YDR Insider

I tried something new this week, designed to help readers get more involved in the newsroom process. Using a simple web cam at my desk, I recorded a video of me explaining what we are working on today. I posted that to our Facebook site.

You can see Wednesday’s video here.

You can see Thursday’s video here.

I did this right after our morning budget meeting, at which editors from the various departments run down their plans for the day. That’s a routine part of the day in most newsrooms.

Traditionally, our days were completely targeted toward the next day’s newspaper. This morning meeting was the official start of the day, a chance for editors to ensure that all the bases were covered and ensure that two departments weren’t chasing after the same story.

These days, 11 a.m. is far from the start of the day. We’ve been hard at the news since 6:30 a.m. at least, updating the web site so often that it might not highlight anything from that morning’s paper by 11 a.m.

But it is still early enough for us to fully jump on a story that we might not have already. And that’s where you come in.

We are going to experiment with several new ways to involve you in the news assignment process. You can be the assigning editor, if you’d like.

We will post a copy of our daily plan — what we call a story budget — here on YDR Insider each day around 11:30. Here’s today’s, for example. Read it. Think it over. Ask yourself what you would put a reporter on if you were the editor. You can comment on that blog post with your ideas. You can email news@ydr.com. You can post your idea to our Facebook site. You can tweet it to us. Heck, send a singing telegram to our office, if you’d like. We don’t care how you do it. But we do sincerely want to hear how you would cover the news in York County.