The grumbling by some Associated Press members has "gone public" and is nicely summarized by Forbes writer Louis Hau, who asks: "Do newspapers still need The Associated Press?
After months of testing, Drupal 6 was officially released today, and I've already upgraded. There are a number of improvements and enhancements that will be of interest to news sites.
One of them is core support for user-configurable workflow through an interesting system of triggers and actions. For example, I quickly created a set that sends me an email any time anyone posts a comment on my website so that I can review it.
If you haven't had a good reason to whack yourself in the forehead today, here's one: In Britain the notoriously luddite National Union of Journalists is arguing against the placement of plasma displays in the newsroom of the Independent showing what's live on the newspaper's website.
In my years as a reporter and copy editor, my least favorite tasks involved handling tragic stories reflecting the dark flaws of human nature. Another seemingly random act of violence happened last night in Kirkwood, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis: Six people killed by a man angry at his local city council.
This morning I learned that a former coworker, Connie Conroy (now Connie Karr), had just finished leading the Pledge of Allegiance when she was killed by Charles "Cookie" Thornton, a construction contractor who recently lost a federal lawsuit against the city.
In some ways, we're all multiple personalities based on context.
I am a different person in the context of my family (where, silly me, I imagine myself to be king), in the context of my wife's friends (who think I'm with the CIA because of my mysterious trips out of the country), and in my various professional roles.
So I can completely justify being in multiple social networks with multiple purposes.
But with the explosion of online social networking, I face a multiple-personality problem. How many social networks are too many?
For me, the Super Tuesday round of primaries has one clear, across-the-board winner: The New York Times. Why? Because nytimes.com took advantage of one great advantages of the online medium over broadcasting, offering a wealth of highly local detail through a very nice drill-down interactive graphical interface.
The #1 national newspaper managed to be very local, offering me data on how the vote in Columbia County, Ga., where I live, compared with the vote in other counties in Georgia.
"If the only tool you have is a hammer," said psychologist Abraham Maslow, "you tend to see every problem as a nail." I thought about that as I examined a couple of recently launched websites: The Industry Standard and NotchUp, both of which bear the "beta" label acknowledging their concepts are only partially baked.
I was looking over Tim McGuire's syllabus for a class he's teaching at Arizona State, Business and Future of Journalism, and one paragraph really caught my eye:
The Chicago Tribune has shut down commenting on a range of political stories, and public editor Timothy McNulty tries to explain why. But the Tribune got it wrong from the start by allowing auto-published comments without even the basic step of authenticating the user's email address. This irresponsibility led to the an outcome that was utterly predictable.
McNulty's defense of the shutdown, however, doesn't stand up. For example:
I'll leave it to others to comment on the potential impact on the newspaper industry of the proposed Microsoft-Yahoo takeover.
I'm interested in how Microsoft may be faced with a choice: Change who you are in a very fundamental way, or destroy both Yahoo and yourself in the process.
That is the very choice facing newspapers today, and we might learn something by considering how this takeover might play out.
