Tying Two Worlds

Video in a print story? Impossible! …right?

Wrong. But only recently wrong. The Gloucester Times, and other Eagle Tribune newspapers started using a bit of technology derived from your local grocery store over the last few months. That’s right, bar codes.

Entrenching

The City’s day-by-day walking, talking, and living marks only one part of the community. The other exists in the air, made up of locals who capitalized on the death of the gatekeeper.

By Day or Week? Musing on the DCM

The Divorced Content model applies itself best to weekly papers. The once-a-week print edition gives reporters time to produce worth-while long-form articles, and provide enough short form “daily” news during the week to keep readers interested.

The Divorced Content Model

News organizations craft one stream of news content. The Gloucester Times produces the Gloucester Times, the Salem News produces the Salem News. Redundant? Not quite.

Those organizations have an original content flow. They’re generally producing news, opinion, video, etc. that no one else produces. But that “content stream” looks a bit like a telephone wire. It’s one cable, encasing a bundle of individual wires. The Gloucester Times content flow provides readers with Cape Ann News, Fishing Industry News, Community Calendar information, Opinion articles, Arts and Life features …

You get the idea.

Platforms, Protocols, and how we read.

The New Media aren’t the information world’s version of pac-man. A new medium will not consume the old medium. Writing did not consume talking, nor photography painting.

So, the web will not consume print in the news world either.

Essentials?

An eighteen page newspaper’s just a bit too long for my taste.

The average morning paper contains a few front-page, leading stories, several local sports pieces, the community calendar, meeting agendas, and the occasional arts and life piece. All deal with the paper’s region.

I’ve read through the two major local papers on Cape Ann, the Salem Evening News, and the Gloucester Daily Times  and paused,  wondering if what I’m reading really needs to be there.

Only What Matters

The multifaceted, prismatic nature of the internet makes it a superior platform.

The net’s not easily classified as a single medium, as it incorporates, in equal focus, the three primary meta-media. That is, the three basic media through which we interact with out world, video, audio, and print. The web allows news organizations, papers and otherwise, to tell stories in a myriad of media.

So why don’t we just use the web? 

Into the Air

Quiet falls over the Internet tonight. An odd stillness, sanity, and calm from a city known for a hedonistic addiction to flashing lights. Pause… something’s not right.

You’re in a dead zone, where the lights haven’t flickered, where a web presence hasn’t been, and where silence, at least in that corner of our digital world, rules with an iron scepter. Welcome to my town.

Why Live?

The six o’clock deadline died when television invaded American homes in a barrage of flickering light. Some say radio killed the evening deadline.

The Internet dug up its bones, and killed it again. 

Live-tweeting, a review

From 7 p.m. to 1:00 in the morning, I stared half at the stage and half into the small screen of a smudged I-pod, wondering who had the bright idea to live-tweet a town meeting.

Truth be told, I did. I talked it out with my editor, and we figured it would work, and be kind of cool for readers to see what was going on at the meeting if they couldn’t, or were to lazy to, go themselves.

It went well … mostly.