theology&geometry

Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

Busy busy busy night at work. Lots of news, lots of news meetings and meetings about news. We’re trying to plan for our inauguration coverage and get the daily paper out and all the while, the entire newspaper industry is collapsing around us. It’s, if I may coin a rather vulgar phrase, a clusterfuck of epic clusterfuckitude.

We’ve got Hearst trying to sell the Seattle P-I (where my former art director works) and now the Minneapolis Star Tribune has filed for bankruptcy. And Gannett, for whom several of my friends work, is ordering a weeklong furlough among its employees this quarter. This is among the ongoing abysmal and well-documented problems at other papers (Google “newspaper crisis” for a real pick-me-up some time; try not to get distracted by Google’s hideous new favicon) industrywide.

Things are bad. Real, real bad. And they’re not going to get better. Things are changing, slowly but getting faster and faster, and it’s going to be painful for people who are used to the traditional way things have been, people who lived through the heyday of newspapers when there was such a thing as a news cycle. We are drenched in free information now, and there is no putting that cap back on the toothpaste tube now. Nor should there be. I love the internet and its capacity for not only entertaining but for getting more people up to speed on more things than ever before. I want newspapers to embrace the potential of the web and get out in front of trends and bring their hefty institutional weight to the online newsgathering process. I want newspapers — printed or no — to continue to be the publications of record. It’s a civic duty that I take seriously, despite my irreverent, profane blatherings to the contrary. I want us to be useful. No, not useful: indipensible. Aggressive and badass. Telling and showing. All that. I have high hopes for the types of journalism that will survive and thrive once the immediacy of the web is fully embraced. I want to see how much more careful and meticulous and accountable reporters and editors will have to be once they understand that their words carry fast and far on these tubes.

I’m in a weird spot because my job — the person who arranges stories and art on the page that will be printed — isn’t going to exist forever. My friends’ and co-workers’ jobs aren’t going to exist forever. What we can actively hope for is that we can grow and change and withstand the labor pains and find a niche for ourselves in the emerging media landscape. Learn how to do web design. Learn how to edit videos and audio and photos. Learn how to create content. How to aggregate content. All that and more.

We’re willing, I assure you. The average journo worth his weight in newsprint wants to do whatever it takes to maintain his relevance to the community. But a complete overhaul of everything you know and everything you are and ever have been is easier said than done. We don’t have the luxury of time to sit around and solve our existential and philosophical problems; we’ve got to get the paper out. We still have deadlines to hit every night. Every night. It would be nice if we could look to industry leaders to do some heavy lifting to shake up the status quo and get out ahead for once. But so far there’s been little but crickets chirping. But the overhaul has to be done. It needs to be done. It’s happening and we can’t slow this thing down. Some people find it easier to get off this janky ride right now and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about it every day. But others will tell you that once this stuff gets in your blood, it’ll take much more than a transfusion to get it out.

Still, the nostalgia and wonder attached to the big ol’ printing press won’t die easily. Just think about all the movies that feature that iconic spinning newspaper, or the camera panning past a bulletin board of news clippings. The printed newspaper has had such a fantastic run in our culture that it’s gut-wrenching to imagine that some day it won’t exist at all. I have no idea if that’s true; I’m as successful a soothsayer as Sam Zell. But newspapers will at most be just a ghost of their former selves, and that’s sad enough on its own. I still stand in awe as our presses run. There’s just something so damn substantial about it.

So here’s to evolving. Whatever the hell that means.

Anyway, that’s some heavy shit. I invite you to wash it out of your mouth with this.

[Project 365]

My friend Coco provides some narration for the scene out in front of our office at roughly 3 p.m. Thursday (day two of Mission: Everyone Suddenly Wants Newspapers):

‘Milk it while we got it’ from Lindsey Turner on Vimeo.

Last night the TV news (I forget which station) broadcast live out front at 10, and the story was about how the paper was the hottest-selling item in town.

So, so weird.

They are directing traffic in the parking lot of my office so that people can drive up and buy editions of today’s paper. Demand was so high that they printed up 40,000 additional copies and they’ll be offering up other promotional items in the days to come.

I’ve not been in the newspaper business very long, so I’ve only lived through an era in which print is said to be dying a slow death. I’ve never really known what it feels like to face great demand for your product, so I have to confess: It’s flippin’ awesome.

Click to embiggenate

Many days, I like to snort a big fat line of newspaper nerdery and check out the day’s front pages at Newseum. And some days, I notice that The Tennessean‘s page is all wacky, like the file got corrupted or something during its trip from the Nashville office to the Newseum office in D.C. Today was no different, except that I found the Nashville paper’s design to be delightfully trippy and abstract and, I won’t lie, totally fun to look at, like the whole thing took a hit of raunchy LSD. I especially love the nameplate, which features an approach that de-emphasizes the brand and instead lets the letterforms act as art … haha, I’m just kidding. The PDF is just fubar, that’s all.

Those crazy pixels!

