dummied

The trunk for the branches

At a glance

This entry was written on March 12, 2007.

The entry prior to this is entitled The path of least resistance.

The entry following this is entitled Unobtrusive Pageless Pagination in Rails.

There are 0 comments on this post.

This entry has been tagged as Newspapers, Recommended, Work, metadata.

Archives are also available.

It might have something to do with my current project at work, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about priorities.

As the media industry, and the newspaper industry specifically, lumbers onto the internet, we seem to have the attention span of an MTV-raised 14-year-old fresh out of Ritalin. We throw ourselves into video, niche websites (although, IndyMoms.com is really quite good … quite good …), soundslides, pet photo galleries and staff-written blogs with short-lived vigor before moving onto the next get-rich-(again)-quick scheme.

As we pour our time, money and other assorted resources into these products, while, our bread and butter – the things we do better and with more volume than any other industry on the planet – sits there stagnant and unloved.

The Great American Newspaper produces more quality content – printed, electronic and otherwise – than almost any individual source in the world. It’s a vast wellspring of pure, unadulterated information, the very lifeblood of the internet itself.

Think about the sheer volume of content a mid- to major-market newspaper produces on a daily basis – stories, photos and listings. There’s a lot of heft there … and a lot of quality, weighty heft if we wield it properly.

But we wield that heft clumsily, with expiring web content, for-pay archives (that no one ever buys) and poorly thought-out, short-sighted grabs for page views and raw traffic numbers that advertisers will continue to devalue.

It takes a little respect for the end-user (which means abandoning slideshow-based photo galleries … yes, still and always a pet peeve of mine), a lot of forethought and planning and lot of structured data, but I can imagine a newspaper world of ubiquitous content.

Take the firehose of information direct from the newsroom and let the public drink from it full-throttle if they want.

Let them slice and dice it however they choose. Give them the ability to find news and photos and listings from their town … their neighborhood … their block. Give them the tools to communicate with each other and with us in a real, meaningful way (and not just comments on stories … that’s the easy way out and we all know it).

Give them the tools they need to make our news their news.

And then get out of their way.

And we can do all of this right now … with existing technology.

It’s just a question of getting out priorities in the proper order.