These days, this seems to be the biggest conundrum newspapers face, to create a responsive site, or a mobile form factor.
On one hand, responsive gives newspapers an all in one model, whichever device your readers use, the content fits the frame. It's more difficult to set up, and to make sure your images fit within the constraints of phone, tablet, phablet, and the new mega form factors, but some easy HTML and CSS tricks make sure you are smooth in your transitions and fitting the standard grids.
On the other hand, it seems we are spending a lot of time and effort selling mobile specific ads to clients, and probably in the most unproductive way ever seen.
A current trend in the industry is to sell the standard Medium Rectangle size (300x250) as a mobile ad position. We want to place 3-4 of these on each page and pretend we are servicing customers in this fashion.
Point A: While they do fit the page, these are not mobile ads. They are repurposed ads that do nothing different or dynamic.
Point B: When and if we do make a transition to a responsive site, we won't have mobile specific ad positions available. The responsive site will display the same blocks, for lack of a better terms, that the desktop would show, just in a different order/sequence to fit the form of the mobile device.
So when you consider point A and point B together, you are have to ask why we are pushing for mobile specific, if we intend to eventually be responsive? Aren't we really selling contracts for ads that we won't be service at some point in the future?
Obviously, the contractual ad agreement problem makes the timing of a changeover to a responsive site more difficult. Either the contract needs to be re-negotiated/amended, or we need to hold off on flipping that switch until all the contracts have expired, leaving us with a gap of time in which we just can't sell new contracts for those spots.
Equally obvious is the flip side of the coin... perhaps we won't ever go responsive. Perhaps the solution is to continue to developer mobile versions of the website, and sell the ads as an independent entity, with the understanding that we are not best serving our customers needs.
That's, for me at least, a hard pill to swallow, but one which I can manage to choke down if that is the decision from on high.
The advantages of responsive design are clear, the disadvantages of mobile sites are also clear, but this is obviously not a purely tech based argument when you consider the need to service the ads that your ad department can and will sell. It becomes a rather bitter tasting stew where everything and anything get thrown into the pot until your are left with a nourishing if less than tasty dinner.
There is no one size fits all solution in the newspaper business. Community newspapers are the heart and soul of news, small papers with circulations of 5,000-25,000 readers. You can find national news all over the internet, but finding that small community news that delivers school board meetings, city council notes, and pictured of Fred's large mouthed mass require a dedicated home grown footprint.
And each community is vastly different from the next, which means advertising needs to meet the demands of a specific set of businesses and markets. And with that, the one size fits all cookie cutter approach to building websites is null and void.
But so many newspapers are part of a larger print family of newspapers where a team has the mandate to try and make each site within the company as cookie cutter as possible, under the belief that we can template everything and make it all fit any of our communities.
Wow, it's hard to imagine a better recipe for digital failure. But with net revenues still being such a small chunk of the pie compared to print, it's also equally difficult to invest capital into an area that isn't paying the bills.
Luckily for me, I am not responsible for the development of a family of sites. I am responsible for one site, and have been able to tailor the content to what my sales team feels it can sell. We are planning a move to a fully responsive site in the coming months, and there will be extreme challenges since we also have been selling mobile specific ads.
It's a discussion I do not look forward to.
Tuesday, October 22, 2013
Saturday, June 1, 2013
Can the Chicago Sun-Times make it work?
The last few years have been surprise after surprise for newspapers across America. From the closing of the Seattle Post Intelligencer and the Rocky Mountain News to the reduction in print days for the Times Picyune, metropolitan newspapers have been making headline upon headline that has the industry tied in knots.
The latest blow that has newsrooms everywhere talking is the announcement that the Chicago Sun-Times has fired it's photography staff and will train reporters to take photos with iPhones.
Madness!
...or is it?
I have long argued that we are on the verge of a philosophical change in the news business. We can no longer afford to think in terms of traditional labels in our business.
