But because I follow people like Krishnan Guru-Murthy and Channel 4 News, and occasionally check in with the mainstream media, I haven’t been able to completely seal myself off from everything.

As has been written by smarter people, the whole thing is essentially a farce. The inquiry’s own “Terms of Reference” say:

We will therefore be considering the UK’s involvement in Iraq, including the way decisions were made and actions taken, to establish, as accurately as possible, what happened and to identify the lessons that can be learned. Those lessons will help ensure that, if we face similar situations in future, the government of the day is best equipped to respond to those situations in the most effective manner in the best interests of the country.

The explicitly stated goal of the commission isn’t to get any kind of justice for the victims, nor hold anyone to account for the UK’s role in the “supreme international crime“, in the words of the American chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunal, Robert H. Jackson:

To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

The inquiry’s goal is to aid future UK governments by looking at the “lessons” of Iraq. But as the ever-perceptive editors of Media Lens note, “the use of military and economic force to control and exploit the world is non-negotiable” for the interests that control the major political parties.

We are free to vote for the Labour party to attack ‘threatening’, but in fact defenceless, Third World countries, or we can vote for the Conservative party to do the same. We can buy the Guardian that respectfully hypes the ‘threat’ as defined by ‘official sources’, or we can buy The Times that does the same.

When public scepticism erupts in response to resultant extremes of criminality and violence that even the media are powerless to deny, the illusion must be bolstered. Then Tweedledum-Tweedledee will choose from their own to rig an “inquiry”, while their media allies present the process as something other than a farce. [Source]

Obviously, this is something that is not even considered by the mainstream media. For Britain’s most ahem “left-wing” broadsheet, the Guardian, the Iraq war was the result of “monstrous blunder“. In an editorial the day after the announcement of the inquiry, the paper wrote:

No, the real reason an inquiry is needed is to draw together what we already know, and in its light to try to grasp how such a monstrous blunder could have been made. What went wrong with the structures, the culture and – yes – the individuals in Whitehall, such that the country could be led into a bloody conflict on a false prospectus?

What’s wrong (not “went wrong” — fundamentally wrong) is plain to see. The UK has been involved (not “led into”) in numerous “bloody conflicts”, but normally there is little need for hand-wringing over the “blunder” of war, because it’s not usually considered a “blunder”. Normally it goes well. For us.

Blair’s bullshit

So, let’s get to the point at hand: today Tony Blair is testifying before the inquiry. The Guardian is reporting that he believed “beyond doubt” that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.¹

I was hoping to write something at least somewhat-interesting on what he said today, but I physically can’t. Go ahead, read for yourself. For anyone familiar with even some of the facts, the mendacity on display is utterly mind-bending.

For example, take what Blair says on the pre-invasion sanctions, imposed during the 1990s:

Blair told the inquiry that prior to 9/11 the British and American policy of containing Saddam’s regime with “smart” sanctions had been worth trying, although there were holes in the way they were working.

This is an interesting position to take. I wouldn’t exactly refer to the unnecessary deaths of over half a million under-fives. Here’s what UNICEF said in 1999:

[I]f the substantial reduction in child mortality throughout Iraq during the 1980s had continued through the 1990s, there would have been half a million fewer deaths of children under-five in the country as a whole during the eight year period 1991 to 1998. As a partial explanation, she pointed to a March statement of the Security Council Panel on Humanitarian Issues which states: “Even if not all suffering in Iraq can be imputed to external factors, especially sanctions, the Iraqi people would not be undergoing such deprivations in the absence of the prolonged measures imposed by the Security Council and the effects of war.”

The rest of what he says is of the same character, and the mendacity will by typical for anyone familiar with what those in power say, and what the facts really are.

What is particularly striking is how Iran is singled out. No points for guessing why.

The solution basically involved me having to go through and strip all the existing HTML code from the article and replace it with stuff that actually made sense. (I think the copy was pasted into the visual editor from a word processor, and was just bizarre and horrible.)

This was an exceptional case, but it made me think about how much code student journalists need to know.

The more I think about it, the more it seems that the main suggestion I was making for how the Lincoln School of Journalism should improve its online teaching — adopting WordPress in all production modules — conflicts with my assertion that students don’t need to know HTML.

On the whole WordPress is very easy to use, but when it comes to actually posting things the visual editor can produce some really horrible code. If things go wrong, or significant formatting changes need to be made, then looking at the HTML is usually the best way of sorting things out.

In a comment, Martin Stabe wrote:

Most – nearly all – journalists will never have to do HTML markup, let alone template design, during their entire working lives.¹

Why is this? I don’t know for certain, but I’d guess that there’s more separation between copy and the resulting code in “professional” CMSes. So, yes, fine, the journalists who get to use those systems will not have to tinker with the code. And if things do go wrong and require some kind of intervention either directly in the code, or with what produces the code, it’ll be handled by people who know what they’re doing.

But what about the people who aren’t part of an organisation that has this setup? An organisation without in-house technical staff? An organisation that consists of just one, or two journalists?

