The Portland Press Herald, my hometown daily, is laying off 38 employees and eliminating 23 additional jobs through buyouts, with the “majority” coming from the newsroom. I’m guessing that’s going to have a severe effect on the mood at this conference.

The size of this layoff is dramatic for a paper its size – (Portland’s newsroom has already been winnowed significantly during a rocky ownership change from the Seattle Times to a group of investors). And the Portland newsroom is one full of veteran, longtime journalists. We’re not talking about layoffs of just-out-of-college J-school grads.

This is huge. And it’s a good opportunity for the industry as a whole to stop and reflect on how we do this.

I’m not questioning the need for these cuts. I wouldn’t anyway without knowing the financial circumstances the Press Herald is facing, but as a community daily newspaper publisher myself I know how difficult of a print advertising environment they must be facing.

But what if a newspaper such as the Press Herald engaged the journalists affected by these cuts in an entrepreneurial brainstorming session on the news and information gaps that exist in Maine?

What if they – in a formal process – helped them use their severance checks as seed money for new, independent journalism enterprises?

There are niches and opportunities out there better filled by the start-up culture this would create than the legacy media brand.

It’s bound to happen with a layoff like this anyway. Check out Connecticut, where former legacy media journalists have launched enterprises such as CT Watchdog, CT Mirror and CT News Junkie.

So why not help set them up as “competitors” that could really function as independent partners to the Press Herald? Use your legacy base to aggregate and curate the work of these new efforts. Help sustain them – and your own operation – by taking on part or all of their advertising sales for them.

If the Press Herald doesn’t do that, the Bangor Daily News should, or one of the Portland TV stations.

The ideas here are straight from the preachings of Jeff Jarvis – and there are more and more resources these days for stoking entrepreneurial journalism, including Jeff’s one program for that at CUNY.

Portland – or the next legacy media company to lay off journalists – should reach out for help and pursue an approach like this. It will be good for journalism, good for your community and may be your only chance at spinning a cutback into growth for your brand.

Fifty community members showed up for a local blogger's presentation on Irish genealogy at the Troy Record.

What if a newspaper could unlock brand new areas of content and news coverage via citizen journalism, use this to connect with audience members yearning for information on these niche topics, and become a virtual and physical center of community information and discourse in the process?

Well, take a look at what’s happening at the Troy (N.Y.) Record under the leadership of Editor Lisa Robert Lewis and newsroom digital specialist Tom Caprood.

Over the past year, the newspaper has recruited 50 local bloggers to be part of its Community Media Lab. (The Troy Record is a Journal Register Company paper, and it’s part of a company-wide effort that has led to a network of more than 1,000 local blogging partners.) According to Caprood, 90 percent of them are blogging for the first time due to the newsroom’s outreach and training of citizen journalists.

Others had “hobby blogs” with small audiences. After partnering with the Troy Record, which links to their posts from its website and promotes their work, they saw their traffic explode. One blogger said the big bump in traffic that the newspaper brought him and interaction from new readers moved his blog from off the radar screen to near the top of Google searches on the topic he is writing about.

Recognizing the gold mine of interesting content being produced by these new bloggers, and the newspaper office’s great location in the heart of downtown, Lewis, Caprood and Troy Record Publisher James Murphy started working on plans for a physical space showcasing these new community connections.

The Troy Record renovated an old circulation office into a community room with free public wifi and a flat-screen monitor for presentations.

They turned an old circulation department office on the first floor of the Troy Record building into a community meeting room. And in early March, they scheduled their first public workshop. A local CPA who blogs about tax advice and is a member of the Community Media Lab put together a program on tax tips ahead of the April 15 Tax Day crush.

“Not one person came,” said Caprood. “That was our first learning experience.”

The newsroom adapted quickly, spreading word about their next event, a program on Irish genealogy presented by another Community Media Lab blogger, by reaching out to local organizations, posting it on message boards and publishing a story about it in the print and online editions of the Troy Record.

“We went from having zero to having 50 people show up two days later,” Caprood said. The room was packed to the point where there was just enough room for emergency exits.

Newsroom staff scrambled to take down names and email addresses of community members in attendance, seeing the opportunity to build something for the future.

The newspaper quickly scheduled a second night with the Irish history blogger, and another 50 people showed up, including a big contingent of new faces.

