Columbia City Paper and Free Speech

Mike Blake — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 06:46:00 +0000

Yesterday The South Carolina news station WLTX ran this news blurb about my brothers paper, Columbia Citypaper . It’s really not a big deal on the surface, some restaurant owner doesn’t want the paper there anymore because of the content of an ad. However what’s disconcerting is that the news station itself decides to blame the story on Columbia Citypaper. The first words of the story are “A Columbia newspaper is causing controversy …” Later in the story my brother Paul explains that he got a call a week ago asking him not to distribute the paper to that particular restaurant, and he was glad to comply.

WLTX Generates a controversy

A week later, after the issue has been easily resolved, WLTX makes this their top story. So who’s trying to cause controversy? WLTX is. And they have the audacity to start the story with “A Columbia newspaper is causing controversy ..” a blatant lie. The reporting gets more peculiar as they proceed to air what is a free add for the local restaurant. There is a couple seconds of Paul Blake saying they no longer deliver to that restaurant at the request of the owners. Then Paul does something interesting, and makes an intelligent point right in the middle of their fluff piece. He says “I just don’t think graphic language leads to any irresponsible behavior.”

Biased Flag Waving

The point of course goes ignored. What follows is a tirade about an “argument as american as the flag flying over the restaurant”, completely ignoring the point made by Paul, who happens to have a flag displayed in the window over his shoulder. Columbia Citypaper’s flag gets no mention though. The news station does take another dig at Columbia Citypaper by saying “Check our web site for a list of other sites that have banned the paper.” They fail to mention any of the reasons the other places have banned it. They also fail to mention their source, Columbia Citypaper which playfully publishes a list of establishments that ban them every week.

Speaking of Fuck

This particular ban was due to the use of foul language in an ad. David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of the Rails web framework (which powers the Columbia Citypaper site) recently made a couple posts about colorful language. He point’s out that swearing at work boosts morale . This is far too interesting though for use on an evening tv news blurb.

An epidemic?

Last week here in Orlando, FL , police arrested employees of The Orlando Weekly because of ads that paper publishes. I’m serious, They were arrested for publishing an ad. Now I’m concerned. Can this happen to anyone who works for a newspaper? Some writers like to imply that the US government is behind current attitudes towards the media. Stories like the one in Orlando make those arguments more plausible. When is it time to fight back, when you hear about any alleged rights violation? When someone you know has their right’s violated? Or do you wait until it’s a relative?

Columbia City Paper and Mephisto

Mike Blake — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 17:35:00 +0000

Ideas from the Margins

My brothers alternative news weekly in Colombia, SC focuses on stories no one else would write about including a regular feature called Bum of the Week, or and occasional interview with a Nazi.

Content Management

He asked me to help him find an open source Content Management System, and after exploring a few, we choose Mephisto. I was impressed with Mephistos usability and online documentation. I also noticed that there we’re several integration tests written for it’s caching system, and used them as an example in a recent presentation. It has slickly designed admin interface, and the writers at City Paper love it. My brothers not afraid to edit some HTML or CSS, so he quickly got comfortable with the design templates.

Surprise

But the best surprises came after we went live with the site last week. First the visitors to the site began commenting on stories like never before. For some reason the Ocadia template we chose with it’s subtle use of color was inviting.

Ironically one commenter who said

I’m not going to make this a forum for debate. Those who want to debate me can come onto a regular white website …

went on and on after that to post the largest comment posted by anyone, and made that article a forum for debate. It turns out that integration of color is much more appealing to him than he ever knew.

College Football Frenzy

The second surprise came just 2 days later. Editor Todd Morehead published a story early Friday about USC’s quarterback keying a car in the school library parking lot. The story was index by Google’s news bot, and went on to get picked up by the the local daily paper that night, hit the Associated Press wire, and was then published on Sport’s Illustrated’s site along with dozens of sites nationwide.

City Paper received a record number of unique visits over the weekend. Mephisto’s caching performed beautifully. It was a great weekend here in the margins. Congratulations to City Paper for breaking a national new story, and to Mephisto for not breaking.

Martinicity: Tag Columbia City Paper