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During my professional sabbatical in the month of April, I had the opportunity to travel to Moscow, Russia to talk with Eurasian journalists about community engagement.
This is my name in Cyrillic!
On April 22-24, the New Eurasia Media Program held its annual International Conference, where I, along with other journalists and bloggers from around the world, shared [...]
Today is my last day at TBD – so you'll have to forgive a little bit of sappiness. I'm one of the last eliminated employees to depart and sticking around to watch everyone leave has been something of an emotional roller coaster.
The early days here, around when TBD launched, will always be a treasured bright spot in [...]
Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week's top stories about the future of news.
Google's surgical strike against content farms: Two weeks after launching its site-blocking Chrome extension, Google made the central move in its fight against content farms by changing its algorithm to de-emphasize them in search results. The New York Times put the change in context, explaining the content farm phenomenon and its connection to Google. Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan explained that Google is saying the changes only affect "scrapers" (sites that pull content from other sources), but that they're actually aimed at content farms, too. And GigaOM's Mathew Ingram talked about why Google may be reluctant to publicly target content farms — because they run a lot of Google advertising.
A few early returns were good: TechCrunch approved of the change, and The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal ran a test search comparing the old and new algorithms, finding that the information from the new one was "much, much better." Demand Media, the most prominent of the content farms, said it wasn't affected overall by the new formula, though, as Henry Blodget of Business Insider noted, it's probably trying to wean itself off of Google reliance anyway.
In fact, it appears Demand Media is telling the truth: Aaron Hall of SEO Book used Sistrix's data to point out that many of Demand Media's competitors were among the sites hardest hit by the change, while one of Demand's largest brands, eHow, actually got a boost. Hall implies that politics have played a role, and while there's nothing concrete suggesting that, the way the changes spared eHow does seem…odd.
There's also bound to be plenty of collateral damage from the algorithmic shift, and Wired looked at one Mac blog that's been nailed by the new formula (its Googlejuice was restored after Wired talked to Google about it). Danny Sullivan reported that Google hasn't made any significant changes to its new algorithm since rolling it out last week, though there are outlets to contact Google if you feel your site has been unfairly hurt.
Elsewhere in the conversation about search, Columbia Journalism Review's Karen Stabiner gave an overview of the debate about search engine optimization: The anti-SEO crowd, led by the Washington Post's Gene Weingarten, worries that the SEO mindset will privilege the powerful and eventually kill off creativity in favor of numbingly literal language. The SEO evangelists, on the other hand, say it's just encouraging honesty and straightforwardness, something it's difficult to object to.
Facebook extends comments' reach: Facebook continued its integration with media content across the web this week with the launch of an updated comments system. Essentially, users can simultaneously post their comments on both a site and on Facebook, with subsequent comments under that thread posted to the site straight from Facebook. PBS MediaShift's Mark Glaser talked to Facebook's Justin Osofsky about the ins and outs of the new system, and ReadWriteWeb noted that it has fewer features than the commenting update Facebook previewed last fall.
TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld identified the two aspects of the updated system that will be most attractive to publishers. First, it requires commenters to use their real names, thus theoretically cutting down on trolls and spammers (this part, of course, has been available to publishers through Facebook commenting for a while). Second — and this is the new one — it extends the reach of a post, spreading into more Facebook news feeds and making it easier for more people to join in the conversation. This particularly excited Lehigh j-prof Jeremy Littau, who said it could create "a virtuous circle between community and content sharing."
There are downsides as well, and while media analyst Alan Mutter was optimistic about the social potential of the new system, he also pointed out that it will give Facebook even more information about its users, which it won't be sharing with publishers. As GigaOM's Mathew Ingram noted, it's the same tradeoff publishers have been dealing with regarding Facebook for several years now: Does the value of tapping into Facebook's social potential outweigh the price of handing over commenting to a notoriously controlling company?
TBD's lessons — more startup, less ad reliance: TBD in its original form may have died last week, but the six-month-old Washington local news site continued to stimulate conversation this week. Its station posted an ad for a new manager to head the site, and TBD's former manager, Jim Brady, talked with Columbia Journalism Review about the site's model, framing the conflict there as not TV vs. web, but startup vs. legacy: "I think if we could do TBD with a pure startup mentality, and if we could fund it more with a V.C. or an angel kind of way, and if we didn't have the legacy side to work with, then I think it would actually have a better chance to succeed."
Others posited similar reasons for TBD's demise: Web journalist Jane Stevens talked about a few causes centered on a lack of corporate commitment, and in The Guardian Emily Bell pinpointed TBD's inability to have its own ad sales team (an explanation with which Brady concurred).
The debate over hyperlocal journalism, stirred by Alan Mutter last week, continued to simmer, with Robert Washburn of The Canadian Journalism Project defending it and Paul Gillin of Newspaper Death Watch saying we need to look at non-advertising-based business models for it, a point media consultant Dan Conover also made in more in-depth form at Xark. Ohio j-prof Bill Reader, meanwhile, said TBD failed because it didn't define its community well enough, but TBDer Steve Buttry objected to that argument.
Amid all the analyses of what went wrong at TBD, Mandy Jenkins, the social media producer there, took stock of what went right, noting four things other news orgs can take away from its tenure: organizational openness, self-promotion, opening info beyond the newsroom, and hiring for mindset over pedigree.
iPad, part deux: Apple made a few headlines by launching iPad 2, which is apparently kind of like the iPad, only it's the second edition. I'll entrust you to the care of Techmeme for all the details about the product itself and focus instead on what it means for publishers and the larger world of media. The Lab's Joshua Benton pointed out two implications in particular — the mounting evidence of an e-book explosion and the iPad's increasing usefulness for reporting.
Damon Kiesow of Poynter examined the latter point in some detail, looking at the iPad 2's specs from a content creation perspective. And Cory Bergman of Lost Remote looked at the device's increased video capability and predicted that it would help fuel a surge in multi-platform video consumption and production.
Elsewhere in mobile media, tech blogger John Gruber defended Apple's app subscription program by breaking down the arguments against it one by one. The Lab's Joshua Benton said that while Apple obviously isn't a charity and the financial difficulties of publishers aren't its problem, the arrangement still isn't ideal. Both posts are among the sharpest takes on the issue I've read, so they're worth taking time to read through.
Reading roundup: What to read this weekend while firming up South by Southwest plans:
— In non-commenting Facebook news, Mashable's Vadim Lavrusik put together a great overview of the varied role of Facebook in journalism. And in non-Facebook commenting news, Los Angeles Times media reporter James Rainey made the case for requiring commenters to use their real names, while Mediaite's Alex Alvarez defended anonymous commenting.
— Here at the Lab, Lois Beckett wrote two fascinating posts based on a talk by The New York Times' Gerry Marzorati — one on the future of long-form journalism, and the other on the Times' planned paywall. Two other thought-provoking pieces published here this week: One by Joshua Benton on language and viral content, and another by three data journalists on news organizations creating value out of the trust placed in them.
— Amy Gahran wrote three awesome primers on mobile media — one on mobile apps, another on the current mobile landscape, and one on mobile media and PR.
— Knight fellow Jeremy Adam Smith shared results from a survey on how meaningful journalism is being funded. It's a gold mine of statistics and information about the state of the journalism ecosystem.
— It's a pretty well-worn discussion, but Frederic Filloux's analysis of why incremental change isn't enough to rescue the newspaper industry is as succinct a summary of the current situation as I've seen. Even if you've heard it all, his piece is a good refresher.
Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week's top stories about the future of news.
The short, happy-ish life of TBD: Just six months after it launched and two weeks after a reorganization was announced, the Washington, D.C., local news site was effectively shuttered this week, when its corporate parent, Allbritton Communications (it's owned by Robert Allbritton and includes Politico), cut most of its jobs, leaving only an arts and entertainment operation within the website of Allbritton's WJLA-TV.
TBD had been seen many as a bellwether in online-only local news, as Poynter's Mallary Jean Tenore documented in her historical roundup of links about the site, so it was quite a shock and a disappointment to many future-of-newsies that it was closed so quickly. The response — aptly compiled by TBDer Jeff Sonderman — was largely sympathetic to TBD's staff (former TBD manager Jim Brady even wrote a pitch to prospective employers on behalf of the newly laid off community engagement team). Many observers on Twitter (and Terry Heaton on his blog) pointed squarely at Allbritton for the site's demise, with The Batavian's Howard Owens drawing out a short, thoughtful lesson: "Legacy managers will nearly always sabotage innovation. Wall of separation necessary between innovators and legacy."
Blogger Mike Clark pointed out that TBD's traffic was beating each of the other D.C. TV news sites and growing as well. The Washington Post reported that while traffic wasn't a problem, turning it into revenue was — though the fact that TBD's ads were handled by WJLA staffers might have contributed to that.
Mallary Jean Tenore wrote an insightful article talking to some TBD folks about whether their company gave them a chance to fail. Lehigh j-prof Jeremy Littau was unequivocal on the subject: "Some of us have been talking today on Twitter about whether TBD failed. Nonsense. TBD wasn't given enough time to fail."
While CUNY j-prof Jeff Jarvis lamented that "TBD will be painted as a failure of local news online when it's a failure of its company, nothing more," others saw some larger implications for other online local news projects. Media analyst Alan Mutter concluded that TBD's plight is "further evidence that hyperlocal journalism is more hype than hope for the news business," and Poynter's Rick Edmonds gave six business lessons for similar projects from TBD's struggles. Journal Register Co. CEO John Paton ripped Edmonds' analysis, arguing that Allbritton "can't pretend to have seriously tried the hyperlocal business space after a six-month experiment it derailed half-way in."
Applying Apple's new rules: Publishers' consternation over Apple's new subscription plan for mobile devices continued this week, with Frederic Filloux at Monday Note laying out many publishers' frustrations with Apple's proposal. The New York Times' David Carr and The Guardian's Josh Halliday both covered publishers' Apple subscription conundrum, and one expert told Carr, "If you are a publisher, it puts things into a tailspin: The business model you have been working with for many years just lost 30 percent off the top."