“Then we had a bass fishing forum,” Caprood said. Again, it was hosted by a Community Media Lab blogger. He shared secrets about the best local fishing spots, and even brought lures and equipment to show off.

A Community Media Lab blogger shared tips and secrets on the best local fishing spots at a workshop hosted by the Troy Record earlier this month.

Twenty-five people showed up this time. “Afterwards, people stuck around for half an hour looking at his lures and asking questions,” Caprood said.

A workshop on social media followed, with 20 community members attending in addition to Troy Record staff themselves, eager to learn more as they integrated Twitter and Facebook into their news reporting.

Last night, the newspaper’s longtime horse racing columnist presented a workshop on the ins and outs of handicapping and the unique features of the nearby Saratoga racetrack as compared to other tracks around the country.

Each workshop the Troy Record hosts is live-streamed on TroyRecord.Com, and Caprood is working on a landing page that will archive replays of each session for future viewing. He has also run live chats during the workshops to field questions and comments from people watching at home or from afar.

The newspaper has also opened the space up for use by community groups, including a recent work session by an organization attempting to promote regional tourism. Free public wifi has been added to the space, and a large flat-screen monitor installed for presentations.

“The end game right now is to get people down here into the building,” Caprood said. “I think the perception among community members has been that it’s not OK to just walk into our building and engage with a reporter or editor. We’re trying to get rid of that mindset.”

Caprood said there is opportunity all around for the newspaper to become more involved as a facilitator of community engagement and problem-solving.

In May, the Troy Record will host a forum with the heads of local theater companies, facilitated by a Community Media Lab blogger who writes about the arts.

The newspaper is planning to open up its first floor on city Election Day for community members who want to watch the votes be tallied and participate in live-streamed commentary and reaction.

Tom Caprood is the Troy Record newsroom's digital specialist.

Caprood said the newspaper wants to be a resource for the growing number of neighborhood-specific organizations who are attempting to revitalize Troy.

Tonight is the monthly “Troy Night Out,” where businesses stay open late and art exhibits are hosted throughout the downtown.

And in a symbol of literally being more “open” than ever before, the newspaper is participating for the first time in the four-year history of the event. It will host a lecture and exhibit of photos taken in the aftermath of 9/11 by former Gov. George Pataki’s official photographer.

Tomorrow, the Troy Record newsroom is crowdsourcing an effort to document a citywide Earth Day cleanup. Neighborhood leaders are sending in “before and after” pictures and videos that will be mapped out on TroyRecord.Com as a display of what a community working together can accomplish in one day.

Murphy said that the good will these kind of outreach projects and creativity have generated for the paper has been significant.

“When I first got here as publisher, people asked about the newspaper like they were talking about a funeral because of our company’s recent bankruptcy and cutbacks over the years,” Murphy said. “Now it’s nothing but positive feedback for what we are doing for the community. The buzz has been terrific and it builds every month, and the result has been significantly larger audience for both our digital and print products.”

“People are noticing,” Caprood said.

Other newspapers attempting to figure out “community engagement” should take notice, too.

Jenny Golfin, whose duties have included morning shift web updating, social media management and reporting, will be devoted full-time to this new role. Her mission will be to provide our audience with links to breaking and comprehensive news and information relevant to their community and interests. Putting the reader first, she’ll link out to blogs, Twitter feeds, YouTube videos and even the work of our longest-standing “traditional” competitors, not just to content produced by our staff writers at The Register Citizen, or by sister Journal Register Company publications in Connecticut.

Why does a local paper our size need, and how does it justify, having a full-time curator on staff?

Well, 10 years ago, it was us, a competing daily newspaper a few towns to our south, a local radio station with a morning news report and the TV stations from Hartford and New Haven.

Scarcity of news sources. High demand for information. Let the good times roll.

Today, our audience turns to thousands of niche websites, blogs and online hyperlocal startups devoted to a single town, neighborhood or interest. Patch.com is arriving on the scene as big media (AOL)’s attempt to scale hyperlocal across a national footprint. The audience itself is now the biggest source of local information out there, equipped with mobile smart phones, free WordPress and Blogger accounts and YouTube logins.

And audience members’ connections to each other via Facebook, Twitter and other social media trump connections, if there are any, between audience member and legacy media brand.

