"Sunday Square Off," with Donna Gratehouse and Greg Patterson
Brahm Resnik’s Sunday Square Off this morning featured our own Donna Gratehouse, the Democratic Diva, along with intermittently nutty right-winger Greg Patterson, who blogs under the name Espresso Pundit; and political consultant Stan Barnes, looking at Tuesday’s state primary.
7:34 AM
What AZCentral is good at
… putting a walking talking annoyance trying to sell us Hondas in the face of anyone who visits their web site:
Getting the search engine to work so one can find a piece of 12 News video?
Not so much.
Note how AZCentral even allows the crappy company it’s using for the animated ads to advertise itself, complete with trademark symbol.
It’s an ad on an ad!
Of course the site needs to sell ads; no one thinks journalism should be free.
But AZCentral.com is a site that’s user-unfriendly even by the clotted standards of most daily newspapers.
I was looking for video from today’s 12 News' Sunday Square Off; two or three passes and it wasn’t coming up.
Here’s what you get the first time using Google News:
7:21 AM
How AZCentral.com sucks, no. 38 in a series
The Republic has a bunch of stories about Rick Romley’s massive document release today.
It’s almost impossible to find them on AZCentral.com. Robert Robb’s column on Thomas should have been linked from the main story, but it isn’t.
There’s also an editorial. That wasn’t linked either.
In looking for the editorial, I noticed a prominent link to something called the Arizona Repubilc Editorial Board blog.
The subhed for the blog is “Editorials from the Arizona Republic.”
The blog stopped being updated in October 2009.
8:18 AM
AZCentral.com: Your window to all the news from the nation and world!
From AZCentral’s front page this a.m.:
7:28 AM
Arizona Republic editor Jeffrey Dozbaba dies
From the paper:
Most of his newspaper career was spent at The Republic. He began in 1978 as a copy editor, became sports editor in 1991, assistant manager editor in 1993, and then senior editor, senior director of the newsroom’s Information Center and finally was named a manager editor in March 2008. He retired in June 2009.
“He helped lead The Republic’s local news coverage and his efforts have left a lasting legacy for the Phoenix community,” said Randy Lovely, Republic editor and vice president for news. “He was a hard worker, but he played with equal energy and could also be counted on to lighten the mood and add laughter to the room.”
I don’t know if this is a Republic tradition or not, but the obit is oddly un-nihil nisi bonum:
[I]t was hard to escape some of the ribbing Dozbaba liked to dish out.
“He could insult you like nobody’s business,” Leonard said, “but he always did it with a smile.”
[…]
Former Republic reporter Bob Golfen, who knew him since college, said some of Dozbaba’s ideas, however, could be a bit hard to follow.
“He was a smart guy with great instincts, but he wasn’t always tremendously articulate,” he said.
When reading over a story, Dozbaba might say it was good but that something was missing.
“He seemed to have a deeper understanding of what we needed to do, even if he couldn’t always say it,” Golfen said.
7:43 AM
The Arizona Republic: All the fluff that's fit to recycle
Over at EaterAZ, an item that catches the Arizona Republic writing the same article twice, and even recycling the same phrases and sentences.
Here’s a sample EaterAZ found, from two pieces the paper did on the local food blog Foodies Like Us, with similar phrases in bold:
“Foodies Like Us is a 6,000-strong social-networking group founded in July by friends and former bankers Jay Pizarro and Susie Timm. It celebrates cooking, eating, dining and drinks, uniting Valley residents from all walks of life who love to socialize around the table. The website features restaurant reviews, recipe swaps, food chatter, cooking blogs, market finds and tips. The group also sponsors cooking classes, progressive dinners by trolley, wine tastings and happy hours.“
[EaterAZ commented:] After scratching our head as to why they’re a “dining newcomer,” we began to think that all this sounded too familiar. The picture looked familiar, too. Hey, wait a second. That IS the same picture… And many of the same press-release copied words (in bold) are there as well. Check it out, here’s something AZCentral.com published two months ago on Foodies:
“Leave it up to food lovers to create a virtual table for like-minded fans. Former banking colleagues and friends Susie Timm and Jay Pizarro (above) parlayed their mutual interest in food to create a 6,000-member-and-growing social-networking group that celebrates cooking, eating, dining and drinks. Their mantra: We are a 365-days-a-year food festival. Their Web site is filled with all things food, including restaurant reviews, recipe swaps, food chatter, cooking blogs, market finds and advice for the home mixologist. The Scottsdale-based company also sponsors cooking classes, progressive dinners by trolley, wine tastings and happy hours at top Valley eateries.”
5:26 PM
Dan Gillmor to start contributing to Salon
The Cronkite school prof, who does the blog Mediactive and specializes in new media, will be writing for the online magazine.
His first column, about Steve Jobs “control-freakery,” is here:
The control-freakery extends to the content, as we’ve seen again and again. Apple’s idea of acceptable content is roughly what you’ll find at Disneyland. The company reserves the right to bar or later remove apps that contain information for any reason it chooses. This is how the brilliant Mark Fiore found his iPhone cartoon app disallowed due to its political content — until he won a Pulitzer Prize in April, at which point Apple decided to allow it.