If the “next big thing” for journalism is really the next small thing — hyperlocal, small publishers, and “entrepreneurial journalists” — then the people doing this kind of work are going to need to know some code.

They’ll be running their own sites. Thankfully it can be done fairly easily. As an example, The Linc does pretty much all its technical stuff in-house.² The knowledge and skills needed aren’t particularly advanced, and they’re fairly easy to pick up.

I think what I wrote about teaching students HTML was a reaction to how it is currently taught at Lincoln. Teaching it as the lead-in to using Dreamweaver is wrong. Students, and journalists in general, don’t need that kind of HTML.

What they do need, particularly if we want to equip students to do innovative things on the internet, is a knowledge of how HTML works in the context of a CMS. They don’t need to know how to write a static page in HTML, and nor should they be taught it.

But they should know how the formatting for the post they’re working on in WordPress works, and how to change things, and know how lists work, and links, and pictures.

If you’re a taxi driver you probably don’t need to know how to build a car, or conduct extensive engine repairs. But you should probably know how to change the oil, inflate the tyres, and fill the wiper fluid. You should also know how they affect things when you’re behind the wheel.

I wasn’t taught HTML or CSS in any great detail, but I know the basics of how to edit the template files on this site to get things to work how I want them to work. I had to play around and learn for myself, and I now consider them essential skills for publishing my own website.³

If there’s a good chance self-publishing is going to be significant for the future of journalism, then we should teach the people who are going to do it the skills they need to do it.

In the comments on that post, Dave Lee wrote: “Blogging – and online journalism as a whole – at Lincoln has been seriously lacking.” I can personally vouch for this. Whilst there have been some encouraging developments, much of the practice and teaching is still rotten.

Across the course, a serious look needs to be taken at every aspect of how online journalism is taught, what the flaws are with the current situation, and what can be done to improve things. I offered Bullet Magazine such a review of their website at the end of December, and I’ll take a similar approach here.

Contents

This post is really, incredibly long. 3,000 words long. To help if you want to skip through, here’s a linked table of contents:

• Summary
• Defining “online journalism”
• Current online teaching at Lincoln
  • The introduction is ill
  • Broadcast is best
  • Pathetic print
  • Online on its own
    • Second year
    • Third year
• How to improve “online journalism” at Lincoln
  • An improved introduction
  • Better broadcast
    • Doing more
    • Setting strict standards
  • Preferable print
  • Oust online
    • Journalists don’t need to know HTML
• Conclusion

The short version

Because the real thing is so long, here’s the short version. (Skip this if you’re going to read the whole thing.)

“Online journalism” teaching is in a bad way at the University of Lincoln, with different production modules teaching different things, and the existence of a separate and useless “on-line journalism production” module.

Students aren’t taught anything meaningful in their first year, and online is dismissed as “blogging”. Meanwhile, the second- and third- year print modules’ online aspects consist of a static Dreamweaver template. The second-year online module also focuses on Dreamweaver. There seems to be no consistent approach in the TV production modules, for any year.

Radio production is the most advanced, and the other production modules should take their cue from Gary Stevens’s work. He has set up a WordPress site that students post work to. Unfortunately, this is not used as comprehensively as it should be, and most content is posted by the third-year radio students.

To improve matters the separate online modules should be scrapped. Very few students take these. The useful material should be taught to the first-year students, and an emphasis should be placed on teaching them the basic of online — including using WordPress. Students should be encouraged or even forced to use this as a way of breeding familiarity with the tools and techniques required.

This will then support more advanced and complex practices in the second and third years, where production modules should adopt WordPress and have students publish all of their production work online. Increased familiarity will also help students contribute to current debates on online journalism and its uses — hyperlocal news websites, for example.

The importance of the internet to today and tomorrow’s media requires that a robust and thorough online journalism education program be implemented. The current situation cannot be allowed to continue.

Open the Oxford, crack the Collins (A definition)

When I talk about “online journalism” I’ll be specifically referring to production, and nothing else. There is a lot of stuff that you could include with “online journalism”: just look at all the topics covered by Paul Bradshaw’s Online Journalism Blog.

In this post I am solely concerned with getting students’ stories on the web.

Current online teaching at Lincoln

Right now, the approach that the School is taking is in a bit of a mess. Different specialisms get taught different things. Depending on the modules students take in their second year they’ll get taught different things, and there’s still a separate online unit.

Because of how compartmentalised this is it makes sense to go through each part individually.

The introduction is ill

There isn’t much of an introduction to the basics of online journalism, and what’s given is poor. In the first year students are set a blogging assignment, mentioned above. In a comment on my recent post about it, Charlotte Reid recalled the lecture given by Bernie Russell, the tutor in charge of the online module, on the topic.

Broadcast is best

Thanks to the work of Gary Stevens¹, a radio tutor, the broadcast modules include a good level of online publishing. Radio newsdays publish their work to lsjnews.co.uk, accompanying their audio reports with small bits of introductory copy, and occasionally with pictures.

