Sometimes the best way to learn about a subject is just to go out and experiment.

With that thought in mind, I’ve launched a hyperlocal/beat blogging experiment, Chagrin Valley Sports. My goal is simple: provide better and more in-depth coverage of local sports in the Chagrin Valley area utilizing a beat blog. I’m starting out with high school football because it is just me right now, and BeatBlogging.Org is my full-time job.

If the site starts making money, perhaps I can hire people to cover other sports. And, yes, I can already cover football much better than any of the local papers can. Local papers tend to write a sports story about an individual school every few weeks.

These are pretty much just token stories to get schools and names in the paper, but there really is no excuse not to have at least one piece of content each week about each football team. If the site takes off, I’d like to have content about multiple sports teams from schools each week.

I’m not looking to build the coolest features or the flashiest site. I’m looking to build the most useful content. Some hyperlocal projects have been high on the cool factor but lower on the useful factor. But by concentrating on creating useful content, I can produce a lot of it, because useful content often takes less time to produce than cool content.

No, you won’t find fancy Flash graphics on my site. Nor will you find us covering high school football games with multiple video cameras.

But you will find which area players are getting looked at by scouts and which have verbally committed to play college football. If a team changes its defensive scheme, you’ll find out about that too.

My goal is to cover high school sports like professional sports are covered. And that means reporting about scheme changes. That means talking about scouting reports and game previews. It means posting playoff rankings every week.

None of that content takes much time to produce. If you have good relationships with area coaches, they’ll tell you when their players are being offered college scholarships. Playoff rankings are posted each week by OSHAA.Org. All I have to do is find the schools in my coverage area and post how they are doing, and that takes very little time.

Maybe you don’t win awards for this kind of coverage, but I think you can win users with this kind of coverage. This experiment is primarily about driving traffic, and the only way for me to drive serious amounts of traffic is to make my site into THE destination for local sports coverage.

Part of being a destination is about producing more than journalism. This means schedules. This means stats. It means linking to other people’s content. It means owning the conversation. It might even mean maps to area schools.

Ultimately, my goal has to be to make my site into the first place people think of when they think of sports in the Chagrin Valley area. If I can do that, I’ll also become the No. 1 place for local advertisers.

The Chagrin Valley area is a geographic fault line. It’s not in one county, but rather my coverage touches three different counties. I’m not going to cover an arbitrary geographic area, and I think that’s a mistake past hyperlocal projects have made.

I hope to eventually cover news too, but I started with sports because it is easier and less time consuming. It’s also a lot easier to build good will with solid sports coverage. Good will is very important for forging the kind of relationships necessary to have community-driven content succeed.

For instance, I am not taking photos, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want photos for my site. That means I have to forge relationships with people to provide me with what I don’t have. Almost every high school sporting event has at least one dedicated parent or school member who is taking photos.

I need to forge relationships with those people, because I don’t want to duplicate content. In fact, I can’t afford to. I have already forged a relationship with one high school in the area. I’m allowed to use whatever photos they have on their Web site for free, and they take hundreds, if not thousands, a week.

Now, how much has this experiment cost me? Nothing so far. It’s hosted on the same server as the JI, and it is running off a WordPress install with a theme I found.

I customized the theme to make it feel more local for users by randomly generating photos at the top of the page of each school. What says Chagrin Valley sports better than photos of Chagrin Valley teams playing sports?

I also focused on SEO from day one. The No. 1 search result for “Chagrin Valley sports” is my Web site. It turns out the query “Chagrin Valley sports” is a popular one, and it has proven fortuitous already that I named my site after a popular search query.

Maybe I could have thought of a sexier name or a more traditional name like The Chagrin Valley Advocate. But my name, as obvious and blunt as it may be, is an SEO gold mine. I’m already the No. 2 search result for the query “Chagrin Falls football,” behind only Wikipedia. My entrenched local competitors have ignored SEO to their own peril.

And how I am driving traffic to my site? I’m finding the online communities where people talk about local sports and becoming active in those communities. These people are interested in good content, and I need to forge relationships with them.

This site may fail miserably, but it has already been a great learning experience. Making money on the Web is ridiculously hard, and that’s why I have to find a new business model for local journalism.

This is ultimately a proof of concept for a Knight News Challenge Grant I am applying for later this year (this is a tiny fraction of what I am proposing to Knight). Whether or not Knight likes my pragmatic approach to producing Web content remains to be seen. But I’m not going to try to out-cool and out-sexy people.

I’m just going to produce lots of useful content. And I’m going to drive a ton of traffic my way.

On May 8th, I made a post about how a previous post from a year earlier had a resurgence in traffic.

