Saturday, December 13, 2008
That headline is a steal from one of Steve Yelvington's items below, about the new Web-based news management developments at his newspaper chain, but it also fits for this announcement from the Pulitzer Prizes:

http://www.pulitzer.org/new_eligibility_rules
New York, Dec. 8, 2008 [^] The Pulitzer Prizes in journalism, which honor the work of American newspapers appearing in print, have been expanded to include many text-based newspapers and news organizations that publish only on the Internet, the Pulitzer Prize Board announced today.

Personally, I'm celebrating the end of classes with a day off, before I spend Sunday creating the final exam for my Media History class. Right this minute, I'm listening to Scott Fore's terrific jazz guitar at Pascal's Kitchen brunch (come on down if you're in the area), and catching up on some blog-reading and Web work...

For the Radford http://www.radford.edu/comm Web site committee, I put together these links to Drupal/Journalism things of interest to our site and program at the university:

The Morris Communications newspaper group has been building a new site management system on Drupal, and veteran new-media guru Steve Yelvington has been blogging a series of articles on the progress over the past five months... See http://Jacksonville.com for the result. His "end of the world as we know it" comment below puts it all in perspective:

"Like it or not, the organizational model that says 'you guys work for the newspaper, and you other guys work for the website' is becoming unsustainable. Newsrooms -- or, if you prefer, 'news and information centers' -- must become multifunctional, multimedia, multiproduct-focused. Call it what you want: convergence, integration, the end of the world as we know it. It just has to happen."

http://www.yelvington.com/taxonomy/term/471

Thanks to a note from Jay Small in Knoxville (http://smallinitiatives.com/blog/jay-small/2008/12/04/inside-view-of-site-system-rollout), I started catching up on Steve Yelvington's posts and went looking for more background...

Here's one of Steve's earlier items about the project: http://www.yelvington.com/node/469 (links added)

"We're basing our work on the Drupal platform, which we've previously used mostly for community interaction. In 2005, we built Bluffton Today on Drupal, focusing the site entirely on community blogging. In 2006, we relaunched SavannahNow on Drupal, adding newspaper content to the mix. Since then we've built dozens of community blogging sites for our newspapers, as well as radio station websites, Skirt.com (21 cities so far) and WhereTraveler.com (40 cities so far).

"This time around, we're going into some new territory. We're integrating a lot more social-networking functionality, which we think is an important tool for addressing the 'low frequency' problem that most news sites face. We're going to be aggressive aggregators, pulling in RSS feeds from every community resource we can find, and giving our users the ability to vote the results up/down. We'll link heavily to all the sources, including 'competitors.'"

1:42:52 PM  #