Interview With Mike Cloutier

[Jeffro]

For the March 13th edition of WordPress Weekly, I'll be interviewing Mike Cloutier who runs WordPress to power the local paper for the Ridgeway and Fort Erie Canada areas called RidgewayHerald. A couple things on my mind for this interview is to not only talk about his use of WordPress, but his thoughts on the state of the print industry.

If you have any good questions you'd like me to ask Mike as they regard to either WordPress, the site, or the print/online industry, post them in this thread.

[Devin]

How do you see the function of the newspaper website? Is it simply an extension of the print version, or are you trying to do new and interesting stuff you couldn't do simply with print- such as video, back and forth conversation, and breaking news?

How do you moderate comments on the newspaper website? Has this been an issue, or are people mostly civil?

Why did you pick WordPress over other CMS choices?

Has the web site helped raise revenue? Do you share with your advertisers how many people click on your ads or view each article?

From your statistics, are there some articles online that are more likely to get people do click on ads? Have there been discussions about writing certain types of content because you know it will increase web traffic and/or ad revenue?

Do you think having articles on the web makes them more accessible and the people you write about more accountable? This American Life recently did a show about how it's really hard to kill a negative story about yourself once it's on the web. Have you ever been asked to take down an article? What is your policy?

Why oh why are you using the default permalink structure?

Have you seen piece on news in The Onion about the death of print media? http://www.theonion.com/content/vide...e_end_of_print

Okay, look forward to the podcast! Cheers.

[Jeffro]

These are all excellent questions. I'll definitely run these across Mike this Saturday.

As for the Onion link, that is pretty darn funny.

[MikeCloutier]

Thanks so much for that tip about WP125. It works as advertised and is exactly what I was looking for.