Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

The life and times of The Rocky Mountain News

Anger and aggregation

The Seattle alt weekly The Stranger had an interesting piece on what might be in store for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer if Hearst doesn't find a buyer by mid-March for Washington state's oldest business. A Hearst exec interviewed reporters to hear their ideas for an online-only version of the P-I.

In a significant departure from longstanding P-I practice, the new website, as currently conceived, will become, in part, an aggregator of links to interesting stories and blog posts elsewhere. If that sounds familiar, it should. The model has been pioneered by sites like HuffingtonPost.com, which takes an eclectic, opinionated, and often celebrity-focused approach to information gathering, mixing reports from its tiny staff with blog posts by notable actors and politicos, photo albums of fabulous people, and a constant stream of links to the hot news stories of the day (almost all originally reported by other publications).

Community newspapers

Not all is doom and gloom in the media world. Consider this piece by Chris Stadelman, who went from being the managing editor of a daily, and later as a reporter for the AP, to being an owner and operator of the Parsons Advocate in West Virginia:

I had a choice when I left both Charleston and AP, something many mid-career journalists don't have right now. Reading the list of cutbacks on Romenesko every morning reminds me of the old Monty Python scene: "Bring out your dead, bring out your dead."

Community newspapers, especially weeklies in rural markets, are like the defiant character: "I'm not dead yet!" The ad bases are stable, the readers dedicated, the future solid if not spectacular.

Can Research be Fun?

If you must do it, you might as well have a little fun. I did with European NAvigator. It is the coolest research tool I've stumbled across in a while. I found it while trying to pinpoint the exact spots in Cuba where the Soviets were building missile sites back in the early '60s. I didn't find the answer. But I certainly enjoyed the search. I found ENA to be well-organized and very engaging. Choose your preferred language at the top of the page -- and have a little fun.

Linking in google map info bubbles

I think most of you have figured this out already, but just in case here are the instructions on how to add outside links to the information bubbles in a google map:

When creating the info bubble, go to the "Edit HTML" view. Add your links in HTML (using the standard "a=href" linking language.

Below is a screenshot of what my HTML looked like. I put in links and horizontal rules to separate the links from the rest of the text.

Journalism training in Montana

Asbestos, Vermiculite and W.R. Grace have been in the news, off and on for several decades. The company is back in court and back in the news again in Montana.

The University of Montana's law and journalism schools have joined forces to cover the the latest Grace trial on the Web.

I think it will be interesting to follow their live online coverage of what's likely to be a tedious trial. And I want to see how the students' work stacks up against the AP.

Chimpanzee attack

Link to story about the chimpanzee attack in Stamford, Conn.

very cool interactive feature

From the NYT (again):
Twitter Chatter During the Super Bowl