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mountain dew listened to a ton of questionable music at even more questionable volumes and rarely left our web team s desks which were buried in our newspaper s morgue i did whatever i could to build the best website possible for the hometown newspaper i adored it was one of the most rewarding times of my life just thinking about it is making me crave highly caffeinated green soda for the next 16 years newspapering took me across the country working with lots of incredibly talented people we built tons and tons of websites some were fantastic successes some were total bombs either way we learned but by the summer of 2012 i didn t feel the passion anymore i was out of my element and done with newspapers and i was absolutely done with newspaper websites then another one of my heroes longtime orange county register editor ken brusic reached out to me it s a story for another time but i ve loved the register since learning about it in college and i loved ken this was before the then ownerless register was purchased by aaron kushner and his 2100 trust group it didn t matter to me that there was no stability at the paper there wasn t even a real job for me the chance to work with ken at the register seemed worth it when kushner s team bought freedom it was made abundantly clear the register wasn t going to focus on digital at all the register was only going to worry about paid subscribers in print how was a digital journalist who loved local news and focused on audience trends going to figure into this plan i used to say all the time that the most important part of the word newspaper is news not paper we should love the journalism not the medium i was going to take my own advice besides kushner s ideas seemed interesting to me they were completely contrary to nearly everything our industry said and did for most of my career print revenues plunged and circulation numbers fell all while whatever team i was a part of focused on the digital delivery of newspaper content in the hopes of growing an audience and finding new ways to help pay for the journalism at this point in my life after i d been blessed to work with and learn from some of the smartest people in the newspaper industry it now seemed clear no one had figured out how to solve this problem it felt like no one would why not see if someone else s completely counterintuitive ideas could save newspapers i became a print editor at the orange county register ken gave me the greatest job description ever it s still thumbtacked to my desk working right in the center of the newsroom i fell even more in love with this newspaper and its people in some ways it was the first time i felt like a real part of a newsroom since i was a reporter back in topeka and being able to watch online journalism from the outside and visit news websites as just a reader was not only informative but also hugely valuable in many ways i learned more than when i was building websites when friends would visit the register and see our newspaper some joked our print edition felt and looked like a website printed in six columns there was probably something to that the register plans its front pages the same way teams i worked with in the past planned for the 8 a m homepage even the stories we tell are webby that s not a euphemism for light or goofy for me webby means an understanding of what people actually read and how they read it this newspaper s drama over the last few years has been well documented at one point it was so stressful and heartbreaking some nights would end with donna wares the register s fantastic managing editor and me asking each other are you coming back tomorrow we were both pretty sure the other was coming back but it didn t hurt to check a long time ago an editor at the washington post told me it s easy to lead when things are going great but real leaders lead when things are tough i wasn t sure i was a real leader but i knew i had to try to be one for as long as i could things certainly were tough so this was definitely the time to learn rich mirman began running the register s day to day operations in october of 2014 by march of 2015 kushner resigned which was fascinating because who knew an owner could resign it was mostly ceremonial mirman was already in charge by that time with mirman as our publisher it became clear i was going to take over the register s websites and digital strategies i was ready more importantly our newsroom was ready even if it didn t know it was i remember something the best programmer i ve ever worked with used to say he never called anything hard he said it was non trivial re building the register s website was going to be non trivial after a couple of years of only caring about print the register now had very limited technology and even fewer digitally focused folks at one time the register had a pretty darn good web team but that team was long gone there used to be an entire floor in our building called freedom interactive also filled with lots of smart people building all sorts of interesting digital tools they were all laid off a week or so before before the new owners arrived in 2012 our newspaper isn t exactly crawling with programmers now the ones we have are really good but hidden in a completely different building in the it department our newsroom computers are ancient pcs that are at least seven or eight years old and run windows xp which was initially released in 2001 and microsoft quit supporting in 2014 only a handful of computers in our newsroom have enough ram to run a modern operating system and photoshop simultaneously without serious issues some of our web servers are older than my eldest son and he s in middle school we use a home brewed online content management system originally written about a decade ago a key part of our site runs on servers that are no longer made from a company that is long gone and the only way to keep them running is when our tech folks can find what they need on ebay the wifi access in our newsroom is so inconsistent and slow many of us use t mobile mobile hotspots at our desks just to get on the web none of this is the fault of our it team they ve known for years we needed new equipment they requested it spec ed it out sent out rfps and were always told the money wasn t there to do it when i was at the 20 000 circ lawrence journal world in 2003 and the 35 000 circ topeka capital journal in 2001 we had bigger web teams both in the newsroom and on the tech side than the register now had as a point of reference the register s 2014 circulation numbers according to the alliance for audited media were about 356 000 the things listed above weren t even our biggest problems under kushner s regime the register announced in april of 2013 that it wasn t just going to have a paywall on its website it was going to have one of the most restrictive paywalls of any news site on the web we were going to stop chasing the digital ghost if you did get to the stories and photos behind our heavy duty paywall you then hit tons of pagination meaning even a short story would be broken into multiple pages many moons ago when the register focused on digital huge parts of the newspaper s site sat on word press blogs in 2012 those blogs were shut down thousands and thousands of pages from our archives were wiped out with the flip of a switch and when you dug into our site s code and looked closely at the index pages and story pages you saw lots of