March 12, 2005

Clean code, blogs makes breaking news easy

I’m sure many of you have had a very long day and night with the Atlanta cour­t­house shoot­ing, but I wanted to take a minute to write down my thoughts while they were fresh.

Clean code makes design changes easy

Obvi­ously the AJC had to make some fairly rapid changes to our home page to acco­mo­date the break­ing news. We had recently under­gone a redesign that brought the con­tent well up to spec with a tran­si­tional layout — mean­ing we used some very light tables for struc­ture and relied on CSS for the rest.

When the scope of the story became appar­ent I was called in to help redesign the home­page, while others worked to rip out some of the heav­ier parts to reduce page weight.

I was able to turn our page around in about 5 min­utes — sure I had to do some inline styles to cover some needs that weren’t in our stylesheets, but I firmly believe we couldn’t have turned the page around so quickly with­out Web stan­dards.

And it’s not just a quick turn­around — because the markup remained rel­a­tively the same, while the CSS changed, our pro­duc­ers had no prob­lems pick­ing up the new page and churn­ing out some great coverage.

After things calmed down some, I was able to go back and yank out our inline styles and turn them into classes in our main stylesheet, and as the day went on and our needs changed, I could quickly add new classes/styles to meet our pro­duc­ers needs.

Blogs are great for breaking news

After our online group was able to get print side to start filing bursts to us, I quickly set up a break­ing news blog.

Our pro­duc­ers were able to post bursts filed by our print staff, and to file reports picked up from TV and the wires to the blog quickly and easily.

Erica, who is prob­a­bly a biased source, said that the blog was the best part of the cov­er­age. She was stuck at her school, in lock­down, with­out a TV, but she could turn to the blog and quickly get the latest — because it was in chrono­log­i­cal order.

I may be speak­ing out of turn, but I think this is the best inter­face to cover a rolling, break­ing story like this. By the end of the day, as our “10,000 foot view” sto­ries started to roll in, we could pro­vide our users the ‘whole story’, at least to that point in the night. But during the day, as the story devel­ops, users who quickly want to find out what’s changed since they last checked in can get it quickly from the blog.

Filed under: Journalism,Web design

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