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Editor’s note: The actual quote was “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” The full presentation is available here: http://sites.google.com/site/io/the-worlds-information-in-context

“Our mission is to make information available and make it useful.” — Michael T. Jones, Chief Technology Advocate, Google

When Michael Jones uttered that line at the recent Google I/O conference, I about fell over. Waitaminute, I thought, isn’t that the roll of the newspaper? I mean, if Google’s mission is to make information available and make it useful, how is that any different from the traditional newspaper mission?

Continue reading ‘Making information available and useful online and why newspapers aren’t very good at it.’ »

You know what? Absolutely no one I know outside of work uses text messaging or instant messaging of any kind. No really. And it’s only been recently that someone I know outside of work has started to use Flickr.

No one I know personally blogs either. At least not on any measurable scale (yeah, I see ya, bro). So I’m not even gonna try to explain the idea of “microbloging” so forget sites like Twitter or Britekite.

Even the youngins — those fresh out of college — when I search for them on Facebook I get nuthin’. Weren’t colleges where Facebook got its start?!?

Understand that these are not Luddites locked away in some mountain cabins somewhere, these are smart folks from all walks of life, at varying ages, and pretty much all of ‘em own computers. Heck they even send email on occasion. Some actually work in technology fields!

In fact, judging by my circle of long time friends — not to mention my extended family — all that web2.0 hype is pretty much a freakin’ myth. Is it?

I don’t think so. I think sometimes we in the field sometimes do lose perspective (I certainly know I do) and think that everyone is taking their Flickr KML feed and making cool Google maps out of them or using Reuter’s Spotlight and embedding news in their iPhones or something , but in reality, only a very, very few or our readers/viewers/users even know what an RSS feed is.

But then we return to relevance…

Hello, my name is Marc and I’m a Twitter addict…

Ok, maybe it’s not that bad (really, I can quit anytime I want…) but I am fascinated by it. So much so that after a brief chat one day with @base10 (the @ sign is a Twitter thing) I decided to implement a simple script to update Twitter based on updates to an RSS feed (I swear I’d never heard of TwitterFeed at that point). The idea being that given a “breaking news” RSS feed, I could automatically scan it every so often and send news updates to Twitter.

Using code from my traffic stuff as a base this was a snap to set up. Then came adding support for multiple RSS feeds with multiple Twitter accounts (think “newspaper chain”) and then came support for ATOM feeds in addition to RSS.

What’s been more interesting (to me) is how the different newspapers I’ve set this up for have used it.

The first site to take advantage of Twitter (using my code) was The Fresno Bee. They track their “Updates” section’s RSS feed, so you get just that: news updates. This was pretty much the intended use. Later they added Twitter support to their BeeHive blog.

Next up The Modesto Bee decided to track their “Local News” section so while you get local news updates throughout the day (good), you also get a burst first thing in the morning of their local news print headlines (not so good). Several newspapers do this, regurgitating their daily headlines onto Twitter, and I’m not really a fan of this because to me Twitter is about immediacy, not yesterday’s news.

That said, Modesto was the first site (as far as I know) to update Twitter manually with some breaking traffic updates.

The most recent addition, the Merced Sun-Star did something slick. They created a special channel within their web CMS just for Twitter. This channel creates it’s own RSS feed and therefore becomes a way to update Twitter directly from their CMS. This is very cool, because it allows them to be selective if they so desire. Now they just have to work on that icon.

So yes, we tweet.

If you follow me on twitter you may have caught a momentary vent yesterday that I think could be explained:

"We need to rethink our workflow" ARE YOU LISTENING? Of course not, you don't Twiiter[sic], do you.

You see I had just got out of a demo of some “next gen” print publishing software that promised to have better support for the web (and since the vendor’s current offering has ZERO support for the web, I suppose anything would be “better”). To be fair, the software really did look like it’s on the right track, treating news content in a media agnostic way, but I strongly suspected some marketing droid had convinced upper management that this new version was a silver bullet that would magically save a gaggle of FTEs on the web side of the house, and therefore we must buy it.

I didn’t ;). I maintained that we could accomplish most of what was being offered on the screen by “rethinking our current workflow” and taking advantage of the software (and developers) we already have in-house. I think it’s called “doing more with less,” but I digress.

“Rethink our workflow? I don’t know what that means,” the crusty old editor said.

I realized that that moment that for all this guy’s knowledge and skill in the newsroom, he didn’t recognize that our current workflow of pulling web content out of the print publishing system after it’s been formatted for the page is fundamentally flawed. 90% of the code to “export” this content for the web deals with “de-printing” it and where do you think 90% of the bugs occur? I’ve talked about this before.

By “rethinking our workflow” I mean nothing less than “exploding” the notion that we’re a news paper and really becoming that news organization we talk about being and, just like in the fancy demo, treating our content — be it text, photos, video or smellovision — in a media agnostic way. Publish to a database, not a paper. Stop writing news stories in a pagination system. Submit content for general editing and then release it to the print and web editors. Let the print editors “printify” their print products (edit for length, add pull quotes and deck heds, suggest headlines) and let the web editors “webify” theirs (package multimedia, links, tags, web heds).

But… what if the web site doesn’t have the same pull quotes?!? What if the headlines differ?!? OMG What if we italicize something in print and the web doesn’t?!?

I’m sorry but who the hell cares? I’d challenge questions like that with, “where’s our video in the paper?” or “I clicked on the teaser box to see the story and poked a hole in the paper, was that supposed to happen?” In this brave new world we need to take way better advantage of the media we’ve elected to support and right now we’re not. We can’t do it as long as we’re funneling one through the other.

We need to rethink our workflow.

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.

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.

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’ »

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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