recently added things that other folks would call black hat seo actually everyone who works on the web would call it that believe it or not this all made building a new website for the register more appealing we had no legacy digital assets to protect the register s online revenues web audience and digital reputation developed over decades were basically gone and for the cyber sins committed this newspaper s website was absolutely dead to google it sounds horrible and it is but it s also very freeing it meant we could build what a newspaper might try to build now knowing what we know now instead of adding on to what we initially built in the 90s we didn t have to worry about breaking something that was now a huge part of our newspaper s online strategy and bottom line because all of that had already been destroyed we developed a plan we shared it with everyone at the newspaper who wanted to hear it we talked about how we would need to iterate on our site things would roll out on our site as they were completed or almost completed or at least kinda working and we would improve them when things launched on our site we would tweak them in full public view doing it this way based upon the limited resources we had would likely take about 18 months before it would start to be obvious we had made real changes that process started in october of 2014 by thanksgiving of that year key pieces of the site s code had been re written and the paywall was completely gone the register s site basically looked the same but it now had different guts through all of this web development we kept our mouths shut even when we had built something pretty dang cool we didn t talk about it we didn t write stories about it we didn t run house ads in our newspaper about it we were quiet when we initially outlined our new digital strategy we decided we weren t going to tell people what we were building we were going to show them after it was done while the newsroom and our tech team was doing all of this mirman was leading a fascinating turnaround of our newspaper s finances the differences in the year to year numbers were eye popping the problem was the hole he inherited was simply too deep in november of 2015 the register s parent company declared bankruptcy for the second time in six years in all likelihood we ll emerge from bankruptcy by the end of march so what about our 18 month web strategy all along we thought we d begin promoting parts of it in april of 2016 the content and technology parts are on schedule but that april date looks important now for very different reasons so starting this week and over the next month or so i m going to write about the things i ve watched this inspiring newsroom and inventive tech team create it s not easy doing this kind of stuff even when you have unlimited resources that s why well funded dot coms still fail it s also why i can t wait to show you what was built here out of almost nothing it s not unusual for someone to recommend an expensive bottle of wine at dinner and seem smart but the much more impressive sommelier is the one who suggests a 10 bottle the whole table ends up loving and remembering that s how we re building our digital strategy low budget but tasty and i hope memorable i can t wait to share what we ve been working on and i can t wait to tell you about the great people at the register who built it all posted on february 22 2016 february 22 2016 hello it s me i m in california dreaming i used to post here fairly frequently i basically quit posting on this blog in early 2012 then i focused on tumblr for a couple of years i stopped posting there in november of 2014 all of those posts have now been imported to this site starting this week i m firing this site back up there s a lot to discuss this is going to be fun or at least therapeutic we ll be talking about what it s been like to work at the orange county register over the last three or four years what we ve been up to in our newsroom and how we built a stealthy digital strategy with old computers older servers and an online team that basically had to be built from scratch that s how you do it when you have no budget and are trying to put humpty dumpty back together again after a previous publisher decided to focus solely on print it s a web strategy that didn t happen quickly or easily it s also not obvious some of the stuff we ll talk about has been in the works for almost 18 months and some of it was done in just a few hours we built more than a few things on the register s site using tools meant to do something completely different we also built the most important big j sites i ve ever been a part of some of the things we did were funny and quirky and we built some really huge things i started building newspaper websites 20 years ago i remember being blown away after seeing the philadelphia inquirer s black hawk down site in 1997 i wanted to figure out how to do that in those early years of online journalism you d get these cool glimpses of how computers and the web were going to not only help us tell stories better but also interact with folks in ways we couldn t have imagined in that era there were times you d see something so big on a news site all you could do was shake your head part of the astonishment came from knowing it wasn t built by a computer there was no mystery mac doing all of that heavy lifting the scale and depth didn t come from a program an algorithm or a fancy database it came from humans real journalists built it using very different tools of the trade there was no simple way to do what you had just experienced not secret shortcut people actually did all of that work we built some of those things at the register as well i ve never been as proud of any online journalism as the things we ll talk about over the next few weeks the same pride goes for the journalists i ve sat next to over these last three or four years they re inspirational talented and more than a little macgyver ish and they were all of those things at a time and in a place where it wasn t always easy to be those things the stuff we ve built together is old school internet only for right now come to think of it i shouldn t have referenced adele to start this blog it s much more like this posted on february 22 2016 an orange halloween i love halloween i mean i really love halloween and i ve always thought it s pretty darn fun when a newspaper goes a little crazy on that day that was the plan this year at the orange county register one of the stories that s always interesting to read every couple of years is what famous people in our hometown do on halloween or what they hand out to trick or treaters so we did a version of that story this year in the register continue reading an orange halloween posted on november 1 2014 october 29 2015 cool stuff from june in the orange county register continue reading cool stuff from june in the orange county register posted on july 3 2014 october 29 2015 125 years of orange county from sunday s oc register on sunday june 29 the oc register ran a cool package on 125 years of orange county here s what it looked like continue reading 125 years of orange county from sunday s oc register posted on july 2 2014 october 29 2015 nhl s freeway series how the oc and la register newspapers handled tonight s playoff game with the launch of the los angeles register in mid april we ve really tried to keep the orange county register and los angeles register feeling different especially on the fr...