lectroid.net

So your newspaper’s IT department has finally heard the whole “print is dead” bit and wants to get in on the web act. Great! Good for them! Yeah, they’re late to the party, but we’ll just say they’re fashionably late and let it slide. Here are some thoughts I have for a IT department that is looking to go web:

There’s a lot of web out there on the web

Figure out exactly what you want to do on teh intarweb. In most companies there are two sides to the web: internal (sites, pages and info for employee consumption) and external (sites, pages and info for public consumption).

So? So very often these areas require different skills. Where I work internally we’re Windows/IIS/MSSQL/.NET based while externally we’re Linux/Apache/MySQL/Perl based. Good luck bridging THAT gap. You have to decide which areas you’re gonna play in because “all of em” oftentimes just isn’t feasible.

On the external side newspapers often get blessed with the additional facets of editorial vs. advertising, which may very well dictate where you apply your resources. It’s hard to quantify the ROI on a nifty Google map of stolen cars.

Don’t fight the last war

Time was when you got a new system in the IT response was simple. You selected some staff to get all trained up and then turned ‘em loose. If everything went well, you were good. If something didn’t go well, you called the vendor.

Um, you can’t call the web.

This sounds dorky, but the web is a culture. Ask yourself how many of your IT folks maintain personal web sites or blogs. How many use web-based services like flickr or del.icio.us? How many follow tech blogs like Ars Technica or Slashdot? If you’re counting on one hand, you have a problem.

While you can’t call the web, you can post questions to online communities. But how can you do that if don’t belong to any?

You wouldn’t hire a reporter who kant spel, wood yoo?

Look, newspapers that have functional IT departments are not small. Odds are the folks in the newsroom are skilled, experienced journalists, many on their second or third paper. Why wouldn’t the same be true in IT?

You won’t hear in the newsroom, “Hey, Jennie in Accounting can write, have her do the story,” so don’t try the same thing in IT.

Most newspapers got onto the web in the late 1990’s. That means there’s a fair number of people out there with 5-10 years of newspaper/web experience. These are the people you need to be looking at. It’s not that Dave, the guy in IT who’s doing the same job today he did when you first got your Vax, wouldn’t make a good “web guy” — he might but, frankly, you don’t have the time.

Remember, you came in late.