Recent changes include combining the Life section with the Local section and calling it Local Life, cutting the overnight television programming listings from it’s weekly TV book and moving the weather page from the back of the Local section to inside the A section.

Enquirer Publisher Margaret Buchanan spoke about those changes in a recent radio interview. (Listen to a radio interview with Buchanan here from WKNU radio (89.7 in the Cincinnati area.)

She said the changes basically are a result of the economy, especially from classified and auto ad sales.

She also said the changes were “purely being driven by the economy,” brushing off the interviewers query if the drastic shift to the Internet for information was part of the problem. When asked if “newspapers were dying a slow death’ she said the question “drives her crazy” and that “there are a large number who still want to read the newspaper.”

Cincinnati.com is the No. 1 Web site in the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky area, which is something that is pretty important it would seem. Buchanan does mention the importance of The Enquirer’s digital products, but I wonder if she really gets it. I find that somewhat surprising since some of the features on the Web site make it seem like the organization gets the importance of the Web and interactivity.

For example, you can sign up to blog, send in pictures, news, etc. right on the site. They also have some pretty nifty databases, and I can also read  hyperlocal news from community papers (parent company Gannett owns most of the weekly papers that serve the suburbs).

I have heard some complaints about its mobile operations and that reading their news via smartphone isn’t very user-friendly. That’s definitely an issue that needs to be worked out. However, as a reader I like the direction the Web site is headed.

I’d like to see The Enquirer be a bit more active using social networks to attract and connect people, but I think they’re starting to with some of their blogging and connection features. I am a little disappointed in Buchanan too. I understand that she might not want to say outright that newspapers are dying, but she could be more emphatic about the importance of new ways to reach people. It just sets a bad tone from the top.

Wondering what Cincinnatians are saiying? Here are some user comments on a Cincinnati mom’s Web site.

I am in my 11th week at the paper now (yes, I’m still counting). I cover education, but I also pick up a lot of general news since we only have three reporters (our other two cover cops/city government and lifestyles, respectively).

I have enjoyed starting to get to know my beat and the community more. So far, I have found that the easiest way to connect with people is either in person or over the phone, which makes sense because we’re a pretty small community (close to 60,000 people in Lee County total).

The part of my reporting that I would really like to be able to tap into more is online/social networking. I update my blog pretty frequently, and it’s getting more views, but I’m not generating a ton of reader feedback from it.

Anyone got any tips for how to help me out? Is this because my community isn’t as used to social networking (very few people from Sanford are on Twitter, for example)? Am I not touching on topics of interest enough? Essentially, how do you build an online community?

Beatblogging.org has some great tips that I check regularly, but I’m still looking for that something extra to spark and generate more reader interest and interaction. Please let me know if there’s anything you can think of; I would love to hear it.

I have also set up a new blog, which I plan to use as a beat blog to engage with my readers and add tidbits that might not make it into my print work. I am also very interested in how I can integrate social media and online networking into my coverage, so if anyone out there has any tips, please pass them along! I plan to continue to use this blog to write more about journalism issues in general/new media/anything else interesting that I come across.

I will mainly be covering education but hope to expand into politics and business as well.

On a personal note, my trip so far has been pretty smooth. I drove down on Sunday, and it took me about 10 hours. I only got slightly confused in a couple of places, which is pretty good for me. I started my day Monday by moving into my Sanford apartment, setting up my water bill, and getting a driving tour around the area by my editor Billy Liggett. After that, I wrote my first story about early voting.

The newsroom is small but cozy and everyone is pretty friendly, so I think I am going to like it here. I will feel better in a few weeks once I get my bearings around all the local politicians and events and my way around town though.

Next week should definitely be busy considering we have elections. Other than the main state and national ones, we also have some commissioner races to handle. On Election Day, I will be covering a race (not sure which one yet though) and attending my first Board of Education meeting. Should be a crazy night. But can’t wait!

Temple Theater in Sanford, NC

In a few weeks I will be starting my new job (and first one in “the real world”) at The Sanford Herald in Sanford, N.C.

I’ll be covering education primarily with some feature writing and local govt coverage and whatever else they need thrown in. I also hope to do a lot of beat blogging and other social networking to get community response and input. Anyone who has experience with doing this sort of thing is welcome to weigh in and give me advice. I would love your input!