In Torrington, we’ve established a Community Media Lab, partnering with local bloggers and niche online sites. Similar efforts across our sister publications have established a network of more than 1,000 citizen blogging partners across Journal Register Company.

We have computer workstations loaded with open-source blogging and video editing software in our open newsroom for citizen journalists and bloggers to use. We offer free classes and workshops in our newsroom classroom, including “Blogging 101″ and how-to’s on social media, video production and journalism basics.

In December, we established a community engagement editor position, in part, to partner with and train bloggers and citizen journalists.

The curator position will help us share that work with our audience, and make sense of the exploding range of information sources out there. Jenny’s first assignment was to study the work of Andy Carvin, the NPR staffer who has provided some of the best coverage of the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya over the past few months in a very non-traditional way. Carvin has used his Twitter feed to curate the Tweets, Facebook posts, YouTube videos and blog posts of eyewitnesses in real time.

She’ll use tools such as lists and hashtags on Twitter and Google Reader and Google Alerts to find and present content relevant to Northwest Connecticut communities and to niche interests including moms from Litchfield County, local and statewide politics and local arts and entertainment.

Another goal of our new curator position will be to make sure that our original content contains links out to referenced and additional information. Failing to link remains a big failure of traditional print media, and we aim to fix it on our sites.

“Are J-schools today part of the problem or solution? How should they change? Should something replace them?”

I’ve gotten a lot of questions about my answer, envisioning journalism schools that are “integrated into newsrooms, creating (a) continuous learning environment for the student and the experienced.”

In the old days, journalism schools prepared students “to be published” by news organizations that had authority because they owned printing presses, broadcast licenses and radio towers.

Today, everyone can be a publisher, and news organizations can range from a single-person kitchen table blogger to a crowdsourced network of otherwise disconnected and “unorganized” people coming together around a common purpose.

Every one of today’s journalism students has been published, and is in effect a publisher themselves, before attending a single day of class. That’s a strong argument for an “on-the-job learning” model similar to what is happening at the University of Missouri.

The same “everyone’s a publisher” reality argues for both newsrooms and journalism schools opening their doors to the community to be part of what Journal Register Company CEO John Paton is fond of calling “the new news ecology.”

Newsrooms should have a relationship with students pursuing journalism as a professional career. But they should also be teaching, and learning from, the soccer mom who blogs about every twist in debate over her school district’s new curriculum policy, the retired coach who maintains the world’s best statistical history of girls’ field hockey in Northwest Connecticut, the local United Way director who is blogging about the people behind the 24 nonprofits the group raises money for, and the resident who gets up every morning to test water quality in a local river and posts results on his website advocating for regional watershed protection.

We’re taking steps toward this at The Register Citizen Newsroom Cafe, launching one of Journal Register Company’s Community Media Labs for bloggers and citizen journalists, but also building a classroom right into the newsroom and offering free workshops for citizens, bloggers and staff.

But most important in relation to the most pressing issue for traditional media, newsrooms could use a journalism school environment themselves right now. As an industry, John Paton has said, “we’re no good” at migrating to a digital model. We have a lot of learning to do, at every level of our organizations.

So here’s my idea:

A traditional news organization should start – or merge with – a journalism school. Just a guess, but starting over would probably be easier from a pure P&L standpoint.

The Anytown News and Journalism School would employ professional reporters and editors, and journalism professors, and many who are doing both simultaneously or alternately.

They would accept students/apprentices into a formal work/study program. Instead of paying tuition, maybe these students would get paid to learn, and work.

It would be funded by creating an organization whose “student projects” are money-making, entrepreneurial journalism platforms.

But importantly (and different from any model I’ve heard about), every single full professional (or “journeyman” or “master” if you want to carry the traditional apprentice methodology of other trades) staff member would be required to continue their education, formally, until they resign or retire.

Student apprentices would graduate with a bachelor’s degree and a new title and pay grade. And then move into the next phase of their education and professional career.

This would provide a better journalism school experience, in my opinion, while opening the profession to a wider and more diverse population by making it affordable (we pay you instead of you paying tuition!). And it would create the world’s best formal staff training program, something we’d all be thinking about if we paid attention to the wisdom of Steve Buttry.

And why limit it to the newsroom?

