#wanews

The #wanews “team” is a group of several journalists, including myself, that have collaborated on a few occasions to share links and information when a regional news event called for it. The journalists in question:

Me

Angela Dice, Web editor of the Kitsap Sun

Elaine Helm, New Media editor at The (Everett) Herald

Seth Long, Director of New Media at Sound Publishing (and my boss)

Brianne Pruitt, Web editor at the Wenatchee World

The idea of collaborating came about organically, first with Seth and Angela. We had some snowstorms in Western Washington back in January 2008 and Seth and Angela, through Twitter, I believe, decided to start tagging news coverage using Publish 2. Publish 2, if you haven’t heard of it, is basically Delicious for journalists and it allows you to build widgets for your tags. We built a page to showcase the widget and saw some decent traffic (not sure of the link to Angela’s). Sound Publishing later won an SNA award for Seth’s efforts.

Not long after that, the snow melted and we saw widespread floods in Western Washington and elsewhere. This time, the other three of us got involved (via Twitter and Publish 2) and the project absolutely blew up. We saw huge numbers on the PNWLocalNews.com page Seth and I built and we all got ample attention from the blogosphere. (Sound Publishing won an award

Things eventually calmed down, but we wanted to keep the momentum going—enter Angela’s News Collaboration Ning network. It gets hot and cold—hot when we hosted a conference call to organize and expand the #wanews effort; cold on the occasions that everyone gets too busy—but it’s become a great place to organize and plan. The best part is, it’s open to anyone—print journalists, broadcasters, neighborhood bloggers, etc.

The #wanews team and News Collaboration network are currently participating in two projects: Angela Dice’s Washington Ferry Talk page (ongoing, using the Publish 2 tag “waferry”) and aggregation of links regarding the July 2009 I-90 Bridge repairs (through July 20, or whenever repairs are completed).

We welcome anyone who would like to join us in our efforts. Sign up for an account on News Collaboration and get started or contact me by commenting here (or via Twitter) if you have more questions.

Obviously, a lot of credit is due to Publish 2 and Twitter, without which this all would be a hell of a lot more difficult.