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While I think that Howard Owens’ heart is in the right place with his idea that Journalists should become wired, we have to realize that this is no replacement for staffers with real web experience.

Its great that you want to pick up a digital camera to “play” and learn. It’s great that you want to glean some understanding of the other “silos” in your newsroom. This is important and necessary to stay (or, more accurately, become) competitive, but to do so without the guidance of a cadre of experienced web staffers — those with at least a decade of web content creation, design or development — is not going to do you any good.

In fact it will probably hurt you.

All this “…buy a small digital camera and…” stuff seems to me to dismiss “web journalism” as trivial (”something you can just pick up”) and technically, I suppose, it is. Of course, so is writing, right? After all we all learned how to write in elementary school, didn’t we? My 3rd grader writes pretty well, so should your newspaper start hiring 3rd graders? (think of the expense savings!)

Well, if all your newspaper is doing is hoping that their existing staffers pick up this “web stuff” by some kind of osmosis without any real experience on staff, then they may as well start hiring 3rd graders, because that’s all they’ll be getting. And it’ll show.

This last Sunday (the 23rd), some neighbors down the street awoke at 2:00 am to their house on fire. I’m happy to say they all survived, but that’s not what this post is about. It’s about how this story was handled by the Sacramento Bee’s web site, sacbee.com.

The story is here.

2:00 am on Sunday is well after press time but the Bee did post a “breaking news” update to its web site at 9:25 am on Monday. Yeah, that’s right, on Monday. For those counting that’s over 24 freakin’ hours later. That ain’t “breaking” news folks.

Whatever, lets just go with it. I first saw the story in my RSS feed reader on Monday morning (hey, it was less than a half a mile from my house so I guess I missed it too) and clicked on it. While it was a good story, the very first question I had was “where did this happen?” I looked for a map on the page but there was no map to be found. How could you have a story today with a story like that and not have a map? Maps have become web journalism 101. The story was apparently updated 4 times that day and yet no map.

Then I wondered, where were the photos? Ok, you missed the 2:00 am alarm, no problem there, I’ve done that. But where was the photo of the burned out house with the people going through it? Cliché you say? Well so are stories about house fires before Christmas.

No map, no photos. It was a good story but it was over 24 hours old. To me it was a missed opportunity to actually put breaking news online and really use the web to help tell the story.

Then they made it worse.

The print version came through with the “firefighter’s gifts” angle in the next day’s paper (now two days on). It was essentially the same story but with a different hed. Owing to a quirk in the Bee’s workflow the print version superseded the “breaking news” web version rendering those links as 404s. Had there been user comments (I don’t know if there were) or any other webification, that would have been lost too. Ouch.

Still no map, still no photos. And what was a good story the day before hadn’t really been updated so now it was closer to mediocre. “Yeah,” a reader would be tempted to say, “I read about all that yesterday, so what else is new?” Funny thing about the web, users expect stories to update.

I want newspapers to succeed, I really do. But you can’t say you embrace the web and pledge yourself to “hyper-local” reporting and then phone in your stories like this. You have to make the stories work on the web and this means adding whatever the web can support to help tell the story. In this case it meant maps, photos, updating the story as you learn more and not killing links to the story because it appeared in print two days later.

It was a missed opportunity.

Back in 1930-something early radio folks like Walter Cronkite figured out very quickly that reading the newspaper on the radio didn’t work. Radio was an audio medium and newspapers were not.

Yesterday I sat through a demo from a company who had a really slick product that put your newspaper’s PDFs online and they had all this cool navigation and searching and whatnot. It looked just like the newspaper and you even flipped pages all Kindle, er, newspaper like.

From a technology perspective it was impressive. From a strategic perspective it was a joke. It was the 2007 version of reading the newspaper on the radio.

The web is not a print medium folks. Yes the web has a printed media aspect, but there’s so much more to it. There’s other, non-print media (”multimedia”) and there’s, you know, “linking”. The physical paper has none of that, PDF or no. There’s certainly no mechanism in the physical paper for microformats or anything like that.

That this product even made inroads — and it did because they supposedly report to ABC for circulation numbers — tells me that we’re still thinking like newspaper people… in 1935.

I hate them, all those social site “walled gardens.” This is why I’ve been somewhat excited by Google’s OpenSocial platform.

I pontificated a while back about reporter’s profile pages so that people could get to know better who’s doing the talking in our still-mostly-monologue medium. But decent profile pages are hard. You gotta have your widgets and your account maintenance and admin pages and styles and blech.

Seems stupid too to reinvent the perfectly good wheels that the various social sites have already invented with their own profile pages. ‘Cept social sites are walled, and that does newspapers — who should never be walled off — not a whit of good.

OpenSocial looks like it can meet me halfway. I think I can build pseudo-profiles from real profile pages hosted on OpenSocial compliant sites. This would leave the editing and maintenance up to the reporter and the account management up to the social site, and this makes me happy.

