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As April Fools jokes go, this has quite a bit of intellectual rigor.
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As April Fools jokes go, this has quite a bit of intellectual rigor.
... and, if I might say, a very well-done one: Britannica takes over Wikipedia.
They've apparently drilled all the way through the Earth's crust to the mantle.
Metro columnist Lorraine Ahearn can now be heard as well as seen. We've got podcasts of two of her columns up here, and we'll be posting more, although schedule/frequency are still to be determined and might be affected by our Web-publishing-system switchover.
Greensboro's Fecund Stench breaks the news -- Roy Williams will be the next Pope -- and describes the cultural benefits.
Through magic modern technology and the hard work of the newsroom's Herb Everett and Mike Fuchs, we've now got posted about 20 minutes or so of the Thursday night meeting of the Guilford County Board of Commissioners, here. This was the segment in which the board split along partisan lines regarding an audit of the county tax department (today's story here). When I left the office earlier this evening, the file was about 70 megabytes (i.e., don't try to download it on a dial-up connection), but if you haven't ever been to a commissioners' meeting, this'll give you a sense of just how argumentative they can be.
On a related subject, reporter Allison Perkins and I are scheduled to do some video and audio taping Tuesday for a Web presentation she is planning. There'll be a spin-off article for the print edition. I'll keep you posted on our progress in producing it, but please be patient: We're both learning as we go.
In The Thread That Wouldn't Die over at TheShu's place, the possibility has been raised that the N&R might somehow take local bloggers' content and make money off it without sharing the revenue with the bloggers. The ensuing discussion led me to share an anecdote that I'm cross-posting here:
Shortly after we first started all this, I decided to try to compile a weekly column with excerpts from local blog posts. I had no preset criteria other than "local" -- timely, funny, pithy, anything might do. Although, as Ed Cone points out [higher in the comment thread], we weren't legally required to seek permission from the bloggers whose work we intended to use in this way, I tried to do so anyway, as a courtesy.
I attempted to contact upwards of a half-dozen bloggers. One got back to me granting permission. One got back to me denying permission (for perfectly good reasons that I am not criticizing). None of the rest got back to me at all.
So we scratched that idea for the time being -- not because we were afraid of breaking the law but because we wanted to be considerate (and not suffer through the bad PR of being accused, even falsely, of stealing people's content). But I'd like to know: In your opinion, did we do the right thing? Or should we have gone ahead and used excerpts?
I ask again here: What, in your opinion, should we have done? If it had been your blog, what would you have preferred that we do?
Within the next few weeks, some of the N&R's news folks, including me, will be holding neighborhood gatherings to let us hear from small groups of area residents on issues of interest to them and their neighborhoods, as well as on the paper/Web site in general. We don't know whether this will become a regular ongoing thing, although I hope it does -- if only for the chance to eat barbecue on the company dime more often. We'll be reaching out to some area residents, asking them to host these gatherings -- and letting them decide whom to invite. Community editor Betsi Robinson and her team will be organizing the events, but I wanted to mention them because I'm excited about their potential for helping us to help you tell your stories.
Two nights ago I went out with staff writer Allison Perkins to shoot video for a multimedia presentation we hope to create, tied to a story she's writing. I don't want to steal her thunder, so to speak, so I'll just say that the sound was muddy, the lighting borderline, the shooting angles tightly constrained and the weather atrocious -- all conditions that actually were appropriate to the subject, even if I might have gotten pneumonia out of the deal. (The subjects, I should add, were cooperative and charming.)
Schedules permitting, we'll edit the video today and hope to have the whole thing ready to go next weekend. Stay tuned.
The actual content won't be news to anyone who has been paying attention, but Monday's Wall Street Journal article on citizen journalism, which mentions us, is now out from behind the subscriber firewall.
It doesn't really report anything new about what we and some of our newspaper brethren and sistren are doing ("new" being relative, of course). It's more of a trend piece: Bit by bit, piece by piece, American newspapers are starting, ever so slowly, to catch on. Jay Rosen said this should be national news, and so it is.
Coincidentally, Jay has an interview up today with Bill Grueskin, managing editor of The Wall Street Journal Online, who has some interesting things to say about what places such as ours are up to. Grueskin's site is making money while everyone else is sitting around wondering how to make money, so go give him a read.
Steve Outing, who has been doing online since way before online was cool, has a post up at the Poynter Institute's site on whether, and how, news organizations should train citizen journalists. For what it's worth, I'd like to see us do that (although there are a number of other things I'd like to see us do first, he said, with a grimace). I think helping a team of citizen journalists produce a really good local investigative story/Web project would be about the most fun I could have without involving nudity, explosions or my kids.
