The lettering on it reads:

There were once 7 of those at The Sacramento Bee but today there is just one: and it is mine.

All this brouhaha about newspaper’s “original sin” (see: Alan Mutter, Steve Buttry, Howard Owens, Steve Yelvington and lets not forget Jeff Jarvis for starters) got me thinking about those pre-historic online newspaper days. In looking back, I don’t see any singular “original sin” per se. If anything a Gomorrah-like den of iniquity perhaps, but no single point of failure.

Everything was new and we were pulling the whole thing our of our collective asses as we went (perhaps that was sin #1).

There we’re only 7 of us back then, and of those only 4 who’s day-to-day job was to work on this newfangled web thing. We had a web designer, two content people and me, a “web engineer”. There was also a guy we didn’t see much of at first who had something or other to do with advertising (sin #2 anyone?) and there was, of course, a manager ostensibly in charge of it all. He, in turn, reported to the Director of Advertising.

Yeah, you read that right, sacbee.com was born as a subset of the Advertising department (sin #3?).

We we’re supposed to launch the new site on the 1st of July, but even after months of planning and work we weren’t ready. Our new go-date slipped to the 15th, and that’s when we ultimately launched. I remember staying insanely late that night before, well past midnight, and on the way in the next morning I passed the web designer on his way out — that’s just how we did things then.

I also remember a few days before launch the advertising guy mentioning that we needed a way to rotate the ads on the site, oh and by the way count the “hits” on them too. From scratch, on the eve of launch, I wrote an ad management setup (sin #4?). It was cartoonishly crude by any standards of today, but it did the job — that’s just how we did things then.

On the first day of sacbee.com’s life we broke 100,000 hits. That was damn good for a heretofore unknown site in 1996 and I was pretty pleased about it. The ad guy had mentioned, however, something about hits not being all that important, that he wanted something called “pageviews”. Eh, what the hell was a pageview? (sin #5). A little “grep” action on the Apache logs and we had pageview counts — that’s just how we did things then.

The pageviews were much lower .

After launch all of us got taken out to lunch. Not to the teriyaki place down the street, which would later become a staple, or anything along those lines, oh no. This was still the Golden Age of Newspapers and in case that was unclear they took us out to the Capitol Club, an exclusive, members-only type of place with cloth napkins and actual silver silverware where not having a jacket would generally be enough to keep you out. As we ate, Erwin Potts made an appearance, congratulating us on our accomplishment, as did McClatchy’s then brand new CEO, some baby-faced guy by the name of Gary Pruitt.

Pruitt asked me right off how many hits we’d had and I told him. I was impressed that he knew enough about the operation to even ask that. When he then added, “and how many pageviews?” I was flat out stunned. Crap, I’d just been told about these so-called pageviews earlier in the day, clearly this new guy was sharp.

On the technical side, our operation was supported by Nando.net, the technology company acquired by McClatchy as part of it’s purchase of the Raleigh News and Observer. Nando.net, which would later become “Nando Media” and ultimately “McClatchy Interactive“, was at the time still going through some of the somewhat violent upheaval that came as McClatchy tried to er… align their strategic direction with that of McClatchy’s… ahem (there’s probably a sin in there too).

Because of this, their attitudes toward us were somewhat, fluid. Some of them didn’t give a rip, about us, our needs or their roll in them. Others flat out resented us. Having to watch while 70% of your friends and coworkers are cut loose will do that. It was not uncommon at all in those days to pick up the phone and be told that the person you were working with just last week was no longer with the company.

Anyway, I digress somewhat, the point to take from all this is that sacbee.com, in it’s earliest form, was hosted on a single Sun Ultra 1/140, that literally sat on some guy’s desk at Nando.net (sin #… what are we up to?) — yeah, that’s just how we did things then.

Despite some recent revisionist history, our relationship with the newsroom in those days was nothing short of frigid (sin #whatever). There were internal politics which I’ll never understand and there was undoubtedly the fact that we were all 20-something upstarts (mind you, all of us came from newspaper backgrounds) which couldn’t have helped. That the then Executive Editor, Gregory Favre, would have his secretary print out his emails and he’d only reply, in writing, via interoffice mail probably set some kind of “tone” we were unaware of. In hindsight, being a part of Advertising I’m sure made us some kind of radioactive to the newsroom as well.

