This is not going to work.

Let me preface this by saying that I do want all of our projects to succeed, and I do support innovation within the Missourian and the advancement toward being a cutting-edge online news source.

However,

There is no way that the web shells project will succeed in this semester with the way we are going. Not a chance. And here's a few of the reasons why:

1) The basic fact that we have not even submitted designs to a web development company. If the company we are using is in fact the same as who's doing Smart Decision, we are going to have to wait until they are done anyway (they are months late, by the way), and people, WEB SITES ARE MADE OVER THE COURSE OF MONTHS. MONTHS! Not a week, not even a few weeks, and not by just copying and pasting a design someone makes in InDesign onto a page.

In addition to that they have to adapt it to the content management system. All large-content websites operate with a program where attaching certain tags in a program to a story/video/photo designates its place on a web page. And that takes time, and it happens AFTER the design is done (in code, not InDesign).



2) We don't have the manpower to do virtually anything we have planned. A few things to consider:

- Clearly, we can not do all of the reporting we've planned ourselves. Do we abandon our beats? We didn't touch this in our meeting today.

- The editors had NO IDEA that we were even thinking of using their reporters. And honestly, what authority do we have to take those resources away from what they're already doing?. They aren't sitting around doing nothing, and the Missourian almost never makes their goal of 30 posts a day.

- We don't have people to do these interactive graphics. The graphics department has their hands so full, and most of them are not trained in Flash (the software that you need to make graphics interactive) I defy any one of you to go up to Mary Nguyen and have her tell you otherwise. And just to put things in perspective, anything that responds to user input IS MADE IN FLASH. These projects take weeks for full-time Flash specialists at media outlets.

- We have talked about gathering an incredible amount of data. Sure, this data exists somewhere. But I guarantee you it doesn't all exist in a usable format online that we can just link to. We can't just take for granted that all of that information is there for us already. We will have to take time to put much of it in a usable format.


I'm not saying that people's ideas are bad. All of these things are doable, but not in the time that we have or with the number of people that we have.

When I've brought this or any similar cautionary comment up in class, I've been told that we are trying to be "innovative." That term is not usually a relative one, but in our situation it is because everything that we have planned has been fundamentally done already by someone else. The "how" is not a mystery, it's something that's already been figured out and we're choosing to ignore it. There is no reason for us to go around with a blindfold on.

What I am saying is that we are in way over our collective head. If the entire class was working on a single web shell, I think we could be successful.

So I guess that is what I would like to propose. Three is not going to happen. One might. Let's choose one topic, concentrate our efforts and come up with a quality, sustainable product that will outlive our stay in Advanced Reporting or even at the Missourian.