:)

UPDATE: Um, I was afraid this was going to happen. Note to Newseum: It would be super duper awesome if you’d create permalinks for the daily front page analysis. That way, when bloggers link to, say, the analysis of all the Obama nomination front pages, they don’t come back the next day and see that their link now goes to some malarky about hockey. So, anyway, my smiley was a brief and lazy way of saying YAY OBAMA.

Holy hell, it got humid fast. I don’t care if “quickly” is preferred standard English grammar there or not. When you’re talking about humidity, you spit the words out and get it over with and then go back inside and take a bath in iced tea.

Mmmm, iced tea.

Anyway, I would like to sit and write and write about lots of different things, but my eyes are still dilated from the eye doctor this morning and I can’t focus on the damn screen. The good news is that my vision hasn’t gotten worse in a year and a half. That’s unheard of for me. So I may finally be stable enough to consider Lasik. Which means that if I am in a plane crash and get stranded on an island, I won’t be the weakest link because I lost a fucking contact lens during the crash. (I know I’m only on the second season of Lost, so maybe that plot device is yet to come, but seriously — where are all my vision-impaired brothers and sisters who would be up the proverbial shit creek were they to land on an island with a pair of broken glasses or no spare contacts? Yes, these are the things I think about when I watch that show.*)

More good news: Yesterday I came in to work only to find out that I’d won a Scripps quarterly design award. Yee haw! I got a certificate and everything. I’m pretty proud. I’ve had a lot of help this year and been given a lot of freedom to create some pretty cool designs, so I’m really thankful for that. Here are the pages that clinched the win:

Apparently the judges really liked the tornado A1. We were sure to include the backstory with the description of the page. (That was the night we had to hoof it to the basement twice and lost at least an hour of production time and they still expected us to meet our regular deadlines. Oh, and it was Super effing Tuesday, too.)

*UPDATE: Oh, duh. As someone who does not exist on the internet reminded me, Sawyer has shitty vision. Although, they kind of abandoned that storyline real quicklike.

I’m about to pick a nit with the daily paper. I think I even beat Mediaverse to it!

This is the big story on the M cover today, though it’s fairly buried in the online edition. It’s a Washington Post piece about online citizen journalists. It is curiously devoid of any reference to any Memphis citizen journalists. There are no breakout boxes with any links to local blogs that would qualify as being run by citizen journalists (a dumb term, if I may say so, because it just sounds so cartoony). There is no sidebar talking about the vibrant community of local bloggers who cover local and state politics and business.

So is the reader to assume that citizen journalism is something that happens only in D.C., where the Post is, or in New York City, where the story is datelined? I think unless the CA gives some context, there’s some danger of that. At the very least, it makes the CA seem out of touch to ignore this obvious bit of helpful context.

Just off the top of my head, I can name several local blogs that, in my view, provide citizen journalism just as much as Faye Anderson’s does. Gates of Memphis, Smart City Memphis, Paul Ryburn (on the downtown entertainment/scene beat), Thaddeus Matthews (link NSFW today — gory pics of dead people and a bare ass are on the index page), Field Guide to Urban Memphis, and At Home She Feels Like a Tourist all do excellent original reporting and commentary. Mike Hollihan of Half-Bakered writes more often at the aforementioned Mediaverse — primarily a media criticism/observation blog — now, but I’d still list him and his blogs along with these others. And those are just off the top of my head. I am absolutely positive that there are others I’m missing. My point stands, though.

Citizen journalists exist here. Hell, Memphis seems to be the kind of place where they could thrive (so many stories to cover and relatively few professional reporters covering them). I think the paper missed a good chance to talk about what local citizen journalists do, how they do it, and why.

Like when I get to put Stephen Colbert’s face on the front page. I mean, I always like my job, but everyone who works any type of job knows that sometimes there are little nuggets of nothingness that might seem meaningless to everyone else but, with careful attention, can be polished and kept and treasured.

And putting Stephen Colbert on the front page is something I can treasure. Cuz I’m a freak.

So, yeah. Not sure when Steve Cohen’s interview will air. But it should be a hoot. Full story here.

That’s not so much a Barbra Streisand shout-out as it is an MST3K shoutout. Giant Spider Invasion, if I’m not mistaken. But I’m a bit rusty on my MST trivia, so leave a comment if I need to be corrected.

My group meeting went pretty well. I pitched a couple of ideas that combine some other members’ ideas and I think we have a viable product. I also came up with a cool name, which I won’t divulge because our project is super secret. The project is due in a week and a half. I’ve promised them I would have stories, photos and master pages on the server by Monday evening, before I visit the Tennessean with half the class to gawk at how a Real Newspaper is made. Maybe I’ll see Pam. But maybe I’ll also see Kevin, the editor who didn’t hire me. How embarrassing.

Happy Valentine’s Day and whatnot. I’m at work and Phil has the day off. What could be more romantic? We wanted to go to the Frist Center, but they close right as I’m clocking out. Bah. A pox on holidays. Well, Cheryl told me about a neat Web site that hosts photos for free, so here’s a sugary sweet saccharine photo for your Valentine’s Day enjoyment.