I thought that traffic would eventually subside, but I was wrong. In less than 3 months, that post has almost doubled the amount of page views it has:

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, blogging has taught so much about how the Web works. When I made that post, I never envisioned that more than a year later it would still be receiving consistent traffic.

The Web works so much different than print. With a daily newspaper, for instance, all the views for a story basically come in one shot on the day an article is published. The day I launched that post (and the day after) are nowhere near the biggest days of traffic for that post.

That post also never had a huge day of traffic, and posts don’t need to generate giant days of traffic to be able to bring in a lot of traffic to a blog in the aggregate. About 90 was the most page views that post ever received in one day, but it has consistently drawn traffic. It has about 1,400 page views now, and in a year, it will probably have between 2,000-3,000.

A couple months ago I made a big SEO push on this blog. I changed the URL structure, put the post titles before my blog name, made sure I wrote headlines with lots of keywords for SEO, developed a site map and made some other changes to the site. I knew that my summer might be busy (I did BeatBlogging.org and Stripes at the same time during June), but I didn’t want my traffic to drop off that much.

And it hasn’t. While, I haven’t been setting records, July will probably be my second-highest month in terms of traffic for the JI. Not bad, considering I don’t post that much anymore, and I haven’t had a big, really popular post in awhile (BeatBlogging.Org is where my best work is these days).

But what I do have is a lot of long tail traffic. 165 posts received traffic yesterday, in large part due to strong SEO. With each post I make (this is No. 301), that long tail traffic gets more robust. Most of my traffic comes in via search engines and referrals right now.

Every journalist should at least experiment with blogging. I have been doing Web work since the the 90s, but blogging has taught me so much about the link economy of the Web. More journalists need to understand that economy.

It’s how the Web works.

A whole debate has sprung up on whether or not journalism schools should be teaching Dreamweaver and the basics of Web design.

I’m not going to touch that debate today, but I am going to argue that every journalist should know a little HTML. Every journalist should know how to make a link, whether using the built in link tools in a CMS (or Dreamweaver) or writing out a link tag by hand.

Every journalist should know what this tag is: <a href=”"></a>

That’s not asking much. Every journalist should also know how to bold and italicize words, and understand when and how to use header tags like <h3></h3>

I also believe that every journalist should know how to make unordered and ordered lists. These are basic HTML tags that can make a big difference when posting content on the Web.

And these concepts can be learned in less than a day. HTML is a hell of a lot easier to learn than the English language. So, if you can become a wordsmith, you can learn some HTML.

Many journalists will be transitioning over to the Web to produce content. Journalists will need to know basic HTML, in addition to knowing how to use a CMS. Journalism schools should really be teaching the ins and outs of how to use a (good) CMS.

Many journalists are already being asked to blog. Can you imagine blogging without knowing how to make a proper link?

Another day I’ll tackle the Dreamweaver/WYSIWYG issue. But I think we can all agree it’s not asking much for journalists to know a little HTML.

The Internet and the Web are here to stay, but how we connect with both will be changing.

The personal computer isn’t going anywhere, but people are increasingly accessing the Internet and the Web via mobile devices like smartphones. The iPhone in particular was a watershed moment for the mobile Web because of the power and grace of its user interface and how easy the phone makes using the Web.

Unlike virtually every other mobile device, the iPhone has a full Web browser, Safari 3. It can display Web content like it was meant to be displayed. Despite lacking 3G support (a much faster data network than what the iPhone uses — EDGE), the iPhone’s Web browser is used a lot more than the browser on the typical smartphone.

In fact Google says it gets 50 times more search requests from iPhones than from any other mobile handset. Vic Gundotra, head of Google’s mobile operations, told the Financial Times that mobile Internet searches may overtake fixed Internet searches within the next few years. People want access to information from anywhere, not just when they are seated at a desk.

Apple has caused other manufactures to step up their game in order to compete with the iPhone. Samsung has several phones that will operate on their new TouchWiz UI. The interface looks quite similar to the iPhones, and many other handset markers are looking to mimic Apple’s groundbreaking touchscreen UI.

Mozilla announced late last year that a mobile version of Firefox is in development. A mobile version of Firefox, with its strong standards support and extensibility, might be another watershed moment for the mobile Web. Imagine having access to a full version of the best Web browser available wherever you go.
Te iPhone should improve considerably this year when Apple releases its second-generation iPhone with 3G. The EDGE network that the iPhone connects to is alright for surfing Web pages, reading news, checking mail, etc, but it’s not very good for consuming rich multimedia content. 3G isn’t as fast as the broadband that many people enjoy at home, but it still has a good deal of bandwidth (and other data networks will overtake 3G within the coming years).