It’s crazy how much I have to do to get ready for the move. I bought my first car today (a 2005 silver Chevy Cobalt), which was very exciting. I’m making a trip down to North Carolina this week to visit my boyfriend and am going to try to figure out where I’ll end up staying in town. And that doesn’t even mention packing up all my stuff and then moving down there!

This is what my new car looks like

I’m very excited though and can’t wait to get down to being a full-time reporter.

A chart of the 1929 stock market crash.

Now, to be fair, most college students don’t have 401(k)s to worry about or many of the same economic concerns as their parents and other working Americans. However, I was heartened to see that many college newspapers have tried to make the financial crisis relevant to many of their readers. The most common stories I found were about endowments, the job market and financial aid/student loans.

I was a student in UNC-Chapel Hill’s business journalism program, so I am a firm believer that all college papers can make these stories relevant to their audiences and that these stories are very important to readers. I think a lot of the college papers that haven’t reported prominently on the crisis yet are either being a bit slow or negligent. After all, this is being hailed as the worst crisis since the Great Depression.

To clarify my methods, I looked at the Web sites of what I consider the “big three” Ivies (since they generally have a tight connection to Wall Street) and the sites of the daily newspapers up for the ACP’s Pacemaker awards this year. I searched the home pages and “news” pages of all sites and also plugged in general terms such as “economy” and “stock market” to tease out more results. If a paper I mention has done more than I have noted, feel free to comment, and I will update this post. There is some good work out there already, and I’m sure more papers will be following suit.

Here are my findings:

• The Daily Princetonian: “The Prince” featured a couple of front-page stories about the economy in its Wednesday edition. One discussed how the economic downturn wasn’t seen as affecting the school’s financial aid offerings. The other was about a panel of prominent Princeton econ professors (note Fed Chairman Ben Bernake was once the chairman of that department) and their take on the crisis. (Disclosure: My older sister once worked as the opinion editor at The Prince).
• The Yale Daily News: The paper has been heavily covering former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s arrival on campus as a professor, but made room earlier this week for a good story about how students might be taking a detour from Wall Street considering the economic crisis.
• The Harvard Crimson: The Crimson had a couple of good stories in the past week. One was about how the school’s endowment fund outpaced the market in the past year. The other has to win my award for the most technically complex financial story I came upon. It detailed the potential impact the downturn could have on Harvard’s bonds.
• The Daily Californian of Cal Berkeley ran a story this week that reminded me of the Yale story, only with a bit narrower focus, talking about how students were looking to turn from banking careers.
• The Daily Bruin of UCLA and The Daily Iowan came up as no-shows according to my searches. However, I found their sites and archives harder to navigate, so that might account for why.
• The Northern Star of Northern Illinois University reported Tuesday that students so far were not reporting that their students loans were being affected by the economy (however, it noted that this might change as lending standards tighten).
• The Daily Northwestern didn’t turn up anything for me in terms of relating the economy to the college. However, it did have a story Wednesday about housing sales in Evanston, Ill., sliding for the 15th consecutive month. This story struck me because it was something that would be run in a metro paper, and isn’t the type of thing you see from college papers much. So they get kudos from me there.
• The Indiana Daily Student used an alternative story format to explain to students what was causing the economic crisis and how they could be impacted by it. The paper also had several editorials and columns about the subject.
• The University Daily Kansan wrote earlier this month about the school’s endowment performance and how that related to the economy, but I couldn’t find much else.
• The Kentucky Kernel, The Daily Nebraskan and The Daily Universe (of Brigham Young) were three more sites I found difficult to navigate and didn’t find any results.
• Michigan State’s The State News wrote a story seeking to assuage fears about the student loan crisis in light of the proposed government bailout this week.
• The Daily Pennslyvanian also takes home an award for in my opinion one of the smartest stories I came across. This one was about how the down economy could affect the school’s capital campaign.
• The Pitt News search didn’t come up with much, but I did find this editorial.
• The Daily Texan had a couple of AP stories on its Web site about the financial crisis and a column about the possible career implications of the economy on college students.
• The Battalion of Texas A&M featured a man on the street that interviewed people about how they thought the economic crisis was affecting them.
• The Daily Tar Heel of UNC-Chapel Hill (disclosure: I was editor of the paper last year) hasn’t tackled the issue from a news standpoint yet, though a source tells me that some stories are in the works. So far, the paper has updated the story daily in its nation and world briefs section and a column on the topic also ran Thursday.

