When I was a kid, I delivered newspapers, and the biggest technological breakthrough that could have delayed my presentation was the flat tire on my 10-speed.
I was thinking about these days this week as we battled our content supply battery in the face of technology flaws. Technology has made us more efficient and content delivery, and we have to jump on the bandwagon.
Here is how this week went wrong.
I usually got up before 5:00 in the morning, and when I went on Monday, I saw that the team working on the Plain Dealer print and digital copy was still working. Not a good sign. They had to be in bed. The leader of the design team sent me an e-mail stating that the team was in a state of shock.
When I opened the digital edition of Plain Dealer on my tablet, I could see the pages, but it didn’t do much to click on the stories. When I went out on my page, I saw that we did not have a sports face. It’s not good the day after the big browns beat Meles’ Garrett to break the record.
In the meantime, no papers were published.
The crash was with Amazon web servers. Our Plain Dealer production software relies heavily on those servers, so we will be slow when they fail. The jumping team completed the task until sunrise.
At 6 or more, the digital edition was reloading and working properly. Most of our readers were unaware that there was a problem. Paper printing race ends at 8 p.m.
When those newspapers hit stores, the Gremlin hit again. At the time, the front page of our website was cleveland.com. It’s cold.
Colin Talk is a member of our team who is proud to keep our website fresh. Millions of people visit it every month, many return daily to catch up, and Colin’s goal is often to make sure they get the new content they are looking for.
For a few Monday he could not change it. That big Browns victory was in front and in the middle of the afternoon, long after we had the breaking news or the Cleveland Indians final home game.
It was another software glitch, and it was fixed until 5pm, but we had to work on issues with Plain Dealer and digital and print editions of our website in one day.
We also produce content in audio format – podcasts. We use one platform to register our sections and another platform to publish them. Within a week of our writing forums exploding, our audio platforms should also be considered. you did.
On Tuesday, the platform for uploading episodes of Apple podcasts, stickers, Spotify and more seems to have entered the worm hole. This week is the week’s news discussion podcast with the audience at CLE. People want scenes at 10 or 10:15. But for Tuesday’s episode, uploading the audio file was like living under Bill Murray’s Underground Day. The forum continues to repeat the tedious steps of publishing, emptying, and restarting a scene.
At one point, the screen blinked and the whole text was transformed into Chinese characters. When we despaired and did not have a show for the day, the stage began to run fast. The show is over an hour late.
We stopped this week’s tech battles at our CLE forum. The forum will record each participant on a separate track to join later. That means we will have different tracks for Laila García, Lisa Garvin and Laura Johnston.
On Friday, the stage somehow managed to record a track for Laila.
There is a backup system, a low quality track that mixes all of us with poor voices. So the rest of us had to go in and mix up some of the high-quality tracks and split the backup. It was less than Tuesday, only half an hour, but it was frustrating.
I go through all this because I hear people go there for printing on the balcony because they don’t hear it there. And when their paper digital editions blink. Or when our website slows down or our podcasts are delayed. People write because they are upset. Sometimes they conclude that the group here is making a mistake.
Believe me when we are upset. But here everyone is, when you are rewarded, to fix things, to provide you with the content you are selling. If you do not receive your digital edition on an unusual morning, please consider that the producers are working around obstacles that are difficult to get into your hands as quickly as possible.
I would like to point out that we are not alone with technical defects. As you read this, there is a good chance that I will be behind you in the kitchen sink. We have one of these taps to turn on the water in our house, and the technology that makes it work is fried. You may have old-fashioned plumbing fixtures, old and leaking sinks, but you always have water. With “touch” technology, when it is fried, you do not get water. For a few days, we had a kitchen without running water, until he found the repair rooms. Want to talk about frustration?
Whether the flow of water or the data, we depend on our technology. When technology breaks down, all we can do is fix it and move it. Just like I had to repair my flat tire to deliver newspapers when I was a child.