Day Three: Printers and Three Letter Acronyms
It's Friday, and my work experience has taught me that Fridays are either (a) frantic days where you finally do all the things you were supposed to do this week or (b) the most boring of days because you have already completed your To Do list. Even though I'm a master procrastinator, it seems like I fall into the second category most Fridays.
I spent most of the day cleaning out old filing cabinets and then we spent about half an hour trying to figure out why a document wouldn't print. At this point, I'm fantasizing about a future where printers no longer exist.
The only big item on my agenda for today was a meeting with Mike from Power One Media, the company that provides the content management system and hosting for the Free Press website. It's been a while since the site technology has been upgraded, so it was Mike's job to convince Joel, the paper's publisher and my boss, that the $250 upgrade is worth it. I guess it was my job to make sure the technobabble (CSS, RSS, XML, etc.) Mike was rattling off actually meant something.
Joel and I were in his office, and Mike was in his office somewhere far away. We used Microsoft's Live Meeting software on Joel's PowerBook to see Mike's web browser on his computer as he browsed through various client and demo websites to show us the new features we could get in the upgrade. Highlights included increased use of CSS in the templates (translation: better-looking and more modern), powerful new controls for display ads, a new yellow pages section, and some other things I don't remember.
I was mainly interested in getting RSS feeds (translation: with RSS, your computer alerts you when there's new news to be read, instead of having to check the web site manually) set up, and Mike said it could easily be set up. So I'm happy enough.
Joel was more impressed to hear about a program that could convert all our finished Quark documents into XML files that can be uploaded to the site and spare Joel and our editor, Don, from having to manually input each story, although it sounds a bit too automagical to be true.
Comments
I can't tell you how interested I am in how current newsrooms percieve Web technologies. $250 dollar upgrades are hardly a drop in the bucket, even on a consumer level if you consider things like Adobe CS2 upgrade costs. I'm slow to be critical that the most impressive thing about the upgrade is the ability to remove a job duty or two. You really have to be a coder of some type to appreciate movements towards CSS and the use of RSS feeds.
I think pitching technology is always going to be tougher than an object because you are really just selling an idea. A program is an intellectual idea stored in math land and doesn't have a tire to kick or a hood to open. That's where you come in, so it sounds.
And that's why I'm so interested in your job over this summer. There isn't this veritable forest of online production type jobs in news just yet. I suppose there are online magazines, and that's great, but I still hold a higher regaurd for the credibility of older print newsrooms.
Posted by: J.T. Mitchum | June 3, 2005 04:06 PM