:Journalistopia

Interested in knowing the nuts and bolts of what it takes to move your entire newspaper site from a vendor to an open-source WordPress install? Visit Miami Hurricane online editor Greg Linch’s blog for the play-by-play from webmaster Brian Schlansky. The recap covers the details of everything from installing Ubuntu on an Apache server to gettting the archive working on the new site.

As more and more news sites are embracing open-source software such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and many more, you’d do well to explore how some of these free and robust tools work can be implemented in your operation and how they can foster the rapid deployment of new ideas.

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More Journalistopia:

• Microsoft to give away development software for students
• An easy guide to search engine optimization for blogs
• Google News Launches Newspaper Archive Service

Want to see the best online information design the news industry is producing? Then you might want to tune into the SND Update Blog for the next few days as SND highlights entries from their worldwide Best of Multimedia Design competition.

There’s more awesome design here than you can shake a t-square at, so make sure to take a look!

Check out the entries from:

Entertainment/Lifestyle Off Deadline (The category with the most entries)
Breaking News (Most of the entries here seem to allow advance time to produce, but really nice work nevertheless.)
Lifestyle On Deadline (Only one survivor here)
Non-Breaking News
Sports Off Deadline

[More at the SND Update Blog]

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More Journalistopia:

• Online News Association seeks award screeners
• Survey: Sports writers hate them blogs
• Tornadoes strike Central Florida

The folks over at Sitepoint are giving away another great PDF book that’s perfect for online news producers: The Photoshop Anthology: 101 Web design Tips, Tricks & Techniques

I previously got a nifty Ruby on Rails book from Sitepoint that was more than worth my while, so make sure to snag a copy of that Photoshop book PDF before the offer expires two weeks from today.

[Free PDF Book: The Photoshop Anthology: 101 Web design Tips, Tricks & Techniques]

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More Journalistopia:

• Get yer free Ruby on Rails PDF book
• Excellent Cheat Sheets for Producers, Designers
• Digital photography tutorials galore

Just announced: 2008′s Webby Award winners! The Webby Awards picks through the best of the Web and grants awards in more categories than you can shake a stick at.

I’ve pored through the list and extracted the winners from news-related categories, as well as news organizations that won in other categories, such as science or best practices. Here’s the Journalistopia-edited list. Apologies in advance if I missed anyone:

Best Copy/Writing
Wired.com
http://www.wired.com
(Also nominated: HowStuffWorks, Design Observer, NYTimes.com and Slate)

Best Use of Photography
Your Shot – National Geographic Magazine
http://ngm.com/yourshot

Blog – Business
FT.com Alphaville
http://ftalphaville.ft.com/

Blog – Political
The Huffington Post
http://huffingtonpost.com

Broadband
ABC.com Full Episode Player
http://dynamic.abc.go.com/streami…

Magazine
National Geographic Magazine Online
http://ngm.com
(Also nominated: Dwell.com, Makezine, NYMag, Yoga Journal Yoga Journal)

Music
BBC Radio 1 Meet the DJs
http://agencyrepublic.net/awards/…

News
NYTimes.com
http://nytimes.com/
(Also nominated: BBC News, Wired, CNN and Discovery News)

Newspaper
NYTimes.com
http://nytimes.com/
(Also nominated: The Guardian, the Independent, the Wall Street Journal and Variety)

Radio
BBC World Service channel site
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/

Science
nature.com
http://www.nature.com

Sports
Yahoo! Sports
http://sports.yahoo.com/
(Also nominated: ESPN.com, Nike Skateboarding, Spyker F1 Magazine, Sweet Spots)

Television
HBO Voyeur
http://www.hbovoyeur.com

VIDEO CATEGORIES

Best Use of Animation/Motion Graphics
The New York Times/T: The New York TImes Style Magazine “Circle Squared”
http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/20…

Best Writing
Onion News Network
http://tv.theonion.com

Documentary: Individual Episode
Coney Island: An Uncertain Future
Getty Images
http://www.rickgershon.com/gettyi…

