Trapper Keeper

I’m giving a “lecture” on content management to Professor Stovall’s web journalism class at UT Tuesday.

Last Wednesday, over half-price burgers at Cumberlands, I told Jay I thought it might be “cute” to start the lecture by talking about Trapper Keepers. You know, the original content management systems. So then Jay asked if I had ever seen the South Park Trapper Keeper episode.

No.

But of course, I bought it from iTunes today. I still haven’t watched the whole thing, but damn, it was funny. The basic jist – Cartman’s Trapper Keeper tries to take over the world.

Anyway, Jay thought it might be fun to play a little of the episode in class… we’ll see… maybe a clip or two.

Once I win the auction on eBay, this Trapper Keeper will be mine.

I must have got Jay to thinkin’ about content management because today he sent me a couple of relevant blog articles… Boxes posted by Greg Storey on Airbags and Redefining content management posted by D. Keith Robinson on Vitamin.

I’ve decided to jump into the conversation and lay down my two cents.

You see, I agree with Robinson, content management is not the same as content management systems. Which kinda leads back to my Trapper Keeper analogy. Just because you have a system, doesn’t mean you’re managing your content. You can store notes, handouts, homework, even pencils, pens and erasers in your Trapper Keeper. It’s your personal content management system. Content comes in and content goes out. But, unlike Cartman’s high-tech Trapper Keeper, it’s up to you to organize it, as little or as much as you like…

  • Is your system pretty?
  • Is your system efficient?
  • What would make your system more useful?

Hmmm…perhaps actually managing your content.

Content management systems (CMS) are great. Especially for the anal retentive organizers, such as myself. A CMS can manage workflow and processes, organize content, provide pre-production services, indexes and archives.

I define a CMS like this:
CMS = People + Processes + Data

People are reporters, editors, photographers, designers and/or developers.

Processes include reporting, editing, approving and publishing.

Data, and I really mean meta data (data that describes other data like headlines, bylines, datelines, categories, which all describe a story) is what journalists should be concerned about.

You see, the power of computers and the internet lie in the ability to organize, sort and search. That’s where a CMS comes in handy. Well, a CMS that utilizes databases and dynamic, searchable content. This could get oh-so-technical oh-so-fast, but I don’t want it to.

What I want is to educate journalists about their role in content management and online journalism. Most of them ain’t developers, and ain’t ever gonna be. They don’t know C++ from PHP from CSS. So I have to agree with Doc Searls Newspapers 2.0 “your job is journalism, not container cargo.”

Let’s go back to the Trapper Keeper. You’re a journalist, how would you organize it? Would you care who was going to use it? What if you were going to let your classmate borrow your Trapper Keeper because he got the mumps and missed class for two weeks? You’d want to provide him with a neat, well-organized Trapper Keeper with easy-to-find information. You’d at least want him to appreciate all the hard work you put into taking notes, right? All the pretty high-lighting in yellow, pink and lavender.

You see, I want my CMS but I want my freedom too.

I want neatly organized and searchable data, but I also want the freedom to choose how I tell a story – maybe with pictures and graphs and charts and audio and video. Or maybe not. And maybe I want to be able to design the layout of the story. Oh no! I said it. Design. Well, what do I know about design? Not the first thing really. But I hate cookie cutters. And, I think I know how to tell a story, so I would like to use my journalism skills to do that. Is that so wrong? I’m not talking about completely redesigning a news page with some hideous color scheme and background music ala MySpace. I’m talking about having the freedom to decide where to drop a pull quote, where to break up the text with a sub head and where to drop an ordered list. Cut and paste if you must, but give your online journalists an opportunity to move things around, drop in some basic HTML and CSS, and once in a while, consider producing a special web-only report that plays to the strength of the medium. (See chicagocrime.org).

Here is where we, as journalists need to be able to talk the talk, walk the walk and have a conversation with our developers. Why oh why can’t we work hand in hand on the next wave of CMS? As part of a journalism education, we should be discussing data mining, search engines, keywords, etc. It’s not so scary. Personally, I think we need more people like me. (Not to toot my own horn or anything but…) We need journalists who aren’t afraid of technology and thinking about technology and things like databases and content management systems.

Our job is journalism. So, what is journalism? Maybe we need to think about how journalism applies to the internet.

As a journalism educator, my goal would be to educate journalists about how to apply good writing skills to new media. Reporting and writing really aren’t as easy as some people believe. There is an art to really good writing – tight, concise writing – and it’s more important than ever for today’s new media. I think we should be training journalists how to think about writing headlines for RSS, title tags for links that boost searches and web-standard HTML and CSS. If you want to be an online journalist you better know something about your medium. It’s different. But it’s not all technical. I don’t believe it’s for every one, but neither is newspaper reporting or anchoring the 10 o’clock news. Some people, like my former students, Meagan and Natalie, will take the challenge and run with it…