At paidContent, James McQuivey made the case for a lower revenue share for Apple, and Dan Gillmor wondered whether publishers will stand up to Apple. The company may also be facing scrutiny from the U.S. Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission for possible antitrust violations, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The fresh issue regarding Apple's subscription policy this week, though, was the distinction between publishing apps and more service-oriented apps. The topic came to the fore when the folks from Readability, an app that allows users to read articles in an advertising-free environment, wrote an open letter ripping Apple for rejecting their app, saying their new policy "smacks of greed." Ars Technica's Chris Foresman and Apple blogger John Gruber noted, though, that Readability's 30%-off-the-top business model is a lot like Apple's.
Then Apple's Steve Jobs sent a short, cryptic email to a developer saying that Apple's new policy applies only to publishing apps, not service apps. This, of course, raised the question, in TechCrunch's words, "What's a publishing app?" That's a very complex question, and as Instapaper founder Marco Arment wrote, one that will be difficult for Apple to answer consistently. Arment also briefly noted that Jobs' statement seems to contradict the language of Apple's new guidelines.
Giving voice to new sources of news: This month's Carnival of Journalism, posted late last week, focused on ways to increase the number of news sources. It's a broad question, and it drew a broad variety of answers, which were ably summarized by Courtney Shove. I'm not going to try to duplicate her work here, but I do want to highlight a few of the themes that showed up.
David Cohn, the Carnival's organizer, gave a great big-picture perspective to the issue, putting it in the context of power and the web. Kim Bui and Dan Fenster defended the community-driven vision for news, with Bui calling journalists to go further: "Let's admit it, we've never trusted the public." There were several calls for journalists to include more underrepresented voices, with reports and ideas like a refugee news initiative, digital news bus, youth journalism projects, and initiatives for youth in foreign-language families.
The J-Lab's Jan Schaffer gave 10 good ideas to the cause, and Drury j-prof Jonathan Groves and Gannett's Ryan Sholin shared their ideas for local citizen news projects, while TheUpTake's Jason Barnett endorsed a new citizen-journalism app called iBreakNews.
Three bloggers, however, objected to the Carnival's premise in the first place. Daniel Bachhuber of CUNY argued that improving journalism doesn't necessarily mean adding more sources, recommending instead that "Instead of increasing the number of news sources, we should focus on producing durable data and the equivalent tools for remixing it." Lauren Rabaino warned against news oversaturation, and the University of Colorado's Steve Outing said that more than new sources, we need better filters and hubs for them.
Blogging's continued evolution: The "blogging is dead" argument has popped up from time to time, and it was revived again this week in the form of a New York Times story about how young people are leaving blogs for social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Several people countered the argument, led by GigaOM's Mathew Ingram, who said that blogging isn't declining, but is instead evolving into more of a continuum that includes microblogging services like Twitter, traditional blog formats like Wordpress, and the hybrid that is Tumblr. He and Wordpress founding developer Matt Mullenweg shared the same view — that "people of all ages are becoming more and more comfortable publishing online," no matter the form.
Scott Rosenberg, who's written a history of blogging, looked at statistics to make the point, noting that 14 percent of online adults keep a blog, a number he called astounding, even if it starts to decline. "As the online population becomes closer to universal, that is an extraordinary thing: One in ten people writing in public. Our civilization has never seen anything like it." In addition, Reuters' Anthony DeRosa argued that longer-form blogging has always been a pursuit of older Internet users.
Reading roundup: I've got a few ongoing stories to update you on, and a sampling of an unusually rich week in thoughtful pieces.
— A couple of sites took a peek at Gawker's traffic statistics to try to determine the effectiveness of its recent redesign. TechCrunch saw an ugly picture; Business Insider was cautiously optimistic based on the same data. Gawker disputed TechCrunch's numbers, and Terry Heaton tried to sort through the claims.
— A couple of Middle East/North Africa protest notes: The New York Times told us about the response to Egypt's Internet blackout and the role of mobile technology in documenting the protests. And Amy Gahran of the Knight Digital Media Center gave some lessons from the incredible Twitter journalism of NPR's Andy Carvin.
— The Daily is coming to Android tablets this spring, and its free trial run has been extended beyond the initial two weeks.
— Matt DeRienzo of the Journal Register Co. wrote about an intriguing idea for a news org/j-school merger.
— Alan Mutter made the case for ending federal funding for public journalism.
— At 10,000 Words, Lauren Rabaino had some awesome things news organizations can learn from tech startups, including thinking of news as software and embracing transparency.
— And here at the Lab, Northwestern prof Pablo Boczkowski gave some quick thoughts on how we tend to associate online news with work, and what that means. He sheds some light about an under-considered aspect of news — the social environments in which we consume it.
I'll be chatting with Joe Grimm and the good folks at the Poynter Institute at 3 p.m. ET today about the role of the social media editor in the newsroom. I expect to get questions about what I do and possibly some inquiries into what's going on at TBD.
If you'll be around, hop on to the chat [...]
If you didn't read about all of the drama regarding TBD this week, well allow me to catch you up. On Wednesday, TBD six-month anniversary, our staff and the rest of the world found out TBD was going to be restructured internally, leading most to incorrectly assume the site's going under.
As social media editor at TBD (and still employed!) I figure I can briefly lay out what's really happening, as far as I know right now.
Anyway, I'm sure I'll write more about this when I get a better handle on it myself. For now, I just wanted to explain what I know and share a bit about how it all went down.
And if you'll allow me to get a little personal for a moment, I'd like to share a favorite anecdote about TBD.
We had a staff meeting on the morning of TBD's launch that has particularly haunted me lately. We were all exhausted from being up all night for the final switch-flip (I had briefly napped in a shower stall at the Allbritton gym), but triumphant smiles were everywhere. We'd been working for months to build this idea and were antsy to get started on executing it. It was a great moment.
Erik gave us a rallying speech that especially resonates right now. He told us to look around the table and savor the moment. We should remember the team as it was right then and there, because it wouldn't always be that way. Some people would leave, we might get dismayed along the way, but on that day, at least, we were all together and we'd just started something we'd all poured our hearts into.
That's the whole reason I'd gone into TBD to start with – I wanted to work toward common goal with people who inspired and challenged me. I still do. Though we've lost far more of the people around that table than I ever thought we would by now, I know I don't regret any of it for a second.
Despite all the changes – and I acknowledge they may look bleak externally – we have a great group of people who were brought together around the same dream. You don't just drop something like that overnight. We'll see how it all goes.
[View the story "Death of TBD Widely Exaggerated" on Storify]
Editor's Note: Our sister publication Nieman Reports is out with its winter issue, which focuses on changes in beat reporting. We're highlighting a few entries that connect with subjects we follow in the Lab, but we encourage you to read the whole issue. In this piece the community engagement team from TBD talk about their jobs and what "engagement" means.
The job of engaging with those formerly known as "the audience" is in some ways becoming a new online "beat" — one in search of a simple moniker to describe what it is, the skills required, and the tasks entailed. Four of the six members of TBD's community engagement team describe what they do at this local news site that came to life in the summer of 2010.
"I'm a community host at TBD." That's what I say when people ask what I do. Hearing this, they smile, sort of, and nod their heads, and then they ask again what it is I really do. By now, this routine is all too familiar — but I can appreciate why. Until I started this job, I hadn't heard of a community host either. Unlike the previous positions I've held — reporter, producer, video journalist — this one was unfamiliar, with responsibilities undefined and always evolving.
While I don't have a clear definition for my title, in the short time I've been doing it, one thing is certain: What I do is unpredictable and diverse. On any given day I will keep an eye on local bloggers and interact with the community via social media. I stay on top of local news by relying on a combination of traditional and new sources. Then I use social media and digital tools to bring accurate and useful news and information to the public — quickly.
Stephen Colbert mocking the national Christmas tree's Twitter account shows that the frivolousness of the plucky social media tool is still up for debate. No doubt Twitter's popularity offsets some of the mockery, and it has contributed to newsgathering and crisis reporting. But does it have any storytelling potential?
Twitter has been a home for crowdsourced fiction, sometimes with involvement from storytelling superstars. Neil Gaiman launched a Twitter story more than a year ago in partnership with BBC Audiobooks America. Even before that, comic bloggers and artists over at Monkey on My Back solicited text for comics via Twitter, and then created the visuals to complete the story. More recently, the Toronto International Film Festival has joined with Tim Burton to launch a Tworror story that is currently being crowdsourced to completion.*
We've previously noted conceptual artist and Storyboard contributor Peggy Nelson's development of a "Twitter movie." And a few users, such as @VeryShortStory, have created truly minimalist stories in 140 characters or less on Twitter:
On the nonfiction side, news organizations are learning how to use Twitter not only as a newsgathering tool to troll for sources or to find specialized information but also to curate tweets for a kind of snapshot of a moment in time. (See The Washington Post's coverage of victory and concession speeches after the November elections.) These collected tweets tend to reflect a series of opinions or to recreate the experience of a community without necessarily telling a story in which there is movement from A to B.
But in October, TBD used Storify to show how curated tweets can engage the devices of fiction – suspense, forward motion and characters – in a story that unfolds close on the heels of real events. Images paired with tweets reconstructed the first hours of confusion after a death outside a nightclub in D.C. This TBD piece may be a game-changer in showing the narrative potential of social media.
So what are the differences between the fictional and the nonfiction storytelling on Twitter? The self-consciousness of doing crowdsourced fiction in a fixed time period tends toward action narratives – or maybe that's ACTION! NARATIVES! – without much breathing space or opportunity for future readers to enter the story by making connections themselves. As contributors compete for the attention of project curators, their tweets tend to drive stories toward ever more improbable and outrageous outcomes.
The encapsulated nature of shared Tweets does lend itself to projects audiences are used to reading in book form with minimal text-per-page ratios, like children's stories and adventure comics. But it will likely take a while to suss out how to apply Twitter to stories that need a slow-building, longer arc.
Crowdsourcing tweets that already exist seems to have more immediate potential for nonfiction storytelling. Curating tweets in the wake of news events fosters creation of a story with less self-consciousness in the voices that emerge. And the real-time nature of Twitter preserves reactions from newsmakers and audiences to events, sometimes before they've been swamped by a common interpretation or spun out of self-interest. Twitter's conversational language provides some of the material for the natural trivia that can make fiction work (humorous asides, what's for breakfast, what's on TV), fleshing out the action and surprises necessary to any story.
