Knight, round 2
I finally submitted my answers to the Knight News Challenge’s second round of questions. No link to the application itself this time because the applications aren’t open for public viewing anymore. Here’s my first post on my Knight idea if you missed it. There were more questions this time, some of them pretty mundane, others rather hard to answer. But one question was particularly interesting to me, so I’ll post it and my answer:
8. What specific, unique opportunity do you see that will make this project more successful than others trying to fill that general need? * (2075 characters maximum, approximately 325 words)
Most news sites online now - large and small - have been charitably described as a giant ball of mud: an accumulation of materials loosely held together to take some semblance of shape. My own employer’s site at one point was created by 23 different Javascript programs that added bits and pieces of functionality. Many sites, when adding applications or functionality, far too often take a third-party application and bolt it onto a page. Or they wind up having to go completely outside their production systems to a different system altogether because the systems they chose to put news online won’t adapt or support new applications. Several efforts I’ve seen aimed at socially networking the news take this same tack - develop an application outside the main CMS and bolt it onto the site or create an entirely separate site away from the main URL. Louretta will take the opposite approach - news, social networking and databases will be in a site’s DNA. There won’t be external calls or separate servers or different URLs. A news organization will use one site, one set of servers, one set of technologies. No vendors. No outside support. And it will be designed from the start to run on an absolute minimum of staff members, who only have to learn one system.
Blogging has been non-existent for me lately. Now that Knight is done for a while I’ll finish the three half-written posts I have in the queue that I’ve been letting slide.
