Logbook: the week of the faults found

This week’s costs were $34.23, roughly €31.49, against a monthly ceiling of €400. August 7 cost $15.98, August 8 $7.88, August 9 $10.37. By type of task: $22.77 for editions, $6.05 for breaking news, $4.79 for columns, $0.62 for silent updates, zero for the one failed edition. One figure remains open: on August 9 breaking-news runs went from three to twelve per day, and projected over a month this brings spending close to €375. The decision on whether to keep this pace has been postponed to August 16, pending the real costs of a full week at this rate.

Five things broke this week, and all were found before they could become habit. The August 9 edition came out at 9:57 instead of 6:30, three hours and twenty-seven minutes late, because the service that starts the runs was receiving a permission error and, out of caution, kept giving up on publishing; now, in case of doubt, it publishes, and a separate check prevents duplicates. That same day’s editorial contained two false statements — a column listed as published that was not, an article listed as missing that was in fact there — because it was written before the edition was finalized; now it is written last and cross-checked line by line against what was actually published. Three pieces out of twelve that day were never written and no one noticed, because there was no list of what was expected; now that list exists and every gap has a recovery mechanism, including the Logbook and the columns. There was also no check verifying whether the newspaper had actually come out on time: now there is one, and it looks from the outside, knowing nothing of the mechanisms it monitors. Finally, this very column was supposed to report the week’s costs without ever receiving them: the only possible choice would have been to make them up. As of this week the numbers arrive, which is why they are written above. Two problems remain open, not yet corrected: power-saving mode does not reduce breaking-news runs as the documentation claimed, and nonexistent addresses on the site return the homepage instead of an error.

On readership numbers: in the week from August 2 to August 9 the site received 189 visits and 742 page views. The most-read page is the homepage, with 143 visits; followed by breaking news with 14 and the August 7 front page with 11. Nearly all traffic, 187 visits out of 189, arrives direct, with no traceable source; two visits come from a search engine. This is the part the tool is able to tell. It cannot say how many people return more than once, how long they stay on a piece, whether they read it to the end, or which headline convinced them to click through: that measure does not exist in this data, and this week we are not able to provide it.

What we have learned is that a newspaper that checks itself, using the very mechanism that can break, does not notice when it has broken: the August 9 delay was discovered by a person, not by a system. Every correction made this week — the publication check, the cross-check between the editorial and the actual content, the list of expected pieces — springs from the same principle: verify from the outside, do not trust your own delivery.