News and Politics: Individual Episode
Finding the Way Home
MediaStorm
http://mediastorm.org/0017.htm

Travel (video)
Frugal Traveler: American Road Trip – NYTimes.com/Video
http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_s…

MOBILE

Entertainment (mobile)
Cosmo Mobile: 100 Hot Cities, Fake Calls, Dude Decoder & Cocktails!
http://m.cosmopolitan.com

Listing and Updates (mobile)
The New York Times Mobile Real Estate Listings
http://m.nytimes.com/re

News (mobile)
Mobile NYTimes
http://mobile.nytimes.com

Sports (mobile)
ESPN.com (Wireless)
http://mobileapp.espn.go.com/wire…

ALSO: Shoutouts to NYTimes.com for their best practices and best visual design/function nominations, Mama Trib’s Swamp blog for best political blog nomination, National Geographic for their best home page People’s Voice award, Consumer Reports for their Guides/Ratings/Review People’s Voice award, the Guardian and Onion for their podcasts nominations, NPR for their politics nomination, NPR and the BBC for their religion and spirituality nominations, Frontline World for their Documentary: Series and Documentray: Individual nominations, U.S. News and World Report for their Best Writing (video) nomination, the New Yorker’s animated cartoons for their animation nomination, CBS for their sports (video) nomination and many more.

Yep, no news site nominees in the navigation and structure categories. We’ll have to work on that…

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More Journalistopia:

• Webby Awards nominees announced
• iPad Users Mostly Male, Love Photos [Y! Mobile]
• Where the writers come to learn

Head on over to the conference site for South by Southwest (SXSW) for free video from the media and entertainment conference. You’ll want to particularly peruse the Interactive Coverage. And yes, the much-maligned Zuckerberg/Lacy interview is there too.

I wasn’t one of the fortunate souls who made it out to Texas for the conference, so if you have any specific recommendations on what to watch, do share in the comments.

And to think I just got Netflix this weekend, and I’ll be spending a couple of hours watching tiny pixelated videos of guys talking about media nerd stuff…

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More Journalistopia:

• Pew: 57% of Internet users watch video
• Directory of newspaper gossip and insider blogs
• Online tools for freelancers

Perhaps a well-placed lolcat caption can redeem this 1981 TIME magazine cover…

Usually I try to spotlight stuff that news organizations are doing right, but there’s also much to be learned from the downright horrific. So check out TIME’s humorous jab at itself with its list of worst TIME magazine covers ever.

If you’re looking for awesomely bad, my votes go to the 1981 ice cream cover and the 1928 Robert McCormick and Joseph Patterson cover.

And the obligatory Journalistopia Lesson: never underestimate the unlimited potential for re-purposing your old cra …er… archival material.

[Hat tip to SND Update and to TIME]

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More Journalistopia:

• Wired magazine’s goofy vanity promotion
• Webby Awards nominees announced
• ‘You’ is Time’s Person of the Year

Just a quick need-to-know: Microsoft has made available the first public beta of the new Internet Explorer 8.

If you’re a designer for your news site, you’ll want to become familiar with the new browser as soon as you can and start looking at potential problem areas with your site’s design (though keep in mind that IE8 is still in beta). IE8 is touted as being very standards-compliant, so hopefully this’ll be the beginning of less CSS headaches for everyone. If you’re interested in more of the nitty gritty details of how IE8 works under the hood, check out the official IEBlog.

[More: Internet Explorer 8 download page]

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More Journalistopia:

• Jakob Nielsen’s top 10 application design sins
• Alert: Internet Explorer 7 downloads automatically
• News design roundup, new monthly column

Design blog Information Architects has created a fantastically cool visualization of 2008′s biggest web trends, all pinned to a map of Tokyo’s train system. I know; it sounds strange. But it really is quite awesome. Soon as I get to work this a.m., yours truly is printing this out and tacking it to my offi …er… cubicle wall.

Check out the clickable version and the PDF A4-sized version.

