Tag: angorafire

So is it true that no more donations are needed for the victims of the Angora Fire? That so many donations have already come pouring in that they literally have everything they need, and that they're now turning people away? Read through the comment thread on this post for the story of someone who detoured from a planned Las Vegas trip and instead went up to Lake Tahoe with a trunk full of donations, only to be refused everywhere they brought them. The final chapter:

After spending several days gathering donations and spending about $400.00 of my own money and driving the 5 hours one way to Tahoe, no one would take our donations. We were told the area had already received more than what was needed and we were turned away from everywhere we called or stopped at. So we dropped off the 100 lbs of dog food we had at the SPCA and left town after a couple of days. The donations were given to a Hospice in Placerville that we found on the way down the hill.

This seems pretty ludicrous that nobody at Tahoe would need any more donations, doesn't it?

Editor and Publisher is at it again, with an article titled "Small Lake Tahoe, Calif. Daily Covering Massive Fire With Blog-Style Web". Kevin Reynen, one of the folks behind OurTahoe, pointed to this article all about the constant updates the Tahoe Daily Tribune has been doing on the Angora Fire. And it's completely true that the paper has been excellent at posting updates online, and passing just about every bit of information they've received along to the public. But they're not doing it "blog-style", as E&P says. They're just publishing a daily "Breaking News" article, and then constantly updating it throughout the day. In the blog world that's the equivalent of putting up one single post, then editing it over and over. You still only have one post.

"Blog-style" coverage would be if every single update they published came out as a separate item on their homepage. So you wouldn't have to click through to see if anything had been updated, you'd just have to look at the top items on the page. And Kevin brings up one other advantage of doing things this way - RSS. The way the Tribune handled their updates, there was only one RSS entry for the whole article. So breaking news wouldn't show up in an RSS reader, because it would just be buried inside an article you'd already read. Kevin tried to fix this by scraping their site and creating his own RSS, but even that effort was met with a lot of problems.

The blame in this case doesn't sit with the staff and editors of the Tahoe Daily Tribune. They were doing exactly what they should have been, and they did a totally awesome job of it. All of the problems stem from the Content Management System they use, the publishing system that runs their website. The Tribune, along with the Nevada Appeal, Record Courier, and several other Sierra Nevada Media properties, use a horrendous piece of crap known as Publicus to publish their websites. Publicus seems to be a particularly hideous scourge on the web, used by newspapers all over the country and, from what I can tell, almost universally reviled by anyone who knows anything about web publishing. My own experience with Publicus has only been through reading websites that use it, but even through that slight exposure I can tell that it's almost impossible to build a quality site using it. The concept of a "blog" essentially doesn't exist inside the system, so to use it to push out any kind of frequent updates you've got to hack it within an inch of its life. It's no wonder the staff of the Tahoe Daily Tribune isn't running a real blog to keep up with the Angora Fire; they're literally doing the best they can with what they have.

Now you'd think the folks over at Editor and Publisher would know all of this. It's their job to follow what's happening in the news industry, and the tools and techniques of online publishing have been a large part of that industry for many years now. So to see them look at a Publicus-based website, which is straight-jacketed into updating the same story over and over again to get frequent updates out, and to actually call that "blogging", that makes me scratch my head in about a dozen different ways.

And it's not like this is the first time they've done this. Remember the Waterfall Fire back in 2004? The Nevada Appeal pretty much pulled the same hack out of Publicus back then, updating the same article over and over to get news out frequently. Editor and Publisher did an article on their efforts (which now can't be found online, but this Poynter column is a good substitute) at that time too. And what did they call what the Appeal had done? Blogging.

So there are pockets of the newspaper industry that still remain confused about what blogging is and isn't. I guess they're so entrenched in their once-a-day publishing schedule with the newspaper that any updates pushed out to their websites out of cycle must be "blogging". I still think it would be exciting to see one of the local newspapers try their hand at real blogging, ditching Publicus for a real CMS and adopting more of a round-the-clock publishing schedule even for mundane news. I think I'm going to be waiting a very long time for that to happen, though. We'll be lucky if the Appeal ever comes online with the new comment system they've been talking about for months.

It's pretty sad that the national media has cocked up the Angora Fire story so badly that people are now afraid to come to Lake Tahoe, and are canceling the Fourth of July reservations they had made. Fox News in particular, I guess, is spreading the word that the whole Tahoe Basin is in flames, and the hotels are at risk, and the multi-million-dollar mansions in Incline Village have fire licking at their doorstops. It's gotten so bad that Arnold Schwarenegger has had to come out and do public relations for the Lake, even going so far as straight-out saying "Right now it is safe to come to Lake Tahoe." Direct quote. "Safe."

So, if you feel like being safe next week, make sure to head up to Tahoe for the Fourth of July. The beaches do get kind of crowded, but if you get there early in the morning you can stake out a good spot. And the fireworks up there are some of the best you'll find in the area. I won't be there, because I'll be chewing on ice and recovering from my tonsil surgery. But all of you go and have fun.

And be safe! The governator said so!