Stories vs. content
Katie Rogers of Medill News Service writes:
Peter Perl, assistant managing editor for personnel at The Washington Post, visited our newsroom and didn’t exactly sugarcoat the current state of the news business. (Just suffice it to say we didn’t file out of the conference room with a corner office on 15th.) It’s called content now, not stories, Perl said. Processing content rather than newsgathering and writing. It’s a new language he admits has taken some getting used to.
“It’s like the stages of grief,” Perl told us. “You have to make peace with that.”
Maybe I’m misreading this, but I don’t think a switch from talking about stories to talking about content is anything to grieve. Instead, isn’t it just a recognition of the fact that journalism takes many forms, and the conventional story is only one of them?
Switching from Drupal to Wordpress
I’ve just switched this site over from Drupal to Wordpress. Although Drupal’s a great system — hey, it even has songs written about it — its biggest selling point over Wordpress seems to be its flexibility, something I don’t really need all that much of for this site. So Wordpress’ greater ease of use for a non-developer seems to make more sense.