• APME Broken Budgets: New interactive released
• Special Edition: Back to School
• AP Lifestyles July Coverage
• Sept 11 - A Decade Later
• Weekly Money & Markets WebEx Demo
• Updated Stylebook Mobile apps available for iPhone and BlackBerry
• Change to Member Choice features: Member Innovation
• Beat of the Week Winners

 APME Broken Budgets: New interactive released

As part of the APME Broken Budgets initiative, the AP released an interactive graphic that includes detailed and historical budget figures, pension and retiree health care obligations, funding for public schools, higher education and prisons, bond debt and federal stimulus spending, among other information. The underlying information will be updated throughout the year. New data will be added as needed, providing an opportunity for AP members to get fresh, real-time information about budgeting in the 50 states. Members are able to fully engage the cooperative aspect of their relationship with the AP, suggesting information they would like to see collected for the graphic going forward.

The 50-state interactive is part of the yearlong initiative by The Associated Press and Associated Press Managing Editors to examine the fiscal crisis facing U.S. states and cities. AP members with Hosted Custom News or interactive media subscriptions receive the interactive as part of those entitlements. It is being made available at a discounted rate to other AP members. The underlying data also is being made available in Excel form to all members so they can create their own graphic or add context to their reporting. The password-protected information can be found at the following links in Firefox at ftp://ftp.ap.org/; and in Internet Explorer at ftp://ftp.ap.org/BrokenBudgets.

Contact me if you want to buy the graphic at the discounted rate or if you would like the login information for the underlying data, which will be provided on request.

APME Innovator of the Year Finalists

Wednesday, July 06, 2011

Posted by: Jack Lail
  
The Kansas City Star, The Register Citizen in Torrington, Conn., and a group of Pennsylvania newspapers are finalists in the Associated Press Managing Editors' annual Innovator of the Year contest.

The papers will present their work at the annual APME conference Sept. 14-16 in Denver. After the presentations, the audience will choose the winner.

The Kansas City Star is honored for the Midwest Democracy Project, a collaborative experiment to find new and better ways for Kansas and Missouri citizens to get informed and engage in civic debate. The newspaper's partners include the University of Kansas William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications, and the University of Missouri School of Journalism and its Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute.

The Register Citizen is honored for its Open Newsroom Project that turned its newsroom into a community center, opening the process of local journalism to the public. Readers are invited to attend daily newsroom meetings and use 134 years of local archives. The Register Citizen, an 8,000-circulation northwest Connecticut daily, won APME's monthly innovation contest for January.

The Pennsylvania Broken Budgets project, which involved 33 newspapers and The Associated Press bureaus in Pennsylvania, is honored for collaboration in informing readers of state legislative staffing. In all, one out of 11 legislative workers in the country works in Pennsylvania, and taxpayers pay $300 million a year to fuel the legislature. This project, which stemmed from the AP-APME Broken Budgets initiative, won APME's monthly innovation contests for April.

This is the fifth year for APME's Innovator of the Year. The winning entry will receive $2,000 from the contest sponsors, GateHouse Media and the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri.

Previous winners of APME's Innovator of the Year contest are The Seattle Times in 2010; The Oklahoman of Oklahoma City in 2009; the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2008, and The News-Press of Fort Myers, Fla., in 2007.

Newspapers are encouraged to submit their innovative work for monthly recognition. Visit http://www.apme.com/ for details.

Special Edition: Back to School

The “Back to School” Special Edition includes stories on back-to-school fashion; how to get acclimated to a new school after a move; the debate over perfect attendance; when high school students and their parents should start preparing for the college race (and how); and what parents wish they’d told their kids before they left for college. All stories will be accompanied by photos.

Upcoming 2011 Special Editions:

-August: Fall homes

-September: Cars

-October: Winter weddings

-November: Holidays

-December: Retirement

To find Special Edition content in AP Exchange, search for stories with “SPE” in the slug using the “advanced search” function.

