Paper no more?

In a not so surprising move the publisher of Northwest Baby and Child has decided to suspend publication of the paper.  It’s been publishing monthly for 27 years.  The publisher has really let the community down by mis-managing the publication, and frankly I’m disappointed they didn’t realize the proper thing to do months if not years ago and that is bring on a partner or sell the publication to another publisher.

Some might ask why the hell do I care?  Well I’ve been working for the paper since 1998 and have been the subject of articles by the editor for roughly my entire life.  I’ve only been working on the project for 10 years in various capacities, and the irony of just completing the transition from an old design and old content management system to a new design and system just last week, the suspension of the print publication is a bit of a blow.

Now let me set something completely straight, in the last few months if not the last year I’ve been distancing myself from the publication in an attempt to no longer be responsible for the site / admin work that I’ve been doing for a long while now.  But I was drawn back into it a few weeks ago when the new “design” went online with no management system for content or advertising.  This was a big no no in my books as it meant someone would have to hand code every article that’s placed on the site.  Which in this current age of blogs, open source and all the free tools out there that help manage content, I thought it was near impossible to not come up with something that could work.  Hell, even MS offers a free offline blog editor, which I happen to be using at this very moment.  That and the combination of WordPress, it would seem like a pretty easy transition from the old not so user friendly CMS we had in place to something far more sexy like WordPress and just use Live Writer to manage the content updates.

So here I am still working to make the site / newspaper work online so that parents can have access to the information they, according to the stats, really enjoy reading and having at their fingertips.


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