Developed PaulConley.com, a business website for media consultant Paul Conley based on a previous minimalistic design using modern Web standards. Design by Kyle Mitchell. Launched 2/18/2010.
Skills: CSS, JavaScript, XHTML, PHP
Medium: Web
CMS: WordPress
On top of the Empire State Building, Manhattan, New York City, by meironke.
One of the things that makes doing web journalism in New York City absolutely frustrating is the lack of online data.
I'm not looking for anything strange. The first data set I wanted was crime reports that include individual crimes and locations. NYPD publishes weekly crime statistics, but not data that could easily be plotted on a map.
It absolutely stuns me that one of the biggest, most famous cities in the world is so backward. And why hasn't the police department been slammed with FOIAs from every journalist in the city for the past 15 years?
Guardian DataStore
About a week ago I posted to Twitter an idea for creating a data hub for NYC, in the vein of The Guardian's Data Store. Everyblock does a good job of the collecting what data NYC does put online, but their job isn't to track down city departments and convince them that providing clean data in multiple, usable formats would be to their benefit.
About a year ago, some journalists were complaining about the "data ghettos" that began popping up on newspaper websites. The problem was/is that newspaper organizations began publishing databases without context.
How would my NYC data hub be different?
It's not. I don't envision this as journalism. It is, instead a service provided TO journalists.
The idea needs some more fleshing out, some investors, and a business model. But it's doable, and necessary. I don't ever want to hear another editor turn down an idea because it will take 2 years and a FOIA to get the required data.
Yesterday's look
You may notice that the site looks radically different today, after being offline yesterday.
I've switched to Darren Hoyt's Mimbo 3.0 theme, for a couple of reasons.
One is that I've always used this site as a learning experience. Learning about how WordPress can be twisted into much more than it was originally intended to be. Learning more about design. Learning about building communities.
The second major reason is that the content of the site has changed a lot since its inceptions. What started out as an experiment in blogging has become my home, a place where I collect all the various things I do online.
Now, I participate in social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. I've started freelancing, both as a web developer and journalist.
I wanted a new way to approach all those things. To show what I can do, what I have done, what I'm thinking about and reading.
Today's Look
So, assuming you land on the front page, (and I know, most of you reading this are not) you'll see several divisions in content. The most recent story is more prominent. A small right-hand column displays recent works and job experience. The middle column lists recent blog posts. And the ever-present sidebar? Well, that has remained largely the same.
The navigation has changed as well. I went back through my posts and have started to collect some of them into series pages. These are the drop-down pages you'll see if you hover on the Archive link. I merged "Sink, Florida, Sink," my road trip to NYC blog, into this one, while still making it easy to follow the journey.
Finally, I've installed the DISQUS plugin for comments. I really like the way they integrate comments that are made on social media sites and add tools to develop conversations on the blog.
There's some tweaking to do, and a few more ideas I want to try out. I'm hoping you'll all help me with that: Take a look around over the next week and let me know what's working and what isn't. What do you like? What do you hate? I'd really appreciate your feedback.
Over the past few months, I've been picking up quite a bit of freelance work. Most of it has been on the technical side of building Web sites. For the most part, I've been working with WordPress, so I can send a client a list of appropriate themes and let them decide.
In the scenario that I'm not using an easily theme-able framework, I'm stuck.
So, I've been spending some more time looking at design elements on various blogs, how colors and typography and borders are used to make even a simple layout look amazing. I've also been collecting resources to keep in mind when working on Web sites.
What are your favorite design resources? Where do you get inspiration?
Developed Bronx Youth Heard website for student journalism program run by the Bronx News Network. Launched 4/10/2009.
Skills: CSS, Design, PHP
Medium: Web
CMS: WordPress
This week I wrote my last Spotlight article for a while. Hopefully I'll get to start them up again sometime down the road, but for now, sayonara.
My last Spotlight is ProPublica's ChangeTracker, created by new intern Brian Boyer.
ChangeTracker is a project at ProPublica that watches three government websites -- Whitehouse.gov, Recovery.gov and Financialstability.gov -- for edits, deletions or changes to existing content. Through an RSS feed, Twitter account or daily email digest, ChangeTracker will inform you when a page changes on these sites, and show you what's been added or removed.
ChangeTracker is yet another example of a trend I've noticed in newer journalism projects. Rather than building a single thing, some journalists are building tools that can be used over and over, in different ways, to produce information and tell stories.
