No. 5: Evergreen content
Where I work, the word “evergreen” brings groans from
reporters. It describes the stories you have to do to fill the paper during
holidays, when most everyone else is off and the news is slow.
On the web, it means something much more
different.
It’s not filler, but rather
useful features that people may return to repeatedly.
But unlike holiday news features, which editors clamor for and
demand, selling evergreen web content can be difficult in newsrooms that still
focus on the print product.
“Why are you wasting your time on that?” you might
here.
After all, evergreen content on
the web may not translate into stories for print.
Yet as we explore
Rob Curley’s seven steps to improve our
delivery of news, we learn evergreen content is important.
One big selling point of producing evergreen content is as a
training tool for the newsroom.
As you learn how to produce slideshows and video and other new tools of
the trade, picking an evergreen project provides a good tool for
experimentation.
You can play with
different features and techniques, and learn the skills you are going to have
to have someday – and sooner than you think – in a breaking news situation.
But with evergreens, there are no deadlines.
You can take your time and learn.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune does this with
a great feature called See-Saw”
(via
Melissa Worden’s X-Degree).
“The benefit of this evergreen content is that as it adds to
the community development of the site, it gives the newsroom a chance to learn
and play with multimedia projects and storytelling,” Worden writes.
You can see the kind of evergreens Rob Curley’s crew
provides for its hyperlocal
Loudoun Extra,
which includes a 250-year history
of the county.
At our site, we
decided to do an
interactive feature of our local art crawl, called “Final
Friday.” I can tell you, at first, we ran into some resistance while we were working on it.
But it provided a valuable training tool
that allowed me to be able to do multimedia for “more serious news” later.