InJersey

In journalism, one of the hardest things to do is hit “publish” (or “send”) on a story that’s still unfolding. Deadlines often force your hand, but it’s frustrating to know that your account isn’t finished, that there are still facts and details and color “TK” — “to come.”

That is very much the sentiment of the InJersey team today. After two years of running InJersey, we have made the difficult decision to suspend publishing our community blogs, knowing full well that the larger hyperlocal movement that we belonged to is as vibrant and innovative as ever.

When we launched in June 2009, in seven towns across NJ, we set out to create something new in the emerging hyperlocal space. We had plenty of inspiration: entrepreneurial journalists like Baristanet‘s Deb Galant and RedBankGreen‘s John Ward, the New York Times’s brilliantly executed “The Local” blogs, and Warren Webster’s wildly ambitious Patch.com (then still an baby, in just three towns). While many of these and other sites did an outstanding job of engaging with town and community leaders, we wanted to do more. To not just talk to and interview these folks, but to give them a platform to contribute posts, photos, updates, and more. Aside from the open-registration, what made InJersey special was that our contributors didn’t just use a form or email template to submit; we gave them full publishing access, and all submissions appeared alongside our staff posts.

As reporters, editors, and web developers for the Gannett New Jersey newspapers — the Asbury Park Press, Daily Record, Home News Tribune, Courier News, Courier-Post, and The Daily Journal — we cared deeply about the quality of writing and reporting on the sites. But we trusted and worked with our contributors to make sure the posts were always civil, relevant, and most of all, a good read. At our height, we had 16 sites covering as many towns, all with reporters, editors, and community members contributing daily. Many competitors, including Everyblock and Patch, have since worked to open up more and more of their platform to contributors.

Along the way, we had a lot of fun and some indelible memories. From the Freehold InJersey “bureau” in Zebu Forno (really just a computer desk with a big pasteboard sign) to the blogging seminars at the Cherry Hill Library (“Do you need to go on the computer to see a blog?”), we did our best to bring the site into the downtown. We’re extremely proud to have had a (small) hand in helping form the New Jersey Hyperlocal News Association (the first of its kind in the country), and our partnerships with groundbreaking startups like SeeClickFix, PaperG, and Outside.In were beyond rewarding.

The greatest joy of all was getting to work alongside the tireless, talented, and terrific team that made up InJersey: Jake Remaly, Walter O’Brien, Julia Hays, Kristi Funderburk, Jim Namiotka, Sergio Bichao, Gene Racz, Deirdre Pitney, Cindy Capitani, Lavinia DeCastro, Adam Smeltz, Loren Fisher, Linda Sadlouskos, Brad Wadlow, Whitney Rhodes, Steve Reed. And especially Colleen Curry, who came to us via a curious tweet (“Do you need writers?”) back when we were prototyping, and who spent the next two years pouring her heart and soul into Freehold InJersey. (Use the links above to follow any of these rock stars on Twitter.)

The decision to close InJersey was not one borne of financial pressure or corporate mandate. Yes, it is true that we recently lost a number of our colleagues who worked on the sites due to layoffs. And it is also the case that InJersey did not sell enough local advertising to make it self-sufficient enough to pay for a full-time staff. But the real reason is that we realized we’re simply not doing what we set out to accomplish — both in terms of original local reporting and community conversation.

We haven’t given up on the hyperlocal movement, and you may soon see the friendly faces from InJersey pop up again soon (on Facebook? Twitter? Your local cafe?). This isn’t a farewell, but rather an “Until we meet again.”
-Ted Mann
Founder, InJersey.com

We’ve been hard at work for several months on a new design for the the InJersey town blogs. In the last year, as we’ve grown our little hyperlocal family, the biggest complaint we’ve gotten about the design of the site is that, once you sign up, it’s not totally clear what you’re supposed to do.

We always intended InJersey to be a simple, easy-to-use blog interface, which anyone could post to. Alas, logging into the backend of our blog software, WordPress, wasn’t exactly intiutive (at least, not if you’ve never used WordPress before). All of which explains why we’re so excited to unveil our new look and feel.

The changes will soon be spread across all of our sites, but for now you can preview them on our newest town, East Brunswick. Some of the important new features:

• A login widget on the right of the blog
• Once you log in, you’ll see a button to “Join blog” — which lets you contribute news stories to the center rail of content
• If you join a blog, you’ll immediately see a simplified set of fields to write your post. Put in your headline, content, photos (if you have them), keyword tags, and an address (again, only if you have it). Hit “Post It,” and BAM!, you’ll be published.
• There’s also another button to “Join Group” — which allows you to post on our new “Chatter” group on the sidebar. This is for short takes, news tips, and quick updates. Given that you might not always be up to the challenge of writing a full-blown story, this area sets the bar lower, encouraging anyone to submit quick, short takes on things in your community.
• You’ll also see a place to contribute status updates and group updates on our root site, injersey.com, which is where you can go to easily switch between towns, view member profiles, browse groups, and interact in other ways on the site.
• You can also sort all the activity on the site using the activity stream on injersey.com, which allows you to filter by news posts, groups, @ mentions, friends, and favorites.

We hope you enjoy the changes. This project was a joint effort between Belmar website development shop WebDevStudios, Gannett NJ, and the site editors on InJersey. A special shout-out to Brian Messenlehner and Chris Cochran at WDS, who did most of the design work and programming on the new themes. The new frontend posting apparatus is made possible by the innovative WordPress theme P2, and the Groups functionality and posting is all done with a WordPress plugin called BuddyPress.

Please send me feedback about what you like and don’t like, as well as any suggestions for further improvement. InJersey is all about making it easier for you to share news with the rest of your community, and we hope these changes will be a giant leap forward in helping accomplish that.

