News-Record.com

As you might have read, we've been having problems with our e-mail server here at the N&R. I just got into the office, and I'm told it's been down since early this morning. It was down much of yesterday, too.

I'll spare you the gory details. Just know that if you need to reach me, you can call 373-7088. But there is one other detail that's relevant. Typically, when someone comments on this blog, I'm notified by e-mail. Obviously, that won't be happening right now. I'll check back from time to time, but if I don't respond pretty quickly to your comment (which I normally try to do when a response is called for), please be patient; I will get back to you.

Thanks!

UPDATE: I'm being told our e-mail will be out until at least Thursday. In the meantime, you can e-mail me here.

Early in our transition toward an online Town Square, I suggested in numerous venues that we might one day want to create a real partnership between N&R journalists and people in the community who might want to work to get a particular story of interest to the community into the pages of the N&R. Now, 13 months into this initiative, a lot of what we still need to do online has been reduced to issues of money and technology, two subjects outside my primary area of expertise, I'm refocusing on content in general and journalism-as-partnership in particular.

There aren't many examples of this kind of partnership out there. On the other hand, that means we're not artifically constrained by another news organization's idea of how this kind of partnership should work, either. There aren't any organizational rules, so we're free to figure out what we think would work. I don't have any preconceived notions regarding structure or coverage subject, nor do I have any Orders from On High regarding those things. So we're free to figure out for ourselves how this should work.

Are you interested in contributing to the N&R's coverage of a particular issue? Do you have an idea for a subject you'd like such a partnership to look into, even if you can't or don't want to participate yourself? Comment here or, if you're feeling shy or need to submit a tip in a less-than-completely-public way, e-mail me. (Yeah, our e-mail is still out, but I'm sure it'll come back up sometime.)

We are not the first newspaper to begin regularly posting readers' contributions online. That honor, so far as I know, belongs to The Bakersfield Californian, whose Your Words section posts reader-written stories online. Some of those stories also have been printed in the newspaper.

We launched YourNews almost a year ago and continue to receive and publish contributions. But we're also hoping to team professionals in our newsroom with interested people in the community to produce stories of general interest that are intended, from the git-go, to be published both online and in the print edition of the News & Record.

Since we launched the Town Square initiative 13 months ago, we've tried to make journalism more of a conversation and more of a partnership/collaboration with the communities we serve. Those concepts can be understood metaphorically, but we're talking about literal, meatspace partnerships, too. If you're interested in taking part, or have a story idea, please leave a comment or send me an e-mail.

I spent this weekend with about 40 members of the College Media Advisers group at their "Reinventing College Media" gathering at the University of Mississippi. You can read a little of what I said here, but this blog post only scratches the surface of the conversation that we had. The good news is, these are bright people dedicated to giving this country the journalists it will need in the future, and they're wrestling hard with some serious issues and problems. The bad news is, I'm not sure even the best things they can come up with will be adequate.

Of course, the same thing should be said of the newspaper industry.

Actually, we do -- badly, in fact -- but it's down again today. If you need to e-mail me something, you may do so here

UPDATE: It would be nice to think that all the e-mail we have received during our server outages over the past week and a half has been preserved, even if it's not accessible. It would be nice to think that ... but it would be wrong. Much of the e-mail sent to us is permanently lost. So if you have e-mailed in the past week and haven't gotten a response, that might be why. I strongly suggest you consider alternative means of getting in touch with us until our IT folks pronounce this crisis permanently fixed.

For the past couple of years, our Web site has offered a free subscription to a daily e-newsletter, compiled and transmitted around midafternoon most weekdays, containing the day's headlines and breaking news as well as an updated weather forecast and some other information.

We're examining whether that newsletter still serves a useful purpose. If you tell us that it does, we may still want to change it to make it even more useful to you. If you tell us that it does not, we'll want to know what other services you might want us to offer in this area. (We already know that an expanded range of RSS feeds, to name just one example, is high on a lot of people's wish lists.)

If you don't want to wait 'til this afternoon's letter, you can fill out the survey now and e-mail your responses to me. (You might want to cc this address in case our e-mail server acts up again.) Here it is:

1) How long have you subscribed to the newsletter?

2) How often do you follow any of the links included in it?

3) Would you rate it as a) very useful, b) somewhat useful, c) not very useful or d) not useful?

4) What feature(s) do you find most useful? Why?

5) What feature(s) do you find least useful? Why?

