Recent Stories with tag online

I can't attend "Journalism: a.WAKE.ning?" this Monday, November 15, because I'll be one of the hosts of BlogsGiving, but if I weren't, I'd be in the audience in the Upstairs Gallery at Theatre Off Jackson.

The evening kicks off at 7:30 p.m. As you enter you'll be presented with the choice of champagne or a shot of rye, symbolic of the question: "Are you celebrating a revolution in journalism or dancing on its grave?" 

Paul Mullin

"I may just stay sober," playwright Paul Mullin told me on the phone. "I don't know which way it'll go."

With NewsWrights United's second Living Newspaper production coming up in February, The New New News, Monday night is both promotion and fundraiser. Mullin sees the Living Newspaper model as a way to inject some much-needed life into theatre, writing:

Happily, when we produced our first edition It’s Not in the P-I: A Living Newspaper about a Dying Newspaper, we noticed an added bonus. The people came—and we sold out nearly every night—not to see excellent theatre adeptly presented by trained professionals but rather stories about a local newspaper that they loved (or hated) that had died recently.

After a preview scene comes a panel discussion on new media and journalism, moderated by NewsWrights producer Tom Paulson and featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist Dave Horsey (Seattlepi.com), Monica Guzman (Intersect.com), Josh Feit (PubliCola), sportswriter legend Art Thiel, columnist Brendan Kiley (The Stranger), and Chris Grygiel (coordinator of political coverage for the Seattlepi.com blogs). Tickets are $20 via Brown Paper Tickets or at the door.... (more)

Duty Calls, courtesy of XKCD.

Oh, noes! Someone was wrong on the internet! In a flash of uncommonly brilliant fail, the editor of Cooks Source [sic] magazine, a New England regional floppy made up primarily of ads, pissed off the entire internet by declaring that everything on it is "public domain."

It took only hours for what should have been a wee, tiny, plagiarism molehill to explode off of Facebook, Twitter, and LiveJournal, and hit the mainstream press--including, but not limited to, The Guardian UK, The Washington Post, MSNBC, and the L.A. Times--due almost entirely to the editor's poor manners.

Judith Griggs, the editor in question, has since been Google-bombed by the website Smart Bitches Read Trashy Books, and exposed as a multiple plagiarist who has also ripped off copy from Martha Stuart Living, The Food Network, and Disney, among many, many others. She even has a shiny, new wikipedia entry! There is little doubt that Ms. Griggs will have to change her name in order to ever hold another job in the publishing industry, at the very least. So that's a lesson for all: Be nice. Also, the internet is not a copyright-free zone.

Also drenched in the sauce made of fail last week was liberal media bastion NPR. The network's retrospective This is NPR: The First Forty Years leaves out most major contributors of color, including All Things Considered host Michele Norris and the African American Public Radio Consortium. Racialicious pointed out that the book illustrates an essay by Michel Martin with a photo of Audie Cornish. This falls under the category of a they-all-look-alike fail.

Yale University Press has bumped their street cred with the release of The Anthology of Rap, which aims to become “an essential contribution to our living literary tradition." I wouldn't go quite that far, but it's past time that rap and hip-hop were included in academic studies of comparative history and literature, and The Anthology of Rap could fulfill some of that function, which is no doubt why Yale published the tome.

Matt Labash, over at the Wall Street Journal, gave a The Anthology of Rap a (mostly) good review, but his piece is primarily of interest for the great books on music that he references and recommends. Fans of music, as well as books, will enjoy his selections, from the classic images in Back in the Days by Jamel Shabazz, to Jeff Chang's hip-hop history, Can't Stop, Won't Stop.... (more)

It started innocently enough, with the Pothole Rangers' online form. See a pothole, report it online, and BLAMMO! pothole filled. If you've tried it, you know the weird feeling of power when it actually works, and a few days later there's fresh asphalt where once there was only hole.

