Chris Snider

I made a few updates to my online breaking news checklist today. Download the updated PDF here.

Last week, Mother Nature dumped 16 inches of snow on Des Moines. And while most of the town simply shut down for a day or two, the Des Moines Register didn’t have that option. We went into breaking news mode and tried to compete with the local TV stations for readers’ attention. And as usual, [...]

Iowa vs. Iowa State in football. We call it the “Big Game.” (Clever, huh?) And here’s a look at all of the coverage we do leading up to the game.

I stumbled upon a great resource from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel the other day. Their Packers bar map helps readers find a place to drink with other Packers fans (almost) anywhere in the world (apparently not South Dakota). Naturally I wanted to do the same for the sports teams we cover at the Des Moines [...]

Here’s a fun little interactive that the Indy Star put together for the Big Ten men’s basketball tournament. It’s a good idea for any city that hosts some sort of post-season basketball tournament.

I’m sure you’ve heard stories about Twitter beating traditional news media on breaking news. Some of this can be attributed to the fact that traditional news media have certain standards for verifying news. But another factor is that we still feel the need to post a full story. Instead, we should get in the habit [...]

If you work for a newspaper, please take the time to watch this: Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo. Obviously the Rocky was in a different situation than most newspapers (being in a two-newspaper town). But I hope this opens a few more eyes to the fact we have to adapt to survive. The [...]

Need some online inspiration? Just take a stroll through some other web sites and learn from what others are doing. With that in mind, here are five ideas that could benefit almost any news web site out there: The azcentral.com live module. Nothing complicated here. Just a continuous stream of reader comments as they come [...]

What if our number one goal was to publish a great web site? How would we do things differently? Would our daily news meetings be structured differently? Would our planning budgets look different? Would people sit in different places in the newsroom? Would we still have a separate online department? If so, would it be [...]

Just got an e-mail about the St. Cloud Times’ holiday yule log. During these dismal times, we decided to offer the online readers a relaxing moment:  A Yule log burning in a fireplace with local holiday music. The page doesn’t even contain an ad. Holiday spirit, or missed opportunity?