6) What change(s) would you make if given the chance?

7) What other format(s) should the N&R consider for providing you with middle-of-the-day news updates? (e.g., RSS, wireless text messages, etc.)

8) How often would you like to receive such updates? a) daily; b) every couple of hours; c) hourly; d) more often than hourly; e) whenever news breaks.

9) Do you have any other comments about the e-newsletter service?

Thanks for your help!

Using the power of an institution to insult people gratuitously over their religious beliefs is rude; for a journalistic institution to do so is unworthy and unethical. That said, refusal to do physical harm to someone strictly because of the ideas they express is a very wide, bright line separating civilized from uncivilized, and there can be no compromise on it.

For the record, any speakers at my funeral are not only welcome but are also encouraged to address the issues that were important to me in my earthly life. You need not even agree with me on those issues, as long as you fully and forthrightly acknowledge what my views were and the basis for those views. Being funny would be helpful but is not mandatory.

Also, there should be plenty of beer, barbecue and blues at the wake.

That is all.

Poor self-esteem can be fatal. But don't take my word for it. Take a coroner's.

Apparently the question of whether or not to link reporters' bylines to their respective e-mail addresses is a burning question in some quarters.

Not ours. We intend to. We're just trying to find a non-labor-intensive way to do it.

Right now, we can do it manually in our Web-publishing system by simply inserting the "mailto" link code around the story's byline. (E-mail addresses and phone numbers also appear at the bottom of each story but are not linked.) I've done a couple of random bylines on stories from today's paper just as a demonstration.

What we can't yet do is format bylines in DTI, our print-publishing system, so that when stories are automatically copied to our Web-publishing system the bylines are hotlinked, and we can't (at least not yet) set up our Web-publishing system to automatically format the incoming bylines.

But we're working on it.

I've spent the last couple of days compiling the responses to our survey on our weekday afternoon e-mail news update. About 70 of our more than 1,200 daily subscribers responded. A quick summary of the findings:

• Not to brag, but we've got a lot of very satisfied customers. That's particularly impressive in that UNhappy customers tend to be much more likely to get in touch than happy ones, all other things being equal.
• Not surprisingly, readers want us to tweak the content, if at all, even more toward local news. That's considered by far the most "useful" part of the content.
• We need to continue to be sure that a headline contains enough info to actually tell the story; "Man dies in Reidsville" isn't especially informative, one reader noted.
• Several folks mentioned they get sports/weather/entertainment news elsewhere and so find it less useful, but at the same time there wasn't much call for dropping them.
• We face a particular problem with sports, however: Midafternoon is just about the least productive possible time in the sports-news cycle for an update. We had a few complaints that the e-newsletter merely repeats what was in that morning's paper, and to the extent that that is ever true (it's not supposed to happen at all), it's more likely to be true in sports than anywhere else. If there's no really breaking sports news at newsletter time, perhaps we should simply plug a local story that will be appearing in the next day's sports section. That would reinforce our local emphasis and get us out of the no-win game of competing with ESPN.com. At least one respondent suggested adding a listing of the upcoming evening's sporting events of local interest.
• Technical issues: 1) A few people expressed an interest in receiving the newsletter in HTML rather than plain text and/or asked that photos be included. Should we experiment with offering the option of HTML? 2) At least one respondent said AOL users have some particular problems following our links (but did not elaborate). This is the first I've heard of that, and I'm looking into it. 3) At least one respondent suggested summarizing the top 2-3 news items right at the top, without links, so they'd show up in Outlook preview panes. 4) We need to make the link from our home page to the e-newsletter subscription form more informative and more prominent.
• Delivery: 1) Most people like the once-daily format, although many said they also would welcome another e-mail any time significant news breaks. One user habit that supports that approach is that most people check e-mail more regularly than they do a Web site (perhaps because it's easier to do that and still look like you're working). 2) Several readers called for more RSS feeds; we've already said we plan to add more. 3) Current users didn't call much for SMS/wireless service. I'm just guessing on this at the moment, but I think we'll probably experiment with it anyway because it might well appeal to a different audience.

Mike Grossman, Mike Fuchs and I will be reviewing the results in more detail before proposing any changes. In the meantime, we welcome any questions or additional comments.

