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Put the rules where everyone will see them. Check out Michelle Ferrier’s clever illustrated explanation of why this works.

…

Make the registration process and form as short as possible. I favor the kind of form that asks for exactly three things: A username, a password, and my e-mail address. The e-mail address will save me if I forget my username and password 12 years from now (I registered at The New York Times Web site in 1995). Some folks feel strongly that you should require real names. But if you’re asking for more than six pieces of information, in my opinion, you’re asking for TOO MUCH.

Make sure to scroll down and read about Daily Kos’s solution to trolls.

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Enter Growing Your News Website, a blog launched last week by Steve Outing (media pioneer and E&P columnist). The idea is that every day, Steve or a guest blogger will post one tip–not news, but tips that can be implemented–for making money or increasing traffic on a news web site.

I’ve already added it to my blogroll. Wouldn’t it be great if this site took off?

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This entire article rubs me the wrong way. Summary:

1. News photographers, especially high school sports photographers, have been barred from access to sports games if their paper sells a lot of reprints online or if they won’t sign a form promising not to sell reprints.
2. Some of these photographers directly make money from reprint sales; one from the Daily Southtown called a picture of a softball team cheering “the money shot.”
3. The Illinois High School Association (IHSA), says this is necessary to protect the contract they have with VIP, a PR company hired to specifically take shots to sell to students and parents; revenue is shared with the school district. “We don’t have a problem with you giving them away or doing photo galleries online,” Anthony Holman, assistant executive director of the IHSA, told Bloomington’s Pantagraph last November.
4. State Representative Joe Lyons has introduced House Bill 4582, which states that no school or school organization “may infringe upon or attempt to regulate in any manner the dissemination of news or the use of visual images by the news media…” which isn’t really what’s at stake here, is it? What’s at stake is the COMMERCIAL use of visual images by the news media.

There are so many things wrong with this. First, the IHSA is stepping way over its bounds. It doesn’t have the right to tell a newspaper what they can and can’t do with their photos. (The Illinois Press Association sued the IHSA to get access to the state football finals and lost the case. Has everyone in Illinois lost their minds?)

But on the other hand, a newspaper isn’t in–or shouldn’t be in–the business of selling reprints. Yet some are: “[V]isit the Web site of what’s now the SouthtownStar and you’ll see the paper means business. ‘Welcome to Southland Photo­Shoppe,’ it says. ‘Your shopping choices range from traditional prints to T-shirts, mugs, computer mouse pads and other items on which our photos are imprinted.’ A simple eight-by-ten is $25.” A newspaper is a public benefit, I believe the term is. It’s like a subway system or a museum in that it provides a value far greater than its monetary worth to shareholders. (Unlike subway systems and museums, newspapers aren’t kept afloat with government money. Probably a good thing, but the Beeb hasn’t often let me down…)

Alas, the sad fact of the news industry is that papers have to pursue outside interests and investments to remain viable. The Washington Post company owns Kaplan. The New York Times has About.com. Gannett owns a job site for nurses? (What? That one came as a surprise for me, too.) So if a small paper in Peoria (or whatever) needs an extra $2000 a year to keep afloat, it’s sad, crass, but necessary. I just somehow feel that the value of the”money shot” picture is more than the photograph itself. Does seeing yourself (or your kid) on the front page of your hometown newspaper not count as a value-add anymore? Isn’t that worth more than a framed photograph? Isn’t there a way for papers to capitalize on this without becoming commercial?

In the end, nobody wins here. As Lyons says, if VIP ever decides it’s not making enough money and pulls out and there’s nobody to take pictures, “Badda bing, badda boom, you’re taking your own photos.” News organizations that have been made to feel unwelcome for years are not going to flock back to take pictures of the high school chess club.

Ugh.

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Flickr: Thomas Hawk

Many of these terms are artifacts from the green-eyeshade era. In fact, maybe nobody really needs to know what a lede is (it’s the beginning of your story, also written using the more traditional spelling lead, but spelled differently to prevent confusion with lead, the metal that made up the letters that were rearranged on a plate and put into the printing press to print the newspaper–no lead, no need for lede.) I’ve worked places that asked for 500 words, rather than 15 inches. I’ve also worked places that assumed I knew what all these terms meant (you can imagine my terror when, as a complete newbie, I was told to “keep [my] budget up to date.” What? I’m not an accountant!)

But it can’t hurt to be prepared.