The work of the third-year radio students, “CityVibe@5”, is currently the only content that is regularly uploaded. In another comment Charlotte Reid explained the situation for the second-year radio students:

The first few weeks of radio newsdays we did the online part. As radio is influenced by Gary Stevens we used wordpress and did upload audio, pictures (that we’d taken ourselves) and copy. But our radio group is so small that it was dropped, even the required element in our portfolio.

Also, some work from the television students is also available on the site. The videos are hosted on an associated YouTube account, and embedded into posts. There are only eight video posts up, so it seems as if this isn’t a consistent practice. Even so, the arrangement is there and the only work left to do is export, upload, and post the video packages.

Charlotte Reid again:

TV in year one we would upload the video to Youtube and link it up to some copy etc on wordpress. From the sounds of it though they don’t in year two because of copyright issues.

The site is a little rough around the edges, but nothing that cannot be easily fixed. I’ve told Gary in person how impressed by it I am, and as such the recommendations below will be minor.

Pathetic print

In the second- and third-year print news module there is an “online” component, but it barely deserves being described as such. Students are required to fill out a Dreamweaver template with that day’s stories. “Fill out” is exactly the right description, as it’s more like filling out a tax return than publishing journalism on the internet.

If you take a look for yourselves, you can perhaps appreciate how dire the situation is. Some “standards”² are applied — each headline must be six words long, and each excerpt 15 — but it is not enough. Particularly annoying are the wildly different picture sizes. Let’s go through the stories and look at the sizes, from top to bottom: (All sizes are in pixels, width first and height second.)

1. 200×100
2. 105×116
3. 101×100
4. 100×100 (The six bottom stories’ pictures are this size.)

Because of the way the dreamweaver template works, the pictures have to be cropped and resized before they’re imported. If you insert a larger picture the box will expand and destroy the layout.

What’s even worse is that, since these are the same stories that appear on the tabloid page, there are usually only about three pictures. This means the less ridiculous 100×100 image boxes often don’t get used.

The “online” requirement — which doesn’t require the person filling out the page to be online — is a joke, and clearly an afterthought (and as such is an afterthought during the newsdays). I expect there was a meeting where it was discussed how to incorporate online journalism into the module, and Roger, Tim, or Bernie suggested this.

I don’t do the magazine module, but it seems that things are just as bad that side of the fence.

Due to the laughable state its in now, the suggestions are more extreme than for broadcast.

Online on its own

Separate to the online journalism teaching included (or not) in the other modules, there is a “On-line journalism production” option. In the second year this combines with a 12-week photography unit to form a whole-year module, while it’s a full, two-semester module for third-year students.

Second year

Put simply, it’s teaching the wrong things. Fundamentally, it is approaching the subject from the wrong direction.

The actual production involved in the unit is focused on producing static content, and much of what’s learned is in aid of that. From the unit handbook (.pdf), one of the five “expected learning outcomes”:

At the end of the semester, you should: […] * be able to design and mark-up a web site by writing HTML, and by using a web authoring program;

Students are introduced to content management systems (CMS), but only briefly. The focus is on Dreamweaver, and that’s what is taught. Dreamweaver, Dreamweaver, Dreamweaver.

I have no opinion on Dreamweaver as a program. I’m not a web designer. But it’s not a good fit for “on-line journalism production”. It produces static pages and static websites.

The WordPress codex says: “[t]he problem with purely static pages is that they are difficult to maintain.” And a site made out of them just doesn’t work when you trying to get news up quickly and easily.

Thankfully it is not required that the assessed site be created in Dreamweaver (my group’s site was done on WordPress). But Dreamweaver is what’s taught.

Each group has to “design and build a Web site covering a particular area of interest as part of a group project.” If you’re thinking this could mean a whole range of things — a site all about horses, for instance — then you’re right. (Last year, one group did create a site all about horses.) There’s very little that’s journalistic about the whole thing.

Third year

Things get a little more sensible for third-year students that take the online module, which runs through both semesters. One of the “expected learning outcomes” is that students “should… be able to use a content management system to host, manage and display your material”. This is encouraging.

Whereas the second-year program is outdated, the third-year one (.doc) is far more up-to-date. But the question here is why is it on its own, away from all of the other modules? It teaches things that all students should know, not just the 20 people who choose to continue with online in their final year.

The king is dead. We’re all the king (Improving things)

Thinking about writing this post was hard. It was hard because I was thinking of how to change and improve the current set-up, a part of which is a separate online module in the journalism course. This is completely unnecessary.

Going forward, there shouldn’t be a separate module for teaching these skills because they should be taught to all journalism students. The internet — and publishing news on it — is just that important. No matter what they’ve decided to specialise in, all journalism students should know how to put their work online. There is no such thing as an “online” journalist. We should all be “online” journalists, and all students should be taught those things that are reserved for the “online” module — the parts that are relevant and useful, anyway.

Below I’ll go through each specialism again, looking at what needs to be done to improve their online teaching.

An improved introduction

Teaching online journalism needs to start with the course. The internet is incredibly important to all media now, and the first-year teaching should reflect that.

