Is it just me, or do you find in your organisation that people expect websites to mushroom by magic, as if little elves were at work while you slept? I've lost count of how many newsrooms I've come across which rely on the efforts of a single, young, overworked web editor to monitor and update their website 24 hours a day, seven days a week (impossible, of course, they just do their best Monday to Friday and hope nothing breaks on the weekend to make them look like muppets).
Advertising sales on US newspaper websites are in good shape, according to a Borrell Associates survey of 3,000 sites in various-sized markets.
I spent much of today describing a website from the ground up. I say describing because I haven't drawn any pictures of it yet, haven't written a formal requirements document, and it's far from being built. At this stage it's just words on a page describing what needs to be included, and the preliminary decisions that need to be made about navigation, search, display, archiving, content entry and so on.
Nothing like a bit of Silicon Alley Insider gloom for a Monday morning. So here's a piece about US newspapers experiencing their worst drop in paid advertising revenue for 50 years. It serves as a reasonable opener to Eric Alterman's excellent essay in The New Yorker: Out of Print: The death and life of the American newspaper.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
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