AP Lifestyles July Coverage

In addition to “Back to School” Special Edition, Lifestyles will have a second week of spot, back-to-school themed stories the week of July 18, including recipes, fashion, cool new products for doing schoolwork, and a look at a new book called “Lockdown High” about zero-tolerance and security trends at high schools.

We’ll also have a Ramadan story at the end of the month about how US Muslims cope with summer daytime fasts during long hours between sunrise and sundown.

Also from Lifestyles this month in fashion, Paris couture shows and Miami swimwear shows; in travel, Mexico tequila tours, Versailles bike trip and Asheville, NC, hiking; Napa wine country with kids; Florida zipline over alligator country, and superhero tour of NYC; and in parenting, what’s behind the rise in home births among rural Americans and a story on “elimination communication” -- how to potty train a baby. 

Sept 11 - A Decade Later

As we approach Sept. 11, 2011, The Associated Press is pursuing stories in all formats to document how the terror attacks have transformed the nation over the past decade, politically, culturally and philosophically.

The AP will offer enterprise in the coming months that focuses on themes like American identity, fear, transformation and the politics of memory and memorials. The AP's coverage will come from across the globe, making the most of its breadth, multiple formats and reporters’ insights to show how this world-changing event has rippled outward into lives across the world.

As part of our coverage, AP writer Tamara Lush will be traveling the country in the coming months to document how the country has changed since that fateful day. For questions about coverage, contact 9/11 anniversary editor Amy Westfeldt at awestfeldt@ap.org, or at 212-621-1969.

Weekly Money & Markets WebEx Demo

AP will be offering a standing weekly WebEx demo to help educate members about Money & Markets.  The demo will provide an overview of Money & Markets in print and online, as well as showcasing modules, best practices, monetization examples and directions on how to enhance existing presentations or start a new service.  The demo is expected to last approximately 45 minutes and is open to all members.

A new tab to the www.markets.ap.org website has been added to allow members to link directly to the training session. 

Money & Markets Weekly Meeting Details:

Every Thursday at 3:00PM EST

Meeting Number: 483 931 822

Meeting Password: money

https://ap.webex.com/ap/j.php?J=483931822&PW=NMTc1MmIwMTli

If you have questions, please contact John Parker at JParker@ap.org or 816-654-1091.

Updated Stylebook Mobile apps available for iPhone and BlackBerry

AP Stylebook Mobile is available for iPhone and for BlackBerry, so you can have AP style wherever you take your smartphone.

Stylebook Mobile features searchable listings for the main, sports, business, punctuation and social media sections, along with the ability to add your own custom entries as well as notes on AP listings. Star your favorite entries to easily find the listings you go to over and over again.

Stylebook Mobile is updated annually when the new printed Stylebook comes out and the 2011 apps are now available for purchase. The latest Stylebook features a new section with food and recipe guidance, as well as an expanded social media chapter. More than 500 terms have been added or updated since the 2010 edition.

Stylebook Mobile for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad is available on the iTunes store.

Stylebook Mobile for BlackBerry is available on BlackBerry App World. 

Learn more about Stylebook Mobile.

Pets page does the trick for drawing advertising

Pet owners spend more than $50 billion annually on their pets and make up more than 62 percent of the U.S. population. Navarre Press Publisher Sandi Kemp in Florida wanted to target that market with strong content, and also connect it with advertisers. So, the Navarre Press created a weekly pets page that is presold for a year at a time and has strong relevant content from The Associated Press. The content from AP is combined with local stories and photos to generate interest and a regular revenue stream.

In creating the page, the newspaper designed a mock-up page and sent it to pet-related businesses. The weekly newspaper’s pet-related advertisers were asked to sign new agreements or to extend existing agreements and move to the niche page. The minimum commitment for each advertiser is 52 weeks. The result was a niche page that appeals to readers and advertisers alike. On the one-year anniversary of the page, the paper had a party and offered to take portraits for its “Pet of the Week” feature.  Each “Pet of the Week” is posted on the paper’s Facebook Page, generating traffic back to www.navarrepress.com.

