Web and Social Media
I’ve employed various media types in my reporting, both at Bloomington North and for The B Square Bulletin. At North, I’ve recorded podcast interviews with school leaders. For The B Square, I’ve implemented and used several innovative online methods for communicating important information to the community. These incremental improvements help the publication reach more readers online in several ways.
Podcasts
In my time at North, I’ve published three in-depth podcast episodes. Two have been with the superintendent of our school district, and the other was with the president of the teachers’ union.
The first interview with superintendent Markay Winston was when she was just a few months into her tenure. At the time, she was interim superintendent. The second interview was near the start of her second school year as superintendent.
All three interviews provided our school and community with in-depth information about two of the leaders who make decisions affecting our lives at school.
Social Media Integration
I created two social media profiles for The B Square Bulletin: Facebook and LinkedIn.
The publication is run by one person, with some freelance reporters and photographers, such as myself. Dave Askins, editor and publisher, was not able to add posting to social media to his workload. But we both knew that having a reliable social media presence is important for reaching readers.
So I automated it, by integrating the website publishing platform with the social media sites. Now, whenever a new article is posted to The B Square’s website, it is automatically posted to Facebook and LinkedIn.
Additionally, I helped the publication utilize the “excerpt” field to write summaries of articles, which are used for content in social media posts, and in a round-up of recent articles in The B Square’s twice-a-week email newsletter.
Live Reporting
Recently, The B Square began experimenting with a Twitter-style live reporting method. We’ve used the system for sports, government meetings, and election filings.
I reported on the school board’s organizational meeting at the beginning of 2026, where annual officer and committee and appointments were made.
The medium allows community members to see and understand an event as it happens. Even if a live stream is available, short text-based updates can be more accessible to people. One reader said they watched a government meeting live while reading text updates simultaneously.
Multimedia Example
Using a variety of mediums to tell a story is important. This article, for example, is about a property our school district owns and a public forum to collect community feedback. Other than the running article text, this piece includes:
- Photos of the building and property
- Photos of public commenters
- A screenshot of mapping data from the county’s GIS system
Each of these provides readers with context and visual information not easily conveyed through text alone.
Testimony
Excerpts from Letter of Recommendation
“Part of what would make Kelton an asset to any newsroom is the kind of technical knowhow that many people might not think of as ‘journalism’ per se. But in today’s publishing environment, using digital tools in novel ways to provide information to readers surely counts as a positive on a journalist’s ledger. …
“Another example … is the workflow he put together for our regular property transfer reports, which now, thanks to Kelton, include a dynamic map showing the properties that have been sold. That work entailed converting Monroe County’s entire set of parcel shapes (polygons) into centroids of the shapes (single points). To get that one task done, he installed QGIS on his laptop, which is a big hairy piece of open source software.”
—Dave Askins, Editor and Publisher, The B Square Bulletin
(View B Square property transfer reports here.)