Tag Archives: online news

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When I helped a college newspaper get set up with WordPress a few years ago, I kept running into little ways in which making WordPress work for a multi-person news organization was … well, usually not impossible, but often a … Continue reading

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Building reference material into news sites

Two recent posts dealing with building static (or relatively static) reference material into news sites to augment the flow of day-to-day news … and, yes, this is one of those posts that’s more for my own future reference than anything … Continue reading

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Why my new year’s resolution is to learn about programming

I’ve found myself quoting Steve Buttry a lot lately, particularly his posts about innovation in the news business. In an August 2009 post titled “Newspapers’ original sin: Not failing to charge but failing to innovate,” he wrote: The disastrous error … Continue reading

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Confessions of a curmudgeon: Why I used to mock Twitter, and what changed my mind

I admit it — I can be a curmudgeon sometimes. I’m rarely the first to jump on a technological bandwagon.  I didn’t own a CD player until 1995, nor a DVD player until 2002.  I didn’t register a Twitter account … Continue reading

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What if we ran a news site on PhpBB?

News sites seem to fall into two main modes of organization. The most prevalent is the one you see at CNN.com, WashingtonPost.com, and my own employer. Conceptually, this layout more or less mirrors the front page of a print newspaper. … Continue reading

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First impressions of AnnArbor.com, Part 2 (Web edition)

Two key ways AnnArbor.com differs from most newspaper Web sites: 1. Presentation of news. While most news sites to some extent copy the basic concept of the front page of a newspaper — the editors choose the most important or … Continue reading

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“The people formerly known as the audience”

Ryan Sholin has a good discussion going on over at IdeaLab (and also here) about what to call your readers when they are actively engaged in creating the news, rather than simply being consumers. A few of the possibilities so … Continue reading

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