Robert is living in “interesting times” (of the Chinese curse variety) and is navigating treacherous uncharted waters that will take many important publications down. Early on he recognized that the future is on the web, and has taken many painful steps to transform his company from leadership in print to cyberspace. The citizens of Dallas are all beneficiaries of his life-long dedication to providing us with high quality journalism. His current focus on transforming his company is a fascinating case study. He deserves a tip of the hat (as does Wick) for his tenacity and the success he has already achieved. It ain’t easy out there when everything you’ve built your business around is changing as much as is happening in the print media world.

DObserver, how did that Kool-Aid taste?
He isn’t transforming his company — his company is being transformed by outside forces. Arrogance led to ignoring good advice and solid warnings at a time when thoughtful reactions would have made a positive difference.
The company is trying to hang 10 on a tsunami and the water is full of sharks. Other people who are not blessed with the company-approved DNA have been thrown to the sharks as the ride becomes more and more unstable.

The decisions made by pioneers are always subject to second guessing by the settlers. For the most part they are made in the dark and often enough wrong - witness the large number of publications which have already failed or had to sell out to the likes of Rupert. In hindsight it’s always easy to identify and pick apart the errors, but look at who’s still standing and (love ‘em or not) still providing local content with local ownership - As for Wick and Robert - hang in there guys.

To call Dechard’s moves (and those of AHC) pioneering is laughable in the extreme. All of AHC’s content support and technology support are supplied by Belo IM and Belo Tech. They, in turn, outsource all of that technology to IBM. So, you have middlemen managing other middlemen, and nobody at AHC knows a browser error from a crashed server when someone complains.

As el Ray mentioned, the stupid blog captcha system is riddled with problems. But, they keep throwing up yet more silly sub-blogs, that don’t work right all the time, and the writers on them populate them with the same stuff that’s in print a day later.

Finally, when you try to search for anything on dallasnews.com, it’s a joke. That’s because of Yahoo!, their partner, who is sinking and Jerry Yang is as clueless a CEO (as Dechard is) as to WHY.

It’s very telling that it’s far easier to find a story on DMN using a site: search on Google than it is using the AHC site itself. The only true pioneering AHC is doing is driving their wagon train into the dirt.

And, DObserver, I thought you were going to change your moniker?

To a Billusa9’s DMN online point, it’s laughable but unfunny. The ‘archived’ articles one tries to (yes even pay for) get at DMN online is like trying to retrieve a wooly mammoth from an ice cave. I have DMN op-ed columns that ran only 2-3 years ago that are lost in cyberspace. While others going back to when Wick Allison was a long-haired media danger and Nancy Nichols was rocketing through puberty pop up like toaster tarts.

Outside of this series of comments I will use a different moniker, but I continue to use it here because I didn’t want you to think I had hidden under a different name. I share your frustration and disappointment with the DMN’s technology - their wagon is indeed in the ditch, the pioneer has a big arrow in its back and it is past the time for them to completely rethink and redo. I suspect that all involved at the DMN are tuned in to the mistakes, but a fix is not akin to throwing a light switch. D’s high tech wagon is a far better example of what is possible but you can be sure Wick and company are driving their wagon as hard as they can to stay ahead of the pack and help define what the future will be.

“Online video continues to represent a strong and growing opportunity for AHC Web
sites. In the 1st quarter of 2008, DallasNews.com served nearly 500,000 video
streams – a number that rival”

that is such a laughable statement. I use Firefox as my browser and use Adblocker. as a result I can’t view the videos using FF I have to revert to using IE. Talk about lame. If Decherd wants to see what an online newspaper should be like then he needs to take a long hard look at the WSJournal. Gee as a paid subscriber I have full access to all Journal editions and can access articles that go back 90 days.

The only saving grace for the DMN is there use of blogs, but they don’t make it easy for comments nor to find them