If Twitter continues to build its user base, journalists will have an expanding pool of millions of voices and characters on hand with individual stories authors can weave into a larger nonfiction narrative. We're not there yet, but as more and more people get used to watching news unfold via feeds, it's easier and easier to imagine.
And as for that Tim Burton project, it ends today. If you don't read this post in time to contribute yourself, you can at least find out how the story ends.
*Hat tip to Megan Garber at Nieman Lab for pointing out the Burton project to us.
The web is a two-way medium. But when it comes to reporting errors on news sites, too often, it might as well be broadcast or print.
It's time to change that. That's why, yesterday, we announced the launch of the Report an Error Alliance -- an ad hoc coalition of news organizations and individuals who believe that every news page on the web ought to have a clearly labeled button for reporting errors.
Today's articles come with their own array of buttons for sharing -- and print and email and so on. We believe that opening a channel for readers to report errors is at least as important as any of those functions.
We aim to make the "report an error" button a new web standard. Toward that end, we're releasing a set of icons that anyone can use for this purpose. It's up to each publisher what to do with them -- link them to a form or an email address, use a dedicated error-reporting service like MediaBugs, or choose any other option that suits your needs. What's important is that the button be handy, right by the story, not buried deep in a sea of footer links or three layers down a page hierarchy.
We've got a handful of forward-thinking web news outfits signed on already -- including the Toronto Star, TBD.com, Salon.com, Poynter.org, and NewsTrust.net. We hope to see this roster grow. We also encourage individuals to add their names to our alliance as an indication of your support for this new standard.
Kathy English, public editor at the Toronto Star, which already has its own "report an error" button, said, "I'm pleased that the Star is a founding member of this important initiative to help assure greater accuracy in digital journalism. The Star has long encouraged readers to report errors for correction, in print and online, where the 'Report an Error' function in effect turns every reader into a fact checker. This is a strong step forward in establishing industry best practices for online accuracy and corrections."
Report an Error is intended to be a focused effort toward a simple goal. Too many news sites still make it hard for you to tell them they made a mistake. Such reports get buried in voice-mail boxes and lost in flame-infested comment threads. Yet journalists still need to hear them, and readers deserve to know that they've been heard.
Implementing a "report an error" button isn't by itself a magic solution to the problem of accuracy and the erosion of confidence in the media. But it's a good start at repairing the growing rift between the press and the public. It's like putting a badge on everything you publish that says, "If you see a problem, we really want to know about it!"
So visit our Report an Error site, join the Alliance yourself, and grab some of our icons to use on your news pages and posts.
The Report an Error Alliance project is a collaboration between Craig Silverman of Regret The Error (and managing editor of MediaShift and Idea Lab) and myself. Though it grows out of my work on MediaBugs, it's a separate effort, intended to distill the simplest, easiest, and most important step in this area that every news website can take.
[Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week's top stories about the future of news and the debates that grew up around them. —Josh]
Olbermann and objectivity: Another week, another journalist or pundit disciplined for violating a news organization's codes against appearances of bias: This week (actually, late last week) it was Keith Olbermann, liberal anchor and commentator for the cable news channel MSNBC, suspended for donating money to Democratic congressional candidates, in violation of NBC News policy. Olbermann issued an apology (though, as Forbes' Jeff Bercovici noted, it was laced with animus toward MSNBC), and returned to the air Tuesday. There were several pertinent peripheral bits to this story — Olbermann was reportedly suspended for his refusal to apologize on air, it's unclear whether NBC News' rules have actually applied to MSNBC, numerous other journalists have done just what Olbermann did — but that's the gist of it.
By now, we've all figured out what happens next: Scores of commentators weighed in on the appropriateness (or lack thereof) of Olbermann's suspension and NBC's ban on political contributions. The primary arguments boiled down to the ones expressed by Poynter's Bob Steele and NYU's Jay Rosen in this Los Angeles Times piece: On one side, donating to candidates means journalists are acting as political activists, which corrodes their role as fair, independent reporters in the public interest. On the other, being transparent is a better way for journalists to establish trust with audiences than putting on a mask of objectivity.
Generally falling in the first camp are fellow MSNBC host Rachel Maddow ("We're a news operation. The rules around here are part of how you know that."), Northeastern j-prof Dan Kennedy (though he tempered his criticism of Olbermann in a second post), and The New York Times' David Carr ("Why merely annotate events when you can tilt the playing field?"). The Columbia Journalism Review was somewhere in the middle, saying Olbermann shouldn't be above the rules, but wondering if those rules need to change.
There were plenty of voices in the second camp, including the American Journalism Review's Rem Rieder, Michael Kinsley at Politico, and Lehigh j-prof Jeremy Littau all arguing for transparency.
Slate media critic Jack Shafer used the flap to urge MSNBC to let Olbermann and Maddow fly free as well-reported, openly partisan shows in the vein of respected liberal and conservative political journals. Jay Rosen took the opportunity to explain his phrase "the view from nowhere," which tweaks traditional journalism's efforts to "advertise the viewlessness of the news producer" as a means of gaining trust. He advocates transparency instead, and Terry Heaton provided statistics showing that the majority of young adults don't mind journalists' bias, as long as they're upfront about it.
On The Media's Brooke Gladstone summed up the issue well: "Ultimately, it's the reporting that matters, reporting that is undistorted by attempts to appear objective, reporting that calls a lie a lie right after the lie, not in a box labeled "analysis," reporting that doesn't distort truth by treating unequal arguments equally."
Commodify your paywall: We talked quite a bit last week about the new numbers on the paywall at Rupert Murdoch's Times of London, and new items in that discussion kept popping up this week. The Times released a few more details (flattering ones, naturally) about its post-paywall web audience. Among the most interesting figures is that the percentage of U.K.-based visitors to The Times' site has more than doubled since February, rising to 75 percent. Post-paywall visitors are also visiting the website more frequently and are wealthier, according to News Corp.
Of course, the overall number of visitors is still way down, and the plan continued to draw heat. In a wide-ranging interview on Australian radio, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger expressed surprise at the fact that The Times' print circulation dropped as their print-protectionist paywall went up. That, he said, "suggests to me that we overlook the degree to which the digital forms of our journalism act as a kind of sort of marketing device for the newspapers." ResourceWebs' Evan Britton gave five reasons why news paywalls won't work, and Kachingle founder Cynthia Typaldos argued that future news paywalls will be tapping into a limited pool of people willing to pay for news on the web, squeezing each other out of the same small market.
Clay Shirky used The Times' paywall as a basis for some smart thoughts about why newspaper paywalls don't work in general. The Times' paywall represents old thinking, Shirky wrote (and the standard argument against it has been around just as long), but The Times' paywall feels differently because it's being taken as a "referendum on the future." Shirky said The Times is turning itself into a newsletter, without making any fundamental modifications to its product or the basic economics of the web. "Paywalls do indeed help newspapers escape commodification, but only by ejecting the readers who think of the product as a commodity. This is, invariably, most of them," he wrote.
A conversation about blogging, voice, and ego: A singularly insightful conversation about blogging was sparked this week by Marc Ambinder, who wrote a thoughtful goodbye post at his long-running blog at The Atlantic. In it, Ambinder parsed out differences between good print journalism (ego-free, reliant on the unadorned facts for authority) and blogging (ego-intensive, requires the writer to inject himself into the narrative). With the switch from blogging to traditional reporting, Ambinder said, "I will no longer be compelled to turn every piece of prose into a personal, conclusive argument, to try and fit it into a coherent framework that belongs to a web-based personality called 'Marc Ambinder' that people read because it's 'Marc Ambinder,' rather than because it's good or interesting."
The folks at the fantastically written blog Snarkmarket used the post as a launching point for their own thoughts about the nature of blogging. Matt Thompson countered that Ambinder was reducing an incredibly diverse form into a single set of characteristics, taking particular exception to Ambinder's ego dichotomy. Tim Carmody mused on blogging, voice, and authorship; and Robin Sloan defended Ambinder's decision to leave the "Thunderdome of criticism" that is political blogging. If you care at all about blogging or writing for the web in general, make sure to give all four posts a thorough read.
TBD's (possible) content/aggregation conflict: The new Washington-based local news site TBD has been very closely watched since it was launched in August, and it hit its first big bump in the road late last week, as founding general manager Jim Brady resigned in quite a surprising move. In a memo to TBD employees, TBD owner Robert Allbritton (who also launched Politico) said Brady left because of "stylistic differences" with Allbritton. Despite the falling-out, Brady, a washingtonpost.com veteran, spoke highly of where TBD is headed in an email to staff and a few tweets.
But the immediate questions centered on the nature of those differences between Allbritton and Brady. FishbowlDC reported and Business Insider's Henry Blodget inferred from Allbritton's memo that the conflict came down to an original-content-centric model (Allbritton) and a more aggregation-based model (Brady). Brady declared his affirmation of both pieces — he told Poynter's Steve Myers he's pro-original content and the conflict wasn't old media/new media, but didn't go into many more details — but that didn't keep Blodget from taking the aggregation side: The web, he said, "has turned aggregation into a form of content–and a very valuable one at that." Lost Remote's Cory Bergman, meanwhile, noted that while creating content is expensive, Allbritton's made the necessary investments and made it profitable before with Politico.
A new iPad app and competitor: There were two substantive pieces of tablet-related news this week: First, The Washington Post released its iPad app, accompanying its launch with a fun ad most everyone seemed to enjoy. Poynter's Damon Kiesow wrote a quick summary of the app, which got a decent review from The Post's Rob Pegoraro. For you design geeks, Sarah Sampsel wrote two good posts about the app design process.
The other tablet tidbit was the release of Samsung's Galaxy Tab, which runs on Google's Android system. Kiesow rounded up a few of the initial reviews from All Things Digital (a real iPad competitor, though the iPad is better), The New York Times (beautiful with some frustrations), Wired (more convenient than the iPad, but has stability problems) and Gizmodo ("a grab bag of neglect, good intentions and poor execution"). Kiesow also added a few initial impressions of the Galaxy's implications for publishers, predicting that as it takes off, it will put pressure on publishers to move to HTML5 mobile websites, rather than developing native apps.
In other tablet news, MediaWeek looked at the excitement the iPad is generating within the media industry, but ESPN exec John Skipper isn't buying the hype, telling MarketWatch's Jon Friedman, "Whenever a new platform comes up, people want to take the old platform and transport it to the new platform." It didn't work on the Internet, Skipper said, it won't work on the iPad either.