And so it is that we're finally able to move our stuff to a new server, which we hope to finish doing by March 1. I'll spare you the gory details behind why such a move was necessary (many of which I'm probably unaware of) except to say that we need it to 1) enable comments on articles; 2) implement the kind of registration/commenting system we need to strike the best balance between freedom of expression and accountability and 3) move the blogs, the better to get all our online content into a single searchable database.

Being almost illiterate from a technological standpoint, I probably can't even imagine how tedious the move will be. So I'm staying focused on the good stuff awaiting us on the other end and thinking happy thoughts.

For quite some time I've been a fan of the concept of distributed computing. Stripped of all the jargon, distributed computing means taking a job that could only be done by a single very powerful computer, of which there are fewer in the world than there are jobs for them, and breaking it up into many tiny little pieces. Then, via the Internet, you send the pieces out to participating computers worldwide. Each of those computers works on its piece of the job, then returns the data to the central location.

My first distributed-computing project was SETI@home, which I got involved with about eight years ago. SETI@home uses computers around the world to analyze data collected from deep space by radio telescopes. The analysis is looking for the kind of nonrandom electromagnetic signals that might indicate the existence of intelligent life on other planets. If your computer is the one that finds life on other planets, you get the credit, although if I were going to score that much luck, I'd rather put it to work on a Powerball ticket.

(What might such a signal look like? We might, for example, broadcast repetitions of Pi into space on various frequencies. One argument against doing so is that it might be interpreted by a more advanced, and hostile, civilization, as, "Hey! Here we are! Come enslave or eat us!" But no pain, no gain, say I.)

SETI@home, based at Berkeley, eventually became part of a larger program called the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, or BOINC. (Another pointless aside: In addition to its more salacious connotations, the word reminds me of "Scientific Progress Goes 'Boink,'" a collection of my all-time favorite comic strip, "Calvin & Hobbes." Hey, I told you it was a pointless aside.)

BOINC is a piece of software that lets you participate as much or as little as you want in one or more of several distributed-computing projects based at Berkeley. My home PC currently is running not only a SETI@home project but also projects from ClimatePrediction.net and Einstein@Home, a search for gravitational signals emitted by pulsars.

Well, this is all well and good, you're thinking, but what in pluperfect heck does it have to do with ... well, anything?

For the answer, you need to visit my new current favorite Web site, Google Earth. You can use the free program, or some of the free tools developed by users, to get a map, a satellite photo, or both (separate or overlaid) of pretty much any address on Earth. Even better, you can drag the map around on your computer screen to see adjacent areas, and you can zoom in (up to a point) or out so as to look easily at things whose exact location you don't know but are NEAR things whose exact location you know.

So here, finally, is my idea.

I'm not sure how we could get computer technology to do all the heavy lifting -- it seems to me as if human judgment would almost certainly have to be involved here -- but what with the Tom Hanks movie "Cast Away" and the popularity of the TV show "Lost" (not to mention the gazillions of "Gilligan's Island" reruns we've all watched), I wondered whether it might be possible to combine the power of Google Earth with distributed computing to find every last speck of land on the globe and look for signs of (shipwrecked) human life. I don't know what that would be, exactly -- the word "HELP!" spelled out on a beach in fallen coconut palms, I guess, or "HI! MY NAME IS AMELIA EARHART!" -- but if there's a relatively cost-effective way to do this, imagine what would happen if we found even one cast-away person.

Maybe we call it Project Gilligan.

OK, it was just a thought.

When you're on hold with Seattle city government, the phone plays music by Seattle-area musicians rather than Muzak.

How cool is that?

I'm not what you'd call a blogging triumphalist, but I figured this was worth noting.

Within the last hour or so, John Brady, the national political editor of The Washington Post, was asked during a live chat session whether he knew yet which lobbying firms might have been involved in the decision to sell U.S. port facilities in six cities to a company owned by the government of the United Arab Emirates. (Scroll down to the question from Pasco, Wash.)

Blogger Holden at First Draft posted that information at 7 p.m. Monday.

The info won't surprise anyone who has followed U.S.-Arab relations post-9/11.

UPDATE: But this will: CNN is reporting that former U.S. Sen. Bob Dole has been retained by the UAE company to lobby Congress in support of the deal. That would be the same Bob Dole who's married to North Carolina's senior senator. (Note: I can't find confirmation of this on CNN's Web site. At least, not yet.)

So, the Stockholm, Sweden, chapter of the biker gang Hell's Angels -- and if you would, just stop and savor, for a moment, the 200-proof weirdness of a Hell's Angels chapter in Sweden -- is under investigation for possible benefits fraud. Seems 70 members of the chapter have been diagnosed with depression ... by the same doctor.

