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?

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.”

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 before Ike’s expected landfall, strike you as shouting?

Or this one, from about the same time?

The immediate message I get from those pages: Just another day at your link-laden local newspaper website.

An event such as a hurricane (a “local armageddon,” as Will Sullivan called it) is the time to try some of the simplification Mark Potts described here. There’s only one story about which everyone is talking, so why overload your page with 30 links about the same event, not to mention the other 50 links that are usually there? Why not just one big picture or, better yet in the case of a hurricane, interactive map? Throw in a gigantic headline, and you’re accurately reflecting both the gravity of the event and its natural grip on your readers’ attention.

Easy to use trumps everything, after all, and lots of words, sentences and paragraphs are the very last thing people are looking for when a hurricane is headed their way, no matter how cleverly they’re written. I’ve done the oh-no-it’s-coming-right-at-us dance six times since 2004 and, believe me, stories are of very little use. Just give me a big map.

Even if you don’t go that far, at least have a special armageddon design ready to drop onto your site:

Here’s some musical inspiration to get you going:

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.

Update: Post edited, edited and edited some more. What a day.

More bad newspaper writing that makes my eyeballs hurt: The “Got _____?” lede. The original “got milk?” ad campaign is bad enough, but to see its udder-tainted influence afflicting the brains of newspaper reporters is worthy of an Official Hartnett Brand Writing Whinge™. Stupid, lazy, meaningless. Not much more to say about it.

Previous installments in this series of annoying writing habits include the “call it” lede, the cop-talk phrase “person of interest,” inappropriate use of “award-winning,” the very rarely accurate use of “in a wide-ranging interview” and that all-time king of writing fail, “to be sure.”