Lord knows traditional media needs a new model for ad revenue. Why not bring business school professors, and students, and the community, and advertisers, into your finance and advertising departments, or mash up the whole thing a la Jeff Jarvis’ entrepreneurial journalism program?

A link to this page – asking readers and sources to bring errors to editors’ attention – now appears on every online story the paper publishes.

We launched something similar – a “Fact Check” box on every story page on RegisterCitizen.Com – earlier this year.

The Washington Post goes much further, and hits all the right notes in seeking to engage with and learn from its audience. In addition to asking for a simple report on mistakes in a story, its form also asks, “What do we need to know to improve future stories on this topic?” It suggests that readers suggest “additional people to speak with, areas to explore, etc.”

The Washington Post corrections/fact check page even has a “yes/no” opt-in to the question, “Would you be willing to help with other stories?”, suggesting that the paper is building a foundation for future crowdsourcing efforts, perhaps by specific topic.

This is a huge symbolic shift, I hope, away from the “fortress journalism” that traditional media has clung to even as the web and social media have completely changed the audience dynamic out from under them.

And the fact that it comes from a Top 5 major American newspaper that has been criticized strongly for allowing “the print guys” to win must offer a glimmer of hope to new media thought leaders such as Jay Rosen, Craig Silverman and Craig Newmark, who have been beating the drum on fact checking and corrections for some time.

The public is invited to attend and participate in daily story meetings at The Register Citizen Newsroom Cafe. The meetings are also broadcast live on RegisterCitizen.Com, where readers are able to contribute comments and ask questions via live chat.

From critics within the newspaper industry, primarily, we heard that it would be impractical, disruptive and somehow tainting of the “professional” process of journalism to allow the public to “look over our shoulders” while we work. There’s a whole slew of arguments knocking down that premise, but there’s also our experience to date, which for us, is more relevant and powerful.

From readers, one of the biggest concerns was that an “open newsroom” would open the door to special interest groups or individuals with pet causes having easy access to reporters and editors and therefore being more likely to influence (i.e., twist) their reporting.

My immediate answer to this was that people representing special interests, pet causes and axes to grind get their message to reporters and editors already. A newsroom that is not just “open,” but also welcoming, with an active agenda of community engagement, will start to balance that influence by hearing from and connecting with the audience as a whole. The more open we are, the more voices you’ll see represented in our reporting, and hopefully, the less chance there will be of missing or skewed context.

A building block of our model is that transparency builds trust. The public is invited to attend and participate in our daily story meetings, which are also live-streamed on RegisterCitizen.Com. When we faced an internal debate recently on guidelines for staff who moderate online story comments, we distributed, heard input and discussed a draft policy via social media and the web, leading up to a public meeting, also live-streamed, in the cafe’s classroom.

Which brings me back to those concerns about special interests having new-found or undue influence over journalists in an “open newsroom.”

Among many assumptions we’ve had to question in attempting to stay true to our “open” model is that old newspaper tradition of “the editorial board meeting.”

Since opening on Dec. 13, we haven’t had any.

Oh, we’ve had requests. But when you explain to the industry association, or, for example, the PR flack for an energy sector company fighting a zoning battle with local residents who called recently, that the public will be invited to listen in on – and ask questions – the value, to them, of an “editorial board meeting” is apparently diminished.

And that has been eye-opening.

What kind of influence have these closed-door meetings had on our reporting? Why would these sources prefer no meeting at all to one where the public can listen in and ask questions? Maybe they’ve gotten used to pushing their spin on editors and reporters and seeing it published without the hard questions or context that scrutiny by the audience would provide?

As we move forward into uncharted waters at The Register Citizen Newsroom Cafe, I see potential for us (in the context of many other points of community engagement) to build a new kind of editorial board meeting, where, as media blogger Judy Sims recently envisioned, we “(facilitate) the coming together of individuals, organizations and governments to solve a city’s great problems …“

For newspapers with a “closed newsroom” (I think I’ll start referring to traditional print media models that way until Journal Register Company’s “digital first” philosophy is embraced by the rest of the industry) , it would be interesting to see the impact that some simple steps toward transparency would have.

Does the editorial on the energy bill, or sales tax exemptions, make note of the editorial board meeting the newspaper had a few days before with the trade association affected by the issue?

