All Things Cahill

Duncan Riley: At the end of the war, Newspapers commit ritual suicide

Duncan Riley writes at Inquisitr that the Philadelphia Inquirer has set a new policy requiring that all “signature investigative reporting” appear in print before it hits the web site.

Romenesko has a copy of the memo sent to Inquirer staff. The important parts:

Beginning today, we are adopting an Inquirer first policy for our signature investigative reporting, enterprise, trend stories, news features, and reviews of all sorts. What that means is that we won’t post those stories online until they’re in print.

Riley goes on:

The decision rests on two major presumptions that fail miserably. The first is that there is a scarcity of competition therefore people who want the news will have no choice but to buy the paper. Secondly, that anything they write of substance is worthy of buying the print edition to read it first when it will either end up on their website, or will be reported on other websites. Neither hold true.

There may be only one major competitor in Philadelphia (Philadelphia Daily News) but both papers exist in a market that offers national newspapers and a world of online choice. That choice also isn’t restricted to traditional media, with bloggers covering local news as well.

The funny bit to me is that this is exactly the tact that almost every single large metropolitan daily tried in the late 90’s up until about 2004 or so, and frankly, is discussed in every single meeting they have about online editorial policy.  The Atlanta Journal Constitution, as I recall, put the lie to  this as a viable strategy in the early part of this decade, and its been discounted just about everywhere since.

I’ll give the Inquirer credit - at least they are trying to identify what it is that makes them so special, and their investigative reporting is at the top of the list.  I’d suggest they’d be better served to concentrate on how they can wring the most drachmas out of that product, rather than trying to restrict their delivery channels.

The newspapers need to start thinking in exactly those terms:  where is it we have unique and compelling product that has value over everything else that is available.  Then they need to look at how to monetize those products to the highest levels.  The problem is often the old cliche, a carpenter tends to see the solution for every problem to be a hammer.  Newspaper men see the solution to their problems be a printed product.  In truth, the thing that makes newspapers different is their content - which is compelling, well sourced, well written and produces a reliable and repeatable level of quality.

Delivery channels are delivery channels, be they print, web, email, sms or whatever.  If the print media could see that they’re pushing the most costly of the available channels, and think about ways to decrease costs by using the deep content capabilities of the web to their fullest, they just might have a chance.

(Thanks to Jay Cody for pointing this out via the “Newspapers: A Slow March To Exinction” slingcast at slingpage.com - and keep your eye open, I’ll be setting up my own next week for a beta test!)

Tags: atlanta journal constitution, delivery channels, editorial policy, investigative reporting, national newspapers, philadelphia daily news, philadelphia inquirer, romenesko, slingcast, slingpage.com, viable strategy

Wordpress 2.6 - It’s a CMS, Baby!

I remember when I first setup Wordpress back in 2003, the old 1.x days, my comment was that “It’s just like a CMS (content management system) with most of the functionality removed.” Well, with the release of Wordpress 2.6, I can finally eat my words. It’s now simply a content management system, and a darned good one at that.

That’s right, content management system. To call it a blogging platform is to sell it short. It’s now all the features I expect to see in a simple content management system, and two that we do not expect to see: it is both easy to use and easy to maintain.

Is it Enterprise level software? No, probably not, although it is certainly scalable and customizable. But that doesn’t mean it’s not in use at corporations around the globe. I know of many that now rather than calling their Interwoven contractor will fire up a new WP install for certain needs.

So here is a run down of the new features that make the difference for me:

• Revision History: this was never a big deal to bloggers, as we generally are lone gunmen. However when you enter a multiple user environment, you need a fast and easy way to see who did what and when, plus the ability to revert to a previous version. This is a staple of the *big bad print cms editorial system* and has been a glaring hole in the WP system by my estimation.

• Image Editing: The previous version hinted at the auto resize capability of the system by offering thumb, medium or large image sizes for anything you uploaded. Now I can select the exact width I want for the image, assign any of the data I want, link it as I wish, all within a neat little flash app. Image editing in Wordpress.
  

  Image editing in Wordpress

• Image Resize: Now I can resize to any size I want (just upload the image, click “insert to post” then you can reopen the image by hovering over it in the editor, clicking the edit image that will appear on the image, and you’ll see you have complete resize options.
• Add Style Code to Image: Also, now I can edit style code directly into the image editor. This is the main reason that you always see my images aligned on this blog to the right, I never took the time to add a padding-right: 3px; to the style sheet, so I didn’t like the way it looked. These styles can now be added directly in the editor.
  
  
• Image Caption: Then there’s the image caption feature - again, I can just write in a caption and I’ve got an image caption. One of the little things, but it’s been missing from this (and many other cms systems) for a long time.
• More Edit Info In Editor: I can now at a glance see the last save time, last edited by and word count info. Also, I have direct link access to see comments, manage comments, manage all posts, manage categories, manage tags, and view drafts. Basically the stuff I need if I’m a production editor working on numerous posts, is right there, so I don’t have to go looking.
• Better Plugin Management: I love that they have separated my active plugins from my inactive plugins. Of course, it just highlights to me that if I am not using a plugin it should be removed.
• Gears Integration: Typically when we start to add so much functionality via a browser, performance starts to drop. I haven’t seen any issues, but Wordpress has added Gears support to handle this. Just click the “turbo” button in the far upper right hand corner.

