nuinca

Opportunities

A colleague and all-around nice guy and I were talking about very intellectual hypothetical scenarios at work today. Some of the obvious ones were things like “It’s 1998 and you could either try and convince AOL to invest in high-speed internet or go lead Comcast’s efforts, which would you do?” You know, really lofty stuff.

But then he posed this question – “If it was 2000 and you could either try and convince newspapers to switch to free classifieds or go start Craigslist, which would you do?” Of course, the obvious answer would be to convince newspapers to accept the idea of free classifieds. And of course, that’s clearly not what happened.

Why not? Because the idea of free classified would have been some wacky shit. Classifieds were the backbone of their operations. Without them, the entire advertising structure would fall apart. Why would newspapers ever give them away?

Now we all know that happened anyway, and before you go all “Jonathan, we covered the decimation of newspaper classifieds 6 years ago,” let me tell you something: My paper JUST started offering free classifieds. Except in print only. And you don’t get any photos. And you still have to figure out how to abbreviate “Yellow couch, slightly creaky, sodden, and has a cat piss stain on the left arm” into 30 characters.

See my point? The internet figured this shit out 8 years ago, and our efforts to match decade-old technology still falls embarrassingly short.

So what other “impossible” ideas remain to be adopted in order to keep this industry afloat?

Good. God.

The power just came back on.

Tropical Storm Fay, a fickle, watery bitch, took 4 days to cross Jacksonville.

*oh, and Jesus. For those of you who have never been through a hurricane/tropical storm, take this as a lesson: The “hurricane path” estimates are bullshit. Technically, Fay hit just north of Daytona Beach and moved westward. Jacksonville, to the northeast, will appear to be out of the damage path, but we got the worst of the wind/rain. So go to hell, you forecasters.*

I don’t know if that’s a record for longest TS ever, but it seems like it. As a brand-new Florida resident (and part of a “hurricane free” city), living, and covering, my first tropical storm was a bit surreal.

Fay first blew in to Jacksonville on Wednesday, defying the usual tropical-storms-get-weaker-over-land theory. By that evening the City began taking the threat seriously, closing down shop and telling most people to say home, just in case this unhurried, windy wore became difficult.

I spent most of Thursday keeping our Twitterati updated. On Thursday morning, we had 200 followers. By Friday afternoon, we had 256, an incredible increase, especially consider that we still hadn’t actually publicized our efforts.

But this post isn’t supposed to wander into my fascination with Twitter and Jaxdotcom, so I’ll continue on what it was like to work/live through this storm.

Through all of Wednesday and most of Thursday morning, Fay was a major disappointment. In fact, on Thursday morning, I wrote on a co-worker’s wall “Tropical Storm Fay flooded my house this morning. Flooded it with disappointment!!” Funny? No. But it captured what we thought about her – a slow-moving, salty threat that never delivered.

Of course, by Thursday afternoon, I would have erased that message had I the time to pick up the Sharpie eraser in Walt’s office. Winds hit 45+ that afternoon and the rain began to pour in what I always imagined to be true Tropical Storm fashion. Kevin and Joe kept the real world updated with a brilliant re-design (and completely Fay-centric) resdesign of Jacksonville.com while I humored our Twitterers. But I won’t talk about that!

When I got home Thursday night around 7:30, Fay was at her worst. Rain pounded at our windows and pushed it’s way through our comfort all night long. In short, we didn’t sleep. About 1:30 Friday morning, the power went out.

While watching the power-outage in all of it’s transformer blowing brilliance was incredible, I still had to be at work at  7 and I was frustrated by the alarm-clock fireworks.

The next morning, I decided to drive through the god awfully flood prone Riverside to work. Trees were down, powerlines were snapping and I was the only idiot on the road. By the time I got to work, Jacksonville.com was in full effort, pushing our news and quickly as we found them. I Twittered and Joe and Amanda did most of the real work. I would gladly detail the next 7 hours of my shift, but I don’t remember many of the specifics, besides Joe/Kevin/I bent over our MacBook Pros, keeping the city aware of closings, dangers, and unfortunately, fatalities.

The good news? The city appreciated our efforts, in a way I’m not sure has happened since newspapers were the only game in town.

So like 1950.

We have received e-mails, phone calls and Hallmark cards (well, not yet, but I hope they come) thanking us for the good work. We kept the city aware of what was going wrong and it made us feel good. Again, I won’t bore you with the Twitter-tastic details, but we received a lot of positive feedback, and more importantly, push out a lot of important information.

Returning to work on Monday is going to suck.

Our dog

Jax vomited in the corner of our yard 4 days ago.

He just ate it.

Goddamned dog.

So this thing…

I have a thing for mythology. And books. So books about mythology rock my world, and this weekend I bought another two from a sweet used book store here in town.

One is about legends and myths of Micronesia. The other are folk tales from the Ozarks. Neither are recent or meaningful enough to have an existance on the internet, so I can’t link to their covers or anything. But take it from me – these are two sweet books, and if you want to borrow them, just ask!

I like mythology because I think it’s one of the lingering elements that still connects us all as a species. Whether it’s Mayan, Greek or Nordic, everyone has an impressively similar rendering of how the world began, and in some cases, how it’s going to end. Of course, there’s little reason to actually believe in the myths themselves, but I think the stories do serve to remind us all that at one point we had to fight together to get to where we are now.

Which is scarier?

Two headlines from CNN.com today -

38 dead after being bitten by vampires bats

Clay Aiken is a father

Both are horrifying, but I’m not sure which one which will give me nightmares first; rabid vampire bats swooping down on defenseless villages and killing 38, or Clay Aiken having fathered what will probably be the most ambiguosly male child ever.

