Peoria Pundit

On a whim, I thought I’d see if Jerry Smith (right), the online editor at the Peoria Journal Star, would agree to answer a few email questions about his job and the future of online journalism. I wouldn’t have blamed him had he declined. After all, reporters are sometimes hesitant to put themselves under microscope. And I have, on occasion, laid some heavy criticism on his newspaper, his bosses and the Web site itself. But Mr. Smith came through like a trooper:

Peoria Pundit: Jerry, can you tell our readers what your job as “online editor” at the Journal Star entails?

Jerry Smith: Basically, I am in charge of all the editorial content on pjstar.com. That includes all of the stories, photos, online special sections, Web logs and multimedia produced by our Web team and newsroom. I oversee all of the comments our readers submit, and all of the questions they ask about our site. I also assist the newsroom, particularly the sports department, with technical matters.

Today, I have a staff of 3 1/2 people who are learning a new system on the new site. We have been publishing 65-120 stories a day for years. Now we are doing it 18 hours a day.

PP: As you mentioned in your article, pjstar.com started with little fanfare and originally was just a collection of links. Today, there’s a ton of content. In your opinion, how important has the Web become in the delivery of news, both locally and elsewhere?

JS: Some might say I drank the corporate Kool-aid, but I think Web-first publishing is going to be a very good thing for the Journal Star and the newspaper business. The Web is literally transforming the way we deliver news, much like cable changed the TV industry. Today, the Journal Star has begun allowing readers to read what we know, when we know it, with frequent updates. We will occasionally hold an enterprise story until after the 10 p.m. news, but that is the exception now, not the rule. A year ago, as you know, it was the rule, not the exception.

The next year is going to be very interesting for our newsroom, to say the least.

PP: Most people seems pleased with the new design. But the fact is that it’s more than a redesign. Can you tell us about Zope and how it is supposed to give readers a better experience online?

JS: I am not a Zope expert, so I can’t say Zope4Media is better than any other content management system. But I can say I am pleased with how well pjstar.com is running already. Honestly, though, anything would have been better than what we were using before Tuesday when GateHouse flipped the switch to its system.

What you are seeing on pjstar.com right now is rather minimalistic, partly out of necessity. Many of the features we long for are still to come. Ultimately, GateHouse wants us to publish our newspaper from our Web site.

Our previous system hadn’t been designed for that kind of dynamic publishing. It was built so that one man could publish upwards of 120 stories on any given day with as little intervention as possible. We pushed the envelope of that system well beyond what we ever intended to do.

Zope should take us well into the future. Although stories will be listed on pjstar.com for a week or two, we have been told, once a story is published, it will remain online.

PP: Any media that operates a Web site has to cope with the question of whether to allow input from the public in the form of comments, and if so, to what degree and what sorts of comments should be allowed? Can you tell us what the Journal Star’s policy is regarding moderation reader comments, and maybe a few examples?

JS: I am fond of the current “Pool Rules” listed below every story. Although I didn’t write these specifically, the pool rules are simple and to the point and basically summarize the policy I have followed since we introduced comments on our site nearly two years ago.

* Keep it clean.
* Stay on topic.
* Be honest and accurate.
* No personal attacks.
* Don’t say anything here you wouldn’t say in front of your mother at the dinner table.
* Use the ‘Report Abuse’ button when you spot a rule violation.

It is very clear to me that our stories produce a lot of emotion. Then, after reading a story, an anonymous reader is offered the chance to sound off. And so they do. The results frequently are outrageous.

I am going to avoid specific examples, but moderating the “honest and accurate” comments is most difficult. I used the quotations because a reader may truly believe they are being honest and accurate, but I have to ask, what is honest and accurate in an anonymous world?

The Journal Star, like all newspapers, almost never publishes information gleaned from anonymous sources. When we do, we will go to great lengths to verify the information, and then weigh the importance of providing it. With comments, we almost never have time to verify the new “facts,” so we instead delete them, or simply disable comments altogether.

PP: I noticed that, at least for now, the blogs operated by PJS staffers seem to be using the old design. When will they be moved to Zope? And is there any chance the pjstar.com will link to other bloggers in the community, as they do at the State Journal-Register, a fellow GateHouse Media newspaper?

JS: The old design on our blogs is just temporary. I am very close to completing new templates that will make our blogs look like the rest of the Web site. Unfortunately, I couldn’t lock down that design before we switched to Zope, but we will roll it out soon.

GateHouse has no plans to host blogs on Zope for security reasons. So our blogs are going to be hosted at the Journal Star for the foreseeable future. Although the blogs at other GateHouse Web sites, such as rrstar.com, look like the rest of the Web site, it is merely cosmetic; most of GateHouse blogs are hosted by WordPress. That alternative is available to us, but several of our bloggers have been blogging for more than two years and we really don’t want to lose the data they have developed if we can avoid it.

GateHouse has had plans for developing user-generated content, such as blogs, from the beginning. Rockford already is hosting community bloggers, and I expect we will do the same in the future. We don’t have a timetable for introducing this on pjstar.com.

This entry was posted on May 25, 2008 at 3:49 pm and is filed under On the Media . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed Both comments and pings are currently closed.