lectroid.net

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

-30-

So back in 1990-something there was a big brouhaha caused by including the reporter’s email addressed in the “tail” of the story:

Buffy Writesalot can be reached at buffyw@thelocaltrusteddaily.com

This was the beginning of the End of Times apparently (well, in a way…). Recently several papers I work for are moving that info up to the byline. They call this progress. I suppose the lack of outcry is progress.

But it’s lame.

What I want to see is a link to a reporter’s “profile” page, in very much the same vein as Facebook profile. Except, unlike Facebook, this profile would be public — the fact that you’re a newspaper reporter makes the whole world your “friend”. Call this “transparency”.

Let the reporters customize these profile pages if they wish — just like Facebook — adding blog postings or photos or video… or whatever. It would be the reporter’s “face” at the paper.

The only things I think I’d require on said page would be a self written “about me” blurb (hello, you are a writer aren’t you?!?) and the inclusion of a “last X stories” widget and a “last X user comments on my stories” widget.

I’m starting to think that what’s needed at newspapers, excuse me, news organizations, is more people. People that you can trust as opposed to a big corporate entity you probably don’t. Staff profile pages with a collection of the reporter’s work and samples of their interactions with people seem to me to be a good way to create this relationship and build that trust.

Really, I’m not opposed to internet video, YouTube and all that, but I think this comment to a Slashdot (yes… journo-geek) article on Boeing’s really flexible 787 wings sums what makes a “good” internet video:

“This would make one heck of a good video for Youtube if it’s done right. I would be very interested to watch the test accompanied by the 1812 overture with the wings snapping in a spectacular fashion just as the drums hit! Oh, and add two squirrels and a cat fighting to the video. And while you’re at it add lightsabers and two chicks kissing. Now that would make a good video!”

Instead, the high and mighty among us give us… ketchup.

Here it is again: 10 obvious things about the future of newspapers you need to get through your head

Is anyone listening?

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.

Like most newspapers, the one(s) that I support are trying desperately to control expenses and are looking under every rock for spare pennies. One tactic oft deployed is the “write once; deploy many” approach to software (or more commonly: “buy once; deploy many”).

The problem is every newspaper is unique. Simply put, what works for one doesn’t necessarily work for another.

As an example, the papers I support were recently introduced to a new web content management system. The system isn’t really bad, although there are some latent issues, but every paper got — or will get — the exact same interface.

But every paper has subtle differences in the way they do things and this “standard” interface causes issues. It slows down production, forces workflow changes, and even in some cases forces product changes — all in the name of saving some nominal amount of money.

To avoid such nastiness, those papers lucky enough to have access to journo-geeks have them work up all manner of band-aids and workarounds. Yours Truly is certainly guilty of such hackery. The problem here is that who’s gonna support said band-aids if/when that journo-geek disappears? What if your journo-geek gets hit by the proverbial bus? Furthermore, what will happen when the offending system/application/whatever is updated? Will the band-aid update with it or will it blow apart requiring frantic emergency pages in the middle of the night?

The obvious (to me) solution is to shoot for “one size mostly fits all,” then provide ways for the journo-geeks and their ilk to tweak and modify things as they need. Make that way flexible yet scalable (upgradeable). And for crying out loud, make it documented.

Make it an interface so that programmers can modify your application.

Get it?

So I did something I don’t normally do this morning. I read the paper. Now, technically speaking I always read the paper, several in fact. I peruse the RSS feeds from a couple of area papers and occasionally I find a story of interest, but this morning I read the paper paper.

You see yesterday the “news” coming out of Virginia Tech was a mess. One shooter, no two. One shooter was killed, no wait he was captured. One dead, no 20 dead, no 30. One headline I saw was creative: “20 to 30 dead”. My Dad, a rocket scientist, would always explain to me the difference between “accuracy” and “precision”. Well, at least “20 to 30 dead” is accurate.

TV was worse. Bad helicopter video and talking heads who spent most of the day trying to fill airtime with news and information they didn’t have. I couldn’t get Don Henley out of my head. At least we didn’t have Dan Rather decimating classic journalism quotes.

Now, I could have spent all day reading news sites and endlessly refreshing web pages for up-to-the-minute speculation (because that’s what it was at that point, speculation) or I could go on with my day and tomorrow, over my doughnut and Mtn. Dew breakfast (hey, the name is Journo-geek ok?), I could read it all, clearly and concisely, in the paper.

So I did.

You see some guy in some national office did spend all day reading news sites and probably calling contacts and probably collated reports from field reporters and he (or she) put together a 120″ story that ran over the wires to my paper. It was long but full of (hopefully) verified facts. It was a far cry from the guesswork reporting of the day before.

Now I’m informed. I have a better idea what happened. That’s how it’s supposed to work.

We on the web pride ourselves on being able to get the news out fast, just like TV. But sometimes the news requires some thought, some time to see how the pieces all fit, in short some journalism.

I’ve had the opportunity to work with a number of so-called “integrated” Interactive Media departments in several newspaper newsrooms and a trend that worries me is the tendency to choose “seasoned” print journalists with little or no web experience over seasoned web journalists — some with a fair amount of print experience — when staffing these newly integrated online operations.

Not good.

I can understand the gut desire of a 60-year-old grizzled print editor to want to staff this new fangled intarweb thing with “his people”, I really can. People he can talk to, people he can understand, people who punctuate spoken sentences with “man” instead of “dude“.

Dude, its also insane.

The logic here, I’m sure, is a talented story teller is a talented story teller, no matter what the medium. The problem is that’s just not true. It didn’t work when they tried to read newspapers on the radio in 1930 and it didn’t work again when they tried to read radio scripts on TV in 1950.

Interactive Media (that’s “newspaper websites” to the buzzword deficient) is a medium unto itself. It has it’s own “culture” and it’s own direction. It’s OK that you don’t know what XMLHttpRequest() is or what the difference is between an XML DTD and an XML Schema, but you need to know about where online media is going because if you don’t, you’re just reading the newspaper on the radio.

Recently a former co-worker, with several years experience building and maintaining a large metro daily website, recounted to me a story about how her new inexperienced masters in the newsroom spent 20 minutes discussing whether an explanatory blurb was necessary on a story explaining what the blue underlined words were.

Dude, they’re hyperlinks!

1996 is on the phone, they want their reporters back.

-30-