Joe Think: Tales about relevance, context, storytelling, and local journalism

KillTheCliche.com fell into my rss reader today (via delicious’ most-popular journalism-tagged links). It’s an idea I wanted to do myself, but, well, in the war of ideas many fall victim to Mr. Not-Enough-Time’s axe.

Anyway, Kill The Cliche measures cliches in articles from The Boston Globe, New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post, Financial Times and Los Angeles Times (read more about what they do here). They break it down by publication, by cliche’d word, and by the number of cliches a reporter has written.

Right now they seem to be tracking the whole number of cliches a reporter, or publication, has produced. This isn’t as useful as measuring the cliches as a percentage of total words produced (as in, “1 percent of Jill Drew’s words are cliches,” or, “0.5 percent of the Washington Post’s words are cliches.”)

Also, measuring a ratio of articles with cliches in them and articles without cliches in them could be another useful metric (”5 percent of the Financial Times’ articles have one or more cliches in them.”)

I’d like to see a list of the cliches they’re tracking, too.

And those are my thoughts on KillTheCliche.com.

This winter I upgraded the forum software that powers Neighbors (the Denver Post’s forum / blog / photo / article commenting system), started work on the Denver Post’s first Django-powered application, helped sheperd some Newsgator-based widgets out the door, launched HappyJournalist.com, and, well, and that’s about it. Here are the details:

• Upgrading Neighbors (the Post’s forum software): This was a challenge. phpBB, a popular online forum system, powers the Denver Post’s forums, article comments, most-commented lists, and is the backbone for its community blogging app and community photo app. We used phpBB2, which was released in 2002, and felt a lot like what the web felt like in 2002. So I put a lot of work in building phpBB2, its backend and its frontend, up to somewhat modern web standards. phpBB3 was released December 2007, and I spent most of February 2008 integrating phpBB3 into Neighbors. This took 80-100 hours of development, documentation and testing time. Most of the work was done on a development environment running phpBB3 on the database with the data as it existed in mid-January. After getting the version-control in its right place, I went through with the search-and-replace to address the easy parts of the upgrade. The add-ons and custom code from phpBB2 took up the most development time — that and the process that allows people to write article comments on the Denver Post’s main site first, and then post them to the forums later…. the big wins out of this were the scrubbing all the custom code and add-ons got, the pretty new CSS and HTML on the forums, the new functionality built in with phpBB3 (friends / foes list, bookmarks, and improved moderator controls), and also some new functionality I built behind the full-name feature on the profiles. Members can now decide if they only want the initials of their name to show, or their entire name.
• Started building The Denver Post’s first Django-powered application: This is still in development, but there are some fun things happening here. I’ll post more about it when there’s more I can post.
• Denver Post widgets: The idea behind widgets is sound: Making your information flexible enough to live anywhere on the web, including other people’s sites and pages. Newsgator is Denver-based business that does a lot of work with RSS, javascript, and widgets. We used their technology to create the widgets on the Post’s site: for breaking news, Politics West, our Rockies baseball coverage and our Denver Broncos coverage. In addition to the information we publish each widget also displays the recent comments on our news, Broncos, Rockies and politics coverage. Michelle Whitman, who has been doing front-end web work for us part-time this year and freelances under the Unity Studios banner, did the design, HTML and CSS. I did the project management, and other odds and ends.
• HappyJournalist.com: This project is best explained by the post I wrote about it on my personal blog, Joe Write.

I read another baby-boomer hand-wring piece about the way newspapers used to be on the San Francisco Chronicle’s website tonight. It got me up enough to register for the site, click the activation link in the email and write a comment.

This is what the lady wrote:

Sure, the Internet is a wonderful place to be. But the digital newspaper shares space with those who post because they have a position to promote, a score to settle, a diet to sell or that voice in the microwave told them to.

Newspapers are better than that. They are apart from that. No, they don’t always get it right. But they are the only daily medium of depth that has the resources and the responsibility to try.

This is what I wrote:

Gosh, so much hand-wringing. I love newspapers too, and you know what I worry about? I worry about the collective lack of imagination of those (such as Drexel [the author]) who can’t envision a future any better than the present that exists. I feel like I just read 15 inches of my grandpa, on his porch, talking about how things were when he was my age.

This attention to nostalgia is part of same mindset problems newspapers face. Sure, newspapers are in trouble. But nostalgia is not a business model, and it’s going to take local papers some attention to detail and investment online if they’re going to figure out meaningful ways to publish information, build community and make a living out there.

I don’t have any grand predictions, but I can imagine a future of local online publishing that’s more engaging, thoughtful, informative, context-laden, diverse, and meaningful to the members of its communities than the paper-based one we used to have.