It's an important concept, given the restrictions and limited resources available to journalists whose publications are struggling. I hope to see a lot more work like this.
Great how 10 Useful Web Application Interface Techniques appears in Google Reader after I was thinking about news Web site UI.
Applicable points:
I wonder what a UI expert would say about how news Web sites should work?
Patrick Thornton wrote about user interfaces today, and how news Web sites are so loath to move away from an interface that mimicks the print product.
The last time I visited a news Web site, I was an employee of the paper working on code changes. I'm not counting clicking through to articles, but deliberately going to the home page of a site.
I get my news from a couple of sources:
Because they don't give me what I want. Because I prefer serendipity.
I'm interested in a lot of things and a lot of places and a lot of people. There isn't one place where I can get all the information I want. And I'm busy, I don't have time to spend all day bouncing from site to site, hoping someone wrote or produced something I care about.
The other reason is this: A lot of people complain about the Internet being an echo chamber. To some degree, this sucks. I have to scroll through a bunch of work that is the same concept iterated over and over.
But, since I don't visit news sites, I also don't see the hierarchy that editors and readers have placed on certain stories. The echo chamber mitigates this problem for me, because I can gurantee that if something is important (or even important only to a certain group of people...people I chose to follow because I care about what's important to them...) I'll see it at least 5 times in Google Reader and another 20 on Twitter.
Is a different UI (user interface) really going to change my behavior? I'll still have to visit multiple sites. The river of news (a la Facebook or Twitter) can get really annoying when I'm looking for something specific. For me, that only works seredipitously. And those cool mapping UI are just cluttery and hard to focus on. To be honest, if I'm looking for articles on a specific topic, I'll just do a Google search.
Thornton is right, though: news Web sites need to stop emulating print. But they need to do it in a way that actually helps the users. We've learned certain behaviors when looking for content online. There are rules that we expect Web sites to follow, and when those are bent too much, we get frustrated. Not good for news sites.
So the question is, without breaking basic UI rules or being gimmicky, how should news sites be designed differently?
Edit: Check out the comments for a discussion between Aron Pilhofer and myself about user interface vs. user interaction.
I deliberately left something out of my resolutions post last week.
I left out my recent efforts to defeat my greatest weakness: Design.
Forget about when I started building Web sites (age 11), my relationship with design didn't start until I got into online journalism.
And I learned that I couldn't design my way out of a keg. ::shudder::
For a while I thought I could get away without being able to design visual elements. I could shoot photos and video, I could program in Flash and code a site from a .pdf. After all, there's a reason for having designers, right?
I was wrong. I learned that sometimes, there just isn't enough designer to go around, and you have to be able to make your own decisions. Things move faster and more smoothly if I don't have to go ask the designer about an element.
Also, there are design elements to everything else I do online, from customizing a Twitter page to visualizing data. I was going to have to learn.
But how do you learn design?
I didn't take a class, or sign up for a workshop. I just started reading design blogs. Following designers on Twitter. Paying attention to what I liked about certain Web sites and what made them ugly.
And I've made progress. I'm not good at details, but I can spec an overall design that doesn't make people wish for blindness. I'd say I've reached paper bag status (as in can design my way out of), but anything more is beyond me.
I want to get better, because I hate not being able to do things. And because Web deisgn is important. I know I'll never be a designer, but it would be nice to have a touch of the craft.
So if you've got resources, blogs, Web sites, or people that I should be paying attention to, please let me know in the comments.
Edit: I decided to add in a list of what I'm reading.
Even though I graduated from college in May, I have trouble with the concept of not being in school. You'd think I'd be used to it by now, but I love school, and I miss all the things that come with it: being a part of a community, constantly learning new things, the surety of having something to work toward for the next few years.
Obviously, these are all part of living in the real world as well, but they seem harder and less tangible. I've lived in the Bronx for three months now, and I still only know the building super and the guy at the convenience store down the street. I'm so busy trying to make rent that I'm not learning the way I was in school. Sure, I learn new things on the job, but it's very different. As for goals to work toward, instead of aiming for a degree I know I can get, I'm working toward a career in an industry that's too busy trying to land on its feet to notice my efforts.
There's no despair in this. Just readjustment. And resolutions.
I don't need to be in school or have my dream job to learn new things or to be a journalist. I just have to carve out the time to do what needs doing.
So here's a list of things I want to learn or do, regardless of jobs.
I think these are good ways to be a journalist without the benefits of working for a publication. I'm still busting my butt to get a job in news, but until then, this is a good simulation.
