I had a different idea about journalism until last week. Asking those questions and stating my opinion got me a flood of email from professional journalists, leading me to write the piece yesterday where I posited that the reasons most pros got in is pretty equivalent to why webloggers start weblogs.
This thread is focused on Knight Ridder and Dan Gillmor. The only columnist I read at KR is Gillmor. And lately I haven't even been able to read him, because the two-facedenss, the supposed toughness he has when he looks deep into my industry isn't balanced with any support for looking going the other way. When I try to pry open the lid on how his industry works, I get a dismissive "go away I'm busy" -- OK, I get it. I'm not supposed to ask about that. So the line is nowhere in sight. Not only is it not necessary for Dan to explain to his readers what went on, and why, but if we ask about it -- we find our integrity gets challenged. How would you feel if Microsoft, for example, slung mud at Dan for questioning their business practices? Perhaps you wouldn't support them or make excuses for them. Maybe you would.
Don't forget the people who read Dan, and value him as an information source, not just today, but in the past too. He picked 10 product trends in Y2K. What were they? Gone. What were the trends viewed through his filters? He wrote a story about the dotcom mania, several of them, that predict what others are saying now. Gone. He says he took on his management. No record of that on the Web. Evidence wiped. We take Arthur Andersen to court, impose a corporate death penalty on them for doing just that. So now journalism has no greater expectation of integrity? That's quite a low definition of journalism. Too low, imho.
It's not just about Dan. A few people have commented on the second section of the piece. The pros tell me I got it right. No one is watching. That's a very precarious place to be.
Knight Ridder isn't the issue Tom, nor is Dan's feelings and irritation at being asked a few questions, and being told that to at least one reader he doesn't cut the mustard as a journalist until he straightens it out. He can keep his job, and all the bennies that come with it, but in my view, his credibility as a critic of others is virtually nil until he's willing to live up to the same standards he holds us to.
As the emitter of intellectual property owned by his corporation, Dan gave up his right to have a say in such ownership decisions when he got hired. This is the actual moral issue here - the ownership of creative craftsmanship - the work of the individual - by corporate entities which have merely a financial, non-intellectual, interest in that work.
Dan can and apparently did reflect publicly on the damage. Does he lose all status as a journalist and become a marketer by virtue of not reflecting? Here's where the suggestion that if one is not a journalist, then one must be a marketer, breaks down.
On the other hand, anyone who suggests that it's absurd for a journalist to publicly analyze a decision by his employer which falls within his area of expertise has swallowed the wrong pill and should be examined for signs of parasitic vampirism. I guess I already said that here.
An Apology and A SpankingContent Management is a business decision. In the case of Knight Ridder from the outside an extremely poor one.From the outside it looks that they ran numbers and decided that they could save money by changing all their sites to achieve the holy grail of consistent branding. They have, but it is more along the lines of the MR. ICK sticker you use to keep children away from poison rather than a symbol of quality and trust.
From here it looks like an attempt to single handedly revive the banner advertising market .Which in the short term looks real good right up to the point that advertisers insist on only paying for click though. CPM as a sales tool has been dead for some time.
Dan Gillmor's column is a case in point. Before the Real Cities "Shroud of Death"(sm), you were presented with three advertisements,. Now it is at least 8. I block ads, so i don't see them, but I will bet that KR counts the request in their calculations for selling ads.
KR's Content manegment business decision looks to be just like what Chris Locke aka Rage Boy said:
"In fact, CONTENT as a corporate label means: "Whatever it is that you put in the void next to the ads in order that your customer, the advertiser, will give you money."
The new KR is a sterling example of the Clown Suit Rule;
'One of the methods used by desperate businesses in need of revenue is to place somebody in a Clown Suit outside their business in hopes of getting folks to stop in. The Clown Suit is an excellent signpost to the impending failure of the business employing them. The only exception to this rule is the Clown Suit Rental Store.'
As for the 404's why bother, they will join the swelling ranks at F***edCompany.com soon enough.
In other words, I am not an impartial observer on this topic, as I try to be on other areas of technology. While it may in fact be a good story for me to cover, my strong vested interest in the outcome would seriously tilt my writing on it.
Having been down the road of swapping CMSes and adjusting online content business models several times, I am pretty confident in saying that URLs don't ever HAVE to be broken, although oftentimes keeping them alive through a CMS change requires a technical solution that the business people don't want to pay for. But that's hardly news.
Business rules and decisions were made that resulted in the design, navigation and site structure you currently see. Design and platform functionality are not attached at the hip. Conscious decisions were also made that resulted in broken links across all of the sites. It was in fact decided that those links would be redirected to either a customized 404 page or the homepage. A message was delivered to users explaining our change and they were given alternate methods for finding the content they were looking for, including a site map, archives and NewsLibrary.
So, that being said, let's think logically for a moment, and not blame the technology (something only the coders can truly speak to as they are the only ones who actually know exactly how the system works) for the results of business decisions. Whether those decisions are right or wrong is a matter of opinion. I support my company's business decisions. When it becomes clear that a decision may have been off, we will adjust our product and policies to better the product for the consumer. The platform will support those business decision changes and we will be able to quickly implement those changes because of the flexibility of the technology.
As a side note: Comparing our newly developed CMS in its infant stages to Microsoft Word, a product created by an established software-devlopment company which has been on the market for many years now and is on its 9th or 10th official release, is somewhat of a stretch and certainly unfair.