So, we were at the mercy of the “nightly dump” for most of our content. In those days the “nightly dump” was a series of quasi-formatted text files regurgitated out of the even-then-archaic SII editorial system at around 2:00 am every morning. There were no end of problems with these files and even Perl’s legendary Regular Expressions could only do so much. In the end it was a torturous shift, stepping through news stories via a crude web-based front end at 4:00am, that got the bulk of our content up by 7:00am — that’s just how we did things then.

Wait, come to think of it, not much has changed here (sin #2,643).

So there were lots of sins because we were making it up as we went along. Ultimately we figured it out though, learning from our mistakes (remind me to tell you about the time no one paid the sacbee.com DNS registrar bill and the domain got revoked) and eventually we became the savvy and knowledgeable web staff that you’d assume would be at a mid-size metro daily newspaper.

Over time, however, the various kaleidoscopes wandered off, tucked into boxes and carried off by their owners, off to different jobs or different careers. Perhaps that was the original sin.

The perfect is the enemy of the good. — Voltaire

Man I’ve heard that quote a lot recently, especially in the online news arena. It sounds all impressive and high falutin’, you know, being a quote from Voltaire and all. The problem is the above quote is almost always uttered as an excuse for something less than perfect or good… mediocrity.

Now, some would say that this is an outgrowth of the traditional newspaper mindset where existing in a virtual monopoly state — where “good enough” was in fact all that was needed for 30% profit margins — for so long has dulled that mindset to the realities of actual competition.

I don’t know that I’d go quite that far (tho it is fun to theorize on occasion) but I do bristle at the quote. Online operations are exceedingly competitive — and are becoming more so almost daily with the advent of local news blogs and the like — so if there are people running around thinking we can aim low and still be successful, well…

I won’t repost the whole thing here but I will pull out the interesting bits…

We will begin to move away from putting all of our newspaper content online for free. Instead, we will explore a variety of premium offerings that apply real value to our print content….

Charging for content is of course is all in vogue these days and in some cases might be smart but I think that if Media News tries it (or rather when Media News tries it) they’ll succeed only in driving traffic (and revenue) to the local (free) alternative media sites. As they sit in the middle of a very technology savvy area I think their risks are crazy high here.

They go on with:

We will begin differentiating our sites from the newspaper and focus on strategies designed to reach younger audiences and extend our reach. The websites, newspaper.com as we call them now, will become a different product. This new site, which we have been calling news.com, will be a regional news site that is actively managed to present breaking news. It will continue to draw a content from the newspaper (but probably in a more abbreviated form), but will also have user-generated content, community involvement and third party content. News.com will continue to serve our existing audience, which spends a lot of time on our sites, and drive significant traffic. They like and depend on our sites for their national and local news. We must not alienate them as we strive to expand our audience and attract younger people and non newspaper subscribers. Obviously, our sites must draw upon the content of the newspaper, but the presentation of that content will be different. News.com will be an entry page to new content offerings, local retail advertising opportunities and premium offerings.

This is the real nugget. I’ve always felt that the newspaper and the “newspaper.com” were different things and so should be handled as different things. Most newspapers today see their web sites as just electronic versions of their print offerings which is (to me) a big part of why many are struggling. Media News looks like they finally want to differentiate the two and I applaud this. They even go so far as to want to take it a bit further (note the distiction in “newspaper.com” and “news.com”).

This is a win but then further down they stumble headlong into 2002.

“We will build a new local utility site (Local.com), which is an ecosystem of local information, resources, user content, shopping guides, and marketplaces.”

Er, a portal? Seriously? In 2009? Good luck with that.

But if throwing back to 1998 wasn’t enough. Then someone had to really stir it up with a rousing game of buzzword bingo:

In order to execute this vision, we have agreed that these new strategies will be done with a template approach, using a menu of common tools and vendors. We will take advantage of the size of MNG to leverage enterprise solutions and build off a common platform that allows for fast implementation and a companywide rollout.

