Xtra operates a severely broken technical infrastructure. Perhaps you’ve tried to load an Xtra news story on iOS?
A tall, overly excitable Ukrainian bottom was chipping away at the Sisyphean task of fixing that infrastructure until they canned him. Among other things, he taught the men nearing retirement age who run the place what Flickr is.
A question I asked Mills, for which I await an answer: “Do you want semicompetent people with bad taste poorly implementing half-remembered bad advice, or do you want this thing to succeed? In other words, will you hire the least unqualified applicants or will you actually do digital journalism right? You’ve got one chance at this.”
A properly conceived gay-news site requires:
positively no comments whatsoever on any news stories; ruthlessly premoderated comments on selected op-ed pieces
bulletproof code
professional graphic design (which costs in the low five digits for one of the few real Web designers at work today, most of whom I know personally); Webfonts inadvisable unless and until tested on Windows
well-tested adaptive layouts for common and many uncommon platforms (double-checked by PPK)
legitimate fact-checking, including looking up every factual assertion (down to the name of the sitting prime minister) and calling sources to verify quotes
a viable print stylesheet
ongoing training for staff in markup, semantics, and character encoding
original journalism only; relegation of daily links to Pinboard
its own Flipboard pane and Flipboard-specific CSS
rational slugs (can be conceptually overlapped with shortlinks)
at most exactly one ad at a time
Instapaper and Readability integration, among others
a reader-contribution model
a ban on staff picking or perpetuating fights, especially on Twitter
training pages and videos to raise the skills of its readers to 21st-century levels
complete avoidance of internal E-mail for any editorial or production function whatsoever, with every single thing done via Basecamp, the chosen CMS (probably WordPress), meetings, instant messaging, and phone
In other words, anything at all that seems remotely familiar from existing gay-news sites must be avoided at all costs. Everything they’re doing they’re doing wrong.
It’s nice they’re hiring a copy editor; heaven knows they need one, even online. But this is a publication that still won’t use italics (because Ken Popert banned them 20 years ago) or write periods in abbreviations like Mr. and St., so they have nowhere to go but up when it comes to copy quality.
But this thing needs a real editor who actually knows his stuff and isn’t labouring under the misapprehension he’s a volunteer facilitatrix at a rape-crisis centre. This isn’t the first time Mills and Xtra have played games with me, but if at some point Mills deigns to actually answer my questions I might file an application. If I were you, I wouldn’t laugh.
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The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2012.01.07 13:33. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is: http://blog.fawny.org/2012/01/07/dailyxtra/
(CORRECTED) On 2012.01.05, the Canada 2 four-man bobsled driven by Chris Spring crashed on the track at Altenberg, Germany. Three of the four bobsledders were injured – Spring, Bill Thomas, and Graeme Rinholm – and were hospitalized in Germany. Tim Randall had only superficial injuries and was not hospitalized. The Canadian bobsleigh team pulled out of the race the next day, with coach Tom de la Hunty insisting the track remained unsafe.
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The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2012.01.06 15:53. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is: http://blog.fawny.org/2012/01/06/bobsleighcrash-liveblog/
Almost every mistake that could be made has been made in the conception and production of the “high-class” Berner Men Calendar 2011.
They picked bobsledders (gold star right there), then shaved them baby-smooth. Obviously that isn’t smooth enough, so out came the baby oil.
They forced one of the few ginger bobsledders, Manuel Machata, to take off his glasses. We’ve been through this already: You don’t need the façade of perfect vision, let alone actual perfect vision, to pilot a sled.
They made the second-biggest guy in all of bobsleigh, Alexander Mann, look as reedy as a platform diver.
Failing to heed the lesson of Dieux du stade, they cap the whole thing off with some scaredy-cat shower scenes that do nothing for anybody. I doubt the guy even felt cleaner by the end of it.
It goes on and on and on. And in another sign these Germans should have quit while they were ahead, Berner keeps pumping out self-incriminating making-of videos (Day 1, Day 2 – look up the rest yourself).
Something has to be amiss when any of these athletes looks better seated in a makeup chair wearing a T-shirt.
How exactly did Germans manage to make shirtless German bobsledders seem tacky? How much of an achievement is it that I feel sorry for these guys?
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The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2012.01.02 14:34. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is: http://blog.fawny.org/2012/01/02/bernercal2012/
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The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2012.01.02 13:07. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is: http://blog.fawny.org/2012/01/02/seier-seier-seier/
Long-awaited development: An interview in Eye not conducted electronically. Feature not awaited by anyone: Complaint by Rick Poynor that graphic-design history picks and chooses its winners. And, as ever, I seem to be alone in noticing when the same topic comes up in more than one place in the magazine. Am I the only one who reads it cover to cover? [continue with “‘Eye’ 81” →]
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The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2011.12.29 14:14. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is: http://blog.fawny.org/2011/12/29/eye81/
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The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2011.12.14 14:33. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is: http://blog.fawny.org/2011/12/14/toveyism/
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The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2011.12.13 14:48. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is: http://blog.fawny.org/2011/12/13/bridle/
Just add /year/month/day/ to the end of site’s URL, blog.fawny.org. You can add just /year/month/, or just /year/, if you wish. Years are four-digit, month and day two-digit (with padding zero below 10). For example:
Long-awaited development: An interview in Eye not conducted electronically. Feature not awaited by anyone: Complaint by Rick Poynor that graphic-design history picks and chooses its winners. And, as ever, I seem to be alone in noticing when the same topic comes up in more than one place in the magazine. Am I the only one who reads it cover to cover? 
