Tag: nevadaappeal

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.

In a note from Kirk Caraway, the Nevada Appeal's Internet Editor, he mentions that they've finally dumped the required reader registration system their website used to have. This was where, just to read the website, not leave a comment or anything, just to read it, you had to set up a username and password and give them a bunch of demographic information. I'm sure I can see where the marketers and higher-ups at the newspaper thought this would be valuable information to have, but the flood of complaints that they've been receiving ever since they implemented it finally proved to be too much.

I think Kirk knew this was a bad idea all along. He says:

This is a system whose time had passed. We first launched it at the same time most other big newspapers were doing the same thing. Most of those papers have now dumped their forced registration systems, for the same reason we did: because it was stupid to hassle readers in this way.

It took a long time to convince some people in our organization that no amount of reader information is worth the hoops we make readers jump through to use our site.

Newspapers are slowly learning the same things blogs have known for a while. You can't take any of your readers for granted. You have to treat them right, because switching to your competition takes literally no effort.

And the number one rule that all business should have inscribed in stone on their front steps: Don't piss off people that you're trying to get money from.

I was starting to worry that the Nevada Appeal comments section was going against its nature and becoming a place for civilized discourse. But my faith has been restored. If you're looking for the usual cynicism and bile, you find plenty of it in this thread about Jethro's casino.

Carson is about the worst run place I have ever had the displeasure of living. Crime is out of control, gangs, dope, and the city refuses to hire cops??? and then allows more low income housing to be built? What do they think is going to happen? All the welfare mom's will suddenly RISE UP and get a job..and stop using meth???

Ahh...feels like home.

Either the Nevada Appeal has a short memory, or they think we have a short memory. Their online poll at the moment asks "Which local project do you think will finish first? The freeway, the Ormsby House, the V&T Railroad, or the Chinese Workers Museum?" If this seems vaguely familiar to you, it's because they ran the exact same poll back in June. Well, it's not exactly the same. That first poll didn't include the Chinese Workers Museum. But still. Are they trying to get a recount, or did they genuinely forget they had already done this?

The freeway was is the clear winner in both polls, by the way. The first time it took home 36% of the vote, and this time it's running away with 40%. So, yay for NDOT, I guess!

And as always, the Ormsby House came in third.

On Tuesday I wrote that the Ormsby House has become a joke, and it looks like I was right on the spot with that. Today the Nevada Appeal is running a poll on their website, related to the front-page story that work is progressing slowly on opening up Tunnel #2 along the V&T Railroad route. There are several signifigant engineering challenges to overcome in getting the tunnel open again, and the unspoken conclusion of the article is that if it's not finished soon it could really delay the plan to have the V&T operational by 2009.

So today's poll asks the question, "Which local project will be completed first?" And your options are the V&T, the Carson City Freeway, or the Ormsby House. Even the paper's editors couldn't resist throwing that little jab in there at the Ormsby's expense. And the public played right along. Currently the freeway is winning with 125 votes to the V&T's 116. And the poor Ormsby House doesn't even place, coming in distant third with 67 votes. That's so funny because that's the exact opposite order of when they're all supposed to be finished. The Ormsby House, of course, was supposed to open July 4, 2001. Then it was pushed back to 2003, and now if you ask they'll probably say, "sometime next summer." The railroad is to be completed in 2009, and the freeway in 2010. But I guess the freeway gets everyone's vote of confidence, because although it's been in the planning stages for 50 years it's still the only one that seems to have the funds available to finish the job. And you can drive down to the Hwy 50 bridge and see people working on the freeway, where the little work they're doing on the V&T is hidden up the hills with a small crew of excavators.

And the Ormsby House? Don't even talk to me about the Ormsby House and their "We are working on it diligently."