(Jobs says the rules changed after Fiore’s original rejection, by which time Apple realized it was making a mistake with political content, but the cartoonist didn’t realize this.)
I’m disappointed beyond words, meanwhile, that journalism organizations are racing to create apps for the iPad, even though they’re putting the final say over whether their journalism is acceptable into Apple’s hands. What does it say about their journalistic principles that they’d do this? Most won’t even respond to the question, and I’ve asked many. National Public Radio’s Kinsey Wilson, who heads up NPR’s online development, is one of the few to admit discomfort with the situation, saying that Apple holds the leverage at this point; he, and other news executives, are basically hoping Apple won’t jerk them around the way it’s done with others.
On his blog Gillmor says he gives Salon a one-week exclusivity for the columns, after which they will appear on his Mediactive site.
4:54 PM
The online East Valley Tribune has a new look
It’s the first major online move since the paper was formally taken over by Randy Miller.
PHXated thinks it looks better, but still suffers from a lot of the flaws of online newspaper sites.
Two quick examples: Note how much of the page is devoted to self-promotional crap and how many lines of navigation the site prioritizes before it starts giving its readers the news they’ve come to the site for.
And second, newspapers can’t get away from that terrestrial feeling of just not having enough room on the printed page.
That doesn’t exist online, so it’s always quizzical to me when I see a list of heds like this, in the new site’s main feature well: * Suns' outside shooting cements Game 1 loss * Mesa to crack down on crime-ridden convenience stores * Executive Board unanimously approves AIA state tournament realignment plan * Minorities are the majority at school, but not at graduation * Brewer: If Prop. 100 fails, I failed * Proposition 100 supporters have cash advantage * Night club sued by neighboring restaurants * More adults coming to EVIT for new-career training * Mesa hopes light rail brings life to downtown
A third to a half of these telegrammatic lines are utterly unparsable to readers--which means they aren't going to get read.
Why not give each of these “Top Stories” a hed and a deck that makes them understandable and inviting to a curious but disinterested reader?
11:32 AM
The state's biggest companies and highest paid CEOs
The former is listed by the Arizona Republic this a.m.
The trouble is that the top fifty companies are dispensed by the paper in no fewer than 25 groups of two, requiring some 24 additional clicks to see them all.
And since this is the miserable web site of the Arizona Republic, you can be assured that each click takes from between six and ten seconds to give you a new page, and that, during that time, the page will, annoyingly, re-situate itself a few times.
It’s an imensely pleasureable reading experience!
You’d think that by hitting print you might get a coherent list to read. Look how this page resolves itself:
Note how that instead of the full list, it just gives you the two entries on that page, and that it doesn’t even do that right. You can also see that the intro paragraph from the beginning of the story is repeated on each printed page.
If, laboriously, you print the whole thing out, you’d have those literary pearls of wisdom 25 times.
Finally, if you look closely on the bottom right-hand corner of the print page, you can see this legend: “Print powered by FormatDynamics”!
In other words, the Republic, like so many other media outfits, is actually paying some other company do to a crummy job formatting its print pages.
Exactly the sort of thing a media company should outsource.
Anyway, if you’re interested in how the state’s execs are doing, The PBJ is on the case tracking executive pay. It’s list of recent dispatches from company reports is here.
7:40 AM
Tempe: Ve vant das Googlefiber!
Tempe, at least, is aware of the potential of widespread ultrahighspeed fiber optic cable in town. Last month, the WSJ reported that Google was looking for a town to use as a test case to build out internet service with gigabyte-per-second download speed, or roughly 100 times faster than most folks currently have.
The company’s created a March 26 deadline for interested towns to apply.
Tempe’s idea, not a bad one, is to ask people to submit video ideas of what the town could do with such a service:
Tempe wants that fiber. We want it for our 175,000 residents, for our 175,000 workers, for our 4 million visitors who travel here annually for fun and business and for our 200,000 college students. Why do we want it? Tempe, Arizona is known for innovation. We think that the combined brain power of all these people, with this fiber, can change the world. We’ve already done so much.
You can help convince Google that Tempe is the best place to showcase their fiber. Tell us how you can change the world, or at least your corner of it, if you had access to the kind of speed that Google fiber promises.
That’s the spirit. PHXated would move to Tempe overnight if it pulled that off. But if it wants it it’s going to have to deal with Topeka first.
4:41 AM
Yelp's coming to town—big time!
The online city guide Yelp is moving into the Valley, saying it will be employing as many as 200 people, the PBJ reports:
The center will employ sales agents and account managers.
CEO Jeremy Stoppelman said the Scottsdale office will be Yelp’s third to go along with its San Francisco base and an office in Manhattan.
The Phoenix Yelp site is here.