What else can I do to be a journalist without the framework? What tips or advice can you give me for fulfilling these resolutions?
Mark Luckie at 10,000 Words ran the website descriptions from a couple of journalism schools through Wordle, creating a tag-cloud-esque depiction of words found on the sites.
The most popular word breakdown:
Medill Graduate School of Journalism: Reporting.
The CUNY Graduate School of Journalism: Reporting, Writing.
UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism: Reporting, Immigration, Stories, New
Asian College of Journalism: Media, Political, Issues.
UNC Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communications: Media, Research.
I ran the University of Florida's College of Journalism site through Wordle, and came up with this:
University of Florida College of Journalism word cloud
(Note: I wrote this a few months ago and forgot about it. I found it while cleaning off my hard drive today. Oops!)
I got a Blackberry Pearl about a year ago, and while I have access to Google Reader and Twitter, (my main sources of news) I just haven't gotten out of the habit of reading off the larger screen of my laptop.
Many media outlets are pursuing the possibilities of mobile news, having learned from their mistake with the Internet. As mobile phones get more advanced and more people use them, there is an opportunity to capture an audience.
One issue to address when setting out to get news on mobile phones is the variation in technologies used by different phones. Many phones can play video or view websites. All phones can receive text messages, but that can be costly to the user.
Viewing websites on a non-iPhone is a ghastly business. Tiny screens, poor rendering of CSS, graphic-heavy or Flash-based websites, they all make information harder to get at. One solution here is to create a mobile stylesheet that the phone browser will detect.
Another problem is content. Just as people don't read off a computer screen the way they read a print product, no one wants to read a lengthy feature article on a 2-inch screen.
What kind of content might one want to see on a phone?
Weather and traffic alerts, events, and big, huge, breaking news. Seriously, the feature article can wait till I get home. But if a criminal is running around my neighborhood with a gun, I'd like to know, ASAP.
What about multimedia? I don't see myself using my phone to go through a complex multimedia package. A video or slideshow, maybe, if I'm really interested. But phones are about "right now" communication. That should be reflected in how news companies approach them.
It may be that the only real solution for phones is better phone software. It doesn't have to be iPhone quality, but the ability to add "news" to your basic menu would change everything. You could do any kind of feed you want then, while not having to go three steps in just to open a browser.
The Associated Press launched the Mobile News Network. The view on a phone is pretty nice, with a top news home screen, categorized story feeds (you can pick the general topics, and a "saved" category for custom searches). You can set preferences for location and the types of news you want to see. They also do video pretty well, providing various formats. They have applications for Blackberry/iPhone/iPod Touch users.
CNN's mobile offerings include a Java application, SMS alerts, live TV (for certain providers), and downloadable videos.
The BBC actually explains how they set up several different versions of their mobile site and let your browser choose the best one.
The New York Times offers a mobile site where you can read the NYT blogs, see most e-mailed articles, get alerts for topics or keywords, and browse real estate listings, stocks and weather forecasts. You can also choose to have news sent to your phone via text message. Customers of certain providers can also get access to crossword puzzles.
Fox News provides live video, streaming video clips, the requisite mobile site, and text alerts. Something a little different: they also offer an audio version of FNC, for a monthly fee.
The people most likely to have a compulsion to check the news every few hours, no matter where they are, are journalists. So I rounded up a few and asked about their mobile news habits.
Greg Linch sent me an e-mail after I asked for responses on Twitter.
I check Gmail on my smart phone (an AT&T Tilt), where I might have a New York Times, Washington Post or Miami Herald breaking news e-mail. After checking Gmail, I look at Twitter for other news and any interesting conversations. I also get Miami Herald breaking news text alerts, which include big national and local news.
If I'm away from the computer for an extended period of time -- or if I'm bored somewhere -- I'll check Google Reader on my phone. If I just want a quick peek at the latest headlines, I'll go to the mobile version of a site such as CNN, NYT or the Herald.
Kyle Mitchell is a music writer. He carries an iPod Touch. In an IM conversation, Kyle told me about his news habits.
NYT is one that keeps going down all the time. AP Mobile News is absolutely fantastic: runs fast as hell and top news never contains any bullshit like celebrity news. I check that a few times a day. Google News has a similar setup, but it's much more clunky.
Brett Roegiers associate producer at CNN.com said
On my phone, I consume the news via Google Reader and Twitter.
