Thankful for a forgotten phone

I tackled Thanksgiving weekend sans cell phone thanks to my forgetfulness. You know what? It was pretty nice. I'm thinking about doing it more often.

Granted, now that I no longer use my device to receive work e-mail, my phone is generally only used for the following activities, in decreasing order of time spent: Making phone calls, checking/posting to Twitter, using the Google Maps app, and checking the Giants score. Since I really had no calls to make, haven't used Twitter much on recent weekends, knew where I was the entire time, and listened to the last of Sunday's game on the radio, being without my phone was no big deal.

Still, not having it nearby felt like a breath of fresh air.

When I realized I forgot my phone, early into the holiday, my wife joked, "Gosh, if you were still at the paper you'd be screwed."

"Wrong," I said. "If I was still at the paper and had forgotten my phone, THEY'D be screwed. I'd be relieved."

Probably not -- but maybe just a little -- true.

Sometimes even the big guys fail to update their sites

As the eight or ten of you who read this know, I used to be the online editor at a small daily newspaper north of Albany. Part of my duty was keeping the website, especially the homepage, updated and fresh. Almost every morning, before I did anything else, I was up to make sure the expected updates had been made overnight and that the site didn't look the same as the night before. Most times everything was hunky-dory, sometimes it wasn't.

It's good to know that even the giant, multi-national corporations have the same problems from time to time. I submit this screen grab from NBC.com, taken at 10:51 EST this morning as I sipped my coffee at work. Note that the homepage is still displaying Sunday night's NFL game between the Giants and Eagles as happening "tonight."

Actually, I wish it WAS still Sunday night. Maybe the outcome of this game would be more satisfying.

The fact that this fairly prominent error was still live 11 hours after the game ended suggests that someone hadn't looked at the site carefully since then, even in the regular working hours of a Monday morning. Maybe they only have one web guy/gal and he/she is out for an extended Thanksgiving break; maybe their (no doubt) overworked web staff is busy with a bigger project. Either way, I think this perfectly illustrates the point that behind every website there is a person, or a group of people, responsible for its upkeep (and countless others who aren't looking at the site to notify them of errors).

Sometimes I wonder how often often we, as people feeding at the trough of information, forget that. In my former role, I was constantly anxious about the public perception of the brand if the website wasn't fresh and updated. In turn, I elevated that responsibility to sacred status in my day-to-day job description. However, I also balanced my worries against anecdotal or first-hand experience with other sites that allowed similar small, or even more egregious, errors. I also factored in my response, as a user of those sites, to such mistakes. Which is much like my reaction to this NBC example: "Hmm. Looks like someone forgot to update the homepage. Oh well."

I think my paranoia was justified to an extent (of course it's best-practice to keep your site timely), but as a player at a (by comparison) small potatoes operation, there's comfort to be found when the big names suffer the same sort of mistakes..

Do political ads belong on news websites?

A day before this year's elections, I went to check out Saratogian.com (the site of the newspaper for which I worked for almost three years before moving to central New York), and was shocked by what greeted me on the homepage: A giant, expanding banner ad for a political candidate. Before and after photos:

No missing this ad. It muscles the homepage content out of the way.

After the huge banner contracts, you can see a second political ad. The positioning of this one bothers me less, but the fact it's there is still open for scrutiny.

I'm really not sure how I feel about this. There's a small part of me that understands that times are changing. If newspapers can put ads on the once-sacred front page of their print editions, why should a political ad on the homepage of a news site be any different?

As I said, though, that's a small part of me. Mostly I just thought it grotesque, and several days removed I still feel nauseous about the idea. I glanced at a few other local media outlets that have relevancy for me (the Times Union of Albany, the Ithaca Journal and the Press & Sun Bulletin of Binghamton), and the only other place I saw a political advertisement was on the IJ homepage (sorry, no picture). I noticed it wasn't for a specific candidate, though, and seemed to be paid for by a particular party or political affiliation.

Look, I've long argued that total objectivity in the media is a myth (especially in the fractured and niche information ecosystem of this day and age), but what sort of message does a giant political ad send readers of a news site when the smiling mug of a candidate greets them (and pushes the real content they're looking for downward for 10 seconds) as soon as they navigate to the homepage? Not a good one. Now combine the fact that this particular candidate was endorsed by the newspaper. Can you see why I think this sort of action inadvertently opens a door and invites questions about the credibility and objectivity of a media outlet?

I should note that I'm speaking broadly, and only citing The Saratogian because that's the example I have. My hunch is that plenty of other papers across the country did this too.

This isn't the same argument as to whether or not newspapers should make political endorsements -- a valid discussion to have, but one that is far more nuanced. Big, obtrusive ads on a homepage? At best, it's tacky; at worst, it cripples the integrity of the brand image.

I'd love for you to answer the question I pose in the title of this post and let me know if I'm off base in my thinking.