That said, this is what people were clicking on off my reading list from April 2008.

1. 8 reasons why your new special section is doomed to underwhelming traffic
2. How Strategic Imagination Happens - Harvard Business Online’s Umair Haque: This guy, Umair Haque, has consistently smart-smart-smart insight into the way the internet economy works, and where it’s going.
3. But who owns Javascript? (front-end vs. back-end development): “In my experience, most in-house web teams basically employ two types of people: designers and developers. Sure, some people call them different things, and there are definitely exceptions, but generally speaking, we’re split into these two camps. For the most part, our technical responsibilities are split up as such: “designers” do the client-side things (HTML, CSS, Javascript, Flash, etc.), and “developers” do the server-side things (PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, .NET, etc.). Somewhere along the line, we decided the gap between front-end and back-end would be a good place to divide up our responsibilities. But is it?”
4. How We Use Twitter for Journalism - ReadWriteWeb
5. The Long Tail: Of Fly Eyes And Newspaper Revenues

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2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
Well, it’s not a particularly useful site. Fun, yes. Useful, no.

HappyJournalist is a lens on journalists who have something to say, like what they do, and feel comfortable typing and clicking the submit button on the blog.

Until we get to the point where the internet has tools to quantify and publish emotion-related information, HappyJournalist will be a semi-static repository of what was said by the folk who have something to say.

That ‘until’ is a big, big ‘until’.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
I’ve been exploring that ‘What’s Next’ idea and have listed some other ideas (MildlyEnthusiasticJournalist.com and DrunkJournalist.com are my favourites, and a few people have contributed their own).

To make this interesting and forward thinking I’m considering pitching a new micro-format that describes emotions.

There’s no good way to aggregate or publish emotion-based information online yet. Seems like that’s a big gap in the web, don’t you think?

The internet’s gears turn because the robots and computers turn the gears, but it’s the humans that make the internet … sparkle.

1. Teaching Online Journalism » An audience is not a community
2. Reflections of a Newsosaur: Think big, act small: Lots of great examples of things news sites are doing that work here.
3. CJR: Wiring Journalism 2.0: “How are the media adapting to the new digital technologies that power blogs, interactive graphics, and social networks? Quickly is one answer, but the advent of digital (what used to be called “new”) journalism is more complicated than that. Last weekend, the Georgia Institute of Technology held a two-day symposium titled, “Journalism 3G: The Future of Technology in the Field.” CJR’s Curtis Brainard talked to co-organizer Brad Stenger, who is also research director of Wired’s annual tech fair, NextFest, about the merger of computers and the press.”
4. It’s not the economy, stupid » Invisible Inkling: “I’m sorry, but every time a newspaper executive discussing layoffs and buyouts blames things like “a drastic economic slump and the meltdown of the Bay Area housing market” I laugh.”
5. About the article commenting system and strategy at philly.com: “Managing comments and other forms of online community isn’t rocket science, but it always seems to flummox newspapers. Thousands of online sites have been running thriving, friendly, well-behaved communities for years, but newspapers seem allergic to the idea of letting readers have their say online—and almost invariably seem do it badly when they do allow reader interaction.”
6. Say NO to video: Conversations with the Video God : MultimediaShooter: The comments on this post are pretty good. So is this quote from the post: “The viewer doesn’t know or care if the image moves like video or is a well paced audio slide show, they want a good story. Period.”

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Advice is cheap, and man is this future-of-newspaper problem producing a lot of it. Here is more.

I’ve written about potential products that can be added to news article pages before. That’s all well and good, but there are distinct problems with the article as a means of presenting information too (I have posts tangential to this topic in the Step Away From The Article category).

Article: Before

Taking this theme one step further, I pulled one of the breaking news articles from my employer’s web site today. Here it is, at the time I read it:

What’s distinct to me about this page, this piece of information, is how few links there are within the article.

