February 2008 Archives

This week marked a quiet, but significant, milestone for the world of journalism done through blogs: Joshua Micah Marshall’s work on his widely-acclaimed Talking Points Memo was awarded a George Polk Award for Legal Reporting.

The Polk awards are astutely described by Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News as “the Golden Globes of American Journalism” on his Movable Type-powered blog. But the New York Times’ Noam Cohen points out that Marshall’s win, and indeed his team’s work as a whole, offers a decided contrast to the hoary old cliché of the blogger as a pajama-clad guy with a more attitude than ideas.

To scores of bloggers, it was a case of local boy makes good. Many took it as vindication of their enterprise — that anyone can assume the mantle of reporting on the pressing issues affecting the nation and the world, with the imprimatur of a mainstream media outlet or not. And most reassuringly, it showed that fair numbers of people out there were paying attention.

At Six Apart, we’ve always believed that blogs are nothing more, and nothing less, than a new medium, native to the web and nimbler than the ones that preceded it. That means that, even though people have been falsely debating “blogs vs. journalism” for the better part of a decade, the truth has always been that this is just another medium in which a great journalist can do great work.

We’re thrilled that a distinguished member of our community has set this precedent. We know that it’s only a matter of time until similar honors, such as the Pulitzer  Prizes, understand that it’s not the choice of medium that makes a work legitimate, but rather the efforts of those who care about sharing their ideas that define a work. And we build tools like Movable Type with the hope that they can be one small part of helping talented teams like the TPM staff achieve work that not only is on par with, but indeed can even eclipse, the best journalism in the world. Though it’s an infinitely smaller tribute in comparison to a Polk award, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mark the moment by naming Talking Points Memo as a Movable Type Featured Blog.

One footnote: As Joshua Marshall himself noted after his win, a big part of why he’s been able to do so much with Movable Type is due to the help of an incredible team that typifies what the MT community is capable of: Apperceptive. He says, “[T]hey come with our strong recommendation. And if you’re looking for people who do this kind of work I’d be happy to answer your questions about our experience.” And as fellow MT blogger Jason Kottke notes, Apperceptive is “the little engine that runs a large chunk of the professional blogosphere”. So our congratulations as well to the team that helps MT power some of the biggest sites in the blogosphere.

One of the fundamental goals for Movable Type for almost seven years now has been to advance the state of design on the web. Some of the recent developments from the MT community highlight how that attention to aesthetics is alive and well.

First, as we described on the company news blog recently, we've made the Design Assistant for Movable Type available as a completely free design resource for the MT community. While the process of creating the Assistant was gratifying, we think it's just as important to look at the design-oriented philosophy behind its creation:

It's easy to make tools to create a design, but it's far harder to create tools that help you get in the mindset of making good tradeoffs.

So today we bring you the Design Assistant for Movable Type. Sure, you can click through it and knock out a cool custom design really quickly. But along the way, you'll start to see how a few common grid/column layouts can impact the way your content is perceived. The Assistant creates finished designs, but you're also encouraged to click on individual page elements and understand the CSS cascade that informs their styling. The last step isn't merely when a particular design is applied to your blog -- the last step is actually the start of learning more, from a broad selection of hand-picked learning resources.

But as with everything in design, it's not merely about the ideas that influence the work, it's about the experience of seeing a design in action. So try out the Design Assistant for yourself and see what it inspires you to create.

Of course, in a community full of smart designers, inspiration can come from the creativity you find in other MT sites. It's something we think about for the Movable Type community worldwide, as our European team has shown recently on its blog, too. And Aaron Bailey of 601am, the highly-regarded blog development shop, has helped make it easier than ever to find and share beautiful Movable Type-powered sites, with the launch of Movable Love.

Movable Love is brand new, but already features tons of clever and unique MT sites, each of which can help inspire your own designs to new heights. And once you've got that beautiful new site built, you'll want to make sure and submit it to the growing collection over at Movable Love.