Oh Lord you need to take on some non-tech companies as clients if this surprises you. I've had clients who forgot they had a website and thought that monthly hosting bill was just for something to do with the back-office Internet connection.
It was a janitorial temp company and they didn't really care about computers. Whoever had been their IT guy before me had made a pretty neat website that would let clients book cleaning staff and give them a birds-eye- view of upcoming staffing needs. It was marginally better than their existing phone and email based system but not enough to make them change it, and over years of saying "let's try it next quarter" eventually everybody forgot about it.
> How the hell did they end up not knowing how to manage the content on their site?
The knowledge atrophied. To me the harder problem is keeping knowledge off the bus… it gets on of its own accord and then boom: knowledge lost. People leave the company, and with them, lessons. People are in constant crunch time, and don't have time for the last 2% of the work that takes 98% of the time, like adequately documenting the weird bits of the system. Half the time the corp site is an afterthought to main engineering, relegated to some CMS that marketing can have, and trust me marketing is not writing docs.
Company leadership at nigh every job I have worked on encourages the company, collectively, to forget. Dev turnovers at most places I've worked average around 2y… that's knowledge, just walking out the door.
hi, I'm a dev who was working in journalism around thirty years ago and still has some connections.
The entire industry is run by actual journalists, it's one of the few industries where people who know how to do the job still rise to the top. Unlike most other industries, where the top brass are MBAs who don't actually know how to do things like build airplanes or write software or what have you. Which is honestly great except when it's not.
The web has never found a way to make journalism as profitable as it was back in the print days, so they mostly see technologists as people who get in their way, as disposable or replaceable.
So imagine the state of their tech stack — CMS's integrated with the front end, if not Wordpress then something like that, nothing headless. “Hey you should remove this plugin" what's a plugin? "look… this Bonzai Buddy, who installed it?" Some guy who left twenty years ago. And it's not in a template, it's in the articles and executed by an eval().
They have no motivation to fix any of it, because again, web sites for newspapers aren't profitable. Subscriptions are profitable. I think the real reason why Substack is successful is not that email is a good format for journalism — in fact it’s terrible — but because you generally cannot inject javascript into it. Which comes back to Gruber’s point — javascript was a disaster for the web as a document standard.
(personally, I haven't read news on the web in something like twenty years — RSS ftw)
