The staff at the Wellsville (NY) Daily Reporter are gaining Facebook fans by the hundreds (yes, I said "hundreds"). Here's how they did it, Part 1.

WHAT THEY DID: From editor John Anderson: "We had a high speed chase (100 MPH through the village which is 30 MPH) and the driver crashed and was on foot for over 2 hours last night.

"I posted four raw video clips as this incident was taking place as well as uploading two pics to facebook from the cell phone camera at the scene. my sports editor flipped those to our web site and through cell phone calls, he was able to update wellsvilledaily.com  as the incident happened.

We had a lot of comments on our facebook page and calls from residents very, very happy to know they could go to bed safety as this man was caught."

Saying they had "a lot of comments" is putting it mildly. They had 50 comments on one post alone.

THE TAKEAWAY: Posting breaking news to Facebook AND your website is what you should be doing as well. Note that the reporter in the field was able to post photos from his phone to Facebook, where the editor downloaded them and posted them to the website. This is a fine example of thinking quickly, using the tools available on the run and serving your audience on multiple platforms.

The Wellsville Daily Reporter has over 4400 fans on Facebook. Coming tomorrow, how one Facebook post got them over 100 fans at once.