That’s bandwidth that can support streaming video, audio slideshows and other bandwidth-intensive task. This is the kind of content that newspapers should already have on their Web sites. All those newspapers struggling to get the Web, are really positioning themselves to fall further and further behind.

And, frankly, many of those papers will probably die within the next 5-10 years. I’m continually amazed by how many newspapers have bad Web products that are merely poorly recreated versions of their print products. A lot of publishers, editors and journalists are saying that they finally get the Web and why it’s important for the future for journalism.

The time for getting the Web was 10 years ago. Now you need to get the Web and the mobile Web. People want to consume content on the go.

Why do I need to be by a computer to get access to the information I want? I shouldn’t, and I no longer have to be tethered to a computer to have access to the Web.

Waiting to meet someone at Starbucks? Why not surf over to NYTimes.com and read a few stories? (NYTimes.com looks great on the iPhone by the way. Many Web sites do not because they were not properly coded using Web standards) Maybe you’ve been out all day, away from your computer and you want to be updated with the latest going on in the world.

That’s the power of the mobile Web. A lot of journalists will say, “why would I need the Web when I’m away from my computer?” These are the same kinds of people who have willfully kept newspapers in the dark ages and have allowed for the catastrophic erosion of a cherished institution.

If you don’t get the Web, you sure as hell won’t get the mobile Web. But then again, the kinds of people who don’t get the Web and why it should be our focus are the kinds of people who should be unemployed.

We have to go where consumers are going. They are going mobile.

I’ll meet you there.

Not convinced that a free, open source project could work for your company?

Here is a list of some companies that use Drupal as a content management system:

1. The Onion - The Onion was founded on a college campus. So, you know it’s good. The Onion publishes a myriad of content from written to video, and it also has a mobile version. Heck, if the most respected name in news uses Drupal, why aren’t you?
2. The New York Observer - It’s only a weekly newspaper, but it has a pretty strong Web presence. You don’t have to be daily to beat the dailies online.
3. Popular Science - It’s like Weird Science, but not. This is a pretty cool looking Web site. One of the better magazine sites out there.
4. Fast Company - A simply stunning site. Very beautiful. I love the “Big Idea” feature. Today’s was “The Blackberry outage made life easier.” Agree or disagree? Go cast your vote.
5. Warner Brother Records - Yes, they are evil RIAA douches, but here is an example of a huge company using Drupal. Of course, record companies are notoriously cheap — they sue 11 year olds.

Not too shabby for a free CMS.

Drupal 6 officially launched yesterday, bringing new features, better security and faster performance, while being easier to use.

This is great news for news organizations looking for a cheap and flexible CMS option, especially college newspapers. If a college newspaper has the right staff in place (Web developers in particular) Drupal is a very strong choice for a CMS. It is very flexible, and it is constantly being improved.

Plus, the price — free — is right for low-budget collegiate publications. Another reason I really like Drupal is that it is highly customizable and extensible through the use of modules. This is great for learning environments because it allows developers to experiment.

Most papers only need a new CMS every few years or so, and that can pose a problem with finding good development talent. Developers like to actually develop, instead of being administrators. By using a customizable CMS like Drupal, you’ll keep your developers happy.

Typically, however, student developers aren’t allowed to touch the CMSes that college newspapers use. This can lead to developers becoming bored. And frankly many people complain that their CMS can’t do this or that, but if you have a CMS that is highly customizable, you have no one to blame but your own staffers.

I also like Drupal because it’s a great platform for continual R&D. Need to roll out new features? Drupal makes it much easier to do this than a proprietary CMS would.

College newspapers should really try to mimic professional newsrooms (the good ones at least). This means college newspaper need to make sure they have front-end and back-end Web Developers.

Drupal has a gotten a lot more powerful and easy to use since the dark ages. It’s a great CMS option for many organizations.

I just told you how journalism is not a good career choice for most of you, but I know many of you are going to attempt to change journalism and I salute you.

Therefor, I would be remiss if I didn’t offer you advice on how to get a good journalism job and how to be prepared for the changing landscape of journalism. What do you need? Lots of skills and a willingness to learn even more skills.

This is advice, however, is only for those j-school students willing to take risks and who aren’t afraid of trying something new — the j-school students who are willing to try to make a difference in the industry during these difficult times.

This is for the few j-school students willing to do whatever it takes to make a difference. This is for the students who don’t believe that only writing is “real journalism.” This is for the students who want to make journalism that matters in the formats and mediums that matters to the people. We serve the people — not ourselves.

