Nick Denton is expanding his publishing empire of niche-blogs, which already includes the gadget-blog Gizmodo: Just unveiled is Gawker, a Manhattan-centric gossip-and-stuff site edited by Elizabeth Spiers. Looks like fun.
Commons ground
Creative Commons launches today with an innovative approach to creating machine-readable copyright licenses that encourage creative reuse and redistribution:
| The Licensing Project will build licenses that will help you tell others that your works are free for copying and other uses — but only on certain conditions. You’re probably familiar with the phrase “All rights reserved” and the little icon that goes along with it. Creative Commons wants to help copyright holders send a different message: “Some rights reserved” and our “CC Creative Commons” logo. |
Roger McGuinn and O’Reilly & Associates are both going to participate.
Matt Welch: the sky isn’t falling
Matt Welch offers a spirited response to the wise old men of journalism who tell us that the sky is falling.
Redesign ruckus
Jim Romenesko’s widely read media-industry blog — once known as Media Gossip and now, under the aegis of the Poynter Institute, published under the more staid Media News flag — hs just undergone a redesign, and the readers are howling. Where are the left-hand column links we loved? Why did they mess with a good thing? Why can’t I change the font size? The “feedback” feature doesn’t work right! And so on, and so on.
As a veteran of a half-dozen redesign projects, I think I can guess what was happening behind the scenes at Poynter: The project is rolling down the road, there’s a deadline that has been pushed back once or twice or three times and just can’t be pushed back any more, a lot of what the designers wanted to do is working and a lot still isn’t, the developers are working as hard as they can, and as the deadline approaches triage kicks in: You put up what’s working and you start prioritizing fixes.
As far as I could tell, the Media News redesign went live some time Friday morning and then went offline for most of the rest of that day — during which time my browser showed the old Thursday edition of the page, in the old design. Which suggests that this redesign launch, like most, hit a few bumps in the road.
What most people — even the savvy journalists who congregate at Romenesko’s site — don’t seem to get is that Website redesigns are nearly always slow-motion train wrecks. No matter how smart and experienced the people behind the redesign are, no matter how much testing you do, once you go live you encounter a million and one little problems. You spend the next several weeks fixing them. By the time you’re done, most of your readers have grown accustomed to the graphical and functional changes that first irked them. Many of them start to discover, and appreciate, the actual improvements that the redesign incorporated. The world moves on.
Meanwhile, much of the value in the redesign is often invisible to the public but of great import to the publishing organization — usually (if the managers have done their homework) there’s a more solid infrastructure in place, a good database is storing the content, and more flexible and speedier publishing tools are in the hands of the writers and editors who need them.
I’m not saying that the Poynter redesign is a big improvement, or that some of the complaints aren’t justified. I liked the “old” Romenesko too, probably because I was used to it. But mostly, I’m feeling empathy for the folks at Poynter.org, who I bet need some sleep right around now.
Large mountain, small bullets
Britt Blaser offers this moving parable, from the author’s Air Force experience in Vietnam: Sometimes, the paranoia can be worse than the danger. Now that the immediate threat of sniper shootings is behind us, these words are worth attending to:
| Our brain — specifically the reticular formation (so-called “reptile brain”) — is set up to face threats first and only seek opportunities when not threatened. That bias for threat info sells stuff to us. To that end, the media has grabbed and holds our attention, robbing us of the chance to pay attention to something other than the media. |
Redesign blues (and neon greens)
Wired News has redesigned its site and gone back to at least some aspects of the old-school Hotwired color-scheme and look. Pulling off any kind of redesign in the post-dotcom-boom Web doldrums is a coup. Douglas Bowman of Hotwired and Terra Lycos has posted some interesting comments on the reaction to the redesign here (link courtesy Dave Winer):
| What’s interesting about the negative feedback is that, aside from the aesthetic — which is always subjective — none of the feedback is consistent. One user wants one thing, another user wants it the exact opposite. |
Here at Salon we recall our last major redesign in summer of 2000, when a combination of technical snafus on launch and a couple of bad choices that we reversed within a week or so led to a massive reader outcry. Those problems obscured the deeper reality that we’d pulled off 95 percent of an extraordinarily complex project, and that we’d put in place a design that still serves Salon well two and a half years later. Someday, of course, we will revamp our site again. And when we do, I expect many of the same readers who told us back in 2000 that we’d destroyed their dearly beloved Salon to write in again and defend the current design — the very same one that they so detested in 2000 — from our awful innovations. It’s okay! It’s just the nature of user response. The most important thing is that the readers actually care; they feel a sense of ownership of a site that they visit regularly. Wired News should take considerable consolation from that.
Those darn copy editors
I, along with many others in the blogosphere, picked up on what seemed like a key quote in the New York Times’ story on the new Bush administration strategy document: “The president has no intention of allowing any foreign power to catch up with the huge lead the United States has opened since the fall of the Soviet Union more than a decade ago.” This statement was presented in quotes in the Times’ story as if it were part of that document itself.
But as several readers wrote in to point out, it’s not. The Times corrected itself a day later: “The comment… was the writer’s summation of interviews with senior administration officials.” I e-mailed the story’s author, David Sanger, whom I knew a couple of decades ago when we worked together on a student newspaper, to ask what happened, and he said it was a copy editing error — which, from my years in a daily newsroom, I can entirely believe. (Before you copy editors start e-mailing, I assure you that some of my best friends are — or were — copy editors.)
None of this makes the Bush administration’s strategy document any less of an aggressive attempt to rationalize a new American claim to the right of “preemptive” intervention. And key passages in it support Sanger’s interpretive generalization, most notably this one: “Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States.” But it’s only fair to set the record straight here.
No time for Google?
Brad DeLong takes Slate’s Eric Umansky to task for criticizing an apparent omission in the New York Times’ coverage of income inequality without bothering to check Google first (and learn that the Times wasn’t hiding anything). “FOR GOD’S SAKE, PEOPLE, USE GOOGLE!!!” Indeed.
Random posts
Google news is hot right now. (See CNet’s story.) Not sure how I feel, as an editor and all, about a “front page” that declares, “This page was generated entirely by computer algorithms without human editors. No humans were harmed or even used in the creation of this page.” (Google’s sense of humor remains intact.) For the moment it’s an interesting experiment. Useful, challenging our expectations, but not any kind of replacement for the human-edited front page. Google’s engineers are smart, though; this is a beta. Who knows how far they can take it? Nick Denton’s critique is worth pondering: he observes that Google’s algorithm fails to give “exclusives” their due.
More must read
Brad DeLong pens a “Platonic Dialogue on Eldred v. Ashcroft“, considering how the Supreme Court might rule on the case challenging Congress’s extension of the length of copyrights. Conclusion:
| The court won’t overturn the copyright extension. They won’t use the chainsaw. But they will take the chainsaw out of the garage and make sure its fuel tank is full. Its opinion will mean, “Congress, there are some limits, somewhere, to your copyright power.” It will mean, “Disney, you’ve bought your last copyright extension.” It will mean, “Congress, next time find someone more serious than Sonny Bono to lead the issue.” It will mean, “We’re not going to tell you where the line is exactly — that would be dicta, and we hate dicta, except when we don’t — but we are telling you that if you move to extend copyright again, you first need to ask yourselves the Clint Eastwood question: ‘Do you feel lucky?'” |