And speaking of filters …

Google Releases Universal Search for Gmail, Docs and Sites I won’t be happy until it can find my keys and documentation of my that December 2003 expense report that accounting still hasn’t pushed through.

The future of UI Is VUI the new GUI?

Verizon Plans to Bring Live TV Streaming to the iPad The future of news is all about getting the right information to the right people at the right time.

FINDING THE MEDIATED CITY Durn, there’s a lot of words in this post. But whatever a mediated city is, I think journalists need to be at the center of creating it.

Auto-Tweeting Your Way to Spamsville Yup. Twitter’s about conversation. Not something you automate.

Broadcast Viewer Average Age: 51 Is it the device or the content that young folks don’t like?

The Web is not dead, but many wish it so
Too many words for me to sound them all out, but Steve Yelvington looks like he might have smart thoughts about the inflammatory Wired article.

It’s still about the journalism, not the CMS I will be so glad when people feel like they no longer have to build their own CMS. Can’t everyone just use Drupal, the most awesomest CMS that is way better than anything else and is used by all the cool kids? The partisanship just has to stop.

The Web Design Community Offers Advice To Beginners Quickly saw a line that I might turn into a t-shirt for class. “Google before you ask.”

Statelight: Transparency in a Box, Pt. 2 I’m generally skeptical of anything in a box. They are usually operated with a turnkey and are bought at a one-stop-shop. But Statline’s good people. And the Good Lord knows we need more transparency at the state level.

Gannett Goes Hyperlocal With HighSchoolSports.net Wanna oust your local incumbent news organization? Publish a database of local crime, gossip about the schools and the scores and video from high school sports.

A fresh look at reporting skills Looks like Mindy McAdams has a good conversation going over at her blog. Need to stop in and check it out.

And finally a handful of posts that always draw my attention — ones that start with a number or an interrogative:

5 Useful Facebook Trend and Search Services

5 Questions with John Byrne of BusinessWeek, Fast Company, and Now, C-Change Media

10 Ways to Make Video a More Interactive Experience

NPR Listening By The Numbers—And The Platform

How Training Citizen Journalists Made a Difference

How Metadata Can Eliminate the Need for Pay Walls

So here’s a new deal I’m going to start trying. I find the headlines and I ask you to filter back to me the new facts, missing info and impact of the stories. If you read one of the stories that pass my filter, will kindly post one comment if you find anything interesting in the articles themselves?

Here’s what passed through my filter today:

Mashable.com and Poynter.org’s Romenesko dominated today’s Thornburg filter. Mashable had nine stories and Romenesko got eight through.

Twenty SXSW panels that journalists would find worthwhile. I SWEAR I’m going this year. Very interested in the proposals about using design thinking in newsrooms.

‘Murdoch has has never succeeded in any digital venture he’s managed’ Always love a contrarian POV. Especially when they may be right.

Primack quits Thomson Reuters to join Fortune.com An niche daily e-mail with 60,000 subscribers. As a journalist, I’ll take that. Getting that many subscribers is one problem, certainly. But once I do, what’s your suggested business plan for me?

Journalists in Mexico forced to practice ‘narco-censorship’ Amid all the fluff we get in daily news media, let’s not forget the journalists who truly risk their lives to shine light in dark places, hold powerful people accountable and explaining an increasingly complex and interconnected world.

Washington Post Co. warns on Kaplan division Always worried about one of my favorite news (and education) companies. Kaplan’s been WaPoCo’s sugar daddy for a while. All newsrooms need a sugar daddy. Or a thin staff. And by thin, I mean they don’t eat.

Aspen Institute panel discusses health of nation’s media Durn. I was just in Breckenridge. How come I couldn’t find an excuse to stay in the Rockies an extra week?

Conservative columnist Kilpatrick dies at 89 For a new media guy, it surprises me how often I get nostalgic about an old media world I never really knew but that has shaped my ideas about what the American press can and should be.

The Future of Public Relations and Social Media Sometimes Mashable’s “tip” columns are useful and sometimes they are utter self-promotion. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to sort them out every day. So, please, Mashable, less chaff and more wheat.

