Nikolai Thyssen featured in Journalism.co.uk story

Hi Steve,

Thanks for pointing to the article - I hadn't seen it.

It wasn't actually an interview - the journalist came with a group from the magazine she works at to hear about Drupal. It seem like most scandinavian publishers are considering the move to open source these days. I'll tell a little more about the Danish Drupal-craze another time...

But since it wasn't really an interview and the meaning has been very condensed, let me just clarify a few things:

• I do not want to keep "expertise in-house" - I'm very happy about all the system development we can outsource (ad serving, hosting etc.), but I don't consider our use of Drupal to be "system development". What I said was that I rather spend me money on innovation than on licensing. When we chose Drupal, we took the money we saved on licenses (which could have range from 25.000 to 200.000 dollars plus integration, custom development etc.) and hired a web developer instead. Best decision ever!

• I definitely do not think that we have to find out everything by ourselves , Ken. I was talking about the time when we started out, and the only newspaper on Drupal I knew of was the Savannah Morning News. Back then - before we found Node Queue and all the other mandatory modules - we did spend way to much time looking in wrong directions or trying out solutions that didn't scale to enterprise level (core search and the sitemap module just to mention two examples).

• Back then our novice questions got answered almost instantly - there wasn't as many questions asked and a question would stick on the frontpage for a day or so. It's great that so many new people are coming to Drupal, but it has changed the ratio of experts vs. beginnes - and thus much more questions are being asked and repeated. If you ask a question today, you are lucky if it sits on the frontpage for an hour.

• That is also one of the many reasons why I praise the cooperation in this group as often as I possibly can. For a small independent newspapers like ours, it's invaluable. For example: we can only afford one developer, and without the exchange of ideas in the group and in direct contact with other Drupal developers he would be working alone - without like minded colleagues. The open source way we basically have R&D department.

• I have been speaking to a lot North European old media executives and every time I mention Earl Miles. I tell them that if they go with Drupal, they will depend on a man that they never met, that goes by the name Merlin of Chaos - a man who is developing some of the core technology they will depend on for their business. It always makes them nervous, but I like the chaos-part of Earls' name as an example of a necessary mind shift.

Finally: I don't consider Drupal-developers "fanatics". I was telling them of our process of choosing the right open source solution and how we posted question on many different forums. Back then I realized that no one was really objective. It is like sport fans: some love love Real Madrid, some Barcelona, but no one will be able to tell you which club plays the best soccer. I usually say that to be honest about the kind of advice I'm giving them.

Nikolai