What this means is that they’re gonna build one site and change out the masthead for each affiliated newspaper. Epic fail.

Users know when you’re “phoning it in” and nothing says “half-assed” like identical sites with the word “San Jose” crossed out and the word “San Francisco” in it’s place. Especially in a tech-savvy area like the Bay Area. No, someone was simply buzzword drunk here and, if they really do try to leverage enterprise solutions and build off a common platform they will in reality only deploy mediocracy when they need to be competing against the best and the brightest.

So Media News gets points for the whole differentiating the newspaper and the “news.com” thing but man, they just can’t seem to wait to get their whole face in front of the shotgun with their other ideas. It’s OK though, I figure that in a few years there will be a wicked liquidation sale where I can pick up all kinds of retro newspaper stuff.

It’s no secret these days that newspapers are hurting (well, to be more accurate most newspaper companies are hurting, the newspapers they hold are generally still profitable enterprises) and a lot of people have been wondering what it will be like when the newspapers are all gone.

Well hopefully not like this.

Recently when the Sacramento Bee Newspaper Guild entered into concession negotiations with Bee Management, the local TV stations and “alternative media” jumped all over it and gave us all a glimpse into some ugly dystopian universe where the media eschews accuracy for what, speed? pretty pictures? I’m not sure.

First up was local TV station KXTV News10 with their atrocious handling of the whole story. From their end-of-the-world headline, Sacramento Bee Fights for Survival to their cartoonish editing online:

Advertising assistance Cindi Taylor has worked for the paper for ten years. “It’s pretty grim. It’s hard to watch people lose accounts,” Bee advertising assistance Cindi Taylor, who has worked at the Bee for 10 years.

They got so much wrong in their stories that it was laughable especially when a simple look at the Newspaper Guild blog provided far more information and contradicted a lot of what was being reported on TV.

But the negotiation teams weren’t laughing. The garbage stories (one media outlet at one point suggested the Bee was going to lay off over 500 people in the mistaken belief that the California WARN act was triggered at 500 people and not 50) were causing serious problems with advertisers who suddenly believed the Bee was right on the heels of the Rocky Mountain News which published its last edition last week when clearly it is not.

If TV outlets and other news sources can’t even get a media story right, how can they be expected to get anything else right? Yes the Bee gets things wrong on occasion and of course people think the Bee is as incompetent as the next media outlet, but I know these guys — the reporters and editors — and they really take this stuff seriously. They at least try.

If they don’t, who will?

So here’s my radical idea: get serious about being in the online news space. Stop thinking some rich guy (or rich government) will save you and save yourself. Stop paying lip service to the web and start playing like you mean it. Here’s how:

First and foremost, recognize that the web is different from print and it really is its own “new” medium. It is not, as so many tend to think, simply a collection of “old” media all rolled up in one place, it’s something entirely new. This concept is really important as it is the foundation needed to build everything else on. Once this is really understood, traditional print operations can start to see where other changes need to be made.

Staffing. Because the web constitutes an entirely new medium, it needs an entirely new mindset. What has worked well for 20 years in print, might not work well online (and vice versa). You have to have the experience and skill with the medium to know the difference.

Most daily newspapers employ a talented print staff, on their second or third newspaper, and would never dream of throwing a brand-new, fresh off the truck, reporter into a senior editing or news decision roll. Yet they do it all the time in their online operations, seemingly grabbing whomever is walking by (or worse, some dreg that they can’t place anywhere else) and chucking them into an “online content editor” roll (or whatever it’s called at your paper). Then they mark it off on some checklist that they placed someone in an online position and sit back and wait for the web traffic (and revenue) to come rolling in, but they can’t figure out why it doesn’t work.

Look, most newspapers got onto the web in the mid 90s, this means there ought to be a fair number of people with nearly 10 years of online news experience — and on their second or third paper to boot — running around. Odds are they probably came originally from the print side as well. Why aren’t newspapers hiring them?

