Tag: website

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.