North Carolina's 9th Congressional District is heard from.

(Via RedState.com.)

UPDATE: Via my colleague Mark Binker, this statement from 6th District Rep. Howard Coble, a Greensboro Republican:

The chairman of a House panel with jurisdiction over homeland security and terrorism issues is urging the Bush administration to reconsider its support for allowing a company from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to operate six American ports.

U.S. Rep. Howard Coble (R-NC), the chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security, said today that Congress needs to examine this proposed sale "thoroughly, deliberately and prudently."

Congressman Coble, who is also a former member of the U.S. Coast Guard and currently on the Coast Guard subcommittee in the House, said he is comforted by the knowledge that the Coast Guard, port authorities, and other U.S. law enforcement agencies will control security at these six ports, but he is troubled that the operational company is owned by the UAE, which "has a past history that bothers me."

"Congress needs to insert its oars into these waters," Rep. Coble added. "I appreciate the fact that the Bush administration says that security at these ports will continue to be controlled by our own Coast Guard and others, but having a UAE company involved in the day-to-day operations at these ports bothers me. I have said since 9-11 that my greatest fear is that another attack on U.S. soil would come through one of our ports. To have a company owned by the UAE directing operations at six of our largest ports needs to be thoroughly, deliberately and prudently investigated - and based on what I know now - that does not appear to be the case in this instance. If this contract came before the Congress for a vote today, I would have to vote no."

(Yes, it appears to be raining weird news today, and yr hmbl corrspndt is out dancing in it.)

Apparently, making computers that don't run is now a good thing.

Via Steve Yelvington, we see that the Newspaper Association of America has done a survey of heavy users of newspaper Web sites. The full report won't be out for a couple of weeks, but some of the headlines include:

• $73,000/year household income (compared with national median of about $43,200).


• 91% of such users have recently bought something online.


• 68% of such users have a broadband connection (compared with fewer than 50% of households nationwide).

More to come.

If you missed the wire story on today's Sports front (not online) about a high-school senior with autism who hit six 3-pointers in the last four minutes of his first and only basketball game, don't miss the CBS Evening News story on him here at YouTube.

Every time I feel justified in arguing that the newspaper industry is too understaffed/underfunded and is too doing the best it can with the resources it has, I run into a newspaper story like this.

Lemme help you out here.

• Nobody but Lindsay Lohan and the people she sleeps with should care whom Lindsay Lohan sleeps with.
• Nobody outside the entertainment bidness and her family and close friends should care about Lindsay Lohan, period.
• Anybody who does care about Lindsay Lohan, whether or not he/she ought to care, almost certainly has better places to check for information on her than the Arizona freakin' Republic.

Yeesh. It's hard enough tryin' to keep this bidness alive without its trying to kill itself all the time.

... is 9 p.m. Saturday. 'Til then, expect saturation coverage -- from "every ESPN entity" and from Mr. Sun!.

Never have I been so proud to be of Scots descent.

A 17TH-CENTURY firewater, more than two spoonfuls of which was said to be enough to kill a grown man, is to be revived by a whisky distillery in Scotland.

A single drop of the ancient drink of “usquebaugh-baul” was described by the travel writer Martin Martin in 1695 as powerful enough to affect “all members of the body”. He added: “Two spoonfuls of this last liquor is a sufficient dose; if any man should exceed this, it would presently stop his breath, and endanger his life.”

Twelve barrels of the world’s most alcoholic whisky, or enough to wipe out a medium-size army, will be produced when the Bruichladdich distillery revives the ancient tradition of quadruple-distilling today. With an alcohol content of 92 per cent, the drink may not be the most delicate single malt ever produced but it is by far and away the world’s strongest. Malt whisky usually has an alcohol content of between 40 per cent and 63.5 per cent.

With the first spirit run expected at lunchtime today, the distillery urged whisky lovers to tune in live on its webcams — “that is, if the distillery doesn’t blow up in the process”.

The US Secret Service admitted in 2003 that it had been monitoring the distillery because the difference between distilling a fine whisky and making chemical weapons was "just a small tweak."

The Web cams are here; doesn't look like anything blew up.

The distillery's master distiller says that when the stuff's ready to drink in about 10 years, the flavor will be "floral." Funny guy, that master distiller.