Aceh Print

Posting is slow again as I've been undergoing some medical treatments that slow me down. But over the last couple days I've succumbed to another social networking tool: after news librarians, and then my college classmates, set up Facebook groups, I decided it was finally time to join up. I've enjoyed using LinkedIn to keep in touch with work collegues and thought that was all I wanted to participate in, but now I've seen the light and have discovered how much fun it is to be able to converse with friends on Facebook, as well as see their photos, etc. Not to take it too seriously, but I admit it's amazing how, among school, work, and family contacts your Facebook lists can grow. I've only been on a day and already have a full platter there. Posting here should resume a more normal schedule in a few days.

When I was a kid, maybe 12 or so, I was enjoying reading so much I wanted to keep track of my books. So I started a file card system. It lasted a few months. I was getting my own little collection of books. You could buy Pocket Books of the classics for 25-50 cents. When my mother took me downtown shopping we would often stop at the lunch counter at Sibley's department store. Right next to it was a little book section. I'd spend some of my allowance each time on a book. I got lovely little copies with attractive covers of things like Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Last of the Mohicans. Still have some. I still have wanted at times to track my reading, just to see how much and what variety I've read, or to be able to remember a book whose author or title is foggy. A year ago my niece Kerry invited me to Goodreads . Sounded like a fun thing to do, if just to list my books. Now I discover in a year I've read 52 books. Just as I thought, a book a week. The first book I liste...

After a slow week, a couple interesting new research blogs: Paper Trail Blog from Center for Public Integrity, links to useful and interesting public records background to stories in the news. Lisa Gold: Research Maven : she lists great tips for finding research resources, writing, and more. A couple research resources: Sports Illustrated's Vault gives access to 50 years of fulltext stories, covers, and images. State Digital Resources: Memory Projects, Online Encyclopedias, Historical & Cultural Materials Collections . The Library of Congress compiles a list of state resources. This is great. I know of a few states' encyclopedias but knew there had to be more. They're all listed here. And this: 5 ways newspapers botched the web , from Valleywag. Interesting recap of several of Knight-Ridder's online initiatives like Viewtron, Real Cities and New Century Network, along with The New York Times' Abuzz and newspaper consortium's Classified Ventures. On Knight...

Is there a place for 'former' journalists in this new world? You bet there is. Here's a wonderful example, from American Journalism Review: Voice in the Wilderness . James Gannon, former editor of the Des Moines Register and Detroit News Washington Bureau Chief, took a buyout a few years back and moved to rural Virginia. With only a weekly paper in the area, he decided there was a need for more updated news, so he started an online news service, The Rappahanock Voice . What does this old newsman think about the new media? It's kind of made a believer of me, Gannon says. I'm an old print guy. I love newspapers, and I still love picking up newspapers and turning the page reading, but that's happening less and less. This is where journalism is going whether we like it or not, and you have to get with it.

Great discussion by Jay Rosen on the Jessica DaSilva flap (yesterday's post) at Pressthink: Big Daddy Newspaper Has Gone and Left Journalism . Lots of links to reaction to her blog and the story of dying newspapers in general here. Most of all, a link to a new site that is an antidote to the 'curmudgeon class': Tree House Media Project . Check out the blog , too. You gotta love a site that proclaims: Fuck Craig's List. Fuck Wall Street. Yes, we have ample reason to be bitter. Times have never been worse for newspaper journalists. And Da Silva? The girl's got a future in some sort of journalism. Here's her comment on the Pressthink posting: I admit I'm young, but I like to think of myself as optimistic and hopeful about journalism. And I attribute that to having an open mind in describing the role of journalist; it's not just paper anymore. Another problem I (and my peers) have encountered in internships is an eagerness to turn us away from journalism or ...