Reading roundup: More thoughtful stuff about news and the web was written this week than most normal people have time to get to. Here's a sample:
— First, two pieces of news: First, word broke last night that Newsweek and The Daily Beast will be undergoing a 50-50 merger, with the Beast's Tina Brown taking over editorship of the new news org. The initial news accounts started to roll out late last night and into this morning at The New York Times, Washington Post, and NPR, who posted an interview with Brown. Obviously, this is a big, big story, and I'm sure I'll have much more commentary on it next week.
— Second, U.S. News & World Report announced last week that it's dropping its regular print edition and going essentially online-only, only printing single-topic special issues for newsstand sales. The best analysis on the move was at Advertising Age.
— Two great pieces on journalism's collaborative future: Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger in essay form, and UBC j-prof Alfred Hermida in audio and slide form.
— Poynter published an essay by NYU professor Clay Shirky on "the shock of inclusion" in journalism and the obsolescence of the term "consumer." Techdirt's Mike Masnick added a few quick thoughts of his own.
— Two cool posts on data journalism — an overview on its rise by The Columbia Journalism Review's Janet Paskin, and a list of great tools by Michelle Minkoff.
— Finally, two long thinkpieces on Facebook that, quite honestly, I haven't gotten to read yet — one by Zadie Smith at The New York Review of Books, and the other by The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal. I'm going to spend some time with them this weekend, and I have a feeling you probably should, too.
Olbermann photo by Kirsten used under a Creative Commons license.
So…how's that Twitter thing working out for you? I'm sure American Public Media will be less glib than that when asking journalists how audience engagement works for them.
APM's Public Insight Network is surveying journalists about their methods of reaching out to readers, but perhaps more importantly, asking them if they think it's doing them any good.
The survey was launched last week and the Public Insight Network is hoping to poll the most connected journalists they can find this weekend at the Online News Association conference in Washington, D.C. (Though anyone can take the survey online.) They plan to produce a white paper with the findings and potentially find new partners for the expanding network.
I emailed Andrew Haeg, editor of the Public Insight Network, to ask why they want to examine engagement now and why tap ONA. "ONA has become the go-to conference for journalists searching for new ways to create distinctive content that cuts through the noise of the Internet, and audience engagement has emerged as a major piece of any news operation's efforts to stand out online," Haeg wrote.
In their zeal to get involved in social media, Haeg said news outlets have taken a "shoot first, ask questions later' kind of approach. Now that more journalists have audience engagement experience under their belt, we're curious to find out how efforts are measuring up."
This seems to jibe with recent signs that more newspapers, magazines and other news outlets are past the introduction phase with social media, as well as the fact that both Twitter and Facebook have people dedicated to working with news organizations. At the same time a number of media start-ups, including TBD, the Honolulu Civil Beat, and Voice of San Diego have made audience engagement a priority from launch.
The insight network's open-ended survey asks basic questions about journalists' familiarity and comfort using Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms to reach out to readers. The big question appears to be whether audience engagement is important and a worthwhile use of time. Haeg said they also want to find out what the expectations are when it comes to online outreach and how journalists gauge success in engagement.
"Is it primarily a way to drive traffic?" Haeg asked. "Does it afford journalist the chance to gather new information, get in touch with sources they otherwise couldn't have, and seek out new stories? Does it feel like a lot of busy work that's not adding up to much?"
In particular, the question of "what is engagement" may be of interest to future-of-news watchers becoming skeptical of what the word means in relation to news. Is it just using Twitter and Facebook, is it talking to readers in comments, is it publishing user-created content? In looking at what mainstream media outlets are successful in social media engagement, ReadWriteWeb based its recent findings on Postrank's analysis, which studies RSS feed items and tallies comments, bookmarks, Diggs, and mentions on Twitter. Over at the Reynolds Journalism Institute, Joy Mayer is taking the long view on engagement, examining how various news outlets define the term.
Haeg said they plan to release the white paper after ONA and ask respondents to test out new engagement tools the insight network creates.
"Welcome to the conference where journalism supposedly doesn't know it's supposed to be dead."
Those were the welcoming words from Online News Association executive director Jane McDonnell as she opened the 2010 Online News Association Conference.
Many of the top people in online journalism in the Unites States, Canada and other countries are in Washington, D.C. this week for the conference. I'm here representing PBS MediaShift and OpenFile, the online news startup I'm involved with in Canada. This post is where I'll collect my thoughts, impressions and all of the notable things I see and hear at #ONA10.
Come back over the course of the weekend for the latest updates.
The conference program officially kicked off with a keynote discussion featuring key people from TBD.com, the recently launched local news website for the D.C. area. Jim Brady (general manager), Erik Wemple (editor), Mandy Jenkins (social media producer) and Steve Buttry (director of community engagement) took part. Some notable quotes and information:
"The way I phrase [our revenue model] to people is that there's no silver bullet -- it's just shrapnel ... there isn't one stream that's going to make us successful." -- Jim Brady. He also later noted that TBD could roll out paid mobile apps that offer very targeted information and functionality. For now, though, their main apps are free and will likely stay that way.
"Burrell & Associates predicts there will be $1 billion spent this year in local mobile advertising, and they are seeing $11 billion by 21014. That's bigger than last year's decrease in print advertising." -- Steve Buttry
"Our editorial vision is that we try to focus on a few key areas: Transportation, arts and entertainment and sports that cut across the region. We can't be in every jurisdiction. For politics we are doing a fact checking approach ... The vision is just work really hard all the time, and always be checking your device. We are just trying to keep the site refreshed at all times." -- Erik Wemple
"If you run a website that doesn't have something that's terrible on it, you are not trying hard enough. You have to fail, fail, fail. You have to fail and fail miserably many times." -- Erik Wemple
Many Jenkins said that in order to do her job she has 22 columns open in TweetDeck, has keyword searches running constantly, and is reading around 200 news feeds constantly. "I follow a ton of our readers -- pretty much anyone who has sent us a news tip," she said.
"Social media, while it's a great source of information, you have to treat it like a tip line, not like a reporter. It's a matter of checking all of your sources before you run with them, and it's an important part of using [social media tools] responsibly." -- Mandy Jenkins
A lot of news organizations think social media "is a way to get our stuff out to people. [Mandy Jenkins] pushed an idea that it's also the police scanner of the 21st century." -- Jim Brady
"The commodity that's most restricted in people's lives is time." -- Jim Brady
More updates to come...
Craig Silverman is an award-winning journalist and author, and the managing editor of MediaShift and Idea Lab. He is founder and editor of Regret the Error, the author of Regret the Error: How Media Mistakes Pollute the Press and Imperil Free Speech, and a columnist for Columbia Journalism Review and BusinessJournalism.org and the Toronto Star. He serves as digital journalism director of OpenFile, a collaborative local news site for Canada. Follow him on Twitter at @CraigSilverman.
This is a summary. Visit our site for the full post ».
"Welcome to the conference where journalism supposedly doesn't know it's supposed to be dead."
Those were the welcoming words from Online News Association executive director Jane McDonnell as she opened the 2010 Online News Association Conference.
Many of the top people in online journalism in the Unites States, Canada and other countries are in Washington, D.C. this week for the conference. I'm here representing PBS MediaShift and OpenFile, the online news startup I'm involved with in Canada. This post is where I'll collect my thoughts, impressions and all of the notable things I see and hear at #ONA10.
Come back over the course of the weekend for the latest updates.
The conference program officially kicked off with a keynote discussion featuring key people from TBD.com, the recently launched local news website for the D.C. area. Jim Brady (general manager), Erik Wemple (editor), Mandy Jenkins (social media producer) and Steve Buttry (director of community engagement) took part. Some notable quotes and information:
"The way I phase [our revenue model] to people is that there's no silver bullet -- it's just shrapnel ... there isn't one stream that's going to make us successful." -- Jim Brady. He also later noted that TBD could roll out paid mobile apps that offer very targeted information and functionality. For now, though, their main apps are free and will likely stay that way.
"Burrell & Associates predicts there will be $1 billion spent this year in local mobile advertising, and they are seeing $11 billion by 21014. That's bigger than last year's decrease in print advertising." -- Steve Buttry
"Our editorial vision is that we try to focus on a few key areas: Transportation, arts and entertainment and sports that cut across the region. We can't be in every jurisdiction. For politics we are doing a fact checking approach ... The vision is just work really hard all the time, and always be checking your device. We are just trying to keep the site refreshed at all times." -- Erik Wemple
"If you run a website that doesn't have something that's terrible on it, you are not trying hard enough. You have to fail, fail, fail. You have to fail and fail miserably many times." -- Erik Wemple
Many Jenkins said that in order to do her job she has 22 columns open in TweetDeck, has keyword searches running constantly, and is reading around 200 news feeds constantly. "I follow a ton of our readers -- pretty much anyone who has sent us a news tip," she said.
"Social media, while it's a great source of information, you have to treat it like a tip line, not like a reporter. It's a matter of checking all of your sources before you run with them, and it's an important part of using [social media tools] responsibly." -- Mandy Jenkins
A lot of news organizations think social media "is a way to get our stuff out to people. [Mandy Jenkins] pushed an idea that it's also the police scanner of the 21st century." -- Jim Brady
"The commodity that's most restricted in people's lives is time." -- Jim Brady
More updates to come...
Craig Silverman is an award-winning journalist and author, and the managing editor of MediaShift and Idea Lab. He is founder and editor of Regret the Error, the author of Regret the Error: How Media Mistakes Pollute the Press and Imperil Free Speech, and a columnist for Columbia Journalism Review and BusinessJournalism.org and the Toronto Star. He serves as digital journalism director of OpenFile, a collaborative local news site for Canada. Follow him on Twitter at @CraigSilverman.
This is a summary. Visit our site for the full post ».
[Each week, our friend Ken Doctor — author of Newsonomics and longtime watcher of the business side of digital news — writes about the economics of the news business for the Lab.]
Finally, we're seeing light on the horizon. Journalism hiring is picking up.
The second half of the year has so far produced TBD's hiring of 50 in Washington, Patch's push to pick up 500 journalists across the country, and the new alliance for public media plan to hire more than 300 journalists in four major cities, if funding can be found in 2011. In addition, the brand-name journalist market has suddenly flowered, as everyone from National Journal to the Daily Beast to Bloomberg to AOL to the Huffington Post to Yahoo compete for talent. These are bigger numbers — and more activity — than we've previously seen, though they build on earlier hirings from ProPublica to California Watch to Bay Citizen to Texas Tribune to MinnPost and well beyond.
