By Steve Rhodes
1. Are Cook County Dems fucking with Tom Tresser?
2. Illinois’ Fugliest Political Web Sites.
3. “Most baby boomers: white, married, went to college.”
And the vast majority of them never marched for civil rights or against the Vietnam War, nor attended Woodstock, despite what the media has been trying to tell you for the last couple of decades.
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Let me tell you something that occurred to me once again when I searched for the link to the baby boomer story in the Sun-Times, where I first saw it in print: They are so not optimizing their website.
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“In the last few years, I’ve visited a lot of newspaper websites for various projects,” Chris Silver Smith writes at SearchEngineLand. “These sites are most frequently the online arms of what were once strictly printed local newspapers. When visiting these sites, I’ve been struck by the technical clunkiness of most – they’re typified by poor usability, layouts still closely influenced by traditional print newspaper layouts, dysfunctional on-site search engines, and content management systems hamstrung with badly-formed page templates.
“Naturally, these sites are not optimized for search engines nor to make their content readily findable via search. It’s unsurprising that the sites are search-unfriendly. The newspapers probably feel highly conflicted in regards to search – the nostalgic desire for successes experienced in the past have made them grow unhappy with the internet paradigm, and they’ve worked each other up into a frenzy to hold Google responsible for their troubles. It’s hard to expressly invite a perceived enemy into your house on one hand while issuing invective against him on the other.
“(I have also encountered newspaper sites which have optimized by some degree. But, these seem fairly few, and even some of them have only taken faltering steps in that direction. The exceptions are some of the biggest players such as the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and other juggernaut newspapers – which are doing professional jobs at optimization.)”
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Now, I don’t bow to the gods of search engine optimization. I think it’s important to retain creative control and judgement over headlines, for example. Satisfying incoming search traffic isn’t as important as satisfying your loyal readers. But there’s a lot more to SEO than headlines.
The challenge, though, is complicated. The division of labor in a traditional news organization collapses on a website; editorial duties take place in the same space as business functions like marketing and circulation. After all, isn’t a writer who puts the appropriate tags on a story or a designer who builds a Digg button into the mix – to use small examples – crossing old department boundaries?
It’s reminiscent of the shift of back-office production duties to design desks, and design duties to copy desks. Technology flattens organizations and rewrites labor efficiencies and the locations of specialized knowledge. There’s a dissertation in there somewhere; I did a paper on this when I was in graduate school and now would be a good time to dig it out and see how it applies to today’s media organizations. But the answer isn’t to stick to old ways; rather it’s to find new ways that retain journalistic integrity instead of letting the marketers and technologists set the standards. Yet another reason why journalists have got to get in the game.
4. Once again the Tribune publishes a press release by a known liar a known liar who won’t submit to an interview with its own reporters. Why?
5. Reinventing Classifieds.
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There’s far more fresh and fun thinking about the news business going on than is generally recognized. As usual, journalists haven’t figured out yet how to keep track of their own profession. Or maybe they don’t care.
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Real-time ads for real-time news.
6. “Loyal readers know that Matches Boyle is a regular in this column,” John Kass writes in today’s must-read. “In 2002, while he was lighting arsons, he mysteriously vaulted over more than 200 better qualified firefighters to become a lieutenant. How? Matches received a ‘merit promotion’ from City Hall.
“Matches, 51, is the brother of the politically connected John ‘Quarters’ Boyle, 49, currently serving federal prison time for bribery. Many years ago, Quarters stole millions of dollars in state tollway change but kept his mouth shut. The discreet Quarters was later rewarded by Mayor Richard Daley with a political job.
“Quarters and his buddies ran one of Daley’s top patronage armies, the aptly named Coalition for Better Government.”
The mayor wasn’t available for comment, though he was available to pretend he wrote an Op-Ed that the Tribune gladly published.
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“On Friday, Judge Martin ignored Matches’ testimony. He ruled that though Matches did indeed betray the public trust, there was no connection between the firefighter’s job and the arsons.”
7. “[T]he neighborhoods receiving the most in blight-fighting TIF money are the wealthiest,” the Reader reports.
The mayor wasn’t available for comment because he was busy approving the final draft of his Op-Ed piece for the Trib.
8. “DEAR MAYOR DALEY: Your bulldozers are hard at work tearing down what’s left of the former Michael Reese Hospital campus,” David Roeder of the Sun-Times writes today. “It seems as if you are doing this out of spite because the city lost the 2016 Olympics bid, in which the Reese site figured prominently.
“Otherwise, why ignore the input from landmarks advocates, who say that parts of the campus attributed to a highly regarded architect, Walter Gropius, should be saved?”
The mayor wasn’t available for comment because . . .
9. Deb Mell sucks, but so do absurd petition rules.
10. Illinois reps waver on health care.
11. Trade Eli Manning!
12. Facebook Feed:
* “Matt Farmer wonders whether the State of Illinois can somehow package Milton Bradley, Tommie Harris, Rod Blagojevich, and Venetian Night as part of a multi-player, multi-state trade.”
* “Barbara Bohn Favorite CTA Red line conductor, to those of us leaving the train: ‘Good luck in the real world.'”
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The Beachwood Tip Line: World beaters.
Posted on November 11, 2009