But as for this system - the URLs of the new system exist for as long as users would like them to exist. Where before that wasn't the always the case with the selection of different CMSes that were in play. And that *is* the factor in what Dave is talking about. Sounds crazy but different sites actually had different CMSes. In some cases, the Merc for example, they were running multiple CMSes! This Salon story only touches on how crazy it was: http://www.salon.com/tech/log/1999/09/16/knight_ridder/index.html
The problem of linkrot is actually *solved* with the new system and not caused by it. We care about simple, clean, bookmarkable links as much, and I'm sure much more then many in the business. No crazy URLs with tons of numbers and commas and question marks. The URLs are predictable. The URLs look like static output, yet the site is actually dynamic and recieves many, many benefits from that. Our links are bookmarkable for as long as the users of the system wish them to be so, and new designs have no effect on that. You may see more redesigns come down the pike (well that's a certainty in the web business) - but you have our word - the URLs will not break under the new system. It's entirely up to the users of the system - the business - to decide how long URLs should last. And that is as it should be. Not a tech person's decision.
The issues in this conversation have nothing to do with the new CMS. In saying this - I'm not saying the CMS is perfect. Far from it. Far from it. And we'll continue to work hard to satisfy our customers. But as for the issues in this conversation - it solves them.
This was either a very slow news day or this article was bought. Jack wouldn't do that would he?
In fact, Gillmor did note the problems in his Weblog. What is he supposed to do? Don a hairshirt and whine about a braindead CMS every day? No doubt that would make Winer feel good (since the change meant Gillmor was no longer using Winer's own software), but I suspect the average reader would much rather see what Gillmor has to say about Microsoft than constant whines about broken URLs.
Are you saying you actually made the business decision to break your old links with the redesign? Seems like lost business to me any way I look at it. Lost advertising opportunities if the articles were ad-supported (unless the 404 pages themselves carry ads, something advertisers would surely love to be billed for,) lost sales conversion opportunities if articles that were once free moved to paying archives, damaged reputation to the users that have to bear with the link rot, and potential loss of future flow from people who might think your 404-generating redesign might not be the last.
Yes, many other companies have broken links as part of their redesign. However, I have yet to see anyone explain how that supports business. The question at hand is not whether a redesign is a business decision, but rather how the redesign was handled. If we're missing the business case, please enlighten us.
KR had one document management structure and moved to another document management structure. This was a business decision. What they could have done at that point is use technology to handle server-side redirects that would have seamlessly guided the client from one location based on the one document management system, to the document location based on the new document management system.
At the best, the redirects could have been automated, if both systems were regular enough to enable this mapping efficiently and accurately. At the worst, KR might have had to hire temps to manually enter in new locations mapped to old locations.
Once the mapping occurred, the content management system, or even a simple 404 error handler with a simple database and pattern matching, could have redirected folks to the appropriate page.
However, all of this pre-supposes a third business decision - that it was worthwhile for KR to go to possibly extraordinary means to do this mapping, and build in this functionality. It is legitimate for KR to make a business decision that the costs of doing this aren't justified by the loss of business, customer satisfaction, revenue, whatever.
We may not like it, but it is a legitimate business decision.
Returning to original issue - should Dan Gillmor have reported on this? Actually, my memory may be faulty, but I thought he did mention or apologize for the problem. The question really is, should Dan have blasted his boss for doing this. He blasts other companies.
Dan's action, or inaction, didn't impact on the flow of information - in other words, he wasn't the only source of the information. He didn't suppress information; what he did was not give an opinion - there is a big difference.
If I were Dan would I blast my boss? Nope. I would only have strained my relationship with my boss, something that would hurt if I needed the support of my boss to cover a sensitive story whereby I was the only source of information. And what would blasting my boss have bought me? One more voice amidst the clutter of noise.
Now if Dan wrote in such a way that you couldn't identify that he works for KR, and then didn't blast KR, or worse, came out with a compliment on the new system, that would have been loss of integrity. If he blasts a competitor for the same problem, that would have been hypocritical.
But being faulted because he declined to give an opinion about a well known business decision his boss made? I just don't buy it.
I'm not sure where the assumption arose that journalists must cover _every_ story. If journalists have a moral obligation, it's to tell the stories no one else knows, or is willing to cover. To not manipulate facts. To report facts if they cover a story. To report facts if they are the only ones that have them and the information should be in the public domain. To specifically separate fact from opinion.
But to blast your boss because he made a dumb business decision and everyone and their brother knows said boss made a dumb business decision - I would hope that a journalist such as Dan is smarter than that. I'd hate to think I got news from an idiot.
But I'm not here to say whether we should have set up redirects from the old sites to the new ones or not. You folks, as users of our sites, an entitled to an opinion on that and I respect that.
I just want to clarify that our content management system does not have a limitation on the URLs, redirects, site design, etc. In fact, the core of our system is open source -- check it yourself.
Even if our content management system couldn't manage redirects/forwards (which it does), we could have set up those redirects on the web server (Apache) layer.
That is what I mean by separating the software from the business decisions. Of course, our software allows redirects, flexible URLs, etc. like most other good software.
As for Mr. Ryan's post - please re-read my boss's post. He didn't mean it the way you are parsing it. The system is built according to the requirements that were assigned by business.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/columnists/dan_gillmor/ejournal/2631449.htm
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/columnists/dan_gillmor/ejournal/2633570.htm
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/columnists/dan_gillmor/ejournal/2639548.htm
I looked at the web site for Cofax, the content management system that Knight Ridder wrote (http://www.cofax.org/). One of the main points they make about the system is that it makes it very easy to redirect old URLs to new URLs. So clearly Rajiv Pant, who I understand played a big part in writing that system, is right to say that the decision to break the URLs was a business decision. Another feature of the system is that its URLs don't look like database-driven URLs; they look like static pages.
I don't understand the logic behind it, I think Knight Ridder was wrong, but I don't run their business.