First-year student Jonathan Cresswell mentioned that there is a little of this at present:

As I’ve yet to be taught much online journalism, as I’ve only been here for one semester so far, (except in a lecture by Gary Stevens who was talking about convergence, and showing great examples of how online can be used to good effect)[…]

Gary deserves some sort of award. This is what needs to be done. But not only telling students, but teaching them too. Right now it is being dismissed as “blogging”. It’s not just blogging. It’s publishing.

The internet enables cheap (or free) publishing, allowing previously un- or underserved communities to share information quickly and easily. You know this. I know this. The LSJ (should) know this.

So why not act on what we know?

Right alongside their basic writing, first-year students should be taught how to publish on the web. It’s easy, so it can be taught quickly. And by getting in early you’re building skills that will be useful throughout the course (and throughout students’ lives and careers).

Start with WordPress. It’s a very simple and easy-to-use CMS. It is also very powerful — and by getting students to use it early on they’ll hopefully be tapping into much of that power by their third year.

Teach it as a tool. That’s all it is. Get students comfortable with it. You could even require that students publish their copy on WordPress blogs for assessment (and if there are any legal worries, just have them password-protected).

The important thing is first-year students are taught about publishing to the internet, that they are taught thoroughly, and they get familiar with doing it. These basic online skills underpin everything else that you could possibly want to have students do later on in their course.

Better broadcast

The broadcast people are already way ahead of everyone else. There are only two things they need to do: 1) more, 2) apply rigid standards.

Doing more

Everything needs to go up. For radio, save as an .mp3 and upload it to an audio hosting site. Embed the player, and you’re all set.

But more people need to be involved. From the author names on lsjnews.co.uk it seems like one person gets stuck with putting everything online. It’s a waste of that person’s time. Sharing the workload will probably be faster, and increases familiarity with the workflow. Everyone should be responsible for uploading their own content.

TV is a trickier one (as video is more time-consuming to produce and upload, and harder to work with). Early on, students should be made familiar with websites such as The Real News Network to show the possibilities for video on the web. With Vimeo and YouTube, the tools for hosting video content are well advanced, and embedding video is fairly simple and straightforward.

I’d imagine the time it takes to export the video as a usable format, and the time it takes to upload and be processed by the hosting website would be the hindering factor here. But getting the video news produced by students online should be an aim.

Setting strict standards

This is relatively straightforward. Whoever has the keys to lsjnews.co.uk should see what their current WordPress theme will tolerate in terms of headline length, excerpt length, picture sizes, picture requirements, etc.

This information should be used to draw up a set of requirements that each story published should meet (headline between 20 and 25 characters long, for example). This will help improve the consistency of the website, and sort out any visual problems there are currently.

Headlines and excerpts should be specified in character lengths, rather than in words (as it’s more specific; words can be long or short).

Preferable print

Use WordPress. Bang. Problem solved.

Well, sort of.

There should be no mucking around with Dreamweaver templates. I mean, just look how awful the newspaper one is! We have to deal with that every newsday.

It’s also really awkward, as one person gets stuck with it, and everyone has to either send over their stories or dictate headlines and excerpts to the person doing the page.

Everyone should be responsible for their own stories. So, here’s a thought: set up a WordPress site, give everyone an account, and have them do it themselves. A side benefit is that you end up with a working website, and not a rubbish-looking, completely-fake piece of static HTML.

Even if you don’t overhaul the way print newsdays work (a topic for another day), this makes things far simpler and easier, and a lot more realistic. WordPress may not be like any news organisation’s CMS — I wouldn’t know, as I’ve never seen one — but I’m sure it’s far closer to reality than mocking up a static front page.

As with broadcast, there should be strict standards in place. The current template has a version of this, but they should all be scrapped, as they don’t make any sense and wouldn’t transfer over.

Oust online

Just bin it. There’s a fair bit of the current teaching that is just out of date and/or unnecessary. What is relevant should be taught elsewhere — in the other modules, or during the first year.

There’s not a lot else to say on this, other than it makes no sense to have it as a separate module. Doing so is actually detrimental to the online teaching that should be present throughout the other production modules.

Journalists don’t need to know HTML

A common complaint I hear from journalism students struggling with their law assessments is “if I wanted to be a lawyer I would have taken a law degree”. But law is essential for journalists, in the same way the highway code is essential for drivers.

If a student wanted to be a web designer they would have taken a web design course. Unlike law, knowing how to code a website is not essential for any journalist who wants to publish on the internet. There are suites of tools that come with either complete designs or automate the process.

I believe that students should know how to do basic things in HTML, but it is not essential, and often better results can be achieved with tools that don’t require such knowledge.

For example, this whole website runs on WordPress, and uses a template designed by someone else. I did not even attempt to build it myself. Even basic visual markup — <em>, <strong>, and so on — isn’t needed. I’m writing this in Markdown³, and WordPress includes a visual editor, which appears to the user to alter text in the same way a word processor does.