There is no longer a place at the table for a "reporter". These people must evolve and become content generators if newspapers are to thrive. They will need to become quality photographers, videographers, and even editors. They will need to become mobile production studios, capable of writing, editing photos, and creating videos of their stories to feed an ever more hungry news audience that no longer relies just on the written word.
Now, I don't think there is no place left for photographers. They still have a lot of value to a newspaper. But they will not be responsible for the bulk of content being generated for an evolving online news medium.
I've been argued with plenty in this regard too. Photographers love to argue that reporters won't be able to replace their quality artwork and years of training. I agree. They won't. And they don't need to.
This week I purchased two $100 point and shoot cameras for our reporters with the understanding that all stories they file from here out will have artwork. It won't be amazing angles and creative use of blurs... and our audience won't know the difference or even care. 16 megapixels makes up for a lot of mistakes in shooting a photo, and I promise you the average news reader would much rather have a "lesser quality" photo, than no photo artwork at all.
The Sun-Times isn't exactly saying no to top quality photographs either. They plan to sub-contract photographers and use plenty of freelance. Good pictures from good photographers will still be purchased and used often. It's a solid plan.
But the bulk of their photos will come from iPhones in the hands of an untrained reporting staff. And unless there is a secret mutiny in the newsroom, the readers won't really see any decline in overall quality, and those things shoot in 8 megapixels.
Photographers that want to survive this next evolution of newspapers are going to have to become skilled in more than just shooting a photo now. The days of knowing how to develop film and play with chemicals are over, and they aren't coming back. It's far easier for publishers to justify the cost of training a reporter to use Photoshop than to pay a photographer to do what a reporter can do.
So what is the answer for photographers who don't want to lose their jobs to journalists? They are going to need to fight fire with fire, and become journalists.
Photo journalists. Content creators. Video editors. Time to expand that skill base.
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, and there is no doubt that a story told in photo tells even more. A video tells even more.
Can the Chicago Sun-Times survive on photographs taken on iPhones by reporters who aren't ask highly trained, skilled, and maybe even talented?
I am betting they can survive. The question now becomes whether photographers can survive the next wave of newspapers. I think they can, if they are willing to evolve with it.
The latest blow that has newsrooms everywhere talking is the announcement that the Chicago Sun-Times has fired it's photography staff and will train reporters to take photos with iPhones.
Madness!
...or is it?
I have long argued that we are on the verge of a philosophical change in the news business. We can no longer afford to think in terms of traditional labels in our business.
There is no longer a place at the table for a "reporter". These people must evolve and become content generators if newspapers are to thrive. They will need to become quality photographers, videographers, and even editors. They will need to become mobile production studios, capable of writing, editing photos, and creating videos of their stories to feed an ever more hungry news audience that no longer relies just on the written word.
Now, I don't think there is no place left for photographers. They still have a lot of value to a newspaper. But they will not be responsible for the bulk of content being generated for an evolving online news medium.
I've been argued with plenty in this regard too. Photographers love to argue that reporters won't be able to replace their quality artwork and years of training. I agree. They won't. And they don't need to.
This week I purchased two $100 point and shoot cameras for our reporters with the understanding that all stories they file from here out will have artwork. It won't be amazing angles and creative use of blurs... and our audience won't know the difference or even care. 16 megapixels makes up for a lot of mistakes in shooting a photo, and I promise you the average news reader would much rather have a "lesser quality" photo, than no photo artwork at all.
The Sun-Times isn't exactly saying no to top quality photographs either. They plan to sub-contract photographers and use plenty of freelance. Good pictures from good photographers will still be purchased and used often. It's a solid plan.
But the bulk of their photos will come from iPhones in the hands of an untrained reporting staff. And unless there is a secret mutiny in the newsroom, the readers won't really see any decline in overall quality, and those things shoot in 8 megapixels.
Photographers that want to survive this next evolution of newspapers are going to have to become skilled in more than just shooting a photo now. The days of knowing how to develop film and play with chemicals are over, and they aren't coming back. It's far easier for publishers to justify the cost of training a reporter to use Photoshop than to pay a photographer to do what a reporter can do.