But as the streets decay, that power becomes responsibility. Every pothole adds itself to a to-do list. Your to-do list. You look around. Is anyone else seeing something and saying something? And then, grouchily, you wonder if it's anyone's job at all anymore, at the City, to check for potholes.

With this perspective in mind, you may or may not be all that thrilled to learn that you can now also report malfunctioning street lights online, or report certain crimes (Property Destruction, Car Prowls, Auto Accessories, Theft of Property under $500, and Identity Theft).

The crime has to have happened in Seattle city limits, not be an emergency, and not come with known suspects. (If it's an emergency, you call 911, of course. If the crime is of another variety and not an emergency, you call 206-625-5011.) There are no rules for ratting out a street light--but helpfully, the map tells you if City Light is already working on the problem.

Government 2.0 was part of Mayor McGinn's campaign, and you can't say he hasn't followed through on it. Besides the emphasis on online reporting options, the City has also created Data.Seattle.Gov, a repository of datasets. The most highly ranked are active building permits and the location of city-maintained toilets, and crime statistics and a real-time 911 feed are there as well. Go ahead, browse. Here's Seattle's designated public fishing holes.

As it turns out, the plan from last September--"doing more with less," "democratizing data," and "revolutionizing community engagement" with the power of Seattle's "collective IQ"--is pretty much what we're seeing occur, if slowly, and with an emphasis of the "doing more with less" part. Who knew that civic engagement would be redefined as a proficiency with filling in online text boxes?

"I'm on the internet every day. I mean, everyone else is doing it."

Sightline's Eric de Place just posted about the Census Bureau's 2009 numbers on internet use, where the Northwest states make a very strong internet showing. Washington is second among states in percentage of people reporting they log on from somewhere (first: Alaska), and sixth in percentage of people who have internet access at home (first: New Hampshire).

Mississippi is the least online state, no matter how you slice it, with just 55 percent logging on.

Now, for my money, you can throw out Alaska as a leader, since the state population is only slightly larger than the city of Seattle. That's apples to oranges!

Sightline is interested in our strong Northwest showing because of the internet's effect on distance. Northwesterners drive more miles because the region is less dense and more roadsy than, say, British Columbia. But trips made on the internet can eliminate a single vehicle's trip entirely (if you watch a movie online, instead of trucking to the video store) or reduce its impact (if your online shopping is delivered).

Since we started The SunBreak in September of '09 over 54,000 unique visitors have come to the site. Last month, we served up over 35,000 page views to over 15,000 readers. People just like you! People who like a little news, some sports, a lot of arts and culture, a bit of food and drink. And occasionally deranged hordes from Harvard.

Readership, and repeat readership, is really the best reward we get for the work we do, which is otherwise unprofitable at this point. You'd think, an online magazine, why that's a license to print money! (It turns out that's just an expression, or so the Treasury tells me.)

How you read is up to you: Our stories can appear in your news stream if you fan us on Facebook. You can get them tweeted to you. (Thanks to everyone who's put us on a Twitter list, you're loved.) Our stories can all show up in your RSS reader--subscribe now. We're also trying out a daily email summary, sent out after 5 p.m. Or, you're old school, we respect that, just bookmark or "favorite" The SunBreak. Stay tuned for mobile platform news; the boys at Instivate have a fleet of elves on it.

You can also participate--write your own post. That could be Front Page material you're sitting on. Or drop your best shots into our SunBreak Flickr pool. Every weekday we choose a pool photo for our Glimpses post.

For those of you with goods to sell, we have advertising you can afford, largely because it's self-serve. Upload some art, choose a daily or global rate, and publish. It's as little as $2.50 a day. Who's reading, you ask? 60 percent of our readers make more than $60,000 per year. 30 percent earn over $100,000. (That's why that top banner is $30 CPM; we're worth it.) You can also sponsor a whole category.

Okay, the short version is, Thanks for reading. Come back soon!