Fleishr

Definitive. Authoritative. Comprehensive.

(this post and this blog are none of those things. nonetheless: )

Gawker Media just bought Cityfile. For all the details on that you can go here, here (read the comments) and here. (Besides Gawker itself, which just has its own memos.) The key line in all of this:

Cityfile’s 2,000-plus profiles of New York notables will be the centerpiece of our new topic and people pages.

That means that Gawker will inherit an authoritative, definitive, comprehensive bio cache. Cityfile’s style includes an encyclopedic entry, a photo gallery, user comments and a newsfeed. Each page is something like a Times’ topic page, with less STUFF on it, but more standardized and easier to navigate.

It’s the type of thing you’re shocked Gawker hasn’t had already. Gawker recently tried converting its readers to using hashtag pages, which is sort of like a half-born transformation of your basic tag page that aggregates all posts about a specific topic while letting users contribute.

All this to say: Print was confined mostly by space. (And obviously no interactive stuff.) But with the web, papers (tv, radio, whatever. media) have the shackles of space lifted. You want context? You should get context galore. Your go-to news site shouldn’t just be the place where you can get the latest headline, but the place that helps you understand it. Part of that involves biographies. The Washington Post has been doing that, with a wiki component, over at WhoRunsGov.

NYT Pay Plan and Why It's A Good Idea

The people who are huge Times readers/fans will pay - and yes, the web design IS worth paying for because it helps you understand and get to information, especially on or through topics pages. People are interested in a certain topic, story or genre are going to keep coming back.

Beyond that, one thing this does, whether Times execs realize it or not, is this plan gets readers conditioned to understand and believe that content is not and should not be free, and it is indeed valuable - meaning it is something they should pay for. But it does so gently, without alienating readers or hitting them with a hard and fast paywall, denying access to all or some content immediately. If the content’s worth it, as high-end niche mags have shown, people will understand that content is worth paying for, and they’ll come to think of it as just another usual, regular, normal cost of living, like a $3 latte, like a $120-a-month cable subscription, like an $11.50 movie ticket (which still seems outrageous but I pay it every time.)




My triumphant return to the blog. So busy with statehouse reporting.

Public borrowing and debt

Chris Edwards at the Cato Institute argues that governments should limit borrowing and get rid of state and local defined-benefit pension plans as a way of curbing corruption.

My (now) colleague John Reitmeyer of the Star-Ledger/Record Statehouse Bureau details the recent history of the use of debt in New Jersey, writing that the state has increased borrowing 700 percent over the past two decades. The state got around the constitution by setting up authorities that are allowed to issue debt without voter approval - but voters, too, gave the go-ahead for the state to borrow about 50 times in the last 60 years.

Bloomberg’s Dunstan McNichol also wrote last week about a report saying New Jersey’s debt grew to 33.9 billion, but I can’t link that because, well, y’all don’t have terminals. But you can read AP’s story on the same New Jersey debt report.

Postcard From My Dad

From: Dad
Date: Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 7:30 AM
Subject: credit cards passwords etc
To: Lisa, Dan

I think you should have a photo copy of the front and back of your credit cards

I think you should email yourself a list of user names and passwords to all accoubnts

I GUESS I AM SENILE BUT I TEND TO FORGET PASSWORDS FOR ACCOUNTS I DONT USE OFTEN

BECAUSE SOME REQUIRE MIX LETTERS AND NUMBER SOME DONT ETC

Low appraisals a Major Problem (clearly)

So major, The New York Times has run at least three stories in the past five weeks about the same thing.
The latest installation, printed this weekend, explains the issue like this:

Real estate agents, mortgage brokers and appraisers all say that the low-ball appraisal has become increasingly common in today’s unsettled market. The problem is even more pronounced when homeowners are hoping to refinance a mortgage or get a home equity loan, because there is no current agreed-upon sale price as a benchmark, they say.

It goes on to explain the changes that have come with the Home Valuation Code of Conduct, which changed the way some things are handled between appraisers and banks.

The first incarnation of the story was back on Aug. 19, and dealt largely with the rage appraisers were feeling over the new rules, and how they feel like they’re always caught in the middle of real estate rage. On Aug. 21, another story about low appraisals came in, this time focusing on the buyer.

(My story on low appraisals, by the way, ran Aug. 22. Ignore the byline… we’re undergoing an upgrade at the paper that has, well, made things a little funny for the time being.)

How to get e-mail during a Gmail outage

Before Gmail fails again, set up a system to retrieve your gmail via IMAP/POP - or, to us non-techies, on your phone.

In the middle of a pleasantly readable/understandable breakdown of yesterday’s outage, this sentence explained why my mail kept coming to my Sidekick:

IMAP/POP access and mail processing continued to work normally because these requests don’t use the same routers.

Also from the Gmail blog is this explanation of (and the differences between) the two acronyms.

ICYMI: Newspapers suck at surviving

Everybody’s talking about (or linking to at least) the latest analysis of the failure of newspapers to be competent. This time, it’s by Bill Wyman, former arts editor of NPR and Salon.com, with a self-professed “too long” piece about “the heart of the collapse of daily journalism.”

He makes a few points my own top editor said to us a few days ago, and which have been repeated over the years: Print circulation costs more than it makes and newspapers got into this pickle partially because they were too comfortable in their monopoly on the method of delivery, yadda yadda yadda. He raps bland features that will never get clicks online because they’re just stories about local people and their hobbies or local charity events.

Skip to part two, with a link provocatively titled “Aren’t reporters partly to blame?” (Get to that in a minute.) I like this anecdote, which shows newspaper managers don’t know how to spend money smartly:

I worked for a nonprofit media company that was in a tough financial spot. An angel swept in and made all the troubles go away. That afternoon, the top newsman at the company got up to address us. “This doesn’t mean you’re all going to get Blackberry’s,” he said. Instead, we hired consultants to tell us what to do with our windfall, and we managers spent with them many hours—many painful hours, days upon days, all of them in rooms filled with people being paid huge sums per hour—we could have better spent doing journalism.

Months later, the consultants gave us our results at a company meeting. Suggestion number one: The staff should get Blackberry’s.

Go to the bottom to his “if I were running a chain of papers” and check out his recommendations.

I don’t get why he blames the reporters for the company not buying new computers or for poor web design or content management or delivery. It’s like, I don’t know, blaming the chef at a Chinese restaurant that doesn’t offer take-out or delivery.

To this day, newspapers still act as if they’re trying to commit suicide. I usually don’t call companies/people out but… Newsday.com? What??? I am not even going to link to it.