It's a dizzying quilt of hiring, in some ways hard to make sense of, as business models (how exactly is Patch's business model going to succeed? what happens when the foundation money dries up?) remain in deep flux. Yet, amid the hope, now comes this question: Are we beginning to see "replacement journalism" arriving?
Replacement journalism, by its nature, is a hazy notion. We won't see some one-to-one swapping for what used to be with something new. Replacement journalism will though give us the sense that new journalism, of high quality, is getting funded, somehow, and that the vacuum created by the deepest cut in reporting we've ever seen is starting to be filled. It is an important, graspable question not just for journalists and aspiring journalists welling up in schools across the country, but also for readers: Are we beginning to see significant, tangible news coverage in this new, mainly digital world?
So, let's assess where we on, on that road to replacement journalism. Let's start with some numbers. Take the most useful census of daily newspaper newsroom employment, the annual ASNE (American Society of News Editors) census, conducted early each year and next reported out at its April 2011 conference. ASNE's most current number is 41,500. That's down from 46,700 a year earlier, from 52,600 in 2008 and from 55,000 in 2007. So, over those three-plus years, that's a loss of 13,500 jobs, a 25-percent decline.
As we consider what's been lost and what needs to replace it, we've got to look as much at possible at reporting. That news-gathering — not commentary (column or blog) — is what's key to community information and understanding, fairly prerequisite in our struggling little democracy. While we don't know how many of those 13,500 jobs lost are in reporting, we can do some extrapolation. Using that same ASNE census, we see that a little less than half (45 percent or so) of newsroom jobs are classified as reporting, while 20 percent are classified as copy/layout editors, 25 percent as supervisors and 10 percent as photographers and artists. So — while not undervaluing the contributions of non-reporters — let's say, roughly, that half the jobs lost have been reporters. That would mean about 6,750 reporting jobs lost in three years.
Okay, so let's use that number as a yardstick, against a quick list of journalist hiring:
"Replacement journalism," of course, is a tricky term, and maybe only an interim notion — a handle that helps us from there to here to there. By the very nature of digital and business disruption and transformation, we have to remind ourselves that the future is never a straight line from past to future, and that it will offer us great positive surprises as well as continuing disappointments. William Gibson's enduring line sums that up: "The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed."
Photo by Matt Wetzler used under a Creative Commons license.
Jim Brady, daddy of metro/hyperlocal startup TBD.com, sent me pictures Tim Windsor sent him from our summit on new business models for news at CUNY two years ago. In the session on the new newsroom, Jim got up and started sketching the structure and size — little knowing, as he said in testimony before the FTC a while ago, that he'd end up building it at TBD.com. Jim at the whiteboard:
The detail. Note the reference to a blog network of experts — which TBD wisely built.
For the history books. If there still will be books.
[Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week's top stories about the future of news and the debates that grew up around them. —Josh]
A high-profile entry into the local news scene: One of the most anticipated new news organizations in journalism's recent history launched this week in the form of TBD, a site owned by Allbritton Communications (the folks behind Politico) covering local news in Washington, D.C. As The Huffington Post's Jack Mirkinson wrote, TBD is "something of a canary in the coal mine" of the future of journalism, being the protoype of a locally focused, community-driven, online-only news model whose effectiveness everyone's eager to gauge. For the basics of the project, here are two local profiles from DCist and the more skeptical Washington Post, a paidContent interview with Robert Allbritton, a Poynter chat with TBD's Jim Brady and Steve Buttry, and an Online Journalism Review interview with Buttry.
After TBD gave its media preview last Friday, quite a few people listed plenty of reasons to keep an eye on the site: Ken Doctor liked the "out of the box" nature of TBD's pro-am/social/mobile/multimedia efforts; Jeff Jarvis liked the collaborative, link-centric philosophy; the Lab's Laura McGann called attention to TBD's interactivity and collaboration through local blogs and social media; and Kevin Anderson was impressed by the project's commitment to profitability.
Several TBD analyses focused particularly on TBD's interactive and collaborative news efforts, with Journalism Lives, Mashable, and Poynter providing good area-by-area breakdowns. Mark Potts, who's starting up a similar blog-network effort, Growthspur, wrote a thoughtful piece about the importance of TBD's own network of local blogs: "TBD is without doubt the biggest, most ambitious effort yet to create a new paradigm for local news coverage of a major metropolitan area," he wrote.
Poynter's Steve Myers also touched on an distinct aspect of TBD's operation — it also includes an Allbritton-owned all-news local cable channel that will be branded TBD TV. He examined how a web-TV converged newsroom operates, and Cory Bergman of Lost Remote (a local TV and hyperlocal news veteran himself) wondered if we might see more TV-local online news partnerships. Here at the Lab, Ken Doctor took a detailed look at the economics of TBD's web-TV synergy, centering on its pioneering broadcast and online advertising hybrid. Meanwhile, David Rothman had some detailed advice for TBD's competitors.
The site officially launched Monday, and the initial reviews were mostly positive. Rothman and Suzanne Yada had the most detailed ones; both were impressed by the site's presentation and several of its features, though both were concerned about how much local news content the site would actually be able to produce. PaidContent's Staci Kramer liked the smooth design, too, but wanted to see more out of the site's locally personalized features. Jack Shafer of Slate loved the way the site was mobile, direct and useful, especially its focus on those local-TV staples of weather, traffic, and sports.
The New York Times' David Carr ("extremely functional…kind of ugly") and Mediaite's Michael Triplett ("off to a good start," despite "thin and D.C.-centric" content) also offered quicker reviews. The most thoughtful review belongs to Lost Remote's Bergman, who noted that while many of the ideas are old, their implementation is new. "This is the first time that a local media group — especially in the TV space — has wrapped these ideas together and aggressively launched them with an investment to back it up," he wrote.
Demand Media's filings raise questions: Demand Media, the new-media lightning rod du jour, filed for an IPO last Friday, giving us the first detailed financial look inside the private company. Several sites took cracks at sifting through the numbers for significant bits, but two pieces stood out: One, Demand Media has yet to make a profit, losing $22 million this year; and two, 26 percent of its revenue comes from cost-per-click advertising deals with Yahoo.
That's a pretty sizable chunk of Demand Media's income, and GigaOM's Mathew Ingram examined one of the company's reported risk factors — that Google could use its own search expertise to create a search-driven content company to compete with Demand. Ingram pointed out that Google already has a patent for a process that identifies "underserved" search content. All Things Digital noted that Demand's heavy reliance on Google "could torpedo the company" if Google changes its search formula or changes its contract with Demand, but it also countered that every web publisher is dependent on Google.
Then there's the whole matter of profitability. The Wall Street Journal's Scott Austin contrasted the numbers in Demand's filing with its executives' numerous past descriptions of the company as profitable, as a reminder that "no one outside the company can verify a start-up's financial claims." Slate's James Ledbetter also noticed an inexplicably large and sudden drop in Quantcast traffic to Demand's sites a few weeks ago and wondered what was behind it. Meanwhile, the Journal also profiled Demand Media's efforts to court big-time advertisers on the web.
A proposal to carve up the open web: A week after reports emerged that Google and Verizon were near a deal that would more or less mark the end of net neutrality, the two companies came forward this week not with a deal, but with a policy proposal. As for whether that would mark the end of net neutrality, well, it depends on who you ask. Google and Verizon called their plan a "proposal for an open Internet," and their CEOs co-authored a Washington Post op-ed arguing that their proposal "empowers an informed consumer, ensures the robust growth of the open Internet and provides incentives to strengthen the networks that carry Internet traffic." The proposal has quite a few moving parts, but it essentially prohibits Internet service providers from discriminating against or prioritizing "lawful Internet content," while excepting wireless networks and some unspecified future services from that regulation.
The tech blog Engadget broke down the proposal, noting that would set something close to the status quo into formal policy, rendering the U.S. Federal Communications Commission powerless to change policy as the Internet changes. Most of the web was quite a bit harsher in its judgment, calling it an open attack on net neutrality by excluding its fastest growing part, wireless. CNET and The New York Times put together good summaries of the backlash, but here are some of the most to-the-point examples: Free Press' Craig Aaron ("one massive loophole that sets the stage for the corporate takeover of the Internet"), the Electronic Freedom Foundation (it limits net neutrality to "lawful" content, leaving "lawful" to be defined) Siva Vaidhyanathan (it gives Verizon control of the most exciting parts of the web) Public Knowledge's John Bergmayer (it divides the Internet into several public and non-public parts) Ars Technica (its rules "will become meaningless as 4G sweeps the country") Salon's Dan Gillmor ("a Trojan Horse for a modern age") Susan Crawford (future services is "a giant, enormous, science-fiction-quality loophole") and Harvard professor Jonathan Zittrain (makes way for "an impenetrable web of contracts and fees").
Noted Google watcher Jeff Jarvis had the most colorful response, illustrating the proposal's potential danger to the open web by presenting a future scenario with two Internets, the old "Internet" with everything pre-2010 and the new "Schminternet," with everything mobile and post-2010. "Mobile is the internet," he wrote. "Mobile will very soon become a meaningless word when — well, if telcos allow it, that is — we are connected everywhere all the time." Meanwhile, Wired gets credit for the most fun phrase — "carrier-humping, net neutrality surrender monkey" — in its explanation of how Google got to that point.
Google issued a response to the criticism on Thursday, arguing that it's not actually leaving wireless networks free from net neutrality oversight, though GigaOM's Stacey Higginbotham picked apart that defense, too.
Reading Roundup: A few final items to send you off for the weekend:
— Mashable's Vadim Lavrusik has a smart overview of the shift toward personalized, socially driven news distribution, with a suggestion for a credibility and trust index to help sort through it all.
— Facebook has launched a media page and is pushing for more collaboration with media companies. PBS MediaShift's Mark Glaser has an informative Q&A with Justin Osofsky, head of Facebook's media partnership team.
— Google engineering intern Lyn Headley has written the first of a series of posts explaining the rationale behind his new Rapid News Awards. It's a short, thoughtful take on aggregation, accountability and transparency.
— Finally, some (possibly) positive news: Spot.Us' David Cohn takes a look at the data and notes that the wave of job cuts at America's newspapers has largely subsided. Cohn wonders if it means newspapers are bouncing back, or if they've just cut down to the bone. I fear it's more of the latter.
"Tell the chef, the beer is on me."
"Basically the price of a night on the town!"
"I'd love to help kickstart continued development! And 0 EUR/month really does make fiscal sense too...


