Comments on: Taking stock

By: Monica

Monica — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 15:22:23 +0000

I just stumbled on this blog post while checking in to see what Joe was up to, and I felt a pang for the group I worked with and learned from over the last 8 years. We couldn’t have done it without Joe giving us the courage and ability to work on projects we thought were going to make a difference. There were so many times we were 2 steps ahead of what our audience and advertisers wanted, so we would “retire” a project only to find ourselves returning the concept years later. I am really going to miss the days of our annual offsite meeting, we could think really, really big, and we were supportive of each other for it. It was an exhausting process, but it kept us focused on the future, and we knew we were in it together. For that, I am grateful.

By: Colin

Colin — Thu, 08 May 2008 02:10:56 +0000

Cool. Good job Joe. I hope you find as much, or more, success in your next endeavor.

By: Rob Landry

Rob Landry — Sun, 04 May 2008 02:01:55 +0000

I remember working at MaineToday.com on Election Night 2000. Probably because I had experience in broadcasting, Joe stationed me in the newsroom of WMTW, our broadcasting partner for the evenings coverage of the returns. It was my job to post quick and dirty news as it happened to a page on the MaineToday site, which I did every few minutes.

No one called it blogging back then, but that’s exactly what we were doing.

By: Jack Lail

Jack Lail — Sat, 03 May 2008 00:45:57 +0000

I loved this line: “We didn’t intend to be “out there” — they just seemed like the right things to do. ”

It’s been a fun ride. Remarkable things did indeed happen in all kinds of places because “they justed seemed like the right things to do.”

And MaineToday was certainly better because of Joe Michaud.

By: Jason

Jason — Thu, 01 May 2008 15:20:45 +0000

Looking back over my 10 years with MT, there are a number of projects that stand out in my mind as real breakthroughs for us. Since there were so many who worked on each of these, I, too, will forgo mentioning names … but you all know who you are and what you did for each of these. (Hopefully)

One of our earliest little “breakthroughs” were the rotating promos that we used to have on the side of our sites. It seems simple — archaic, even — today, but having 3-5 randomly selectect promos for different sections show up was pretty eye-catching way back in 1999.

I think the biggest breakthrough we had was creating an easy-to-use, deploy and manage system that allowed readers of the site to comment on stories. We had tried forums and were experimenting with blogs. But Reader Comments really registered with people — they instantly got it, and they loved it. They still do, despite a number of changes that we’ve made through the years. To me, that more than anything shows the power of the Web. And we were right there at the forefront (though, admittedly, we weren’t first) letting the public comment right on our stories and content.

Closely related was our “MyMaineToday” section, which was our “alpha” version of a citizen journalism site. For a variety of reasons, MyMT took a bit to catch on, but some folks got it right away and began posting stories, photos, events and classifieds related to their favorite Maine towns. It’s still on the site and still gets a fair amount of activity.

Finally, I have to mention two of my other favorite projects that I had the good fortune to work on: our Post-A-Job self-service job posting system, and our Free Ads free online classifieds system. While we weren’t able to make either of these quite as successful as we wanted, they still stand out to me as a great way to give our audience (including advertisers) products and services that met certain needs, and they were radical departures from “business as usual” for a newspaper company … if I were only to judge by the amount of internal politics that they stirred up.

Everyone at MT has contributed to our successes … and to our much-celebrated failures. And I consider myself extremely lucky to have spent the last 10 years alongside people that I consider the brightest and best in the industry. And, Joe, too.