Web designer opening at MDW

Submitted by yelvington on April 23, 2008 - 1:59pm

Morris DigitalWorks is looking for a first-rate Web designer to join its award-winning Web development team. This is a design job that requires an understanding of usability principles, site architecture and wireframing as well as the skills necessary to execute high-quality graphics and Flash interactives. XHTML/CSS skills are required and experience with Drupal theming is a definite plus. Email me for a copy of the job description if you're interested or know of a good candidate.

The Web is the center? Maybe just one of the centers

Submitted by yelvington on April 23, 2008 - 12:06pm

If the world unfolded as predicted by Bill Gates, printed newspapers would be dead in the next four years. While he may turn out to have been directionally correct and merely wrong about the timing, it's been interesting to watch the world change around Microsoft and slowly render the software giant impotent at a time when newspapers continue to hang around and even start new print publications.

Link spammers try the subtle approach

Submitted by yelvington on April 23, 2008 - 9:40am

I've left unpublished a bunch of comments lately that seem to reflect a new kind of spam.

Since Google's algorithm is known to value inbound links, many of the spam comments that get posted on the Web actually aren't intended for users of the site where they're posted. They're Google spider bait. And when they're posted on a website that has good Google karma -- like mine -- they can help elevate the target site in Google search returns.

Until recently, the comment spam that I routinely delete without publication has been heavy-handed, obvious, and probably automated.

Life after the coming tsunami

Submitted by yelvington on April 18, 2008 - 4:34pm

The other day in an email to a friend I referred to "the economic tsunami that seems headed for the U.S. newspaper industry."

Is that overstated? If you recently lost your job in a newsroom cutback, you probably don't think so.

But when I was traveling last week I saw something that surprised me.

The "Boxing Day tsunami" from the 2004 Great Sumatra-Andaman earthquake was a horrible thing, leading to 300,000 deaths and staggering destruction.

Government licensing of journalism

Submitted by yelvington on April 17, 2008 - 3:32pm

At the risk of once again being told that I hate America, I'm compelled to cite Neil McIntosh's observation that the United States has an ugly characteristic in common with a certain African country: "Were I to take up reporting again and do my thing from Web 2.0 in San Francisco next week, I too could be locked up and thrown out the country - just like reporters from Zimbabwe whose fate she [Mindy McAdams] highlights on her blog.

ABC goes from laurel to dart

Submitted by yelvington on April 17, 2008 - 2:13pm

In the print-only "Darts and Laurels" feature of Columbia Journalism Review for March/April, there's a "laurel to Charlie Gibson and ABC for hosting the best debates of the nominating season -- so far." Well, last night, only hours after I posted the complaint "Journalism? Public service? The networks aren't even trying," it seems Gibson and company threw it all away.

The networks aren't even trying

Submitted by yelvington on April 16, 2008 - 11:51am

It's traditional in journalism for everyone to talk at the beginning of an election cycle about how they're not going to descend into horse-race journalism and, instead, focus on meaningful, issue-centered coverage. And then everybody forgets all about it and wallows in the gutter.

Robert Reich, the former secretary of labor, hits the nail on the head with this blog item:

Frequency: Our toughest challenge

Submitted by yelvington on April 15, 2008 - 2:41pm

In my PublishAsia presentation in Macau I walked through a general business case for social networking as an integrated feature of a news website.

The argument goes like this: We have an audience problem. We can fix our sales incentives, train our people, tune our pricing and our packaging, and replace leadership as necessary. But at the end of the day we're going to hit a very hard wall. That wall is available advertising inventory that meets the advertisers' needs.

Back in the online world

Submitted by yelvington on April 14, 2008 - 11:35am

I'm back in the online world after two weeks in which I was not completely offline, but nearly so. I spoke and moderated a session at the Ifra PublishAsia conference in Macao, toured Bangkok's canals, and spent a week on Phuket Island with my wife, where we rode an elephant, paddled through bat-filled caves on tiny islands in the Gulf of Thailand, snorkeled, swam, and somehow managed to avoid sunburn.

Routing around bad journalism

Submitted by yelvington on March 22, 2008 - 3:52pm

Here's another example of how the Internet has shifted power from institutions, and how that can be a good thing. While the Internet certainly has empowered whispering campaigns and hate bloggers, it also has enabled us to get to the truth behind badly reported news, if we care enough. Today I found the full Jeremiah Wright sermon from Sept. 16, 2001, in which he made the "inflammatory" statement "America's chickens have come home to roost." It turns out he was quoting Edward Peck, former U.S. ambassador to Iraq and deputy director of President Reagan’s terrorism task force.