Tribune hires reporter for media, advertising/marketing beat

Just to clarify for the Love Feder commenter, we love Feder and his brand as much as you apparently do. Rob was the last person we moved off of our old site to our new Drupal platform because we wanted to squash as many bugs as possible first and cater to his large community of commenters. We're now at the point where we needed to move Rob over, and far from subsuming him, he has (as always) a prominent daily home of his own on the main splash of our homepage. And if you look at the right rail of this blog, you will see the Robert Feder Twitter module, the Robert Feder Facebook module, an invitation to browse Feder's archives--which now include every post he wrote for Vocalo including the many comments--not to mention his bio and an invitation to e-mail him. So, we could not be more proud of our association with Robert Feder and we will continue to promote his hard-earned professional brand. We are working on some short- and long-term comment enhancements. In the short term, having all the comments appear below the item so you don't have to click an extra link to see the full list. Later this summer, we'll be rolling out an improved comment system for the full site, which is actually the last major piece of development we have left for our online home. We know how absolutely important the commenting community is to Feder--even going back to his wonderful mailbag columns in the Sun-Times--so we're going to make sure you've got a comfortable place to cut loose on the media developments of the day.

Drupal is a very powerful content management software like Joomla. Excellent choice! The redesign is clean, organized, the advertisements are moderate and don't trample over the content. A welcome mat for visitors to stay a long time with little to no fatigue. To port over the old columns AND comments from his previous site is a task not easily done. Rewards and pat on the back for the database specialists that accomplished that. To the one individual, word verification helps keep this site from making people register to comment and cuts down on internet spam. You can't understand word verification and its value until you are on this side of a web site and acutally making it work, the right way for people to enjoy! Best of luck with the new format and Mr Feder's future columns! Regarding Robert Channick, best of luck to him and his new position. Happy to see The Chicago Tribune continuing the feature and not eliminating it. Warm Regards, President Pedro

The Tribune's new motto: If we can't beat 'em we'll hire someone with the name Robert and at least confuse 'em.

Pedro: There weren't any spammed comments on Feder's blog before, so captchas are stupid here. And the comment system is a disaster. It's not TOC's fault that the comments are truncated until you open them up, it's the designer of the software TOC uses that's at fault. TOC's fault is using it this way & not having full comments from the start.

Content (scoops) is king and that's why this blog will always rock! Even though we are big-time WordPress (WP) evangelists, your massive Drupal network is totally off-the-scale and the future enhancements will be exciting to utilize. The Tribune is really throwin' down right now and obviously devoting a lot of resources to execute their objectives. Their site's redesign is very crisp and the images seem to have significantly more "pop" to them (they jump off the page). It could simply be that they're using more images. Also of note is the fact that the "Trib Local" sections are still powered by WP which makes for a very interesting case study, as the main Trib site runs on Movable Type. We heard that the Tribune was going 100% WordPress, but who knows? It's definitely fascinating to watch, take notes and attempt to mimic the cool functionality. It's a very fun game. Thanks again for the priceless, informative and inspirational nuggets your blog provides. Cheers and continued success!

My two cents: I don't like how the comments are set up - they should all be visible by default, preferably with the most recent at the bottom. (has a more natural, "progressive conversation" feel that way) If I was setting it up, that's the way I would do it. Also - "Not Verified" - Can anyone tell us HOW to become "verified"?

I'll bet the Trib hired him for only 28 hours @ week so they don't have to pay benefits....