Much of today has been spent working on Greensburg stuff — taking care of the KiowaCountySignal.com web site.

Here’s what’s been going on:

• I woke up this morning to an e-mail from Matt Coen, CEO of MyCapture. GateHouse has several newspapers that use MyCapture for its print photo sales service. Matt had read on this blog about our efforts to get real web coverage up of the tragedy in Greensburg. He wanted to help. KiowaCountySignal.com already had a my capture account, but he wanted to make the UGC tools from his company were available to us, so he was upgrading our account for free. Thanks to MyCapture, we can now directly accept submissions from readers. The photo album is empty right now. If I get some time, I’ll solicit some photos to seed the albums. Given the fact that the town is devestated and residents might find it hard to participate in photo sharing, we may not get anything, but I think it is very important we make this tool available — important journalistically.
• The Greensburg paper is not a member of Associated Press, but this morning we were feeling frustrated that AP stories about Greensburg are all over the web, but we couldn’t use them. I called my contact at AP and got permission to start using AP on the site. We want our coverage of this story to be complete as possible, and though we have our own staff, AP can still help in that goal.
• Our own staff is now filing stories online.
• The GateHouse Media news service is sending an editor and a reporter to Greensburg. Also, we’re sending our multimedia editor there to shoot and edit video coverage. They will start arriving there tomorrow. Besides multimedia, they will also blog from Greensburg and Pratt. The reporter we’re sending also covered Katrina, so she’s got some good experience on these kinds of stories.
• Speaking of blogs, we did manage to get a blog launched today. It doesn’t have the right skin on it yet, but it will. Since we don’t have our UGC tools working in the CMS yet, we wanted a blog primarily so visitors could leave comments, but since the decision was made to send additional staff there, it makes even more sense to have a blog.

Enough of this post. I need to start getting some posts up on the Kiowa blog.

UPDATE: Well, I didn’t do any blogging on the Kiowa blog.  At least not yet.  I just couldn’t find anything new in citizen media of interest. All the blog posts I found were nothing more than “gee, isn’t this a shame … I knew someone from Greensburg,” or “I once passed through Greensburg.”  Not a lot of substance. And on YouTube, all the latest videos are just lifts from TV coverage.  Of course, since only MSM is allowed into Greensburg, there isn’t much right now for the citizens to cover.