Few work things
Some of the reasons for my slow blogging here the past couple months have been work projects. To explain my quiet a little, I wanted to link to a few here.
• On Deadline. I've been cowriting this news blog since mid-January, and we've seen steadily increasing traffic and Technorati attention. The tagline "Breaking news and must-read stories" has been accurate, with us just as likely to write about one as the other. And both have worked out pretty well so far.
If you're stopping by, I usually write from 6 or 7 until noonish. Longtime USAT reporter Mark Memmott writes during the afternoon, and freelancer Michael Winter handles the East Coast's evening from the West Coast. They've both been great to work with.
• Our inside-page redesign. I'm not a page designer or an IT developer, but I've been working some between the two. The designers have made a great new look for our story pages, big and very graphical and able to get across a lot of information — powerfully — within a limited space, and the IT developers have updated our content management tool with a hefty amount of brawn while keeping things efficient.
My role's been to help in the implementation. How do set up and use the tool in productive ways? What can we do to maximize our output at the same time as we're moving into greater depth? The separation of design and content and tools is a great thing for the online publishing industry, but all of these things still come together at the producer level and demand to be figured out.
At the Daily with Jeremy and Mike, we called this issue "the journalism before the journalism" because of its effects on storytelling. (I brought this up in my Tribune paper in grad school. The tools and the design truly do affect content, and anyone who doesn't think so isn't paying attention to production.) USAT has some editors who see things the same way, and they've been awesome about giving me shots at this stuff.
• News. Is news just going to get busier, or is the last year a weird one? Things took off wit the pope's death last year, and never seemed to calm down for more than a few days at a time.
Anyway, Carl Sessions Stepp (I think I sold my first Springsteen tickets to his wife in '99) has a terrific article in the most recent American Journalism Review about how online newsroom work. He visits several for the story, including my own, talking to some of my editors and coworkers about how things come together. Mostly working past the hype (sorry to citizen journalism and podcasts), it's probably one of the most down-to-earth stories about online news to come out in years.