There is, of course, more to it than just raw years of service. You want people who are avid and active consumers of the online medium, just as traditional newspaper people are by nature avid and active consumers of newspaper products. I’m talking about people who can make good decisions about the value of a story online because they get that the web is different than print. They get that if a story plays out over time then it needs to be done in such a way that various RSS readers, mobile sites and whatever else comes a long needs to be able to update properly, as opposed to just posting a “write-thru”. I’m also talking about people who are active in both in the writing of and the consuming of blogs. I’m also talking about people actively involved in social sites like Facebook as well as being immersed in other aspects of the online medium (perhaps “how many RSS feeds are in your Google Reader?” might be a good interview question).

These are the people who will build and maintain a serious web presence.

Web Design. Hopefully your crack new web staff knows what should be obvious: newspapers websites suck. Why? Because they were built by newspaper people and follow that same potpourri newspaper model that works so well for, well, newspapers. Problem is, it is the modern equivalent of reading the newspaper on the radio in the 1930s.

Rip all that shit out. Adopt the topic or the storyline approach to better facilitate story-telling online. Also recognize that some stories destined for the newspaper, just might not attract anyone online, which is fine, so don’t post them.

Additionally deploy content using a more linear model. Most newspaper websites are a mishmash of headlines and ads all vying for the readers eye much like the physical newspaper, but resulting in nothing more that a cacophony of visual clutter. Streamline and simplify. I’ve seen newspaper website statistics that routinely show that the traffic on the average story page (or photo) is a miniscule percentage of overall site traffic. This isn’t the case with more linear blogs where article traffic is almost always commensurate with site traffic. This, to me, translates into gross inefficiency and lost traffic potential because stories are scattered all about

Also market your /news, /sports and other subsections directly and focus traffic to them, away from the busy mess that you still call a “homepage”. Not only does this increase your SEO, but it gives readers a reason to come back again and again as news and information updates because they’ll have something to follow. Or better still, design the site to automatically change, so during peak news events users never have to leave.

In short, tailor your web site for the web, not for the printed newspaper.

Workflow. Finally, with a more web savvy staff and a more web savvy site, you have one more dragon to slay: your heretofore broken story workflow. I’ve ranted about this before but even still, damn near every newspaper I’ve ever visited is still working with print-centric story workflows (nevermind the fact that most are also still working with 1990s technology).

Here’s a free tip: if you’re still automatically (or semi-automatically) shoveling content from the “print product” to the “web product” you’re doing it wrong. Just stop. Instead take advantage of the idea of “curation,” where your web editors — using that wealth of online experience you hired them for — pick and choose the best stories and present them in a way that will work well online. But make sure they’re pulling from a story pool before they are edited for print. Give them the tools to easily add web-centric content such as visualizations, embedded video, and yes cross-referenced hyperlinks to other content.

To do this, of course you’ll need a content management system that doesn’t suck as well, something most newspapers just don’t seem to have — either for print or online. Given the huge sums of money flushed each year into ineffective publishing systems and the man-hours used to apply duct-tape to them, I’d think there’d be substantial savings and improved efficiency all around if someone would take the time to invest in newer solutions. And there are newer solutions, especially for web content (and many are free).

Or, newspapers can continue to attempt to become more efficient in other ways, through cutbacks and layoffs, which work in much the same way that cutting off your fingers makes you a more efficient typist. It’s their call.

There is a sense of panic in the newspaper industry, that newspapers are dying, and even though newspapers have been ill for a lot longer than most people think, it has only been recently that real discussion about it has taken place. This gives me some hope, because maybe, just maybe the decision makers are finally ready to get serious about this newfangled web thing.

I think Syndrome is now working for the newspaper industry.

Ink and paper are commodities, news is a commodity, Journalism is not. This is why newspapers work as businesses. Once upon a time, all a newspaper needed to shine was great writing and that was about it. Later some papers figured out that decent photography and some effort at page design would be good too, but the hallmark has always been the writing. Content, as was said, was king.

