In Commonwealth magazine there was an interesting article about how the very best ownership model for newspaper could be owned by a non-profit foundation. In the article Dan Kennedy writes…

“Ownership, though, remains a hot topic—not just in Boston, but nationally. The Times Company, like Gannett and McClatchy, is a publicly traded corporation thats obliged to deliver the highest rate of return for its shareholders. Though the Times Company is somewhat insulated from the pressures of the market (chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and his family control the voting shares of stock), publicly traded companies in general have come under fire for their management of newspapers. Increasingly, the typical profit margins of corporate-owned newspapers—20 percent or higher—are seen as inconsistent with well-funded public-service journalism.”

I think there is very compelling evidence that a nonprofit foundation can run a successful newspaper, but I also don’t believe that a non-profit is the ownership method that we should try to get all newspapers to convert to. I’ve had dealings with newspapers owned by a publicly traded corporation, a newspaper owned by a single family (person) and newspapers owned by a non-profit foundation. It’s true that a profit margin can get in the way of running a journalistic community oriented paper, but without a profit all of the newspaper ownership models will fail except those with a rich owner willing to lose his fortune keeping a newspaper alive.

I once met the publisher of a newspaper owned by a non-profit foundation. He told me they were a for-profit newspaper owned by a non-profit foundation community foundation. Without the newspaper the foundation doesn’t have anything to give away and the more money the newspaper makes the more the foundation can invest in the community. But, corporately owned newspapers and family owned newspapers are also very involved in their communities and greatly contribute to community organizations.

Onthe lonely plains of Kansas where Ellington CMS first appeared as the brainchild of Adrian Holovaty and Rob Curley made a name for himself comes the new ultrasimplistic redesign of LJWorld.com. Simplicity is good, but is this too far?

I took the 2007 Alistapart web design survey. Have you?

As students in my Online Design class embarked on their final project, I lectured on the overall site planning process and working with a client. Monday by noon posted their site planning process focusing on what questions to ask your client.

The more web sites I freelance, the more I realize how important client communications is. I have a lot of experience working with internal clients at the newspaper or my university and I communicating with them seemed easier than my freelance clients because we already had common ground from working at the same organization. As I reviewed the times I communicate with clients with my students, I realized I have five different checkpoints where I make sure the client and I are on the same path.

• Proposal & Estimate: Review the site outline and special features, talk about the advantages of the way I design (CSS, future proofing), sale them so they don’t get sticker shock.
• Wireframe focusing on general layout and navigation labels.
• Image comp created in Photoshop or Fireworks.
• Template/homepage laid out in HTML/CSS
• Final review

The more freelance sites that I’ve designed, the more steps I’ve added to the process. I think one of the most important aspects of communicating with a client is to make sure the final decision maker is reviewing your work along these steps. On one site that I designed, I got all the way to the final step and the client told me her boss didn’t like the colors and wanted me to add a shadow effect to the header and the footer. If the decision maker had actually been reviewing the work, this should have been picked up on step three rather than at the end of the design. The second bit of wisdom that I gained from that incident is to not quote flat rate designs, but rather quote hour estimates and hourly rates and when they pull a stunt on you, bill them for the extra hours.

In the news today, the train at the Memphis Zoo lost its last car, then the car derailed and flipped. No one in the train was injured, but several riders were transported to the hospital.

I remember riding the train at the Memphis Zoo (they have nice site with a fun navigation rollover) since I was very little (if you have Facebook, you can see some photos of me when I was little that my sister-in-law Kim posted). Once in sixth grade I was at the Memphis Zoo for a field trip and several of my friends kept jumping off and on the train in the tunnel. After the 2nd time around with them jumping off, the train engineer (driver) stopped the train and found a hose and sprayed them down.

My wife thinks MSNBC use of the Virginia Tech shooter’s photo is irresponsible. I’m not completely in that boat, but I could be persuaded to climb on board. The irresponsible argument chases down the possibility of copycats and the feelings of the families and those close to the victims. On the other hand, you could argue the photo is newsworthy and shows the attitude of the shooter whom everyone is trying to figure out.

At the National Association of Broadcaster’s convention in Las Vegas Adobe has announced their new Adobe Media Player. Unfortunately when I think of Adobe Media Player I think of Windows Media Player meets Acrobat reader. Not very pretty. I think Flash works pretty well for transparent, cross-platform video playback.