Tag: nevadaappeal

The Appeal has two articles online today about Carson City's early years. Guy Rocha continues his story with a look at the fates of one of the founders of Carson City, Frank Proctor. And Sue Ballew looks at the aftermath of the Pyramid Lake War, along with a few comments from myself on the fate of Anton Tjader, a doctor who was thought killed in the ambush but actually survived.

The Appeal has two articles online today about Carson City's early years. Guy Rocha continues his story with the founding of Nevada Territory, and Sue Ballew takes a look at the Pyramid Lake War.

The Appeal just has one article online today about Carson City's early years, a look from Sue Ballew at how the newspapers covered the news back in the 1860s. Also, a trivia question about the Capitol dome.

There is also, in the newspaper, another article in Guy Rocha's series about the early days of Carson City, this one concerning the intrigue surrounding the efforts to declare Carson City the state capital. But that article hasn't appeared on the website yet. Update: It's online now: Carson City's stature grows quickly in late 1850s.

The Nevada Appeal has a couple more articles today about the early history of Carson City. The birth of a new city by Guy Rocha details the founding and first few months of the new town in the Eagle Valley, and Sue Ballew presents the front page of the Territorial Enterprise from Dec. 31, 1859, in PDF format.

The Nevada Appeal started its coverage of the Carson City Sesquicentennial today. There was one article on the front page, and a couple more in section C.

First was an article by editor Barry Ginter detailing all the events that are planned to celebrate the Sesquicentennial. It sounds like the big bash will be on August 16th, a huge block party that will take over much of downtown. Other small events are scattered throughout the summer.

There is an article by Guy Rocha about the founders of Carson City. Even though Abe Curry is widely held as the "father" of Carson City, he actually had three business partners that helped him get the town started. This article is a preview of a talk Guy will be giving at the State Museum next Tuesday, the 26th. Details on the talk are in the article.

There is a story by Sue Ballew about the first newspaper printed in Carson City, a 1859 edition of the Territorial Enterprise. The Enterprise was started in Genoa, moved to Carson City for a bit, then finally wound up in Virginia City where it found its greatest fame. The Daily Appeal, precursor to the Nevada Appeal, was started in 1865. The front page of that 1859 edition of the Enterprise is available to download on the Appeal's website.

And finally they have a quick quiz about Carson City history facts.

All of this reminds me that I really need to get working on new articles for Carsonpedia. That site has been kept in a state of quiet neglect just because I've had other priorities (and a baby crying in my ear all day), but I need to throw it at least a small bone every couple of days, just to keep it fresh.

I didn't see any kind of fanfare or announcement, but the Nevada Appeal has turned on the new commenting system on its website. I guess it happened today, because I'm sure I remember seeing the old-style comments were still there yesterday.

New comments

This is a good move, because up until now the comment system on the paper's website has been crap. This new system looks to have quite a few advantages. For one thing, you can now read the comments at the bottom of the article, instead of having to click to another page. For another, the stupid way that the system would truncate a long comment and make you click again to read it all has been done away with. And, the new system requires registration. Which is kind of a tricky subject. I allow anonymous comments on this site, because I want as few barriers as possible to conversation. There could well be someone who has something valuable to say in a comment, but they don't want to jump through all the registration hoops so they just walk away instead, leaving their thoughts unspoken. That's the danger of registration, that you're missing out on what they might have said. But on the Nevada Appeal's website, that concern is overshadowed by the fact that the article comments used to be a complete mudpit before, and anything that cleans that up is a good thing. Under the old system, effectively every comment was anonymous, which led to some of the nastiest stuff being written because there was no accountability. And even the valuable comments had no name on them, no way to track one commenter's opinion over time or identify who was saying what and responding to whom in a single thread. Registration fixes all those problems, so I think in the Appeal's case it's definitely called for.

Anyway, it's a small step, but put enough small steps together and you've got something pretty big. I can see the Appeal moving in the right direction, however slowly.

I had another thought today about the Nevada Appeal's website. I know this one is completely pie-in-the-sky, and it's never going to get done, but it would be so cool if it ever did happen, and it would definitely take advantage of the fact that space on the internet is basically limitless.

I was reading Doc Searls, and he wrote a post a couple of days ago with advice for newspapers. And most of the advice is tips on how they can make it through the transition to online with a minimum amount of fuss. But when I hit #2 on the list, I had a brainstorm. #2 reads "Start featuring archived stuff on the paper’s website." And this is something the Nevada Appeal already does a tremendous job with. They have an archive section where you can pull up and read just about every article published in the paper over the last few years. It's a great tool, and I've used it many times.

