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The St. Petersburg Times has taken the wraps off its newest website, a stab at community journalism/blogging. Dubbed “It’s Your Times”, it was given a premature outing last week by Tommy at Sticks (amazing how lax even experienced Web media people can be about hiding in-development projects).
Disclosure: I work for Florida Trend, which is owned by the same company that owns the St. Pete Times. As with most happenings concerning the newspaper, I did not have any prior knowledge of this new offering, and still don’t have any inside scoop on it.
Site design is about as clean and professional as you’d expect. It’s powered by Drupal, a blogging software that I looked at for here, but decided was too inflexible and geekish. And indeed, it’s making for some annoying elements on “It’s Your Times”, like a notification that there’s an “attached file” on each post, which in reality is nothing more than the clearly visible thumbnail image. (By the way, the favicon needs to be replaced — it’s a dead giveaway.)
While I’m sure this is a welcoming format for the typical mainstream media consumer, I question why these new digs were deemed necessary. To me, they’re not much of a step up from the old-style BBS forums the paper maintains, which (amazingly to me) seem to be quite busy these days. Why reinvent the wheel?
Of course, this is a reinvention anyway. Plenty of other newspapers have set up shop in this space; and most of those efforts were responses to local community reporting sites like Topix and OhMyNews. There’s no pioneering going on here.
In my mind, this project serves as a stepping-stone for engaged readers. Those familiar with forum participation can move on to “It’s Your Times” and treat it as a dip in the blog swimming pool. After getting acclimated to it, they’ll move on to setting up their own blogs. Of course, I’m sure others will be satisfied with just this.
As with anything, “It’s Your Times” will succeed only if it’s cross-promoted in the print edition of the Times (which is still the mass-media organ, as with most metropolitan areas). The promise of publishing user-submitted content in the paper is a good incentive to throw out there, and should stir plenty of early participation.
Category: Florida Livin', Internet, Media
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The “attached file” notification simply means they’re doing something wrong. When they attach a file they should UNCHECK the box that says whether it should be listed. The only time a file needs to be listed is if it’s a media file that should be downloaded rather than displayed inline. The first listed file will appear as an enclosure in the RSS feed, which makes podcasts very easy.
Drupal is very flexible and it does a lot more than simple blogging (for which I prefer Wordpress). Drupal is well suited to complex community-based or portal sites and can be extended with additional modules such as a gallery, e-commerce, etc.
Comment by Mike Cohen — 09/13/2005 @ 12:10 AM
Your first paragraph exemplifies why I consider Drupal not worth the effort. Why should you have to uncheck anything — shouldn’t the default already be an unchecked setting?
I didn’t dig too deep into it, but the inflexibility I found had to do with basic but (to me) vital stuff, like easily configuring layout, generating clean permalinks, customized comments, etc. It struck me as requiring a lot of work simply to get to stage zero, so I passed.
But granted, not every content management system is ideal for blogging. If i were starting up something like It’s Your Times, I might find Drupal to be the way to go. But not for a blog.
Comment by CT — 09/13/2005 @ 9:09 AM