Staging a Web Site January 6, 2010
Posted by SteveatLFPress in News.trackback
There has been much criticism over the time that I have worked here around the fact that we do not do a sufficient job adding hyperlinks within articles. We often post articles with an accompanying URL but do not take the extra time to ‘activate’ the URL through the use of hyperlink code. A brief explanation is in order as well as a promise of better things to come.
The current work flow for our content management system sees many of our articles added to the printed newspaper before they appear online. This is not some underhanded attempt to boost print circulation by withholding stories, but is merely a function of deadlines. Often times a reporter will be working on a story well into the evening. Occasionally they are trying to confirm details with sources, or they may simply be working on a particular story only after other assignments have been completed. For a variety of reasons these articles first appear in our print product. What then happens is an automated process that converts our printed paper to XML, which is then loaded up to our web site overnight.
The following morning our web team gets their first crack at the story in order to ’stage’ it (to use the interior design terminology) and make it more interactive.
Now, when a story is ready to be filed during the day it goes through a different process. The reporter posts the story on the site and alerts the online team, who then immediately begins the process of staging the article to optimize it for online reading.
Amongst the tasks they take on:
- activating any URLs included in the article
- looking for additional areas where linking could add context to the article
- adding related maps
- uploading associated documents to our Scribd account and inserting into the article
- linking the article to any related videos that have been shot and uploaded
- Adding the Livestream video player when live video will be broadcast
- connecting the article to related photo galleries
- inserting any ‘Twitter boxes’ to display tweets coming in real time from a reporter
Beginning shortly we will be changing the work flow such that all stories are ’staged’ in this manner when they are loaded; the hope being that you will no longer find an inactive URL as part of a story.
If you have any questions on this topic or how it can be improved upon, feel free to drop them into the comments or send me a message on Twitter.
@SteveatLFPress
It’s not even that there is an inactive url. I find that they just don’t include links what so ever when they write stories.
IMO writers HAVE to adjust the process they have for writing to include all the extras before, do the lions share of that work themselves, THEN dump the interactive content for print.
I also think this will save time (and money) for an already struggling business model and better prepare everyone for the future of the industry!
Bill: That is certainly where we are moving the reporters towards, but you also have to factor in the copy editing process that has to take place.
And, as importantly, the editors are getting better at understanding how they can use digital media to tell a story, and are assigning the stories to the reporters with the request not just for text but all of the related ‘extras’ you mention.