Editor and Publisher finally gets blogs

I don't know how many years ago it was that I heard Greg Mitchell say he was on the verge of launching an Editor&Publisher blog. I do know that the setting was New Orleans in the pre-Katrina era.

Since then, E&P has continued to limp along, powered by a dismal excuse for a Web content management system administered by what appears to be an exceptionally inept IT department.

Fitz and Jen (Mark Fitzgerald, Jennifer Saba) and The E&P Pub (the whole staff) are finally online, hosted on separate Typepad domains, completely separate from the main E&P website (which continues to be trapped in antiquity). There are no visible RSS links, but your Web browser might autodiscover the feeds embedded in the HTML header.

It's a shame what VNU/Nielsen has done to E&P. For years the real reason we all read E&P every week was to pore over the want ads and imagine how we would escape from writing obits in West Elbowville to become rich and famous journalists. What we found was mostly jobs offering "great hunting and fishing" or a chance to work for minimum wage in the lovely Texas permian oil basin, but we all continued to dream.

The Web broke the very concept of a monopoly on want ads, but the mismanagement of VNU pretty much trashed any chance E&P had of holding onto that business. JournalismJobs.com just walked away with the market by building a site that's simple and easy to use while VNU apparently outsourced its classifieds system to a tribe of drunken macaques.

Right now it's almost impossible to find a newspaper job in E&P's classifieds. If you can get past the entire data dump from Google's HR department, however, you can find a fine job installing and maintaining Nielsen ratings boxes.