Many newspapers, the Post included, realized the “Dead-End Article” was a problem online, and took a few steps to correct it. Many cases, the Post’s included, those steps seem to be founded on the “this is what else we can add to the page within our CMS’ constraints, and with little additional effort.” That often results in a list of articles directly related to the current article, a list of overall most’s (popular / discussed / emailed), and a list of recent news from that particular section. Those lists don’t address the possibility presented in the article information itself, which is what I focused on in my re-do of this article.

Article: After

Below is a mockup I made of that article page as it could live on the internet. It’s re-organized and includes additional context and information (all made up for the sake of example). It’s what I imagine would be a useful way to address the presentation of a piece of breaking news on a news organization’s web site. I’m not an awesome designer, and I didn’t want to work hard on the look-and-feel of this, because that’s not what this exercise is about.

Explanation

I didn’t “design” links into this mockup for one main reason: everything can be linked. Each statistic can link to more detail about the information it presents. Each piece of information I added is structured, and structured information is much easier to link with other like-minded pieces of structured information. Much easier to link means much less likely to be a dead-end. Less likely to be a dead-end means much more useful information. For more on this structured data stuff, read Adrian Holovaty’s classic A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change, as well as his article Dynamic News Stories.

What would be necessary to make this information presentation possible

News organizations already have the reporting muscle — that’s not the challenge. Breaking the information into re-usable pieces is. Getting specific is. To get specific, this is a high-level on what it would take to publish the information presented in that mockup:

• Creating archives of all the death-related news published takes people on the online production side.
• Creating the tools publishing county-related news lists takes web developers and online producers.
• Creating and maintaining statistic counts on deaths in a geographic region takes producers and librarians and reporters.
• Creating a means of dynamically publishing relevant statistic counts on news articles takes developers.
• Creating a way to integrate single-point locator maps into news articles takes developers.
• Creating a way to integrate themed multi-point maps into related articles takes developers. Creating and maintaining those maps takes producers and librarians and reporters.
• Creating a way to integrate specific related-news lists into articles takes developers.

It’s worth noting that with the exception of the statistics, all of this data is low-overhead data to produce. Adding an article about a death to a death-article list in a reasonable CMS would take about five to ten clicks, max. The major work is building the tools to allow for information to be published in this way.

Thoughts? Share them here.

Anyway, Kill The Cliche measures cliches in articles from The Boston Globe, New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post, Financial Times and Los Angeles Times (read more about what they do here). They break it down by publication, by cliche’d word, and by the number of cliches a reporter has written.

Right now they seem to be tracking the whole number of cliches a reporter, or publication, has produced. This isn’t as useful as measuring the cliches as a percentage of total words produced (as in, “1 percent of Jill Drew’s words are cliches,” or, “0.5 percent of the Washington Post’s words are cliches.”)

Also, measuring a ratio of articles with cliches in them and articles without cliches in them could be another useful metric (”5 percent of the Financial Times’ articles have one or more cliches in them.”)

I’d like to see a list of the cliches they’re tracking, too.

And those are my thoughts on KillTheCliche.com.