Today, however, there is this other (should I still say, “new”?) medium that newspapers are dabbling in called “the web” and it brings some other aspects to the table that no one had to consider before, things like functionality and usefulness.

Functionality and usability are most certainly not commodities.

The problem is most newspapers are still approaching the web like, well, newspapers. They look at their website’s functionality as a commodity and much like ink or newsprint they assume they can just write a check and the problem is solved.

This is evidenced by a plethora of vendors with something to offer a newspaper. You can write a check and get comments on your site. You can write a check and get your stuff magically dropped onto maps. You can write a check and get your stuff crammed into mobile phones. You can even write a check to get news on your site (er, what business were you in again?) and bizarrely you can even write a check to have someone else write your stories for you. With all this check writing, who needs innovation?

But here’s the thing, if you can write that check so can I. Ok, maybe not me personally as oftentimes those checks aren’t small, but my company can or conversely, my company’s competitor can. So in other words, “when everyone is super… no one will be.”

I get where this strategy sounds good. See, if all that hard-to-understand “techie” stuff (the stuff that actually makes up the functionality and usefulness of a website) is nothing more than commodity then newspaper survival must all boil down, once again, to content being king — and that must be a very comforting thought to those who wish the Internet was never invented. It’s the “do what you do best and link to the rest,” approach taken to a perverted extreme.

It’s also suicide.

Look at what the iPhone has done to the mobile industry. Or, closer to home, look at what Craig Newmark did to newspaper classifieds. What will happen when someone simply makes a better news product and introduces it into what is becoming a homogenized online news space?

Or the real question: why wait to find out?

I happen to live in the “western slope” of El Dorado County, California and so that’s where I’d concentrate the bulk of the blog. There’s a huge cross section up here of rural and suburban communities with kazillion dollar homes where you can park your airplane in your garage only a few hundreds yards from crime infested neighborhoods themselves only a few hundred yards from ranches and open country. In short, it’s a little diverse.

We have a newspaper, the Placerville Mountain Democrat, but their 1998 approach to the web has left a sizable opportunity to anyone willing to take it. Another key fact is that broadband, once near impossible to get up here, is for the most part now available across the region. These are important factors if you want to start a beat blog.

So first I’d start with the technical mainstay: data. This would include a complete database of area schools, K-12, both public and private and including contact numbers, map locations and, yes, the always important test scores. This is database 101 and would be a snap (for me) to do. I’d also do something similar for other areas of interest: hospitals, police stations, parks, whatever. This is important because you want to have a really solid foundation of area information to build on. I’d also have bio pages on every elected official in the county, including pictures. This data would be linked to from within any posts or stories on the site, both for usability and SEO — but more on that later.

Then you want what I call “robot driven news”. Live updating police and fire info, ideally off feeds from the county Sheriff’s office and the various area fire agencies if possible, like sactraffic.org does. Now you have breaking news on the site without lifting a finger. Arrest logs as well. Though they are somewhat seedy to me, they get huge numbers of readers. All this is just data and with data the idea is to make it universally accessible and useful.

Then there’s sports. I’m not sure how possible it would be but covering the high-school sports scene would be good bonus. There are four area high schools so it would not be wholly impossible to have dedicated “sections” (or WordPress categories) for each of them. The reality is however that Max Preps is located literally down the street from me and they may have that space locked up.

I’d also add user content and social tools. You don’t do a lot of work here or write a big check. It could be as little as setting up a group or two on Flickr for photos (and now video) and hyping it or doing something a little more technical and looking at some of the big boy APIs. Google has their OpenSocial stuff available and there’s the Facebook API as well. All the these can be leveraged, in whole or in part, to add a whole lot of social without a whole lot of overhead. Best part is: its all free. A huge net win.

But there’s one thing missing….

I always tell people (especially tech-phobic print folks who are so busy fearing for their jobs they often lash out at “techies” like me) that all the technical bells and whistles in the world means crap without a voice. You need a voice, you need the part where you, a human, actually explain things so people can understand. No computer can ever do that. Be it a summary of the last Board of Supervisors meeting, a bit about being an animal control officer in El Dorado County (come on, up here that’s got to be an exciting gig) or just a lament about the excessive building in the area, you need a voice.

