The Media and Their CMS Apps

https://medium.com/@jotham.sederstrom/regarding-shaun-king-and-the-daily-news-e458523367ce

http://nymag.com/following/2016/04/dont-trust-your-cms.html

I think this says more about the poorly-designed workflow systems in some media orgs, and how the media loves to whine and make excuses for their foul-ups. What about attention to detail?

If journalists are forced to use a wretched CMS or workflow system, then it's still at least the media org's fault. Maybe the journalists should revolt against their internal system and demand better "working conditions."

The workflow steps outlined in a couple articles are amazingly bad and dumb for 2015-2016. It sounds like they are 20 years behind. A self-hosted Ghost blog app might be a huge improvement.

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From the medium.com post, written by the editor who was fired by the Daily News.

So it was with no small amount of shock that I learned on Tuesday the Daily Beast had leveled serious plagiarism accusations at Shaun regarding an exclusive story its reporter had published earlier that morning. Within a matter of hours after Shaun published his own column about Elliott Williams, a victim of neglect inside a Tulsa County jail, a large block of text — sans quotation marks or attribution — was discovered by the Daily Beast to be identical to two paragraphs from their own story. Rapidly, other news outlets pinpointed another example where blocks of text appeared identical to another report, again without quotation marks or citation This was my fault and I accept 100% of the blame.

Correct. But ...

In all honesty, the controversy — a fuck up on my part, to put it bluntly — comes down to two unintentional, albeit inexcusable, instances of sloppy editing on my part and a formatting glitch that until Tuesday I had no idea was systematically stripping out large blocks of indented quotations each time I moved Shaun’s copy from an email to The News’ own Content Management System, or “CMS” as it’s called in media parlance.

First, the workflow problem:

_"... moved Shaun’s copy from an email to The News’ own Content Management System ..."

It appears that their CMS is so bad, that they don't use it until near the end of the writing/editing process.? I wonder how much they paid for the CMS. Copying and pasting from an email in 2016!?

Did the app remove the indented spacing or the actual quotation marks or both? I can see an app removing spacing at the start and end of lines or copy.

The writers should use some kind of start and end text characters to indicate block text, such as Markdown's greater-than sign. Or place a bunch of hyphens or equal signs at the start and end of the block text.

But how did this go unnoticed AFTER it was published or doing the proofreading process? Does the CMS offer a preview mode for writers and editors to use before giving the greenlight to publish to the world?

It doesn't make sense that neither the writer nor the editor took the time to verify that what would be displayed on the website matches what was originally written.

Maybe the CMS acted squirrelly. It definitely sounds like the CMS does not offer a good writing environment, which is probably another reason why some smaller publishers will switch to using Medium.com.

But humans are responsible for final approval before publishing. Blaming the CMS or blaming a busy schedule are horrible excuses. Maybe this is one reason why the public has little trust for the media.

Expanding on the excuses:

In those two cases where no citation or hyperlink appeared in the column, I believe I likely cut attribution from the top of Shaun’s quoted text with the intention of pasting them back inside the block — *only to get distracted with another of the many responsibilities I juggled as an editor.*

I assume that one of the responsibilities of an editor is for the story to be accurate.

This supports my belief that multitasking is a good way to complete many tasks with mediocrity.

On any given day I was tasked with editing not only Shaun’s column but roughly 20 other news stories from five reporters, all of whom filed early and often. Add to that a whiplash-inducing crescendo of breaking news, a handful of administrative responsibilities and the chaos typical of most newsrooms, and it’s easier to fathom how frequently focus can snap from one second to the next.

Focus can snap, that's a problem with multitasking. Interruptions. But this sounds like a workflow design problem. And maybe a business problem. Is the focus on quantity over quality?

Anyway, the editor is making excuses.

This is not an excuse, but here I take issue with Jim Rich’s assertion that these mistakes were “inexplicable.” They can happen easily if you’re not paying extreme attention to detail at every moment.

Not paying attention to detail can lead to mistakes?? What a shock.

Attention to detail should be an unwritten description of the editor's role. That was the editor's job. That's why he should have been fired. He failed to fulfill a basic requirement.

But I don't understand how the writer does not have a role in previewing the final version of the article before publication. If the workflow leaves the writer out of the process, then that's the org's fault.

