[Case Study] Chi-Town Daily News uses Highrise to manage newsroom

In "No Casual Operation: Inside a Citizen Journalism Newsroom" [Poynter.org], Geoff Dougherty, Editor of Chi-Town Daily News, talks about using Highrise to manage his newsroom.

Managing three dozen inexperienced journalists who work remotely to cover a city like Chicago is no easy task. We've had to think carefully about developing procedures to make sure that people and stories don't fall through the cracks.

A big part of that system is Highrise, Web-based software that was designed for customer-relationship management. It has turned out to be unexpectedly well-suited to managing a newsroom.

While many volunteer-driven organizations run on a casual, catch-as-catch-can basis, we needed to keep everyone in our office updated on what our volunteers were doing -- who was looking for a story, who was supposed to be filing this week, and who needed a phone call to make sure they were still on board.

Highrise enables us to collect contact details on our volunteers in one location, assign the volunteer to an editor, track stories to completion and send automated reminders when deadlines are missed.

When a prospective volunteer contacts Frank, he schedules a meeting to explain how the program works, sets the volunteer up with a username on our content management system, finds out what she's interested in covering, and assigns her to one of our two editors. He also tags volunteers by neighborhood in Highrise, which makes it easy for us to match writers with breaking news or other coverage opportunities.

Frank creates a Highrise task for the editor, who then follows up with a phone call or e-mail suggesting a couple of story possibilities to the writer. We've found that covering a meeting is a great first assignment for our volunteers, most of whom have no prior journalism experience or training.

Because the meetings occur at a fixed time and location, they eliminate the possibility of procrastination. The meetings, and the resulting stories, follow a predictable format, so we can provide some tips and and examples to the writer before she arrives at the meeting.

And because we're familiar with what usually goes on at those meetings, we're in a good position to spot accuracy problems in stories about them.

Many of our story ideas are drawn from an online civic calendar we created to keep track of the thousands of Local School Council meetings, community policing gatherings and other neighborhood events that occur in Chicago every year. The calendar is searchable by address, so it's easy for editors and writers to find upcoming events in a particular neighborhood.

Once we've talked over the story with the writer, we use Highrise to track deadlines and progress. Highrise allows us to automatically store e-mails to our writers with their other details, so we can instantly pull up someone's profile and see what he's working on and what kind of progress he's making.

Our system also allows us to follow up with writers who, for whatever reason, have missed a deadline or disappeared from view. After two or three attempts at contact, editors assign the writer back to Frank, who follows up to find out if the volunteer is still interested in working with us.

As we fine-tune this system and expand our volunteer network to cover the rest of Chicago, we're looking to sharpen our ability to respond to breaking news.

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