Use Adobe Fonts in Your Own Web Designs Always interested in the ongoing battle between openness/interoperability and attractiveness/designer tyranny.

Jim Barnett on Texas Tribune via Nonprofit Road blog Barnett is a smart guy and was kind enough to let me pick his brain when I launched my failed N.C. political news service in 2001. So I hope he succeeds at Texas Tribune and continues to share the lessons he learns as an old-school entrepreneurial journalist.

Hulu Serving 3x as Many Video Ads as YouTube The two things I want to know after reading this headline: Why? and Is Hulu also doing 3x revenue as YouTube? Plus, I’m always cheering for UNC journalism alumni like Hulu CEO Jason Kilar.

Gawker boss says Web media need to be more like TV Nick Denton gets the Web, and I’m not just saying that because I too think that Web media has been slow to pick up on the “right” lessons from TV news. I wonder if Denton’s reason for saying Web media need to be more like TV are the same as mine.

5 Trends Affecting How We Connect Through Social Media I’m only interested in this Mashable column if it has actual research and data. Anyone can do anecdotes and speculation. Even me.

iPhone App Makes Barcode Scanning a Social Experience Food pricing is an untapped social news product. You want to defend your local news market? Make grocery shopping part of your UGC strategy. (See, I told you even I could offer unsubstantiated speculation.)

How People Are Signing In Across the Web [STATS] Dear Mashable, if by “[STATS]” you mean actual research and information, then I’m all about this.

Slideshare Is Going Freemium I love and use Slideshare. And HootSuite, which is also “going freemium.” And I’m putting the word “freemium” as the center square on this month’s buzzword bingo sheet. (Also, I wonder if there’s a future revenue stream from turning your letters-to-the-editor and comments sections into “freemium” services.)

TV Guide Gets a Slick New iPad App OK, so it’s slick. But is it strategically interesting in any way? Is there any lessons to transfer to other news and information services looking to make the mobile leap?

USA Today launches multimedia special marking five years since Hurricane Katrina Need to take a look at this and look for applicable lessons and suggestions for other newsrooms.

Web Faceoff: Freemium vs. Ad Supported Mashable – You’ve sunk my battleship!

Nine Questions on Patch’s New Push: National Hyperlocal?, SEO Sauces, and the Case of the Besieged Florist One journalist per 10,000 to 80,000 people. Compare that ratio to the typical newspaper newsroom ratio of five years ago. ( I think it’s 1-per-1,000, but I need to check Phil Meyer’s book “The Vanishing Newspaper” to be sure.) Also wondering if it’s time to start creating two cleavages for “community” sites — geographic AND behavioral/psychographic. One alone will not do. But do two cut the slices too small?

Please do share your thoughts.

With that optimistic image fresh in your mind, let’s look at what CMSs do and why your news organization needs one.

Why do I need a CMS?

First, everyone else is doing it. The McClatchy papers have Digital Workbench, the Fayetteville Observer and Wilmington Star-News use the Software Construction Company’s SCC MediaServer, the Asheville and Greensboro papers use Saxotech. In 2006, Media General plunked down a somewhere near $400,ooo for a new CMS for its properties. Several of the state’s smallest papers use TownNews.com. The Daily Tar Heel uses College Publisher. OrangePolitics.org (and The Onion and The Virginian-Pilot) use Drupal. The Independent Weekly uses Gyrobase. The University of Miami student paper uses WordPress. The Lawrence Journal-World uses (and created) Ellington.

But aside from popularity, you need a CMS so you can:

• standardize the visual appearance of your site
• re-use the same headlines, story text, photos and other content simultaneously on several of your site’s pages without having to build each page by hand.
• create workflow efficiencies across media.

What Does a CMS Do?

At its most basic, a Web content management system is a database of content and metadata combined with visual and conditional rules that govern how the content is displayed in various settings.

A CMS usually has these components:

• A database
• A collection of cascading style sheets
• A collection of content display rules based on various conditions described in a programming language such as PHP.

Where Can I See CMS Examples?