Here’s a comment from Mindy McAdams, whom I agree with on the topic. A brief excerpt:

[T]he amount of [CSS & HTML] that journalism students need to know is really quite small. I think we should aim more for exposure and basic comprehension[…]

And you may as well do that in the first year, while you’re focusing on something else. Perhaps while teaching the basics of how a WordPress theme is constructed, and which template documents control which user-facing elements.

Conclusion

The Lincoln School of Journalism need to radically overhaul the way they think about online, and the way they teach their students about it.

Online should be incorporated into the other production units, and students should be taught how to actually use the tools in their first year. This is extremely important because it is the foundation for doing anything more complex, and publishing on the internet is so important now that not teaching it straight away is inexcusable.

At a specific level, tutors should focus on using WordPress as the standard online publishing tool because it is free, quick to teach, easy to use, and immensely powerful. It should be thoroughly incorporated into the three production modules and used throughout the three-year course.

An academic year later, and it doesn’t look as if anything’s changed. In a comment on my post about blogging assignments Mindy McAdams wrote:

[I]f they treat it as a class assignment… they will never understand blogging, will they?

I have taken it for granted that assigning students to create and keep a blog is the best way to get them to under tand blogging. But maybe there is a better way.

I’ve got no idea whether any of the staff at Lincoln read that post, but I doubt it. Here’s what the “Journalism Skills” unit handbook for first-year Lincoln journalism students says on blogging:

***Blogging — You will be required to produce a blog with at least six entries. You will receive instructions on these requirements in the lecture devoted to blogging by Bernie Russell in week four (February 17). The blog will be handed in by 4pm on Thursday April 15 (Week 10). You will hand in a copy of the blog address (the URL) on an A4 sheet of paper, which also also contains your name and student number, YOU WILL ALSO email the blog address and your name and student number to Bernie Russell and Roger De Bank by 4pm on Thursday April 15 (Week 10). This represents 15% of your Semester B marks. [Their emphases.]

The comment I made about the requirements for last year’s first-year students still applies: “That isn’t blogging as self-motivated publishing. That’s work.”

I’d be very interested to hear what Bernie says in his February 17th lecture, but I’m not especially hopeful he’ll fill students with a passion for blogging.

In my retrospective of how the first topic went, I was very pessimistic about the chances of increasing involvement, and dismissed it as yet another case of my 90/10 rule on student effort.¹

Just a small town girl

After I posted, Andy Hickley emailed me some comments. Andy has given me permission to reprint his thoughts here, and I think they’re illuminating about why LSJ bloggers is in the state it is, and what could be done to improve things.

Whilst having a blog ring is very simple and easy, i think it’s basically the subject of it that led many people to completely ignore writing up an article – i don’t know how relevant hyperlocal journalism is in the world, but it’s not a phrase i’ve ever heard uttered before.

Naturally a lot of people just aren’t gonna be interested in writing or reading a blog about something they don’t care so much about. Maybe we should start with softer topics at the beginning of the LSJ phenomenon that slowly work their way up to harder views? Thus my suggestion for the next one would be about what people’s plans and dream jobs are after graduation – whilst hardly groundbreaking, it’d at least be readable and help the general public to find out more about the individual bloggers personalities, which might help them come back when we talk about something a little over their heads?

Also whilst i’m slowly growing more to love Twitter, i’m fairly certain that journalism students who use it are in the minority, maybe getting some Facebook updates (even if it’s just a status or something from you), or asking Sam Pidioux to email round updates and reminders to contribute like she did when the thing got created, might get some attention and contributions?

Just a city boy

I think Andy’s views are far closer to those of the “average” journalism student than anything I, or Shane, or Daniel, or Josh might write.

i don’t know how relevant hyperlocal journalism is in the world, but it’s not a phrase i’ve ever heard uttered before.

This example is incredibly revealing. Andy isn’t thick by any means, but hyperlocal is a “big thing” in the media world right now, to the point where my natural instinct is not to link to any sources because I assume that the people reading this already know about it.

What needs to be considered is that a lot of the things I take for granted don’t figure for most of the students on the journalism course at Lincoln (and perhaps a majority across the UK). The people who know about this stuff, and read and write about it, and use Twitter (etc.), as Andy points out, are in the minority.

But to the people in this minority it all seems very natural and ordinary — “You’re not on Twitter? Really?” — and I think this also carries over into blogging. With regards to potential topics for LSJ bloggers, I subconsciously assumed that people who had a blog would be “in the know” when it came to the prevailing discussions of the future of journalism — hyperlocal being an example.

It’s a census year

So now we have two distinct groups which I’m going to define as “those who know”, and “those that don’t”, at the risk of sounding condescending.

What really excited me about LSJ bloggers when I was setting it up was that it could be an unparalleled venue for discussing the future of journalism, and other major issues facing the trade — it would look at national and international trends in journalism with the ability to apply them to a shared, local situation. It could easily combine lofty theory and on-the-ground practice.