The home page of the database confused me at first, but I am really glad that this information is now available online and in a searchable format. Otherwise, the data can be tricky to find and sort through. One of the bummers is that those who contribute to local races don’t have to identify their employer. That way it’s more difficult to see what interests are at work in the election process.

I searched through some of the other Ohio newspaper Web sites to see if they had any similar tracking devices in place for local elections. I couldn’t find anything on The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Web site (though I find navigating their site a bit tricky). Ditto with the Akron Beacon Journal. The Columbus Dispatch has a good politics site for the election, but no luck with the local stuff.

So I guess kudos to The Enquirer, and I hope that more sites follow in its footsteps and Ohio expands its transparency and puts more financial records online.

Downed power lines from this week

The power to my house was restored in about 36 hours, much faster than a lot of areas. As of this afternoon, my grandpa still didn’t have his power back on. Some outages might take until next week to repair.

All of this got me thinking about how newspapers and media outlets cover storms, particularly when a large part of their audience is still in the area and without power. In the face of hurricanes and tropical storms this fall, The Times-Picayune of New Orleans continued its online operations, providing updates after residents were forced to evacuate. Other newspapers, such as the Wilmington Star-News, provided online updates in the face of tropical storm Hanna and also posted Twitter updates.

Overall, I have been happy with how The Enquirer has covered the storm. Stories were updated frequently online, residents could post their own photos to the site and information about how to deal with the outages was generally pretty available. However, it made me think about what a newspaper does when most of its online readers don’t have access to the Internet. I don’t have a BlackBerry or iPhone, so the only way I could get information was by driving to a library that had power back on or picking up a print newspaper.

My main method of communication that I still had available was my cell phone. The only thing I could think of to help out would have been mobile phone updates through text messages. I also could listen to updates on local radio stations, so I would have to say they probably had the most reliable connection to people. Television stations also had coverage online and on tv about the storms but suffered from the same problems in terms of communication.

So in the case of a blackout, what do you think is the most reliable way for newspapers and other news services to update their readers in real time about what is going on? Do newspapers lose more readers in this scenario? Or maybe they are the beneficiary of no one having power and people having to pick up the print product for information. All interesting thoughts to consider, I think.

According to a radio report I heard in the car this afternoon, nearly 300,000 residents are still without power, and Duke Energy is hoping to have it back for everyone by the weekend. The company even brought in reinforcements from North Carolina.

Enquirer photo of a fallen tree in Wyoming.

Our power came back on Monday night (not soon enough for our food in the fridge/freezer not to be spoiled), but our Internet and cable didn’t come back online until this afternoon.

I’ve heard lots of people who have lived in Ohio their whole lives say they have never seen anything like this. In my 22 years living here, I have certainly not seen it.

Not having access to things like my e-mail or Twitter certainly helped me realize how much so many of us feel the need to be connected all the time. The local library’s power was back on before my house’s, so I went there to charge my cell phone and get my Internet fix for a bit.

I am the kind of person who is always checking news sites like the New York Times, Reuters and Washington Post, and it was odd to pick up a paper Monday when we were still without power and know that the news I was reading in the Wall Street Journal must already be so outdated compared to whatever was going on in the financial markets after they opened.

Nothing bad really happened when I was without power or Internet. There were no emergency e-mails that needed my attention, and no news happened that I couldn’t catch up on in the next few days. Still, that feeling of not being instantly connected was disconcerting.

I did come across a story in the Cincinnati Enquirer that I found amusing from a man who found the power outage refreshing. Enjoy this excerpt:

Tom Lang relished in the new-found freedom from technology and other distractions Sunday and Monday.
“Right now only my Blackberry connects me to the outside world. Once I put it down, I will enjoy a peace I so rarely receive. That is true darkness. I’m not upset the power is out. In fact, I enjoy it. I am for once in my life without distraction. All I can hear are the crickets outside my window and they sound wonderful,” Lang wrote in an e-mail to The Enquirer.
The native Cincinnatian said he has never seen anything like the widespread area blackout caused by wind.
“The wind came through and turned this city upside down,” he said.
Lang was crushed to learn late Monday afternoon that the power had been restored to his Columbia Tusculum home.
He said he might go home from work – a Northern Kentucky financial office that was operating on generator power Monday – and unplug everything and sit in the dark once again.
“(The blackout) was something that (was) so great and everyone around me was so miserable,” he said.