I say “looks like” because I haven’t figured out the right mojo yet. I didn’t get a whole lotta time this weekend to whack on OpenSocial but I did get a simple Twitter app working (”simple” being the operative word).

I’ll figure it out though.

So I just read off Romenesko (sorry Howard) that Rick Rodriguez, The Sacramento Bee’s Executive editor resigned today.

That’s interesting, I thought, doing my best mental Jack Sparrow imitation.

You see, I don’t technically work for the Bee, but I often work at the Bee (ok, yes, I did once work for the Bee but now I don’t… it’s confusing) ANYWAY not long ago the AME in charge of the Bee’s “online operations” casually mentioned, “oh, hey, Rick wants to meet you.”

Say what?

Now, I know very well, I’m “known” around the papers I support. I tend to speak my mind and have these crazy web theories and opinions that sometimes impress people but sometimes…. um… not so much. I honestly asked, “uh, is this a good thing or a bad thing?” It was good thing, I was assured. “Maybe lunch… next week?”

That was two weeks ago.

I walked past the AME the other day and casually asked, “Yo, where’s my lunch?” with a grin. Apparently Rick had been out all week, and it was not normal. I don’t know newsroom politics really at all so I had no clue how to read that. Hell, I had no clue how to read any of this. Is it normal for exec editors of papers to, “want to meet you?” It had a weird Sopranos feel to it.

“…differences are not about resources, they’re not about staffing, they’re not about expenses…”

Well Jiminy, what does that leave? News coverage? Internet strategy? More importantly what about my lunch?!?

The next editor will not be a Bee employee but will come from the ranks of the newspaper’s owner…

Oh I can think of a few people offhand, it’s a zillion-billion to one shot but a certain Indians fan…

These days my world at work revolves around getting news stories out of my employer’s newspaper publishing system and onto the web via my employer’s in-house web CMS.

Welcome to my nightmare.

You’d think it would be easy, just issue a SELECT * FROM news WHERE date = $today; and be done with it, right? Well, not so much.

Continue reading ‘Why it’s so hard to get print stories online’ »

Now here is a good use of Twitter (IMHO): Sacramento Traffic Updates

Unbeknownst to most people the CHP makes available a dynamically generated XML file of all their working incidents state-wide. Borrowing a page from the LA Fire Department, it struck me that using this feed for updates to Twitter would pretty slick.

So @sactraffic was born.

I of course made it configurable so I can set the “Center” and “Dispatch” that I want (in case I get a hankering for “FresnoTraffic” I guess) and then I found that at least in the Sacramento area there are still a lot of incidents so I further added configurable filtering on the “Area” (as in “just give me ‘Sacramento’ and not ‘Placerville’ or ‘Auburn’”).

Then I went and filtered all those nifty CHP shorthand acronyms, “JSO EB ONR” (just south of east bound onramp) and low and behold actually readable alerts.

I was (and still am) concerned that hitting that XML file every 5 minutes is unnecessary traffic and load, I would rather not grab the whole file if it hasn’t changed. I was surprised to find out that the file seems to be generated on the fly on every access as both the Last-Modified and Etags headers apparently update on every access regardless of any changes. And they look like they don’t use compression either. Seems to me that the CHP itself is not worried about excess traffic or load.

This whole exercise took about an hour, give or take, and then a few minutes here and there for tweaking, and of course writing this blog post.

There are two types of car mechanics.

There’s the neighborhood mechanic (and this includes the dealer mechanics as well) who will fix your car when it’s broken. They will advertise, “We only use manufacturer certified parts!” They will fix the funny noise, replace the broken part. No more, no less.

Then there are race mechanics. Oh they’ll replace the part that blew up on the track, but they’ll also listen, watch and fix what you didn’t even know was broken. And you want them to. They’ll suggest changes, “Hey, you need a little more camber in the front suspension…” They’ll spend huge sums of money on the “race” version of parts because the .0001 second gained for 10x the price will matter. Winning matters.

It’s been my experience that most newspaper IT shops (actually most corporate IT shops in general) are like the neighborhood mechanic, fixing what’s broken and offering only vendor certified parts - no more, no less. And you know what? Historically, that’s been fine. Historically newspapers have been operating in the automotive equivalent roll of dropping the kids off at soccer practice so the IT’s roll of neighborhood mechanic has been just fine.

Except we’re in a race now.

Mark my words, if your IT shop isn’t providing you with expensive racing parts and tweaking the camber on your front suspension, you are going to lose.

Why don’t newspapers offer their classifieds to other sites (bloggers, partners other papers in the chain) in an AdSense-like model?

You know, with the addition of some JavaScript your site could run a little widget with an ad in it tailored to the content on your site. And you get paid for it to boot.

Just a thought.

I keep saying that the web is a completely different medium and we should not be regurgitating print copy onto it, but rather creating new content specifically for it.

Example: http://www.nytimes.com/ref/us/20070803_BRIDGE_GRAPHIC.html

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