At Christmastime, a family member gave me a gift card for Sweetwater, an online retailer of musical instruments, pro audio gear and accessories. I browsed the Sweetwater website (while logged in to my long-established account — that’s important), and used the gift card to buy some nice locking tuners as upgrades for a couple of my […]
Posted inDigital
Tinkering
More time spent at home during the coronavirus crisis means a chance to tinker with and learn more about some WordPress components of long-standing interest, specifically: Newspack. This uber-plugin and theme-with-variations is designed to incorporate other plugins and enablers that optimize WordPress for the workflow of small/medium news organizations. I downloaded and installed both plugin […]
Posted inDigital
To Cordillera Digital, and beyond…
With Scripps and Quincy buying the Cordillera TV stations, the next few months become the last hurrah for my group, Cordillera Digital. That means a talented team of digital professionals, and great people, entering the job market now or soon. They’re Twin Cities-based, though some may be open to relocation. If your company is hiring digital […]
Posted inMusic
What I would do with Gibson Guitar (repost)
I wrote this in May 2018, originally posted on LinkedIn, and have updated it a few times since then as noted throughout, most recently Sept. 20, 2018 — JS Guitar enthusiasts and industry watchers already picked through accounts of the fall of Gibson Brands, Inc., into bankruptcy, looking for nuggets to suggest what will happen to […]
Posted inDigital
What's wrong with online customer service: an example
It should not be difficult, slow or aggravating to use the website of a leading virtual fax service (eFax) to cancel a $16.95/month account. But it is all three. For starters, you can't just fill out a form and cancel. Ugh! Anytime you enter a customer service web interface and find that canceling or downgrading […]
Posted inDigital
Why I still say 'interactive' instead of 'digital' et al
Sorry, nits. Meet your picker. It bugs me (yes, puny play on words intended) to hear leaders of legacy media businesses refer to their “digital” strategies or products, meaning all their online/internet/web/social/mobile stuff. How did “interactive,” as the adjective of choice for such stuff, lose favor? It is both more accurate and more aspirational. I […]
Posted inDigital
If 'Do Not Track' happens, what's Plan B for targeting?
Despite plenty of conversation and posturing, we're a long way from regulations or even standards for a “Do Not Track” registry as pushed by the Federal Trade Commission. If “Do Not Track” were to come about, would that be the end of many of the ad targeting forms we have seen evolve on the web, […]
Posted inDigital
In news production, a return of the hunter and packer
TVNewsCheck looks into Deseret Media's news production approach and finds a model it implies is novel — but that, in fact, we in the industry have tried before, though we might have widely spread opinions about that memory. Deseret's news organization pumps content into a Salt Lake City newspaper, television station, radio station and affiliated […]
Posted inDigital
Montana now fully tuned up
With today's launches of Operation Tune-Up on KPAX.com in Missoula and KAJ18.com in Kalispell, Cordillera Interactive finished its rollout of new site architectures to all seven station.com sites Cordillera runs in Montana. We will pause and sigh, relieved, before moving on to more site launches the first weeks of October, November and December. We stepped […]
Posted inDigital
More Cordillera Tune-Up sites
Cordillera Interactive launched two more Montana site rebuilds this week in its Operation Tune-Up project: KTVQ.com in Billings and KXLH.com in Helena. Here's the before (left) and after. The changes under the hood matter most in this project, as I described last week: lighter page weights and scripts mean faster load times and fewer nagging […]