adrian holovaty

August 31, 2003, 12:04 AM ET

SMS sports alerts on KUsports.com

To mark the year's first KU football game, we launched a new feature on KUsports.com today: SMS game alerts. Users can sign up to receive KU football game scores and stats on their cell phones in one of three ways:

1. After the game
2. At halftime and after the game
3. After each quarter

You can choose whether you want to receive these updates on a game-by-game basis or for the entire season. The alert messages are hand-written by an editor rather than being automated, because that allows us to pick out key stats and interesting tidbits.

From what I've heard, this is small potatoes compared to some of the SMS stuff happening in Europe, but we're genuinely pleased and excited by this new technology. It's a perfect fit for quick breaking-news bits, of which sports scores are an excellent example.

On KUsports.com, quite a few people have signed up to receive the alerts already, despite the facts that the feature has only been advertised on the site for about a day and a half and that KU football doesn't have as good of a reputation as, say, KU basketball. What's really interesting to me is that most of the people who signed up requested the quarterly updates, as opposed to only the postgame or halftime/postgame options. Seems like they want as much info as they can get, as often as they can get it.

The most interesting thing about this, though, is how easy it is to do technically. The deep, dark secret behind our SMS implementation is: It's just e-mail. All of the large American cell phone companies provide an e-mail interface to their clients' cell phones. For example, to send an SMS to a Sprint PCS customer, just send an e-mail to the person's 10-digit number at the messaging.sprintpcs.com domain (e.g. 3122221467@messaging.sprintpcs.com), and your e-mail will be displayed on his or her phone as a text message. It's that simple.

There are other ways of hooking into cell-phone providers' SMS systems -- ways that provide more security and reliability than simple e-mail -- but every provider seems to have a different API. In designing the KUsports.com system, I decided that the benefits of the e-mail approach -- namely, a common interface -- outweighed the minor disadvantages.

Judging by the preliminary reaction to the KUsports.com game alerts, I think it's safe to say we'll only be doing more of this. (This is our second venture into SMS, our first being lawrence.com event reminders, which we've had for a few months and are quite popular in themselves.)

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August 21, 2003, 1:37 AM ET

OJR interview transcript: Correction policies

Online Journalism Review's Mark Glaser interviewed me for his latest article, Newspaper Sites Are Slow to Fix Their Online Corrections Policies. I agree with JD Lasica's philosophy of posting raw transcripts, so here's the whole e-mail interview, which focused on my find-the-contact-information series from a while back:

What prompted you to do your experiment? Did it have anything to do with the Blair scandal and corrections, or just your own frustrations contacting people?

It was definitely my own frustrations. I was inspired to do the experiment after the bajillionth time of going to a news Web site and failing to find the contact information I was looking for.

Honestly, I hadn't even considered the Blair/corrections aspect until a reader e-mailed me this:

"I think that editors create the position of 'Readers' Ombudsman' in order to avoid speaking directly to readers. Perhaps if the NY Times made it easy to get feed-back from readers, they would have been suffiently warned about Jayson Blair to take action long ago."

Do you think now, after the scandal, that top news sites will make it easier to notify them of corrections? Why or why not?

I think some might, because the Blair scandal was such a shocker. But I have a feeling many site managers think they're doing a good enough job already, if only because they're intimately familiar with their own sites to such an extent that they think finding contact information is a piece of cake.

The perfect example: During my series, one online editor e-mailed me to say "you won't have trouble finding that information on our site." Well, I took him up on the challenge, and I *did* have trouble -- it took me about seven clicks to find the information.

Will we begin to see "Correct this story" links within every article? I don't know, but it certainly wouldn't hurt.

How important do you think it is for readers to have an avenue to report errors? Why have sites been poor on this front in the past?

Giving users a way to post feedback easily is essential. We're in this business for them, not just to hear ourselves speak. News sites should take a hint from weblogs and allow user comments on every page; I know from experience on my own site that readers often have much to add to a story and are generally willing to take the time to correct something if it's easy to do.

I think sites have done poorly in the past because they're still locked into the old-school gatekeeper mentality: "WE decide what's news, thankyouverymuch, and WE'RE always correct, dammit." That's absurd. The participatory-journalism philosophy being advocated by folks like Dan Gillmor is so much healthier for the industry.

Did any of the top sites you mentioned on your blog actually contact you about your experiment?

None of the sites I focused on contacted me, but a few other online editors did, and the series got some attention in the blogosphere.

Is their worry about spam or getting too much email a legitimate concern? Why or why not?

The spam worry is a lousy excuse for being lazy. If you're worried about spam, obfuscate your address. There are plenty of ways to do it.

As for the worry of getting too much valid e-mail, I just can't understand that, because I sincerely enjoy reading e-mail. I suppose if a news org gets too much e-mail, it would do well to hire a secretary to sort through it.

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August 19, 2003, 12:59 PM ET

Miami Dolphins get big promo on KansasCity.com

The Knight Ridder newspaper chain, which uses a centralized Web publishing system for more than 30 of its newspapers, is often criticized in the industry for giving those sites a cookie-cutter design.

Well, the design isn't all that's shared; banner ads are shared across the network, too. And that leads to inappropriate, embarassing mistakes such as this on KansasCity.com, pointed out to me by Joel Mathis:

For readers who don't keep up with American football: That's an ad for Miami Dolphins e-mail news updates. On a Kansas City news site.

Miami is about 1,500 miles from Kansas City, which has its own football team.

And I'll bet quite a few fans of the Kansas City football team saw that ad and wrinkled their noses. That's how a site loses readers' trust.

Guess that's what happens when corporate controls the Web site.

UPDATE, 12:22 a.m.: E-Media Tidbits reports a Knight Ridder spokesperson has said that this Dolphins ad was "deliberately scheduled" to run on the Kansas City news site because "there are many Dolphin fans all over the county."

Uh huh.

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August 14, 2003, 5:58 PM ET

CNN and Chicago Trib display sitewide breaking-news alerts

While checking various news sites today to read about the power outage on the U.S. East Coast, I noticed two sites -- the Chicago Tribune and CNN -- displayed the news alert via urgent banners at the top of most (all?) article pages. It's a smart idea that helps disseminate breaking news to people who aren't necessarily reading the sites' home pages.

I'd known (and reported) that CNN had such a capability but hadn't seen it in action until today. As for the Trib, this is the first I've heard of their implementation.

Screenshots:

• Chicago Tribune (PNG, 56 KB)
• CNN (PNG, 68 KB)

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