Extra credit: Here’s a Palo Alto Times piece that describes the words used by the printers themselves–which didn’t exactly overlap with what reporters and editors used at the time. Wonderful words that just roll off the tongue: quoin, hellbox, chase, turtle.

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My first thoughts are that I’m pretty impressed with the look of the thing. It’s supposed to be “Slate for black readers” yet looks nicer than Slate. (I’ve never been impressed with Slate’s weird pop-out Javascript navigation menu.)

I like that the “stuff” in the left column changes–sometimes it’s the top 5 stories, sometimes it’s a list of blogs, sometimes video. But oh–why do the blogs have to look so different? That’s a big negative.

The news content is pulled from other sources on the web, and opinions/blogs are written in-house. It seems to be a good mix of current events and commentary, but after such a short time I can’t be sure.

There are pictures on the Views (opinions) page, but News seems to be devoid of photos. And, come to think of it, why exile blogs to a separate section rather than allow them to mix with Views?

A plus for The Root is it looks like comments can be posted by anyone. And the blogroll to the left is great.

What do y’all think?

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You can read my interview with Kim Yorio (the shorter one) on ReadExpress.com here: Real Chick Lit

In the course of writing this story, I didn’t exactly have the opportunity to read the book, so I can’t vouch for its content, but I can certainly vouch for Caitlin and Kim, who are both very well-spoken, enthusiastic, knowledgeable women. (And I don’t believe the bit about Caitlin having a fear of public speaking–nice try, ladies.)

The ‘girls’ mentioned a story about being on The Today Show: the first time, Kim freaked out and Caitlin did all the talking. The second time, just before the cameras went on, Caitlin said she thought, “Oh my god, people actually watch this show.”

I had my own mini-moment like that yesterday, when I introduced myself at the end of the presentation and the girl behind me in the book-signing line said “Oh, you wrote that article? That’s how I knew to come here.”

Oh.

People actually read this paper. Hmm.

It’s easy to get suckered into the idea that you’re a lone writer toiling in obscurity, but everyone–from the top guy at the Post to a blogger with a Technorati authority of 3–has to remember that there ARE people out there reading.

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It looks like the Bee has a registration wall that activates after you view two pages; luckily, this piece is exactly two pages long.

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Successful interviews get people to go further than they planned to go, and rarely come from a planned list of questions, even when the questions are good ones. Interviewing does not work that way. It is a dynamic process involving two basic stages. Stage 1 is planned; Stage 2 exploits the moment that Stage 1 produces, whenever and however it occurs.

If Wallace has really put Clemens to the test, he did so using a strategy that ties his questions together so the whole is more than the sum of the parts. Rather than “confronting” Clemens, Wallace will have established some basic points of agreement. Accountability inevitably comes out of agreement, not fireworks. It’s the only practical way to get Clemens to open up and come clean. [Source]

The whole article is worth a read. As for more interviewing tips, I enjoyed former colleague Kevin Flowers‘ tip that he gave a roomful of starry-eyed interns at the Erie Times-News—”put ‘em on the defensive.” The theory being that someone who feels they have something to prove are more likely to speak out of emotion rather than coolly reading a press statement.

Clemens was on 60 minutes last Sunday. You can read a transcript of how the interview actually went here.

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Just a few weeks before former San Jose Mercury News Editor Carole Leigh Hutton resigned in a surprise move last Thursday, she led a team of staffers in a presentation to MediaNews Group CEO William Dean Singleton to turn the daily into a three-section paper.

Some staffers, still puzzled days after Hutton’s sudden departure, are speculating that that idea, which Singleton and other company brass did not support, may have been the final blow to Hutton’s job.

One of several aspects of the paper’s ongoing “Rethinking Project,” the decreased sections idea was apparently greeted negatively by Singleton and David J. Butler, MediaNews vice president for news, during a presentation in mid-December. [Source]

I’ve written on the Rethinking Project before, in December. I thought it was an interesting if not excellent idea then, and (with no updates to the Rethinking blog to convince me otherwise) am sticking to my guns. Why not have a section for the “important” take-down-the-mayor and wars and political machinations, a section for business, and an “everything else” section? Is it too radical to consolidate sports and entertainment? (Aren’t sports, after all, a form of entertainment?)

What’s sad is that if this project, and specifically the three-section idea, was really the reason behind Hutton’s departure, then it’s probably not going to move forward, or at least not in the way it was going.

Butler, who replaced Hutton as Mercury News editor last week, cited the “Rethinking Project” and specifically Hutton’s description of plans to “blow up the paper” during comments to staffers last week. He said such an approach might be too bold for the moment…

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