So what is the answer for photographers who don't want to lose their jobs to journalists? They are going to need to fight fire with fire, and become journalists.
Photo journalists. Content creators. Video editors. Time to expand that skill base.
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, and there is no doubt that a story told in photo tells even more. A video tells even more.
Can the Chicago Sun-Times survive on photographs taken on iPhones by reporters who aren't ask highly trained, skilled, and maybe even talented?
I am betting they can survive. The question now becomes whether photographers can survive the next wave of newspapers. I think they can, if they are willing to evolve with it.
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Reducing IT costs with Open Source
Let's get right down to the meat of the issue shall we? No sense in flowering up the subject with pretty words, after all, I'm a newspaper network engineer, not a reporter or editor.
The costs of IT are going to have to come down in the coming years for newspapers. It's that simple. The days of the feast are over, and we have to get leaner to do our jobs.
Yep, that means you won't be getting your new editorial workflow that costs a quarter of a million dollars this year. And you probably won't be getting the 16 core server either. Nor all the software upgrades you'd like.
Oh how will we ever survive?
The answer is simple, creativity and open source.
We have begun deploying a Drupal based editorial workflow solution to our newspaper group. Not only does it do a pretty solid job of an eds for pressitorial workflow, it has some pretty cool advantages. Like what you ask?
The first clear advantage is that it acts as a central repository of information for all of our papers, and the stories and be sorted and filtered in a multitude of ways. This means we can begin reducing the cost of the Associated Press by providing our own regional coverage.
Second, it outputs a series of feeds which populate our website for us. Stories go through the editorial process on the back end, and when they are in their final state, they feed into our website like magic, ready to be published to the web.
Third, we have created a series of XML export files which get used for pagination. An editor/paginator can download their export file from the workflow, and import it into InDesign. From there they can drag and drop stories on to the page, pre-styled and ready to go. It cuts down on man hours used producing pages for press that could be better used generating content.
Lastly, it is free. It was built on 100% open source software, so it won't cost us five employees to roll out. It's web based, so operating system changes and browser upgrades have minimal to no effect. And one of our reporters is now filing stories from the field on a $250 Chromebook, and it works perfectly. Talk about reducing costs, improving efficiency, and getting more mobile right?
We are also beginning to work towards centralized PDF generation using Linux and the ps2pdf command line functionality. Why you ask? Because with Adobe moving to Creative Cloud, the price tag for Acrobat Pro / Distiller may skyrocket to an annual fee that can be easily reduced with an open source alternative.
For a group of more than 20 newspapers, that $800 a year savings can add up to a part time employee.
I can't recommend more robust publishing software to be replaced by open source just yet. Scribus is just not a viable alternative to InDesign for print heavy newspapers, especially dailies, but it's come a long way in the last three years, and it's another open source alternative worth keeping your eyes on in the next three years.
OpenOffice, for most operations, can be just as effective as a more costly Microsoft Office solution, and runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux. It's helpful to tweak your settings so that files save as Office native formats rather than the default ODF format, but that's an easy fix to apply to save $360 a year on Office 365.
GIMP is not ready to replace Photoshop on the mainstream, but if you give your photographers a chance to get used to it by playing a little bit, you'll find they crop functions, sharp unmask, and most of their basic photo editing functions are very familiar to them. No, I wouldn't design ads in GIMP, but I wouldn't recommend designing them in Photoshop either.
If you are a newspaper IT professional, and you want to see your job last a good long time, then begin looking at ways to reduce IT spending and save your company the money. The days of the big servers and expensive software are over, and now we have to learn to live on tighter budgets, just like every other department in our business.
Yep, that means you won't be getting your new editorial workflow that costs a quarter of a million dollars this year. And you probably won't be getting the 16 core server either. Nor all the software upgrades you'd like.
Oh how will we ever survive?
The answer is simple, creativity and open source.
