#mobile experiments

[mobilemondays]

Snapchat experiment, continued

By Erica A. Hernandez, Mobile Reporting Specialist for the AJC (@EricaAlyssa)

The seventh-annual Red State Gathering was held in Atlanta Aug. 7-8 and I was a part of a team of more than 10 AJC reporters, photographers and editors who were on hand to cover the event. We were expecting about 10 republican presidential candidates to speak at the event, which began the morning after the first GOP debate. With more than 900 people in attendance, we knew it would be a big engagement moment for us. So in a collaboration with the AJC’s audience and politics team, I snapchatted the event from the AJC’s official Snapchat account (AJCnews).  

Here is the result from day one:

The goal here was to make sure to get every candidate from that day into the story along with behind the scenes peeks and commentary from our talented political team, that was on site, churning out lots of content all day. 

Day 2 we we’re expecting Donald Trump to close out the event but that all changed when the host of the event, Erick Erickson, dis-invited Trump for comments he made about journalist Megyn Kelly on CNN.

This change of plans turned the RedState Gathering into the hub of Trump news, though Trump was nowhere to be found.

Day 2 results:

With the help of the social team sharing updates on various channels (Twitter, Facebook) our Snapchat audience saw a good amount of growth in followers and engagement on both days. 

Stay tuned -- and follow AJCnews on Snapchat to see what we try next. 

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AJCnews’ Snapcat story from Saturdat July 4, 2015 AJC Peachtree Road Race. 

See our full post about experimenting with this medium. 

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Snapchat: Live From The #AJCPRR Finish Line

There’s no arguing Snapchat is here to stay but the question now facing us at the AJC and reporters at media outlets across America is how do we engage our audience on this somewhat mystifying medium?

The AJC has had a Snapchat account for some time (follow us at AJCnews) but no one has really put much effort into pushing content out through it or growing our specific audience on it. With that in mind, I wanted to experiment with live event coverage via Snapchat during one of Atlanta’s biggest events, the AJC Peachtree Road Race.

The Goal

As a mobile reporting specialist, I was already positioned to be at the finish line on race day gather quick hit videos, stories and photos. The idea being this content could be turned around and pushed out on social very quickly to engage our mobile audience whom were either at the race cheering others on, running the race or just following race updates from home.

With that goal in mind it seemed like a very natural progression to add Snapchat to my coverage plan. The audience we were looking to reach would likely be on Snapchat more than they’d be on our homepage (like most mobile visitors to our site).

Snappin’ Away on Race Day 

I set out on race day at 6 am to catch the MARTA to the finish line. Once I got off at midtown, I saw the station was flooded with racers trying to stay dry on their commute to the starting line. I knew I wanted to tell that story but I wanted to show a sense of place since this wasn’t obviously race related.

After a few attempts of getting a shot inside the MARTA stop, I pointed the camera out toward the rainy street scene and got a much better result.

I wanted to show more than just the women’s and men’s winner crossing the finish line. That kind of news is not what Snapchat users would expect on that platform. They are looking for more interesting, sometimes funny photos and videos that show them a little slice of something they’re experiencing or something they wish they were experiencing.

Like Instagram, breaking news on Snapchat isn’t going to perform too well, but compelling images and vibrant scenes will.

My goal for this experiment was not only to test what works and flex my Snapchat muscles, but I also wanted to see if the thirst for Snapchat content was there. Since we aren’t regularly posting content to Snapchat yet we aren’t campaigning hard to grow awareness of our account. But I forwarded a screen shot to our social media manager on-call on race day and asked him to tweet it out to encourage people to follow us.

He did.

It’s important that he included that photo because it gave our audience a peak of the kind of content they’d be signing up for – we were not and would not tweet out a call to action for a blind follow.

The Results

In one day the AJCnews Snapchat account jumped from 19 followers to 34 followers with just that one tweet from the main AJC account.

My final product ended up being less than 200 seconds long and feature five photos and six video clips.

(Watch full Snapchat story here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-71dJhbJX4)

In a world where social referrals to mobile rule, any new social connections to our audience can be beneficial and is worth exploring. Here’s hoping Snapchat becomes a natural part of our mobile and visuals daily work flow.

Erica A. Hernandez, mobile reporting specialist at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution authored this post. Follow her on Twitter @EricaAlyssa.

[mobilemondays]

Mobile Experimentation: End Chronic Homelessness in Atlanta

I formatted a blog post, "End chronic homelessness," which were two opinion articles posted on the MyAJC site that were posted on one blog post. My goal was to format this blog post to make the articles look better for a mobile screen. Here is the before and after of what I did.

Before

The text of the story was unedited in terms of formatting. Besides the bolding of the title and byline, not much else seemed to be formatted on this blog post. I thought it should be made obvious to the reader where one opinion piece started and the other ended.

I also believed that the bylines should be structured differently. It wasn't obvious to the reader who the author was and why they should listen to them.

TKTKTKT

After

I formatted the titles as Heading 1 on Wordpress, I capitalized the authors' names and added their biographical information in the byline, not at the bottom after the article.

