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yelvington.com - Steve Yelvington's weblog

I'm Steve Yelvington, and this is my blog. I'm a lifelong journalist and now a strategist for a media company. These are my own thoughts.

Read as we writeYesterday

Packt, a publishing company that specializes in books about computer programming, has begun selling electronic versions of its books that you can download before the writing is even finished. They call the program RAW -- for "Read As we Write." You get to download chapters as they are posted, even before the final publication edits.

The benefit is easy to see: It cuts out the painfully long cycle of manufacturing and distribution that can make computer books out of date before they're shipped. The cost, of course, is that the consumer has to deal with a potentially higher error rate. Packt is setting up Google Groups for each RAW book and encouraging readers to post corrections, which may make it into the final printed edition.

This isn't an isolated case; it's part of a broader pattern of "ship, then fix" that's touching everything from laptop computers to mainstream journalism. We blog, we make mistakes, we fix mistakes, and eventually we maybe print something that's more accurate and more thoroughly researched than it otherwise would have been. Such a process often is very uncomfortable for those raised in the closed-society model of journalism.

I'm reminded that everything old is new again. Long before the Web and open Internet access revolutionized the online world, there was a closed online system called GEnie. One of GEnie's features was a very active discussion group for writers and wannabee

In the war roomOctober 9

This week I'm in Jacksonville, Fla., where a team (right) is hard at work rebuilding Jacksonville.com on our new Drupal-based site management system. There are others up in Augusta and other locations, working as part of a larger virtual team, but even with instant messaging and regular conference calls there's no substitute for shoving a bunch of folks into one room with a sack full of junk food and not letting them out.

The Florida Times-Union's site will be the first on the new platform, followed by the Topeka Capital-Journal and the Conway (Ark.) Log Cabin Democrat. Launch has been pushed back a couple of weeks because of the elections -- we have high confidence in the hardware and software, but people will be stressed out enough without the added complexity of new tools on Nov. 4.

We're relying heavily on some Drupal contributed modules, especially Views (which lets you query the database and create various types of lists without writing SQL), the Content Construction Kit (arbitrarily structured special content types), FeedAPI (RSS and Atom acquisition), and Panels (arbitrary custom page layouts).

The result should be a system that lets reporters report, writers write, and editors edit without having to know anything about HTML, scripting, FTP and other online technobabble. Nevertheless, there are going to be some interesting training challenges as we

IHT: Death of a global brand?October 8

Forbes reports that the New York Times is planning to fold the IHT.com website into the Times' main website, perhaps the first step in bringing to an end a venerable brand in the community of American expatriates in Europe.

It seems inevitable. The International Herald Tribune, originally the European edition of the New York Herald, once met a great need. For the expat American in Paris, it was like a drink of cool water to a traveler wandering in the desert.

It made content from its longtime partner owners, the Times and the Washington Post, available every morning on racks at news agents and tobacco shops throughout Europe. It wasn't that long ago that traveling singer-songwriter John Prine, seeking the familiar comfort of something truly American, could pick up a copy of the IHT and be inspired to write an ode to Dear Abby.

But the Web has changed all that, bringing every major newspaper in the world into a one-click radius in a highly networked global society.

There has apparently not been a decision to kill the brand in print, but I would not at all be surprised to someday see the International Herald Tribune quietly replaced by the New York Times in those European newsstand racks.

It's a shame, because I think the Times and its previous partner, the Wa

Sorry, you don't get off the hook so easilyOctober 3

Paul Fahri is right in so many details as he recounts how he deck is stacked against America's newspapers, yet so wrong in concluding that journalism doesn't share the blame. Journalism should share the blame, and journalists are not powerless.

He seems to have a notion that there is some sort of objective standard of quality that has been maintained during the long and painful descent of newspapers from the position they once held at the center of American life.

There is no such standard. Quality of journalism has much to do with relevancy and relationships, and those are moving targets.

The right question is whether newspapers are practicing journalism that's relevant to the lives and the needs of the community. And there lies the problem. The needs of the community have changed. Newspaper journalism, by and large, has not.

I could go off on a rant about how newsroom mossbacks have actively interfered with innovation, especially online innovation, over the last 15 years. There's no point; that's water under the bridge, and even the few remaining curmudgeons recognize that the world has changed (however little they want to deal with it).

The deck is stacked against the newspaper, but newsrooms are not powerless victims in the grip of some irreversible cosmic force. There is still high demand for effective local mass advertising solutions. Newspapers can be that solution -- in fact, th

Town crier, town square, and community memorySeptember 30

Newspapers, which replaced the town crier with what became to be known as print journalism, are slowly awakening to a second function that's ideally performed on the Web: the town square. But there's a third role that's being overlooked, and that's the role of community memory.

I've begun using that term lately in discussions of how we need to expand our journalistic processes. We need to move away from exclusive reliance on episodic storytelling and toward the creation of "living resources" that are updated whenever they need to be. I touched on this concept briefly in earlier posts about obituaries, which in many cases ought to be life stories of the living.

Neither the production nor the consumption of news today is necessarily tied to a schedule. We're no longer limited by the daily print cycle or the six o'clock newscast. Most journalists see that as a "publish it now" opportunity, but miss the "maintain it forever" implications.

Jeff Jarvis takes on this topic today in a declaration that "the building block of journalism is no longer the article." He continues: "I want a page, a site, a thing that is created, curated, edited, and discussed. It’s a blog that treats a topic as an ongoing and cumulative
process of learning, digging, correcting, asking, answering. It’s also a wiki t