This is what you need to do to prepare yourself for modern-day journalism and to be able to land a job in today’s ultra-competitive market place (nothing breeds competition like scarcity):

You must have an online presence – It’s the 21st-century, are you honestly still sending packets of clips out to employers? And if employers want you to snail male them clips, do you honestly want to work for them? The answer to both is, of course, no.

When I built my personal site a few years ago, I set out to develop a place to showcase my work and talents. I knew I needed a digital résumé. A paper résumé might be fine for a print reporter, but for an online journalist it’s laughable.

Want my contact info? Go to my Web site. Want to view my work? Go to my Web site. Want to find out about me? Go to my Web site.

Business cards, printed résumés and biographies are so last century. I wanted to land a job in the 21st century, so I had to figure out a21st century way of marketing myself.

Professor Mindy McAdams tells students to make sure they have a respectable online presence. The key there is respectable. Don’t waste your time with an ugly, mistake-filled Web site that isn’t compatible on a lots of browsers and has very little content on it. Remember, your personal Web site is a reflection of you.

Even if you want to be “just a reporter” you need an online presence. Why? Because many jobs will ask you if you have a blog or personal Web site.

They won’t be impressed with “no.” Some employers might not care if you have online skills or an online presence (there are still many employers out there like this), but many do care deeply and won’t hire a technophobe. They certainly won’t hire a technophobe not in this job market and with the demands modern journalism.

Luckily for all of you, I already wrote a post on how to make a personal Web site: Build a digital résumé and make yourself stand out. If all j-students left school with the ability to launch a personal Web site and blog, journalism would be infused each year with new talent and skills. Journalism needs people with technical skills and a firm understanding of the Web.

But don’t wait on starting that personal Web site. Meranda Watling says to just do it.

You must have at least some online and multimedia skills — If you have a lot of online and multimedia skills and the flexibility and willingness to learn new things, not only am I confident that you can make a difference, but I’m also confident you would be extremely employable should you choose to leave journalism (and you might have to one day whether you want to or not).

Last year I made a summer reading list for j-school students who wanted to learn new media skills. It covers HTML, CSS, audio, video, Flash, blogs, etc. The list is for learning technical skills, but you’ll also want some more general online skills. Do you belong to social networks? You should at least try a few out.

Try them all and see which ones you like. I guarantee you won’t like them all, but I’m confident you’ll like a few. Understanding social networking is very important for journalists moving forward. The No. 1 thing that most news sites lack is the kind of conversation and community participation that blogs and social networks foment.

If you look at the way most new sites integrate with social networks, it’s a very me-first strategy. News companies are only interested in finding ways of getting users to push news content onto social networks, but it doesn’t really serve the readers. Instead of asking our audience to seek us, we should go out and seek our audience.

The problem, however, is that the majority of people working at and running news sites don’t get social networking and its power. Make it your mission to get social networking. The Web is going to be increasingly social in the years to come.

And I would never, ever consider hiring a new grad who didn’t use social networks. Almost all college kids do, and if you don’t, it would be a huge red flag. Huge.

It’s not too late to learn — It’s never too late to learn skills, whether you are a last semester senior staring at graduation in four months or a 65-year-old reporter. If you’re younger than a college senior, you have no excuse for not learning lots of online and multimedia skills.

If your j-school doesn’t teach the skills you need to succeed — and they probably don’t — make it your mission to learn on your own. Most j-schools will teach you how to be a good interviewer and reporter. Now you just need to learn how to translate those skills into new mediums.

And frankly, it’s not that hard. Sign up for a Lynda.com account to learn lots of online skills. A years worth of great training videos, tutorials and work sheets is less than a lot of you pay for a semesters worth of books you’ll barely touch.

Finally, forget all that talk about how journalists only produce content while we leave the business and marketing to others. You need to understand business and marketing, because you are in the business of marketing yourself.

Go out and grab yourself the computer, online and multimedia skills you need to compete in the 21st century. Then market the hell out of yourself with a great personal Web site and a strong presence on social networks in the blogosphere.

What are you waiting for? Do it.

Apparently every newspaper that has a bad Web site got some sort of memo that said, “if you just put video on your Web site, you’ll get tons of traffic and be a modern newspaper. It’ll be totally bitchin’.”

But here is the thing: Doing video poorly will only hurt your newspaper. It will cost you money, waste your staff resources and cause viewers to find other, better Web sites. Look at this video from The Morning Call of Gov. Ed Rendell (D-Pa.) announcing he is endorsing Hillary Clinton (I know, riveting).

It was shot on a cheap camera with an internal mic and without a tripod. The video doesn’t sound good, doesn’t look that good and — this is rich — someone walks in front of the camera at some point.

Real professional.