I also added lines between the two pieces to signify they were totally different and not necessarily written for each other. I added links where I could (I only added five in this blog post), but I didn't change any of the content. I linked to Rick Badie's AJC bio page, the home pages of the organizations mentioned in the bylines, and linked to the MyAJC version of the article.

As a side note, I didn't center the titles. That is how the mobile version of Wordpress translates that formatting. The headers aren't centered on the wired site, as you can see here.

Side-By-Side Comparison

The left is before, and the right is after optimization.

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Mobile Experimentation: Honey Boo Boo moves to Atlanta

An optimization of AJC's Buzz blog's Honey Boo Boo family now living in metro Atlanta, covering how to organize lots of aggregated content and embeds in a blog post.

Before

In her blog post, Jennifer Brett links to lots of previous articles about the Shannon family, famous for the TLC show "Here Comes Honey Boo Boo." She also embeds a Facebook post relevant to the story as well as a transcript of the Facebook post's text. I faced two challenges with this blog post: organizing aggregated content and a big chunk of transcript text.

The problem with the transcript is that it is long. It takes up a whole screen of the iPhone 6+, to give an idea of how it might not be legible on mobile.

After

My biggest changes for this article was placing the list of past coverage at the bottom, after the content. I'm interested in exploring more of inserting related content throughout an article. But I felt that placing a list of past coverage before the content of the article wasn't a good experience for the reader. Also, as a content producer, I wouldn't want a user going to an older article before reading all or most of the current article.

I also added more links throughout the article, to make the article look more interactive and resourceful.

The biggest challenge was this huge block of text (the transcript). Instead of putting it in quotes, I indented it. Alternatively, I could have italicized the block of text.

Hopefully these small changes add to a better user reading experience.

[mobilemondays]

Mobile Experimentation: Embedding iFrames for mobile-first

While threading and optimizing content for mobile this week, I looked at "Jon Stewart’s top 5 greatest Georgia politics hits" on the AJC politics blog. Jon Stewart had announced he was leaving The Daily Show, so AJC Washington reporter Daniel Malloy did a round-up on the top clips where Georgia was mentioned criticized made complete fun of.

I did some tweaking of the title, experimented with iframes for mobile and played with the power of lists.

Before

Here are some screenshots of what the blog post looked before I went in and made some edits.

There were several things I noticed that could be modified for a mobile audience. The first and most obvious was the title. If you read the title alone, you weren't exactly sure what the article was going to look like before you clicked it. It could have been a short burst, an article, or a list. That uncertainty can turn some prospective views away.

Second, the videos were not responsive to the smaller screen size. When you clicked the videos to watch them, they adapted to your screen and played perfectly fine. But at a glance, they were not fitting properly. Plus, the iframe was messy with more The Daily Show promotional links.

Third and lastly, this blog post was clearly a list, but why wasn't it formatted as such? For some weird reason, people love lists. They like numbers and order.

After

To optimize the headline, I added the words "top 5" into the title. Then, I listed the videos 1-5, giving each video a title and dating them. Then I added a briefly summary of the video's content, including linking to AJC content relevant to the video clip.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to make the iframes truly responsive. I set the iframe width at 100% in the blog post, so the image is warped when you look at the video on a wider screen, lik a desktop. Ideally I would have found a way to make the iframes truly responsive on a smaller screen, but this is a work-around that sufficed for the time being.

I also did NOT change or "break" the link. This story had already been published and promoted and visited, therefore I would never change the link.

Side-by-Side Comparison

Here are some side-by-side comparisons of before (left) and after (right.). You be the judge of whether these changes truly make the story more mobile-friendly.

Header

Body

Body (cont.)

 Footer

Article

Jon Stewart’s top 5 greatest Georgia politics hits (AJC)

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Mobile Experimentation: Spacing out images and visuals

The AJC had a series of stories recently on the sudden and fatal pedestrian accident on I-285 that causes massive traffic through much of the city during rush hour. We had a lot of content coming in, from text to video to photos to multimedia pieces. We also had a lot of updates as the story developed.

In "Police look for answers in accident that killed woman, crippled I-285," we had an article with all our most recent updates at the time as well as links to our photo gallery, photo, videos and multimedia pieces. However, when I came across from it, I saw how our CMS put automatically put elements in awkward places and generally gave the mobile reader a bad reading experience.

Before

The rest of the article is several scrolls worth of text. My main issue with this layout is that the different types of content were not well distributed throughout the story. The story looked ok on the desktop site, but did not look good on mobile.

Another issue I had with this layout was that the user had to scroll a lot through ads and photos just to reach the beginning of the text. I wanted to change this with my optimization.

.

After

For my optimization, I spread out the images a little more liberally, including adding a photo gallery that wasn't already embedded in the story. 

The "after" is different from the "before" because there isn't such a huge chunk of text with no visuals at the bottom. Our CMS automatically places an image or related content every three paragraphs, no matter how long he paragraph is.

Because I also moved the list of links that was previously at the top of the story to the bottom.

I can't control where the ads appear or how big they are, so I don't worry about how the ads make the page look at the moment. My main priority is making sure our content is accessible, easy to read and engaging.