Liniment Formulae

These stupid, useless photo galleries are stupid, useless

If you follow me on Twitter you know that since Tuesday night I’ve been highly critical of a photo gallery that appears on numerous Tribune Company sites. The gallery contains photos of poorly parked cars found on and downloaded from Flickr, and, when available, captions written by the original Flickr users. (Did you catch the part where I said the gallery features pictures of poorly parked cars? That’s right, poorly parked cars.)

Clearly, the gallery is nothing more than an inane way to drum up meaningless page views that earn effectively nothing, but I’ll get back to that. I had two narrower, more immediate criticisms of this particular example of a Stupid Tribune Gallery™. First, while each picture included the Flickr username of its owner, neither the name nor the photo itself linked back to the original photo page on Flickr. That changed early Wednesday morning, and (more…)

The Canterberry Place test

Apologies for interrupting the usual flow of cat pictures, newspaper buildings and novelty videos for the first time in many months, but, prompted by little more than Sunday afternoon boredom, I want to share one very small, mostly trivial thought on what “local” means to me.

I live in the sort of sprawling, suburb-of-nowhere area typical of South Florida, in a neighborhood named Canterbury Place. One of the two main roads leading into my neighborhood also is named Canterbury Place, but the street sign when we moved in two years ago, to my endless amusement, read CANTERBERRY PLACE.  (It was replaced with a corrected sign a few months ago, and one of my life’s great regrets is that I didn’t take a picture of the old one.)

If you’ve ever had the misfortune of talking to me in person about the concepts of local and local news, you’ll know that I can’t shut up about the Canterberry sign. (more…)

I will now share with you an example of my daily productivity summary so that you may better understand my accomplishments and struggles

The South Bend Tribune’s daily planner emails are silly, amateurish flapdoode compared to the rigorous memo-based system I implemented as a 5-year-old to measure my own productivity. As a pioneering toddler proponent of introducing lean systems concepts such as Takt Time and One Piece Flow into the kindergarten classroom, I have prepared daily personal productivity memos seven days a week for more than 25 years.

These memos, composed with an antique fountain pen in impeccable, flowing calligraphy, are to this day delivered to every member, both living and deceased, of my immediate and extended family, every school teacher and university professor I have ever met, every boss, manager, and assistant manager I have ever worked for, and at least one secure document repository on every continent save Antarctica.

As I believe in giving back to the community and reaching out to the children who don’t have a fighting chance, I will now share with you a recent report so that you can elevate your level of planning while simultaneously capitalizing on the bigger goal of communication, vis-à-vis your part in doing your part to maximize the system of determining efficient workload distribution. I like to write a single, unbroken paragraph full of unpredictably employed punctuation: (more…)

Best video that unintentionally illustrates what working at a newspaper feels like on most days I’ve ever posted

Update on our web developer job opening

A quick note that the job opening I wrote about last week has finally been posted on Djangogigs.com. The job description there has been slightly rephrased to emphasize Python and Django, but it’s the same position described here. That is all.

Job opening: Get your programming on in West Palm Beach; work with a team of, frankly, ridiculous awesomeness; build bum-blowing stuff that will make your mom proud and impress your friends and neighbors

Here’s an opportunity so brilliant that only my very best Pokeweed picture can do it justice: The Palm Beach Post is looking for a full-time critical thinker and problem solver to join a small team of innovative coders. This job would involve or naturally lead into coding, user experience brainstorming, data modeling, server architecture, and analytics.

Must be self-driven, inquisitive, and eager to learn. Must ask good questions and thrive without extensive direction. Must enjoy getting your hands dirty with unfamiliar systems as necessary. Must be experienced with JavaScript, HTML, CSS, XML, SQL and at least one of the following languages: Python, Ruby, Perl, PHP. Experience with Django or a dialect of Lisp a plus.

