Ladies and gentlemen, the nominations for Best Slashdot Analogy of 2010 is now closed. Congratulations, Mr. Boyko, on your prize of 500 Tanzanian shillings.
Ubuntu membership has not been introduced recently, it has been around from before I started Ubuntu (2006), at least. This is not news. The title needs changing.
Which could have been determined by Taco with just a little basic research. An e-mail. A text message. Anything.
I'm trying to decide whose failure was more epic: Taco (lack of fact-checking) or mxh83 (lack of knowledge). Leaning towards Taco as the "winner." Any thoughts, folks?
I'm having problems with suspend/resume on my laptop... well, actually, I'm having problems with resume. It suspends fine and dandy; resumption... it doesn't. Hibernate also works, and the computer resumes just fine from hibernation if all the peripherals connected at hibernation are still connected when I bring it back up. So it's something in DeviceKit-power, which replaced the now-deprecated HAL daemon, and I haven't gotten far enough into the various logs to find the specific problem.
That's literally my only problem; everything else works (including my software-based Winmodem, but who still uses modems anymore?). Ubuntu 9.10 is faster than 9.04 and appears to use less RAM with the same software set running. (That's in my experience; your mileage may vary with driving style and tire inflation.)
If Austria can do it, it seems likely that other governments have that capability (even if they claim otherwise despite documentation to the contrary).
If you want me to have fuller information, please answer my phone call or e-mail.
E-mail is by far a better option, I think.
It's good for making initial contact, but a telephone interview produces a smoother and more conversational exchange which comes out a lot better in a news article. I can certainly do it that way if you absolutely insist but it's less pleasant to the reader's eye.
And in the meantime, it's still sitting out there for two hours without your input. And I will probably be working on something else with an equally-tight deadline at that point, too.
Of course, if it's past the end of my workday and my co-workers can't reach me, I may not be able to get back to you until tomorrow morning.
Believe me, I'll move heaven and earth to get in touch with you before the story's due but if I'm doing that, please appreciate what I'm trying to do and what constraints I may be under.
I would think they would actually do some research to get their story. You know, reporting. I know that no longer exists in this day and age but one can reminisce about the days when reporters actually did their job.
The single most important tool a reporter has for that job is the telephone. If you've already put that information out in a clear, concise format, that's a good starting point. But I still want to talk to you, or to somebody like you. Without that interview, there's no story to be told.
If you are getting assignments on that short of notice, you should know the field you are reporting well enough and be actively following it closely enough to have completed your research before getting the assignment.
Some reporters have that luxury. Others are more generalists and deal with a variety of topics. They don't have that luxury. For that matter, even the specialists can't be aware of everything.
Like Ms. Schindler said, "(Y)ou've gone deep with your project, and I haven't. I may not be familiar with the problem that it aims to solve. So tell me about it."
There'll be a graf that says "Representatives of (ORGANIZATION NAME) did not return a request for comment" or a phrase to that effect. The effort to make contact was made; for reasons out of my control, it was not successful. My editor gave me a set amount of time; the sand in the hourglass ran out. There's nothing I can do about that. And there's a lot less of that time in the 24/7 online news cycle than there was in the printed media news cycle when the presses rolled at midnight.
If you want me to have fuller information, please answer my phone call or e-mail. Or, as suggested elsewhere, if you don't have time then designate somebody as your press representative and tell him/her to return my phone call when it comes... and also tell him/her to register with Peter Shankman's Help A Reporter Out initiative. Or, as suggested in Ms. Schindler's IT World article, create a/press page or section on your Web site like the big companies do. There you should have information about what your project is about, why you think it matters, its current status, who to contact for more information, screen shots (please remember that print media require high-resolution versions of screen shots or other images for the printing press), press releases and other mentions in the media. (That's not the same as an FAQ and I won't quote an FAQ. I want to hear from the people behind the project what they're doing and why they're doing it. People make news stories interesting. There's a human angle to everything.)
Use plain language, not jargon. If you translate that page into a foreign language, have someone fluent in the language (preferably it's his/her native language) double-check your work. If it's a bad translation, it reflects badly on you. I've lost count of how many foreign businesses have an English press kit that reads as though a fourth-grader wrote it up and I have no doubt that many businesses from English-speaking countries have non-English press material that is equally poorly translated.
Ms. Schindler's Care and Feeding of the Press is excellent. Everyone trying to get press coverage should read it -- hell, I've dealt with public/media relations professionals who could learn a lot about doing their jobs from reading that -- and a lot of people who don't currently think they need press coverage might want to take a look at that, too. In many cases, the information that reporters are looking for is precisely the same information developers and end users are looking for.