text:
Yeah, he royally fucked up the PK in the Champion's League Final last year. Yeah, he dives too much for my liking. But today in Porto, he was an artist. He slashed in and out and around the defenders as if on skates. And, to make matters better, he came back on defense once in a while, too.
Cristiano Ronaldo doesn't show up in big games
Filed under Champions League

subset: commoncrawl


text:
6th Class really enjoyed experimenting as coders today using Lego WeDo and our iPads.
This year 6th Class have been participating in a study being conducted in DCU on teaching primary science through real world issues. As part of the study we have been lent a number of Lego WeDo sets. 6th class and Ms Stirling built robots today and using their coding skills programmed them to move around the classroom.
The video clips and photos below show the fun they had:
Hopefully other classes will have the chance to use the Lego WeDo sets and we might even add a set of our own to our wish list.
Thank you once again to our wonderful PTA who fundraised for our iPads. We certainly have enjoyed using them this year!


text:
ROCKFORD OUTLASTS IOWA 7-4Oct 14, 2017
Wild Returns Home To Host Manitoba Friday at 7 PM
ROCKFORD, IL – The Iowa Wild (1-3-0-0, 2 points) were defeated by the Rockford IceHogs (2-0-0-0, 4 points) 7-4 in front of 4,687 fans on Saturday night at the BMO Harris Bank Center. Despite four even strength goals and a balanced offensive output, special teams proved to be the difference as Rockford scored twice on the power play and its shorthanded goal midway through the third period proved pivotal. Former Wild forward Tyler SIkura scored the shorthanded goal 10:07 into the third period, breaking a 4-4 tie and propelling the Hogs past the Wild. In the home opener Rockford rookie center Matthew Highmore scored twice and the Hogs added two late empty-net goals to win by three. In the first Iowa road game of the season, defensemen Alex Grant had a goal and an assist, while center Cal O'Reilly and Ryan Malone each set up two tallies for multi-point nights. Defenseman Mike Reilly, as well as forwards Colton Beck and Justin Kloos each chipped in with a goal. IceHogs goalie J.F. Berube (2-0-0) stopped 27 of 31 shots in the win. Wild goaltender Niklas Svedberg (1-3-0) made a season-high 39 saves on 44 shots in defeat. Iowa returns home for three straight home games starting Friday at 7 p.m. with a visit from the Manitoba Moose.
After 18:19 of scoreless play, Iowa tallied the game's first goal after defenseman Alex Grant followed his own shot and snuck the rebound past goalie J.F. Berube for his first goal of the season. Center Cal O'Reilly had the lone assist as Iowa claimed a 1-0 lead. The Hogs capitalized on a power play at 19:06 after Matthew Highmore tipped a point shot from defenseman Ville Pokka for the 1-1 score. Defenseman Alexandre Fortin added an assist on Highmore's second goal of the season. With 21 seconds remaining in the first frame the Hogs pushed in front 2-1 off Highmore's second goal of the game. Fortin added his second assist of the night helping Rockford take a one-goal lead to the locker room.
Iowa pulled even at 7:24 of the middle period as Colton Beck beat Berube with a wrist shot for his second goal of the season. Grant played the puck off the Rockford end wall, banking the pass the Beck, who was parked to the left of the IceHogs net. Pat Cannone added an assist as Iowa tied the score 2-2. The Hogs used the power play to push back in front 3-2 at 9:47. Defenseman Erik Gustafsson blasted a one-timer from the right-wing circle for his first goal of the season. Center Vinnie Hinostroza and right wing David Kampf each picked up an assist on the goal. Iowa countered with Mike Reilly's first goal of the season at 11:18, tying the game 3-3. Defenseman Hunter Warner started the rush with a snap pass to center ice for winger Ryan Malone. He carried deep down the right side of the Hogs zone and centered to Reilly, who jumped in on the rush and put the puck past Berube to tie the game. Iowa claimed a 4-3 lead at 14:18 after Justin Kloos swept a rebound past Bereube for his first goal of the season. Malone and O'Reilly each had an assist on Iowa's fourth goal of the night. For the second straight period, the IceHogs struck for a goal in the last minute of play. Anthony Louis finished off a centering feed from William Pelletier for his first goal of the season and a 4-4 score. Forward Luke Johnson added an assist on the goal at 19:04.
The IceHogs regained the lead at 10:07 of the third period when former Wild forward Tyler Sikura potted a rebound off a shot from Graham Knott for his first AHL goal and a 5-4 Rockford lead. The shorthanded goal also marked the first career point for Sikura. Hinostroza and Matheson Iacopelli each added empty-net goals in the last minute of play for the 7-4 final score.
The Wild returns home to meet the Manitoba Moose on Friday, Oct. 20 at 7 p.m. Ladies Night is presented by Style Encore. It is also a Bus Beer night with $2 beers presented by 100.3 The Bus. There is also a $2 off Barefoot Refresh special presented by Barefoot Wine. The Collegeville ticket special is available for purchase at the game presented by KISS FM.
Iowa and Manitoba faceoff again on Saturday, Oct. 21 at 7 p.m. at Wells Fargo Arena. There is a pregame tailgate party, showcasing the local concert series performance. Decoy performs from 5:00 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. on the South Side Patio. Fans may purchase two tallboys for $10 for the local concert series. The Brewdog pack is also available for purchase at the game.
Follow the Iowa Wild on Twitter @IAWILD or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/iawild.
The Iowa Wild 2017-18 season is presented by Mercy Medical Center: and runs from October through April. Fans may purchase seats to see any of the team's 38 regular season home games at Wells Fargo Arena. Season tickets to see the Wild play its 2017-18 season at Wells Fargo Arena start at just $10 per game. For more information on tickets, including ticket plans and group seating, please contact the Wild ticket office by calling 515-564-8700 or go to www.iowawild.com.
For more info on season ticket packages call 515-564-8700 or email Nate Berglund at [email protected]
To schedule a Wild appearance, email [email protected]
To create a customized advertising package for your company contact Brian Mather, Senior VP of Sales and Business Operations, at 515-564-8720 or email at [email protected].


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Botswana Economic Adviser
Economic Adviser to Botswana to Lecture
Stephen R. Lewis Jr., who helped shape the African nation's government, will speak at UCR on Dec. 4.
(November 24, 2009)
NEWS MEDIA CONTACTName: Bettye Miller
Tel: (951) 827-7847
E-mail: firstname.lastname@example.com
Stephen R. Lewis Jr.
His appearance is free and open to the public. Parking costs $6.
Lewis, known internationally for his work in developing countries, has served as a research adviser to the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics, as an economic adviser to the Ministry of Finance and Economic Development in Kenya, and as a longtime economic consultant to the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning in Botswana, where the government awarded him the Presidential Order of Meritorious Service in 1983.
He also was invited by the Council on Foreign Relations to analyze the South African economy, work which resulted in his 1990 book "The Economics of Apartheid."
Lewis served as director of Carleton College from 1987 to 2002. He elected chairman of the board of RiverSource Funds, a Minneapolis-based mutual fund group, in 2007 and is a consultant to The Presidential Practice, which advises newly elected college presidents.
The University of California, Riverside (www.ucr.edu) is a doctoral research university, a living laboratory for groundbreaking exploration of issues critical to Inland Southern California, the state and communities around the world. Reflecting California's diverse culture, UCR's enrollment has exceeded 21,000 students. The campus opened a medical school in 2013 and has reached the heart of the Coachella Valley by way of the UCR Palm Desert Center. The campus has an annual statewide economic impact of more than $1 billion.
A broadcast studio with fiber cable to the AT&T Hollywood hub is available for live or taped interviews. UCR also has ISDN for radio interviews. To learn more, call (951) UCR-NEWS.


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Commercial building and facilities management resources for corporate facility executives, building operators and facility managers in all industry and service sectors. Templates articles below.
QUESTION OF THE WEEK: Booking Software Templates
Are there any affordable, easy to use tools that can be used for multiple bookings?
QUESTION OF THE WEEK: End User Satisfaction Surveys
Is it possible to create one template that can be used by the facilities management department to measure end user satisfaction with multiple processes/projects?