I hope this explains why I wanted it to be a place where we could easily discuss things such as hyperlocal journalism, because we could take the theory, and think about how we could apply it — the city of Lincoln would provide a common foundation and testing ground for a variety of ideas.

But this assumes that the people taking part in the discussion are part of the first group — “those who know”. Unfortunately the majority of journalism students aren’t in that category, at least at Lincoln.²

Move to the suburbs?

That’s the situation. It may not be ideal, but it’s what we’ve got to work with. So how can we alter LSJ bloggers to draw more people in, and be more active once they are?

I think the most important thing is what topics we discuss. Implementation and notification are secondary issues — posting notifications on Facebook (etc.) is a secondary thing, whereas topic selection is fundamental.

I still completely reject the line of thought put forward by Darren Moss, because it ignores our constituency: journalism students at Lincoln.

We need lightweight journalism-related topics, it seems. That, combined with a different system of notification and advertising, may prove enough to get more journalism students involved. Topics should be interesting, journalism-related, but shouldn’t sound like the quantum physics of journalism. They should be things that people already have some kind of opinion on, so that it doesn’t seem like a lot of effort to develop and voice it.

It’s time to have a think. If things go well, LSJ bloggers may be relaunched for semester B.

But it lacks some stuff that WordPress does really well. With Tumblr your posts aren’t the focus — when you log into the Tumblr dashboard it shows you the posts from those you follow. It’s not particularly suited for use as a CMS, which is made clear when you see that it shows your posts as a big list. It’s geared towards publishing, publishing a lot, and seeing what other people are publishing.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. I don’t doubt that it got me blogging regularly, and even often, which is something that I just wasn’t doing before. In fact, I wrote a post about how effective Tumblr was in doing that.

It’s served me very well over the past few months, but how easily things could get “lost” in a mass of posts — particularly ones that you’d spent a long time working on — was really quite disturbing.

WordPress is the opposite, with many options for sorting, categorising, and finding content. This is one of the things that drove me to Tumblr, probably because I didn’t have many posts (and very few of good quality) and WordPress was constantly pointing it out.

While working on my deconstruction of Bullet Magazine’s website the importance of having a clear layout that made it very easy to find and archive content became very apparent. It’s the whole reason why their website is crap, and the whole reason why it needs to change.

And then I published.

I hated what resulted. At over 2,000 words, it was a perhaps unusually long post. Even so, my Tumblr site dealt with it very badly. When reading it you could get half-way down, and have the whole screen occupied by text with no navigation elements either side, except for the scroll bar.¹ Due to the styling, there wasn’t a huge amount of text per-screen either, so the overall effect was very disorientating. I was lost in my own copy.

This specific instance could have been dealt with by a change of theme, but it’s a good cameo for Tumblr’s problems more generally with being “lost in content”.

So I decided to take some of my own medicine, and decided to switch back to WordPress. I’m using the Basic Maths theme, which is nice and clean, with WordPress’s inherent advantage for keeping track of content, along with an awesome custom archives page.

I’m no longer pissing my posts into the abyss, they’re all neatly organised, and the navigation tools on the index pages provide the proper perspective to avoid feeling “lost” again.

That’s the main reason I changed back. I’m also glad to be back using a very flexible, powerful platform. I’ve also got comments enabled again, without having to use Disqus.²

Tumblr isn’t a bad system. It’s really not. It’s fantastic. But it’s just not what I’m looking for for my main site. I’ve still got it set up and I’m still going to post things to it, but “proper” blog posts that have taken time and effort will be published here.

The sheer number absolutely amazes me. But I am greatly saddened when I take a look at the online presence of our closest competitor, Bullet Magazine. Whereas the amount of stories we posted averages out at nearly two and a half every single day between 14/9/09 and 20/12/09, there are just 29 articles on Bullet’s website — averaging out at one every three and a half days.

This is absolutely baffling, as Bullet has had three printed issues this semester. I can’t tell you how many articles they published in total as all the copies are back in Lincoln, and they’re not available online at all, despite their Facebook page promising that “Bullet Magazine is also available as a downloadable PDF at www.bulletonline.org.” (Note: This was removed while I was writing this article. There were significant changes to their Facebook page today.)

In this article I will examine Bullet’s current situation online, look at the technical issues that prevent them from having a good, easily accessible, and easily updatable website, and suggest changes that they can make in order to improve things.

I am not doing this to brag, to glibly point out flaws, or spitefully criticise them. If this was the case, I wouldn’t offer suggestions for changes. On the contrary, my motive is to help them build a better online presence, as it is utterly essential for both those writing the articles, and those reading them. Putting copy online allows for a more-or-less permanent archive, that is accessible by anyone, anywhere in the world, and all you need is an internet connection.

It allows writers to easily share material with friends, family, or potential employers, and the material will be accessible long after they’ve graduated.

Readers can similarly share material very easily with people who can’t get their hands on a physical copy, or access it themselves if they don’t have one. The persistent nature of online content allows for them to read older articles, long after the issue has disappeared from the stands.

There are no downsides. With the right setup, putting things on a website is incredibly quick and easy. There is no excuse not to do it.

