As I believe I’ve noted, I am now working on a workflow system for the office. Content be damned, what we need is a way to automate the transfer of documents between people and desks.
There are some hurdles, mind you. Firstly, I am new to this business. I’m fairly certain there are big holes in my knowledge of how the system works and how well it would translate to web-based database management. Then there’s the issue of what happens when the system breaks down?
Take today for example. We publish on Thursdays with most deadlines on Tuesday for page proofing on Wednesday. New Year’s Day is a holiday and falls on Tuesday and we’ve been hit with a snow storm today (Monday) and one will probably hit Tuesday night as well. Given this scenario, how would a workflow system make things easier, or would they make them harder?
I think I’ll do up a whitepage on that issue. In the meantime there’s copy I ought to be writing!
As luck would have it I work for a really small outfit. I love technology, but I don’t fancy myself much of a technical guru. At the moment I am desperately trying to figure out just how far into the 90’s my company’s web technology reaches. Seriously, like updating the page by handcrafting html pages generated from Quark exports. Holy crap!
So all that talk before about CMS technology has just gone out the window, as it seems there is more that must come up to date before the entire production system of the paper is translated to 21st century technology. Still, I really like the idea of a digital workflow system.
That’s what I’ve decided to call it. Not “content management,” but “workflow system.” Because what I really want is a system that can manage how information makes its way to one of a number of publishing outputs, be they newspaper, website, book or insert section. Bricolage is sexy, but overly complex for what we do. There’s also a program called AdWorks which they’ve just paid through the nose for and which might not integrate well with a new copy management system.
Perhaps that’s the answer though. Instead of trying to kill every bird with one stone, I should work on a system just to replace what I know and get our copy into a system that archives and organizes it as we produce it instead of post-facto.
From the office window, this was our first snow of the season. It accumulated to near eight inches. The amount is made all the more impressive because the coast usually doesn’t see snow like this until later in the season. At least, that’s what everyone tells me.
So there’s a big website redesign going on at my company right now. We publish newspapers and community information. I’m on both the technology and content committees. There is a lot of bleed over between the two.
As I look at systems to use for website workflow it occurs to me that there are no (or at least none that I can see) content management systems (CMS) which are built for managing content first and designing a website second. All of them involve telling content where to position itself and how it should float. Where to put images and how to build a menu.
What I’m looking for is something that hides everything but what each source of information for the website needs to see. Thus, reporters and advert sales people should not see anything but a place to create adverts or articles. No, left column menu content, or footer tag content. That is so irrelevant as to be not funny. Ez-Publish is built like some sort of Windows web app and doesn’t seem to understand that not all CMS users need to see 100% of the mechanics of the website.
To this end, Bricolage seems most suited to my needs, but it is written in Perl and has very little support these days. What I want is a system that both replace the current Excel/Word workflow at the business for the paper products, and enable easy updating of content to the website when it’s relevant and ready.
I was hoping that by writing an article here on the subject I would somehow clear the air around me, but now I just feel frustrated even more. I think it’s time to hit the old pen and paper.
I can’t avoid taking work home with me. My mind doesn’t isolate problems, things bleed over. I am trying to get better, but for now I have to deal with the stress and plan my life to avoid it as much as possible.
What I’m slowly learning, however, is that much of the stress I do have is not only avoidable but unnecessary. There are many things in life where compromise is the name of the game, and journalism is one big exercise in it. Many of the times I go to sleep trying to organize my work day because I have a lot of sources and a lot of writing that needs to get done.
I just finished a story for this week which did not come out at all how I would have liked. I only had two principal sources and I felt I could have done a lot more. Of course, as I ran over my last two work weeks in my head I realized the problem was hardly because I was not doing my job. Instead I had automatically prioritized the work I had the past two weeks and just never had time to call the other three or four sources which I wanted.
So the story actually reads quite well and gives a lot of information I don’t think people had before. That should be goal of any news story, so mission accomplished. And while it didn’t look like I imagined, it was finished and is going to print.