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- See Wright for other articles with titles that contain, either by relationship or by coincidence, this character's surname.
Captain Robert Wright was a Human male serving in Starfleet in the 24th century.
In 2372, Wright was assigned as commanding officer of the USS Dauntless as a replacement for the retiring Captain Leland Bell. Under Wright's command the Dauntless served with distinction during the Dominion War and fought in several large battles including the Battle of Tyris and the Battle of Cardassia, in which she earned unit citations in both engagements.
In 2377, the Dauntless was sent to investigate the very unusual solar activity from the Vesuvi systems' star that had been hampering the dense colonization of the Vesuvi star system in the region of space known as the Maelstrom. In order to investigate the problem with the Vesuvi star further, Wright took the shuttlecraft, Icarus II, to the Vesuvi IV terraforming station, the system's only outpost in the region.
En route, the Vesuvi star destabilised and went supernova, releasing a deadly blast, that damaged the Dauntless, destroyed the shuttlecraft, and killed Captain Wright and destroyed the entire Vesuvi star system, which included the Draegos colony, the destination of the Dauntless. Wright's successor as Dauntless CO would be his executive officer. (TNG video game: Bridge Commander)


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Something Different for Mom this Mother's Day
Being a mother is one of those amazing experiences that are at once incredibly precious and unbelievably hard. And yes, Mother's Day is one of those Hallmark holidays, but let's be clear – all moms deserve at least one day of recognition and gratitude every year. Take her to breakfast, send flowers or chocolates, spring for a massage or spa day, or consider gifting her with an alternative to more mainstream stress-busters. Because motherhood may be magical, but it's one stressful job. And goodies like these may help. Read more


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"If you don't stand for something you will fall for anything." –Gordon A. Eadie
Hello friend,
Sometimes, I confuse even myself. As someone who generally prefers to be alone and doesn't watch a lot of television, I end up doing a lot of pondering. As someone who writes in a journal every day and attempts a deep-diving letter to you every week, sometimes I feel like I have explored every topic in the human experience from a dozen different angles.
Sure, I get surprised still, on those occasions when someone gives me a look at the world from a brand new perspective. I love when that happens!
But on most days, on most topics, I tend to think I have looked at things backward and forward, trying so hard to understand each side that I sometimes forget which angle I came in believing to be the correct one. Hence, my confusion.
I am always open to new information and a fresh perspective, and that leaves my opinions vulnerable to change. I have flip-flopped on many things during my adult life, both through simple experience and through deeper examination of my head and heart. I have done it with social issues and with spiritual beliefs. I have done it with people.
Though an open mind and a willingness to change always get a bad rap in political campaigns, on the whole I think of my malleability as a good thing.
But just because a guy is open-minded doesn't mean he is without a solid foundation. Right? I mean, even though all this journaling has made me more receptive to different viewpoints, I don't think of myself as wishy-washy. I know where I stand on the basics. I have a rock!
So, what is it? What is my foundation? What do I believe?
I believe we are All One. I believe this in not simply the scientific way that the physicists can show us, but also the spiritual and metaphysical way. This is my most fundamental belief. I believe we are All inextricably intertwined, All a part of the One. I mean this in the way that there are lots and lots of unique waves in the ocean, but they are all still the ocean. In my model, you may have your own soul with your personal calling and I mine, but you are still me and I am still you, and we are still the ocean, too. I know that starts to sound like New Age mumbo jumbo to most people. That's okay with me. In this belief that we are All One, my foundation has its one leap of faith. I capitalize the "All" and "One" because I believe this unity, this singularity of the Universe, is Divine. I can't prove the Divine part, of course. I mostly infer it from the intricacy and pure awesomeness of the Universe, which I know could have happened randomly. But even if this faith part proves to be false—and I am open to that and don't mind a good interrogation of my reason—the fact that we are All connected remains backed by science. So, whether we are "one" or "One", the effect that has on my day-to-day existence remains unchanged (though it changes my view of the possible afterlife). It still leaves me with a profound responsibility when it comes to my planet, my Universe, and all that occupy it.
I believe that connecting with your passion or Bliss—whether as a career or hobby or way of life—is crucial to fulfillment. I believe this so strongly that a large part of my Bliss is to help people to discover their own and to engage it authentically. This is precisely why you are reading these words right now. I hope that through self-reflection, you will come to understand who you really are and what makes your heart sing. That could be children, teaching, travel, or ornithology. Whatever it is, I believe that engaging it regularly is crucial to you living your best, most satisfied life. I want that for you.
I believe there are very few things in the world more valuable than self-belief. I would be beyond grateful if my children were blessed with vast stores of both kindness and self-belief. That is enough to make a good life out of.
I believe that without empathy, we are lost, both individually and collectively. Perhaps this is simply a subset of the kindness that I just mentioned, but I feel the need to give empathy its own spotlight. I look at the problems of the world today—the Haves vs. Have-Nots, Republicans vs. Democrats, Christians vs. Muslims, Whites vs. Blacks, the general Us vs. Them we are so encouraged to fan the flames of—and I just see an appalling lack of empathy. An inability to put yourself in the other person's shoes. To see her as you. To think, "There, but for the grace of God, go I." This, of course, connects back up to my first, most fundamental belief: that we are All One. To live that belief is to embody empathy.
I believe we are here to make the world a better place and to lift each other up. I am totally clear on the idea that my existence is to be spent striving for happiness, prosperity, and general well-being for myself (I think most people are with me on that, right?). And since I truly believe in that first core concept of Unity, logic tells me that I ought to strive for happiness, prosperity, and general well-being for All. It should come as no surprise to you that things like wars, racism, environmental destruction, the prison-industrial complex, and the extreme income inequality pain me in my deepest places.
I believe, finally, that despite my unsocial nature and completely contrary to the dominant cultural message of self-reliance, we are only able to "Do Life" with the help of others, and it is only in relation to others that our time here has any meaning and value. Thus, we can value personal growth—like writing in a journal—and personal responsibility, but we prove those valuations with our actions toward others and in the love that drives those actions.
There. That's what I believe.
How about you? What ideas make up your foundation? Open up your journal and scrape off your top layers to get down to your core. What thoughts make up your bedrock? Are you like me and have one primary belief that casts a giant shadow and informs most of the other beliefs? Which belief is your most powerful? What kind of belief is it—spiritual, moral, emotional, scientific, rational, or something else? In what areas of your life do you feel that belief's reverberations? Do you feel it every day? Even if it works every day in your life, how often do you actually think about that belief? Is it a part of a mantra or prayer that you use to remind yourself of its importance? How long have you believed your most important belief? Were you taught it from birth? Did you come upon it yourself, making the conscious decision that it was for you? What about your other main beliefs: were they chosen for you, or did you decide to adopt them? Can you limit your core beliefs to a small handful, or does your list go on and on? How different are your beliefs from those of your parents and siblings? Will you try to pass your beliefs on to the next generation? Do you ever get preachy to others? How do you feel when other people try to get you to adopt their beliefs? Are you generally open-minded? Are you open even when it comes to your core beliefs, or are those untouchable? Do you have any unhealthy beliefs? Do you wish you could let go of some and trade them for others? Can you? Which are your favorite beliefs, the ones you are proud of? Are you good at acting consistently with your beliefs? Where can you do better? Leave me a reply and let me know: What do you believe?
Believe in yourself,
P.S. If this increased your self-awareness or made you evaluate things differently, please share it. Spread clarity!


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Memorial Day weekend is the official start to summer, which means it's time to open up the neighborhood pool yet again. Pools are one of the best summer pastimes and the perfect way to entertain kids during long summer days. Before you open up your pool to the masses, be sure to share the following reminders with your residents to ensure everyone has a safe and enjoyable pool season.
Unaccompanied minors
It's recommended that you have rules in place prohibiting unaccompanied minors from entering the pool. Many cities, like San Diego, have rules in place for public pools requiring adults to accompany children under the age of seven or less than four feet tall. Consider consulting with your legal team to determine the best age limit for children to attend the pool by themselves.
Big no-no's
Make sure residents and their children understand what is unacceptable pool behavior, even it if seems super obvious. Common rules like no running, spitting, nose-blowing, diving, flips, and rough housing should be frequently reinforced to avoid issues and injuries.
Adult and kid swim
Do you have designed times for adult swim or kid-only hours? Be sure to let everyone know about this at the beginning of pool season, as nothing's worse than showing up to the pool with anxious kids during the middle of adult swim.
Snacks and food
What are the rules regarding food and drink in your pool area? It's recommended that you prohibit food consumption within the pool and ban gum chewing. If you have designated areas for eating, be sure to mark those properly with signage. Remind people if certain food or contain types (such as glass) are prohibited.
Do you have rules around residents bringing guests to the pool? Make sure to send those out to everyone. If there's a specific process residents need to follow in order to bring a guest, outline that in your community newsletter. If guests need to sign something like a liability waiver, be sure to host that online so they can fill it out before arriving.
Hopping the pool fence for late night swim can be tempting for neighborhood teens. It's important to reminder residents why this activity is illegal, as well as the potential risks for doing so. If your community presses charges against trespassers, be sure to let residents know what the potential punishment is for breaking this law.
The pool is not a gigantic bathtub, and people need to be reminded of this. Encourage people to shower before entering the pool and to wear clean swimsuits. Remind residents to avoid entering if they have open cuts, sores, colds, coughs, or infections. For parents with small children, let them know they must wear waterproof diapers in order to enter the pool.
Post the rules
People need to be reminded of even the most basic rules on a regular basis. Be sure to post your pool rules on the entrance and throughout the pool grounds, ensuring they're visible and obvious to all attendees. Also post a digital copy of the rules in your online resource library. To help keep everyone safe and aware, require residents to sign a copy of the pool rules before receiving access to the pool for the season.
Interested in learning more about how to keep your community and its resident safe? Download our free seven-step checklist.


