Journalism

Last year, an audience task force for Sandusky Newspaper Group, the parent company of the Standard-Examiner, came up with a list of best practices for news employees using social media. One of the practices was not to use Facebook and Twitter as vehicles to disseminate news. Instead we use social media to promote and link to news and other content available on newspaper-owned websites.

One of the reasons for this practice was to direct audience to the platforms where the newspapers sell their own advertising around content, rather than someone else doing it on a social media site. Another reason was to allow for the news content to be posted on a secure website where there was some institutional editorial control.

This meant someone else would view the content before it was posted and it would have tampering protection.

The recent hacking of the Associated Press Twitter feed shows just how vulnerable social media platforms are for spreading rumors and misinformation.

I like to think my journalism career started in January 1960 when I was 11 years old.

On one of the first days back from Christmas break, my sixth-grade teacher outlined what we would be doing for the rest of the school year. That’s when she announced that, as an end-of-year project, everybody had to write a two-page research paper.

That wasn’t a surprise to me, but hearing those words straight from her mouth sent shivers down my spine. Who could be expected to gather enough information to write two pages about anything? I decided the answer was to start early, so I began in February.

It didn’t take long for me to realize something: Finding out where to get information, how to follow the facts from one to the other, seeing how they branched out and then came back to connect into a coherent story wasn’t a nightmare. It was fun.

Kristen Hebestreet knows some things — like farms, rural communities and the people who live there. That’s one reason she’s excited about being our new correspondent covering Morgan County.

Kristen is an Ogden native and an experienced newspaper journalist. She has three bachelor’s degrees — anthropology and communications from the University of Utah and English from Weber State University. Plus, she said she’s “one test short” of a master’s in English.

She also has 17 years of experience as a reporter, most of it in the Appalachia area of the southeast, working at newspapers in Bristol, Va., and in Kingsport and Johnson City, Tenn.

Jesus Lopez Jr. is a jack of all trades.

By day he is a mild-mannered reporter covering Weber County three days a week.

At night, on weekends, he becomes a presentation editor, designing and laying out pages of the Standard-Examiner print edition and posting stories to our digital platforms.

The tablet could be just what the doctor ordered for the ailing newspaper industry.

The Pew Research Center’s annual Project for Excellence report indicates that the growing number of tablet computers and smartphones is contributing to an influx of people returning to traditional news sources, like newspapers, online. The growing use of social media has also led to more digital exposure to news stories through referrals.

We’ve seen this trend in our own analytics. Traffic to our mobile site has doubled in the last year, especially since we introduced an app.

PROVO -- Brigham Young University will scrap its daily newspaper for a weekly publication and put more emphasis on a digital reporting.