In this busy publishing world, it’s really impossible to take a step back and throw more fresh observers at a problem. It’s even more impossible to expect that automated publishing systems wouldn’t pass unwanted material through from time to time.
Anyhow, figured I’d share some of these jewels that I’ve been hoarding over the years. They’re more or less a mismatching gallery of lost-and-found news CMS oddities and other quirks, including bizarre data reporting.
1 CNN’s AD SPACES listing, with SSI (server side include directives). Not sure why this is left wide open, unless it’s an artifact from a successive set of migrations where protected directories became neglected.
2 The Guardian’s misuse of crowdsourcing (world’s favourite foods: interactive). Their map shows favorite foods from various countries. Spoiler: favorite food in Mexico is “Mexican” food, and favorite food in India is “Indian” food. Instead of cleaning and cooking the crowdsourced data, they’re serving it raw. One of my other beefs with this map is that they don’t combine various types of pasta (Gnocchi, Spaghetti, Lasagna) onto a single plate.
3 Annotation tools shouldn’t need annotation tools of their own. See ProPublica’s experiment in “showing your work.” Once you flip the “Explore Sources” switch to ON, passages with direct sources become highlighted, showing the relevant snippet. Only problem is, for an annotation tool that’s supposed to shed light on things, is this really as straight-forward as it seems?
How many millions is it?
Is it one million, or two million?
Why is “two million” showing a document snippet stating “one million?”
Further in the article, “The jury awarded Linda Carswell $2 million, including $1 million in punitive damages.“ Three million?
4 Oldie, but get your popcorn ready and watch Netflix’s 2010 masterpiece, titled “Example 2 Hour 23.976 Burned in Timecode.”
5 Must admit, I still can’t get my head around this one, but, something’s probably very odd. That being, Guardian’s misunderstanding of a treemap in “How our ageing population will drive up public spending.” There are no totals in treemaps; way it works is that all the broken-up pieces add up to a total. Total is the overall rectangle encompassing all the parts.
Think of a tree — each branch and leaf add up to the whole tree.
If you disassemble the tree, branch by branch, and stack it up – that bundle would represent a total.
Should you happen to label each branch with its position, you might find yourself puzzled to step back and find a thick trunk labeled “total tree with all the branches in it” sitting next to disassembled pieces.
And if you reassemble this, can you imagine seeing a branch on that tree that represents the entire tree combined, including the said branch? Space would fold on itself in a recursive loop.
6 Attack of test3 from outer space. Presumably there are also test1, test2, and perhaps even a test4 out there, but this one is particularly curious. Seems like someone at AP issued an original test3, and various automated wire programs published them.
Houston Chronicle: test3 with lorem ipsum from a Microsoft help page
Sacramento Bee also published the same test3 – automated AP wire?
Los Angeles Times: someone named their dog test3? Nah, but could you imagine?
The Kansas City star also carries AP’s test3
Anyhow, you can find more of these by searching for the phrase “On the insert tab, the galleries include items that are designed to coordinate with the overall look of your document.”
Turns out there’s a microsoft macro for word, where if you start typing =rand() and hit enter, it generates random text (ala lorem ipsum, except it generates text from help). You can insert parameters to that, number of paragraphs and number of lines per paragraph, ie: =rand(4,10).
Many newspaper publishing systems are powered by MS-Office: the VB / .net / etc activex component, or whatever hipsters call those things these days, so I would expect them to work similarly. Anyhow, searching for that phrase, you might see some programming tests in the wild.
Lastly, don’t laugh at these. I’ve left plenty of these around, in various states. From broken templates, to things like highschools named null, and mouseover cats in article comments.
News world is never a perfect system — it’s volume-based, and glitches get buried under a mountain of copy.
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