If your site can't handle inbound Drudge traffic, are you really in the news business when it matters?

Seriously. If your calendar says 2008 or later, and you're a metro-market news site, and you can't handle a wave of traffic from Drudge or Digg or Slashdot or any of the popular linkfarms, you should rethink your server budget.

(Yeah. I know. I should be so lucky.)

UPDATE: I questioned posting this, because I thought it bordered on unfair. But now two hours later, the same article on tampabay.com is still being linked by Drudge and is still making their server swoon. Unsolicited advice: make it a static page for now.

UPDATE 2: As of 12:15 pm, the site appears to be stabilized. Glad they're back.

Just because you have a tool, doesn't mean you have to always use it

I like what two Liverpool newspapers are doing: geotagging certain news stories and plotting them on a map.

But I like what they're not doing even better: tagging every single story.

“We don’t use them for everything; there would be no point in geotagging Liverpool town hall for every council story, for example. But for location-specific articles they work really well.

I don't know how many times I've heard the "everything would be geotagged to City Hall" argument against location metadata. Well, there you have it: just don't tag those stories.

If the location metadata adds to the story, use it. If it adds unnecessary complexity, don't

The map is here, though it seemed to be struggling with load when I checked last.

J-school wants geeks, will pay

J-schools are far from blameless for the lagging state of modern journalism, but at least Medill is doing something about it. Through an ad in the free version of Twitterific, I just saw that the school is actively recruiting programmers to apply for scholarships:

Medill believes that journalism is a key foundation for a functioning democracy and that in the 21st century, programmer/developers are enormously important to the future of journalism. So we have partnered with the Knight Foundation to create this scholarship program for people with strong technology skills who are interested in pursuing a journalism master's degree at Medill.

"The skills and insights that technology developers have are increasingly important to the analysis, delivery and accessibility of information needed in a democracy," said Rich Gordon, who teaches interactive journalism at Medill. "At the same time, the journalistic skills learned at a place like Medill can yield important ideas for applying technology in ways citizens will find relevant and engaging."

These are full scholarships to an expensive and prestigious journalism school and are the result of a partnership between Medill and the Knight Foundation. If you're a coder - or know one - this is definitely worth checking out.

If you had a working Wayback Machine, what would you tell yourself in 1998?

Pat Thornton, who blogs as The Journalism Iconoclast, posted a fun thought-puzzle the other day: If you could jump into the time machine and go back ten years, what would you tell yourself in 1998 about journalism, and where it's headed.

Here's my list, which is in no way complete. What's on yours?

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I love time machines. I’m assuming I can take supporting documentation back with me to make the case.

The more obvious things are, well, obvious (Go live sooner. Link out liberally. Refer to the web from the paper. Put email addresses next to bylines. Don’t waste years thinking about paid content and registration). What follows are the tweaks I wish I could go back and make.

1. Save everything. Stop throwing away stories after two weeks. You’re burning history. And take a screen shot of the site every day. You’ll be glad you did.

2. Find geeks who love news. Pay them well. Ask them to start thinking about how to make all that saved data accessible and findable.

3. Establish a $50 fine for anyone in your organization that uses the phrase “capture eyeballs.” The web is not television. Though, you’ll be surprised to hear, it becomes a very efficient delivery device for video. Full-screen video. Does that make you think of possibilities? It should.

4. Don’t listen to the Big Iron guys in IT when they argue the relative merits of Sybase and Oracle. Ignore them, and don’t spend a penny on these programs. Instead, insist on free My SQL as your database.

5. Stop thinking about articles. Think data. Break articles into chunks of data.

6. Read Dave Winer. Pay close attention. He’s a bit of a nut, but if it’s 1998, almost everything he’s saying is right.

7. Digitize and curate your photo library. It’s a local treasure and worth tons of traffic. (This tip valid in 2008, as well)

8. In fact, open up the entire library for free searching. (”Preach The Long Tail” years before it’s written.)

9. Establish another $50 fine for the term “lock in.” The web is open and slippery. And that’s a good thing that will benefit you in the long run.