“We also placed the pictures from our event online where the pet owners could purchase mugs, calendars, playing cards, etc., with their pet’s picture,” Kemp said.

Beat of the Week Winners Aging Nukes

The idea began with a routine brainstorming session. Two veterans of nuclear power coverage were recalling the days when the industry was subject to much greater scrutiny. Jeff Donn, a member of the National Investigative Team, remembered covering the closing of the Yankee Rowe reactor in Massachusetts because of damage from age in 1991. Investigative Editor Rick Pienciak had covered Three Mile Island in 1979. What, they wondered, is happening now with even older plants? Donn began combing through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s document database, which contains about 2.5 million documents, with ample references to such aging problems as brittle reactor vessels, leaky valves and busted seals. Over the next year, the Aging Nukes project was pursued with the full range of investigative techniques. The result: a four-part series, Aging Nukes, with a 4,200-word opening installment that proclaimed: Federal regulators have been working closely with the nuclear power industry to keep the nation's aging reactors operating within safety standards by repeatedly weakening those standards, or simply failing to enforce them.

Olympics scoop

It was almost cloak-and-dagger stuff, with whispered meetings and secret codes. Steve Wilson, AP's London-based European sports editor, was staking out International Olympic Committee headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland, where NBC, Fox and ESPN were bidding for the next set of multibillion-dollar U.S. television rights. As a small IOC group deliberated two floors above, several hours passed with no sign of movement, so Wilson prowled the halls. Eventually, he caught sight of two key negotiators sneaking through a side door. After 20 years on the Olympic beat, Wilson knew something was up. He sent a text message to an official he had known for years. The reply: "We have a winner." But who was the winner? Wilson ran into an IOC official with first-hand knowledge of the decision and, as they shook hands, asked if NBC was the winner. Tap his palm once if it was, Wilson said, and the official did. Just to be sure, he asked him to do it again, and he did. Wilson then spotted an international TV executive leaving the building and followed him out. The executive confirmed not only that NBC was the winner, but that the deal was for four Olympics – not just two – and was worth more than $4 billion.

Reaching into history
The assignment was daunting: Find the boy on a video that horrified the world during the Bosnian war. Not only did Sarajevo Correspondent Aida Cerkez, APTN cameraman Eldar Emric and photographer Amel Emric find him. They were able to reconstruct an enduring image of the war. The search began after Gen. Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military commander, was arrested on war crimes charges. A grinning Mladic was shown in the video in July 1995 patting the 8-year-old Muslim boy on the head, giving him chocolate and assuring him that everyone in Srebrenica would be safe. Hours later, 8,000 Muslim men and boys were massacred. The boy was believed to be dead or to have fled abroad, but the AP staffers handed out pictures of the boy. Cerkez’ mother got the first break when a group of women said, "His name is Izudin Alic." Eldar Emric hired a stringer who went village to village, finally reaching a café where several men told where the boy’s house was. The AP took Alic, now 24, back to his family home. He showed family albums, took the stringer to his father's grave and identified himself on a YouTube video.
 

Tsunami risk

Tokyo business writer Yuri Kageyama had little experience with Japan's decade-old public records law, the equivalent of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. Nevertheless, the law would prove pivotal to the revelation that Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s tsunami-risk assessment at its Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant amounted to a single-page document that was never really examined by regulators and hadn’t been updated in a decade. Kageyama was looking into the utility’s efforts to assess the tsunami risk when a senior official at Japan's Nuclear Industrial and Safety Agency mentioned the document. But when Kageyama asked for a copy, the official refused. So she turned to Justin Pritchard of the National Investigative Team. He suggested she file the request under the public record law. To her surprise, she heard back from an official asking for more details. Then, after the required 30-day waiting period, she received a bare-bones document that was the sum total of tsunami preparedness assessment from the operator of the crippled nuclear plant. The assessment ruled out the possibility of a tsunami large enough to knock the complex offline.