After I filed my piece detailing my experience as a Demand Studios writer, I was discouraged that I had to leave the reader hanging as I had yet to get my story approved and published.

I’ve been in journalism for close to 30 years. As one would expect, my skills, the tools of the trade and the state of the industry itself have evolved dramatically over that time.

Newsrooms that once functioned under a cloud of cigarette smoke now work in a cloud computing environment. Writers who once tucked a reporter’s notebook in their back pocket now wield a digital voice recorder or a Flip camcorder. Editors who once redlined copy and haggled over how headlines matched the lead art now stress over Web analytics and keyword selection.

 The Columbia Journalism Review just released a report called "Magazines and Their Web Sites".  It's possible to draw a conclusion from the findings that magazine websites are more likely to be profitable if they put "web guys" in charge and don't worry much about things like copy editing or fact checking.  Well, you might think that if you confused correlation with causality.

Let’s get something out of the way: I absolutely enjoy reading Silicon Alley Insider. Its tech and media stories often find their way into our Daily Buzz email and the publication is big part of my morning Google Reader binge.

However, after reading the site for a few months I’ve noticed the publication often relies on the shameless use of women and sex-related headlines to drive pageviews. 

A few examples:

When posting the obituary of late author J.D. Salinger, the New York Times forgot to give the story one last proofreading:

Website redesigns are vital projects that don’t happen often enough for most of us to get good at them. Developers and designers know exactly what they need to do, but struggle because the rest of the players often … don’t. Here are some guidelines for assigning responsibilities to make your next website redesign more successful.