groomed but casual austin
In a spirit of grumpiness, I’d like to point you to an Austinist post with a particularly stupid lede. It starts, “Salons here are like coffee shops in New York. It seems like there’s a cute, hip one on every street corner…” Reading this, I wonder if the author has been to the Big Apple. I frequently relent and get coffee at Starbucks in New York because coffee shops are hard to find and New York coffee is often of dubious quality. Friends who have transplanted to the city that never sleeps often complain about how few coffee shops are there. In contrast, Austin seems to outpace the nation in cute, hip coffeeshops. I have no opinion about salons – I’m a SuperCuts kind of guy – but this seems like a redonkulously silly comparison.
A more legitimate gripe I have with Austinist is how frequently the site updates posts after they’re posted. The site seems to re-edit at a faster rate than most other blogs, but what’s really irritating is how it will update a post about an event after the event has taken place. I don’t want to see last weekend’s “Weekend -IST List” reappear in my reader on Tuesday morning. (Yes, this happens.) I presume some editor found a typo in the stale entry and corrected the problem without realizing it would repost the entry.
I would set my reader to ignore updates, but the site often updates posts with relevant information. For example, the site often gives away concert tickets, and I do want to know if a winner has been found. The blog clearly needs to set an editorial policy about updates. A second set of eyeballs should look at posts before they go live, and contributors should not update event posts after the event has taken place. The second rule, in particular, would keep editors from wasting time and annoying readers.