My world will never be the same

Tom Waits

So yeah, Tom Waits.

He was in Jacksonville the night of June 30th. Tickets were expensive as sin, but having seen the show, I would have happily paid twice the amount. For those of you who don’t know, I think Tom Waits is the greatest living songwriter and easily one of the most influential artists in American music history. He has been producing music since the early 70’s (I’m pretty sure his first album came out the same year as Cold Spring Harbour.) With that being said, I’m amazed at the number of people who either have never heard of him or wonder; “that black guy?”

What I looked forward to the most about the Tom Waits show was the same thing I usually dread from other revered musicians. That is, their ability to take one of their popular songs and make it work in front of a live audience. If Eric Clapton plays Layla, he’d damned well better play it just like I heard it on the radio. Tom Waits, on the other hand, has had no top-40 hits, and has thusly avoided pigeonholing himself into some depressingly shitty playlist that we all expect from him. His music can be frantically different between albums, from poppy to melodic to as cross-cutting as a table saw.

He told us the night of the show “We’ll play all your favorites,” which was a nice way of saying “Go fuck yourselves, we set the list.” When the house lights went down, we could see a few shadowy figures walk onto the stage. The crowd went nucking futs. A few seconds later, another figure crossed, this one limping slowly across the stage. The audience became chaotic, deafening. If Tom Waits had ever needed to enforce his position as musical ring-leader, that was the crowd for it.

I can’t even begin to describe the stage show, and it’s one of the few times in my life where I can honestly say – you had to be there. In short, it was the fantastic, shifting and tilting experience it should have been.

“I’ve never been to Jacksonville before,” he said once. “That’s because Florida is for old people…. That’s really more of a statement against myself than you.” Later, during Tom Wait’s solo set at the piano, some jerkoff shouted “I want to have your baby!” . “Nowadays that’s possible!” Waits snapped back “Talk to my manager… But my sperm, it’s expensive. I’m like a fuckin’ racehorse.”

Heard enough? I’m sure you have. I haven’t made a lifetime to-do list yet, but when I do, I am going to write “See Tom Waits in concert” at the very top and then fucking cross it out.

My Twitter obsession, continued…

So we’re still Tweeting away at work.

We started it as a fun way of connecting to a new audience at work; we push out the usual blood/guts headlines, but try to include some personality with our posts when applicable. Personality – the one thing I think most newspapers completely lack.

An example: Joe and I had been creating noon-time Twizzlers (tweet + quiz …. funny, right?) and our Twizzler the other day was “What’s the best waffle topping? A) Berries B) Syrup C) Batman. Sure it’s meaningless and 99% of our traditional newsroom would hemorrhage from knowing we had posted such a flippant question to our audience, but the truth is – it worked. We had a lot of responses. The winner (arbitrarily chosen, of course) won “a bag of internets”. Would a traditional news source have done something like that? I don’t think so.

Of course, now we have to wonder about how long it’s going to be until we are asked to stop or are fired.

The biggest pay-off has been the fun. Truth is, for a long time our dept. has been suffering from a deflating moral – while we’re in an exciting industry, the shrinking staff and wildly increasing demands have turned our jobs from fun and experimental to repetitive and smooth. Our fun has carried beyond Twitter and into our entire department, something for which I know we are all thankful.

Assuming I don’t get fired for Twittering without a license, I can’t think of anything wrong with this great new service. We are connecting with our community in a whole new way – and I don’t mean that bullshit connecting, but a real connection, where people are once again thankful for the news and appreciative of the service we provide. Remember that? Yes, gratitude. It’s another part of our industry that’s been bleeding on the sidewalk for a long time.

One of the most respected bloggers in J-ville even posted this on his blog tonight: “If you use Twitter, which I’ve recently become addicted to, you really should be following jaxdotcom. The Times-Union, our little prehistoric paper, has found a new-tech way to circumvent the traditional news cycle. I love it! It’s my favorite new fix.”

There’s no way of describing how satisfying that is to us. If you happen to be a newspaper type reading this and wonder “What’s the big deal about a local blogger praising the dominant media in town?” then you have completely missed the point. We have become relevant to a young, smart, influential member of this community and to me that’s worth more than a lifetime’s worth of front-page bylines.

Tonight’s score,
Jaxdotcom: 81 Judson: 216

Solzhenitsyn

So that old Russian bastard died today.

He wrote one of my favorite books from my “childhood”, one I still re-read whenever I can. A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch is an amazing read, even if you don’t take it as a useful history lesson. My copy hits about 150 pages, and it’s incredible the characters and situations he works into the one 24-hour period.

His other works – The Gulag Archipelago (tried to read it all – really did, but it’s thousands and thousands of pages), The Cancer Ward, and The First Circle (which I think is the novel for which he won the Nobel Prize) are all super duper and worth a try. Most of the news articles have mentioned the re-publishing of his work in a series of releases, having started in ‘04 and finishing in ‘10

In case you’re interested, and you should be, since you’re reading my blog, here’s his speech to the Harvard commencement class of 1978: A World Split Apart

Parmesan “Fish”

Does this product seem weird to anyone else?

Lean Cuisine Parmesan Fish

I wish I could find the commercial, because it’s even more obscure.

Fish? You think they could be a little more specific. Salmon, Trout, Tuna, Orange Roughy or something.

I imagine some big machine pushing fish tails and eyeballs into a tiny little fish fillet form. Yummy