However, his words were not really a reflection of his loyalty to wires so much as a reflection of his pessimism about the newspaper business. I have interviewed at positions at two places that I am waiting back to here from–one is a newspaper and the other is a wire service.

Both of them pose different opportunities and challenges. I “grew up,” so to speak, with newspapers and working on my college’s newspaper. There is something special and even intimate about holding a newspaper in your hands that you can’t replicate online.

Coming from the production side of newspapers, there is something fun about putting all the pieces of the puzzle together–budgeting stories, adding photos, teasers, etc. It’s neat to see how so many people can come together and contribute to create one product.

On the other hand, the woes of newspapers have been well documented. In 2008 alone there have been thousands of job cuts and buyouts, mainly attributed to lower advertising and classified revenues. For a recent graduate, the prospect of joining a newspaper is a bit scary (especially since being the last hired often means being the first fired).

In recent years, newspapers have been adopting some of the techniques of wire services, namely the move to deliver real-time news online. The immediacy and urgency of getting the news out there at a wire service is one of the things I enjoyed most about my time at Reuters. I don’t agree with newspapers that will tease readers and only put out an excerpt of their news during the day. That only leads to readers getting frustrated and going elsewhere for their news.

Reuters put most of its content online for anyone to access but did hold back on some of its value-added analysis pieces, making them available only to paid financial news subscribers. I don’t necessarily have a problem with that practice.

The biggest challenge that both newspapers and wire services are facing is the Web. Wire services might be good at getting news out there quickly, but that doesn’t mean they have figured out the Internet. In fact, they have only recently started putting an emphasis on interactive content like video, online graphics and blogging. A good friend of mine interned at Reuters doing multimedia this summer (I believe he was the first intern to specialize in that).

However, the problem is that it’s not clear what the right online model is, and the industry probably needs to throw a lot of resources out there to figure out a successful course of action. Some news services are just plain slow to act on new ways of communicating. For example, I couldn’t find Bloomberg on Twitter. The Knight-Batten Awards reward innovation, but if you think about in terms of the scope of the problem, it’s really just throwing pennies at finding solutions.

Ultimately, wire services and newspapers are going to have to face this head on. Financial news services like Reuters and Bloomberg might face a little more leeway than the AP (which is pretty dependent on newspapers still), but all of the wires still will have to adopt. Newspapers will have no choice but to keep seeking innovation.

So I thought I would share some of the more common errors I come across that personally drive me crazy every time.  How frequently I come across these particular errors is the main reason they all make the cut. Here is my list of style pet peeves (in order of least intense hatred to the most):

• Prior to/before: This is just a classic case of people using more words than necessary to express a thought. Prior to also just has a more stilted, official sound. Honestly, would you ever say prior to instead of before to a friend while having a conversation? I don’t think so.
• Dates: There are a couple of things in this category. The most common style mistake I see is people who forget which months of the year are abbreviated when they are accompanied by a date. For the record, it’s actually pretty easy to remember with a simple trick. The months that are not abbreviated come all in a row, March through July. I also get irritated when people forget the time, date place rule for events. For example the correct order is: 9 p.m. Tuesday at Nippert Stadium.
• Between/among: This one is pretty simple, and I think most people get it confused in writing because they say it incorrectly in speaking. You can only use between if there are two people/objects. Among signifies more than two people/objects are involved. So, it would be: The prize will be divvied up among the nine winners.
• Which/that: A lot of people don’t know this one. Which is used for nonessential clauses, and that is used for essential clauses. If you wouldn’t put parentheses around it, then you probably want the word that and not which. For example, “The clock, which is brown, needs to be fixed.” The fact that the clock is brown really doesn’t matter that much. On the other hand, if you are writing, “The clock that was broken last week needs to be fixed,” the use of that is pretty important. It isn’t just any clock that needs to be fixed, it’s the broken one.
• Who/that: This one bothers me the most, but I am not sure why. It’s another one of those mistakes that people put into writing because they say it out loud that way. The way I used to explain this one to people when I edited as a person is a who and an object is a that. A lot of people incorrectly refer to people as thats. For example, it should be “the person who believes this” not the person that believes this.”

Got any style pet peeves of your own? Feel free to share and let me know your personal gripes!

Some fun grammar blogs:

• Motivated Grammar
• Bradshaw of the Future
• Language Log
• Notes from the Copy Editor