Poor user experience: no one’s fault but yours.
"We can't. That's how we've always done it."
"We can't. We would be giving up revenue."
"We can't. [Insert internal group here] won't let us."The bigger a company gets, the more frequent excuses become a form of social currency. Eighty percent of ...
The squishiness of digital reader satisfaction.
For some reason, when a product goes digital, we quickly forget that real people use it.We become focused instead on traffic metrics: how many pageviews did we get? Did we increase our unique users? What's our average duration?And then we use these...
On building a publication from scratch.
Building a publication from scratch -- scaling it so that there's regular content, and then regular good content, and then regular original content, and then increasingly new and different kinds of regular original content, is very much like a game of ...
On (finally, incredibly) paying for news online.
I just subscribed to a newspaper for the first time in my life. I'm a journalist, but a young one, and so have until now been able to get my news for free, on the web. (Fun fact: I have paid for exactly two copies of a newspaper in my life: one for ...
Online journalism needs ’20 percent time.’
Sometimes I ask myself if there's really any creativity left in online journalism.Let's face it: innovation in online publishing is awfully hard to come by these days. It may be because we're so busy looking at everyone else's work 24/7 that we can't...
The death of learning in journalism.
I wish I had a mentor. Several of them, really.Sure, I've got an editor, and he's swell. But he's only one guy, with one career's worth of insights. In our 21st century-style distributed workforce, built largely upon the backs of freelancers around t...
Disclosure: this is a cop-out.
I spotted the following disclaimer on Mashable this morning:"Mashable Op-Ed: This post reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily those of Mashable as a publication."A fine warning, if the author was a contributor who had not...
Letting the cables sleep.
If you've been wondering why I've been so lax in updating this blog, here are my reasons. (See also, from August: "Jobs you'll have as an editor.") I promise I'll get back on the horse with haste.
The Internet’s Valley of Death: Expectation
We all say that the Internet is full of poor journalism, bad (or none!) copy editing and churnalism at every turn. Yet few of us as consumers are willing to change that. In fact, we indulge it.Yet when there's a terribly short or sensational or just ...
When algorithms go wrong.
I like to use Philly.com as an occasional product punching bag, it's true.But sometimes mistakes can be comical.I give you this right rail module promoting photo galleries of historic Philadelphia:I know we only have a month left in 2011, guys...
The problem with Silicon Valley ‘scoops.’
Foster Kamer demonstrates, as he's wont to do, how scattershot and blind tech blogging in pursuit of pageviews can have a very real impact on the financial markets.Related: MG Siegler defends the practice while disparaging competitors for doing the s...
The problem with Silicon Valley ‘scoops.’
Foster Kamer demonstrates, as he's wont to do, how scattershot and blind tech blogging in pursuit of pageviews can have a very real impact on the financial markets.Related: MG Siegler defends the practice while disparaging competitors for doing the s...
