Joe Murphy » On The Job

Highlights from the bad-word regex list I’m working on:

Joe — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 21:38:57 +0000

Today I put together the first draft of the regular expressions that will filter out bad words in the comments in a future commenting system. The variations are pulled from more than three years of comments + bad words on The Denver Post’s article commenting system.

These are the highlights:

(CHAI|TE?E?A?)[ -]?B.*(A|U).*G.*G?(E.*R|I.*N.*G?|E.*D)?.*S?
d(i|1|\|)ck(less|head|wad|weed)?
(m(o|u)th(a|er))?(F|PH)[aeiouv\-\.\*':@]+.*C?.*K(E?R?S?|I?N?G?|FACE|HEAD)
(jack|bad|dumb|fat)?(a|@).*[\$sz8x].*[\$sz8x].*e?.*(\$|s|z)?
(dip|dog|chicken)?[\$s]?.*h.*[i\|1!-@a]+.*t(ty|t|head|eating)?s?

Further proof newspapers are relevant:

Joe — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 15:19:41 +0000

An editor had a voicemail left on his phone this morning… this is how he explained it to a colleague:

“I got an awesome message — a woman at a hotel room in Arvada, her alarm clock broke and she called because she wanted to know if it was Thursday or Friday. She left a voicemail, and included her phone number.”

What not to do when selling someone a newspaper subscription

Joe — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 06:56:32 +0000

This email was forwarded to me from a college student in another state… I thought it worth posting… the names have been changed to protect my job (I kid, I kid).

To Whom It May Concern:

I currently live in Springfield, Anystate. I work full time and am a part time student. I just had a gentleman stop by my house to offer me a FREE subscription to the Local Times for this semester and the only I would have to pay for is $.50/week to pay the deliverer. I kindly declined his offer because I am just not interested. I read my news online and I was just not interested in the offer. Here is how our conversation continued:

Seller: But you’re a student, right?

Me: Yes, but I’m just not interested.

Seller: But it is just $.50 a week. Fifty-cents!

Me: Thank you, but no thank you.

Seller: proceeded to share his head, turn to go down the stairs and then whistled (not a cheery tune, mind you, but a whistle that a person does when he just can’t believe something) and then he mumbled something

Me: Excuse me, sir, what did you say? Did you just say that I was retarded?

Seller: No, I said that people around here are retarded. Have a nice day.

Me: Sir!

Seller: Oh, don’t take offense. You’re not the only one. We usually only get 8 out of 10. Have a nice day.

Me: Get a life.

I am NOT impressed!! What kind of person is this? I’m afraid that I don’t even know his name and I’m not even sure if he works directly for you or if he works for the university. Either way, it reflects upon YOU. I just wanted to mention this so that if you knew of who it was you could possibly mention that that kind of service isn’t impressive.

Thank you for your time on this matter.

Sincerely,
Angelina Clinton

User-generated fibbery

Joe — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 05:40:29 +0000

Ken Otterbourg, managing editor of the Winston-Salem Journal (where I was working before I came to Denver), has a tale of an awesome photo of the lunar eclipse that a reader submitted:

A reader submitted that photo, which looks great. But, when the photo editor was readying it for print, well, the image told a different story:

Read the full story at Otterblog.

Thinking about a new product? Think about your article page’s needs.

Joe — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 04:30:47 +0000

Online news organizations have plenty of opportunities to launch new products that build on their information, build on their community, or launch distinct information. Many of these products will be useful … not all of them will be successful. For newspaper-dot-coms not sure where to start, I recommend building an app on top of a product that already gets a lot of clicks. Build something on top of your article page.

Sure, many others have talked about how articles are a shabby content crutch in this information age. But until you can afford that brand new pair of Holovaty-brand bionic legs, build on your success…. no, not your home page — that wreck of a page oughta be put to death, not built on. Build on your article page.

Here are some ideas for apps that can harness and extend the power of your article page:

An in-house article bookmarking tool. This is Ryan Sholin’s idea, and it’s a good one. I mean, what fraction of a percent of people are actually using those social bookmarking links on every page of your article? Sure, this requires some sort of registration system to handle the data, but you have one of those, right? And think, once it’s done, it’s another way to break the page-view vice and figure out what articles your readers are so interested in, they bookmarked it to come back to later.
Loomia’s “People Who Like This May Also Like...” widget. Now, I haven’t used this so I can’t speak to its greatness, but I can tell you this: it’s free. Well, okay, not really — it’s $50 a month, if you do fewer than one million views. But hey, that’s cheap. And as someone who is probably cheap themselves (kidding, kidding), I’m sure you appreciate that.
Add your most-popular article lists. Better yet, integrate your section-specific most-popular lists. If you’re feeling adventurous, put your section-specific least popular lists on there — show the people what they’re missing. Don’t have a most-popular app? Do you have any type of site stats package? Well, get yourself a freelancer and fix that problem. It shouldn’t take more than 5 hours for a freelancer to build an awful-but-works app… make that ten hours if they’re the brother / sister / cousin of someone you know.

Got any you’d like to share? Let me know~

Note: I see the a snarky tone in this post. I can’t say I’m proud of that, and I can’t say it won’t happen again. If you have any suggestions for handling the snark (or a good newsroom “I-can’t-believe-they-said-that”-type joke), won’t you throw it my way?