The Email Hole

By | November 22, 2011
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Email is not something to get too upset about, until you lose one to downtime by your provider of choice. And then you realise that it is too important to be left to free services, or even a domain hoster.

I use a hoster called Hostway, and they went spectacularly down last week. (This despite the fact, or perhaps because of it, that Hostway launched a new service recently offering 150 GB of space for $10 a month.) It was only about a day, but several domains I based there lost email access when their storage failed. Now I have no idea who might have been trying to reach me and couldn’t because of bounced emails, what newsletters I’ve been removed from because of bounced emails, what email newsletters I may have missed

Now this kind of thing happens, but it made me realise that losing one email is the same as losing all of them if you don’t know which email it is, since it may be the important one you’ve been waiting for offering you money/marriage/a new nose. Email is different to hosting a website: a website can go down, and you’ll lose some traffic, but it will come back up again. Email is a stream of discrete bits of information, and there’s no way of telling whether there are any missing.

In short, a good hoster needs to guarantee that, should something go wrong, no email is left behind. Hostway have not, so far not been able to assure me of that. They say that emails lost during the outage have been recovered, but as far as I can work out that does not refer to those lost because of the outage — in other words, those emails that were stored on their servers and not recovered by users before the outage hit. (Emails to their technical staff about this were responded to with pasted notifications from their support team, which didn’t address this issue.

This surprises me, but shouldn’t. They are listed by Netcraft as the second most reliable hoster last month and I’ve not had many problems with them. But they are a domain hoster, which means that bullet-proof email is not top of their priorities. As Syd Low of AlienCamel puts it (declaration of interest: I’ve been using Syd’s email service the past few years, and it’s rock solid), there are three types of email service: bundling services (like Hostway), free services (like Gmail) and paid services (like AlienCamel) which provide Web access, lots of redundant backups to make sure no email goes missing, plus anti-spam, anti-virus and anti-phishing features.

My lesson from all this: email is too important to entrust to people who don’t take it seriously, or who aren’t getting money for your business. Of course, no one wants to pay for something they’re getting for free, or more cheaply, but sometimes free and cheap is not enough.

The Journalist Dilemma

By | November 22, 2011
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Jeff Jarvis over at BuzzMachine says there are too many journalists and newspapers would do well to cut back on reporters and reinvest digital interaction on the local level — in other words, to build connections with communities and have them report. Cheap/free local citizen Journalists, in other words, replace jet-setting, expensive correspondents:

So maybe the problem with journalism today isn’t that there are too few reporters and and editors but too many. I’ve talked before about the foolishness of sending 15,000 reporters to the political conventions, about papers sending TV critics to junkets or golf writers to tournaments. Inside the newsroom, too, there are overwrought processes. Meanwhile, of course, revenue is sinking and staff will follow.

But rather than treating this as an endless retrenchment, the ballsy editor would take this bull by the horns and undertake an aggressive reinvestment strategy. Why not cut that staff today? Find your essence — hint: it’s local, local, local. Streamline now to put out a better focused and better print product.

I definitely agree with the absurdity of having thousands of journalists all covering one single-dateline story, whether it’s a convention or a Michael Jackson trial. But I wonder, too, how this obsession with new approaches to media — citizen journalism, community interaction, local coverage vs non-local — is going to look a few years down the track. For sure, there’s a lot to be said for breaking down the barriers between newspaper and community between professional and amateur reporter/photographer/editor. But this movement will also have some heavy long term effects that aren’t really discussed in this blogocratic world.

  • “Going local” is nearly always going to mean narrowing horizons. Newspapers and their portals (and their successors) with thinner or nonexistent foreign pages, what coverage there is based on wire reports. Is this what we want?
  • I’m all for interactivity and respect for active reader/contributor participation. But to me it’s somewhat shortsighted an argument that goes “newspapers are less profitable so fire the people who actually differentiate, or should differentiate your product from everything else out there”. Surely we should be talking about how journalists might raise/alter their game to match this challenge? Since when was responding to a change in the market a question of throwing the value overboard and investing in fewer skills, not more?
  • The issue closest to my heart is international coverage. Baltimore Sun, LA Times etc are cutting back on international staff. Fine, people say, replace them with bloggers. No question bloggers are good, and have good things to say, but who is going to do the legwork to explain, in an objective and engaging style, the complexities of issues such as terrorism (al Qaeda, Jemaah Islamiyah), disaster relief (earthquakes, tsunamis) to an international audience? There may be no interest in these issues right now, but when another disaster happens, who is going to do the coverage? 9/11, anyone?
  • Foreign coverage is only a “worthy” (rather than profitable) investment because it’s seen that way, not because it need be. I certainly agree with one commenter that journalists tend to hunt in packs, not because they lack imagination but because they tend to be rewarded by nervous editors looking for “matching” copy. The result is a foreign news page that tends to look similar from publication to publication. This needs to change; most foreign correspondents work their socks off satisfying editors’ hunger for matching copy (“Java Earthquake Kills Hundreds; Briton Forced to Cut Short Holiday”) and then, when everyone else goes home for the weekend, traipse off to the jungle to weave a telling story about environmental destruction/global warming/species extinction.

In short, I think we need to explore ways of reinvigorating coverage of news beyond our own local niche and recognise that the idea of the foreign correspondent, while dated and definitely in need of updating, has been around since the Boer War because it works. For sure there’s plenty of room for amateurs (some of my favorite writers about Indonesia aren’t journalists) but there’s also room, nay a need, for professional reporters to explore and report back on what they see. In an increasingly complicated world we need them more than ever.