• Upgrading Neighbors (the Post’s forum software): This was a challenge. phpBB, a popular online forum system, powers the Denver Post’s forums, article comments, most-commented lists, and is the backbone for its community blogging app and community photo app. We used phpBB2, which was released in 2002, and felt a lot like what the web felt like in 2002. So I put a lot of work in building phpBB2, its backend and its frontend, up to somewhat modern web standards. phpBB3 was released December 2007, and I spent most of February 2008 integrating phpBB3 into Neighbors. This took 80-100 hours of development, documentation and testing time. Most of the work was done on a development environment running phpBB3 on the database with the data as it existed in mid-January. After getting the version-control in its right place, I went through with the search-and-replace to address the easy parts of the upgrade. The add-ons and custom code from phpBB2 took up the most development time — that and the process that allows people to write article comments on the Denver Post’s main site first, and then post them to the forums later…. the big wins out of this were the scrubbing all the custom code and add-ons got, the pretty new CSS and HTML on the forums, the new functionality built in with phpBB3 (friends / foes list, bookmarks, and improved moderator controls), and also some new functionality I built behind the full-name feature on the profiles. Members can now decide if they only want the initials of their name to show, or their entire name.
• Started building The Denver Post’s first Django-powered application: This is still in development, but there are some fun things happening here. I’ll post more about it when there’s more I can post.
• Denver Post widgets: The idea behind widgets is sound: Making your information flexible enough to live anywhere on the web, including other people’s sites and pages. Newsgator is Denver-based business that does a lot of work with RSS, javascript, and widgets. We used their technology to create the widgets on the Post’s site: for breaking news, Politics West, our Rockies baseball coverage and our Denver Broncos coverage. In addition to the information we publish each widget also displays the recent comments on our news, Broncos, Rockies and politics coverage. Michelle Whitman, who has been doing front-end web work for us part-time this year and freelances under the Unity Studios banner, did the design, HTML and CSS. I did the project management, and other odds and ends.
• HappyJournalist.com: This project is best explained by the post I wrote about it on my personal blog, Joe Write.

This is what the lady wrote:

Sure, the Internet is a wonderful place to be. But the digital newspaper shares space with those who post because they have a position to promote, a score to settle, a diet to sell or that voice in the microwave told them to.

Newspapers are better than that. They are apart from that. No, they don’t always get it right. But they are the only daily medium of depth that has the resources and the responsibility to try.

This is what I wrote:

Gosh, so much hand-wringing. I love newspapers too, and you know what I worry about? I worry about the collective lack of imagination of those (such as Drexel [the author]) who can’t envision a future any better than the present that exists. I feel like I just read 15 inches of my grandpa, on his porch, talking about how things were when he was my age.

This attention to nostalgia is part of same mindset problems newspapers face. Sure, newspapers are in trouble. But nostalgia is not a business model, and it’s going to take local papers some attention to detail and investment online if they’re going to figure out meaningful ways to publish information, build community and make a living out there.

I don’t have any grand predictions, but I can imagine a future of local online publishing that’s more engaging, thoughtful, informative, context-laden, diverse, and meaningful to the members of its communities than the paper-based one we used to have.

1. Ten things journalists can do to reinvent journalism
2. YouTube by the Numbers: “Tim Wintle of Rubberductions forwarded me a pointer to a new piece of research which analyses viewership for YouTube videos in the first month.”
3. The Pothole Paradox: Why Building The Geographic Web Is Hard, and Why It’s Worth Doing: “The idea of requiring geographic metadata for information might strike some people as excessive, but I suspect in a few years we will look back at the first decade of the web and be amazed that we went for so long without it.”
4. The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits — to You
5. Thoughts on EveryBlock and context
6. Topix.net Weblog: Welcome to the Neighborhood, Google: Chris Tolles makes a few points on zip-code based indexes of news — he takes it from a “news article” approach, which doesn’t necessarily account for the classifieds, photos, people, or businesses that are referenced in any particular article.

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Not all journalists are angry, and in the spirit of celebrating these dark times, I give you HappyJournalist, which asks the question, Why are you happy (to be a journalist) today?

Enjoy.

Well, there’s another Twitter Piggybacker (hat tip to Adam Howell for the term and the link), this one with a local information bent: Commuter Feed. To quote,

Commuter Feed is a free service that lets you post reports on traffic and transit delays in your local area using Twitter.

Commuter Feed is a community-generated traffic report, published by anybody stuck in traffic with a twitter account and a cell phone. You can subscribe to the traffic reports for your area, and get twits when something new pops up. Will this work? Possibly — seems like exposure will be Commuter Feeds biggest challenge. Do newspaper-dot-coms have the same exposure challenges for the web apps and communities they launch? No, no they don’t.

So while some news organizations (such as my employer) are getting busy doing the shovel-dump publish of their headlines onto twitter, well, there are other people out there looking for ways to share and make local information more useful to the folk who live there.