As an owner of Macer Media, publisher of The Sacramento Press, I have never made a political statement on this site. Today I will, out of self-preservation, and a concern for what is just and good for this site, and the people of this community in general. Wikipedia went black Wednesday due to its strong opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Google also voiced its opposition with a link on its homepage. Many other Interenet companies took similar steps. So the first question is: What is SOPA? SOPA is a piece of proposed legislation in the House of Representatives aimed at, you guessed it, stopping piracy. The main proponent of the bill is the Motion Picture Association of Ame

As of today The Sacramento Press has an official mobile site. The great thing about this mobile site is that it can be found at the same location as our regular site, it's way more readable on your average smartphone. Our great development team optimized most of the pages on our site for the mobile browsing experience and those pages include: Sign-up Log in Front Page and Tag Pages User Profiles Search The other big feature we are launching is a developer API. An API or Application Programming Interface is a way for someone to interact with our site programatically. So if someone wanted to make an application for a phone or the Web that used our publicly available data, now they c

You know who you are, but when you write for The Sacramento Press, our readers might not. That’s part of the impetus behind today’s site update concerning disclosures. We have added a new section to our “write article” page that pokes and prods everyone from staff to community contributors to disclose personal and professional affiliations to anything discussed in stories. This update goes hand-in-hand with an update to our terms of use policy, which now requires a disclosure in any circumstance where a contributor has a “personal or professional interest in the subject matter of such article.” The interface is clean and simple and is just a text area that allows you to add a short des

It’s been nearly two and half years since we launched The Sacramento Press, and today we released a few changes (more than just the temporary purple color), one of which is removing the beta stamp from our navigation. What is a beta stamp, you ask? Well, since you can no longer see it on our site, I grabbed this screenshot of what it used to look like. Beta generally indicates that a company is still working out the kinks in their core product. But we finally are happy to say we feel pretty happy with what we have, so no more beta! Does this mean we stop working on new features? Absolutely not. We will in fact bring new and increasingly cool features to The Sacramento Press over the co

Previously I wrote an article mentioning how search no longer sucked. And while that was true, it wasn’t great either. Yesterday’s improvement to search makes it even more usable. The biggest difference is that now our search results are displayed in order of relevance, with significant weight given to more recent content, instead of strict chronological order. Chronological order made sense, since, well, we’re a news site and the more current the content, often the more relevant it is. However, sometimes nothing new has been written about what you are searching for, but you still want to find it at the top of your search result. Now we have a balanced mix of relevance and chronology. We

Now you can add captions and credits to images that you upload to the site. Because we have added captions and credits, the interface has changed for adding pictures to the slide show at the top of each story. The interface will allow you to give yourself a photo credit and assign multiple captions at the same time. Captions are optional, but image credits are required. You can also rearrange your pictures by simply dragging and dropping the rows into the appropriate order. You drag a picture by clicking the gridded dot icon located just to the left of your picture. In order to display this new information, we had to change the look and feel of the article’s slide show gallery. Captions

Search on our site no longer sucks. We spent the last few weeks digging up our original search system and revamping it entirely. No longer will you see out-of-date Google search results with duplicate entries. Now you will find custom, up-to-the-minute results parsed into three different types: articles, users and comments. You’ll also notice that there are now new icons to represent the different content types, and you will find them to be consistent site-wide, not just in the search results. One other noticeable change is the search box in the navigation bar. Now it is much more visible with a white background and clear in purpose due to the button saying “search” and not just “go.”

Comments are a crucial and highly valuable part of our site. The core vision for The Sacramento Press is an open media platform to inspire ongoing, healthy conversations and reporting. In addition, when conversation is lively but civil, we see tangible business benefits in terms of page-views and visitor loyalty. When conversations are dominated by bullying, name-calling or off-topic comments, we see a tangible loss in terms of unique visitors and page-views. Most importantly, it is a severe detriment to our purpose and philosophy and angers our community. In the last few weeks we have made big pushes internally to correct this. As head of product development, I have had a big part in th

How do you know if community contributors on our site are using their real names? How do you distinguish staff reporters from community contributors? How do you know who has been featured on our front page? This weekend, The Sacramento Press launched badges to address all those concerns and more. Badges come in two varieties: merit and identity. Identity badges identify our users, what they do and their role on our site. The staff of The Sacramento Press assigns all identity badges manually. Assigning badges will start slowly and take time. We have eight identity badges: Editorial Staff, Sacpress Staff, Editorial Interns, County Government, City Government, Law Enforcement, Fire Departme

The future of news is not paper. At the same time the future is not necessarily just computers or mobile phones either. These days a new player, in the form of a new medium has entered the fray. That new technology is eInk. eInk is, much as its name implies, electronic ink. From the eInk website, eInk is described as offering, “...the viewer the experience of reading from paper, while having the power of updatable information.” The key difference between eInk and a computer screen is that it is not backlit like a screen, so it can be viewed in bright sunlight but not in the dark. To retain the image on the screen no power is required. So does eInk satisfy those that want the feel of news