That would be the hard part for me. While I’d find the technical bits; the databases and feed processing and maps and social APIs a hoot (not to mention shooting pictures of the occasional high school game), the day-to-day writing — you know the “blog” part of “beat blog” — would be a challenge. Believe it or not I can only pontificate so much .

Furthermore to do something like this, I’d have to be seriously dedicated because like all great journalism, I’m not gonna make a whole lot of money off it for a while which, conveniently, brings me to monetization. The quick and dirty way to make some money off a blog is to use Google’s AdSense and off the start this would be the only real option. As things grew (yes, that is the plan) I imagine I could potentially partner with other area blogs and possibly look at selling our own ads or sponsorships.

Now one solid advantage in monetizing this thing would be that strategically it would be in a great place. There’s not a lot a lot of local news coverage in this area. The Sacramento Bee is 35 miles away and struggles to really cover the area and the closer paper, the Placerville Moutain Democrat — as I alluded to before — has a pretty archaic view of the web, requiring a print subscription to view their stories online. This has served to make them invisible to search engines and so by following a few basic SEO rules there’s no reason I couldn’t, in very short order, drive at least one of my competitors into web irrelevance with Google and other search engines being the largest driver of traffic.

So there you have it. I doubt it’s something I’ll do anytime soon, but who knows, with times being what they are…

Or at least it’s different from the way I’ve grown accustomed to on the web.

Oh sure you have the daily news-cycle being replaced with the “always on” instant news-cycle of the web. To anyone that’s worked anywhere near a wire service, that isn’t new. What I’m talking about something different.

On the web I find myself following a particular story, or event, or subject. As things change or as that event unfolds, the web updates. And I update. Sometimes it’s all in one place or on one website and that’s great, you can just reload to your heart’s content and watch the page change. Sometimes you have to hunt about, going from site to site to get the latest news on said event or person.

Sometimes this news updates fast with updates every few minutes, or sometimes it’s an ongoing thing warranting only the occasional checkin. Whatever, it’s what I’m used to.

However, on the print side, in the average paper a story is researched, written, edited and then published… and then, the day after it’s published, its ancient history. Yes, I know there are series, or “stories with legs” but those are the exception. Many stories hit and then vanish, relegated to some obscure “spill page” at the bottom of some index page somewhere. Reporters, of course, know about a story’s history (“Hey, didn’t you write about this last year?”) but we the consumer rarely get a look at a piece once it’s day has come and gone.

This’s what’s weird to me. Ironically, for all their physical presence newspapers are very much a transient news outlet while the web, for all its abstract “virtual” presence, is very much not.

Jeff Jarvis over at BuzzMachine talks about this too in “The building block of journalism is no longer the article“. In fact it was his post that finally got me thinking about this. He refers to the “topic” — which is in effect the “story, or event, or subject” I was talking about before — as the new basic building block of the web. I like that idea.

So I got to thinking… are we doing it wrong? It’s said that Alexander Graham Bell originally thought that the telephone would be used to bring symphony music to remote areas. It’s a classic example misunderstanding an emerging new media. So are we making the same mistake? In most cases we still take the transient news model from our papers and put it onto our web sites, I think we might be.

Where a lot of people like to ask “if you are building a news website from scratch…” I like to ask, “If you were building a newspaper web site from scratch, what would you do differently?” I’m thinking I’d start with something topic-based.

We tend to organize news content online like we do in the paper. Why? Because that’s what works in the paper. Online we could have news rotating through the “home” page and offer links to topics that are currently important. It’s just a thought at the moment, but one I hope to work on.

Besides the (painful) lessons learned about workflow I think its time to reexamine how news is presented online. Topic-based seems to make a hell of a lot of sense.

Back now? Ok, Daylife (in case you’re cheating and reading ahead) is a “news aggregator” — that means it is a service that, in their own words, “gathers and analyzes mind-boggling amounts of high-quality news and other content from across the web.” Then they package it up in ways that virtually anyone from users (that would be you when I told you to go look at their site) to web-head, code monkeys like me can use.

