a day ago
The same, but different: our new website explained
People generally take a dim view of unexpected change in the daily staples of their lives, including the design of their newspapers. So the top brass here were prepared for a bit of flak when they overhauled our digital offering. A lot of the rumpus centred on problems with finding items that had previously been reached with a couple of nonchalant clicks, but to judge by readers' comments and emails, most are getting their bearings again.
One aspect of our overhauled website and app that may be less obvious to readers is that it completes the transition away from so-called edition-based publishing, an approach inherited from print that does not work well for fast-moving online news. Again, some readers, used to a once or twice-daily serving of stories, have found this disconcerting, such as Tim Dawson, who was puzzled not to have been able to track down online a piece he had read in print. 'I had assumed that all of your daily content was available via the app and the website,' Tim said. 'Is this not the case, and if it is not, how much of the content is not offered via the app and the website?'
Our head of digital, Edward Roussel, explained why an article might appear in print but not digital. Breaking news stories appear first online and in the app. A version is later prepared for print. There is no value in taking the print article and publishing it online as we would be duplicating stories. In other words, the print and digital articles may be substantially different. Second, he said, we edit the app in the same way as we edit print. That is to say, we determine an optimum number of daily stories, across a dozen broad areas of coverage, and focus on the quality of those stories. 'One thing we don't do,' Edward stressed, 'is simply dump all print stories online.' That used to happen at many newspapers in times gone by, but it does not make for a happy reading experience.
We publish on average 185 stories a day digitally. A midweek edition of the print newspaper, consisting of the main section and Times2, has about 140 to 150, but when you add Bricks & Mortar, The Game and all the weekend sections, the daily average exceeds 200. So, yes, it's true some print stories do not appear in our digital editions — but, given that a digital facsimile of the print paper is available in the Live app, on the website and even as a standalone app, no one need miss a word.
The eagle eye of Stephen Pilbeam of Southampton alighted on a divot in our report on the dentist who unexpectedly found himself playing in the US Open. 'You say Matt Vogt has struggled with 'the Wurlitzer of emotions he has ridden since he qualified'. I suggest Mr Vogt may have ridden emotional rollercoasters, waltzers and whirlwinds, but merely played a Wurlitzer.'
Hole in one. The Wurlitzer firm, founded in 1850s Cincinnati, began by importing musical instruments from Germany and moved into making pianos and then the organs that accompanied silent films. Jukeboxes followed — but no modes of transport, unless you count the organ that rises out of a pit in Blackpool Tower. In time the jukebox and organ operations split, but both were eventually owned by Gibson, the guitar brand favoured by Les Paul, Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page and Angus Young of AC/DC, not to mention James Hetfield of Metallica. I don't think we can claim, though, that Vogt felt as if he had been thunderstruck, or riding the lightning.
I must confess I've not read Ronald McIntosh's 1990 blockbuster Hyphenation: Discussion of the Changing Principles of Word Division, so I am not an authority on a subject considered 'stretchingly difficult' by Fowler's, but our style guide has wise advice on hyphens, which boils down to: use sparingly. They are tolerated in words with prefixes to prevent a collision of identical letters, as in co-opt and pre-empt, and likewise in composite terms such as cut-throat. Which will not, you might think, be much comfort to Dale Savage of Loughton, who complained: 'Your paper seems to have dispensed with the hyphen when appending a prefix to another word. This creates confusion to the eye and brain, trying to figure out what this strange new word is. When modifying a word with a prefix, please use a hyphen. The worst and most common example is 'miniseries'.'
I can see that 'miniseries' looks like the love child of miseries and ministries, which sounds like gripping TV and is presumably why our style guide does prescribe a hyphen in mini-series. When it comes to radioisotopes, though, we're less accommodating.
The outing for the cod-Latin motor bus poem last week was a trip down memory lane for David Marchant of Kent and Nuala Lonie of Linlithgow. For David it brought back Latin for Today and translating Fabula de Petro Cuniculo for bedtime stories — 'still a standard joke in my family as we recall Dominus McGregor'. Nuala impressively 'dredged up from memory' some extra couplets I had not included.
Peter Lowthian of Marlow was thinking about Tolkien — who, you may recall, didn't write the poem. He had been to an exhibition at the British Library that 'featured some of Tolkien's correspondence, including a fan letter from Joni Mitchell, which I suspect impressed me more than it did him. Quite a few people wrote to him in the languages he invented, which Tolkien corrected in red ink and sent straight back again.' One of those red marks would have ornamented my column last week, for I erroneously referred to 'Elvish languages' when I clearly meant 'Elven' — many thanks to Ben Rapp for setting me straight on the correct way to refer to imaginary tongues.
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