Drawing the line on Herald comments

If you have some thoughtful — even caustic — criticism you’d like to offer about the Herald’s State Employee Payroll database, have at it. But if you’ve come here to bash Herald employees and to publicize their private information, you’ve come to the wrong place. You know who you are.

The salaries paid to public employees is public information. You might like it. You might not. But making public information public is not illegal, immoral nor, as best as I can tell, fattening.

Toward a Globe-al community

Beth Israel Deaconess president Paul Levy has posted an interesting item on his blog about the future of the Globe. His suggestion: Use the Web to transform the Globe into an online community, with blogger contributions running alongside the paper’s journalism. He even proposes paying bloggers with some sort of Globe scrip to buy goodies or make charitable donations. He writes:

All of sudden, regardless of actual ownership, this is now our newspaper. You have given me a reason to check in, to participate, to feel pride, and to feel a sense that you are relevant to our community in a variety of ways.

For the CEO of a major institution to embrace the “news as a conversation” model espoused by citizen-journalism advocates is an important step. Levy gets it. I also think Globe editors get it more than he gives them credit for, but he’s right to argue that they need to turn the battleship around faster than they’ve managed so far.

Update: Adam Reilly thinks we disagree. I’m not so sure. I take Levy’s suggestion as an “in addition to” sort of idea, not an “instead of.” Ideally, the Globe would foster a community around its journalism, not sacrifice the journalism for the sake of community.

Yes to marriage equality

I hadn’t planned to post at all — I’m in the business center of a Best Western in Arlington, Va., helping to chaperone my daughter’s eighth-grade class trip to Washington — but I had to pause for a moment to celebrate the Legislature’s standing up for marriage equality.

Here is Bay Windows’ account. This is great news for the state, and, I hope, the end for the anti-marriage forces.

Eat now, pay later

I don’t mean to steal a page out of Seth’s blog, but I have important news to report following a weekend visit to Woodman’s: (1) believe it or not, they’re now taking credit cards; and (2) when I ordered the fried jumbo shrimp plate, I was offered cocktail sauce instead of automatically being given tartar sauce. Not nearly enough horseradish in the cocktail sauce, but, still, it was a huge upgrade.

Photo (cc) by kariek. Some rights reserved.

Food fight

As a somewhat disgruntled customer of Wild Oats (my suggested motto: “You’d Better Want What We Have, Because We Don’t Have What You Want”), I’ve been looking forward to seeing my local outlet converted to a Whole Foods.

Now Daniel Gross of Slate tells us that the Bush administration has finally identified a proposed merger it doesn’t like. As Gross suggests, it sounds like revenge.

What Craig hath wrought

I’ve been catching up on some new-media blogs this afternoon, and have run across a couple of favorable references to this post by Ryan Sholin, titled “10 obvious things about the future of newspapers you need to get through your head.”

I agree with a lot of it, despite a tone that stands out for snottiness even in the generally snotty world of blogging. But I want to take serious issue with this:

It’s not Craig’s fault. Newspaper classifieds suck and they have for years. Either develop simple database applications with photos and maps to let your users actually find what they’re looking for, or partner with a good third-party vertical who can. Anything less is a waste of your time.

Uh, actually, it is Craig’s fault. Not in the sense that Craig Newmark did anything anything wrong or evil when he created Craigslist. Rather, I’m talking about a simple reality — he and newspapers are in two different businesses, and his business has caused serious damage to the news business.

A large daily newspaper is an enormously expensive undertaking, and, traditionally, about a third of its revenues came from classified ads. Many newspapers actually made a pretty decent transition to the online world. As I recall, the Globe had a searchable help-wanted database on its Web site 10 or 12 years ago, and the Herald wasn’t that far behind.

But they still needed to charge money — lots of it — in order to pay for their journalism. When Monster.com and Craigslist came along, offering free and nearly free classifieds, there was no way that newspapers could compete. I recall reading a couple of years ago that help-wanted revenue at the San Jose Mercury News dropped from something like $115 million to $15 million in just a few years. (Note: Since I first posted this item, I found the article describing this.) Not surprisingly, the Mercury has been cut to the bone, with rumors of more cuts in the offing.

Could online newspaper classifieds be improved? Sure. But you have to wonder what the incentive is. The Globe is now partnering with Monster.com, which makes a lot of sense. No way, though, can this be as lucrative as the days when the Globe had a near-monopoly on the local classified market, and the Sunday paper was as popular for all those job listings as it was for the news it contained.

State employees online II

The Herald’s online database of state-employee salaries seems to be working as intended today. You can search by name, look up entire departments and sort by name or salary, among other features.

Adam Gaffin has some ideas on how to make it more usable — although it looks like at least a few have already been implemented. Personally, I’d make it so that you could download the whole thing into an Excel spreadsheet.

I’ve looked up a few people this morning, and found out that they don’t make as much as I’d assumed.

Update: Joe Dwinell shares some tips, including how to pull parts of the database into Excel. What about the whole thing? “Sorry, it’s too big to e-mail.” Yes, but it could be posted as a downloadable file.

State employees online

Herald city editor Jules Crittenden may think the print edition is what matters, but the most interesting thing going on in his paper today is online: the Herald has unveiled the entire state payroll as of April 2007.

I think there are some legitimate privacy concerns, but the fact is that these are all public records. On balance, making them readily accessible is a good thing — although I’m less than thrilled with the Herald’s page-one tease calling it “Find-A-Hack.”

Herald Web guy Joe Dwinell calls the online payroll a “searchable list.” Maybe I’m missing something, but all I see is a non-sortable table broken into 3,979 Web pages that you have to click on one at a time. Perhaps further refinements will be coming.