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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.

This week was gonna be a tough one, no matter what. My company was launching a major update to one of our systems at The Modesto Bee and so a gaggle of us were on site and were planning to spend the night when…

“Um, where did Fresno go?”

Suddenly all the systems at The Fresno Bee dropped offline… followed by all the Fresno staffers I have in my IM buddy list disappearing. One of our guys was on the phone to someone down there and said, “I heard the fire alarm and then the line went dead.”

Holy crap!

It turns out that a fire sprinkler pretty much blew apart and flooded a small room where all the network and phones came into the building.

I wound up driving down that night because with the network out web updates — my domain — would be awfully tricky and while they would probably have the network back up sometime that night, if they didn’t by the time we knew for sure it would be too late to drive down and implement any wild hair ideas.

When I got there I immediately set up my laptop on the local network and popped in a Verizon EVDO card. Worst case I’d move updates to my laptop from the internal net and then bring up the EVDO card and move the updates manually to the web staging server.

Then I went to check out the damage. There had been 6″ to 8″ inches of water in this tiny little data room and most of the equipment had been either submerged or completely sprayed with this mucky 25-year-old sprinkler water. When I first walked in I didn’t have my camera, which was too bad because there was muck on the walls and guys were basically laying in it trying to get equipment pulled out to dry it off.

Then I sat in a pretty grim meeting of powerful people. The print operation was unaffected as all the internal systems and networks were fine, they’d still put out a paper. The major concern was the phones, the next morning people would be calling to place ads, to make complaints, to do any amount of business all via the phones. For an hour we discussed a variety of ways to get the phone traffic handled in the event they couldn’t get the phone system back up by morning.

Interestingly what was NOT discussed was the myriad of internet feeds than any newspaper has to put stuff on the web in various places including daily news feeds, classified feeds and the like. By exclusion, I got to see what really mattered.

So after the first edition went to bed, I dutifully juggled the data from one machine to another over the EVDO card and as expected 5 minutes later the network came up. While I called it a night, other folks were still at it using hair dryers to dry the remaining equipment.

Amazingly, they had most systems restored by morning, which is a testament to the hard work a lot of people did (but not me, I was in a hotel room working on the aforementioned system upgrade).

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.