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Huntsville, Ala. – T-H Marine Supplies Inc., of Huntsville, Ala., is continuing and growing its popular Atlas Awards Tournament Contingency program for 2017.
"We are excited to continue and expand the Atlas Awards program. For 2017, we have sanctioned even more tournaments," T-H Marine's President and CEO Jeff Huntley said. "The Atlas Awards program provides a great way to reward our customers for being valuable representatives of our brand."
"2016 was an awesome year for the T-H Marine Atlas Awards program," said Jimmy Mason, T-H Marine Director of Marketing. "We had our first Grand Slam winner in two years and then a few weeks later, we had another. In addition, we had a number of members cash in on numerous highest finisher awards. It is cool to see our customers use T-H Marine products to excel in their tournaments and then cash in some great bonus money."
Mickey Beck of Hendersonville, Tenn., won an American Bass Anglers Ram Truck Open Series Tournament in July making him the first T-H Marine Atlas Awards Grand Slam winner in two years. Beck said, "Being a part of the Atlas Awards every year has helped me win a lot of extra lure money. The Atlas Awards is a no brainier for any level of competitive fisherman – but the biggest bonus is having T-H Marine products on my boat to help me catch that next fish to obtain this contingency."
For more information on the T-H Marine Atlas Awards Tournament Contingency program and to see a list of qualifying tournaments, please see thmarine.com/atlas-awards. If you are interested in having your tournament sanctioned, please email [email protected].


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Paxil and PPHN
Written by Faith Anderson on April 3, 2012
Paxil and PPHN Birth Defects
SSRIs like Paxil are a class of antidepressant medications that act upon the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain to relieve depression and improve certain mood disorders. Paxil garnered FDA approval in 1992 as a treatment for major depressive disorder, and was additionally indicated in later years to treat conditions like obsessive-compulsive disorder, social anxiety disorder and major panic disorder. Despite its popularity in treating depression and other debilitating conditions, Paxil maker GlaxoSmithKline has received significant criticism in recent years because of its possible connection to major birth defects like PPHN. PPHN, or persistent pulmonary hypertension of the newborn, is a potentially fatal birth defect in which a baby's circulation continues to bypass the lungs after birth, depriving the rest of the body of the oxygen it needs to survive.
FDA Warnings for Paxil Birth Defects
The latest Paxil birth defect study follows a warning issued by the FDA in 2005 regarding the link between Paxil use in pregnancy and congenital malformations, including heart defects. It was this FDA notice that elevated the pregnancy category of Paxil from C to D. In 2006, the FDA issued an additional public health advisory warning consumers and healthcare professionals that babies exposed to SSRI drugs like Paxil after the 20th week of pregnancy may be six times more likely to suffer from PPHN than babies exposed to no antidepressants in pregnancy. According to the BMJ study, conducted by researchers in Sweden, babies whose mothers take an SSRI like Paxil during pregnancy are twice as likely to be born with the life-threatening birth defect, PPHN.


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Blog Archives
Comic Reviews: Dark Knight 3: The Master Race and Venom Space Knight!
Dark Knight 3: The Master Race #1 (DC Comics)
At long last, Dark Knight 3: The Master Race has arrived. The Frank Miller and Brian Azzarello penned series has a metric ton of hype around it, but many (myself included) are wary after Miller's The Dark Knight Strikes Again. Sure, with Azzarello helping on the scripts and Andy Kubert on art, it's a good chance we won't be getting DKSA again, but there's always the possibility that we could get something even worse as well. While Dark Knight 3 isn't a complete mess, it's merely a solid opening issue, not the spectacular groundbreaking first issue it's been hyped as. Read the rest of this entry


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Every Wednesday at noon, CST, Brown Paper Tickets posts upcoming events happening in the Chicago area. Here are hot tickets for events coming up. Check back for stellar events that fit the interests of locals and tourists alike.Know of any other events happening in the Chicago area this week? Post them in the comments section.
TONIGHT!! African Expressions Dance Workshop Hedwig Dances presents the African Expressions Dance Workshop taught by instructor Amaniyea Payne, Artistic Director of Muntu Dance Theatre. The workshop provides an experience in natural rhythmic movements and incorporates traditional African dance, Caribbean dance and African American culture into the movement. The class awakens the senses through muscle toning, breathing exercises and movement, all to the accompaniment of live African drumming. All levels are welcome.
Thursday, September 22 Meandering the Mekong Taste Khmer cuisine and learn the secrets to creating
sumptuous authentic dishes of Cambodia. Watch a cooking demo and enjoy a dinner buffet with such Cambodian delicacies as: Pleer Saik Gho (Beef Salad) – a wonderful, flavorful and healthy dish often compared to Civeche.; Cha Khreung Saik Moan (Chicken Lemon Grass) – One of those dishes that highlights the influences from India, as it calls for a lot of the ingredients found in Indian cooking with Khmer infusion such as lemongrass and kiffer lime leaf; Cha Pbales (Stir Fried Vegetables) – An easy to make dish that is healthy, versatile and quick that can be good by itself or as an accompaniment with other dishes; and for dessert, Banana in Coconut Cream and Tapioca. Meander the Mekong through a travel slide show presentation for guests interested in a future trip to Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam.
Friday, September 23 and Saturday, September 24 Yo Joe! – A Real American Hip-Hop Musical In its world premiere, this original, two-act musical comedy is for anyone who recognizes the call, "Yo Joe!" (Also for those who don't.) Do the popular toy action figures hold the key to ruling the world? It's a faceoff between good and evil, with a colorful blast of music, combat and comedy! Book, music and lyrics by Jay Gish, who previously scored the midwest debut of Chemically Imbalanced Comedy's production of "CARTOON."
Saturday, September 24 HOPS! Oktoberfest 2011 Homebrewers Pride of the Southside are proud to once again host their annual Oktoberfest at the VFW hall in Bridgeport. Come enjoy an afternoon of homebrewed and local craft beer, food fresh off the grill and lots of Gemütlichkeit! Homebrewers! If you have something that you would like to share, please bring it. There will be HOPS! members around, including many with BJCP expertise, who will give critique, advice, and let you know how you can become a member of this fine club.
Sunday, September 25 Historic Berwyn's Bungalow Tour The Berwyn Historical Society announces the 5th annual Historic Berwyn's Bungalow Tour, "Bungalows and More." Berwyn, a hidden gem of a town, is located just 9 miles southwest of Chicago's Loop and boasts one of the largest concentrations of Chicago-style bungalow homes in the U.S. Tour-goers will learn the history of each home (interior and exterior) on the tour, while gaining valuable ideas and insight for restoring and maintaining their own vintage homes. The 2011 tour's homes are located along "The Old Plank Road – Route 66". Participants may walk, bike and/or drive between houses that are stops on the tour. The 2011 tour highlights will include an Art Moderne, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, as well as a range of bungalow styles.
Know of any other events happening in the Chicago area this week? Post them in the comments section.


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Are you looking to improve your agility, power, and strength?
Heritage Community Fitness & Rehabilitation has partnered with industry-leader Fitquest to provide Carleton Place sports performance training.
Created by NHL head strength and conditioning coach Chris Schwarz, Fitquest programs are designed for elite athlete training. Through our partnership with Fitquest, we bring sports performance training to our community.
Learn more about Fitquest in this video introduction.
Fitquest Conditioning Group Fitness Classes
This program combines agility, cardio, and strength training for a one-of-a-kind workout. During the class, Fitquest-certified trainers take members through circuits designed to push your limits by challenging you mentally and physically. Train like an athlete. For the dates and times of our Fitquest group fitness class, view our class schedule.
Fitquest programs are also available in Ottawa and Kanata. Visit their website for more details about Chris Schwarz, the Fitquest strength and conditioning team, and programs.


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Solar Cells
Recommended for High School through College.
The goal of this activity is for students to develop a model for the power production of a solar cell, including what variables influence power production.
In the Preliminary Observations, students observe a solar cell generating enough electrical power to operate an LED, buzzer, or other simple electronic device. Students then brainstorm a list of factors that affect the ability for the solar cell to generate power, such as light level, cell angle with respect to incoming light, cell temperature, or the load applied to the solar cell. To investigate the power production of a solar cell, students pick one of the variables and design and conduct an experiment.
Learning Outcomes
- Design and perform an investigation.
- Draw a conclusion from evidence.
- Construct a simple circuit containing a solar cell and a load (resistance).
Sensors and Equipment
This experiment features the following Vernier sensors and equipment.
Option 1
Option 2
Option 3
Option 4
Option 5
Additional Requirements
You may also need an interface and software for data collection. What do I need for data collection?
Next Generation Science Standards
Disciplinary Core Ideas
- PS3.A Definitions of Energy
- PS3.B Conservation of Energy and Energy Transfer
- PS4.B Electromagnetic Radiation
Crosscutting Concepts
- Cause and Effect
- Systems and System Models
- Energy and Matter
- Influence of Engineering, Technology, and Science on Society and the Natural World
Science and Engineering Practices
- Asking Questions and Defining Problems
- Planning and Carrying Out Investigations
- Obtaining, Evaluating, and Communicating Information
Physics Explorations and Projects
See other experiments from the lab book.


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Progressive House
Electronica / Downtempo
Melodic House & Techno
Blending sounds of her native South Africa with deep tech-house beats, Bloem aims to elevate dancefloors around the world to a state of positive energy and movement.
She has released a number tracks on Sol Selectas, ABRACADABRA records, Motek, Warung Records.
We are happy to welcome Bloem on Akbal Music with her stunning EP of mystic tribal affairs. Into Bloom has two original tracks and three remixes. Filled with exotic elements, hypnotic vocal samples , tribal percussion and weird sounds this a must for some good afro vibes.
In the remix side we have 3 massive remixes by Niko Schwind, Derun and Anastasia, all wonderfull interpretations in different ways.
Derun remix is a more balearic version of the original, filled with groovie drums and folkloric guitars combined to create a beautiful vibe on the dancefllor.
The second remix comes from Anstascia (ex Blond:ish member) ideally for a party banger situation with delicate drum patterns, juicy groove patterns, hypnotic hooks and rolling adventure. Already tested during the summer in Ibiza.
Last but not least we have the Stil vor Talent legends Niko Schwind providing a dreamy story of Inbewu perfect for a sunrise in the desert full of emotional elements but with an edgy vision , we are so honored to welcome Niko to the family.
All around a lovely package full of positive uplifting mystic conscious music.
Electronica / Downtempo
Electronica / Downtempo
Progressive House
Melodic House & Techno
Melodic House & Techno
Robbie Akbal / Ay Sarita / Alejandro Mosso / Elfenberg /
Akbal Music /