The alpha and the omega

By Michael Becker | Published: March 12, 2010

Plagiarism has come up as a sub­ject of dis­cus­sion again recently, lead­ing some crit­ics to pon­der the rea­sons why jour­nal­ists lie, cheat and steal, pur­pose­fully or “accidentally.”

Matthew Ingram tack­les pla­gia­rism from another point of view, say­ing that if jour­nal­ists thought more like blog­gers and truly val­ued hyper­link­ing, then they wouldn’t get them­selves into such messes.

I espe­cially like what Ingram has to say about how print jour­nal­ists tend to see themselves:

Traditional print media work­ers are used to think­ing of them­selves as the be-all and end-all of infor­ma­tion, the only source that any­one could pos­si­bly need (despite the fact that many sto­ries are based either wholly or in part on report­ing by wire ser­vices such as the Associated Press and Reuters), and are loathe to give any­one else credit. That has to change.

There are all sorts of rea­sons why jour­nal­ists do and don’t link. Web tra­di­tion says they should. Business sense sug­gests they shouldn’t. Whatever. Allowing your­self to “acci­den­tally” include some­one else’s words in your work with­out cred­it­ing them is the result of lazy jour­nal­ists with poor nota­tion skills. Period.

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The Web strategy hamster wheel

By Michael Becker | Published: March 10, 2010

Today our company’s CEO paid us a visit. To mark the occa­sion, we had a meet­ing to talk about how much con­tent our paper should be putting online.

Our cor­po­rate own­ers have a pol­icy about how much con­tent we and the other papers should be putting online for free. I won’t give a num­ber, but suf­fice to say, it’s not much. It’s also a loose pol­icy, it seems, since our paper puts almost all of our con­tent online.

The pur­pose of hold­ing back con­tent is, of course, to make the printed ver­sion more valu­able. If cus­tomers can’t get the news any­where else, they’ll be forced to buy the printed paper or pay for a sub­scrip­tion to our PDF-based elec­tronic edition.

This strat­egy would work if we were the only source of news in our com­mu­nity. We are not. Read More »

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The perils of centralization

By Michael Becker | Published: March 8, 2010

My paper’s Web site is down tonight. I don’t know if it’s sched­uled main­te­nance or not. I assume if this is sched­uled main­te­nance that I didn’t get the memo. As the Web edi­tor, I should get those memos.

I think it likely that it’s not sched­uled main­te­nance, and here’s why. The main Web site for the com­pany that devel­oped and built and main­tains our Web site is down. Now, if it was sched­uled main­te­nance, why would they take their own home­page down? Why take their sup­port site down?

Maybe I don’t under­stand the details of how to main­tain servers. Maybe.

Here’s the thing, though. The same com­pany has man­aged to sell Web sites to almost every other major news­pa­per in Montana. That means that, by my count, these papers are down tonight:

  • The Billings Gazette (largest in the state)
  • The Missoulian
  • The Montana Standard (Butte)
  • The Helena Independent Record
  • The Bozeman Daily Chronicle (my paper)

(And that’s just in Montana. This com­pany oper­ates across the country.)

It seems that the Great Falls Tribune and Flathead Beacon remain unaf­fil­i­ated with our Web com­pany, as their sites remain online tonight.

Let me just pose a hypo­thet­i­cal here. What if some­thing major hap­pened in one of those cities (or across the entire state) dur­ing this down­time? A sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of Montana would be with­out online news — from the news­pa­pers, at least.

It would be a field day for the tele­vi­sion sta­tions, whose Web sites are not hosted by the same com­pany. No, sir. They are online and func­tional tonight.

I under­stand the ben­e­fits of going with a big com­pany for your Web site needs. It saves money, ulti­mately, because you’re pay­ing for exper­tise in bulk. These sites are like the Sam’s Clubs and Costcos of tech. Budget con­straints force papers to shop there because they can’t afford to buy the best — hand-crafted, arti­san stuff.

But it’s a night like tonight, sit­ting in the mid­dle of a black hole of news, that I won­der whether it might be a good idea to widen our gaze next time we redesign the site. Maybe we shouldn’t just choose from who­ever hap­pens to have a booth at the trade show. Maybe we should see if there’s some­thing we can do for our­selves and keep things in-house.

Just a thought.

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Info about Twitter for journalists

By Michael Becker | Published: March 3, 2010

An absolute bevy of infor­ma­tion for jour­nal­is­tic uses of Twitter from Mr. Steve Buttry. Read it, and read the arti­cle he links to by Julie Posetti; it’s an analy­sis of Twitter use by Australian journalists.

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New Web Site

By Michael Becker | Published: March 3, 2010

My news­pa­per just launched its new Web site, so I’m spend­ing a lot of time answer­ing e-mails, train­ing news staff and squash­ing bugs. Excuse me if I’m qui­eter than usual on the Web.

Oh, and if you want to see the new Web site we’ve hatched, check it out.

On a sad­der note, my brand-spanking-new 27-inch iMac at work seems to have fallen prey to one of the model’s dis­play prob­lems. The Mac repair guy’s com­ing by today to rob me of my pre­cious, though he thinks it likely that he can have it fixed in a day. Yay!

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