Through borrowed laptops, digging a thumb drive out of the bottom of a coffee cup, and disregarding my company’s insatiable desire for keeping pageviews in-house, I have used Tableau at work.
Here is the first Tableau data vis I made for ADVaristySports.com. A graph showing the number of wins for local basketball teams in comparison to the number of games played:
It’s Tableau, so of course, it’s fully interactive. Click on a line in the graph or on a school name there on the right, and everything else is grayed out to highlight that one particular team. You can also flip back and forth between separate charts for boys and girls teams.
The use of this is to give a visual demonstration of when the teams we cover had hot streaks, cold streaks, etc. Of course, the higher up the line goes on the graph, the more wins the team had. If the graph is just moving parallel, that indicates a string of losses.
In a couple of days, I’ll be writing a post detailing the bit of MacGyver journalism it took to get this going. Not too much, but some.
Even cooler is that several of the features E&P gave us the award for were projects I was a part of. So I’ll pull the excerpts from the E&P article and explain in detail what I do that’s a part of these projects.
The paper teamed up with two chambers of commerce to produce nearly a dozen political forums during the primary and general elections last year. Employees, including the editor, lugged the necessary equipment to various locations so they could do live webcasts and live blogging.
Yeah, lugging that equipment around was a pain, trust me. The origin of these political forums was the general demise of all local programming in the Yuba-Sutter area by Comcast. Before, there would be televised candidate forums on good ol’ local Channel 19. Well, Channel 19 is basically no more now, so that left a hole in who would produce it. Well, it wound up being us.
My part in this, besides being one of the many equipment haulers, was the liveblogging section of the webcast. I managed the CoverItLive liveblogs. I would create poll questions to pose for those watching the livestream, relay suggested questions for the moderators from the online audience, and moderate the user discussion going on.
It was definitely warmer inside the Yuba County Government Center than when I was liveblogging the section title football game a couple of years ago.
Last September, the newspaper began using QR codes, two-dimensional bar-type codes that enable smartphone users to link content, enter online contests and view photos.
Ah, QR codes. Fascinating things. I’ll admit, I was a little cold to their use at the beginning, at least on the news side. I thought they would have more use on the advertising side.
If you've never seen one before, this is a QR code. Scanning it will link to this blog.
But I’m a convert. I now see QR codes as being probably the best possible way to blend a print publication with an online counterpart. There are those who still prefer a print newspaper over reading it on a computer or on their smartphone or tablet (I don’t know how many, I just know they exist). But now, if those same people have a smartphone, they can now get the whole interactive experience. Say a reader wants to watch a video, but doesn’t feel like firing up the computer to do it. Well, now if they have an iPhone, Blackberry, or any smartphone that runs Android, they can use a scanner app (there’s several free ones), one quick scan and they’re watching our video on their phone.
I think publications intended for readers on the move, such as business journals or free music publications, could find even more benefit from QR codes than we have.
In the sports department, we use a lot of QR codes, since we produce a lot of video and the photographers do a lot of game slideshows (Photography is a major traffic driver at ADVaristySports.com). Every video and slideshow is given a QR code in print. We link to our weekly podcast with a QR code, and we have a standing QR code linking to our blog The Press Box, that can go in whenever the situation calls for it.
It’s my job to obtain the QR codes. We get unique QR codes for every new video or slideshow, through a vendor named interlinkONE. I then download the QR code graphic, run it through Photoshop to give it the proper specifications to make it play nice with our pagination software, and it’s ready for the newspage.
It’s pretty cool to have been a part of something that results in this kind of recognition. I’m thinking it won’t be the last time in my life something like this happens.
No posting for awhile as I’ve been in adjustment to the new working environment.
But here’s how things have been going so far.
Good. Really good. I won’t say “great,” because in my opinion nothing going on in the newspaper industry right now merits the word “great.”
I’m in my third week on the new job as online sports editor. It’s included one revamped product launch, one new product launch, and a second new product launch coming next week.
So first things first, I’m busier. That was a given. And honestly, it’s better that way. I felt guilty not having a lot to do at the beginning of the week before. Now, while I can still tell the end of the week has more to do than the beginning of the week, the difference isn’t as drastic.
Also making a big difference is the enthusiasm and willingness of the sports staff to do Web stuff. Want a blog post? No problem? I brought up the possibility of podcasting, and everybody wanted to do it. Not figuratively everybody, but literally everybody.
My switch in jobs coincided with a redesign of ADVarsitySports.com. It was a company-wide design change across Freedom Communications, so I didn’t have any real specific input on the project. So it’s a matter of adjusting as much as I can within the limits of what the design and CMS allow me to do to tailor the site to feature what we do best as much as possible.
