New Media Bytes | Online journalism, web production and promotion

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Welcome to New Media Bytes, a site dedicated to helping understand the changing face of news media online.

My name is Shawn Smith. I’m the senior news producer for MLive.com, the online arm of Booth Newspapers in Michigan and a branch of Advance Internet. Sister sites of MLive.com include Cleveland.com, Oregonlive.com, NJ.com and Nola.com.

This site is my own sounding ground on the trends of online news and a place for aiding other journalists on blogging and multimedia production and story packaging.

I started at MLive in spring of 2005, hailing from a predominantly print background, and I admit I wasn’t convinced by online at the time. For the most part, I got all of my news online and was already blogging, but I didn’t take it seriously. It wasn’t, after all, a newspaper.

Enter Katrina, when I got a change to be part of the team at Nola.com, the New Orleans site featuring the Times-Picayune. Nola.com helped save many people during the aftermath of the hurricane by using blogs as a forum for readers to post locations of stranded people. It also provide users a place to post breaking news as it happened. The site won an award from the Online News Association in 2006 for its coverage.

Since then, I’ve been crazed with understanding the news online and creating a better product at MLive for the nearly one million monthly unique readers. My news staff and I help coach and produce everything from stories to multimedia to blogs for our eight major newspapers and catalog of bloggers. The newspapers include the Ann Arbor News, Bay City Times, Flint Journal, Grand Rapids Press, Jackson Citizen Patriot, Kalamazoo Gazette, Muskegon Chronicle and Saginaw News.

You can find me on Linked in and Facebook.