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…
Where the dead trees go to rest. Tonight some co-workers regaled me with tales of some of the crazier CA shenanigans over the years. Tales of open gunfire out front on Union Avenue translating into people inside (there are huge glass windows fronting our building) hitting the deck and hiding under their desks. Tales of a crazy man who lived on the fifth floor without anyone noticing for … weeks? Tales of another crazy man…
It took me a few hours, but I’ve finally completed my papercraft Newsbot. I’m calling him Bojanklesbot because he’s held together rather jankily with packing tape (like everything else in my apartment) and he looks like the kind of robot who might be voted off the island kinda early, if you know what I mean. Anyway, it’s a really cool project spearheaded by my pal Shane, illustrator extraordinaire for The CA. The advent calendar from…
3-something p.m.: I notice that the analog clock on the wall near the design desk is way behind (or ahead, I guess). It reads 9-something. 5 p.m.: The clock begins making a pained humming noise, as if its insides are revving up out of madness. I give the clock a mean sideways glance and say, “That is gonna have to stop or I am going to find somewhere else to work.” I continue giving the…
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…
I’m so excited/nervous/barfy/worried about how today is going to unfold. I have my hunches and my hopes, but we all know those don’t amount to a hill of vomit-flavored jelly beans. I remember being so full of hope in 2004 and then feeling all that slip away like sand in my fingers. Dirty, stinking, fickle sand that I clearly never had a grasp on anyway. Waking up and knowing Bush had managed to pull it…
Let the meta blow your mind. Friday morning I woke up and saw this post at Mediaverse in my Google reader and instantly had a mini-heart attack. What I had been working on late at night here at T&G had somehow shown up on the local media watchdog’s blog, where said watchdog had shared the following: And yesterday, CA designer Lindsey Turner posted a likely template design for what appears to be a new CA…
(Like everyone else, all we can talk about in the newsroom lately is Michael Phelps.) Intern, just after Phelps’ win last night: I bet he’s on steroids. Metro editor: Did you see what he eats every day*? Intern: Steroids? *According to Wikipedia, it’s either 6,000 or 12,000 calories a day. YOW.
Only it’s really my Thursday. Harumph. Somehow I managed to escape a post-election hangover, despite all the tequila I befriended last night. I was so jittery by the time I left work at midnight that I needed the stuff just to help me sleep. Election night can be especially unkind to newspaper folks, but this one went more or less smoothly on our end, and went according to script (and yes, I mean that in…
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