Nancy Andrews is Managing Editor of Digital Media for the Detroit Free Press. Share links to other great packages. Go online to tae.asne.org, or e-mail Nancy at nandrews@freepress.com.

PUBLIC SERVICE JOURNALISM, A CORNERSTONE of a daily newspaper, can fall flat on the Web. Here are some simple tips to help make your most important stories also the most read.

Does anybody read public service journalism online?

For many of us, the “public service” part of journalism is why we do what we do. It's what keeps us in journalism instead of working for a PR firm. These stories make our community a better place and are at the very core of our being. So, of course it's a painful exercise in futility if this core mission work goes unnoticed. “Humbling” was the word used by one editor I spoke with recently.

Do we need to let the public know we're doing work that explains or reveals information that will make our world a better place? Yes. It's a lofty goal to be both “most important” and “most popular” with the same story, but we can accomplish both. Every editor can have an impact on the readership of your public service journalism by simply asking more questions about your audience and how you expect people to find out about your coverage in the first place.

Take a stand with your journalism

Browse over to CNN.com's “Impact Your World.” There's no mistake that part of the site aims to help you and CNN make the world a better place. Isn't that Public Service 101? Who, in any newsroom, would think a story about refugees would draw big traffic? The well-told story of Youssif, an Iraqi boy who was doused in gas by masked men and set ablaze, earned more than 4 million page views in two days. More than 13,000 people gave more than $800,000 to help Youssif and others. www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2007/impact/youssif.html

A CNN explanatory project on autism drew a smaller but loyal following as well and more than 500,000 views to video, which is large even by CNN's standards. www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2008/news/autism/

We've been doing research here at the Detroit Free Press, and some members of our audience are telling us to a stand and declare right from wrong. Many view us as biased anyway, so why not declare our bias? Years of concern about conflict of interest have perhaps made it appear as if we have no interest in our community. “Become involved” and “be a member of our community” is what I'm hearing. Perhaps in our public service journalism we should simply be bolder about making a difference. We should be bolder about righting wrongs.

Important does not have to equal dull

“Man threatened with foreclosure over $50 parking ticket,” was the headline on an important investigative piece for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “People will click on that,” noted Mark Katches, assistant managing editor of projects and investigations. And click they did, more than 100,000 times.

“An academic discussion would not drive traffic,” says Nancy Laughlin, the Free Press assistant managing editor for digital media. “You have to be alert to words that sound stuffy. Newspapers have their own language and so do Web sites. They're not always the same.”

So, take a look at your online headlines and chatter for your projects. Do those headlines make you want to click? I read a lot that sound more like labels than teases.

Publish your best stuff on highest traffic days

Of course, your biggest-effort, signature pieces go in the Sunday print edition, but does that mean it belongs in Sunday's online package?

Many organizations, from The Virginian-Pilot to the Salt Lake Tribune to The New York Times, now publish packages early on Fridays or Saturdays and continue to promote the work throughout the week. This helps make your regular online audience, the people who click on your home page once a week, or maybe even a few times a week, aware of your package.

Note: Unlike signing up for a push subscription that shows up on your doorstep every day, visiting your Web site is an active choice a person must make every visit. Don't assume the same people choose to visit you every day — they don't. So, if you have an important story, promote it on more than one day, and certainly on your top traffic days.

Note that many major newspapers endorsed the presidential candidates online on Fridays, rather than Sundays, because of the greater Web traffic.

Promote your package inside your site

Do you know how people enter your Web site and what percentage of people enter through the home page? The sports index page? An article page? If you only promote your top packages on the home page, then you are missing a lot of people. Although this figure varies from site to site, my guess is you're missing at least half your audience if you can't promote something beyond your home page.

It's kind of like the person who gets up too late, and the newspaper is already disassembled. Wouldn't it be nice if you could afford a promo on every page of your newspaper that said, “Hey, you missed a cool package on 1A"?

Many sites have created cross-promotional areas on the bottom of article pages to address this very issue. Click on any standard article on freep.com for an example.