I’m attacking it with a strategy of keeping the last two slots on the 9-spot rotating A-box as teases to our Twitter and Facebook, since in the redesign we lost a separate rotator for promotions. I’m reserving the “Featured Stories” box on the left rail for more feature-style stories that don’t have a strong time element.
Like any redesign, there’s some aspects of it I’m hearing about it that some readers don’t like. And like any complaints, some I understand and even agree with to various extents, others are just plain ridiculous. We’ll see how it goes over time.
As far as data visualization, not a lot going on there yet. There’s just so much limitation for day-to-day statistics without being able to insert Java-based visualizations into stories on our CMS. The coding won’t even allow for Java inside our WordPress blog. If I had to pick a work-related frustration that’s developed, that’s it.
But onto the good and positive stuff.
The shift change has made it easier for me to film more sports video. Before, filming a sporting event meant changing my entire schedule. Now, it doesn’t. So filming three games is pretty straightforward to do.
As an added bonus, I’m not limited to just producing a game highlight video. If there’s an interesting detail of the game I think is worth of highlighting individually, I now have the time available to go back into the files and build secondary videos. Three examples so far: The see-saw fourth quarter between rivals Lindhurst and (big underdog) Marysville, a key 11-0 run for Faith Christian, and the video below, a replay of big dunks by Yuba College:
Plus, there was also the launch of a new product and one in the works I’m excited about.
Then, last week, we launched a e-newsletter called “Sidelines” that acts as a rundown of content from the sports department during the previous week, pitching the big upcoming sports events of the next week, and acting as a teaser for video and slideshows. It makes use of a list of 700 people that have signed up for sports e-mail updates that had, up until now, gotten nothing.
And as I mentioned before, I was doing some microphone dabbling at my desk this past week to see the capabilities of doing a two-microphone podcast with GarageBand. Needless to say, the sports guys were really enthusiastic about doing it (one writer even has two years of podcasting experience, blows my two semesters of college radio out of the water). So we’re shooting for doing the first episode of The Press Box Podcast (co-branding it with the site’s blog) next week.
So, thus far I’m really excited. Based on some early projections, we’re looking at around a 20 percent YOY growth for the month of February, which is good heading into the spring season, since baseball and softball are traditionally very popular sports in the area.
Things are changing around for me at work. Maybe to an even bigger extent than the move I made two years ago.
Starting this Monday, I take on a role as editor of my paper’s prep sports site, ADVarsitySports.com.
Freedom is current rolling out redesigns of its Varsity prep sports sites in its various markets. My paper’s site has been one of the more popular Varsity sites in the chain, so we’re at the front of getting the upgrade.
If you want to see what it looks like, the Orange County Register has their new Varsity site up already because, well, they’re OC.
But this new Varsity will require a little more work on organization end as far as uploading stories, and is a little more demanding on interactive content. So the decision was made to move me over into the editor role and handle the site’s story uploading.
It’s going to be an interesting change. I’ll be working the late shift full-time now, which I do have mixed feelings about. I will still handle a few of the news-side duties I had before, as far as updating databases and (hopefully) building interactive graphics, but it looks like I won’t be filming news videos anymore, just based on the timeframe.
But at the same time, there’s a lot of things that are good about this, which in the newspaper industry is becoming a rarer and rarer thing. I get to work with a sports staff that’s excited about and really into doing things for both print and online. The schedule and responsibilities allow me a little more room to experiment than I had before. Plus, I now have pretty much “buck stops here” responsibility for a news website, which is maybe the most exciting thing about this to me. Not that I’m running the whole show, I’ve still got supervisors and their expectations, but I’ll get to make a lot of decision-making content-wise and what goes where. And I get to sleep in if I want!
Oh, I’ll still be keeping an eye on the news side of the interactive world. I’ll still be doing my Tableau experimentation and other things. But this should, hopefully, be a lot of fun.
I took home the spreadsheet built for the Appeal-Democrat’s Mid-Valley Unemployment Database (which is built on the site in Caspio) to see what other looks I could come up with in Tableau. Especially since the unemployment database, being organized by county, gives the potential for something to be done to create an interactive map, which I’ve been itching to do since I’ve been totally jealous of the stuff the Sacramento Bee has been doing with map-displayed databases but I haven’t had access to a copy of Flash and Illustrator to build on the basics I got while at KDMC in Berkeley.
I selected only 3 1/2 years out of the 20-year data set, since this range best demonstrates just how much unemployment has spiked in the area. Also, I’m kind of bummed that the playback feature available on the desktop isn’t available once you share it publicly. Without looking on the Tableau forums and just assuming (*dramatic music*) Imagine it has to do with the loading speed from the public servers.
Probably tomorrow before work (night shift…some news to share on that later) I’ll start work on the multi-view dashboards like Joe made for the UCW data.