Now if I can just stop sweating the little things in life like incoming and outgoing expenses.
One of the things I love about working for a newspaper is that it gets me out and talking to people I otherwise wouldn’t. In fact, I’m introverted enough I really wouldn’t talk to anyone unless my back were against the wall.
Since working as a reporter, I’ve noticed I’m about a thousand times more likely to just walk up and talk to someone, or strike up a conversation with the person sitting next to me at a concert. But it’s not all roses.
While I’ve become better at approaching people or standing up and taking a pictures, I’m still not great. I still don’t like the phone. And I still don’t like to stand up to take pictures. As a reporter, I am essentially a looking glass for my sources and the public who reads my work. Of course, my writing style and my little biases come through, but without sources in the world there would be no reason to do news. It would all be photo-ops and press releases.
Sometimes one has to do something unpleasant. For some people it might be use a computer, for me it’s talk to people and try to get information out of them in such a way that you wont have to call them back in ten minutes to check something. The positive for me far outweighs the negative, but it does make me question whether I’m a good journalist or not.
In the end, my editor likes what I write and has lauded me numerous times for my initiative. So either his expectations are really low, or I need to let my fears go and keep working.
I am currently on two different committees, each responsible for one aspect of a company website redesign. This is a small company, so I can see how that would happen. And truth be told, I am excited to be a part of both. I am also happy to not be leading either of these committees.
I do, however, have reservations about how drastic the changes to the site can be when the technical knowledge of the technology committee seems to know less than I do. I like the guy, but I have trouble being honest to people’s faces. So I can see this project skidding out of control pretty easily — at least skidding out of my vision for what the site could be.
One idea I have come up with is to have links to similar stories using something like Google News for collation. I can see this idea not going well, as it invites people to leave your page. But I also see it as being honest with your readers that a diversity of opinions and writing are a good thing. Also, it suggests that you are confident about your coverage because you will put your story up against your “competitor.” Though we don’t really have any true competitor seeing as how our printing helps keep one our closest enemies very close and dependent on us.
I am ambitious. At least, I feel like I am often more ambitious than many people around me. When I first started working for a weekly paper I was excited to do a lot of good work, and maybe even expand what the paper could offer with my overflowing energy.
Flash forward two months and I am starting to feel the weight of routine and the amount of work involved in an endeavour like a sports column. Even regular sports coverage is a full time job. I am constantly bombarded with potential things to cover. The benign things often ballon and take up way more space and effort than I would have thought possible.
Where once I thought I could change the paper for the better, I’m beginning to wonder if it’s even worth spreading yourself so thin. I try to make myself an expert about topics as various as state education reform and tidal energy generation that I find I don’t have time, nay often just don’t care, how the basketball team did. I have enough trouble finding relevance in professional and division 1 sports.
How can I keep the enthusiasm alive when stories intrisically have more or less gravity to them? I certainly can’t only cover what I percieve as important.
I got called out today. A lawyer dialed up the paper after it went to print. Apparently she felt blindsided by the harshness of a fellow lawyer’s comment in the paper. She thought I should have called her back to ask her what she thought about the other’s words.
I feel a little mixed on the subject. For one I don’t feel too bad because my editor green-lighted the article. By my book that’s an endorsment for everything in it being kosher. He’s a great and moral person and I don’t think he would let even a hint of slander or libel slide through. On the other hand he perhaps didn’t know that I hadn’t called back the original lawyer to tell her what the other one had said. So I guess I still could have made a mistake here. I’ll have to wait till Monday now to find out.
It’s not eating me up inside, but I feel like I might have watched something that touched on this subject in my training. I feel like I should have known better and this was a rookie mistake. I will not, however, always vet stories past my sources before they go to print. That would be awful.
As it happens, I don’t have time for this project. I do, however, have time to write little asides about how I feel things are going in the world of a small weekly paper. There’s not a lot of drama, so don’t expect too much. Just the ebb and flow along with observations from inside the pressbox.