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More Journalistopia:

• Joel Stein doesn’t care what you think
• A super-powered map
• Catnip for Online Designers with SND’s Best of Multimedia Entries

The Orlando Sentinel Posse is here in Miami for the 2008 Future of Web Apps Conference, where he hope to figure out how we can peer into the future of web technology and apply it to the media.

A few quick tidbits: Josh Hallett of Hyku is at the front of the room snapping away, so catch his Flickr photoset and many others tagged fowamiami2008 throughout the day. Sentinel tech writer Etan Horowitz will be blogging today on the new Etan on Tech blog. And, catch Sentinel designer and Twitterholic extraordinaire Bill Couch’s feed here.

More in a bit.

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More Journalistopia:

• The case for using Twitter
• Audio from Future of Web Apps Miami available
• Who’s blogging ONA?

If you’re not careful, “feature creep” can cause a project to get buried under additional requirements, resulting in big delays and a lousy outcome. Photo by wilderdom

Web development and design blog Six Revisions has a fantastic article on how to prevent “feature creep,” otherwise known as the tendency for managers and clients to tack on additional features to a project at later phases, resulting in significant delays, broken code and –often– an overall crappier result.

The number one solution, according to Six Revisions: Dedicate enough time to requirements gathering and making sure stakeholders understand what the outcome of the project should be. If something is an essential feature, it should be documented from the get-go.

From one of the tips:

Be clear on what it is, exactly, you’re developing for them. Don’t promise a grand, exciting, but ambiguous/ambitious end result. Instead of giving broad generalizations such as “I’ll be developing a search engine optimized website”, try to outline the deliverables that you will provide

Along with my previous post this morning about Jakob Nielsen’s top 10 usability sins, this is another article you should read if you have anything to do with projects for your news site.

Six Revisions: Eight Tips on How to Manage Feature Creep

[Via Digg]

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More Journalistopia:

• New Google search feature raises news site eyebrows
• 360 degree photo tutorial
• Your news site needs people pages

Usability guru Jakob Nielsen published an article yesterday outlining the top 10 mistakes one can make when designing a Web application. Nielsen says:

Usually, applications fail because they (a) solve the wrong problem, (b) have the wrong features for the right problem, or (c) make the right features too complicated for users to understand.

The last one, (c), is most often found on news sites. One culprit (among many) is editors’ desire to spell out as many details as possible to reade…er…users, often resulting in a clunky and convoluted user experience. Folks, a web application is not an A1 news package.

Nielsen covers such usability sins as standard elements (radio buttons, dropdowns) behaving in unexpected ways, small click targets and not having progress bars or other elements to indicate something is going on.

Even if you don’t personally get into the nitty-gritty of designing Web apps, you should take a look at this article. Nielsen’s article will increase your usability IQ and help you provide more insightful feedback on projects that cross your desk.

More from Nielsen here: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/application-mistakes.html

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More Journalistopia:

• From SND: A new way to read The New York Times
• When is the gee-whiz Flash graphic worth it?
• Fun with the New York Times’ new Reader Beta

Christina Luan over at the Virtual Hosting Blog has put together a must-read list of 23 design lessons learned from eye-tracking studies such as the one put on by Poynter.

Read this list. Love this list. You dare not ignore this list. News sites are often the biggest offenders of this list.

Among the lessons:

Fancy formatting and fonts are ignored. Why? Because users assume they are ads and don’t have the information they need.

Navigation tools work better when placed at the top of the page.

People generally scan lower portions of the page. [...] Give readers something to latch onto when they’re scanning your page.

Many more here.

And, on an unrelated sidenote, the Audacity 1.3.4 Beta was released with improvements galore. Audacity is the cash-strapped news operation’s audio editor of choice due its many great features and low, low price of “free.”

Hat tip to Download Squad on both items.

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More Journalistopia:

• Nielsen’s top newspaper Web site ratings
• Poynter Eyetrack 2007 study says online readers read deep
• Internet Explorer 8 Beta released