Torrens: As The D.O.’s readership shifts from print to online, we’re taking major steps toward digital innovation

There’s never been a better opportunity to be a part of digital innovation at The Daily Orange than right now. The digital team is the largest section within the in-house staff, and its workflow has so much stake in a night of production that we’ve begun to qualify The D.O. as “the organization” rather than “the paper.”

The expansion of our digital production came after looking into how The D.O.’s print and digital platforms can work together but target different audiences. Because students typically access The D.O. through social media and on their phones, we’ve geared our digital content toward topics that interest the campus community, while our print content focuses on stories affecting the greater Syracuse community. Though plenty of campus news still makes it into the paper, there’s an emphasis on covering city stories, including the mayoral race and the future of Interstate 81.

We’re excited to build on this mentality, considering we were named Newspaper and Online Pacemaker finalists by the Associated College Press for our work during the 2016-17 academic year.

Our partnership with Snapchat to create a weekly Publisher Story geared toward campus is a prime example of how we’re working to better engage our student readership. Snapchat approached The D.O. and three other student newspapers in the spring to participate in the Campus Publisher Story pilot program, and The D.O. launched its story the first week of the semester after assembling a Snapchat team over the summer.

The Publisher Story highlights campus-centric features, polls and fun facts. Our channel has 966 subscribers and averages 24,550 views per week. The story is geofenced, meaning it’s only accessible via Snapchat’s Discover page for people on Main and South campuses, but it’s viewable to anyone who searches “The Daily Orange” on Snapchat’s home page.

To help with our Snapchat production and other digital work, we increased our number of digital design editors from one to three. We also recently welcomed a digital copy chief to ensure the content we’re publishing is clear and concise on all digital platforms.

We were able to introduce these positions by streamlining social media management under the digital editor and utilizing the senior staff to edit enterprise stories and meet with developing writers, which allowed us to cut the social media director and development editor positions.

In addition to our Snapchat ventures, we’ve amped up our podcast production to include two regular podcasts — one based on regional STEM news and the other on sports — and added two email newsletters. Pulp’s newsletter, which focuses on events in the community, is sent every Friday morning, and our sports newsletter is sent on Sundays. Our video team is also consistently publishing one video per week with the help of its expanding network of contributing videographers.

In an effort to better serve the Syracuse community using our digital platforms, we’ve teamed up with ProPublica on its Documenting Hate project to launch a form on our site that allows readers to submit hate incidents on campus. ProPublica approached The D.O. about using the tool, which will allow us to connect with readers in a more personal way and allow readers to provide tips on these incidents.

As part of our print vs. digital assessment, we also took a hard look at the content that had been published in the paper for years and re-evaluated its purpose. Perhaps the largest makeover in print was on page 2, which transformed from the anchor for Pulp’s daily front-of-book feature to a serviceable page that includes an “about The D.O.” section, a code for our Snapchat Publisher Story and our letter to the editor policy, among other details highlighting The D.O. as a community service.

In addition to front-of-book items like Meet Monday and Tattoo Tuesday, Pulp columns are also now online-only. To compensate for the space columns usually occupied on a given day in the section, Pulp has developed a beat system that slots stories relevant to the campus and city communities into the paper, including dining, theater and festival news. This has also led to a series of embedded service guides, including an Outdoors Guide, a Homecoming Guide and a Family Weekend Guide.

News is experiencing a similar renaissance in its beat system, which previously included a rotation of speciality pages dedicated to topics such as city news and happenings at SUNY-ESF and other universities. Realizing we didn’t want to keep some of these topics tucked inside the paper and relegated to just one day per week, we cut the specialty page and doubled down on the topics that had substance and value to readers.

Now, stories that would traditionally be published on the News specialty page are worked into the regular budget, and our writers can focus on city and university politics stories that readers value and that provide substantial experience for budding journalists.

As The D.O. continues its evolution toward a digital-first newsroom, we’re excited to keep experimenting and learning what works, what doesn’t and what we can do that no other Syracuse publication can.

Alexa Torrens is the managing editor of The Daily Orange, where she previously served as editorial editor, news editor, development editor and asst. news editor. She can be reached at atorrens21@gmail.com.