The Stroble Paradigm
Eleven years ago this month, I was pulled into a meeting here at the N&R of a bunch of people, most of whom were much higher up the food chain than I, and learned that we, via our corporate parent, were getting into the Internet bidness. A few months later, I was assigned to lead a team of newsroom and tech folks in planning content for what would become the N&R's first Web site, Triad Online, which started going up between Christmas and New Year's Eve of 1994.
One of my team's early meetings involved brainstorming content. Someone suggested that we would probably want to post online the contents of Discover the Triad, a special section we publish every year that's a kind of user's manual for this region.
Dave Stroble, a writer with an even unhealthier interest in computers than my own, then suggested what we were being trained at the time to call a "paradigm shift": Rather than re-reporting each year's edition from scratch and then sticking copy from the printed edition online, he said, we should maintain the information online, make different newsroom people responsible for keeping the different sections up to date, and then download the contents each year to produce the printed edition.
It was a good idea at the time. Now, with our more advanced technology, it's an even better idea. And I was reminded of that by this post at Southern Rants, in which Sue talks about an acquaintance who noted that a charity that appeared in the N&R's recent wish list for area charities was seeking something that he could provide, cheaply. And he provided it.
In the brief ensuing discussion, a commenter suggests that the list be kept online and interactive, "like a wedding registry," which would better serve local charities and make it easier for people to help. This is a perfect, and arguably even more productive, example of what Dave Stroble, who since has left the company, was talking about. I don't know what the technical obstacles to this idea would be, but I'm going to find out.
Perhaps, then, the first manifestation of what I'm going to continue calling the Stroble Paradigm will appear soon as a service linking people who want to help with agencies that need the help.
Got any other ideas for exploiting online's advantages over print in this fashion? Send me an e-mail or hit the comments link.
Comments (8)
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*laugh* It's amazing when darkmoon and I are the same person.. that I would definitely agree with these comments! *grin* But in any case, glad that my ideas have been pushed a bit farther. Making everyone's life more difficult with my "brilliant" ideas is what I live for. *laugh*
Btw, your search function is okay. It doesn't quite do what I wanted, but it wasn't too hard to find. Had to figure out what your search looked for it, and I just feed it the right words.
Posted on January 27, 2005 1:17 PM
Yeah, but don't ALL search engines work pretty much that way? I want something easier, EASIER, I say! :-)
Posted on January 27, 2005 2:20 PM
*laugh* misconception. search engines do NOT work the same way. Take for instance, google versus Yahoo. Both cached servers, but totally different algorithms.
Technical jargon, but here goes. That's like saying that all sorts are the same. But everyone that writes code knows that a binary sort, versus a bubble sort function vastly different. Makes a huge deal when it comes to search parameters and how your site is being searched.
Posted on January 27, 2005 3:04 PM
Oh wait. I totally missed that sarcasm. *sigh* I blame work! Work is the one that's to blame!
Posted on January 27, 2005 3:05 PM
And the cool part? Is that people will believe you! :-)
Posted on January 27, 2005 9:13 PM
Search engines are decidedly different, but I approach from a(n)(educated) user standpoint. I'm familiar with Boolean searching (and/not/or) and consider that to be an advanced search. I ass.u.med the N&R search was boolean (it's not) and gave it one good try and gave up. I find myself yelling at Web sites that don't have a prominent and *useful* search box clearly displayed. When you shift the N&R paradigm, do talk to geeks about searches; then be SURE to talk to users.
Posted on January 29, 2005 5:47 PM
Folks,
As has been mentioned previously, we are currently smack in the middle of implementing a new online publishing system that will bring many of the "bits" of news-record.com (which are currently scattered all over the place and served by a variety of systems) under one umbrella. One upshot of this new, fully integrated system will be an improved site search both in breadth of searchable content and search logic.
Incidentally, you can use Google to search news-record.com if you prefer.
-- Steve Paschall,
NRinteractive User Experience Development Mgr.
Posted on January 30, 2005 12:59 PM
Eleven years ago "this month"? Lex, you need to clean out your desk more often! Surely you can't be recalling the date from memory. You must have been flipping through your old notebooks.
Still, it is flattering to be remembered, by whatever means. And it is especially gratifying to learn that some of my ideas are taking root.
I've been stuck at this point for several minutes considering the notion that a continuously updated online charity wish list would be "more productive" than a continuously updated list of the community information in Discover the Triad. I would not dispute that it would be more useful to the readers or more beneficial to the community.
But if you want productive -- and what veteran of Continuous Improvement doesn't still whimper for it in his sleep? -- then you've got to take a look at your calendars. I just flipped through Sunday's paper and found nine, and it looks like none of them are Web-enabled the way your goTriad.com calendar is. That's a real shame, because the goTriad.com calendar looks like a great tool, both for submitting listings (productive for the newspaper when your readers do your typing for you) and for finding events (productive for readers when they have so many good options for searching and for displaying the results).
Actually, I could argue that the Stroble Paradigm (blush) is already manifest in the news stories that News-Record.com posts online hours before they go to press. In other words, the 24-hour Web site has the potential to be the primary source of information while the once-each-morning newspaper is simply an alternative delivery mechanism.
But, as you pointed out, the most salient feature of the paradigm is that the information is maintained online. This is what shatters the old way of thinking, which was defined -- and constrained -- by the notion that things are only news for a day, to be replaced the next morning by new news.
The ideas I proposed in 1994 were about more than streamlining a computer system so stories could be posted online as easily as they're laid out on a newspaper page. They were about breaking the time barrier. Going online offers a newspaper two ways to do this.
First, sometimes people want to go back and look up a fact or story that was published a long time ago. If you really do still have your notes, you may have preserved another quote from me: "Yesterday's news can be worth more than today's." Somebody's taken this to heart, because I see that you're now charging $2.95 per story in your electronic archives. (What did we start out at -- 50 cents?)
But the second aspect is contradictory. When people access information electronically, whether it's on a Web page or one of those quaint Infoline telephone systems, they're going to expect it to have the same immediacy as a live TV or radio broadcast. When we look at an old, yellowed newspaper clipping we accept that it represents a moment frozen in the past. (And we accept this of an electronic archive, where the path into the past is clearly marked.) But normally when we find something online that's not up to date, it's really annoying.
To return to the example of the Discover the Triad section, an online reader is not going to be satisfied with knowing what the county commissioners' phone numbers were when the section was printed last August. He or she needs to know how to get through to those clowns right now.
Re-verifying information about the community at frequent intervals so as to live up to this expectation will satisfy (dare I say delight?) the customers. But it is not a particularly "productive" way for reporters to spend their time.
Maybe we should dispense with the P-word and try "cost-effective" instead. The News & Record has practically unlimited online space at its disposal. Compared to putting ink on paper, this cost is barely a factor. So this once-practical reason to limit your package to just what's new since yesterday is no longer in force.
With a Web site and a new paradigm you are free to be the preeminent source of information about the Triad, instead of just news. Maybe some of that should be slow-changing information about the community that’s valuable to readers at any time.
Now all you have to do is figure out what information the Triad wants most, and how you can make a living by wrapping ads around it. (Or, what the heck, by selling it one article at a time. Why stop at one new paradigm?) I wish you all good luck in this endeavor. If nothing else, I know you'll have fun trying.
-- Dave Stroble
Posted on February 10, 2005 4:06 AM