As a newspaper (well, alt-weekly) editor, I've got to respond to this.
You could have written your comment from my town. I work in the same offices as the local daily, and got my start as a beat reporter for them.
In my mind, the problem comes down to profit margin. Sure, Craigslist is eating up classified ad revenue. I've been in those meetings, too. There's not as much money coming in.
So what's the initial solution? Cutting positions in the editorial department (that's the folks what does the writin').
The problem I see locally is that it means we don't have as much local news coverage. My daily went from five reporters to cover the community down to two, primarily through attrition. Heck, I covered local education (K-12, plus a university and technical college), and wasn't replaced when I moved over to the alt-weekly gig.
A lot of people in my company are pushing user-generated content. In our case, that's meant repurposing posts from our Web site's blog to a weekly "community voice" publication, much like the site you describe.
So what happens? We get a community publication that's old news to anyone who checks out our Web site, and doesn't contain any "real" reporting. We end up with a daily that's a conglomeration of a few local stories, but mostly wire copy from the Associated Press that anyone can see for free up on CNN.com or a million other sites the day before. And people stop reading.
"Revenue generation" is a big word in the news industry, and the editorial folks aren't seen as direct revenue generators.
Granted, I'm still a low man on the totem pole, but my solution would be to plow money into getting good reporters and writers. Think about it - for the national stuff, anyone's going to check out the big Web sites or their TV news.
But for local things -- what happened at the school board meeting, new businesses opening downtown, who's up-and-coming in the city's political scene -- they'd only have one definitive source. That'd take more reporters, but I think that eventually it'd drive up our readership, thus boosting ad revenue, making everyone happy.
15-plus? C'mon, my mom has our old IIe that still works just fine (complete with Disk II and old-school Imagewriter) after 24 years.
On a related note and totally unconnected to the subject note, is there anything out there that would help me take lots of high school papers written in Appleworks 1.0 to a more modern format?
Your points are appreciated, and, in many situations, your argument is perfectly sound. However, it doesn't really work for us.
1) The sheer age and cruft of the news database is starting to catch up with us. We can't have an on-line archive, in part because Newsedit just can't handle it. 2) We have lots of modern hardware, but occasionally a program written for OS7 (or possibly even earlier, I'm no Mac Historian) can be unhappy with newer software. 3) We're quite familiar with it --but we also have occasional fits of pique at its limitations.
The biggest problem is that Quark has moved on since version 4.1, and the newer versions have features that, while we don't necessarily NEED them, would be very, VERY nice to have.
Unfortunately, our version of Newsedit only plays nice with Quark 4.1.
Believe me, most of us are more than ready to retrain. Indeed, most of us younger folk actually LEARNED to newspaper on systems more advanced than what I'm now using. On top of that, the paper's systems guy insists that 90 percent of our computer problems are due to using the old software (often on blazing-new machines).
It's true that the software is doing what's required, but I and many others here feel that we'd be a little more productive with modern tools.
The newspaper I work for (with accompanying printing press) still use OS9, with maybe one or two exceptions running OSX.
Why? Because the particular combination of Quark 4.1 (yup, that's right) and Newsedit IQue 1.0.2 (copyright 1992... sigh) simply don't work under OSX.
Sometimes I fantasize about the higher management types realizing that using a 12 year old program for all of our word processing maybe isn't the best idea...
While you can't edit the models themselves, you CAN add all kinds of attributes to them. My roommate, for example, spent the better part of a week trying out different materials (each with different properties like conductivity, potential energy, overall quality, etc.) to see how to make the most blasty guns he could.
SWG also gives you "experimentation points," which you can use to try and make a gun shoot farther, a scanner scan more accurately, or clothes last longer, for example.
Though most of the in-game markets are glutted with identical items made by novice crafters, you can find a few with that something special extra, "distinctive style," if you will.
Back when I was growing up, my folks picked up a copy of "Haunted House" for the Atari 2600. The game scared the hell out of me (at six years old or so), and even now that I've got a 2600 again, I won't play it.
