Coyote

It’s great to hear praise for S/55 and S/77, and for those brave evangelical journalists who helped convince the Luddites among us that it was going to be worth it all. But I come to praise the visionaries who put this beast together. They are the Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreessen’s of Reuters, who created a robust CMS that - despite the sniffs and eye rolls from the sophisticates who impatiently told us that expensive, ill-considered “innovations” like News2Web were the future - actually did enable the best journalism in the world by being simple for the user, and getting out of the way.

For decades. With a virtually non-existent failure rate.

My hat is off to the late Dave Mitchell [http://planetabell.blogspot.com/2008/11/tribute-to-greatness.html], Tom Guinan and Fred Gray. Nothing lives forever, nor should it. But nobody who was there when Coyote came to the newsroom will dispute that this elegant monstrosity was a wire service journalist’s dream come true. ■