10. Teach your reporters to blog. Use Romenesko as the gateway drug.

11. Insist that each story created by the newsroom have attached meta-data, including topic keywords and location. Let the guys from #2 use it in amazing and surprising ways.

12. Repeat after me: “Publishing online counts as publishing. You don’t have to save it for the paper.”

13. You’ve incubated the web group separate from the newsroom to allow a culture and a business to emerge. Good. But now you need to start planning to merge into one news operation that publishes for multiple platforms. Don’t wait much longer for this.

14. Google these names at least weekly in the next few years: Craig Newmark, Jimmy Wales, Nick Denton, Jason Calacanis, Mark Cuban, Kevin Rose. Whatever they’re up to, pay attention, don’t scoff, and borrow liberally.

15. Talk to your users. Add bulletin boards. Attach comments to stories. Participate. That “connection” you’ve always wanted with your readers? The one you pay focus group leaders thousands of dollars to fake? It’s yours for the asking, and it’s free.

(SunSpot.net grab actually from 1997. See what I mean about saving your screenshots? I stopped before 1998, and the actual Wayback Machine has broken images on most of the pages.)

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Got a better list? Go to Journalism Iconoclast and add to the discussion.

Great news: Tampa hates the Tribune redesign

On Monday, The Tampa Tribune joined the list of redesigned US newspapers. But Tampa, under editor Janet Coats, went farther with the rethinking than most, putting all the news and sports into one main news section on most weekdays.

Soon after the papers hit the street, though, the backlash began. Here's Coats, from their web site tonight:

On Monday, we asked you to tell us what you think about the Tribune's redesign, Boy did you take us up on that invitation.

In brief: a lot of people hated it. They called. They emailed. And they canceled. 300 cancellations and thousands of complaints.

So, why is this great news? Despite the fact that this made for a miserable week for everyone from the publisher down to the page designers, the passion that readers and subscribers demonstrated proved the strong connection between a paper and its readers.

The silver-lining here is the anger and outrage that readers displayed when they felt management at The Tribune had gone too far in tinkering with their paper. Their paper.

As long as readers still feel that proprietary sense of ownership, there's still hope for newspapers.

Given the newspaper industry assumption that each paper is shared by two or more readers, I wonder why nobody on the redesign team thought that shoving all the news and sports into one section might cause problems in a lot of subscribing households.

But the good thing is that in just four days, Tampa redesigned the redesign, and will be delivering the next iteration to readers tomorrow. They listened, they learned, they adjusted. Now it's back to the readers for their reaction.

The sky? Not falling.

Terry Heaton is also thinking about online advertising.

That’s a pretty healthy-looking chart, and I agree with the analysts who don’t believe that online advertising will crash and burn as a result of what’s happening in the financial markets. Advertising didn’t end during the great depression; in fact, creativity and innovation flourished, and that’s where we need to be today.

Boom. Bust. Boom.

I displayed the little totem pictured to the left in my office for the past 7-8 years as a constant reminder to myself and anyone who came to visit of how things aren't always what they seem. Flush times could simply be masking bad ideas and stupid money. Tough times can present opportunities to think different(ly).

The only constant is that, in the words of Don Ameche's character in the David Mamet movie, "things change."

Right now, we're all living through a big change. In a downturn, money dries up. People spend less. Businesses advertise less. News organizations struggle to cover their markets on less revenue.

But even in the current tough scenario, online looks to grow in the coming years. We'll see if the predictions hold, but recent prognostications by some key analysts, while ratcheting their projections downward, still hold out hope for mild improvement in digital ad revenues.

The problem is, of course, that these are just projections. You have to look only as far as last December to see how far ad projections can be off when conditions on the ground change.

But if we don't invest our efforts and our dollars where the growth is, we might as well pack up and go home.