Now

The current website is an absolute mess, for several different reasons. They range from the hilarious to the tedious. I’m going to start with the structural factors — how the site’s built, how it runs — and then discuss the content (how it’s displayed, how often it’s been updated, and not judgements on quality).

Use of Blogger for article hosting

Bullet’s website uses Blogger to host all of its articles. But rather than it being a straightforward Blogger site, each section runs from a separate blog. These use an essentially blank theme, and are framed on the site. To see this for yourself, pick any article, right-click on the date, and open the link in a new tab.

The image on the left shows what the front page draws its content from — it just frames a Blogger blog. This is done for every section on the site. Here’s a list of all of the blogs used:

• Front page
• News
• Features
• Entertainment
• Sport
• Music
• Fashion

By far, this is the stupidest setup I’ve ever seen. I can’t even begin to imagine what made anyone think this was a good idea. The only thing that it achieves is being able to separate out the categories, and have customised surrounds for them on the Bullet site.

It’s ugly, inefficient, and requires the maintenance of seven different content catalogues. Because of the complete separation between them it means that you can’t easily access all of the content — they are walled off into their own sections.

On Facebook, one member of the staff has said “the website is causing some issues at the moment due to its set up [sic]”. It’s painfully obvious why. Blogger does not work well as a CMS. It’s quite good for simple, journal-style blogs. (As in, actual blogs.)

Its options are limited if you want or need to handle a lot of diverse content, and display that content in different ways. What Bullet have done is attempt to wring a CMS out of Blogger by stapling together several blogs. But that doesn’t overcome any of the limitations, and just adds to the complexity and awkwardness of the system.

Unless you want to just show a long list of posts, displayed in their entirety, don’t use Blogger.

Page design

Because the actual content is framed and separate from the rest of the site, development of the surrounding area is also separate. And clearly there hasn’t been a lot done. Each page features a sidebar to the left of the content frame. Most of them are empty. Only the features and fashion sections have anything written in the side. The rest are just long strips of grey — that two sections have something in the sidebar shows that the rest is down to laziness.

And talking of length, the issue with pages being unnecessarily long is still there. Each page except for the news section have a roughly-800 pixel tall empty space. (News has a smaller gap, but there is still one there.) I can’t for the life of my figure out why. For most computers, this is at least a screen-full of empty space.

This is even true for pages that have a relatively large amount of content, such as the features page.

Content

As mentioned, there is very little content on the whole site. The “Photoblog”, “Magazine”, and “Info” pages are completely blank, and there are just 29 articles spread across the other sections. It does not take a lot of effort to put content on the internet. This smacks of laziness. They have access to all of the copy they published in the three printed issues, so why not put that online?

The features section is the one updated most recently, on December 3rd, whilst the music section hasn’t been updated since September 17th.

There is no excuse for this.

Perhaps it’s just as well that there isn’t a lot of content on Bullet’s website, as there would be no useable archive system to back it up. The only section with a visible archive is fashion, which has the standard Blogger archive widget tacked to the top. Because of the use of seven different blogs, it would only be possible to show a per-section archive, rather than one that covers everything on the site.

Standards

Yet another thing that differs across the site are the rules for content. There don’t seem to be any. To ensure consistency a website should have rules on things such as headline length, picture sizes, etc.

This is something Bullet clearly have not thought about, which allows atrocities such as this four-deck headline to be committed. The 14-word headline occupies the same amount of space as the 122-word story underneath it.

There are also no standards for picture usage or sizes. Some articles have them, some don’t, and all images are of different sizes.

Nor has any thought been put into how to use the front page. Currently there are two items on the front page: a link to an interview with Mary Stuart, and the editor’s letter from the September 2009 issue. Also, because of the framing system, if you click on the link to the interview with Mary Stuart it opens in the front page frame (rather than taking you to the features section) and the content has its own scrollbar.

Summary

Bullet Magazine’s current website is just awful beyond belief. It’s crap.

There’s little content. What stories it does have are managed used a fragmented, fundamentally incapable system, which has been combined with static HTML to form a monster of a site.

It is set up in a way that is needlessly complicated, and cannot be changed in order to produce a good product.

Prescription

Bin it.

Bin it off.

Bin it off right now.

Next

You have to start again. But this time take a different path.

Use WordPress

There should be no argument over this. There are many crap sites that can be improved by simply switching to WordPress, and Bullet’s is one of them.

WordPress is a much more flexible and powerful CMS, but this power is not overwhelming. Instead it makes many things much easier to do, with far better results. It would give you the unity between design and content that is desperately needed, as it provides a “complete” system.

You manage your design and your content with basically the same interface, and the two are both separate and connected. Any changes you make to the design won’t affect the integrity of your content (though it will display differently) and at the same time you make design choices to better display your content. Right now the framing system completely separates the two. This is not necessary, and is in fact harmful.

