 5:00 pm Thursday, July 31, 2014

At the intersection of social media and print, there is a flashing yellow light.

Occasionally in our haste to make the next turnoff, we dont pause long enough to look both ways twice to confirm its safe to proceed.

We got our equivalent of a warning ticket a few weeks ago, when a new column featuring tweets about calls to area dispatch centers raised the ire of a local mom and her friends.

Departing reporter Chelsea Gorrows Twitter feed and column, 9-1-WHAT? serves a two-fold purpose: Help educate our neighbors about the proper use of 911, and to provide a moment of levity for a planned project to increase news pages in The Daily Astorian. It mostly fulfills that mission.

Where we should have given more pause, is when the call was about a person-to-person crime, and to take note in the logs that there might be a minor involved.

The tweet in question said a man stopped a jogger and had her give him a hug. On the face of it, without other knowledge, its goofy.

In real life, it made a young teenager question her decision to report an attack, and for that we are sorry. Any forced contact is never OK, and we applaud the family for stepping forward and calling us to task.

140 characters cant tell the whole story

Heres the thing: that tweet on Twitter raised nary an eyebrow, even though the full Twitter-verse had access. That environment is not a good way to gauge appropriateness for a smaller-town audience.

Facebook and website comments, are similarly not a good gauge of the actual temperature and tolerances of a community, yet.

On DailyAstorian.com, we allow commenting on almost every story, asking that participants sign in and observe the rules: Keep it clean; Dont threaten; Be truthful; Be nice; Be proactive and Share with us.

Unfortunately, on certain stories, the comments devolve into name-calling and backhanded slams against individuals. We let the commenters police themselves somewhat through the Report link, but other times, we have to pull the plug on all commenting for those stories. On occasion, weve even banned individuals, only to have them return under another name and email.

A new way to share

You may have noticed the ads and emails about our new website debuting Wednesday.

We are pretty excited on all fronts, as our new platform is very mobile-friendly, faster-loading and boasts a cleaner design. We have a new logo, with interchangeable art to give a flavor of our region. We launch the site with a sailboat photo in honor of the Astoria Regatta, but it could well have been any number of events or area scenes.

With the integration of our print software with our digital system, we can post to the site with a click of a button. This means news will be updated quicker and more often.

But, one of the best benefits will be new commenting software. We are switching to Disqus, which we believe allows a better way to identify and moderate our commenters. In any case, everyone has to sign up again, which, while a pain, gives us a clean start.

Changes in the newsroom

You may have heard through the grapevine that we have two of our reporting team leaving for larger Oregon publications. We are so proud of them, so this is bittersweet for us, as we hope it is for them.

Chelsea Gorrow leaves Wednesday for the Eugene Register Guard; Ted Shorack leaves mid-month for the Bend Bulletin. We also say fare thee well to our summer intern Sarah Mason, who has had a wonderful impact on our reporting and coverage since June.

All have added tremendously to our coverage and the communitys greater understanding. We wish them all well.

Caution, but full-steam ahead

So, now we have an opportunity to think about our digital-print differences and those flashing yellow lights.

Already, we aim to focus 9-1-WHAT? on lighter fare and where the column is placed. Well try to keep it off hard news pages, until our new section launches.

Well spend more space helping readers understand how to best use 911 dispatch.

We are looking for new members of our team to bolster our social media and multimedia skills.

Our goal, as always, is to enlighten, illuminate, entertain and inform accurately, professionally and journalistically.

Keep us posted on our progress, in print, online and whatever comes next.

Laura Sellers is the managing editor of The Daily Astorian. Previously, she was the corporate digital media director for EO Media Group, the family-owned company that owns The Daily Astorian, Chinook (Wash.) Observer, Seaside Signal, Cannon Beach Gazette and Oregon Coast Today, as well as five other publications in Oregon.