Technology

I am always looking for better/easier ways to organize all the information that gets thrown at me each week. When I discovered Remember The Milk I was very excited, as it presented a really easy way to organize what I had to do. I even flirted with keeping long-term to-dos in the system. Unfortunately, the interface doesn’t lend itself to adding extended notes and keeping track of complicated due dates. For example, I might have an event I have to attend with has a different due date than the writing assignment on the event. RTM was not an elegant solution to such things.

I also have struggled with writing notes on little scraps of paper when people call me out of the blue. Even when I’m not caught off guard I see the notepads pile up with meeting notes and interview questions. What I wanted to be able to do was throw away these pieces of paper. My nightmare is filled with trying to organize these notes into something to which I can refer back.

Enter the wiki. I’ve decided to set up a “digital file cabinet.” It’s powered by Dokuwiki, though it could be any wiki software. The point is, I create a new page for each issues, group, person or place I have to deal with. As I gain information or think of questions to ask, I add them to the wiki. It doesn’t replace the paper, as I still like to just jot things down. But an hour or a day later I can go back to that sheet of paper, add the information it contains to the wiki and be done with it. It’s a wonderful system and I already feel the weight of clutter lifting. Now all I have to do is make sure I keep at it.

Management

I am not good at managing time. This is an absolute truth and one I wish to change. It is especially bad when you work at a job that involves deadlines, writing (creatively) on deadline, hard deadlines and often office-less work. I am always tempted to just pack up my things and say, “I’ll take care of it from home.” That is both a non-winning strategy and a horrible lie.When I first began working for the newspaper I chidded my boss for being so strict about only working out the office.

While I’m not ready to concede my ground completely–reaching people is often best done in the evening–I will admit that his principal is correct. I just don’t get much done from home and I tend to fill the hours I get with work. Thus, a writing assignment that ought to take 3 hours, and will if I’m only in the office for 8 hours a day, will bleed over into 24 hours of thinking, writing snippets, imagning more effective ways of working and ultimately not getting anything finished.

Now, I will admit this may be 99% character flaw, but my bosses philisophical opposition to the “home office” method suggests there is more than 1% of objective truth to the supposition. As someone recently pointed out at a school board meeting where the question was to extend a custodian’s hours to better clean teh school, “certain jobs will not necessarily improve with added time. Instead the job will simply expand to fill more hours.”

I’m paraphrasing, of course, but the point is there. Especially when the issue of creativty creeps in, I feel as though hard and fast deadlines set by things like hours in the office are requisite to just getting things done. Unbridaled creativity is a powerful and aimless force. Journalism is both an exercise in creativty and just getting things done. I just need to learn to keep my balance on this line.

Schooling

Allow me to step into a’nother sphere in my ven diagram of work. Right now I am attempting to get my head around a massive legislative push in the State of Maine to consolidate school districts.

I was called out in an article I wrote last week on a number of details that I just didn’t get right. So now I’ve spent the last hour and a half reading consolidation literature and trying to get at something, anything that can make education, America and the government make sense.

One thing I’ve noticed, and this is just an observation of myself–nothing of import here, of all the hot air and vective that gets bandied about the clearest ideas I find are the positive ones. Almost as though Milton weren’t just “on to something,” he truly understood that evil, hate and anger are easier to muster than constructive thought because it reverberates faster.

Negativity builds the walls that keep us from listening and thinking outside ourselves.

With that said, Maine is in dire straits. But I would argue they are no more trouble than most other States in our Union. When population growth slows down we don’t know what to do. Student numbers begin to diminish and the forumla we used to educate our kids doesn’t fit anymore. So pull out all the support that seems “redudant” and things will surely improve.

What if the government were capable of auditing itself? Municipal, state, federal, any of them. Would we see people with lots of experience expecting large salaries refusing to take pay cuts even as the state budget and the social services programs eat away the confidence of the people who, let’s be honest a moment, are supposed to be liable for what their representative government does?

I can’t blame people for wanting more. I feel I am living inadequately because my spouse and I are having trouble getting by some days, especially in winter. But should we then move to Georgia where we don’t have to heat our house? Should I go get a job in the government because they’ll offer me a good health care package and pension program? Maybe I should be a teacher? In Maine they have better starting salaries and benefits by a long shot. Oh wait, but what to do about consolidation.

See, negativity is so much easier.

Contacts

I’ve read so many lists of how to be an effective journalist by developing contacts. Indeed, one of my favorite aspects of being a reporter is that it gets me out and doing things. For New Year’s I was at a series of concerts in Blue Hill. I was not on assignment and feeling a little bemused at what was being offered when it occurred to me that if I were on assignment I would be forced to, say, go to the belly dancing demostration. Now, I’m not interested in that at all intrinsically, but when forced I’m sure I would have had a great time.

In response to this, I suppose one could say that all I need to do is recognize when I build a wall in my head against things that I may not like. But I don’t believe it’s that easy, and part of parsing the world involves deciding what you do or do not like. I go to as many things for journlistic reasons that make me want to shoot myself in the head, but it’s the positive ones that I take away from the job.

In any case . . . I began this post because I realized that while culturing contacts and people who can tip you off or provide quotes is a great thing to do, my problem is walking that line between getting good information from them and bothering the hell out of them. I once read a Peace Corp memoir about someone’s travels in China and realized that nearly every “amazing” person he met was probably rolling their eyes as this big white man furiously scribbled in a notebook for “posterity,” read: publishing potential.

Not all people love talking to a reporter. My hope, and I suppose it could be a resolution for 2008 as well, is to be better at recognizing when I’ve pushed to hard on a contact and when I haven’t pushed hard enough.

Workflow

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!

Small paper

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.

First snow

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.

Content

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.

Compromises

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.

Sources

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.