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New Ventures in News Libraries
A presentation at the 2002 SLA News Division conference

Part Two: News Library websites
(See also Part One: News Library intranets)

Speakers: Sheryl Rosenthal and Michael Jesse
Moderator: Michael Jesse

Reported by Jessica Baumgart and Michael Jesse

This is the News Briefings page maintained by the library staff at U.S. News & World Report.

    In New Ventures in News Libraries II, Sheryl Rosenthal of U.S. News and World Report and Michael Jesse of The Indianapolis Star shared some ways their libraries contribute to the public websites of their publications.

    Both libraries provide background information on a variety of topics ranging from current events to historical information. Sheryl and Michael talked about how these extra pages can increase traffic to the website and directly generate revenue.

    On usnews.com one of the navigation links is for something called "News Briefings." When visitors click on that link they go to a page managed by Sheryl and her team in the library.

    News Briefings are individual web pages providing background on various current event issues such as the War on Terrorism, Wildfires in the West, the Conflict in the Middle East and the Catholic Church and Sexual Abuse.

    These are all topics that the library has researched for stories published in U.S. News so much of the work involved in making them was research already being done. This project, Sheryl said, accomplishes two important objectives. It preserves the results of library research so that it has continuing usefulness and it assoicates the library with revenue generation.

    What you see on the News Briefings site is a public-access version of a project which began on the library's intranet site. In fact, most of the News Briefing topics have slightly different counterparts on the in-house site. One serves the public and the other serves the staff of the magazine.  The reason the two are not fully blended, Sheryl explained, is that they have somewhat different content and serve different purposes. For example, the in-house page on one of these topics could include links to stories in other publications which the library pulled from Factiva. (The library could not use such stories on the public site because of copyright conflicts.) On the other hand, the public site would emphasize links to previously published U.S. News stories which site visitors have to purchase to see in full text (the most recent two issues of the archive are free).

    Both the intranet pages and the public News Briefings are the end result of library research which was being done anyway for a story -- or research done in anticipation of it being needed for a future story.

    Sheryl also showed a feature called "Book Shelf" which is also an off-shoot of traditional library work. Often, when doing research for a story, writers will request books on the topic or librarians will recommend specific titles . After the story is written, the library will ask the reporter which (if any) of the books he or she would recommend to readers.  As a result of this, some stories on the website will include a list of recommended books that the reader may want to purchase. When the website visitor clicks on the title of the book, it links to Amazon.com and if the reader makes a purchase Amazon shares the profit with U.S. News.

    Those clicks don't yet amount to a lot of money, Sheryl said, but the important thing is that the library is participating in revenue-generation for the company -- both in terms of the bookshelf links and the news briefings which provide content for the website, increase traffic and encourage the purchase of archived articles.

An 'encyclopedia' approach at Indianapolis


Although The Indianapolis Star Library's FactFile website mostly focuses on local topics, it includes a few national-international FactFiles such as the one above on the Sept. 11 attacks

     The Indianapolis Star Library's Factfile site on the IndyStar.com website is entirely under the control of the library. The library staff creates the files, writes the narratives, designs the pages and posts them on the site.

    Librarians start with a template created by the web team for the standard navigation links common to all pages on the site but are not otherwise dependant on the web team for page design and posting. The Library also submits all newly-composed copy to one of the newsroom editors who works on the Web team. His role is to be a copy-editor and one more layer of eyes proofreading the narratives, but he has no dominant role in choosing what topics they cover or how they do it.

    These FactFiles are encyclopedia-style background files on important events and people in the paper's coverage area. As examples, Michael showed the bio file on Evan Bayh (currently a U.S. senator and formerly governor of Indiana), the history of the Indy 500, and the background file on capital punishment in Indiana.

    Michael said those pages originally included links to multiple stories within The Star's former public archive system, but those links have temporarily been masked while the newspaper changes to a different archive system.

    Some FactFiles, such as the coverage on a National Guard recruiting scandal or the 2002 primary election results, link to free copies of the stories on which the FactFiles were based. In some cases the narrative is fairly brief with a long list of story links, as in the case of the page on the Indiana Pacers' 2002 season, while in other cases the narrative is quite long, as in the History of the Pacers.

    After the new archive is online, Michael said, the library staff hopes to go back to the practice of linking from a free-access FactFile to individual stories which the user would have to pay to see. Although he believes that combination of "free and fee" is a good concept, Michael said the most important thing is that they are making this information permanently available on the newspaper's website.

    Michael described his view of what he considers the news library's responsibility on the internet: People in the community should be able to go to the newspaper's website and find the answers to fundamental questions about the community -- even if the newspaper has not written about those things recently.. If you search the name of your mayor you should find a lot more than whatever stories the paper may have written in the past month. If there was a huge controversy last year, readers should be able to find a concise account of what all the fuss was about-even though so much time has passed.

    Although the librarians concentrate on local topics, they did make files on the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the Oklahoma city bombing. There are also files on tornados, norious crimes, major companies, the pro sports teams, etc.

    These files are designed to stay on the site indefinitely, even though some may not be updated very often.

    Each file has an "updated" date so users can tell how current it is.  Narratives are written in past tense so they don't become dated. Instead of saying "Bart Peterson is mayor of Indianapolis" FactFile writers are taught to say "Bart Peterson was elected mayor of Indianapolis in 1999," so when he is no longer in office there will be fewer changes that need to be made.

    Michael also passed out a handout providing some specific HTML code showing how a FactFile or other static webpage can interact with stories in an archive. See the handout for more information on this.

    When answering questions from the audience, Michael said said that the amount of work that goes into this project is less than one full-time person. He credited librarian Barb Hoffman with doing much of the work that is on the site and said two others, Dawn Mitchell and David Savka, have contributed to the project.

     Both Sheryl Rosenthal and Michael Jesse demonstrated great ways news librarians can contribute to the public website of publications and bring revenue into the organization.

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