We have begun deploying a Drupal based editorial workflow solution to our newspaper group. Not only does it do a pretty solid job of an eds for pressitorial workflow, it has some pretty cool advantages. Like what you ask?
The first clear advantage is that it acts as a central repository of information for all of our papers, and the stories and be sorted and filtered in a multitude of ways. This means we can begin reducing the cost of the Associated Press by providing our own regional coverage.
Second, it outputs a series of feeds which populate our website for us. Stories go through the editorial process on the back end, and when they are in their final state, they feed into our website like magic, ready to be published to the web.
Third, we have created a series of XML export files which get used for pagination. An editor/paginator can download their export file from the workflow, and import it into InDesign. From there they can drag and drop stories on to the page, pre-styled and ready to go. It cuts down on man hours used producing pages for press that could be better used generating content.
Lastly, it is free. It was built on 100% open source software, so it won't cost us five employees to roll out. It's web based, so operating system changes and browser upgrades have minimal to no effect. And one of our reporters is now filing stories from the field on a $250 Chromebook, and it works perfectly. Talk about reducing costs, improving efficiency, and getting more mobile right?
We are also beginning to work towards centralized PDF generation using Linux and the ps2pdf command line functionality. Why you ask? Because with Adobe moving to Creative Cloud, the price tag for Acrobat Pro / Distiller may skyrocket to an annual fee that can be easily reduced with an open source alternative.
For a group of more than 20 newspapers, that $800 a year savings can add up to a part time employee.
I can't recommend more robust publishing software to be replaced by open source just yet. Scribus is just not a viable alternative to InDesign for print heavy newspapers, especially dailies, but it's come a long way in the last three years, and it's another open source alternative worth keeping your eyes on in the next three years.
OpenOffice, for most operations, can be just as effective as a more costly Microsoft Office solution, and runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux. It's helpful to tweak your settings so that files save as Office native formats rather than the default ODF format, but that's an easy fix to apply to save $360 a year on Office 365.
GIMP is not ready to replace Photoshop on the mainstream, but if you give your photographers a chance to get used to it by playing a little bit, you'll find they crop functions, sharp unmask, and most of their basic photo editing functions are very familiar to them. No, I wouldn't design ads in GIMP, but I wouldn't recommend designing them in Photoshop either.
If you are a newspaper IT professional, and you want to see your job last a good long time, then begin looking at ways to reduce IT spending and save your company the money. The days of the big servers and expensive software are over, and now we have to learn to live on tighter budgets, just like every other department in our business.
The Role of IT in Newspapers
It's no secret by now that print publications are struggling. We've seen many metro newspapers close down or reduce to three day a week printing, and community newspapers are downsizing en masse.
It's the world we live in. People want their news immediately, not 16 hours later when the presses wind down and the newspaper has been placed on their doorstep. It's the instant gratification mixed with a sense that we can learn all we need to know about the important things in our lives in 140 characters or less.
More and more people report they are turning to Facebook and Twitter as their main source of information. That, my friends is a very dangerous thing. In 2011 when the Moment Fire gripped Southeast Arizona and evacuated homes, a Facebook page was launched almost immediately to inform those effected of the dangers. The problem is, the news was mostly unreliable. People evacuated homes and sought refuge in areas that weren't in any threat zone, because people reported rumor and myth online.
Yes, it was a source of "news", but it wasn't trusted news. The newspaper I work for was openly lambasted by local readers for not posting evacuation notices fast enough. Again, the problem wasn't the speed of the information, it was the reliability. They were upset we didn't post evacuations in places that weren't being evacuated, but they had heard on Facebook their house was about to burn down.
It all culminated when a local competing on-line only news source reported one of the largest gas stations in town had exploded in the fire. This gas station sits just down the road, hundreds of feet, from one of our largest elementary schools. Parents flocked to the school fearing for their children's safety creating a large traffic jam that even emergency vehicles couldn't clear quickly.
