A Baltimore Herald Update

As some of you may have observed I’ve been working out my proposal for the Baltimore Herald.

The part I’ve been working on with the Morning and Evening Editions is news gathering and story formatting.

Now the news gathering part has been a rip roaring success from my standpoint- 80 stories today!  And it is somewhat easier and less time consuming to visit frequently and harvest just a little bit at a time.

It has proven somewhat harder than I thought to slot the stories into their correct categories, but a large part of that involves the difficulty of moving around in and testing a large diary at all.  Today in the Morning Edition there were 49 stories.  The Evening Edition had 31.  The largest diary in the broken up categories I envision, Asia, would have had 21, and you would only be adding to the bottom each time and not hopping around.

Not being able to rely on the square bracket link shortcuts is going to be a huge issue for me unless pacified fixes it before production.

The Intro Section is highly unreliable, links that end in ‘/’ never, ever work top or bottom, Wikipedia only about 50% of the time.

The reason that this is particulary a pain in the ass is because it makes your cut and paste operations hard.

When they work it’s very simple-

Grab the Title, the publication info, and the 3 graphs you’ve selected- bang copy and paste into your notepad document.

Take out the ADVERTISEMENT place holder (or any other crap) and fix up the info (put the date on the bottom, make sure you have the organization).

Bang your Brackets around your [Title ], go back and grab your link, and pop it in there.

Then slap some <blockquotes> around your graphs and you should be good to go.

Copy and paste it at the bottom of your diary.  Individual updates could hardly be easier, of course you would actually batch them.

If on the other hand you went with the <a href=””></a> format you would now have to batch them because of the inconvenience of reversing the link order (from Label Link to Link Label which is also much harder to read when you’re checking for duplicates) and search replacing the brackets.

If you don’t have a text editor with macros and I don’t, it’s about 4 or 5 extra keystrokes for each link.  You can’t do it while you’re story picking because that’s the order your cut and pasted text comes in.

Other idiosyncracies include no double quotes ‘”‘ in links, you have to replace them with &quot;, and you have to put a literal character ‘\' before the ‘$’ symbol.  Trust me on this, I’ve done thousands of links.

Now the Body of a diary is not nearly as picky as the Intro section so this may not be that big an issue for the most part, the problem is when you start adding interesting links at the top, say a set of headine only links at the top of each category diary.

A Typical Category Diary-

Africa (date) == Title

Tags: Africa, World

Intro

[All Africa Stories tag]

[All World Stories tag]

[Daily Editions tag] (Main)

Today’s Headlines

[Headline 1 link]

[Headline 2 link]

…

[Headline n link]

Body

Because of pre-publishing you should be able to put up a week of templates at a time and fill them out as needed.  Any that didn’t get stories you would delete at the end of the day when the new set was up (that way anyone can contribute by comment at any time).

After all your categories were up you put up the Main Edition for the day-

Main Edition

Front Page (date) == Title

Tag: FP

Intro

News Categories

[World tag] #

 [Africa tag] #, [Asia tag] #, [Australia tag] #, [Europe tag] #,

 [North America tag] #, [South America tag] #, [Antarctica tag] #

[U.S. tag] #

 [News & Politics tag] #, [Media tag] #, [Entertainment tag] #

[Business tag] #

[Science tag] #

[Health tag] #

[Sports tag] #

[Bloglines tag] #

[Not News! tag] #

Body

(note: this was originally above the fold, but 80 is a long way to scroll)

Today’s Headlines

World-

[Africa diary] (linky links, use pre whoring feature)

Headline 1

Headline 2

…

Headline n

(note: not as links to avoid linking problem.  Boldface only.)

[Asia diary]

Headline 1

Headline 2

…

Headline n

This way you can get to the stories you want to check out without scrolling through 16 diaries.

By using the tags, users have onother way to contribute too.  They can gather 3 or 4 stories about Science or the Environment (which I generally include in Science) and post them in a properly tagged diary.

Any way, that’s what the outline looks like now.

I’ve dropped the 2 a day concept, only one set of diaries updated Overnight, 10 am to noonish, 6 pm to 10 pm ish.

Still looking for CEs and Admins.  Still in desperate need of someone who knows Soapblox blog setup like OTB to help me get the site running so I can continue testing some of the concepts.

This is not a competitive thing.  I’m hoping this tool will make news gathering for aggregators easier and more comprehensive.