Throw the bums out

Submitted by yelvington on December 29, 2006 - 12:41pm

Here's a New Year's resolution every news site should make: Throw the bums out! There is no reason to allow a small number of bullies to corrupt a community discussion forum. If your message boards, story comments, or blogspace has turned into the kind of place where decent people can't have a decent discussion, bring the hammer down ... on behalf of the rest of your users.

Yahoo News GM Neil Budde has shut down Yahoo's news message boards -- temporarily. In a note of explanation, he said:

The Star Tribune sale, again

Submitted by yelvington on December 26, 2006 - 11:55pm

Back in 1998 when I was at the Star Tribune, the Cowles family sold it to McClatchy for about $1.2 billion. McClatchy was a big surprise -- hardly anyone at the paper had heard of the company, and the sale price was a shocker.

I left the Star Tribune in 1999, and now McClatchy has sold the paper to a private investment group for $530 million, less than half that. I'd love to be able to point to myself as a factor (and maybe throw in a couple of others, such as Tim McGuire and Tom Mohr) but not even my kids will believe that line.

Playing telephone with the change message

Submitted by yelvington on December 21, 2006 - 5:40pm

When I read the Gannett "Information Center" memo and its attached Q and A, I immediately worried that there was so much in it that it would be misinterpreted and lead to unpredictable side effects. Faced with the enormity of it all, people would naturally latch onto the little parts that felt most comfortable (like hard news 24x7, or video).

Newspapers online: Wikipedia's worst article?

Submitted by yelvington on December 21, 2006 - 1:47pm

While working on a presentation today I was looking for some dates and stumbled across Wikipedia's Online Newspapers entry, which may be the worst page in the entire collection. What little information it has is riddled with inaccuracy. This probably is an illustration of the Cobbler's Children principle. Perhaps some J-prof could armtwist an undergrad into fixing it.

Fortunately we have Dave Carlson's Online Timeline, which is thorough and accurate.

RSS: Getting better, but still broken

Submitted by yelvington on December 15, 2006 - 9:34am

I'm an RSS addict. Once you have an RSS reader set up, it's easy to get addicted. But RSS is still a fringe technology, used by a small percentage of the population. Why? Because it's broken. Getting better, but still broken.

The broken part has nothing to do with the competing standards -- RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 (which has nothing to do with 1.0), Atom, et cetera. That's behind-the-scenes stuff and users don't need to care.

The broken part is the subscription mechanism. It's too complicated.

Opening the door to comments

Submitted by yelvington on December 11, 2006 - 8:31am

Jonathan Dube points out that the Washington Post, CBS News and Newsweek all have added comment capabilities to story pages. I don't think comments are the best way to build community, comments are infinitely better than no conversation at all. We've come quite a way from the days when editors would look at you and say, in all seriousness: "You mean you let them say anything they want?"