“I didn’t come to Twitter until last year, after pretty much everyone in Nashville had already jumped on board,” says Grantham, who now uses the service daily as the voice of the station’s NashvilleIsTalk.com — a site devoted to interacting with the community.

Rather than use a standard template developed for a group of organizations under the same corporate ownership, NIT uses a customized Drupal theme, which allows for easy integration with other social sites such as twitter, blogger, and other blog sites.

NashvilleIsTalking.com all but abolishes the need for staple feature pieces like “man-on-the-street.” Rather than one person being tasked with asking strangers a common question for the community’s reaction, you can now visit NIT. Registered users can maintain profiles, create and moderate groups, vote on aggregated content, browse the comments of Nashville area Twitter users, read Nashville-area blogs and much more.

In addition to its social networking components, Grantham uses the site’s front page to debut the story he’s working on through out the day, which gives the community a chance to improve the direction of information and often fill in gaps in reporting, he says.

“It has really become an important tool for me in the newsroom. Not only am I able to share breaking news items, but I also share news leads that come from Twitter with the producers.

“Had I joined Twitter when everyone else did I’d probably still be tweeting what I ate for lunch,” Grantham says.

For more insight into how to make local news interactive, check out Grantham’s responses to interview questions below:

What attracted you to the job of community-journalist for NIT / WKRN?

I rediscovered a passion and began searching for a job in communications using the web. WKRN stood out to me for a couple of reasons. Most importantly they seemed to have a clear vision of the role the net can play in connecting directly with an audience.

How much of NIT was realized before the site was created?

The concept of the site being a single authored blog had already been in place by the time I got here. It used a MovableType platform at the time. All the content was created by one author, and [a mix of] paid and volunteer authors on the weekend. Shortly after arriving, I migrated NIT to the more open-source platform Drupal, which opened us up to using a world of plugins. I created other blogs for staff and also balanced that with producing an evening newscast. It was a very difficult balancing act.

When management changed, NIT went through a widely noted transition period that was very difficult on the community. We lost our blogger, Brittney Gilbert, who was viewed as a voice for the community. It took some time before I could focus full time on the site. Once I could, I worked with a sister station to transform the site into something more than a blog.

What has changed since then?

Now the site does much more than current blog platforms can. Registered users can maintain profiles, create and moderate their own groups, vote on aggregated content, browse the tweets of Nashville area Twitter users, quickly see what Nashville area bloggers are posting about in the NIT Cloud (a cloud of terms aggregated from the daily posts of more than 250 area blogs), and a lot more. The site literally provides over 100,000 RSS feeds of any topic you can imagine. If you want a feed of all Nashville area blog posts about the Titans, you got it.

The investment in Nashville Is Talking by new management has allowed it to become a powerful and robust extension of the original vision of providing the community a platform to connect with each other based on their shared values and interests. The more robust community-driven platform also brings a dose of reality to that vision in terms of creating a more viable community-driven model. The model before that had predictable problems that are addressed by turning the site over to the community.

When did you become familiar with twitter, digg, and other social networking tools?

I became familiar with social networking tools in 2000. In 1999, I began what is now called “blogging” at my own personal website. I was manually posting and archiving entries. Shortly after that, a friend introduced me to MovableType. Things snowballed from there. Before that, I used BBS’s. Things have really changed over the past 12 years!

Would you call yourself an early adopter of new technology?

I don’t view myself as an early adopter of technologies. After the “dot com” era of the late ‘90s, I tend to follow everyone else’s pain and then settle on what works. I’m not in a rush to show off the fact that I bought the latest gadget. I like to show off the fact that I bought what works [at a] way cheaper [price] and with upgrades, even if that means coming a year late. I didn’t come to Twitter until last year, after pretty much everyone in Nashville had already jumped on board.

How has the community interaction changed your reporting?

It really has become an important tool for me in the newsroom. Not only am I able to share breaking news items, but I can also share news leads that come from Twitter with the producers. Since using it this way, I’ve noticed [that community interaction has] started to become widely discussed and reported. Had I joined Twitter when everyone else did I’d probably still be tweeting what I ate for lunch.

[From previous question:] Any examples come to mind?

I think the perfect example of my own evolving use of Twitter is in disseminating valuable information from the newsroom. One example came during the deadly tornadoes. I tweeted reported rotations in real time. I also fed reports from the field back into the newsroom. I used Twitter recently to live tweet a police chase on I-40 a couple of weeks ago, knowing people read their tweets in traffic.

