I had a note this morning from Peg of bellascribe (now living in Charlottesville, but I've been deliberately stalling moving her to the ex-pat list on account of I keep thinking she'll move back any day now) in which she asked the following question:
What's going on with lowcountryblogs roundup? hmm? Seems a shame.
Well, here's an answer. Actually, here are several answers. I'm betting that some of them will be of interest to Lowcountry bloggers.
1. Last week's Ernesto coverage was a big event for Web journalism at The P&C. I had to cut back on my pleasure-blog reading when we took the Storm Watch blog active at Postscripts, but the result was the first 24-hour news cycle we've ever initiated that actually lasted more than 24 hours. In 1999 I helped turn Charleston.net into a blog-like site during the height of Hurricane Floyd, but that event lasted only part of a day. We live-blogged Ernesto for 52 hours and learned good lessons in the process.
None of what you saw at Storm Watch was all that new to veteran bloggers, but for many print journalists, this event marked their first foray into do-it-yourself Web publishing. The Big Bosses were highly pleased with the result, and the attitude around here towards blogs in general just got significantly brighter.
The news staff held a lessons-learned meeting yesterday afternoon. Your comments were discussed, and we came out of that session with a commitment to train more of our staff in the use of blogs as journalism tools.
(Ernesto's other effect was that I worked a bunch of hours, which accounts for the comp day I took Tuesday after Labor Day).
2. This morning I mailed off a signed contract that completes our purchase of the innovative Ellington content management system for Charleston.net. I'm proud of our organization for making this decision, because buying a cutting-edge system to produce our website represents a major commitment to online news.
Here's the background: On Aug. 1, we replaced our old, homemade Charleston.net content management system (CMS) with a newer but still homemade CMS we called V2. The V2 project had been underway for about a year by the time Executive Editor Bill Hawkins brought me on board last November, and in February I began seriously investigating off-the-shelf content management systems that could replace the not-yet-implemented V2. In April, after previewing multiple news-based CMS platforms, we recommended the purchase of the Ellington CMS, developed by World Online of Lawrence, Kansas. The obvious problems: Our recommendation came in the middle of a budget year, right before the anticipated launch of V2.
For the geeks among us: Ellington is a content management system based on the open-source Django web publishing framework. The two stand out as the only such products ever designed from scratch by journalist/programmers for use by journalists. Designer/programmers on the original project included Rob Curley, Adrian Holovaty and Wilson Miner.
To understand what this means in practical application, look at the Lawrence Journal-World's websites, ljworld.com and lawrence.com. What we had to grasp here was that with only our small, in-house staff to draw from, we simply couldn't engineer the V2 Charleston.net system to provide even a fraction of the tools that Ellington will provide us. You can see the difference when you look at these sites.
Don't expect to see overnight changes at Charleston.net. We'll begin developing an Ellington-based Charleston.net after some staff training in Kansas next month, followed by a from-scratch rebuild that I hope to begin testing early next year. As local bloggers, you'll be given some early looks at what we're creating, and I'll be asking many of you for feedback before public release. Bill and I have talked about inviting you, as a group, to come in and give us feedback before we start configuring the components. If that interests y'all, let me know.
The Ellington project has consumed much of my energy and attention in recent months. It's rewarding to finally be able to start building around it.
3. Budgets, plans and programs: What we've managed to accomplish in 2006 -- including this blog -- has been done without a budget for new-media development. We paid for training, travel, software and equipment, not to mention these Typepad blogs on Postscripts, out of newsroom operating funds. In 2007, our goal is to put some money behind these experiments.
One of the flaws in the concept of Lowcountry Blogs is that it has always been a staffed blog without an actual staff. This wasn't a big issue when I was engaged in the slow-moving process of finding, comparing and negotiating for content management systems, but now that the pace of my full-time job is picking up, it's going to be an issue. Plus, once I complete my assigned development tasks, I go back to being a reporter.
I tried handling the staffing of Lowcountry Blogs as more of a cooperative venture, but I often failed to treat the volunteer round-up writers the way that I would want to be treated (poor April got hosed every time she pitched in). The creation of the Lowcountry Blogroll took some of the pressure off the daily roundups, but I became convinced that the solution to doing this site well wasn't improvising temporary work-arounds and relying on the free contributions of Heather and other LCB stallwarts, but structured commitment.
This blog, like Nashville's Talking, needs a staff. And we're putting in a budget request for one.
One of the early critiques of LCB was that we shouldn't have started it if we weren't going to provide for its staffing five days a week. Point taken. But if we had done it that way, we never would have launched it. What we're working toward now is an improved LCB that would be part of an integrated whole, not an experiment on the fringes.
Also among our requests this year: Money for multimedia, training and the development of new user tools.
Your thoughts and comments on these topics are extremely valuable, and they get the attention of decision-makers around here. So keep 'em coming.
More later...
--dc