This traffic jam was along the main route that firefighters were using to put out the real flames, which were in an empty field on Fort Huachuca, and the gas station was in no danger at all, a large four line bypass separate the two. It would have taken 60 foot flames to jump that road, a road that was now packed with terrified parents, hundreds of cars, and stood in the way of emergency workers who needed to make sure the flames didn't become dangerous to an entire military base.
The misreporting of news online has become a dangerous problem to society, and it is still the job of the traditional newspaper to get the story right, not spread fear and chaos, and report responsibly. But it's also our job to report as quickly as possible, to inform, and to quiet the fears being spread by the uninformed.
The role of IT in newspapers today has changed quite a bit. We are no longer just here to fix your printer, or calibrate your monitor. We have become a source of the information flow. It is our job to drive new technology that can provide a community with quality information quickly and easily.
My newspaper won a national newspaper website award for the work we did during the Monument Fire because of our use of email alerts, SMS messaging, and social media to help inform the community. We used digital maps of evacuation zones, and hosted live chats with our reporting staff to give people the most up to date and sourced news that we could. And a lot of that fell directly in the lap of IT... me.
When Gabrielle Giffords was shot, I was called into the office early on a Saturday morning to help direct the flow of information. Our reporters and editors were busy trying to gather the news and verify it through multiple sources, and it became my job to get it online, to send out SMS alerts to the community, and to keep web servers that were under an amazing amount of stress up and running.
We live in Gabrielle Giffords district. This was our Congresswoman. And it was a mad house. Newspaper websites in larger cities like Tucson and Phoenix crashed under the weight of the page requests flooding in, and we became the place people could get news from. We did nearly 200,000 page views that day, when we normally do about 500,000 per month. It was a huge task to keep the information flowing, but we did it. And I think we did a damned fine job.
IT people in newspapers are no longer just the nerd sitting in a cold server room watching bits of data move from disk to disk. We are no longer just writing snippets of code to produce a better PDF. We have become the forefront of major breaking news. We are now part of the communication process, and our communities rely upon us to provide the best ad fastest news to them, from the hands of the editor, to the eyes of the reader.
In the coming years, that will become even more true. As newspapers cut back costs, we will be called upon to replace expensive legacy systems with open source alternatives that do a better job. We will be asked to integrate systems that exist independently and were never meant to work together. We will be asked to be the bandaid for the monetary bleeding, and reduce costs of hardware and software, rather than people and jobs.
We will be called upon to be MacGyver, building elegant workflows out of antiquated parts, a little duct tape, some chewing gum, and a paper clip, and to make it work better than the million dollar solutions smaller newspapers can no longer afford. There will be crappy photos taken on smartphones from reporters trying to get the story, and we will be asked to make them look good in print, converted to CMYK, and blown up to a front page story.
This is our task, and it's an important one, because the newspaper must survive in order for a community to be informed. There must still be a place of trusted information, both online and in print, for the future of intelligent and informed people all over our country.
We will work with our sales departments, our editorial departments, our circulation departments, and our production departments to improve the quality of our paper, but we will also be the front lines of major breaking stories, quarterbacking the plays and making sure we not only get it right, but we get it quickly.
If the Monument Fire taught me anything, it was that I am not just a code monkey and server mechanic any more. I am a webmaster, a photographer, a communications specialist, and often, the first point of contact for a very scared group of people who need a voice of reason.
And it feels pretty good to be able to be that person for my community.
It's the world we live in. People want their news immediately, not 16 hours later when the presses wind down and the newspaper has been placed on their doorstep. It's the instant gratification mixed with a sense that we can learn all we need to know about the important things in our lives in 140 characters or less.
More and more people report they are turning to Facebook and Twitter as their main source of information. That, my friends is a very dangerous thing. In 2011 when the Moment Fire gripped Southeast Arizona and evacuated homes, a Facebook page was launched almost immediately to inform those effected of the dangers. The problem is, the news was mostly unreliable. People evacuated homes and sought refuge in areas that weren't in any threat zone, because people reported rumor and myth online.
