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| Sunday, April 10, 2005 |
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Remaking the news 
| | Now I realize that Heeeyah! (etc.) is indeed the blog that's "mostly postings by the News-Press-obsessed Dan Ancona, the committee's media guy." The top link on that blog, BlogaBarbara, seems no less News-Press obsessed. I imagine, from Travis Armstrong's vantage, local blogs do seem a bit on the adversarial side. |
| | I'm not a wonk about local politics, and I don't want to get between Dan (plus other bloggers) and the paper, even though I have problems with the paper too. But see, my problems with the News-Press are the same as I have with all newspapers and all magazines, which is that they get some stuff wrong, some of the time. Comes with the territory. You've got to put out X pages of ink, every day, against hard deadlines with limited resources. You do your best, and it's never good enough. |
| | Mistakes are inevitable. What's more, most subjects (like the one at hand here, about local blogs) are not finished ones. Credit where due: Travis asked readers to send in pointers to other blogs. In other words, he was looking for help. Not gotchas. |
| | If you don't read the Star online, as I do, then you may not have noticed that they've basically blogified the whole site. You can post feedback comments to any story or editorial. There are very few newspapers that have gone this far to give their readers the ability to offer feedback on stories and discuss them with others in the community; the Star is among the very first to do this. Additionally, assistant managing editor John Moore blogs at least once a day on what the editorial staff is working on for the next day's edition, giving readers a glimpse into the internal nuts and bolts of the newsroom. I'm pleased to see the Star add these features to their site. |
| | I'm trying right now to see if the search facility at the top of the page works, and if it reveals a policy of locking up archives behind a costwall. Hmm... The search didn't work. When I click on Search Help I just get a long list of stories grouped under town names. Clearly there is a CMS (content management system) involved here, and it's not working quite right. But then, I can think of damn few that do. The San Francisco Chronicle's SFgate comes to mind, even though it's now loading so slowly I'm thinking of changing my mind. |
| | Okay, with another browser, search at the Star works now. But when I click on an older (January) story, I get shunted to a registration page that asks a bunch of annoying stuff, including my income level (with no choice to decline answering a question most of us consider rude). |
| | Now I'm registered, with a reminder to sign up for eSavers Direct emails, which I declined once already. |
| | Once past that gauntlet, I search again, go back to the same January story link I got in the last search results, and .... Voila! I get the actual story. Even as a subscriber to the Santa Barbara News-Press, I can't look at old stories without paying for them. Here's one example, from the same date (January 12) and search ("floods") that brought me recovered stories from the Ventura County Star. |
| | Again, my purpose here isn't to play gotcha with the News-Press. The paper needs constructive help, not rebukes. It's a good paper. I read it every day. I'd like us to help make it better. So here are three suggestions for the paper: 1) Reach out to, and take advantage of, local bloggers, friendly and otherwise; 2) Encourage blogging by your own staff (no need to host, as the Scripps papers do — too complicated, and not necessary); and 3) Open those archives — not just to subscribers (registered or otherwise), but to Google and other search engines. Search engines are the reference sections of the world's new library. Excluding your work from that library reduces the paper's authority. For more and more of us, if you're not on the Web, it's like you don't exist. |
| | The paper has had occasional stories about how a planned all-news format for KZBN (which just became KRNP, I see), which has been playing nostalgia music at 1290am for the past few years (during which it has been owned by Bob Newhart). The station will have a relationship with the paper (which I learned through the paper's owner, Wendy McCaw, in a recent story under her byline). How about recruiting bloggers to help out with the station? Or better yet, local podcasters too? |
Excuse us?
| | The headline atop the column of Travis Armstrong, editorial page editor of the Santa Barbara News-Press, reads Where are the great S.B. blogs? His column actually covers a number of subjects, but blogs are the top item. Here's what he says about them (right up to where he gives his email address, which is also here): |
| | There's a debate in media circles of what to make of the trend of people keeping journals on Web sites. Are bloggers a breed of citizen journalists or just people with a computer and Internet access who rant day in and out? |
| | One of my former bosses drew blogger wrath when he pointed out that these writers aren't disinterested observers, but readers believe them because what's blogged conforms to the political points of view of those looking at the sites. |
| | "It is an increasing burden," Dennis Ryerson, now editor of the Indianapolis Star, told Editor & Publisher magazine. "It hurts because now anyone can publish on the Web. You have people who are politically aligned raising questions about our standards, but there is no attention given to their standards." |
| | I think it would be great if blogs became a challenge to journalists in Santa Barbara. It's all the better to have more people interested in public life in Santa Barbara and civilly debating ideas through varying outlets. |
| | But in scanning the Internet last week, I grew disappointed that the blog phenomena hasn't really taken off in Santa Barbara. |
| | The county Democratic Central Committee has one that could become an interesting read if some of the party higher-ups, rather than the hangers-on, begin contributing. Right now, it's mostly postings by the News-Press-obsessed Dan Ancona, the committee's media guy. |
| | Did I miss some great Santa Barbara blogs during my Web surf? The ones I've seen so far are like Fox News, all opinion and reacting but no reporting. They just tell people what they want to hear. E-mail the Web addresses of other blogs to me... |
| | Well, I just looked up weblogs santa barbara on Google, and came up with nothing from Fox News-alikes, but these top two finds instead: Heeeeyah! The (unofficial) Weblog of Santa Barbara County Democrats, Beautiful Santa Barbara Blog. Also, after very little additional searching, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this and this. There are many more. And that's just searching on Google. |
| | And jeez,  what about edhat, a bloglike site that's possibly the best local online journal in the whole country? In addition to well-written and -researched (not to mention funny) daily features, edhat constantly updates gas price maps, restaurant waiting times, bad cell reception locations, and real estate sales, among many other services a local newspaper's website ought to have, no? And that list barely scratches the ever-widening edhat surface. If edhat isn't a challenge to the News-Press, what is? |
| | Seriously, I believe bloggers shouldn't challenge local papers so much as augment them. Think of bloggers as stringers and you start getting the picture. More at We the Media and Ourmedia, both by mainstream journalists who also blog. |
| | One other not-too-small bit of advice for the paper: quit hiding the archives. I'm sure selling them makes some money; but I'm also sure that money is worth far less than lost-authority cost of putting archives where search engines can't find them. I've written more about this subject, as have many others. Rather than repeat ourselves, I'll just point to Beyond Content: Digging the new Intermediation Business. |
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