The California Watch newsroom was buzzing Tuesday – even more than usual. News broke that Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Tom Coburn, R-Okla., had released an oversight report highlighting questionable stimulus projects – a $175 million award to BP chief among them.
That BP had received this money came as no surprise to us; we were set to publish Will Evans’ comprehensive look at the project and federal grant on Sunday.
In light of the breaking news, we decided to move early – and had our biggest traffic day since February. Our editors here opened the door to media partners to publish the article by 4 p.m. PDT, and we immediately began reaching out to bloggers and news outlets as well as Facebook and Twitter users.
Lisa Cohen, our public relations consultant, e-mailed prominent blogs and news sites. KPCC, the Huffington Post, Michael Moore, and LAist quickly picked up the story. Evans appeared on KCRW’s “Which Way, L.A.?” and KGO Newstalk.
The two of us, meanwhile, teamed up for social media outreach. Meghann is the new distribution and online community manager for California Watch and the Center for Investigative Reporting. And I'm the slightly less new public engagement manager for California Watch. The result of our social media effort? More than 150 tweets in less than 24 hours about the BP story, including posts by Mother Jones, KQED Health, and ProPublica.
In addition, we had more than a 100 retweets and 140 Facebook "likes" of the article on our blog. Overall, through social media we reached tens of thousands through both Twitter and Facebook alone.
BP wasn't the only big story of the day. Reporter Chase Davis' blog post on state managers earning overtime during furloughs had nearly 10,000 page views as well as dozens of retweets. The San Francisco Chronicle picked up the story for both print and online. The blog also appeared on the Huffington Post and got mentions on the Sacramento Bee's State Worker blog, Rough & Tumble, LA Weekly, and LAObserved.
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