Craig Saila & Adrian Holovaty – Old Media, New Technology
A presentation given at at Web Directions North, Vancouver, February 8, 2007.
Session description
Web based distribution is changing the nature of established authorities like newsprint and television.
As traditional media declines, the relevance of their online brands continues to grow in both revenue and traffic. All of this is leading to a radical restructuring of how the mainstream media sees itself, and how it operates. From the surprisingly quick adoption of blogs, RSS, and other technologies that fall under the “Web 2.0” label, there are many discussion points about what is working, and what isn’t.
In this session, two experts working at the intersection of the web and newsprint will discuss how this change is occurring. They will be looking at the fallacies built into online advertising and traditional metrics which don’t map to how the new Web operates.
They’ll also explore the maturing online landscape and how traditional media now face a fragmented market, populated by strong Web brands that offer genuine competition through their innovation and nimbleness.
About Craig Saila
Craig Saila is the Senior Web Producer managing front-end development for The Globe and Mail family of Web sites, where he:
- introduced story-based reader comments to the news sites in 2005;
- brought the first RSS feeds to a Canadian online newspaper;
- and developed a complete redesign of the sites using the Web’s best practices.
Prior to joining CTVglobemedia and The Globe and Mail, he worked in dual of role of both an editor and Web developer for: the Ontario Science Centre; Sun Media’s CANOE; a business magazine company; and one of Torstar’s early online experiments, a daily webzine covering technology. In the early-2000s, he was also an assistant editor for Digital Web Magazine; he also built the templates for that site’s standards-based redesign.
For five years, starting in 1997, Saila taught basic Web design and online journalism at Ryerson University’s School of Journalism. He also helped develop the curriculum for the school’s first course in that subject.
Throughout, he’s been writing about Web development and online journalism at saila.com.
About Adrian Holovaty
Adrian Holovaty is a Web developer/journalist. During the day, he’s Editor of Editorial Innovations at washingtonpost.com; just as newspaper reporters write articles and TV journalists shoot video, Adrian writes journalism Web apps. He frequently evangelizes the use of technology by journalists and has spoken internationally about “journalism via computer programming.”
Cocreator and lead developer of the popular Django Web framework, Adrian enjoys contributing to open-source projects, making information accessible to the public and reverse-engineering things. His All Music Guide fixer was the inspiration for Greasemonkey, and his site chicagocrime.org was one of the original Google Maps hacks.
He lives in Chicago, where he was named one of Crain’s 40 Under 40 at age 24. His weblog is at Holovaty.com.
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