Brett volunteered some advice to media outlets:
I'll tell you what news organizations should pay attention to: location-based web apps. I click 'restaurants' or 'bars' and it shows me what's in my area without me having to input where I am. I guess I'd say try to take advantage of the platform in some way and not just show the latest headlines.
Lyndsey Lewis has an older Nokia, but checks the news on her iPod Touch.
I don't use my phone, because I have a shitty Nokia phone and it's hard to read stuff on it. But, I also own an iPod Touch, which I bring with me everywhere and use for news. I have the New York Times app on it and use that almost every day.
So what applications are you using to get the news on your phone? What do you think media outlets should be doing to get people's attention? What can manufacturers do to make phones easier to use in this context?
I've been wanting to write a bit about what I'm doing and where I'm working, but had trouble figuring out how to approach the subject.
You see, I work for a PR company.
I can hear you all gasping. No, I have NOT crossed over to the "dark side."
PR companies are scrambling like most other institutional businesses to figure out this whole "Internet thing." My job as "Digital Media Intern" is to move Quinn & Co. forward by teaching how social media works. Twitter, Facebook, blogs, the whole kit and caboodle.
So I've been doing lots of research: what's the best blogging platform for their purposes, how can the company and their clients build loyalty through Twitter and Facebook, how to monitor brands with Google Alerts, optimizing press releases and websites for search engines, and building lists of bloggers and micro-bloggers for Real Estate, Travel and Food, Wine & Spirits.
I've also been doing some multimedia work: a video from a media panel, working on an interactive email design.
All of which is very helpful in getting to my goal.
I want to work in news. No question. I don't care if it's a newspaper, magazine, radio station, because when you get to the website, it's all the same.
Ultimately, news outlets have to learn the kinds of things I'm learning now. How do you build niche audiences online? How do you manage an online community? And so on.
While my true love is reporting through multimedia (including data), this is fun, too. I've never liked the black hat/white hat metaphor, so I'm working in shades of gray.
I hate flu season.
Mostly because everyone around me gets sick and depressed and my well-meaning parents nag me to get a shot I don't have time to wander around looking for.
Somehow, despite not getting a flu shot since sometime in middle school, I haven't had the flu in years. The last time I got it, I was ridiculously sick for 24 hours, and then I was just fine. I <3 my immune system.
But for those of you who do get sick, Google has a new toy for you. (If ever I were going to be a fangirl, it would be for Google.)
Using the existing Google Trends, Google Flu Trends predicts flu activity based on search terms.
From their about page:
Each week, millions of users around the world search for online health information. As you might expect, there are more flu-related searches during flu season, more allergy-related searches during allergy season, and more sunburn-related searches during the summer. You can explore all of these phenomena using Google Trends. But can search query trends provide an accurate, reliable model of real-world phenomena?
We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for "flu" is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together. We compared our query counts with data from a surveillance system managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and found that some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in various regions of the United States.
During the 2007-2008 flu season, an early version of Google Flu Trends was used to share results each week with the Epidemiology and Prevention Branch of the Influenza Division at CDC. Across each of the nine surveillance regions of the United States, we were able to accurately estimate current flu levels one to two weeks faster than published CDC reports.
But my favorite part is this: You can download the raw data being used to generate all those nifty charts and maps.
Now, someone please tell me they've downloaded that data and are turning it into a swoon-worthy app for their news website?
As I got off the train at Penn Station Tuesday morning, still drowsy from the 1 hour commute, I heard "Free copies of the NY Times!" coming loudly from somewhere behind my left ear. I kept walking.
Two blocks later I caught a glimpse of the front page of the paper carried by the large, dark trenchcoat in front of me. Wait a second!
What I saw was this:
Naturally, as soon as I got to the office I did some Google searches. It took another 15 minutes for the first blog posts to hit.
Apparently a group of pranksters called The Yes Men recruited volunteers to pass out these FAKE papers!
Gawker has a great peice on the subject, and The New York Times takes it in stride.
Check out the Web edition and PDF files. Too bad they didn't produce any multimedia.
That'll teach me to ignore the word "Free."
So, I write up my post for today, publish and check the site, only to find that three of my recent posts no longer exist! The comments are gone, the posts are gone, and the only record is in Google's cache and my RSS reader.
Does anyone know of recent WordPress vulnerabilities? How can I check to see if I was hacked?
Last night was one of most exciting of my life. I got to watch America do something special.
I got home around 6:30, right after the first polls closed. I stayed hooked to television and computer until just after President-elect Barack Obama's acceptance speech. It was an amazing experience.