Do you actively search for Nashville folks with a web presence?

I do actively seek new Nashville area blogs to add to the NIT site. I also find them through Twitter. I also have them emailed to me from people that want to be aggregated on the site.

Many organizations are just now shifting to a social network-based Web site rather than the usual news and content-only sites. (The NYT’s just introduced Times people to their site)…Why or why not is this easier at a local level?

It’s a double-edged sword. Larger national media outlets have the resources to invest in development or re-skinning open source platforms and molding them in their own image or crafting them to fit their strategic vision. On a local level, resources are often hard to come by, and what you get is a cobbling of platforms to achieve the same thing. That said, on a local level is where you grow the kind of dedicated and high quality relationship with your audience. That’s very important to the sense of community that often fuels social media relations across multiple platforms.

It’s an exciting thing to see happen, and every corporation can benefit from moving in this direction. Eventually community presence in national media and larger corporations will be looking for the experience many of us are gaining on a local level. There is only so much you can expect from marketing your company to consumers through traditional advertising. There is no direct relationship in advertising and marketing as we know it, and that world will dramatically change in the next few years.

Is there anything I haven’t touched on that you’re particularly interested in saying? (Like about the site, community, etc. anything.)

I love working with people who see the importance of the role the net will play in transforming the way the world gets and interacts with information. I also love working with veterans of news, and I will always remember the challenges they face with the changes that are happening. For some, that change is very difficult. But the fact is, we are no more in the television and newspaper business than Wal-Mart is in the trucking business. Our business is no longer the industry that surrounds distribution – the trucks, the printing press, the reams of paper, the broadcast towers, the satellite dishes, the lights, the huge cameras, the buildings, the “live trucks”… It’s the final product: information. The market in an on-demand world for news and information where people have to wait to receive a highly produced product is steadily shrinking. At the same time, the online audience for news and information is growing significantly. It’s an exciting time to be working in a new medium that is transforming the way we get information.

Or you could just remember his memorable words: “the medium is the message.”

1) Does the newspaper really need a Myspace page? What about a twitter account?
Adapting to new technology is essential for the survival of any medium, not just journalism. But, when converging your organization to new forms of communication, channel your inner Marshal McLuhan. Myspace is a site largely used by individuals who want to meet people in close proximity— at least initially. To a lesser degree, it has become a directory of sorts but I don’t know anyone who consults myspace when looking up contact information for businesses. Yet, I see all sorts of newspapers signing up and attempting to participate as if they were a single person who lives down the street and likes all the same bands as you. This medium is not necessarily good for Newspapers. Twitter on the other hand is an excellent social network since it allows for somewhat frequent and short news updates (similar to RSS feed) and an instant reaction from those who read it. Know your medium and what people expect of it.

2) Am I a journalist or blogger? AND ALSO Are bloggers journalists?
If an organization/individual is using their medium responsibly and maintains a code of ethics then…does it matter?

3) Early Adopters Vs. Veteran Reporters
The convergence of new communication technology has spawned the term “early adopter,” which is simply a buzzword when referring to journalism. We simply need new language for this area of transition because the current labels divide and confuse a news staff more than it helps. Everyone on every staff has had areas of expertise that were exploited by editors and valued by peers. Forcing everyone to learn something they don’t see the value in (or don’t quite understand) produces blogs for the sake of having blogs and unnecessary time wasted on unnecessary myspace pages. Instead, there needs to be more people in a news room asking “how can we enhance this coverage?” without explicit instructions on how to do so (and helping to educate when asked). Convergence will come when its ready —- and it will definitely happen.

4) Thinking about a redesign?
Every newspaper is different and it would be foolish of me to presume a “one size fits all” approach is the answer to effective web design. But, what I do see value in is trends. Spend some time looking at web sites that have plenty of information yet have little to nothing to do with newspaper journalism. How do you navigate through the page? How many elements do you see immediately after typing the URL? Try some of the sites you frequent in your spare time. Newspaper Web site blogger Ryan Sholin’s site is a great resource for identifying trends. If you’ve ever thought about a redesign, it’s worth checking out.

A new Web site called SpotCrime.com combines the attention demanding police scanner with Google’s Maplets technology to form the ultimate tool for anyone who has ever been tasked with working the crime/safety beat shift.

Information, gathered from police department crime logs and local news organizations, is divided into various incident categories and represented with a different icon on the Maplet.