Go where your audience is; tell them what you've done

Start with the assumption that not everyone comes to your home page. Now assume that the majority of people don't even come to your site. That's right — assume Yahoo News and Google are your audience's top source for news. Simply compare your total daily unique visitors on any given day to your coverage area's population, and if you can parse your visitors by geography, that's even better. Once you realize that the majority of people you want to reach will not come to your story unless you go out and find them, you'll begin to look outside your own sphere for new audience.

Who will care the most about what you are investigating? Find your niche audience and specifically tell them about it. We wouldn't hesitate to be interviewed on radio or TV about a project — well, the door is open for us to enter the open “talk shows” online, which are more commonly known as blogs, forums or chats.

For a project on the 40th Anniversary of Aretha Franklin's performance of “Respect,” freep.com/respect, the reporter, videographer and editor all took time to promote the project elsewhere. They e-mailed links to contacts made while researching the story. They posted comments and links on Aretha Franklin fan sites, joining the discussion and also identifying themselves and their role in the project. In the end, the majority of the audience came to the package through e-mailed links and links through blogs, not through the promotion on the home page. The story continued to have spikes of traffic weeks later.

In Milwaukee, the Journal Sentinel staff made a Facebook page for an orangutan named Mahal. Check out the coverage at www.jsonline.com/mahal. The three-part narrative about a zoo animal also delves into the issues of rain forest destruction. Essentially, the Journal took a cute and fuzzy story that attracted a lot of attention and added more explanatory journalism. Overall, the series of articles and interactive media have topped more than 100,000 page views. Note however, that some of these page views are essentially hidden from search engines because of the construction of the page in Flash.

Others use Twitter, MySpace and e-mail blasts to go where the people are. I do want to give a reality-check on some of this. Not everything works, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try. When I hear about a huge news organization heralding its Twitter feed, and I only see 200 people following the feed, I am a little suspect of the advantages. Evaluate your return on investment. Some organizations seem to be more successful at creating a following. For example, CNN.com has more than 48,000 followers on a moderately used, breaking news feed. NPR.com has more than 11,000 on an active politics feed.

Make sure search engines can READ your work

Sometimes we build the coolest devices and make the most exceptional presentations only to limit ourselves in the distribution of our content. Huh? Meaning, don't assume a search engine sees the page as you do. Go to your browser's toolbar and View>Page Source (Crtl +U). See that text — that's what Google sees when it reads that page. Search for the terms you would search for that page in Google. If you can't find those terms, neither can anyone else.

Realize that some people read your stories through RSS feeds, links displayed on Yahoo News or on a mobile device. When you remove your content from your standard article feed by putting the text within Flash graphics, then your story won't be in those automated places — thus fewer opportunities for people to come across your story.

This doesn't mean you shouldn't do cool Flash graphics and interactive features. Evaluate what text you can get on the page so the search engines can read it. Take a look at just about any nytimes.com interactive graphic and you'll see, as New York Times multimedia editor Andrew DeVigal points out, as much text as possible is on the HTML page — not hidden from search engines. The only content in Flash is the content that must be in Flash.

You might choose to create alternative forms of the story to allow the content to be distributed in your regular RSS feeds and mobile devices. Make this an active decision. Know what you are giving up in readability or across platforms and adjust accordingly. Or not.

Make it truly interactive

On the other side is the full exploitation of the Web as a medium. Translation: Convey information online in ways that you can't do in any other medium. All news organizations seem to have great successes with interactive databases, but there's more. Perhaps you can turn the information into a game, and make what is important entertaining as well.

A package on Childhood Obesity www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/health/childhoodobesity/ used all the tools to tell the story — strong video, photo and text reporting with the addition of an interactive nutrition game. “It took a 30,000-foot story (childhood obesity) and gave people a chance to hear on-the-ground stories and also — using the game — show the challenges of dealing with this issue in everyday life,” said Jim Brady, washingtonpost.com's executive editor.

The Post is also a leader in live chats online. While debate surges about scheduled programming versus on-demand delivery, the chats live on and can satisfy both needs. The Post includes the interactive discussions with reporters on major projects in addition to regularly scheduled chats.

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/liveonline/

Make partnerships

You are part of the World Wide Web — so don't be an island, expecting people to find you. Send out tentacles to reach other places.

