Tag Cloud
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Tell us about your experience with The Sacramento Press
by Ben Ilfeld, published on December 20, 2008 at 7:56 PM
Storyline: Feedback
Loading images
Over a month ago I asked everyone: what is wrong with The Sacramento Press?
It was an attention grabbing headline, but more importantly it opened an honest conversation between all of us who run and write and read The Press.
Now I am asking for broader feedback: tell us what you like and don't like about The Sacramento Press. Give me suggestions for our operations, marketing and sales.
The last time I asked we got feedback that helped us build out a better help section, fix bugs, add features, and even begin a path towards changing our legal agreements.
We are always looking to improve our site and operations. We don't have all the answers, but I hope we continue to ask the right questions.
Flag Article As:
Conversation Express your views,
debate, and be heard with those in your area closest
to the issue.
Leave a Comment
Is there a submission process? Any editorial review? What I like about the site is getting a little insight into local Sacramento from local Sacramentoans. Things that aren't necessarily big-time news, but are interesting to newcomers and old-timers. Like the big lemons. That's fun.
You and everyone else has the opportunity to publish without editorial review. However, we do try to pick quality stories to make up the top portion of our front page. We try to choose authentic and local stories first even if the grammar and spelling is off.
We also want to help people write better articles. You or anyone else can email journalism@sacramentopress.com with your article for proofing before you publish.
The storyline feature is interesting, but ultimately just an over-complicated way of doing "Related stories" links, which are far more efficient and easier to understand. Also, the storyline bar randomly pops up on stories, which I'm sure is not helpful to the first time users.
And where's the crime news?
The storyline bar should not randomly pop up. If it does then that is a bug. If you open the storyline bar and do not close it then it will be open on all other articles until you close it. What browser are you using?
Ultimately the storyline is not a way of doing "related stories" links. For more information on what a storyline is see:
http://www.sacramentopress.com/headline/243/What_is_a_storyline
Also, we will be improving both the flexibility of storyline creation and how we display storylines. The goal of our initial release is to be easy to read and easy to write. Once we have worked out the many bugs we still see in those areas we will focus more on building out the capability of storylines.
I welcome the design discussion. Of course we have reasons for making the feedback tools on the right side large. Joel covered some of them here:
http://www.sacramentopress.com/headline/922/Regarding_the_next_update#1520
Finally, I do not believe that priority is determined by the width of the text area. However, I do not believe that articles are more important than comments. If I could weigh them evenly I would. For example, I believe that our conversation here is more important than the original article.
On the other hand, I understand that for ad placement purposes, presumably, people would rather have their ads placed at the top of a page and next to the premium content, not next to comments (which may or may not exist for any given page)...and so comments may just get more space for practical reasons.
I do not find discussions purely derivative at all.
I hope that maybe if you're interested in writing - you will be one of the contributors who writes a really well-written article - easy to read and encouraging conversations. We would love to have you help us to continue to improve the quality of our content. Thanks for your feedback, Dan.
I believe conversations and feedback are vital for a site where neighbors can self-publish.
The goal is to enable better writing. That is why we offer workshops, copy editing, help researching and help finding sources for all of our contributors. This help is voluntary, but just as important in our minds as the slick tools to self-publish online.
Our site is a citizen journalism effort. We strive to be a news source, but sometimes the writing is not the best possible. It is our job to try and improve the writing as much as possible.
Because our site allows for instant publishing by any member of the Sacramento community it means that much of the content goes up without editing.
One suggestion I would make off the bat is that you contribute writing to the site yourself since you seem to be an excellent writer.
The goal is to get all the small stories out there, and if someone has a unique story to tell but isn't the best writer we still want them to tell it. Over time we hope to improve the quality of writing. I hope that addresses some of your concerns and if not please feel free to add additional comments.