Ms. Schindler makes a solid point on the second page: "(Y)ou've gone deep with your project, and I haven't. I may not be familiar with the problem that it aims to solve. So tell me about it."
In that case, I have no option but to finish the assigned article as best I can within the deadline given by my editor. That may mean that somebody's getting left out of the article. That is also the nature of the beast.
No, it's not an emergency... but I just got this assignment five minutes ago and I have to have it done in three hours because my boss said to have it done in three hours so he can put in on the web in three hours and 15 minutes and because he's planning to drop something else on my desk in three hours and five minutes. Man, I don't have an option here. Can you help me, please?
The lesson here is plan ahead. As soon as you know you're going to be working on a story, start asking for comments. If you wait until the last second, you're likely to not get a reply. Yes, reporters can get short deadlines, but you can't expect volunteers contributing their spare time to jump at your say-so, and you have to allow time to get the corporate wheels rolling in the latter case.
A lot of reporters aren't given the luxury of oodles of extra time by their assigning editors and those editors expect results, not requests for more time because "they have to get the corporate wheels rolling over there." The reporter might have hours from the time it's assigned to the deadline for turning it in... and to some people outside of and ignorant of the writing/editing/publishing process, that short amount of time can be misinterpreted as "waiting until the last second." It's not. It's the nature of the beast.
Except that they launch from a latitude not far south of Houston. If LBJ could've moved it to Corpus Christi, I'm sure he would have.
Still, the Cape is a nicely convenient bump, and all that water around the area probably had a lot to recommend it in terms of keeping the Ruskies out back in the '60s.
And there's another thing about all that water, and it's a factor that had a lot to do with the choice of Cape Canaveral: plenty of space to have a crash in without worrying about rockets and debris coming down on houses, schools, other sorts of buildings and... well, anything with people, really.
Shuttle bumped again tonight. They're going right past Tuesday (weather down this way tomorrow is expected to be worse than it was today) and aim for a launch at 18:03:10 Eastern time on Wednesday (2203 GMT).
Online ad revenue will not pay the bills. At current rates, it won't bring in enough money to pay for hosting fees, overhead, salaries and benefits.
You want to read the web site? Pay the man. You want to subscribe to the RSS feed? Pay the man. You want to link to it from your blog? Any non-subscriber who tries to access it is going to be redirected to a login page.
For all intents and purposes, newspapers have been getting paid by advertising for years. I doubt the $0.50 I have to put in the box for daily newspaper covers the cost of the trees they have to cut down. Why can't the online advertising model work as well?
No, the cover price doesn't cover it. Subscription/per-copy sales profits are only a small source of revenue.
Online advertising revenue doesn't come close to the per-column-inch model of print because online advertising prices are absurdly low by comparison. You'd have to jack per-click or per-page-view rates up a lot to even make half of what print advertising still brings in, to the point that advertisers would scream bloody murder if you did so. And then what happens when you factor in online-ad-blocking software like AdBlock Plus? That obviously eats into online advertising revenues.
One way or another, you-the-reader are going to pay for access in the future, whether via individual site subscription fees (like this proposal or like... well, pr0n) or blanket fees paid by your ISP and then passed on to you (the cable-TV-like model used by ESPN's ESPN360 service). The latter model enables ISPs to price competitively and advertise that they offer access to certain sites their competitors can't, but it's not taking off at the moment.
In-depth coverage of topics other than car crashes, car chases, murders and home invasions. You know, the kind of coverage that TV stations simply aren't good at.
Which is why this is a great move. Not for Murdoch or News Corps employees of course, but for all of the free news web sites out there. News Corp is removing its self from the gene pool and will drive traffic to the sites that 'get it'. And with increased traffic comes ad revenue, commenters ^H unpaid content providers, and with more revenue and more content they can offer a better product.
And what are you going to do when we're all charging for access? That time is coming and a lot sooner than you'll like. Online advertising revenues aren't going to carry the water by themselves. At some point, you're going to either pay up or do without.
Owning a newspaper has always been about the vanity of owning a newspaper, they've never made money.
Absolutely false. Newspapers' profit margins have traditionally run upwards of 15 percent (by comparison, ExxonMobil (XOM) has a profit margin of just under 10 percent). The reason newspaper publishers are whining now is because they're no longer making money at rates that make the Mafia envious and are desperate to preserve a profit margin that's possible in no other industry. Until a few years ago, print advertising paid revenue like no other source, to the point that newspaper executives (who, almost without exception, are not from the reporting side of the industry [/bitter]) flat-out refused to consider spending money on trying to figure out how to come up with some sort of business model for online content delivery. Newspapers are still profitable; the bean-counters' problem is that newspapers aren't as profitable as they used to be and the bean-counters haven't come to terms with that fact yet.
