TypePad funds journalists bailout program
TypePad, I learned from one of my media news emails today, is offering a bailout to journalists who have been laid off or are fearful of layoffs. I really love this idea since I’ve been pondering the best way to present a WordPress/blogging workshop to the AAJA-LA membership and this is a shortcut for anyone thinking of getting into blogging but is intimidated by the idea of trying to dig into HTML or CSS. Anyway, here’s what they’re offering:
- A free TypePad Pro account, valued at $150 a year
- Automatic enrollment in the Six Apart Media advertising program
- Promotion on Blogs.com
This is good for several reasons.
- You introduce yourself to TypePad, which I hear is just as good as WordPress. And you probably won’t have to do any programming, which I know is just not going to happen with many old school journalists.
- You’ll learn a Content Management System (CMS), which will make you familiar with what many newsrooms are using now to control their websites. That would be an extra skill set to add to the resume.
- Launching a TypePad blog is an excellent way to build an online presence, keep writing, learn how to build traffic to your blog and be an all-around citizen of the blogosphere. This is important stuff.
- You’ll be using software that is used by the likes of CuteOverload, Talking Points Memo and LA Observed. I could only dream of getting into that stratosphere.
If you’re keen on something like this, I’d say jump on the bandwagon quick. Apparently, hundreds of journalists have applied for the “bailout” and its a limited-time offer. I also have to make sure anyone stumbling on this post understands that launching a blog won’t really do anything except give you an online presence, but at least that’s something. It won’t save your job, it won’t get you back your job and it won’t save journalism, but at least it will keep you writing.
However, if you are late to the party, I might be willing to offer whatever help I can (out of the precious little that I know), in exchange for my using your questions to develop my workshop here in LA. :)
We use Movable Type here at the Daily News. It’s the nuts and bolts that go into TypePad. Actually I believe the entire Tribune chain, including the L.A. Times, uses TypePad. See how cleverly they make the navigation on the left side of the pages look the same on their TypePad and “regular” CMS sites.
Actually I’m looking at a project right now that will be a combination of regular blog content and additional, supporting non-bloggy Web pages, and I need to choose a CMS for it. Right now I’m considering WordPress and Drupal.
Even though I am just about neck-deep into Movable Type, and it does many things well, I think the momentum is with WordPress at the moment. If I knew more about how WordPress handles the rest of the CMS equation (other than blog posts), I’d be closer to figuring the whole thing out
Apparently, Movable Type only recently became free for download. They probably make a lot of their money with big organizations like Tribune and Singleton (excuse me, Media News Group, heheh), but having WordPress be free and so open source makes it a lot more progressive because a bigger community is working on it.
Yeah, MT’s move to open source came a bit late. They’re still making money with the enterprise version — plenty of it, in fact.
The latest version of MT is quite an improvement. Unfortunately nobody told my templates, which are still mired in the 4.0 era.
It’s funny to me that Tribune is using the SixApart-hosted Typepad instead of self-hosted Movable Type. It’s probably a good move because somebody else takes care of the headaches, and all they have to do is part with a few thousand bucks per site.
MediaNews uses Movable Type, and while we used to host it offsite, we now host it ourselves in Denver. My company’s Linux guy in Colo. is very good, and things have improved tremendously in that regard.
The other thing about Movable Type is that there’s not all that much documentation for it. And most of what there is tends to be pretty sketchy.
One of the big things we do with MT is use (very heavily) a plugin called MultiBlog, which aggregates posts from as many other blogs as we have in our installation and then creates index pages of them that we deploy all over the place. We’ve got over 300 blogs on our installation. Most aren’t active, but they’re there.
If WordPress had a multi-blog plugin or option (and I could figure out how to use it), I’d be very interested.
The not-new, but getting-bigger thing now is Drupal, which I barely understand, but which is being used for more CMS duty than you’d think. Lots of companies use it for their Web sites. It does blogging (I’m not sure how well compared to WP and MT) as well as other CMSey duties. I’m trying to learn more about it … I believe that the Jacksonville, Fla., paper just converted their site to Drupal. …