Post by swamprat on Mar 7, 2021 21:35:50 GMT -6
Sad day for UFO news. My old friend Billy Cox gets UFO blog cut. One step forward and two steps back. He writes:
Since a few of you have asked (3), yes, it’s official – Gannett killed my UFO blog, De Void, yesterday. I knew it was coming a week or two ago, but I’d asked an editor at the Herald-Tribune in Sarasota if he could keep the hounds at bay until Monday. He said yes. By time I tried to log on Friday afternoon to write a bon voyage piece, it was already too late, the site had been permanently disabled. Sorry – be quicker next time.
Before anybody goes QAnon, it had nothing to do with content, although that would’ve been a more preferable motive. The futurists at Gannett – the biggest newspaper chain in America – decided De Void wasn’t “performing” well enough. The purge from on high was billed as part of an across-the-board hose-down of all blogs and other initiatives that weren’t generating the metrics they wanted. There was no discussion, only the relayed word that Gannett had identified “Readability” in the SEO analytics as the problem.
OK, I’m not that vain. De Void was no great shakes. A lot of it was repetitive and florid with self-pity, and my “Readability” scores were pretty *bleep. Here’s the readout on one blog alone: There were “3 consecutive sentences starting with the same word.” There were not “any subheadings.” There were more than 20 words in 39.7% of my sentences, which is “more than the recommended maximum of 25%. Try to shorten the sentences.”
Days earlier, I attended a mandatory company Zoomer about our marching orders going forward, so I knew where I’d fallen short. Wheezing red mist under a crush of a billion $ in debt, and with 99 percent of all ad revenues sucked up by Google and Facebook, Gannett is hitching its fortunes to digital subscriptions. But Stone Age laptop users alone won’t be enough to survive. The key is getting device-users to buy in. Which means trying to seduce smartphone attention spans into staying with a story for the length of a stoplight.
The key phrases were “scannability,” “infogram,” “digestible and mobile friendly,” and “meets them in places they look for news.” Don’t forget the “why it matters” nut graph. Or “bullet points.” And “how does it impact me?” All of which makes perfect sense. Like, when was the last time you were impacted by a UFO?
Anyway, my farewell De Void was going to be about why, as the only daily newspaper reporter in the United States blogging about UFOs since 2007, I was/still am optimistic over the future of media coverage. Between the phenomenon’s sprawling scope, the early stages of government accountability, and a sustained surge of public interest following the Defense Department’s release of those F-18 videos three years ago, a competitive growth industry has barely even gotten started. There’s more, but this is already way too long.
So. To those in pursuit – two words to the wise: shorter sentences.
Since a few of you have asked (3), yes, it’s official – Gannett killed my UFO blog, De Void, yesterday. I knew it was coming a week or two ago, but I’d asked an editor at the Herald-Tribune in Sarasota if he could keep the hounds at bay until Monday. He said yes. By time I tried to log on Friday afternoon to write a bon voyage piece, it was already too late, the site had been permanently disabled. Sorry – be quicker next time.
Before anybody goes QAnon, it had nothing to do with content, although that would’ve been a more preferable motive. The futurists at Gannett – the biggest newspaper chain in America – decided De Void wasn’t “performing” well enough. The purge from on high was billed as part of an across-the-board hose-down of all blogs and other initiatives that weren’t generating the metrics they wanted. There was no discussion, only the relayed word that Gannett had identified “Readability” in the SEO analytics as the problem.
OK, I’m not that vain. De Void was no great shakes. A lot of it was repetitive and florid with self-pity, and my “Readability” scores were pretty *bleep. Here’s the readout on one blog alone: There were “3 consecutive sentences starting with the same word.” There were not “any subheadings.” There were more than 20 words in 39.7% of my sentences, which is “more than the recommended maximum of 25%. Try to shorten the sentences.”
Days earlier, I attended a mandatory company Zoomer about our marching orders going forward, so I knew where I’d fallen short. Wheezing red mist under a crush of a billion $ in debt, and with 99 percent of all ad revenues sucked up by Google and Facebook, Gannett is hitching its fortunes to digital subscriptions. But Stone Age laptop users alone won’t be enough to survive. The key is getting device-users to buy in. Which means trying to seduce smartphone attention spans into staying with a story for the length of a stoplight.
The key phrases were “scannability,” “infogram,” “digestible and mobile friendly,” and “meets them in places they look for news.” Don’t forget the “why it matters” nut graph. Or “bullet points.” And “how does it impact me?” All of which makes perfect sense. Like, when was the last time you were impacted by a UFO?
Anyway, my farewell De Void was going to be about why, as the only daily newspaper reporter in the United States blogging about UFOs since 2007, I was/still am optimistic over the future of media coverage. Between the phenomenon’s sprawling scope, the early stages of government accountability, and a sustained surge of public interest following the Defense Department’s release of those F-18 videos three years ago, a competitive growth industry has barely even gotten started. There’s more, but this is already way too long.
So. To those in pursuit – two words to the wise: shorter sentences.