This Fat is Phat, seriously. Takes 37s yellow fade technique to the next step.
[The New York Times](http://www.nytimes.com) reports that [more papers, including themselves, are considering a for-pay model.](http://nytimes.blogspace.com/genlink?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2005%2F03%2F14%2Fbusiness%2Fmedia%2F14paper.html) [(Via Hypergene)](http://www.hypergene.net/blog/weblog.php?id=P263)
If paid content becomes the model that most general circulation newspapers move to, it will be the beginning of the end of those brands.
Contributing to the F.U.D. about online editions comes an ‘analyst’:
> “Newspapers are cannibalizing themselves,” said Frederick W. Searby, an advertising and publishing analyst at J. P. Morgan.
Unless the last [two](http://www.indystar.com) [papers](http://www.ajc.com) I worked at are extreme outliers, the audience model for newspaper Web sites is generally one where there is some minor overlap between the print and online audience. But for the most part, the paper is reaching separate readers with their online edition.
That’s right, newspapers are expanding their readership!
Read it again, because for years we’ve been told the opposite.
But watch out, just when the newspaper industry has a chance of becoming relevant, timely and useful to a new generation of readers (the same generation we’ve been chasing, to no avail, in print for years), along come the analysts, MBAs, and PHBs with moves to cut that off at the knees.
Here’s what will happen if papers start charging:
1. Most of their audience will leave, (entrepreneurs take note, here’s a potential emerging market segment)
2. Just enough of the audience will pay that the aforementioned analysts, MBAs and PHBs will say, “Look, we’re making money, told you so.”
3. Newspapers will drop off the new-media radar as bloggers, search engines, aggregators, etc. are unable to provide _free_ marketing to these publications by linking to, and writing about, them.
4. I, and others, will say “Look your no longer relevant, see we told you so.”
What are my plans? I’m going to retire a billionaire after trademarking the phrase I Told You So™.
**Update:** [Steve Outing](http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=31&aid=79730) agrees with me, sort of.
This is a call to all those brave [WordPre.cio.us](/projects/) beta testers.
I’m having trouble finding the breakdown with regards to the date of the entries. In theory, it’s going to be posted at the date/time that your blogmark itself has in [del.icio.us](http://del.icio.us). For many users, this seems to be the case, but some are seeing problems where the date is off in their [WordPress](http://www.wordpress.org) blog.
So can anyone with the problem please send me an e-mail to **del2wp** at **heisel** dot **org** with the following information:
1. A link to a page on your Web host that has the output of your [php_info()](http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.phpinfo.php) function.
2. The RSS URL you’re using in your [WordPre.cio.us](/projects/) installation. (The $rss_url in the config section.)
3. The times that your last few blogmarks **should be** posted at, and the time they **were** posted at. Be sure to include the **title** of the blogmark along with those times so I can correlate them.
I’m also releasing some sample template code and CSS to achieve the presentation that I’ve got here on [heisel.org](/), you can find it on the [projects page](/projects/). The template code assumes that you’re filing your posts under a category called ‘Blogmarks’, if not then you’ll need to hack the code accordingly…
**Update:** If you’d like to keep up with work on WordPre.cio.us then subscribe to it’s [RSS feed](http://heisel.org/blog/category/projects/del2wp/feed/)
I’m sure many of you have had a very long day and night with the [Atlanta courthouse shooting](http://www.ajc.com/news/content/news/noadsindex/courthouseshooting.html), but I wanted to take a minute to write down my thoughts while they were fresh.
###Clean code makes design changes easy
Obviously the [AJC](http://www.ajc.com) had to make some fairly rapid changes to our home page to accomodate the breaking news. We had recently undergone a redesign that brought the content well up to spec with a [transitional layout](http://www.uie.com/articles/meyer_interview/) — meaning we used some very light tables for structure and relied on CSS for the rest.
When the scope of the story became apparent I was called in to help redesign the homepage, while others worked to rip out some of the heavier parts to reduce page weight.
I was able to turn our page around in about 5 minutes — sure I had to do some inline styles to cover some needs that weren’t in our stylesheets, but I firmly believe we couldn’t have turned the page around so quickly without [Web standards](http://www.webstandards.org/).
And it’s not just a quick turnaround — because the markup remained relatively the same, while the CSS changed, our producers had no problems picking up the new page and churning out some great coverage.
After things calmed down some, I was able to go back and yank out our inline styles and turn them into classes in our main stylesheet, and as the day went on and our needs changed, I could quickly add new classes/styles to meet our producers needs.
###Blogs are great for breaking news
After our online group was able to get print side to start filing bursts to us, I quickly set up a [breaking news blog](http://www.ajc.com/news/content/custom/blogs/breaking/index.html).
Our producers were able to post bursts filed by our print staff, and to file reports picked up from TV and the wires to the blog quickly and easily.
[Erica](http://www.ericaendicott.com), who is probably a biased source, said that the blog was the best part of the coverage. She was stuck at her school, in lockdown, without a TV, but she could turn to the blog and quickly get the latest — because it was in chronological order.
I may be speaking out of turn, but I think this is the best interface to cover a rolling, breaking story like this. By the end of the day, as our “10,000 foot view” stories started to roll in, we could provide our users the ‘whole story’, at least to that point in the night. But during the day, as the story develops, users who quickly want to find out what’s changed since they last checked in can get it quickly from the blog.
WordPress customizable post listings
Need to investigate more, might be like using MTEntries outside of the WP’s The Loop
By day, I'm a product manager serving a group of fantastic engineers at Square.
By night, I fight crime and solve mysteries with a robot pal of my own creation.
By midday, I like a snack, generally a cookie.
Part of this biography isn't true (hint, I like cookies and engineering, I don't own a robot)