I don't think that the writer should receive any blame, unless the writer was suppose to preview the final version, but someone got lazy.

The editor receives most of the blame. The org's workflow and CMS choice could receive a lot of blame too.

Many of us in the news industry are increasingly under pressure to deliver an ever higher volume of stories with ever fewer resources and let’s just say, that doesn’t help. I don’t say that to absolve myself of blame, but to illustrate how this happened with no intention on my part to damage Shaun’s reputation or the paper’s.

Whining.

Okay, the editor is a victim of the decline of the newspaper industry, thanks to Craigslist, Google, Facebook, and um, heck, the entire web.

Maybe the website can add more JavaScript, trackers, ads, and other bloatware to their articles. That should help.

Finally, I want to personally apologize to Kate Briquelet of the Daily Beast and Rob Arthur and Jeff Asher of FiveThirtyEight.com for removing attribution and links to fantastic stories that Shaun originally cited. I absolutely did not mean to do that, and fundamentally believe that proper citation is crucial to upholding basic journalistic standards and ensuring transparency about the reporting process with readers. I am sorry.

Removing the attribution links is not the fault of the CMS. As the editor noted earlier, he had planned to add the links, but he got busy and distracted. But this occurred more than once. This part of the story seems blurry.

It would be foolish to leave out links and attribution intentionally because the hack would get exposed easily and quickly like what happened. I believe these were unintentional mistakes, but the editor failed to be an editor.

From the nymag.com article:

One of the great promises of digital publishing has always been that it’s easier than old-fashioned printing. No presses needed, no warehouses, no infrastructure, no pesky typographical union: You type into a box, you hit the blue button, and you’ve published.

That's not a promise. That's fact, and it has been exactly that easy for more than 15 years.

It was that easy in 2001 when I started blogging with the Greymatter app that worked with a web browser, producing a static HTML site.

It worked that easily with my first version of ToledoTalk.com code when the site began in January 2003.

Many hosted blogging tools have made it that easy with more sophisticated features available if the writer chooses.

1. Click the Compose/Post/Write link or button
2. Enter text in a textarea box (and maybe a title in a separate text input field)
3. Click "Post" (or create, update, publish. possibly click preview first, but the post can also be edited to correct mistakes.)

Only a few steps are required to publish to the world. And only a small amount of form junk on the post page is required. For my web publishing apps, I have three pieces of form junk: textarea box, preview button, create/update button. A link exists, however, to use the JavaScript editor instead of the HTML textarea box.

That's how easy it is for blog, wiki, and message board software. It can be more complex if desired.

For media orgs where multiple people may touch a piece of writing, more sophisticated software or at least a well-designed workflow is needed.

It's easy for the rest of us to publish to the web. That's probably why Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are popular.

But maybe it's difficult for media orgs to publish to the web. Again, this is why Medium.com is an interesting business to follow because Medium makes it easy for media orgs to publish to the web.

Back to the article:

Of course “easier” usually just means that the work that used to be done by humans and machinery is now being done on and by computers.

What? Humans are still writing and editing most of the stories, correct?

Publishing to the web is, in many ways, hugely more complicated than publishing on a printing press; ...

Well, that's the dumbest thing that I have read thus far in 2016. Journalists probably do more harm to the news industry than anything else with that type of thinking.

... it’s just that we trust our programs — the text editors we use to write and the content-management systems, or CMSes, we use to publish — to do most of the complicated work.

Okay, but if the CMS caused a problem, then where are the humans to proofread and edit the content?

But as anyone who spends most of their time head-down in a CMS will tell you, CMSes (and text editors, and email clients), are not to be trusted.

More whining and excuses from the media.

Emails furnished by King showed that his original copy (which he filed in the body of his emails — the sound you hear is my teeth grinding just thinking about that) had in fact correctly attributed the quotes ...

Yes, teeth should grind. And how do journalists accept this? Why don't they write an endless array of articles that rail against their writing systems and workflows?

If some journalists like to write stories that influence decisions made by politicians and business, then why don't they do the same for their internal processes? Expose their sausage making flaws.

At least the nymag.com writer acknowledges the human mistakes:

Sederstrom wrote a long, well-articulated apology on Medium, in which he takes full responsibility for the mistake. He also explains how it happened:

This may sound like a paltry excuse: a poor carpenter blaming his tools. And, obviously, Sederstrom and King both should have been checking the final product.