The easiest way to play with a CMS is to sign up for a blog on WordPress.com.

There are several sites — including OpenSourceCMS.com — that will let you play with various open-source content management systems so you can see their strengths and weaknesses.

Where Is the CMS? Is it on the Internet or Something?

Content management systems are software applications, just like Microsoft Word. But they run on Web servers instead of your local computer. Very often you load content on to the site simply by filling out a form in on a Web page and/or uploading files from your local machine. If you can attach a file to a Gmail (or Yahoo or Hotmail) account, you can create, edit and manage content in a CMS.

So the first thing you need to do is get some space on a Web server where you can host your CMS. Be sure you can have access to the database, server configuration files and any other programming languages your chosen CMS needs in order to run correctly.

Few newspaper publishers have any interest in shopping for a host that is fairly priced and has the right version of PHP running. That’s why several companies offer all-in-one hosted solutions. You give them the credit card number and they take care of the rest. Some examples that are appropriate for small publishers are:

• Ellington
• Co-Press
• TownNews
  

Design and Other Customization

In order to make your site pretty you will need to customize it’s layout and format. This is done first through by applying a “theme” to your CMS and then by installing and configuring various additional pieces of code, often called “widgets” or “plugins.”

To do this, you need to hire a designer who has experience with user interface and information architecture design of news Web sites. Don’t hire someone who doesn’t have experience working with a news site.

Your designer should do this:

1. Work with you to understand the mission of the site and the ways that various audiences will use the site and the work flows that content creator/editors will build the site. These are called use cases.
2. Define a finite set of page templates. Each template will display content based on a set of rules that is common to all pages using that template. Examples of templates for a basic Web site would be:
   Homepage, Section Front (or Category Index), and Article Page. There could also be templates for things such as user comments, photo slide shows, restaurant reviews, search results, etc.
3. Create wire frames of each template.
4. Create black and white design comps that show where text and visual elements will appear on each template. These design comps usually include logos and other graphical elements.
5. Create color comps.
6. A final version of the page with an associated style guide.

Many of you, dear readers, are thinking to yourselves right now that you might just skip from step 1 to step 7. If you do this, you will discover that you’ve not clearly communicated with your designer or programmers. You will cause problems and frustration that make people unhappy. See “beach at Normandy” analogy.

A Final Word of Caution

The death of every well-meaning CMS deployment project comes in the battle between the need for universally standard templates and the need for maximum flexibility. News editors want standardization so they can hire people who don’t have technical skills, but who have strong news judgment. But they also hate being locked in to templates because many of them grew up in print newsrooms that value creativity and originality in layout and design.

If you have a staff that has any sort of creativity, be prepared to hear “But what if the mayor is assassinated on the day the of the state football championship and we want to lead the site with a video and user comments and a breaking news banner instead of a static lead text blurb with a dominant photo?”

And be prepared to have an answer.

Enter FluidTunes..

FluidTunes is a Mac application that uses the computer’s camera to detect hand motions and allow users to navigate iTunes. Wave a hand, flip through album covers. (Good news for germophobes who can cancel that order.)

That got me thinking… what if a news site used the iTunes cover flow navigation interface as it’s UI? Each story becomes an album, and the daily report is represented by a virtual stack of stories through which the reader can thumb.

Then again, maybe that’s a lot of extra work for something a simple horizontal list of headlines can do almost as well…

(Hat tip to Andrew Werhane for the heads up on FluidTunes.)

On one hand, maybe they’re right. After all, teasers have been a feature of broadcast news for years.

On the other hand, this mentality flies in the face of just giving the customer what he or she wants. And, as we all know, the customer is always right.

So, how much of a tease will the online audience tolerate? Are younger readers, who are more likely to quickly click links in search of the information they want, more likely than older readers, who often carefully assess their choices before clicking on a link, more tolerant of teaser heads? Does the perceived urgency or relevancy of a headline cause readers to be more or less likely to click on teaser heads? Is there some measurement of vagueness that would allow us to find the right balance between serving our reader customers and serving our advertising customers?