What do you think?
You can keep an eye on the chimney that will announce the outcome of voting for a new pope by using the Vatican's chimney-cam. Available in Real or Windows Media, at several different bandwidths, and even the low-bandwidth image (the one you'll want if you're on dial-up) looks pretty sharp. Remember -- black smoke: no pope. White smoke: New pope.
Two votes were taken before noon today (Vatican City time, which is five hours ahead of U.S. Eastern), and at least one more will be taken before the cardinals break for the day.
... Tribune Co., which owns, among other things, Newsday, the Chicago Tribunea and the Los Angeles times, reported a 9% drop in circulation revenue in the first quarter.
Co-worker: "You'd better hurry up with that saving-newspapers thing, Lex."
Dude. I'm hurryin'.
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay apparently believes it's wrong for Supreme Court justices to do research on the Internet:
We've got Justice Kennedy writing decisions based upon international law, not the Constitution of the United States? That's just outrageous," DeLay told Fox News Radio on Tuesday. "And not only that, but he said in session that he does his own research on the Internet? That is just incredibly outrageous."
I'm not a lawyer. Neither, for that matter, is former exterminator Tom DeLay (so far as I know). So I ask the lawyers among our readership: Is there some ban on Supreme Court justices doing their own research, on the Internet or anywhere else? If so, why? If not, should there be?
Thanks.
-- Spent yesterday morning editing video with Allison Perkins for a story she's doing. We didn't finish, but hope to on Monday.
-- Tonight I'm shooting more video for an upcoming story by Tina Firesheets. Here's hoping it's not as rainy as it was last week when I shot Allison's video.
-- Two more N&R blogs will be appearing within the next few days. Mike Fuchs, the newsroom's main Web guy on weekdays, will be writing the Bargain Blog, which he plans to make a coupon shopper's paradise. (UPDATE: Mike says his blog will make its debut Monday morning.) And reporter Justin Hayes in our High Point office will be starting a blog focusing on the Jamestown/North High Point area. Also, our existing SportsExtra blog will be gaining two new voices: Charlie Atkinson, who has been a sports writer and editor here for more than 20 years and currently works on the night sports desk, and Bill Hass, another long-time sportswriter who currently covers the Greensboro Grasshoppers.
-- An update on our new Web-publishing system. I'm told we've got all the organizational kinks worked out in getting story categories in that system to line up with story categories in the system we create and edit stories in for print, but that there are "a few kinks" left. We can't finish creating story templates, story-category templates, etc., in the new system until those kinks are worked out, but we hope to have that process finished within a week. (Extend that to two weeks if we have problems with the software that will enable commenting on individual stories, but that's a feature we think you'd be willing to wait another week to get.) Presumably we'd launch the new site a couple of weeks after that.
-- Key newsroom people will begin receiving training within the next week or so on how to post stories online with the new system. (Actually, they won't be doing it "with the new system," they'll be doing some things in the existing print system that will allow the new Web system to grab and publish those stories, but I'll spare you the gory technical details.)
-- I'll be appearing at 10 a.m. tomorrow on WNAA's Table Talk talk show with host (and friend and former co-worker) Joya Wesley to talk about grassroots journalism, including but not limited to what we're up to here, and its implications for community and democracy. WNAA is at 90.1 FM, with a live Webcast here. It's also a call-in show, and I believe the number to call if you want to comment or ask a question is 334-7952 (or send e-mail here).
How much of what passes for "news" is really public relations? A lot, says Paul Graham in this interesting column that explains how top-flight PR work benefited his company ... but also led him to look at mainstream news coverage with a lot more skepticism.
Having worked in PR in New York before I entered newspapers, I can say that he's got it basically right. And now that you know what to look for, feel free to point out examples of mainstream news coverage that looks to you like the work of a PR firm.
As promised, two new blogs appear today: Bargain Blog, by our newsroom's online editor, Mike Fuchs, and the north High Point/Jamestown blog, written by reporter Justin Hayes, who lives there and is in search of what he calls "backyard epics."
And we have a few others up our sleeves, too. Stay tuned.
That living wills would become a topic of social discourse in the wake of the Terri Schiavo case was predictable. Less predictable, however, was this: The bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Madison, Wis., says living wills are can be a mortal sin. (Corrected 11:35 a.m.)
I don't know whether anyone local applied for one of the "New Voices" grants that were being given out by the Knight Foundation -- I know there had been some discussion locally -- but if anyone did, you didn't win. On the other hand, some of the projects that did win look pretty interesting and might serve as examples for this community's efforts.