Yes, it was a source of "news", but it wasn't trusted news. The newspaper I work for was openly lambasted by local readers for not posting evacuation notices fast enough. Again, the problem wasn't the speed of the information, it was the reliability. They were upset we didn't post evacuations in places that weren't being evacuated, but they had heard on Facebook their house was about to burn down.
It all culminated when a local competing on-line only news source reported one of the largest gas stations in town had exploded in the fire. This gas station sits just down the road, hundreds of feet, from one of our largest elementary schools. Parents flocked to the school fearing for their children's safety creating a large traffic jam that even emergency vehicles couldn't clear quickly.
This traffic jam was along the main route that firefighters were using to put out the real flames, which were in an empty field on Fort Huachuca, and the gas station was in no danger at all, a large four line bypass separate the two. It would have taken 60 foot flames to jump that road, a road that was now packed with terrified parents, hundreds of cars, and stood in the way of emergency workers who needed to make sure the flames didn't become dangerous to an entire military base.
The misreporting of news online has become a dangerous problem to society, and it is still the job of the traditional newspaper to get the story right, not spread fear and chaos, and report responsibly. But it's also our job to report as quickly as possible, to inform, and to quiet the fears being spread by the uninformed.
The role of IT in newspapers today has changed quite a bit. We are no longer just here to fix your printer, or calibrate your monitor. We have become a source of the information flow. It is our job to drive new technology that can provide a community with quality information quickly and easily.
My newspaper won a national newspaper website award for the work we did during the Monument Fire because of our use of email alerts, SMS messaging, and social media to help inform the community. We used digital maps of evacuation zones, and hosted live chats with our reporting staff to give people the most up to date and sourced news that we could. And a lot of that fell directly in the lap of IT... me.
When Gabrielle Giffords was shot, I was called into the office early on a Saturday morning to help direct the flow of information. Our reporters and editors were busy trying to gather the news and verify it through multiple sources, and it became my job to get it online, to send out SMS alerts to the community, and to keep web servers that were under an amazing amount of stress up and running.
We live in Gabrielle Giffords district. This was our Congresswoman. And it was a mad house. Newspaper websites in larger cities like Tucson and Phoenix crashed under the weight of the page requests flooding in, and we became the place people could get news from. We did nearly 200,000 page views that day, when we normally do about 500,000 per month. It was a huge task to keep the information flowing, but we did it. And I think we did a damned fine job.
IT people in newspapers are no longer just the nerd sitting in a cold server room watching bits of data move from disk to disk. We are no longer just writing snippets of code to produce a better PDF. We have become the forefront of major breaking news. We are now part of the communication process, and our communities rely upon us to provide the best ad fastest news to them, from the hands of the editor, to the eyes of the reader.
In the coming years, that will become even more true. As newspapers cut back costs, we will be called upon to replace expensive legacy systems with open source alternatives that do a better job. We will be asked to integrate systems that exist independently and were never meant to work together. We will be asked to be the bandaid for the monetary bleeding, and reduce costs of hardware and software, rather than people and jobs.
We will be called upon to be MacGyver, building elegant workflows out of antiquated parts, a little duct tape, some chewing gum, and a paper clip, and to make it work better than the million dollar solutions smaller newspapers can no longer afford. There will be crappy photos taken on smartphones from reporters trying to get the story, and we will be asked to make them look good in print, converted to CMYK, and blown up to a front page story.
This is our task, and it's an important one, because the newspaper must survive in order for a community to be informed. There must still be a place of trusted information, both online and in print, for the future of intelligent and informed people all over our country.
We will work with our sales departments, our editorial departments, our circulation departments, and our production departments to improve the quality of our paper, but we will also be the front lines of major breaking stories, quarterbacking the plays and making sure we not only get it right, but we get it quickly.
If the Monument Fire taught me anything, it was that I am not just a code monkey and server mechanic any more. I am a webmaster, a photographer, a communications specialist, and often, the first point of contact for a very scared group of people who need a voice of reason.
And it feels pretty good to be able to be that person for my community.
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