I can't begin to count how many meetings I had to endure where business-types implored us reporter types to figure out how to attract younger readers to the traditional printed newspaper. They really didn't want to hear me tell them that younger readers have grown up with the Internet, greatly preferred online news delivery and really didn't care about a product that was at least six hours old by the time they got it. I rather suspect --- but can't prove --- that my bluntness on that topic made me part of the class of laid-off-and-bought-out journalists back in 2005, when it was still a bit of a rarity compared to now.
I'm actually grateful to Twitter in this instance. Without/.'s Twitter feed alerting me to allegations that Twitter is spreading panic about swine flu, I never would have known that Twitter is being accused of spreading panic about swine-flu.
Where would I be without a Twitter post telling me how awful Twitter posts are?
Considering how 24 hour news networks (aka CNN) have been around for almost 30 years, and they have never managed to have any sort of investigative reporting,
Interesting that journalist (a group of people who make a living bringing you information about things that do not "belong" to them - events) are mad about websites bringing you information about things that do not "belong" to them - AP stories.
AP's not selling the event itself. It's selling the coverage of the event produced by its employees and its member news organizations.
That's especially true when these same articles are already used in local and wire stories and that our audience is a fraction of that.
Aren't those articles being published by media outlets that pay for the privilege?
Further, it doesn't cost five figures to produce 65 articles a year,
Salary, benefits and in most cases travel and other necessary expenses (telephone, for example). It adds up.
It comes down to this: Either way, you're going to pay somebody --- and more likely, a whole bunch of somebodies --- to do the work. How much would it cost you to pay somebody to research and write those 65 articles as bespoke works that you own the copyright for?
Slashdot Mirror
I take all credit for that grammatical failure, by the way.
Ladies and gentlemen, the nominations for Best Slashdot Analogy of 2010 is now closed. Congratulations, Mr. Boyko, on your prize of 500 Tanzanian shillings.
Ubuntu membership has not been introduced recently, it has been around from before I started Ubuntu (2006), at least. This is not news. The title needs changing.
Which could have been determined by Taco with just a little basic research. An e-mail. A text message. Anything.
I'm trying to decide whose failure was more epic: Taco (lack of fact-checking) or mxh83 (lack of knowledge). Leaning towards Taco as the "winner." Any thoughts, folks?
I'm having problems with suspend/resume on my laptop ... well, actually, I'm having problems with resume. It suspends fine and dandy; resumption ... it doesn't. Hibernate also works, and the computer resumes just fine from hibernation if all the peripherals connected at hibernation are still connected when I bring it back up. So it's something in DeviceKit-power, which replaced the now-deprecated HAL daemon, and I haven't gotten far enough into the various logs to find the specific problem.
That's literally my only problem; everything else works (including my software-based Winmodem, but who still uses modems anymore?). Ubuntu 9.10 is faster than 9.04 and appears to use less RAM with the same software set running. (That's in my experience; your mileage may vary with driving style and tire inflation.)
Yes it is OSS. It's not GPL, but an open source frontend with the right license would still be OSS.
If the underlying driver isn't also GPL'd, then it's not open-source.
And as long as we don't have access to that underlying driver, we have no way to guarantee that there's no backdoor into our communications.
Of course, we already know that the Austrian interior ministry has confirmed it has no problem listening to Skype conversations.
If Austria can do it, it seems likely that other governments have that capability (even if they claim otherwise despite documentation to the contrary).
I should have known I wouldn't be the first to remember that from last week. Can we mod both timothy and Slatterz -1 Redundant?
If you want me to have fuller information, please answer my phone call or e-mail.
E-mail is by far a better option, I think.
It's good for making initial contact, but a telephone interview produces a smoother and more conversational exchange which comes out a lot better in a news article. I can certainly do it that way if you absolutely insist but it's less pleasant to the reader's eye.
And in the meantime, it's still sitting out there for two hours without your input. And I will probably be working on something else with an equally-tight deadline at that point, too.
Of course, if it's past the end of my workday and my co-workers can't reach me, I may not be able to get back to you until tomorrow morning.
Believe me, I'll move heaven and earth to get in touch with you before the story's due but if I'm doing that, please appreciate what I'm trying to do and what constraints I may be under.
I would think they would actually do some research to get their story. You know, reporting. I know that no longer exists in this day and age but one can reminisce about the days when reporters actually did their job.