Even if you’re not inviting the public, why not list for your audience what “official sources” are getting this closed-door, formal access to your editors and reporters?

And if you won’t let the public in to those meetings, why not, at least, broadcast live (or even a taped but complete version) video on the web?

I’m pleased, following months of work and planning behind the scenes, to be able to share with you this announcement from Journal Register Company. After 110 years in (literally) our ink-stained, print edition-focused building in Torrington, Connecticut, The Register Citizen is moving to new offices that reflect how much our business model has changed.

The centerpiece is a Newsroom Cafe, with no walls separating the public from reporters and editors. Incorporated into the space is also a Community Media Lab, the opening of 120 years of newspaper archives for easy and free public access, and the creation of a Community Journalism School.

Read our local story about the move here, or for more about the whole project, visit RegisterCitizen.com/newsroomcafe.

And for an excellent, comprehensive overview of how we got to this point, see Journal Register Company CEO John Paton’s amazing presentation today to the INMA Transformation of News Summit at Harvard.

Craig Newmark, founder of “Craig’s List,” has argued that “trust is the new black.” News outlets that emphasize accuracy, fact checking and a relationship of trust with their readers will survive and thrive in the new news ecology.

That means welcoming and embracing reports of errors – from minor to significant, from concrete to subjective – admitting our mistakes, and moving swiftly and very publicly to correct them.

This is why RegisterCitizen.Com pioneered the simple concept of the “Fact Check” box at the bottom of every story online as a public statement of accountability and easy and convenient way for our readers to engage with us on corrections.

Consistency in following the protocol we have set up regarding corrections is one of your most important responsibilities as a reporter for Foothills Media Group. It establishes and maintains our most basic credibility as a source of local news.

Please follow this protocol regarding errors and corrections:

1. As soon as a story is published online and in print editions, it is a reporter’s responsibility to monitor online story comments and be attentive to Fact Check reports, emails, phone calls, in-person reports and reports in other media that call attention to or make you aware of errors or inaccuracies in our reporting.

2. Errors – ranging from spelling and grammar mistakes, to incorrect facts, to aspects of a story that are misleading due to improper or missing context – should be corrected as soon as possible, and there is no time limit after a story is published on the need for a correction.

3. The only errors that do not require a formal correction (and can simply be changed in online stories without a notation calling attention to it) are misspellings and typos that do not change the meaning of a relevant detail in the story. (Misspellings of proper names do require a formal correction.)

4. For all other errors, you must follow this process each time:
- Change the online version of the story so that the error is corrected within the body of the story.
- Write a note at the bottom of the story calling attention to the correction. Follow this format, “CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported the hometown of Winchester town manager candidate John Smith. He is from Rochester, New Hampshire, not Rochester, Minnesota.”
- Publish a version of the correction to our online “Corrections” page at RegisterCitizen.Com/news/corrections. Publish it as a separate story under “News,” with the word “Corrections” in the tagging box. Refer to the headline of the story, and the date the story was published. Use the headline to link back to the actual story.
- If an error appeared in the print edition, draft a correction as a separate story in Prestige. Refer to the headline of the story, the date it ran and the page on which it appeared.

5. Always repeat the error, in addition to providing the correct information. Otherwise, we are just vaguely admitting we got something wrong, without explaining what it was.

6. Send a copy of each formal correction to the editor, managing editor (eolson@registercitizen.com) and publisher (mderienzo@registercitizen.com) when you make one. Reach out to one of them if you have any questions about how to handle a correction or are not sure whether one is needed.

7. (ADDED THANKS TO ELAINE CLISHAM … thank you!) If you know (granted that some are anonymous) who asked for the correction, or pointed out the error, get back to them with notification and/or a link to the correction, and thank them for notifying us. If someone asked for a correction on a subjective matter that we ultimately decided did not need a correction or clarification (please consult/notify editors before deciding this), still get back to the person with acknowledgement of the request and an explanation of why we are not running something.

8. Do not be worried if it seems like you are making/notifying us of a lot of formal corrections. With the volume of stories we do and facts we report every day, we will be making multiple corrections every day if we are as vigilant as we should be, and our readers are as engaged as we want them to be in pointing out problems.