I’ve come to believe that the custom HTML & framing solution was so that different sections could have their own styling (different colour bars at the top) and comments in the sidebar. It was a pretty bad solution, but it sort of worked. In WordPress there is a way of having custom archive pages that will let you do this. I haven’t tried it myself, but there are resources to help. (Here’s the WordPress codex page about archives.)

Switching to WordPress will fix most of the technical problems and strangeness that results from the current setup.

Content

But technical issues aren’t the only problem right now. Yes, they hurt everything on the site, but you could still publish articles.

This wasn’t happening. I’d love to hear excuses for this, because they’d all be bullshit. There is no reason why all of the articles published in the three printed issues this semester are not on the website, apart from laziness on the part of the people responsible.

The “Online Editor” position has just disappeared from Bullet’s Facebook page. It’s unclear what exactly this role entailed, but if Paul Moffat had sole responsibility for uploading content then that was a very stupid decision. At the very least, each section editor should have a WordPress login and be responsible for posting their section’s articles.

And everything written in every section should be put online. It’s easy. There is no excuse for not doing so.

What is uploaded should adhere to guidelines that are clearly laid out. These should be written with regards to the specific theme being used, so that it’s clear what size pictures are needed, how many characters result in clean headlines and excerpts, etc. Write them down, email them out, and get everyone who’s uploading content to stick to those guides. This will result in a standardised and consistent look.

Case in point

To show just how easy it is to do, I did it: Bullet Magazine on WordPress.

Go have a look, poke around, and then come back.

The whole thing took me an hour to set up last night, and about half of that time was uploading the content (all of which is my own, so there are no possible copyright issues).

It was free, and required no technical knowledge (the WordPress implementation that should be used will require some technical knowledge, but it can be picked up extremely quickly).

It is a better website in every single way than Bullet’s current one. And it took me an hour.

Here’s a round up of all the points that need to be made about this example:

• It’s on WordPress.com, so you don’t have full control over the HTML or CSS, amongst other things. Bullet should host their own WordPress.org blog.
• Certain things aren’t implemented, such as customised category pages. See here for information.
• The theme used is the only magazine-style one available for WordPress.com users. The self-hosted version should be used, and there are plenty of suitable themes available.
• I suspect they’ll want to keep a similar arrangement to what they have now, where the front page is separate from the other sections. This can be achieved, but requires a little bit of work. See here and here.

Concluding note

As I have shown, it would be very easy to replace Bullet’s current, awful website with a WordPress-powered one that would be far superior in every aspect.

It would take next to no time, and would probably cost nothing (as they have web hosting and a domain name already).

All that is required is the will to do it.

It’s been a great year for The Linc, and a great semester in particular. Since September 14th we’ve had 225 stories, of which 95 were news. We’ve had two great print issues, with the December issue being our biggest ever, at 16 pages, and in full colour for the first time.

It’s been fantastic welcoming some very talented and dedicated people to the team. I wish to thank everyone who has written news this academic year, and can’t speak ill of anyone that I’ve dealt with personally. There have been disagreements and arguments, and I’ve swore a lot at a lot of different people. But on reflection, everyone has contributed high quality work, and The Linc has been better a result.

I am very confident in the team of people who I expect to take The Linc forward, and the sun that I can see at the horizon of 2010 looks very bright indeed.

I’d like to thank everyone I’ve worked with on The Linc this year — every single one, including Leo Worsdale — because despite the occasional friction, we’re awesome.

If you’d like to read our last two stories of the year, one looking back and one looking forward, here are the links:

• In review: biggest stories of 2009
• Looking ahead: Lincoln in 2010

Here’s the video of John Pilger discussing “why journalism matters” with Professor Richard Keeble of the Lincoln School of Journalism. It took place on Monday, October 12th 2009.

It’s taken forever to get sorted, and the video quality & the camera work isn’t the best, but it’s the whole talk, including the Q&A at the end.

If you’d like to read it, here’s my email interview with Pilger.

The University of Lincoln’s press office beat me (quite substantially) in publishing a write-up of Dorothy Byrne’s talk at the university last week. It’s a decent article, though Ian writes consistently good copy so that shouldn’t surprise anyone.

But what is interesting is… it’s missing half the people who were part of the talk last week. There isn’t a single mention of Mike Jempson, director of Mediawise, who shared the stage with Byrne.

Update: 11.40pm, December 1st, 2009

My copy’s available here. I’ve focused on Jempson because he had more interesting things to say, and I’ll leave the press office to write about Byrne’s pathetic defence.

Update: 1.20pm, January 25th, 2010

I’ve just spoke to Jenny Sheriston from the press office. Apparently she wrote the copy, and excluded Jempson because Byrne was more interesting, and she considers Byrne to be one of the most important women in broadcasting.

I didn’t write this at the time, but it was the reason for my concern of Jempson’s exclusion: Byrne is is a prominent figure in the dominant media, and so has fairly easy access to other dominant media organisations.

Outside pressure groups, like Jempson’s [Mediawise][ws], often have great difficulty getting attention for their critique of the media, and those with more radical views are often ignored completely.

We should bring attention to marginalised views, and not just focus on the powerful.