Friday, March 9, 2007

mcall.com This widget from the Morning Call's Sunshine Week feature has already been embedded in a local site -- before the feature appears. Click to see it in action.

Yesterday I asked what Tidbits Readers were planning to do online for Sunshine Week. Chris Krewson (online editor of the Allentown, Pa. Morning Call) just e-mailed me about this interesting project.

Krewson wrote, "On Sunday we're running a major investigative story on Pennsylvania's reputation as the puppy mill capitol of the East Coast. To do that, we used the state's Right to Know Law and obtained 20,000 inspection reports, and assembled them into a database.

"Today we launched that database on our site for users to search, days before the story runs. But that's not the coolest part. At the bottom of that search widget, there's a link that encourages users to embed our database search tool on their own Web pages, in the same way YouTube lets people embed videos on their pages or blogs. At least one site, a pet owner consumer rights group in N.J., has already picked it up"

...I think this is a fabulous example of using online media creatively to both spread the news on open government issues and enhance the reach and brand of news organizations. It's important to remember that if you want to succeed in online media, it's not always about luring people to your site.

Well done, Morning Call!

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