Morning Call's Pet Widget: Finally, a newspaper site enables sharing
Congrats to Chris Krewson (the just-named Online Editor at the Morning Call newspaper in Allentown, PA.) and staff for launching some neat digital tools to accompany an investigative project that's scheduled to run in tomorrow's paper.
Here's what Krewson had to say about the widget in a recent email:
On Sunday we're following in the Inquirer's footsteps and investigating the state's puppy mill reputation. To do that, we used the Right to Know Law and obtained 20,000 inspection reports from the state, and assembled them into a database.
Today we launched that database on our Web site for users to search, days before the story's running.
But that's not the coolest part.
At the bottom of that search widget on our homepage, there's a link that encourages users to put our database search tool on their own Web pages, in the same way YouTube lets people embed videos on their pages or blogs.
What I like best about this project is that the Morning Call has enabled users to replicate and share it on virtually any other website.
Terriffic job...now, I'd like to see this model applied beyond pets (which are cute, yes) to more serious subjects like housing and wage disparities, public employee compensation, etc.
More coverage on the project at: E-Media Tidbits
Seed Newsvine