Yelp has its uses, and it also has its detractors: A story from last year from the East Bay Express, an alternative weekly in Berkeley, detailed some of the outfit’s dicey leveraging of its reviews and its advertising. It began this way:
The phone calls came almost daily. It started to get creepy.
“Hi, this is Mike from Yelp,” the voice would say. “You’ve had three hundred visitors to your site this month. You’ve had a really good response. But you have a few bad ones at the top. I could do something about those.”
The story had a half-dozen local businesspeople testifying to calls like that—and the unconfirmable but nagging sense that negative reviews of their places of business cropped up high on their Yelp page just before the sales folks started calling.
The Express story got criticized by Yelp, mostly for the fact that all of the people quoted in it didn’t want their names used.
The reporter, Kathleen Richards, defended the practice, noting that the businesspeople understandably didn’t want to get on Yelp’s bad side.
… but just to make the point, she turned around and wrote an even longer piece, this one with a slew of on-the-record complaints about the same practices or worse. That story’s here.
6:36 PM
Google ultrahighspeed internets! Something Phoenix should be bidding on
Breaking news, from the Wall Street Journal:
Google Inc. plans to build and test broadband networks than could deliver speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans use.
[…]
The Internet giant, which plans to offer the service to at least 50,000 customers and potentially up to 500,000, said it aims to foster the development of new “killer apps” as well as experiment with new ways to deploy fiber networks.
Key graf:
The company is collecting responses from interested communities until March 26 and will reveal the ones it has selected later this year.
5:36 PM
Kicking the EVT while it's down, continued
Granted it’s a holiday, and granted there’s an enormous amount of pressure on the folks inside the East Valley Tribune—they don’t know, week to week, if they’re gong to have jobs.
But here again is the main feature well of the paper this a.m.:
I’m assuming the web site has something programmed into it to generate the feature well by taking the top stories from two different departments. But as we saw last week and again today, it’s maybe not smart to let the front page of a web site be created without human intervention.
7:00 AM
You hate to kick the EVT while it's down ...
.. and granted, it’s New Year’s weekend. Still, here’s the front-and-center well of its front page this a.m.:
p.s.: Heat City is reporting that the paper’s editor, Chris Coppola, is leaving—for an editing job at the Arizona Republic.
1:59 AM
Another example of how AZCentral.com sucks
“Hey kids! Let’s go to Lake Pleasant! We’ve never been there before. Tommy—why don’t you look up the best route on the internets!”
“Great, Dad! I’ll look it up on AZCentral dot com! Why, with just a few clicks, we can get a map that shows us exactly where it is!”
“Terrific, son! What are you finding out?”
“It was simple, pops! Here we go!”
“Um, that looks a little weird, son. Why is it in Morristown? And where in the hell is Morristown?”
“Oh, Dad, you just don’t understand the web! AZCentral dot com has great maps you can manipulate to find out exactly where we’re going! Let me pull the map out a bit. It has to be right—it’s AZCentral dot com, ’Arizona’s home page’! Gimme a sec, Dad. Click … click … and—voila!”
“Um, Son, isn’t that Lake Pleasant way over there to the right, 60 miles away from the red arrow?”
[The child’s lower lip begins to tremble] “You mean, AZCentral dot com wasn’t right?”
[Hastily] Wait, Tommy, I can get us there. Just click on the phrase ‘Lake Pleasant Regional Park,’ though, so we can find out if we can fish."
“Daaaaaad!”:
[Child bursts into tears] “There’s nothing there!”
[Sorrowfully] "I’m afraid not, son. [Sigh] I thought it might be a few more years before we had this discussion, but we might as well have it now.
“Let me tell you what happened. You’d think that, with many decades of publishing in the state, the Arizona Republic would have an unparalleled storehouse of information about things to do in the area, including recreational activities. That would all be very useful to visitors to the paper’s web site, AZCentral dot com.
“But that would take a genuine care about serving readers. Papers like the Republic got out of the habit of thinking like that decades ago. In the internet age, it’s a lot easier to just put banners on the site about all the things to do in town, without actually providing the information folks might need to do any of it.
“The result? A supposedly local web site that can’t keep track of a goddamn lake fifteen- or twenty-square miles in size. You can see that no one at the paper ever looks at the results. It doesn’t even tell us if there’s a marina, if we can fish or swim, or what. There’s virtually no information at all, and the one bit of information it does have, the address, is incorrect.
“You see, son, this is why the daily press in America is in trouble. For decades they made millions with their local monopolies. Now, they have to be on the web, but their thoroughgoing timidity, internal lassitude and penny-pinching ways means they are singularly ill-equipped to compete in these new paradigms. Not to mention—”
“Uh, Dad?”
“Yes, son?”
“I’m bored. You always get a little wound up when we talk about stuff like that.”
[deep breath] “You’re right, son. Next time we’ll just use a good old-fashioned paper map.”
[smiles] “Aww, Dad!”
[Exeunt, pursued by a bear]
[Curtain]
12:14 AM