Some more interesting thoughts on news research and other topics... In the Wall Street Journal by Jason Fry, The Case of the Missing White Pages (link fixed). It explores the question of whether there is a directory of cell phone numbers (a question that comes up on NewsLib about once a year). A few years back there was news one was coming, but according to this story, Intelius gave up on it. Cell phone users don't want strangers getting their numbers, end of story. But it raises some interesting thoughts: That will arouse uneasy feelings that technology has once again done away with something we assumed was eternal...Those of us who remember looking ourselves up in the white pages and thinking that now we belong to a place may lament -- not for the first time -- that our real-world communities are becoming more fragmented as people spend time in online communities of their own choosing instead. (Via Resourceshelf.) Mentioned in Derek Willis' report on some sessions he attende...

Via Mark Schaver , a link to a posting at GraphicDesignr that lists the number of Twitter tweets coming from newspapers around the country. Among them, news, sports, even a Miami Herald Twitter on Cuba . A lot more than I would have guessed. Guess there is something to this Twitter thing after all. Of course, when I tried to get the Asheville Citizen-Times Twitter feed, I got the 'Too many Tweets' announcement.......

I'm intrigued with today's story about the Bill Clinton rant against the author of the negative Vanity Fair story about him, recorded by "amateur reporter" Mayhill Fowler ( at Huffington Post ), because Fowler is the same reporter who reported Barack Obama's comments at a San Francisco fundraiser about 'clinging to guns and religion'. (Dave Winer discusses .) After the first story, I pictured a young blogger, but it turns out Fowler is a 60-something former Tenneseean with a lifelong family interest in politics , who's worked her way into a position as a frequent 'Off The Bus' blogger. This is exactly what the 'Off the Bus' project was hoping for , I'd think, using bloggers to find news the major media misses. It's just one of several intriguing new ways of getting news that have been showing up this election year. They don't always last (I remember Voter.org from the 2000 election) but make things interesting while the d...

In the upcoming issue of New York Review of Books: The Library in the New Age , by Robert Darnton. This discussion of how information is disseminated spends a bit of time on news, blogs, and other new media. Good stuff: ...stories about blogging point to the same conclusion: blogs create news, and news can take the form of a textual reality that trumps the reality under our noses. Today many reporters spend more time tracking blogs than they do checking out traditional sources such as the spokespersons of public authorities. News in the information age has broken loose from its conventional moorings, creating possibilities of misinformation on a global scale. We live in a time of unprecedented accessibility to information that is increasingly unreliable. Or do we? I would argue that news has always been an artifact and that it never corresponded exactly to what actually happened. ...having learned to write news, I now distrust newspapers as a source of information, and I am often surpr...

Over the last few years, several newspapers have made the expensive investment of scanning their microfilm to make stories available online that are older than their text archives, started in the early 1980s or later. ProQuest has done several newspapers, as well as Olive , Heritage , and Cold North Wind. Some are available online, by subscription, or through the newspaper's Web site, downloaded for a small fee; some public libraries offer access to ProQuest papers, too. The New York Times is one of those papers, and you can search and download individual stories from their older archives in PDF ProQuest format. But now the Times has launched Times Machine , where you can actually browse scans of an entire newspaper. If you're a home delivery subscriber you can use the full service, covering years from 1851-1922. A few papers are available for non-subscribers, covering major events and '100 years ago today'. (Note the page also suggests checking if your local library ...

Derek Willis looked at the South Florida coverage of the Miami Dolphins draft, and discovered databases on the Sun Sentinel's and Palm Beach Post's websites (and the S-S's sister paper, the Orlando Sentinel). None at the Miami Herald. So, being a data junky, Derek made his own: Miami Dolphins Draft Database . What a wonderful exercise to show how easy it can be. Why isn't every newspaper doing things like this? (Because most papers don't have anyone on staff that knows databases like Derek.) It took Derek a little over an hour and a half to do this. Took me about 2 seconds to find a list of all Dolphins draft picks from Wisconsin .

Here's Twitter from the Senate Floor ; Twitter from the House Floor .