But for some reason, when I was reading through Doc's thoughts on providing access to archives, most of which has to do with making the newspaper more visible to Google, and therefore increasing readership and advertising revenue, I started to think of a different kind of archive that the Nevada Appeal has, specifically the microfilm archives that stretch back over the last 140+ years of the paper's history. The paper started printing in May 1865, the year after statehood, as the Carson City Daily Appeal. And I'm pretty sure that archives exist for most of the paper's history; they have been dipped into constantly for the "Past Pages" column that was produced by Bill Dolan for nearly 60 years, and is still kept going by his son Trent and daughter Sue. But where are those archives kept? I don't know the answer; they're probably somewhere in the dusty stacks of the city or state library, available only to the few who have the time and inclination to go fetch them.

But why do they have to be hidden? Why does history always have to be locked away? My thinking is that the whole of the Nevada Appeal's archives, going all the way back to May 1865, should be available online. The old microfilms could be put up on the web as PDFs for everyone to read, and many of the more noteworthy stories from the past could be added to the paper's current archive system. This would be a tremendous resource for the community, and would do nothing but drive traffic to the paper's website. Which they could then use to raise their advertising rates, so everybody wins. And meanwhile the amount of armchair history that could be enabled by this move is immeasurable.

It's a project that I'd love to be a part of, if my plate wasn't already full with my job, family, new baby, and remodeling my house. I'm already trying to bootstrap a similar project that would make available online heaps of historic photos of the area, but I'm just stretched too thin to get anything finished anymore.

I've been starting to notice a few changes on the Nevada Appeal's website, changes that seem to indicate they're moving in the right direction finally. The first change is that, if you look at the homepage and the main section pages, you'll see that the stories have timestamps on them now. So they're not only marking each story with the date, they're also marking the time it was published to the website. Now, I don't know how long these timestamps have been there. I'm not very observant so they could have been there for months. But for a newspaper, which usually runs on a daily cycle, to start marking things by hour and minute, I see that as a big step.

Of course, posting these timestamps reveals the dirty truth about the paper's website. If you look at the times, you'll see that most of them are between the hours of 11pm and midnight. This is when they push out all the stories that are going to appear in tomorrow's paper, all the stories that have been waiting in the computer system all day. This is also probably roughly the time the paper itself goes to print, so the website and the fishwrap both get the stories at the same time, and neither one gets a chance to scoop the other.

That's the other change, though. If you look you'll see a few timestamps that are outside of that middle-of-the-night window. The Breaking News/Latest Updates section on the homepage is starting to get more use, and the result is that we're starting to get new content in the middle of the day from them. It used to be that they'd only break out of their publish-at-midnight routine for a big story, like a wildfire or a bank robbery. But now I'm seeing regular stories, and things like entertainment reports, showing up throughout the day. These stories aren't having to "wait" for the paper to be printed, they're being posted on the website as soon as they're ready. I've been calling for this for a long time, and now I'm finally starting to see it happen. This is the big step that papers have to make to get the best use out of their websites.

So hopefully this is a new trend, and the Appeal is slowly moving away from the once-a-day-publishing mentality and starting to embrace the idea of their webpage as a living entity, capable of always having something fresh for their readers. There are stories being written and edited all throughout the day in their newsroom. These stories shouldn't have to wait until midnight to get published, and now, increasingly, they're not. All I can say is, Bravo. More please.

Maybe one day we can hope they move off of Publicus too, but that might be too much to ask.

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.

The Nevada Appeal has dug down to find out the reason Long John Silver's restaurant closed last month. Apparently the city wanted them to install a $30,000 grease interceptor, to stop grease from draining into the city sewer system, and the restaurant wanted the building's owner to pay for it. But the city's codes say tenants have to pay for those kinds of improvements, and the franchise owners refused to do it. Instead they just shuttered their doors. I guess that's one cost of doing business that they weren't willing to pay.

And that wasn't their first run-in with the city's health code, according to the article. Floor grout is one problem specifically mentioned, but I found the following health inspection report from last August:

Long John Silvers No. 5217, 1280 S. Carson St., 91.
-1 Food is stored in containers which are inadequately labeled or unlabeled, specifically prepared coleslaw.
-2 Fish was stored in the freezer without a cover.
-2 Ice not dispensed by employees using scoops, tongs or other approved utensils. Dispensing utensils must be stored on a clean surface or in the ice with the handle extending out of the ice.
-1 Non-food-contact surfaces are subject to splash or food debris, specifically the edges of the shelves under the counter, and are difficult to clean. The edge laminate is missing and porous wood is exposed.
-1 Non-food contact surfaces are not clean; specifically, the supports and wheels of the fryer have accumulated grease and debris.
-1 Floors are not clean; specifically, the floor under equipment has a build-up of dust and debris.
-1 Mop bucket with dirty mop water found in a food-preparation area.

The comments on the article are generally of the "good riddance" variety. So, I don't think Carson City is sad to see them go.