Share Our Content on Facebook and Beyond

Look up. Yes. Just above this line. Notice the little slick button that says "SHARE"?

Know what that means? It means you can take any blog post on "News Of The Sun," and share it with your friends and colleagues via the many different online social networking sites out there.

Now, with our content, you can "Digg" it, "Fark" it, "Twitter" it -- and more.

The world will never be the same. :-)

Next Dance Partner

The Baltimore Sun Media Group today announced a content-sharing partnership with WJZ (Channel 13), the local CBS news affiliate. The deal is about cross-promotion, with Sun print content getting promoted on television and WJZ video content getting featured on BaltimoreSun.com.

It's an interesting move on the part of BSMG. Some other Tribune newspapers operate in media markets where the Trib owns a local TV station, making for better "synergy" (supposedly). So the cross-promotion between newspaper and TV is presumably a little more seamless.

For the Sun, striking a deal with a local TV station is nothing new under the sun. In my 8+ years at the newspaper, this is the third deal. First, it was WMAR (channel 2), about five years ago or so. Next, a few years later, came WBAL (Channel 11) for a very brief time. Now, it's WJZ.

It seems WJZ's video will be showing up all over BaltimoreSun.com next month. They'll be selling and placing ads in front 0f the videos (something The Sun seems to have been unable to do on its own) and giving The Sun a piece of the revenue.

This really is a spot of good news, at least at this level: local television news across the land is generally notorious for using the local daily newspaper as a tip sheet for its own daily news reports. In our case now, WJZ gets to give us credit. (Nice move, Tim Franklin!)

But.

The push to include video on BaltimoreSun.com from a local TV affiliate, some might argue, is a departure from the Web video strategy laid out for the newsroom several years ago. The push was for "YouTube-quality" news video -- nothing too slick or overly produced, we were told. Just a video news report that a busy print reporter could record quickly while out on the street. A video editor would chop it together and throw it up on the web. We're talking basic stuff: crime scene video, a two minute interview with a politician. No standups in front of a camera, no TV "style" -- in fact, the Tribune Interactive training manuals didn't want our web video to be anything like TV reports.

During the last contract negotiation, management made a big deal of allowing reporters the flexibility to pick up a video/photo camera. But -- and this is my interpretation of this -- management wasn't willing to pay its reporters a little more to do video/photos. And the union wasn't going to allow management to evaluate a print reporter's performance in doing video/photos.

The result? Reporters had neither a carrot (more pay) or stick (fear of a negative performance review) in picking up a video camera. Thus, our development of Web video is not as far along as it could -- or should -- be right now.

So now, we have WJZ. We hope the dance works out. We hope we can learn a few moves from each other. We hope it makes both sides lots of money.

Movers & Shakers

Baltimore Sun Media Group's chief financial officer Erik Smist is leaving to be director of finance and administration at Johns Hopkins Press, according to an all-staff email today from Sun Publisher Tim Ryan. Mr. Smist's last day is Monday.

Mr. Smist had been with BSMG since 1986. Management will be seeking a replacement, according to Mr. Ryan's email. Good luck, Mr. Smist.