That's it. End of. They should have been checking the final product. Why didn't they? Despite workflow and CMS issues, not checking the final product is the worst flaw of all. It's inexcusable behavior.

But of course, the media likes to blame everything else more.

But it’s also the kind of story that web editors everywhere will recognize immediately. After all: The only indication that King is directly quoting rather than paraphrasing is the indented block quote line. In other words, the line doesn't exist in the text as written. It exists in the text as formatted.

That's a human design flaw. Bad choice. They should have established a style manual for how to markup a story if it will be submitted within the body of an email message, instead of as an attachment from some program. But either way is absurd.

If the CMS is so bad that the writers and editors cannot use it to create their content from the start, then the company should replace the system. I'm stunned that someone would file a story within the body of an email.

But despite all this clumsiness, the writer and editor could have caught the flaws by paying attention to detail and checking the final product. How come this is not being addressed in more detail?

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http://jothut.com/cgi-bin/junco.pl/replies/69152

https://medium.com/@jotham.sederstrom/regarding-shaun-king-and-the-daily-news-e458523367ce#.kohq1n7yn ---- http://mediagazer.com/160421/p6#a160421p6 #media #writing #cms #design
From: JR's : micro blog - Apr 21, 2016 - reply

16 replies
JR: "... sloppy editing on my part and a formatting glitch that until Tuesday I had no idea was systematically stripping out large blocks of indented quotations each time I moved Shaun’s copy from an email to The News’ own Content Management System ..."
- 20 hrs ago - # - reply

JR: Seems like an odd workflow for 2015-2016, and how could the CMS glitch go unnoticed for so long?
- 20 hrs ago - # - reply

JR: "... distracted with another of the many responsibilities I juggled as an editor." ---- more proof that in my opinion multitasking means doing many things with mediocrity.
- 20 hrs ago - # - reply

JR: "On any given day I was tasked with editing not only Shaun’s column but roughly 20 other news stories from five reporters, all of whom filed early and often." -- wow. 4 stories per reporter per day. Quantity over quality? Possibly a workflow design issue when managing that much content.
- 20 hrs ago - # - reply

JR: "Add to that a whiplash-inducing crescendo of breaking news, a handful of administrative responsibilities and the chaos typical of most newsrooms, and it’s easier to fathom how frequently focus can snap from one second to the next."
- 20 hrs ago - # - reply

JR: Excuses. But key phrase against multitasking: "focus can snap."
- 20 hrs ago - # - reply

JR: #gtd
- 20 hrs ago - # - reply

JR: "I take issue with Jim Rich’s assertion that these mistakes were “inexplicable.” They can happen easily if you’re not paying extreme attention to detail at every moment."
- 20 hrs ago - # - reply

JR: Yes, happens when trying to do too much at the same time. May need to rethink workflow or priorities within the org.
- 20 hrs ago - # - reply

JR: Here we go. The whining of the media industry. ---- "Many of us in the news industry are increasingly under pressure to deliver an ever higher volume of stories with ever fewer resources and let’s just say, that doesn’t help."
- 20 hrs ago - # - reply

JR: "False Plagiarism Accusation Against @ShaunKing Shows Dangers of Online Mob Journalism" ---- https://mobile.twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/722841312261607426 ---- come on. The outrage is selective. The deranged social media mob claims many victims.
- 20 hrs ago - # - reply

JR: https://theintercept.com/2016/04/20/false-plagiarism-accusation-against-shaun-king-shows-dangers-of-online-mob-journalism/
- 20 hrs ago - # - reply

JR: https://medium.com/the-30/on-the-shaun-king-mess-and-the-editor-in-the-age-of-churn-634b5abe666d#.cyolbnzeg
- 7 hrs ago - # - reply

JR: http://nymag.com/following/2016/04/dont-trust-your-cms.html
- 7 hrs ago - # - reply

JR: Blame the geeky programmers. Good one. I say, blame Craigslist.
- 7 hrs ago - # - reply

JR: "Publishing to the web is, in many ways, hugely more complicated than publishing on a printing press." --- wrong, at least for me and my web publishing apps. Maybe the CMS apps for media are too complex
- 7 hrs ago - # - reply

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http://www.mediaite.com/online/new-york-daily-news-hires-columnist-blacklivesmatter-activist-shaun-king/