Here is the corrections policy we have posted for readers on RegisterCitizen.Com:

The Register Citizen strives for accuracy in the news stories and other content that are published on RegisterCitizen.Com and in its print edition.
We are committed to correcting all errors that come to our attention, and encourage readers, story sources and the community at-large to point them out to us.
Errors can be brought to our attention in a number of ways, including contacting the reporter who wrote the story in question by email or phone, or contacting Managing Editor Emily M. Olson at editor@registercitizen.com or 860-489-3121, ext. 334, or Publisher Matt DeRienzo at mderienzo@registercitizen.com or 860-489-3121, ext. 350.
Readers can also use the “Fact Check” form that appears on this page and at the bottom of every story that we publish on RegisterCitizen.Com. You can report errors anonymously, or provide an email and/or other contact information so that we can confirm receipt and/or action on the matter, and ask you to clarify if necessary.
We believe that no correction is too small to deserve our attention, and so we urge readers to notify us of everything from clear errors in fact, to misspelling of names, to improper or missing context that leads to a misrepresentation of the issue being discussed.
We strive to correct errors in our reporting as quickly as possible, and in several ways.
If a story has appeared both online and in print, we will print a correction in both places. Our Corrections box in the print edition of The Register Citizen is printed on our daily editorial page. Our Corrections page online is at RegisterCitizen.Com/news/corrections.
Because we are able to edit stories online after they are initially published, we will do so to fix the information that was wrong. But we will also list a note at the bottom of the story marked “CORRECTION” that points out what was changed from the earlier version of the story. That correction note will also be printed on this page of the website.
Online and in print, we believe that corrections should repeat the error and then report what the correct information is so that readers get the full picture of how our reporting and/or editing went wrong.
We can’t guarantee a mistake-free newspaper and website, but we can pledge to be transparent about how we deal with and correct mistakes. That is the goal of this corrections policy and corrections page. If you feel points are missing from this policy, please contact Publisher Matt DeRienzo at mderienzo@registercitizen.com or 860-489-3121, ext. 350, with your suggestions.

I checked in with each member of my staff of about 40 people in Torrington, Connecticut, last week to see how we’re doing.

As expected, I guess, the newsroom leads other departments in fulfilling the goal of learning one new technology, and newsroom employees involved more directly in journalism and content gathering lead those whose jobs are more heavily tied to our print edition. Copy editors and page designers, for example, have been the slowest to learn and embrace new technology.

Similarly, our graphic artists, whose job is 95 percent tied to creating ads for the print editions of our daily and weeklies, and pages for our shopper, are farther behind than any department in the “learning one new technology” challenge.

It’s a chicken and egg thing. The more your job is tied to print, the less mindset and time you have to devote to learning about digital technology. But the less digital technology you know, the more doomed you are to be stuck in a job with a viability that is shrinking every day and will at some point be obsolete.

If we are going to be relying on these employees to be part of a completely “digital first, print last” culture, as a manager I need to disrupt this cycle and get people off the hamster wheel.

Journal Register Company is offering unprecedented training programs on the use of video in news and advertising, social media, search engine optimization and more. Getting employees to take advantage of them is the obvious step, but integrating them into the way you do business on a local level is the real key. And we’re up against 120 years of inertia built around meeting our next print deadline.

But let’s talk about our progress!

John Paton’s decision to provide a Flip camera to every reporter in the company taught most of our newsroom to expand the presentation of their journalism to a whole new medium. We have shot video with almost every kind of news story. Staff have learned more about editing video. And we have branched into live-streaming of video, including the web broadcast of some important local selectman’s meetings and candidate debates during the recent election season.

The most prolific videographer on our staff is Peter Wallace, a sports writer, the longest-serving member of our newsroom, and the guy in the room most likely to be voted “old-school newspaper guy.” (And while sports stories get the least amount of page views on our website by category, we have discovered that sports videos get the highest amount of views. It’s clearly about finding the right medium to tell a particular kind of story.)

Journal Register Company’s Ben Franklin Project helped reporters and editors learn about the incredible amount of free, open-source tools available for enriching our presentation of the news, and they now regularly embed video (our own and from other sources), source documents, Google Maps and more to enrich stories.

