Comments on: Caught flat-footed

By: Dan Kennedy

Dan Kennedy — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:25:53 +0000

Aaron: Agreed … the mobile edition of Boston.com is brutal. Shows you what you get when you outsource a core function. They ought to try making it good and charging for it.

By: Aaron Read

Aaron Read — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:24:16 +0000

Not only is Mobile.Boston.com slow to update, exceedingly prone to broken links, and generally a poor, poor substitute for the “real” Boston.com….but a few weeks ago they decided to make it impossible to get to the “real” site on your phone! Thanks a lot you dumbasses!!!

(used to be you could use, say, a Windows Mobile phone and go to http://www.boston.com and go to the real Boston.com site, and go to mobile.Boston.com and get the “mobile” steaming-pile-of-fail site. Now anytime you use a mobile browser to go to http://www.boston.com, you get the mobile site automatically with no way around it.

Screw you Boston.com – I only read you for the sports coverage (which also has gone in the toliet lately…what’s with making it so goddamn hard to find out what the game score and standings are?!?) and these days I get better coverage and info at mobile.ESPN.com!

Disgusting.

By: Brian

Brian — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 04:23:14 +0000

I was out in CA when the news hit, and it was interesting to see the coverage there. Both the SF Chronicle and the Fresno Bee devoted the entire front page above the fold to Kennedy’s passing; the LA Times, on the other hand, wasn’t able to get the story into their print run.

By: George Williams

George Williams — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 03:14:10 +0000

Not that it really matters but the Last Rites used to include “Confession” so reception of the Eucharist would be appropriate, even for the likes of Teddy for we do forgive and love the sinner but not the sin.

By: io saturnalia!

io saturnalia! — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 00:35:01 +0000

Fish,
I’m not sure any Catholic, regardless of standing, would be denied extreme unction. I’m not positive, however. The host is probably another matter.

By: Steve Myers

Steve Myers — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 18:34:32 +0000

Thanks for pointing this out, Dan. I asked Bennie DiNardo about this and he said the problem stems from the special home page layout that was created for Kennedy's death. A bit more info here.

By: LFNeilson

LFNeilson — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 11:27:39 +0000

It’s clear that the Globe editorial dept. still has the power to yell “Stop the presses!” Printing in a remote location not only factors in windshield time, but also puts the press under a contract printer. New Bedford and the CCT are printed in the same facility, but that didn’t help NB catch the story. The papers are not printed simultaneously, and I’d guess that NB was on the press first. Once it’s printed, then a new press run is an extra expense, at contract rates. I’d bet that a paper owning its press could do it faster and cheaper. And these days, no paper has extra bucks. I’ll bet, too, that nobody had that driving sense of the importance of covering a breaking story. Once they’d put the paper to bed, they went too.
As for broadcast, we (in Maine) received the news at 5 a.m. on the BBC feed on Me. Public Radio. My wife was news channel surfing, and noticed that Fox TV had nothing until 8 a.m.

By: Twitter Trackbacks for Media Nation » Caught flat-footed [dankennedy.net] on Topsy.com

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 08:54:13 +0000

[...] link is being shared on Twitter right now. @dankennedy_nu, an influential author, said @rsybuchanan It's [...]

By: mike_b1

mike_b1 — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 05:08:01 +0000

Hopefully the catholic church will remember the whole “love the sinners” shtick it has been preaching for almost 2000 years.

And hopefully those card-carrying members of the “call us catholic, not a cult” club will remember that as well.

By: aml

aml — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 03:56:47 +0000

When the footer of the page says “powered by Quattro Publishing.” it essentially means “outsourced to Quattro Publishing.” and it is very likely that neither Boston.com nor the Boston Globe have any direct control on what gets put on the site and when. (At least that was the way the older mobile vendor LSN worked. I wasn’t around when they changed to Quattro.)

It looks like mobile.boston.com is built by grabbing the top few links from the homepage, and the business and A&E section fronts. It is probably built by screenscraping the boston.com site. It is likely that boston.com changed around the top news well sufficiently that it broke the Quattro’s screenscrapers.
(Vendors like that love to market themselves as being so handsoff, rather than how robust they are. “Just sign with us and you get a mobile site without lifting a finger” sounds good before you sign up. “we’ll be up to 12 hours behind” usually isn’t mentioned.