10:55 pm on Wednesday July 3, 2013
| Posted by Casey_Grim
An Open Letter to The Digitel Community
Fellow editors,
I have been a contributor to The Digitel for a while now and have meant to do this earlier, but things have kept me from doing so, but decided to take the time to do it now, so here goes.
As an editor here I have seen alot of RSS feeds or whatever you call them from local news sources such as The Sun News, WBTW, WPDE, WMBF and others and I don't see how a contributor like myself who see an article of interest and decides to post it here on The Digitel to find it already exist, not by another editor but a feed from a local news source I know The Digitel is a place to write short summaries of stories of interest, but I don't see how if there are getting feed right from the source. I know the aim of this site is to not re-report, but to act as concierge, connecting folks to the best in local coverage online, but I say that is hard to act as a concierge when you have the direct feeds to the source, so I say the The Digitel should cut back on the direct feeds and let the editors write short summaries on stories of interest like The Digitel was orginally meant to be and get back to using The Digitel's 5 points.
Don't take this letter the wrong way as I'm just stating my opinion and I think The Digitel could better better with a cut back on the direct news feeds. That is just my opinion.
Casey Grim
Comments
If I feature or add an
If I feature or add an article and or see that someone else has I suppress all other articles from other news sources. The same goes for the article with the most votes.
I get the frustration of seeing multiple articles with the same basic info -this is an issue thanks to TheDigitel's "small town" hyper local approach.
I agree that we shouldn't
I agree that we shouldn't pull the headlines and link as like you said would discourage others from having their say in the matter and isn't that the purpose of The Digitel? I like the option you suggested of "enhance this headline and share your opinion on the matter." I don't think we get rid of the automated seeding, but just cut back on them, so more editors can manually post story summaries for other to have their say on the subject.
Hi Casey, thanks for writing. This was undoubtedly one of the bigger shifts in version 2.
I don't think we considered that pulling in the headline and link would discourage others from having their say on the matter at hand — would an option to "enhance this headline and share your opinion on the matter" return that ability to bring editor opinion into — what I'll call — the forum?
Or would you rather see the automated seeding go in favor of the more manual method?
For those not familiar with our five points, they can be read over here.
I'm going to promote this to the editor's picks for more discussion, and give it a bit more thought myself.