Journal Register followed up on Ben Franklin with the JRC Idea Lab, and we were fortunate to have one of our reporters, Kaitlyn Yeager, chosen for it. Kaitlyn’s Idea Lab work has brought many great ideas and learning experiences to the staff so far. An example was election night, when we used Google Docs to create a large, town-by-town voting results chart. We embedded it “above the fold” on the home page of our website, and Google Docs allowed multiple staff members, at the same time, to input results that showed up on the web in real time. It made for the fastest and most comprehensive election night results we’d ever been able to provide to readers. That chart, and what we have learned over the past nine months about search engine optimization, helped us lead all Journal Register Company newspapers in the traffic bump that we got from election night – up 77.4% in page views and up 72.1% in monthly unique visitors.

Effective use of social media was the “one new technology” that many staff members chose when John Paton made his challenge in the spring.

Newsroom staff have settled into a routine on breaking news stories of posting even a brief confirmation of the story to our website, posting a link to Twitter, sending a blast to our free email news alert subscribers, and then sharing on Facebook. Soon, that process across JRC will start with a text message to mobile phones.

Social media was also the “one new technology” that most of our advertising staff wanted to learn this year.

Our classified department is using Twitter to promote online job postings through our partnership with Monster Hot Jobs, getting better results for our advertisers and more traffic to our “help wanted” site.

And while sales reps and managers have lagged behind the newsroom in using Twitter, Facebook and Four Square to connect with clients, they have learned this year that they need to work with clients on how to incorporate these free social media tools into an overall marketing plan. In the past, through our own ignorance we would have ignored their role or treated them as competition.

We started 2010 intrigued by John Paton’s challenge to “learn one new technology.” We have found, over the course of the year, that the company is creating an environment where we are continuously learning.

Can’t wait to see what’s in store for 2011.

This is a very simple concept that started with our newspaper’s website in May and quickly spread to the rest of Journal Register Company under the leadership of Paton and Vice President of Content Jonathan Cooper. Provide a visible and easy way for readers and sources to challenge the facts in your news reporting. We did it through a “Fact Check” form on our home page. Last week, we switched to having one of these forms at the bottom of every story that we publish on the website.

Regarding all the attention, a key point to make here is that The Register Citizen is not on the vanguard of accuracy in journalism. We’re a small (8,000 print circulation with a larger and engaged digital audience of 140,000-plus monthly unique visitors) community daily, with a small, inexperienced staff. We have a huge problem with accuracy, not to mention basic grammar and spelling mistakes.

And we were hyperlocal before it was a buzzword … always have been. That’s why this works so well for us: First of all, we need it. Second, if you’re writing about a neighborhood issue, residents of that neighborhood, our readers, are going to know better than anyone else what the facts are.

Megan Taylor asked what percentage of Fact Check reports are useful. Surprisingly, about 80 percent have been, the rest consisting of spam, opinions about the article in question that would have been better suited to the story comment function, or just completely irrelevant messages.

Of the 80 percent that were useful, most pointed out “minor” errors such as spelling mistakes, or a reference to “Elm Street” instead of “Elm Avenue.” But about 20 percent of the “useful” Fact Check reports have raised substantial and legitimate factual errors or misrepresentations in the referenced story.

Terry Olson asked about manpower in responding to Fact Check reports.

We are trying to get our entire newsroom staff (17 people total) reading and engaging with online story comments (we get a lot of them for a paper our size), because they often advance the story so much further (especially as we report “digital first, print last” … mistakes are caught, new angles discovered, context enriched over the course of a day of reporting by having the audience involved from the beginning) and it extends the reporter’s sourcing, potentially, to the entire community.

So having them verify, use and respond to Fact Check reports is only a small incremental part of that workflow we’ve already tried to establish.

Which is a good segue to the comment made by ARLnow.Com. This local news site in Arlington, Va., used the example of a motorcycle accident story to show that active engagement by reporters and editors with readers who are using story comments to point out errors can accomplish the same thing.

I couldn’t agree more. Having a separate online form attached to every story that says “Fact Check” in bold letters and explains to the reader that we encourage them to correct us or provide context is a way to hammer home to the audience that we want them to hold us accountable, that the process is transparent, and that we welcome it.

Once we can build a tradition of audience engagement and trust, the more gimmicky feel of a “Fact Check” box won’t be necessary. But in making the transition from closed-off legacy print media practices, it is an important statement to our readers right now.