Here’s a group that doesn’t understand irony and enjoys hemorrhaging money. “A WordPress for new orgs: Knight gives Bay Citizen, Texas Tribune $975,000 for open-source CMS”
Just let that sink in.
The idea is that they’ll develop a framework that’ll cost an estimated $15,000 dollars to customize that integrates social media, SEO and ad networks.
Sounds like they’re creating the WordPress of WordPress.
If you want an example of an ideologically entrenched person stubbornly accepting reality without fully understanding it and thereby degrading the authority of the institution for which they write, check out this antagonistic column from the Columbia Journalism Review.
It begins with an illustration that doesn’t make sense because it implies a single puppet master controls the Internet. That’s patently ridiculous and would immediately dissuade any sane person from reading the text that follows. The text goes on to espouse several myths, chief among them that if you put keywords in your story it’ll somehow make it to the top of Google’s results list.
Cleverly, the headline is “CJR Column Mentions the Simpsons.” And, if you search for “Columbia Journalism Review Simpsons” this article arrives first! Good for them. However, if you search for Simpsons, this article is nowhere to be found.
It’s almost like just mentioning something is irrelevant. It’s almost as if clear, concise writing with an audience in mind gets you listed. It’s almost as if your audience would want to type in “Columbia Journalism Review SEO” and expect to see the Columbia Journalism Review’s take on SEO.
“In the beginning was the word—and the headline writer, who worshipped at the church of the active verb alongside the layout artist, who defined the significance of a piece based on where it sat on the page.” Maybe lighten up on the God complex, and then realize that your opinion on importance may not reflect reality.
This SEO story isn’t listed on Google by typing in “SEO” or “Simpsons.” Why? There are a number of reasons. One might be that attacking the Internet on the Internet is a bad idea. Another might be that the website isn’t updated every day. (The Daily Blog is apparently the Weekday Blog.) Yet, ultimately, it’s probably because the story is factually misleading, doesn’t have a right to be three pages long and because CJR’s print circulation is so print-centric that reading online is blasphemy and CJR has made no attempt to collect an online audience.
I’m getting somewhat tired of the trope that is essentially, “technology is destroying journalism.” First it was the Internet and bloggers, then it moved to social media and now we’re narrowing it down to specific devices. This article, which claims that the iPad is destroying the future of journalism in its headline, is what we in the business of fact call a link bait. It rambles for a while about RSS and search and something to do with sharing to end vaguely with nothing, and, oh yes, it never really mentions the iPad.
Let me make this as simple as possible for everyone. Uninspired up-and-coming journalists and unwilling-to-deviate Mesozoic executives are ruining the future of journalism.
They say people don’t want to pay for news. They used to say people didn’t want to pay for music. Apple sold its 10 billionth song in 2010. Hire a user experience designer and I’ll pay to read your website. Until then, shut up. It’s not social media. It’s not short attention spans. It’s not iPads, or apps, or apathy. It’s this chaotic mess of links: nytimes.com.
Reuters has this really well-intentioned article about how the Huffington Post is going to beat The New York Times. Sidestepping for a moment the obvious irony of the Reuters website looking exactly like The New York Times website, we’ll notice one important omission from the argument. (Which is, by the way, that HuffPo is more visual and social, while The New York Times is all filled with words.)
The article starts off that HuffPo wins because within hours of a story posting there are more than 2,088 comments. Quality over quantity everyone always says. It’s too bad everyone uses quantity to measure success. Of those 2,088, I guarantee at least 100 of the people couldn’t spell comment. Around eight of those people are there to spam a conspiracy about gold or Donald Rumsfield they paste on every story and the rest are in an intractable war of Left versus Right that has absolutely nothing to do with the story they’re commenting on.
This quote, however, is my favorite part:
Most importantly, the HuffPo page is genuinely, compellingly, interactive — it’s almost impossible to visit it without finding something you want to click on. Like! Comment! Tweet! Go here! Try this! Visit that! There’s site navigation, yes, but that’s just one layer of a very rich and complex page architecture. At the NYT page, by contrast, to get out of the Media Decoder blog you either have to click on a generic navigation button like “Sports,” or else you’ll just leave the page and the site completely.
The Huffington Post acts the same way as the New York Times does. To get out of a story, you have to click the generic categories at the top. I’m not really sure what point is trying to be made here. He is right that HuffPo has more interaction. There are, after all, three Twitter feeds on that page, an entire giant box for Bing, two mentions of the Big News page, four ads, and a section for the most discussed and most viewed stories and they aren’t next to each other. Put it another way, HuffPo loads slower than The New York Times and appears as though it was pieced together over time with no planning.
User experience aside, there’s one good reason why HuffPo doesn’t “win” against The Times.
Now for that omission. (I’ll present my argument visually like the good man at Reuters.)
And, if someone could explain this paragraph to me in a way that makes sense, I’ll be eternally grateful.
The fact is that readers come to the NYT — or any website — because they want to read itsstories. They don’t much care about branded sections, or deciphering the difference between a news story and a blog entry. (The Olbermann story is a blog post, for reasons which even I don’t fully understand.) But the NYT site architecture seems built around the peculiar way that the news is produced inside 620 8th Avenue, rather than around showing the NYT’s readers the exact stories they’re most likely to want to read.
I get that we Photoshop magazine covers. The way people look naturally repulses me. The day they invent Photoshop glasses so I don’t have to look at dirt on the sidewalk is the day I become a permanently happy person.
What I don’t get is the change in the bottom right corner.
This article in the New York Times is about how the Internet, and technology in general, is making children less able to focus and succeed. Many of the quotes used in the story are of children saying, “If it weren’t for the Internet distracting me I’d get my homework done.”
Bullshit.
Technology, video games and the Internet are convenient scapegoats for a larger societal problem. We don’t value education at all.
A column by Thomas Friedman highlights this problem effectively when you compare the United States to the rest of the world. Many of the top graduates of US universities are not from the US.
I got some free stuff at WordCamp Atlanta, obviously, as that’s the only reason I go to these things.
The pennies say WordPress and WordCamp Atlanta.
I’ve just got back from an informative day at WordCamp Atlanta hosted by SCAD, my university. I mentioned this event previously and linked to the badge that said I was attending, however I’ve since learned that because I attend SCAD that I’m technically a sponsor. (It says so on my badge.) Therefore, I must revise the badge on my Web site. I’ll throw in the original for good measure.
The talks have been informative so far. I’ll have a lot to take back to District, and perhaps for my talk at the Spring National College Media Convention.
Everyone is creating their end of year lists. The Huffington Post even has a list for the top funniest movies of the decade. Don’t bother looking, they list every movie in the genre. I’ve created my own list, of sorts.
Best spoof of a spoof:
