Building the front page with the readers (From The Northern Echo)

Building the front page with the readers

9:43pm Friday 6th January 2012 in Peter Barron By Peter Barron

It's been a really interesting experiment tonight - building the Northern Echo front page in stages on Twitter.

The interaction from followers has been remarkable and new followers have joined during the process.

Some comments have influenced the look of the page, with suggested changes and ideas being taken on board.

I'm not sure if it's been done elsewhere but it's been fun and I'll definitely do it again. Sports editor Nick Loughlin followed suit with the sport front page and has also had good reaction.

It's an important front page tomorrow because of the significance that it is probably Darlington Football Club's last game.

It needs to be a paper that people will keep for posterity and I hope they will.

I had the idea to incorporate the whistle in the early hours of the morning when I couldn't sleep and remembered I had one in a drawer somewhere.

My special thanks to front page sub-editor Jo Kelly who put up with her work being in the Twitter spotlight. She also had several other pages to do by the way.

Thanks also to graphic artist Chris Moran for working on the central graphic.

I now have two hopes - that the paper sells well tomorrow, and it turns out not to be Darlington's final game.

Goodnight.