While the recent foul weather has certainly put a damper on things in the garden state, there is one positive thing to come out of the last couple days. Two actually! Over the last few days we’ve rolled out two new InJersey sites devoted to Woodbridge and Morristown

The former is headed by Home News Tribune reporter Sergio Bichao, while the latter is being spearheaded by Daily Record editor Jim Namiotka and his team.

We hope you register to join these new sites and if you’d like to become a regular contributor, or just have questions about the site, please email Ted Mann, our site administrator.

InJersey has had a few upgrades lately, the most notable of which is the new interactive activity stream. If you’ve ever used social sites like Facebook and Twitter, this should be very familiar!

At the top, you’ll find a box where you can post status updates or information you’d like to share with groups you belong to. Very soon, you’ll also be able to post to community blogs you belong to. And around the same time we’ll also be incorporating these activity streams onto the town blogs (Freehold, Flemington, Cherry Hill, etc), so you can use all these neat features right there.

A couple useful things to know:
• If you use @username (putting in a user on the site — e.g. @colleencurry), the person you’ve mentioned will be notified.
• URLs in your posts are automatically turned into hyperlinks.
• You can sort the new activity stream using the “Filter” dropdown (e.g. show only your friends, or only your groups)
• You can reply to other items in your activity stream by clicking the “reply” button next to each item.
• Click on “Favorite” to save an item to your favorites list for future viewing.

For those curious about how this came about, the activity stream is one of the key new features of BuddyPress 1.2, which is a WordPress plugin that InJersey is built on. We plan to make even more use of it in the coming months, and use it very prominently on the site, as this is, we believe, a much easier path for our users to submit their own content.

Everyone who’s tried the new “After the Deadline” proofreading tool seems to be unanimous: It’s the best way imaginable to check your spelling, grammar, and word usage. Only problem is, if you’re anything like me, you probably hit publish before you remember to hit the proofread button.

Well, the good folks who created AtD have come up with a solution: A setting to make sure you auto-proofread all your posts. To enable this just go to the bar at the top of InJersey and navigate to your profile page.

There you’ll see this:

When enabled, this feature will run AtD against your post (or page) before a publish or update. If any errors are found, you’ll be prompted with a dialog:

If you want to publish, click OK. Otherwise click Cancel to interact with the errors and make your changes.

The next time you hit Publish your post will go through.

via WordPress Plugin Update « After the Deadline.

Today we launched a new service to give you better grammar, spelling, and style-checking on your InJersey posts. Here’s a quick video about how it works:

It’s an incredibly powerful tool, which uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing technology to find your writing errors and offer smart suggestions.

Click in the editor to check spelling, style, and grammar to perform a check on your post before publishing.

Over the last few months we’ve noticed that the simple addition of the Tweetmeme “Retweet” button has led to way more stories from InJersey making their way onto Twitter. The reason, we think, is simple: After you post a comment here, you can also put it on Twitter for all your followers to hear what you had to say.

Of course, there’s plenty of people who like to share to Facebook, too. Previously, you could always use the handy “ShareThis” button to do this, but we like the simplicity of the Retweet button (not to mention the count of the total number of times something has been shared). So, we’ve now added this same type of button to share stories on Facebook.

Happy sharing!

We just launched in Somerset Hills, an area of NJ that encompasses Basking Ridge, Bedminster, Bernards, Peapack, Far Hills, Gladstone, and Bernardsville.

After the break is the story that ran in the paper to promote the new town site.

Read the rest of this entry →

To help make InJersey even more Twitter-friendly, we’ve added a retweet button to the bottom of every post on our town blogs.

This button taps into a service provided by Tweetmeme, which also does a count of how many times a given post has been tweeted.

It’s far from exact, and there’s definitely a lag time, but it adds another tool to help facilitate community conversation. If nothing else, we hope it makes the process of tweeting posts a little simpler.

Happy Tweeting!

One of the best things about using the WordPress blog software as the backbone for InJersey is that there are lots of different ways to publish a post — even without a computer!

You can, of course, log into the site and use the “Add New Post” screen. But say you’re in the middle of downtown Freehold and see a major accident or a fire or a new store. You want to share the news with your neighbors right away, but it’ll be hours before you can get to a computer. All you have is your trusty cell phone.

And, as luck would have it, that’s all you need to be able to log in and post news and photos to InJersey.

No matter whether you’ve got the latest iPhone or an older, more basic phone, as long as you can access the web, you can log into the site and post. Here are three of the best ways that we reccomend:

1. If you have a Blackberry, download the WordPress Blackberry app at http://blackberry.wordpress.org/install

It takes a few minutes to install the app, and you’ll need to already have an InJersey login and password to get set up. Make sure that you specify which InJersey town you want to add. For example, you might want to put in cherryhill.injersey.com as the site domain.

Rather than walking you through all the set up steps, check out this quick video:

2. The WordPress iPhone app works much the same way as the Blackberry app. Again, make sure you have a username and password before attempting to add a blog. Here’s a quick video demonstrating how the iPhone app works.

3. Finally, even if you don’t have a smartphone like an iPhone or Blackberry, you can still access InJersey to make a post by using our mobile-optimized backend. To get to this, type in the URL of the town you’re interested in contributing to, plus add “wp-admin” to the end of the URL. For example: http://flemington.injersey.com/wp-admin

From there you’ll see an option to enter the “mobile admin interface.” Make sure to check this off.

Next you should see a stripped-down and mobile friendly version of the backend of the blog, where you can easily write and publish posts.

If you have any trouble at all getting any of these to work, please email ted [at] injersey.com.