Now that right there is very cool in and of itself, but the truly over-the-top feature of Daylife is its ability to “chain” topics. Like Wikipedia, you can spend hours clicking through links on Daylife meandering from news topic to news topic (until, I imagine, you end up at Cargo Cults since every web search ends there).

But so what? Well, I got to start looking at Daylife for work. Now this is really interesting, because when I first heard of Daylife (probably via BuzzMachine) it was billed as a way for small web news sites or beat blogs to rival their bigger brethren in content so right away it was strange — being the bigger brethren and all.

We decided (meaning, “I was told to”) to look at Daylife in three areas (and yes I’m being intentionally vague here because we’re not done yet):

1. Pad out an existing strong section with related content from Daylife
2. Bolster a weaker section of our content with related content from Daylife
3. Build out a section that we think could ‘drive traffic’ where we had no existing content before

It’s that last one that was the most interesting to me because, simply put, I thought it was terrible idea. Padding out native sections with related news is one thing, I think that’s a great approach (especially when you can tailor the sources like you can with the Daylife API) and as a believer in the Ethic of the Link it all fits in nicely.

(Hmm, all that Link Ethic stuff is from BuzzMachine who’s proprietor, Jeff Jarvis, is a partner in Daylife… do you see a pattern here?)

But building out what amounts to a virtual section of your web site with no original content at all just feels like, well… cheating. Sure your ad folks can probably sell it (revenue!!!), but it none of that content is yours and I question anyone’s ability to drive sustainable traffic to a section that’s not a natural strength of the site in the first place. And then I can’t get past the whole “negative-sum” notion of it — if everyone simply linked to everyone else, would anyone have any original content? To me this breaks the ethic of the link in a big way.

All that all being said, I still elected to start with this so-called “virtual section” because, ironically, due to it’s very nature of not having any in-house content it would be the quickest and easiest to build. This way, my thinking went, I could wade into the Daylife API, play around a bit, build the section out, deploy it and then move on to the “real” sections with a better understanding of how Daylife works. That seems to have been a good approach so far. I still think the whole virtual-section idea is dodgy though .

On the tech side, Daylife has a pretty slick RESTful API (called the DayPI… get it? day-pee-eye?) where you can do generic searches or pull related articles and photos for a given article or photo which is all to be expected. What’s cool is you can pull related topics as well, which come with their own stories and photos (this is the basis for the “chaining” mentioned above). They have a number of libraries and code snippets available (of varying quality) to get you going and I played with a few of them to get a feel for what was doable.

Ultimately, since they offer a native JSON return format, I opted instead to write a simple proxy to their API so I could roll the whole thing up in AJAX calls (made extra simple thru jQuery). This also allowed me to cache the requests on the local side for a quick speed boost.

So we’ll see how the various sections do, I like the idea of Daylife and I like their approach to news. If it’s used correctly it can be, I think, a really nice add-on for most news websites.

In the same vein that there are requirements w/in newsrooms to subscribe to the paper, I’d like to see the “online desk” staffers barred from taking the print edition.

Why? Because it clouds online news judgement. When online staffers are still happily existing in a 24-hour news cycle of monologue presentation, they fail a lot of times to expand their thinking to a web-based, constant news stream, dialog model that will, it seems pretty clear to me, define the future of news online.

In short, they become liabilities.

I recognize the value both financially and functionally of a print product, I truly do. I don’t think such a restriction should be permanent by any means. It’s just that since many newspapers are not hiring “web natives” for their web positions — and therefor crippling themselves — a “print ban” on online staffers seems like a good way to whiplash them into starting to think like web natives.

Sort of a “total immersion” type of approach.

It was an off-the-cuff comment made shortly after arguing some academic point or other with a friend who, while a talented and dedicated print journalist, wasn’t much of a web user, and so didn’t see my point at all (of course my delivery could not have been at fault ).

Now that I’ve had the time to think more about it… I like it even more.