The Eureka Reporter

The Eureka Reporter was an ambitious and somewhat controversial local daily newspaper which has gone the way of many newspapers nowadays; to an unfortunate but probably not so untimely demise. Their site was pretty spiffy, though.

For my entire life and long before, the sole newspaper of note in the area was the Times-Standard. Then a local millionaire, fed up with the Times-Standard’s relative lack of local news coverage and liberal editorial bias, decided to do something about it and established the Eureka Reporter. It was a gut check to the local news market, almost invariably covering the front page with nothing but local news and burying national stories on the inside; printing every page in full color; offering the paper delivered and in stores for completely free; and taking generally a more conservative editorial perspective than the TS, something which got a lot of people in a huff in this mostly left-leaning region. (It should be noted that neither I nor Precision Intermedia were vetted for our political stance before being accepted for the job. I’ve done work for rightist-targeted sites, and I’ve done work for leftist-oriented sites. There Is No Conspiracy.)

However, though exact numbers are impossible to come by, it’s likely that the Reporter never made a profit. Eventually it was decided to cut their print run from seven issues a week to only five, and move more coverage to their web site. We were commissioned to build their spiffy new site.

It was my first really big Drupal project, so it was a bit of a trial by fire. When it was all over, I was happy with the end result, but I also knew that, knowing what I knew after the project, I could have done much it better, faster and cleaner if I had to do it all over.

One of the more unusual aspects of it was the “e-Reader,” a Flash-powered widget for reading the newspaper with the exact same layout as the print edition. Ideally, they would have just offered PDFs of the newspaper to download; however, they didn’t like the idea of copies of the paper being that easy to acquire for some reason I can’t recall. In house at the paper, pages were put together in Adobe InDesign and converted to PDF for print. What I ended up doing was writing a Rube Goldbergish AppleScript which would use Illustrator to open the PDFs, lay them out side-by-side in an Illustrator document, then export that document as a Flash file which maintained the text and vector graphics as curves, making the resulting file much smaller in terms of filesize (not to mention much cleaner-looking). The Flash widget for reading the paper would load these double-pages one at a time, and also cache the previous page and pre-load the next page, so that you could easily browse the paper and flip through one page at a time without a perceptible loading time after the initial one - it was pretty sweet, though in the end, I still felt it was a pretty silly solution compared to just putting a single PDF up to download.

Part of the contract was not just building the site, but configuring the server for it to run on. Both I and my contact at the Reporter assumed during the site development that it would be a Unix-based server of some sort, but then we got kneecapped from the Reporter’s parent company’s IT department when they told us the only thing they could give us was a Windows-powered server with ASP and SQL Server. …Yeah, Drupal wasn’t going to run on that. We were pretty close to being done with development at that point, and there was no turning back - heck, if we had known that we would have to work in ASP, we wouldn’t have been able to take the contract at all. My contact at the Reporter managed to pull some strings and eventually we were told that we could have a bare Windows server, but we were responsible for installing all software beyond that and getting it up and running. It was a bit of a shock to me as I had at that point absolutely zero experience setting up a Windows server, and some of the things I tried completely fell apart when the site went live and started getting thousands of hits an hour - there was a lot of downtime and snail-slow server connections in the early days of the new site. Eventually, I got something running, but it was a painful experience and didn’t exactly improve my opinion of Windows as a server platform.

But I think that, all told, the site was better than that of the Times-Standard, which was (and still is) cluttered with advertising and tends to take visitors to a lot of annoying off-site services. Alas, it wasn’t enough; some lawsuit was filed against the Reporter by the TS for something-or-other, and eventually the benefactor decided to give up on the project. The lawsuit was settled out of court, one of the contingencies being the dissolution of the Reporter; the newspaper’s offices were shuddered soon after. Unfortunately, the site was taken down with it; that’s why I can’t link you to it. So goes newspaper history.

At the very least, the Reporter was successful in giving the Times-Standard cause to re-evaluate its operations and improve its local news coverage, as well as the look and feel of its paper in general.