Users can search any combination of incidents with relatively zero effort. You can even review entire months of reported data at the same time and then narrow the search results by time of day. While there is a disclaimer on the incident data—similar to Google’s statement about driving directions— all information reported contains a link to the source.

“Our data collection methodologies are relatively new, however, we are estimating accuracy above 95 percent,” said Head of Research Greg Kastner in an e-mail. “Journalists could use our site to focus attention on areas of high crime that seem to be neglected.”

While the new web site offers a clean interface and easy access to large amounts of information, it doesn’t replace the police scanner just yet since its still the fastest way to find out about incidents. The rate at which SpotCrime can add new incidents depends on how quickly police departments update their logs, which can be anywhere from 2 hours to 3 days after occurring, according to Kastner.

Right now, the 125 most populated cities in the country are represented on SpotCrime and over a million incident reports have been logged since going live January 2008, according to site President Colin Drane. Eventually, he said, more cities will get added.

SpotCrime also offers their aggregated crime report information via e-mail, text messaging, applications for the iPhone and Facebook and a Google Earth data link. Support for both Twitter and RSS are still in the testing stage.

I don’t have any magical suggestions, but it’s clear the future of most newspapers is paperless, free, and heavily local in character. But these are very broad descriptions; there is still an enormous range of possible outcomes, good and bad, even with those preconditions.

For instance, the “hyperlocal” idea is useful but inadequate if taken literally, given that we’re in an era when categories of local and global are increasingly blurred. Virtual communities know no geographical boundaries. Both economic globalization and climate change have serious local and global effects, and political/policy fixes will increasingly have to straddle those categories. The more “hyper” the local in newspaper coverage, and the more it becomes just a buzzword, driven by business models that don’t incorporate an understanding of the community or the world, the more blinkered and navel-gazing the local newspaper will become. Not good, given where they’re starting from.

Lee Abrams is Tribune’s new innovation director, coming from XM Radio and a long, highly successful career as a radio executive, and he’s made a practice of writing long, stream-of-consciousness memos about what’s wrong with newspapers. His latest is up on Romenesko. (Speaking of, why did Tribune - apparently - make Abrams abandon his blog? Seems like exactly the kind of reflexive, decidedly non-innovative corporate diktat that is killing the business.) It’s great to see an outsider and proven innovator looking critically at the business. But I’m not loving what I’m reading:

*Changes are made but they are SO subtle that no-one outside of the building notices.

*Writers and Editors content is undermined by a generally dated and tired look, that is tweaked but not noticeably evolved.

*Are rife with assumptions. That people will find great stories…that the paper will get credit for breaking stories…that the writers are known commodities…that the paper is the center of the local news universe. Well—-not necessarily. Historically yes, but in 2008, not a given. Gotta REALIZE WAR HAS BEEN DECLARED by the Google’s and Fox’s…and FIGHT BACK…RECLAIM YOUR TURF! Ain’t gonna happen by osmosis.

*Are not very aggressive. At least by today’s standards. If a radio station had the circulation declines facing newspapers, all hell would break loose and you’d see the big guns pulled out. I don’t see that in newspapers. When AOL started declining, they blew up the company. My point is that we gotta fight back….fight back to reclaim. It’ll never be 1938 again, but there’s no reason newspapers can’t aggressively get in the 2008 competitive groove and grow again.

Well, yeah. But all of this has been obvious for years. If Tribune needs to spend big bucks to hire a proven innovator to come in and write memos telling its employees what any reader can see, things are worse than even I imagined. And while a little old-fashioned fire in the belly can’t hurt, it’s not a solution. Abrams mentions Fox and Google as the competitors, the enemy newspapers must gird themselves to battle. But if you’re at at a medium-sized, Tribune-owned paper, are Fox and Google really your chief competitors? How are newspaper execs, editors and reporters supposed to get lathered up for a fight when they don’t even know who or what their rivals are anymore? (Blogs? XM Radio? iPods? Jon Stewart?)

Again, no brilliant solutions here. But newspapers do need to blow things up. The current model, with its layers of editors, copy editors, classified ad reps and pillar-of-the-community caution, has to go. Papers need to experiment, try new formats, new models. There’s the open-source idea advanced by newassignment.net, or by local startups such as Paul Bass’s New Haven Independent. That’s one way to inject both new perspectives and some buzz into the business at the same time. But papers also have to protect and nourish two things they already have - reporting and the newspaper “brand.” Original voices and journalistic credibility are pretty much all papers have left - and they’re good both for making money and for the healthy functioning of society.

www.johnmcquaid.com/blog