Who are we? People who appreciate somber hats and spectacular mustaches, that’s who. How should you get in touch? E-mail me here for more information, or hop on The Twitter and contact @wensing or @wmhartnett. Afraid of the ruinous technologies of our industrial society? Very, very loudly shout something like, “HEY, MATT AND MARK!”, followed by your question or contact information. We’ll be listening closely.

Here’s the listing on Yahoo! HotJobs, if that’s your thing. Hopefully coming soon to Djangogigs.com. Any other recommendations for places to post it?

Broken breaking news: Zoning meeting relocated! Mid-level bureaucrat tasked with middling new responsibilities! Land-use plan available for comment!

I meant to post this four weeks ago based on a Twitter update from Nick Bergus, but I’m only getting around to it today after spotting some particularly silly examples: How embarrassingly mislabeled are so many newspapers’ “breaking news” sections and items?

Most news doesn’t truly “break,” after all, despite the re-branding of some local news and metro departments as “breaking news teams.” So mixed in with headlines of a more credibly breaking nature (“Meteorite impact levels orphanage, causes bus plunge, closes 48 lanes of I-95″) are some of a more, well, pedestrian nature. As always, not to pick on anyone in particular, but to illustrate the breed with a few specimens:

• Draft of Troutdale’s land use plan available for comment
• Sheriff puts training director in charge of jails
• Palm Beach County moves zoning meetings
• Local SPCA needs help with Hurricane Ike animal rescue
• Dolphins have only one turnover, and want to keep it that way

News? Perhaps. Interesting news? Maybe. But breaking news? More like, as Mark Hamilton offered, “the scheduled event is about to begin,” or “stories we happened to have just finished and posted.” Or in all too many cases, if we’re being really, really honest, “stories on which you’ll instantly regret clicking that we almost certainly should not have even bothered writing.”

Post roundup: Place still matters, community is physical

I believe in the value to newspapers of physical communities, particularly at their most indivisible level, neighborhoods. (And I mean real-world neighborhoods, even when they’re made up of only 52 homes.) Howard Owens has a great new post on that topic, and Mark Potts has a nice followup. Also not to be overlooked are two posts from this summer by Steve Yelvington. Check those out right here and over here.

Stop whispering and start shouting: Don’t look everyday when the big story heads your way

Hurricane Ike is pointed at Galveston and Houston, and the forecast as I write this says it could be packing sustained winds of more than 100 mph when it makes landfall late Friday night or early Saturday morning. Not a storm to mess around with, and the sort of news that absolutely monopolizes a community’s attention. The perfect time for news sites to stop whispering and start shouting, in other words.

Not to pick on any one newspaper, because we all know none of us are truly putting it all together online, but does this screenshot, grabbed less than 24 hours (more…)

This just in: Area man still frustrated while trying to find basic contact information on newspaper website

I look up the physical addresses of a lot of newspapers while putting together Paper View Monday updates. Actually, make that try to look up a lot of newspaper building addresses, because the process is immensely annoying and frequently futile. Often, I simply give up and make cat videos instead. As I put it the last time I whinged this particular whinge, “Nearly every newspaper site I visit seems to protect the physical location of its office with the sort of paranoid zeal more commonly associated with Dick Cheney’s undisclosed location.”

In case you were anxiously waiting for a six-month update, it’s still hugely aggravating. And today I had the added pleasure of trying to find individual staff contact info at a particular newspaper that is generally praised for its otherwise admirable online efforts. Best I could find: An explanation of the e-mail address format used by the paper (firstname.lastname@annoyingnewspaperwebsite.com), but no staff list to which I could then apply that convention.

(I also learned, while wandering sections of the site that appear not to have been updated since 1997, that while they accept press releases via e-mail, one should always follow up with a phone call to confrim that the press release was received. Because that’s not annoying or superfluous.)

All I ask for: Street address somewhere obvious, perhaps even in the footer of the index page itself, and a “contact us” section that actually indiciates how I might go about, you know, contacting you.