The single most important tool a reporter has for that job is the telephone. If you've already put that information out in a clear, concise format, that's a good starting point. But I still want to talk to you, or to somebody like you. Without that interview, there's no story to be told.
If you are getting assignments on that short of notice, you should know the field you are reporting well enough and be actively following it closely enough to have completed your research before getting the assignment.
Some reporters have that luxury. Others are more generalists and deal with a variety of topics. They don't have that luxury. For that matter, even the specialists can't be aware of everything.
Like Ms. Schindler said, "(Y)ou've gone deep with your project, and I haven't. I may not be familiar with the problem that it aims to solve. So tell me about it."
There'll be a graf that says "Representatives of (ORGANIZATION NAME) did not return a request for comment" or a phrase to that effect. The effort to make contact was made; for reasons out of my control, it was not successful. My editor gave me a set amount of time; the sand in the hourglass ran out. There's nothing I can do about that. And there's a lot less of that time in the 24/7 online news cycle than there was in the printed media news cycle when the presses rolled at midnight.
If you want me to have fuller information, please answer my phone call or e-mail. Or, as suggested elsewhere, if you don't have time then designate somebody as your press representative and tell him/her to return my phone call when it comes ... and also tell him/her to register with Peter Shankman's Help A Reporter Out initiative. Or, as suggested in Ms. Schindler's IT World article, create a /press page or section on your Web site like the big companies do. There you should have information about what your project is about, why you think it matters, its current status, who to contact for more information, screen shots (please remember that print media require high-resolution versions of screen shots or other images for the printing press), press releases and other mentions in the media. (That's not the same as an FAQ and I won't quote an FAQ. I want to hear from the people behind the project what they're doing and why they're doing it. People make news stories interesting. There's a human angle to everything.)
Use plain language, not jargon. If you translate that page into a foreign language, have someone fluent in the language (preferably it's his/her native language) double-check your work. If it's a bad translation, it reflects badly on you. I've lost count of how many foreign businesses have an English press kit that reads as though a fourth-grader wrote it up and I have no doubt that many businesses from English-speaking countries have non-English press material that is equally poorly translated.
Ms. Schindler's Care and Feeding of the Press is excellent. Everyone trying to get press coverage should read it -- hell, I've dealt with public/media relations professionals who could learn a lot about doing their jobs from reading that -- and a lot of people who don't currently think they need press coverage might want to take a look at that, too. In many cases, the information that reporters are looking for is precisely the same information developers and end users are looking for.
Ms. Schindler makes a solid point on the second page: "(Y)ou've gone deep with your project, and I haven't. I may not be familiar with the problem that it aims to solve. So tell me about it."
In that case, I have no option but to finish the assigned article as best I can within the deadline given by my editor. That may mean that somebody's getting left out of the article. That is also the nature of the beast.
Parellelize is what my boss will do to me if I blow deadline.
If only I had mod points ....
You made me laugh and spew Coke all over the keyboard. Excellent work!
No, it's not an emergency ... but I just got this assignment five minutes ago and I have to have it done in three hours because my boss said to have it done in three hours so he can put in on the web in three hours and 15 minutes and because he's planning to drop something else on my desk in three hours and five minutes. Man, I don't have an option here. Can you help me, please?
The lesson here is plan ahead. As soon as you know you're going to be working on a story, start asking for comments. If you wait until the last second, you're likely to not get a reply. Yes, reporters can get short deadlines, but you can't expect volunteers contributing their spare time to jump at your say-so, and you have to allow time to get the corporate wheels rolling in the latter case.
A lot of reporters aren't given the luxury of oodles of extra time by their assigning editors and those editors expect results, not requests for more time because "they have to get the corporate wheels rolling over there." The reporter might have hours from the time it's assigned to the deadline for turning it in ... and to some people outside of and ignorant of the writing/editing/publishing process, that short amount of time can be misinterpreted as "waiting until the last second." It's not. It's the nature of the beast.
Except that they launch from a latitude not far south of Houston. If LBJ could've moved it to Corpus Christi, I'm sure he would have.
Still, the Cape is a nicely convenient bump, and all that water around the area probably had a lot to recommend it in terms of keeping the Ruskies out back in the '60s.
And there's another thing about all that water, and it's a factor that had a lot to do with the choice of Cape Canaveral: plenty of space to have a crash in without worrying about rockets and debris coming down on houses, schools, other sorts of buildings and ... well, anything with people, really.
Shuttle bumped again tonight. They're going right past Tuesday (weather down this way tomorrow is expected to be worse than it was today) and aim for a launch at 18:03:10 Eastern time on Wednesday (2203 GMT).