Bill Church, executive editor at the Statesman Journal in Salem, Ore., was happy with traffic for their 10-month project on Invasive Species of Oregon. Each installment exceeded the views for top stories on an average news day. It was treated as a convergence project from the start and had a strong connection in print and in the community. According to Church, some partnerships developed formally and informally as a result. The project was included in an Oregon Public Broadcasting special report. Staff members continue to participate as panelists in programs about the issue. Multiple niche sites link back to invasivespeciesoforegon.com.

Only 20 percent of the visitors to the project came from the newspaper's home page. More than 50 percent of the people who viewed this project clicked a link from another site, usually a special interest site.

Break up your project into easy-to-understand parts

Daily series offer several benefits by letting your regular audience receive the information in portions small enough to digest. The technique also can build conversation momentum. At the Salt Lake Tribune, an issues-by-issue series on the presidential race caused their Sunday traffic to double, according to Terry Orme, managing editor for news and business. Energy and energy development are important topics in Utah, for instance.

Speak to your core audience

“When prioritizing projects ... editors need to know what issues resonate with online readers, and then use that knowledge to great advantage,” said Jane Elizabeth, director of online news for The Virginian-Pilot, Norfolk. In Virginia, gun news is a hot topic, so it was no surprise when an in-depth look at guns stayed in the top five news stories for an entire month.

hamptonroads.com/pilot/news/guns

Historically, The Washington Post name is synonymous with government watchdog work. The Post won an ASNE writing award and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for public service for its coverage of the deteriorating conditions at Walter Reed Medical Center. The series also did great in Web traffic, according to editor Liz Spayd. www.washingtonpost.com/walterreed

You are never done

You can't forget your project once it's published. Just because something worked yesterday doesn't mean it's functioning today. In most Web site content management systems, stories expire without intervention. Upgrades and template changes can conflict with pre-existing work. I've gone to plenty of projects, including our own on freep.com, and found broken links or noted missing material. The most important of our work becomes an entry page unto itself. The Post's Walter Reed package has more than 600 links from around the Web coming into it, so that page must work (and it does.)

How do you want people to navigate through?

Free Press reporters and editors began thinking about how a story should be displayed online. Instead of breaking up a 150-inch story with subheads, why not make it into chapters? In seeking to do something better for the Web, the project ended up being better for the newspaper, too.

A story about a popular girl from a wealthy suburb who died in a dilapidated drug house (freep.com/fentanyl) ran as a chaptered story on a Sunday. Each chapter had a “next” and “previous” button at the bottom of the page. Navigation to all the chapters also was listed in the right column of every page and on the project's index page. More than 80 percent of the people who started the project read every chapter that day. Multiple chapters filled the slots on the site's “Most Popular” list of stories.

Think about the design of your pages. Sometimes a new look and feel will work. At other times, you might be best staying with a standard template. Show the project to people unfamiliar to it, and watch silently as they attempt to navigate through it.

Don't be afraid to market yourself

“We're not ashamed of marketing here,” said Katches of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He says the Journal runs house ads promoting the investigative team in addition to promoting specific coverage. And if there were a bigger marketing budget, “I'd like to see our team on the side of the bus,” he said.

Katches runs a team of eight reporters in a newsroom of about 200 staffers. “Five percent to do one of the most important things a newspaper can do is not asking too much.” In Milwaukee, “Watchdog” is now listed in the top navigation on the home page and includes multiple facets from searchable databases to citizen watchdog, where as the name implies, citizens can do their own investigative reporting. “We're trying to bring it all together; it's not just the one big story,” he said. jsonline.com/

Yes, most popular can also be most important

There's a reason that “pop culture” refers to what is most popular. But sometimes there is a convergence of popular and important. Our reporters broke the story of the Detroit mayor lying under oath in a policemen's whistle-blower trial. The saga of abuse of power and government office continues while the ex-mayor sits in jail. It was investigative watchdog reporting at its best. (See related article, P. 31) Our community has written us thank-you notes, and some people sent unsolicited donations to the cause of great investigative journalism. And, yes, this coverage also was most popular — accounting for more than 25 million page views to stories, photos and videos, with more than 100,000 comments and thanks from the Wayne County prosecutor who picked up our investigation and took the mayor to court. *