Until April 14th, 2009 we, at The Sacramento Press, had been lax in enforcing our policies. As of that date we have begun to more strictly enforce our policies. We strive to be the best source of local news and information in the Sacramento area. We aim to do that with a mix of paid reporting, and contributions from the Sacramento community. However our site is primarily written by community volunteers who submit their content without direct contact with The Sacramento Press Anyone who lives in Sacramento is welcome to sign up and write for our site with no editorial approval prior to posting. It is a very free system, the only caveat is that you abide by the rules and policies of the si

The current fear goes something like this: "If the newspapers disappear, so does all the real original reporting with it." The basic charge is that there is no business model for "giving away" news online, because online revenue is too miniscule and newspapers spend an enormous amount to get us that amazing original content. The trouble is that a lot of those assumptions are just plain false. Once you start delving into the numbers those assumptions begin to wash away. For instance, what does an average major daily pay, in terms of a percentage of its overall budget, for its editorial department? While one's inclination may be to assume that it is a huge portion, the reality is that the

As it is today, could the Sacramento Press replace The Sacramento Bee? In a word, no. However, one word is far from the full story. In my last installment of this storyline, I outlined the course I was taking in discussing the future of news, with an emphasis paid to local content, since that is what this publication focuses on. Over the course of the last week, I embarked on the rather epic and tedious task of quantifying exactly what is in a week's worth of The Bee. In order to do this, I purchased a copy each day and as meticulously as possible recorded how many pieces of content The Bee wrote versus content drawn from other publications, and of that content, how much of it was local.

This survey was conducted of The Sacramento Bee, from Monday, March 23rd to Sunday, March 29th. The aim of the survey was to pinpoint how much of the written content of The Bee was written by The Bee and of that content how much was local and how much was not. Each day was divided into the sections of the paper. Sections of the paper that had no attributable articles were simply not included. Within each section, all the different publications were separated out on to their own lines, with special lines for local Bee content and McClatchy content (from the Washngton bureau, or a foreign bureau). Each mark per line denotes an attribution for a piece of text. Shortcomings of this survey:

Newspapers are in peril. There is very little doubt about that, and if you are somehow doubting that, I point you to last week’s news that the revenues of the world’s most-read newspaper, USA Today, are likely down year over year 30%. Aside from industry-wide declining revenues, last week also saw the closure of the Rocky Mountain Post News and the end of the print edition of the Seattle Post Intelligencer. From these events a heated discussion was born. What is the future of news, and if newspapers are heading the way of the Dodo, who will report the news? The goal of this storyline is to address those very serious questions, especially from a local news angle. Over the course of the nex

Don't miss out on our next workshop, Interviewing Techniques, which will be held this Thursday, March 19, from 6:30 - 8 p.m. Stephen Magagnini will be leading an interactive workshop on how to make the most out of interviews, which will help to improve the quality of your writing, whether it be for school, Sacramento Press or your career. Magagnini has taught journalism, advanced composition, investigative reporting and narrative writing at UC Davis. He continues to teach professional journalists how to do their jobs better as part of USC's Institute for Justice and Journalism and Health Journalism Fellowships, and the American Press Institute's seminars on compelling writing. He's bee

Are you looking for an excuse to come meet the staff of the Sacramento Press? Come join us for our next workshop on Feb. 25th from 6:30-8 p.m. Molly Dugan, an assistant professor of journalism and communication studies at Sac State, will be leading the workshop on Journalism and Ethics. She'll be discussing how ethics come into play when we write and publish articles. We'll be serving food and drinks at our office. Our last workshop had a fantastic turnout, with more than 30 people in attendance. We'll continue to hold more workshops covering a variety of topics. If you have any suggestions for future workshops, please send them to colleen@sacramentopress.com or comment below. We look

We are now in our fourth month of operation, and we are happy to see the growing number of community members writing for our site. I'm sure there are many of you who have been reading but are hesitant to post your own story. You may feel like you aren't a good enough writer, or you may not know what you should be writing about. Whatever the reason may be for you not writing, we'd love to get you to change your mind by attending our next workshop. The next scheduled workshop, titled Intro to Journalism, will take place from 6:30-8 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 3.

Holly Heyser, a journalism professor at Sacramento State, will be discussing how to discover news in your everyday life and how to go abo

With the start of a new year we, at The Sacramento Press, have decided to update the sections that are present on our navigation bar. As we expand out of our initial test area and cover more of Sacramento, we wanted to update our primary sections accordingly. Despite the change in the navigation bar our focus remains the same, to be the best source of news and information in the Sacramento area. Additionally we have found that many contributions to our site are about various cultural topics, such as movies, art and entertainment and so we wanted to include that as well as several other new sections. While the new sections are more traditional in nature nothing about the way we deliver a

At 11a.m. on the last Friday of each month I hear a high pitched noise for 2 minutes. This noise is emanating from one of many civil defense, or air raid sirens that were first built for World War 2. Although I hear this high pitched noise at my office, the photos in this article are actually of an air raid siren located in front of Mulvaney's Building and Loan on 19th Street between L Street and Capital. In this storyline I plan to find out the definitive answers to who built all the sirens, why they still are tested and how the whole system works. My journey has started at the library and will continue tomorrow with an interview of Mike Grace who is the one who actually flips the switc