I was happy to find email from a reader who'd waded through all of yesterday's transcript of Thursday night's discussion of the new town hall and recreation land. While I was delighted that the reader described it as "nice, very interesting," they also asked for some way to tell the names of Town Board members from the names of the audience. To make this easier, I decided to color-code the names. Town Board members and town employees now have colors, while audience members' names remained black.
(If the paragraph above doesn't show some green and red text, I'm afraid the color-coding won't work in your browser. It works now in Mozilla, Firefox, and Safari, and the versions of Internet Explorer I've been able to test.)
I'm not entirely sure what colors to use for some people's names. I tend to link our County Legislators' names to their web sites, so some people may be used to seeing Martha Robertson's name like this, for instance, but in this case I don't think she was exactly reporting from the county, so I left her name in black. I also don't know know quite what to do about elected officials who aren't members of the board, notably Town Clerk Bambi Hollenbeck and Highway Superintendent Jack Bush. They weren't involved in this conversation, so I guess I have a little time to think about it.
Hopefully this will make it easier to sort through long transcripts. I'm not going to go back and annotate old stories, but I'll use the convention going forward in regular stories and see how it goes.
Posted by simon at January 16, 2005 3:22 PM in tech