I don't know if it was something about being chased by the ghost of that old man, or the creepy way your eyes looked on the screen, but that game freakin' terrified me.
Another early childhood terror-maker was Castle Wolfenstein (the original, not "3D").
I got to the point where whenever I would hear that "HALT!" coming out of my Apple ][e's speaker (speech in Apple games being a rarity in the mid 80s), I would practically soil myself.
Yup, you'd think you were away from that SS guy, but all of a sudden he appears at the top of the screen... AIEEE!
When I dug out the old Apple a couple of years ago, I was *almost* tempted to play it... Hell, I still have the occasional nightmares about both of those games, and I've rampaged through "Silent Hill" and all the "Resident Evil" series with nary a psychological scratch.
Guess the girlfriend-soon-to-be-fiancee's right: I'm an odd bird.
Good point---hadn't thought of that one. After all, they were able to completely rebuild the brains of people who were horrendously damaged by cryogenics.
Maybe Spider decided to go all Luddite on us at the end?
The end of "Transmet."
on
Ask Warren Ellis
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I was always a little disappointed by the ending of "Transmetropolitan." As much as I like the thought of Spider making it out of the city and living happily in his garden, it just didn't seem to fit the tone of the series.
A friend of mine (a journalistic bastard in his own right) introduced me to Transmet, and had his own theory about the end of the series---Spider discovers, in a wave of revelation, that the city itself is a cultural reservation, and he escapes to the outside (presumably even worse than the city).
My question is this: Why end the series with such a hand-of-God maneuver? Spider's in remission, he's happy in the garden, everyone lives happily ever after? It was definitely a payoff, but not the one that I (and many other readers) had been expecting or waiting for---it seemed a little incongruous with the rest of the series.
Slashdot Mirror
As a newspaper (well, alt-weekly) editor, I've got to respond to this.
You could have written your comment from my town. I work in the same offices as the local daily, and got my start as a beat reporter for them.
In my mind, the problem comes down to profit margin. Sure, Craigslist is eating up classified ad revenue. I've been in those meetings, too. There's not as much money coming in.
So what's the initial solution? Cutting positions in the editorial department (that's the folks what does the writin').
The problem I see locally is that it means we don't have as much local news coverage. My daily went from five reporters to cover the community down to two, primarily through attrition. Heck, I covered local education (K-12, plus a university and technical college), and wasn't replaced when I moved over to the alt-weekly gig.
A lot of people in my company are pushing user-generated content. In our case, that's meant repurposing posts from our Web site's blog to a weekly "community voice" publication, much like the site you describe.
So what happens? We get a community publication that's old news to anyone who checks out our Web site, and doesn't contain any "real" reporting. We end up with a daily that's a conglomeration of a few local stories, but mostly wire copy from the Associated Press that anyone can see for free up on CNN.com or a million other sites the day before. And people stop reading.
"Revenue generation" is a big word in the news industry, and the editorial folks aren't seen as direct revenue generators.
Granted, I'm still a low man on the totem pole, but my solution would be to plow money into getting good reporters and writers. Think about it - for the national stuff, anyone's going to check out the big Web sites or their TV news.
But for local things -- what happened at the school board meeting, new businesses opening downtown, who's up-and-coming in the city's political scene -- they'd only have one definitive source. That'd take more reporters, but I think that eventually it'd drive up our readership, thus boosting ad revenue, making everyone happy.
Nope. I mean the original, one-floppy, 80-column Appleworks. Database + word processor goodness old-school style.
I must have written about a hundred different papers on that thing.
15-plus? C'mon, my mom has our old IIe that still works just fine (complete with Disk II and old-school Imagewriter) after 24 years.
On a related note and totally unconnected to the subject note, is there anything out there that would help me take lots of high school papers written in Appleworks 1.0 to a more modern format?
American Journalism Review had a great article last month about the assault on shield laws.
I realize that shield laws and ThinkSecret's NDA smackdown aren't quite the same thing, but the AJR article is great.
Figured I'd plug it.
It is a Rod Stewart reject. Check the first track of the Patch Adams soundtrack.
But I really *liked* Mutant League Football!
