Allie would like to thank you for taking part in another successful Catember. The categories are archived in a reverse chronological order, but you might be interested in seeing three entire years of Catember joy. You would start right here.
She would never let on, but I think Allie likes being famous on the Internet. She pretends to be annoyed by some of the cameras — the iPhone in particular, though she is very patient with DSLRs — but she is very proud of the attention. So when I told her this weekend that Catember was almost over — she’s a cat, she doesn’t read calendars — she was a bit sad:
Cats are tough, though. She’ll bounce back soon.
Something new is the Alabama Media Group, which is launching this week. There is a lot of criticism in the fall air, but some people have to do that so they can later point out they’ve been screaming the loudest. This is largely untrodden ground that the people at AMG are walking, but I know those folks at al.com and many of the people at the three papers that are used to producing the old daily miracle. Give them a bit of time and they’ll do some impressive work.
So it is a big week in local news. First, on college campuses everywhere, the Clery Act reports are due.
Can The Boston Globe and MIT hack the future of news together? Maybe for them. But I have this growing suspicion that these answers will all be locally customized:
“In the long term, maybe we’ll come up with something that will matter to the organization, to the bottom line,” he said. “In the short term, it’s just really cool to have these cool ideas floating around.”
Marstall said his goal is to have experimental modules that readers can play with on Boston.com and provide feedback to the Globe Lab. The lab was created for the purpose of exploring ideas that could be transformed into products for the Globe, or tools that could be helpful in reporting, Marstall said. The additional manpower, and brainpower, provided by MIT, will accelerate that, he said.
The reason a handful of news organizations have created their own research and development labs is to have people working on new ideas outside of the day-to-day business concerns of journalism, Moriarty said.
Seems like Jeff Moriarty, vice president of digital products at the Globe, agrees, doesn’t it?
Pew: After email, getting news is the most popular activity on smartphones, tablets Why are tablets good? These findings:
Another key finding: Almost one-third of people who acquire tablets find themselves reading more news from more sources than before.
What they’re reading is also interesting. Almost three-fourths of tablet news readers consumed in-depth news articles at least sometimes, with 19 percent saying they do so daily.
Here are the revenue notes, from that same Pew study.
I tell students you don’t write question leads or question headlines. Only very, very occasionally, I say, are they appropriate. Here might be an example: Are we already in a recession?
Most of the time and for most people, the difference between no growth and contraction probably doesn’t mean that much. However, we are in a much different situation now than we were in 2007. The Federal Reserve has more or less gone all in with its open-ended quantitative easing. The government’s fiscal mechanism is paralyzed and a large portion of the electorate has no appetite for further fiscal stimulus. If the American economy were to go into a so-called “double-dip” recession the government would be especially hard-pressed to drag us out. It would be a huge blow to the nation’s confidence and would lead to shrinking government revenues and further net job loss in both the public and private sectors.
For those reasons, it’s more than a little frightening that we’re seeing a spate of depressing numbers that could signal a recession on the horizon — or that one is already here.
Read the whole thing.
I mentioned the other day how an old online friend popped up on Twitter out of the blue last week.
The Internet is a lovely thing, really. Tonight I’ve been chatting with a guy I used to play soccer with. He was a defender, probably the fastest guy I played with, who had the natural ability that comes with working really hard at something. We played with a few very gifted guys, but he made himself as good or better than all of them. He was never afraid of work that was hard or to put in the time to make something good.
Good guy. We grew up together. We avoided trouble together. We probably caused some, too. Here’s a grainy and bad picture of an OK picture. This is some birthday of mine, probably 12, I’d guess.
We were at a restaurant called China Doll. For my birthday, and by then I’d gotten to that awkward feeling of people giving me presents, he gave me a knife he found in a scabbard he’d made. It was a very nice and thoughtful gift.
We lost touch somewhere just after high school, which is one of those small things that shouldn’t happen, but now he’s popped up on Facebook.
He’s got a beautiful wife and a handsome son. He’s in Afghanistan and, for him, that seems just about perfect. (Told him I was teaching journalism. He said he’d always thought I would have made a great comedian.)
I see his pictures and he looks exactly the same, just a little more intense. There’s a picture of him and his mother on there that I could write full essays about.
He’s got plans to open a paradise resort, hopefully some time next year after he rotates out. Told him I’d swing by and help him hammer things.
Hey, I can bend nails in paradise, too.