Plus the video is just plain boring. This event was not something made for Internet video, especially a clip that is almost two minutes of just press conference footage. It’s not a remotely important or exciting press conference.

I only watched the clip because a reader tipped me off to the bad video and how he felt it hurt the Morning Call’s image. The Morning Call, by the way, is the third largest paper in Pennsylvania with 100,000+ circulation.

Newspapers, don’t do video that isn’t shot well or by someone who knows how to shoot video. You don’t need the fanciest camera, but you should know when to use a tripod and what is worth shooting. Both of those judgments were clearly lacking in this video.

Long before I’d invest in video, I’d do these things: audio clips to add to print stories, photo essays, photo galleries, audio slideshows, databases, flash infographics, blogs, twitter feeds, social features and microsites.

And, of course, I’d make sure my Web site had a good user interface and that all the content was easily searchable.

With video, you are competing against established content providers, like the local news. And that video The Morning Call posted was worse than most of what is on YouTube. When high school and college kids can provide better quality and content, you should really reconsider what you’re doing.

Honestly, what advertiser is going to want to sign up for poor video? We can’t complain that no one wants to pay for our content when we produce content that is worse than what is on free sites like YouTube.

You could have a totally modern news site without video, and video will not suddenly transform your site into something modern. Be smart with your resources, because the industry doesn’t have a lot of room for error.

EveryBlock is ChicagoCrime.org on steroids, and it is officially here to change the face of journalism forever.

EveryBlock strives to put data into the hands of citizens down to the block level. It strives to give users a much better portrait of the world around them. From the introductory blog post at EveryBlock:

For a long time, that’s been a tough question to answer. In dense, bustling cities like Chicago, New York and San Francisco, the number of daily media reports, government proceedings and local Internet conversations is staggering. Every day, a wealth of local information is created — officials inspect restaurants, journalists cover fires and Web users post photographs — but who has time to sort through all of that?

Our mission at EveryBlock is to solve that problem. We aim to collect all of the news and civic goings-on that have happened recently in your city, and make it simple for you to keep track of news in particular areas. We’re a geographic filter — a “news feed” for your neighborhood, or, yes, even your block.

The funny thing about both sites is that they are the kind of data that newspapers should have been giving their readers for years on the Web. Why doesn’t the Chicago Tribune do this? It took four people less than a year to build EveryBlock for three major markets — Chicago, San Fransisco and New York.

Founder Adrian Holovaty describes EveryBlock over at Poynter:

EveryBlock filters an assortment of local news by location so you can keep track of what’s happening on your block, in your neighborhood and all over your city. We compile news, we classify it by location/geography, and we present a beautiful, easy-to-use interface that lets people view news in specific locations.

There are two main ways of reading news on EveryBlock — by location and by type. You can search for any address, neighborhood or zip code in the city (more on the city list in a bit), or you can browse by type of information: restaurant inspections, mainstream media articles/blog entries, crimes, building permits, etc.

At its core EveryBlock is a service. Newspapers used to a service too. Perhaps EveryBlock can inspire newspapers to rediscover that core.

Compare EveryBlock to the data ghettos we find at most newspapers sites. EveryBlock takes large amounts of data and presents it in an easy-to-use user interface. Newspapers have largely ignored the importance of a good user interface for years, even though user interfaces are critical to the success of products.

The data doesn’t matter if users can’t figure out what to do with it. I’m sure EveryBlock will be changing in the next few months, but it is already a step forward for journalism, even if it might leave the mainstream media behind.

Time, Slate and others have begun using Twitter to post rapid-fire updates from the campaign trail and at primaries and caucuses.

And if they can do it, why can’t you? You can.

Twitter is easy. Signing up takes seconds. All you have to know how to do is type 140 characters or less and hit submit.

It works with many smart phones, and it can help take coverage to a whole new level. Don’t believe me? Check out this NY Times article about how Twitter is changing political campaign coverage.

Here is the thing: what have you got to lose by trying microblogging or beat blogging? Nothing. In fact, you stand to gain a lot.

To Josh Tyrangiel, the managing editor of Time.com, “the business thinking is the same as almost all of my business thinking: Why not?” The more exposure to Time.com’s material, the better, and no one can afford to be choosy about the setting. So Ms. Cox also has a Flickr feed for her photographs from the campaign trail that Mr. Tyrangiel is happy to promote. Ultimately, he said, it is a hopeless fight.

“If you tell people how to consume their content, they will ignore you,” he said, a truism that experience had taught new-media executives. “Let people do what they want to do and try to be in their circle of choice.”

Let that last quote marinate for a bit. That’s how you succeed in the 21st century.