Online ad revenue will not pay the bills. At current rates, it won't bring in enough money to pay for hosting fees, overhead, salaries and benefits.
You want to read the web site? Pay the man. You want to subscribe to the RSS feed? Pay the man. You want to link to it from your blog? Any non-subscriber who tries to access it is going to be redirected to a login page.
For all intents and purposes, newspapers have been getting paid by advertising for years. I doubt the $0.50 I have to put in the box for daily newspaper covers the cost of the trees they have to cut down. Why can't the online advertising model work as well?
No, the cover price doesn't cover it. Subscription/per-copy sales profits are only a small source of revenue.
Online advertising revenue doesn't come close to the per-column-inch model of print because online advertising prices are absurdly low by comparison. You'd have to jack per-click or per-page-view rates up a lot to even make half of what print advertising still brings in, to the point that advertisers would scream bloody murder if you did so. And then what happens when you factor in online-ad-blocking software like AdBlock Plus? That obviously eats into online advertising revenues.
One way or another, you-the-reader are going to pay for access in the future, whether via individual site subscription fees (like this proposal or like ... well, pr0n) or blanket fees paid by your ISP and then passed on to you (the cable-TV-like model used by ESPN's ESPN360 service). The latter model enables ISPs to price competitively and advertise that they offer access to certain sites their competitors can't, but it's not taking off at the moment.
In-depth coverage of topics other than car crashes, car chases, murders and home invasions. You know, the kind of coverage that TV stations simply aren't good at.
Which is why this is a great move. Not for Murdoch or News Corps employees of course, but for all of the free news web sites out there. News Corp is removing its self from the gene pool and will drive traffic to the sites that 'get it'. And with increased traffic comes ad revenue, commenters ^H unpaid content providers, and with more revenue and more content they can offer a better product.
And what are you going to do when we're all charging for access? That time is coming and a lot sooner than you'll like. Online advertising revenues aren't going to carry the water by themselves. At some point, you're going to either pay up or do without.
Owning a newspaper has always been about the vanity of owning a newspaper, they've never made money.
Absolutely false. Newspapers' profit margins have traditionally run upwards of 15 percent (by comparison, ExxonMobil (XOM) has a profit margin of just under 10 percent). The reason newspaper publishers are whining now is because they're no longer making money at rates that make the Mafia envious and are desperate to preserve a profit margin that's possible in no other industry. Until a few years ago, print advertising paid revenue like no other source, to the point that newspaper executives (who, almost without exception, are not from the reporting side of the industry [/bitter]) flat-out refused to consider spending money on trying to figure out how to come up with some sort of business model for online content delivery. Newspapers are still profitable; the bean-counters' problem is that newspapers aren't as profitable as they used to be and the bean-counters haven't come to terms with that fact yet.
I can't begin to count how many meetings I had to endure where business-types implored us reporter types to figure out how to attract younger readers to the traditional printed newspaper. They really didn't want to hear me tell them that younger readers have grown up with the Internet, greatly preferred online news delivery and really didn't care about a product that was at least six hours old by the time they got it. I rather suspect --- but can't prove --- that my bluntness on that topic made me part of the class of laid-off-and-bought-out journalists back in 2005, when it was still a bit of a rarity compared to now.
I'm actually grateful to Twitter in this instance. Without /.'s Twitter feed alerting me to allegations that Twitter is spreading panic about swine flu, I never would have known that Twitter is being accused of spreading panic about swine-flu.
Where would I be without a Twitter post telling me how awful Twitter posts are?
Considering how 24 hour news networks (aka CNN) have been around for almost 30 years, and they have never managed to have any sort of investigative reporting,
Are you quite certain about that? Back in February, CNN won a National Headline Award in the Documentary Or Series Of Reports category for its special "On Deadly Ground: Women Of Iraq" produced by its Special Investigations Unit ... which, as you can see, has been working hard on a lot of things for a long time.
Interesting that journalist (a group of people who make a living bringing you information about things that do not "belong" to them - events) are mad about websites bringing you information about things that do not "belong" to them - AP stories.
AP's not selling the event itself. It's selling the coverage of the event produced by its employees and its member news organizations.
That's especially true when these same articles are already used in local and wire stories and that our audience is a fraction of that.
Aren't those articles being published by media outlets that pay for the privilege?
Further, it doesn't cost five figures to produce 65 articles a year,
Salary, benefits and in most cases travel and other necessary expenses (telephone, for example). It adds up.
It comes down to this: Either way, you're going to pay somebody --- and more likely, a whole bunch of somebodies --- to do the work. How much would it cost you to pay somebody to research and write those 65 articles as bespoke works that you own the copyright for?