Thanks to the Post-Dispatch; now, Patch.com
Today, I head to New York for three days of orientation at my new job with Patch.com. I’ll be a regional editor in St. Louis for the fast-growing company. How fast growing? When I started interviewing for the position in early June, there were about 60 Patch sites up and running; now there are more than 80. And the feeling I get is that the pace is only going to increase.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Tuesday was my last day at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, where I spent eight years as online news director and, in the past couple of years, as an assistant city editor. I had eight good years there and I am am greatly appreciative of the time I spent at the P-D. The people I worked with were all professionals, who cared about journalism and their public service mission. They made me a better journalist. I have always been impressed with the standard my colleagues set for their work, and for the kinds of stories that deserved front-page play. They never settled for the best of the that day’s news; they expected front-page stories to live up to a certain standard before they were considered. It was a wonderful environment in which to work. Read more
Bloggers and mainstream media can cooperate
One of Toby's dino pictures, from the Sinclair station in St. Louis at South Broadway and California, near Interstate 55.
I weary of the drama that exists sometimes between the pure “blogging community” and the so-called “mainstream media.” If we can just communicate, we can work together nicely. I think we’ve missed some opportunities to do that at the Post-Dispatch, but I think we did it right this week with a story that ran on Wednesday.
The story was a brite about the disappearance of the Sinclair Oil dinosaur mascots in St. Louis in the wake of a takeover of the company-owned gas stations. My colleague Matt Hathaway found the tip on a blog called BELTSTL.com, which writes about local preservation and architecture.
It wasn’t hard news, but it was a worthy feature, given how ubiquitous the dinosaurs are on the Sinclair logo and the toys that the stations sell.
While Matt wrote his story, I reached out to the blogger, Toby Weiss, to ask for permission to run some of her pictures of one of the dinosaurs in the paper. She granted it, asking that we credit her by name and by the name of her blog. When the story ran, Matt included this paragraph in the story.
After rebranding of the stations started early this month, a local preservation blog — beltstl.com — broke news of the dinos’ disappearance. And since then, Sinclair enthusiasts have been ramping up their searches.
Toby was also happy to have us work on the story, apparently, because she was “ultra-curious to know” what came of the statues. Toby sent us a nice follow-up after the story ran: “Great reporting makes a good story. So glad you guys did that!”
Data visualization: Rise and fall of Missouri jobs
Rise and fall of jobs in Missouri and the St. Louis area.
I love this visualization of how jobs have fluctuated over the past five years in the St. Louis area. Link to see the functioning graphic on my colleague Steve Giegerich’s blog, STL JobWatch. The graphic shows expanding and contracting circles each month over the past five years, representing how many jobs were added or subjected to the economy each month.
Post-Dispatch interactive designers Brian Williamson and Erica Smith created the graphic based on research I’d done with data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which adjusted the data for seasonality.
The graphic, a snapshot of area employment, reflects the counties and cities where the employed and unemployed reside and not, necessarily, the business locations where they work or worked. The graphic includes representations of the rise and fall of jobs in the St. Louis metropolitan area and the major metro areas of Missouri.
A similar graphic of the national employment scene, designed by TIP Strategies, provided the inspiration for this map.
Plenty of skeptics for Jack Dorsey’s next move
Jim McKelvey shows off Square. (Dawn Majors, St. Louis Post-Dispatch)
My colleague Tim Barker had a story this past weekend for our business section about the next business venture for Jack Dorsey, the St. Louisan who co-founded Twitter and has just started generating buzz for his latest venture, Square.
The mobile credit card payment system depends on a small piece of hardware that plugs into the audio jack in a user’s smart phone. With that dongle, a user can accept a credit card payment by swiping the card through it, getting the buyer to sign with his finger on the phone and, bingo, the transaction is done.
Tim (who is one of the reporters I edit) interviewed Jim McKelvey, a co-owner with Dorsey in Square and the guy who helped inspire the idea, thanks to a lost sale at his Third Degree Glass Factory in St. Louis. McKelvey couldn’t take a payment from a customer who wanted to pay with American Express. Read more
Follow up: The vulgar comment & the school
Cross-posted from The Editors’ Desk on STLtoday.com.
As you can imagine, we’ve watched the uproar closely in the wake of my blog post on Monday. I recounted the case of a person who lost his job at a local school after twice posting a vulgar comment on the Talk of the Day blog on Friday.
We don’t condone vulgarity or obscenity on our site. We won’t tolerate it. Increasingly, we are concerned about the tone of the conversation on STLtoday. When we can, we ban people without apology for bad behavior. We have taken steps to beef up our review process and we’ll continue to enhance those measures to address bad language and intolerant speech.
We also miss stuff, so we depend on you to point out those comments and help us deal with them. That’s not new; we’ve said that from the beginning. We want to hear from you.
On Friday, I saw the reader’s comments, I noticed the comments came from a school and I made the decision to call. The school used its server logs to track the comments, based on the time they were made, to a single work station. After confronting the employee, he resigned. Since then, I’ve heard the criticism, loud and clear.
The criticism of me falls largely in four categories. First, that I overreacted, using an atomic fly-swatter to address the issue. Second, that I somehow violated our privacy policy. Third, that I’ve set some sort of precedent for how we deal with readers who make obscene comments. And fourth, that I was gleeful or boastful in blogging about the incident in the first place. Read more
Kurt's Tweets- Realizing how woefully out of touch I have been with this part of the county. (@ Saint Louis Bread Company) http://4sq.com/5z5Bfh
- Just had my first Gmail phone call -- with my parents -- and the quality was fantastic. Wow. http://tcrn.ch/a8GndI
- Another day, another interview. Fingers crossed. (@ Saint Louis Bread Co) http://4sq.com/avGImL
- Helping my son learn the first 20 elements on the periodic table. Disturbed by how many more elements there are since I studied this stuff.
- Giving blood. (@ St. Martin's Episcopal Church) http://4sq.com/aiWuEk