What you're seeing, above, may be impossible to read; click on the image for a bigger view. It's a screen shot of a comment I just left in a Courier-Post forum here, saying:Courier-Post owner investigates charges of overtime abuse at the paper
Gannett, which owns the Courier-Post, said today that it is "looking into" allegations by Courier-Post employees that many newsroom staffers are working overtime hours without pay. The employees had warned Publisher Walt Lafferty in a Feb. 10 letter that they would take their grievances to the U.S. Labor Department if their concerns weren't addressed by Feb. 22 -- Friday. For more, see Gannett Blog at http://www.gannettblog.blogspot.com/.
Frankly, I wrote it to test the limits of free expression at the newspaper in Cherry Hill, N.J. Unmoderated comments are a double-edged sword, eh?
I think you found the limits of the Courier. I clicked on the link to your post and it doesn't seem to be there now.
ReplyDeleteWhat does everybody think of the one-size-fits-all website template that is being rolled out company-wide? I actually was naive enough to believe that the online staffers where I work came up with the design on their own, including that three-topic carousel. Then I see they're all the freakin' same, from Asbury Park to the Tennessean!
ReplyDelete"Powered by You and the Tooterville Tribune." I don't know diddly about the nuances of optimal web site appearance and function, but the site design strikes me as generic and bland.
Well, Jim, it looks like you've found the limits of free expression here in Cherry Hill...Your post has been removed from the C-P homepage.
ReplyDeletePlease tell me that this isn't all for nothing! We're desperate for a solution, but is it possible that --even with all of this attention--Gannett won't bother to make leadership changes?
Your online staffers may not have designed it, but they put in a lot of hours to make the hopelessly broken templates work for your paper. Each paper that has rolled out was delivered templates with broken CSS, bad tags, and items specific to Des Moines hardcoded in! As far as I know, GMTI made no corrections to the templates in between rollouts despite numerous tickets being opened from each paper.
ReplyDeleteThat said, the new sites look okay, but thanks to the new Pluck engine they load far slower than their predecessors despite what the "offical load tests" say.
I give the online guys big kudos for the work on their end of things, I just disagree with the company-wide uniformity. Not every paper is the same, not every market is the same, and i think Web sites should reflect that. I also disagree with the emphasis on the "your news" crap. It's just another way to produce content without having to pay people to put it together.
ReplyDelete