As one of 17 members of the Journal Register Company's ideaLab, I am tasked with trying to teach digital skills across our newspaper staff, the Connecticut cluster of newspapers and our company as a whole.

The most recent challenge for the ideaLab is to complete a project in the next 30 days that teaches a skill to our co-workers. I have chosen to set up all my staff members with a company Twitter account and to teach them how to use it.

First, I will start with my 9 newsroom employees. Then, we will move on to the advertising department. I will teach them how to shrink URLs using programs like Bitly or Tinyurl, and I will share how they can each learn to grow an audience of followers, thus increasing traffic to our website on a regular basis.

I am also hoping to get some of our in-house Twitter experts to come to Middletown to teach a brief class in how to best utilize Twitter for business purposes. This class will be free and open to the public - a date to be announced soon.

The next goal is to assist staff at our sister publication in Torrington with the same steps, hopefully by utilizing my newly trained staff members as teachers. Ideally, a Twitter account will be assigned each new employee who starts in our company, just as an e-mail account or computer access would be set up.

You can follow our staff members here:

www.twitter.com/vsundqvist
www.twitter.com/KellyOleksiwMP
www.twitter.com/WaltGogolyaMP
www.twitter.com/CrystalDeyWHN
www.twitter.com/CMichalewiczMP
www.twitter.com/JeffMillMP
www.twitter.com/erikaheyer

(Twitter accounts for Photo Editor Catherine Avalone and Barbara Douglas coming soon!)

And you can also follow our regular Middletown Press accounts:
www.twitter.com/Middletownpress (@Middletownpress)
www.twitter.com/MPsportseditor (@MPsportseditor)