The single biggest feature though, is one that will come in handy for the lone gunman blogger: they will now be able to do an automatic (single click) update for Wordpress when a new version comes out. That’s a huge feature, and will help the less technical stay up to date and secure.

So far, the only issue I’ve seen is that my Tag Suggest Plugin appears to have stopped working. A very small price to pay. I was able to update the site in about 10 minutes, most of which was spent downloading and uploading files. For the first time I did an autoupdate on the recently updated plugins, which was sweet.

Congratulations to the Automattic team and happy Blogging Content Managing to all!

(An after thought a day later: I should probably mention that I’ve got 10 high volume multiuser sites running on WP, where we use it as a CMS, some getting over 10 million visits a month. This update brought in the final bits the system needed in my estimation...)

Tags: Automattic, bloggin software, content management systems, Wordpress, wordpress 2.6, wordpress 2.6 review

Blog Aggregation

David Churbuck posts this morning on Blog Aggregation. We both did a blog aggregation project over at Reel-Time.com in 2003 which, as he notes, was well ahead of the curve (and probably the need). He’s got some excellent points, but I have a few things to add.

The idea of a blog is something that many of us don’t fully understand. It’s basically an online journal that was designed to allow users without server level access to maintain their own content and easily switch the appearance of that content via templates. Over time, they have become so much more.

One of the most powerful things about a blog is that the presentation you are most likely seeing, my own template on my site, isn’t necessarily the way everyone will see the content. RSS, which is essentially an XML stream of content, allows us to present our content in many different formats and many different places. The promise of XML, as it was presented a decade ago, was that it would allow us to separate content from presentation, and in that, it is indeed one of the few technologies to have fully delivered on it’s promise.

So we now have blogs, with all kinds of neat little RSS feeds which are quite granular, down to the category or tag level, that allow us to slice and dice our content, to mix and match by category, by author, etc. I’ve looked at the aggregators that Churbuck mentions, and basically barfed…yeah, they work, but their ugly and they don’t have to be. We should be able to easily design pages that will consume the rss feeds and present them in a useful manner.

I’ve been saying for years that the most misunderstood bit of blogs is their categorization capabilities. The better you categorize, the more useful your content (although you can also use tags…).

My ideas:

• Remember to sort by categories - make it easy to allow users to find what they want.
• Remember to provide direct links to the authors.
• Let users set up searches that trigger rss feeds so your content can reach them when it’s appropriate. And you can even allow search to create a page on the fly if you’ve got enough content.
• Leverage internal as well as external assets - you can use outside streams, although you may want to be able to editorially decide which bits of content you will present on your site. You can literally scavenge posts via Google Blog Search and Technorati.
• Think of your pages as homepages - each topic or category you present should be optimized as though it will be the only one your readers will see.
• You can have multiple feeds from blogs, some summarized, some containing the full content, and some broken into categories, tags, etc.  They can be reassembled into larger groups (all my authors writing about javelin throwing) in interesting ways.

Consuming RSS feeds and rendering them on pages is easy stuff and can provide that deep niche content we want. There’s no reason to settle for out of the box tools that make our content look like one of those “portals” companies pushed in 2001.

In the example Churbuck offers of the Olympics, I’d consider setting up pages for:

• Countries
• Main sports categories, track and field, swimming, martial arts, etc.
• Social and off the field categories
• Major celeb pages - some of the athletes get a lot of mentions, provide their own pages
• Search - once again, it’s key…

Then you ensure your bloggers are tagging properly and you’ve got the start. In fact, you can even have an editor retag stuff as “lead story” etc. This stuff works for splogs and it can work for high volume content situations as well!

The real take away secret is this: aggregation is simple content management. Think of it that way and you’ll jump way ahead of the pack.

Tags: blog aggregation, david churbuck, external assets, reel time, rss aggregation, simple content management, xml stream

Sun Buys MySQL

An interesting move - and for most of you thinking “this doesn’t affect me” I can tell you you’re dead wrong. You see over the past couple years, MySQL has become the back end database for a good deal of the web. If you’re CEO doesn’t have his own Gulfstream, chances are that some of your mission critical applications and quite probably your own website is using MySQL for something, if not everything.

I’ll withhold judgment on the whole thing for now. There’s more important issues here.

You see, we’ve come to the point that Open Source solutions, the LAMP solutions are winning out over enterprise solutions. The days when you needed an Interwoven or Vignette CMS system, constructed over an incredibly expensive Oracle database, running on servers the size of refrigerators are over. IBM realized this and embraced PHP. Sun has bought MySQL. The message is out.

Back in the day, the open source stuff was consider the province of the bootstrapper. Now the bottom tier is reaching up and its pressuring not just the middle level systems, its challenging the staid old favorites of business. MySQL 5.0 has many of the features that had kept the earlier versions out of the enterprise, such as stored procedures.

If you are running a business, you owe it to yourself to keep an eye on open source solutions, especially before buying any big, proprietary system.