dummied

Sticking my neck out

At a glance

This entry was written on December 16, 2005.

The entry prior to this is entitled Making Movable Type fluid.

The entry following this is entitled A Round of Applause for The Times.

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My current newspaper employer—who I have not explictly mentioned here but haven't made a real effort at hiding, either—has recently decided that they need to place a greater emphasis on their website. In theory, I'm in total agreement. I think their handling of it before now has been mediocre to piss-poor and any additional effort should of course be applauded.

How does this affect me? Well, if I do nothing, it doesn't affect me directly at all. But, given my feelings on related newspaper-website interactions, I'm deciding to try and make it affect me much more directly.

The newspaper's forming a "Solutions Team" to try and guide this greater emphasis on the website. They sent out a badly-formed Word document for volunteers to fill out and return, and this is what I wrote:

Why should you be a member of this team?
I should be a member of this team because I know, in both technical and philosophical areas, how the internet works better than anyone at this newspaper. I have been designing web pages as a side hobby since I was in high school. I know the backbone technologies of the Internet, from HTML and CSS to programming languages such as PHP and Perl and relational databases such as MySQL. I also have a very good idea of where the Web is currently at, and more importantly, where it's headed. I know that newspaper companies that continue to not take their websites seriously—from using outdated markup schemes and poorly thought-out designs to not using current technologies such as RSS feeds—will not be a good position to survive the inevitable switch from a traditional content delivery system to the upcoming digital delivery system.

What three ideas do you think the newspaper should enact next year?
First off, the website should have summary RSS feeds. The technology has been percolating for several years now, but as companies such as Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft start integrating Really Simple Syndication technologies into their applications and, in the case of Microsoft, upcoming operating systems, it will be vitally important for newspaper websites to take advantage of the technology, especially since it is essentially an advertisement for the stories we produce and costs us next to nothing.

Secondly, the website needs reworked to use current web standards instead of a tag-soup mess of bloated table markup that is costing this company money. By switching to a lean XHTML/CSS markup, we can dramatically cut our bandwidth costs.

Finally, we need to come to grips with the realization that a traditional newspaper is a dying form of media in this country—and there very likely is no way to prevent its death. No amount of local news up front, big, splashy centerpieces and coupon books will prevent the death of newspapers as a viable, vibrant piece of the modern media puzzle within my lifetime. The time has come to accept this and move on—and that means taking the web seriously not as a competitor but as a new, better and cheaper delivery mechanism for the same quality content we have always produced.

I have many, many more ideas than this, but you asked for the big three.

How do we make our operation move faster?
Send stories to the web not at the end of the night, but after they are read by the desk—whenever that is. That way the site updates at different points during the day and night, rather than in one big block sometime in the middle of the night. We can also (I would think) be able to update all the stories with the late fixes during the normal middle-of-the-night dump.

We can also allow our readers to contribute through forums, web galleries (in the age of cell phones and web services like Flickr, enabling readers of the web site or the newspaper to upload photos from live news events to a web page should be an extremely easy thing to do) and/or small, micro-zoned community blogs (which can integrate staff copy and reader-submitted copy).

The key to almost all of these ideas, however, is moderation—as in assuming the worst in people and making sure there is a layer of oversight between the general public and website to prevent things like the L.A. Times' ill-guided foray into the world of wikis. We have to assume that if left unfettered, people will deface any avenue to interaction we open. It only takes a few bad apples, and we have to have someone or some mechanism in place to sort the good from the bad.

What is the most innovative thing you have introduced at the newspaper this year?
I currently work as a page designer in the sports department, so my opportunities for innovation are few and far between. I did, however, revise the format of our player capsules in our All-Star/County sections to make better and more efficient use of time and newshole and provide equal attention to all members of our first teams.