During past elections, information was sought largely from television news. This time, I paid more attention to a large selection of Web sites than to the obnoxious commentary of political analysts. Apparently, so did a lot of other people:
According to Akamai, which is the content delivery network for most major news sites including CNN (which had a record day on its own), NBC, Reuters, and the BBC, global visitors to news sites peaked last night at 11 PM with 8,572,042 visitors per minute.
That is double the normal traffic level, and 18 percent above the previous peak of 7.3 million visitors per minute achieved during the World Cup back in June, 2006. (The third biggest peak to news sites was last March during the first day of the U.S. college basketball playoffs when it hit 7 million visitors per minute).(TechCrunch)
Most of the links below aren't to news sites, though. These are passionate and creative people who found different ways to reflect on what we all saw last night. A little bit of meta-coverage, if you will.
Mark Luckie put together a time-lapse video of the NYTimes home page from last night. It starts while voters are still at the polls and ends with Obama's victory. "In the Hall of the Mountain King" was an inspired musical choice.
Mark Newman and his cartogram software showed how skewing the normal red/blue map according to population or electoral votes is a better graphical representation of how America voted.
Daily Kos collected headlines and newspaper front pages in the US and elsewhere. Excellent collection with some really creative designs.
My friend Matthew Gonzalez grabbed some screen shots from news Web sites' home pages. I really love the NYTimes treatment.
Designer Robb Montgomery collects his best picks of front pages. I have to agree, the Chicago Sun-Times front is amazingly powerful. He also brings us "a video tour and spot critique of top U.S. media Web sites and their election graphics at the moment when Sen. Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election."
ReadWriteWeb put together a really cool slideshow of election coverage online, showing resources from Twitter to Ustream, news sites and more.
Mindy McAdams put together her own slideshow of voting maps and home pages.
I recently joined the Spot.us group on Facebook. I've met David Cohn and heard him talk about Spot.us as well as following his blog for quite some time now. His idea is intriguing, and I've been pretty excited to see how things might work out for him.
From his message to the group, here are three successfully funded stories:
The first example of Community Funded Reporting came from a fantastic reporter Alexis Madrigal who examined the infrastructure of ethanol in the state of California. I feel confident that it is the most exhaustive look at the subject to date.
The second example is ongoing: The SF Election Truthiness Campaign. We raised $2,500 from 74 small donations (average $33) to fact-check political advertisements for the upcoming SF Election.
Just today PBS' MediaShift blog wrote about it.
Our most recent success story is underway right now: Chris Amico will look into the environmental concerns of cement kilns in the Bay Area.
Sounds like things are going really well for David so far, (congrats!) and I hope to see the project grow and even expand to other areas!
Here's the first response this month:
TNTJ: Review of The Journal and Courier Web site | By Daniel Victor.
VERDICT: I give it a B-. If your priority is to quickly scan and access the news of the day, this site does it better than most out there.
What it lacks, though, is the kind of innovation that will push the newspaper’s brand forward. It has to better package its Web-only content and show why the site can become more than a place to stop for news.
I think it's interesting that the question was interpreted as "critique the Web site."
I work for my local paper and am moving soon, so unless someone else is willing to switch with me as Daniel and Meranda did, I'm staying out of this one.
A few days ago I got an email from Daniel Bachhuber, who is working with the Oregon Daily Emerald.
He wanted to know if I was interested in discussion content management system options for college media. After my time as online managing editor at The Independent Florida Alligator, struggling with a CMS that liked to fight dirty, I've daydreamed of building a modular open-source system myself.
The problem:
College Publisher is an inappropriate platform for student newspapers
but most newspapers don't have the resources to custom roll their own
CMS.
The Alligator uses TownNews, but the idea is the same.
Daniel started a wiki, College News Press, as well as a mailing group to keep track of ideas and coordinate discussion. The wiki includes tasks, benchmarks and platform comparisons.
His vision:
- To create an easy to deploy, simple to use (open source?) content management system (CMS) with varying levels of sophistication that is specifically geared towards the student newspaper and local news market.
- To provide abundant knowledge resources to student newspapers interested in switching platforms that have minimal IT manpower.
Daniel is even submitting an application for the Knight News Challenge!
I'm really excited to work on this, even though I'm no longer a member of the college media sector. The two biggest problems with newspaper Web sites are site design and CMS limitations. Hacking a CMS should not be among the things we have to do to be innovative.
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