There's a guy here in the office who loves his Blood Bowl, too, though that one's a tabletop, not video, game.
Your points are appreciated, and, in many situations, your argument is perfectly sound. However, it doesn't really work for us.
1) The sheer age and cruft of the news database is starting to catch up with us. We can't have an on-line archive, in part because Newsedit just can't handle it.
2) We have lots of modern hardware, but occasionally a program written for OS7 (or possibly even earlier, I'm no Mac Historian) can be unhappy with newer software.
3) We're quite familiar with it --but we also have occasional fits of pique at its limitations.
The biggest problem is that Quark has moved on since version 4.1, and the newer versions have features that, while we don't necessarily NEED them, would be very, VERY nice to have.
Unfortunately, our version of Newsedit only plays nice with Quark 4.1.
Believe me, most of us are more than ready to retrain. Indeed, most of us younger folk actually LEARNED to newspaper on systems more advanced than what I'm now using. On top of that, the paper's systems guy insists that 90 percent of our computer problems are due to using the old software (often on blazing-new machines).
It's true that the software is doing what's required, but I and many others here feel that we'd be a little more productive with modern tools.
The newspaper I work for (with accompanying printing press) still use OS9, with maybe one or two exceptions running OSX.
Why? Because the particular combination of Quark 4.1 (yup, that's right) and Newsedit IQue 1.0.2 (copyright 1992... sigh) simply don't work under OSX.
Sometimes I fantasize about the higher management types realizing that using a 12 year old program for all of our word processing maybe isn't the best idea...
At the risk of being an ass, I must point out that he never actually claimed to have invented the Internet.
What he said (and is true, by the way) is that he pushed through funding in Congress that led to the modern Internet.
While you can't edit the models themselves, you CAN add all kinds of attributes to them. My roommate, for example, spent the better part of a week trying out different materials (each with different properties like conductivity, potential energy, overall quality, etc.) to see how to make the most blasty guns he could.
SWG also gives you "experimentation points," which you can use to try and make a gun shoot farther, a scanner scan more accurately, or clothes last longer, for example.
Though most of the in-game markets are glutted with identical items made by novice crafters, you can find a few with that something special extra, "distinctive style," if you will.
Back when I was growing up, my folks picked up a copy of "Haunted House" for the Atari 2600. The game scared the hell out of me (at six years old or so), and even now that I've got a 2600 again, I won't play it.
I don't know if it was something about being chased by the ghost of that old man, or the creepy way your eyes looked on the screen, but that game freakin' terrified me.
Another early childhood terror-maker was Castle Wolfenstein (the original, not "3D").
I got to the point where whenever I would hear that "HALT!" coming out of my Apple ][e's speaker (speech in Apple games being a rarity in the mid 80s), I would practically soil myself.
Yup, you'd think you were away from that SS guy, but all of a sudden he appears at the top of the screen... AIEEE!
When I dug out the old Apple a couple of years ago, I was *almost* tempted to play it... Hell, I still have the occasional nightmares about both of those games, and I've rampaged through "Silent Hill" and all the "Resident Evil" series with nary a psychological scratch.
Guess the girlfriend-soon-to-be-fiancee's right: I'm an odd bird.
Good point---hadn't thought of that one. After all, they were able to completely rebuild the brains of people who were horrendously damaged by cryogenics.
Maybe Spider decided to go all Luddite on us at the end?
I was always a little disappointed by the ending of "Transmetropolitan." As much as I like the thought of Spider making it out of the city and living happily in his garden, it just didn't seem to fit the tone of the series.
A friend of mine (a journalistic bastard in his own right) introduced me to Transmet, and had his own theory about the end of the series---Spider discovers, in a wave of revelation, that the city itself is a cultural reservation, and he escapes to the outside (presumably even worse than the city).
My question is this: Why end the series with such a hand-of-God maneuver? Spider's in remission, he's happy in the garden, everyone lives happily ever after? It was definitely a payoff, but not the one that I (and many other readers) had been expecting or waiting for---it seemed a little incongruous with the rest of the series.