Helen Mirren

Helen Mirren is phenomenal. I have been a fan for many, many years, but just this evening for the first time watched The Passion of Ayn Rand. In it, Helen Mirren ascends to another plane.

Guess the year

"Air travel is already a nightmare for anybody who can’t afford to lease their own Learjet, and the odds against getting anywhere in the country on a commercial airline — expecially on a Friday afternoon — are getting longer and longer.

"Even a 22-minute commuter flight might go sideways on you at any moment: A rain cloud can mean sitting on a runway for three hours, and then getting arrested by FAA security guards for trying to smoke a cigarette or asking why your luggage was sent to Key West, or even weeping helplessly in a manner that worries the stewardess and fits some kind of ‘emotional distress’ profile that means you might stab the pilot in the brain with a rat-tail file and start jabbering in Arabic. …"

(Hunter S. Thompson, April 20, 1987. From Generation of Swine – Gonzo Papers Vol.2: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the ’80’s)

Postscript to what I wrote above:

A friend e-mailed me to say she didn’t understand the point of this entry. Here’s my explanation (in colloquial English) to her:

My point (obviously not very well made) is that that passage was written in 1987, but could easily have been written about what it’s like to fly today. I’m reading all this stuff written by Thompson 20 years ago (or more) and I keep reading these passages (like when he was writing about Nixon) that could be lifted whole and used to describe what’s going on today. As I’m reading I keep getting these eerie "ghost of the past haunting the present" feelings.

Web nerds and their cool sites

I’m in the throes of researching newspaper Web sites and which elements make them wildly successful or savagely unsucessful. I’m doing most of my preliminary research online, of course — here’s a sampling from this evening’s dive into the whirlpool of link-laden Web techie sites and blogs:

Rob Curley’s blog — The primary genius behind the pioneering and crazily successful Lawrence Journal-World-owned site Lawrence.com and the completely re-designed and re-launched (Jan. ‘06) Naples News site, among others, Curley has now been hired by the Washington Post to invigorate its online presence.

Journerdism — a cool blog where journalism and nerdism intersect — all things techie in comprehensible English, oodles of links, vlogs, pictures, graphs and more. The blog is put together and incessantly updated by Will Sullivan, Interactive Projects Editor at the PalmBeachPost.com.

Fast Company — a magazine "about innovative people and ideas," with a jam-packed Web site, loads of links and hordes of blogs.

Question 1

Which is the loaded (pun fully intended) question of whether supermarkets and other grocery/convenience stores should be allowed to sell alcohol.

As a New Zealander who spent the last 13 years in Northern California, I’m a little bemused by this question. I landed in Boston two months ago (almost to the day) and it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t be able to buy a bottle of wine or six-pack of beer at the supermarket (or only at some supermarket branches). I feel as though I’ve been plunged back into New Zealand of the 1970s, when bars closed at 6 p.m. and nothing was open on Sundays. But that’s beside the point.

The point is that this debate is creating unusual fellowships throughout the online "journalistic" world, from Adam Gaffin’s aggregator of all news-Boston, Universal Hub, to Sergeant John Daley of the Boston Police Department’s Intelligence Unit — and the man who, with David Bratton, came up with the original idea for the BPD’s public-relations-oriented blog.

Also weighing in is the other all things-Boston aggregator, though this one on the other side of the river, Jon Pettit’s Bostonist.

With a Google search, Internet users can find any number of articles on this subject from a range of media. For example, the Boston Globe article linked to in the first line of this post.

Such a wealth of viewpoints channeled through one medium, available to "all" (potentially, although limited by access to the needed technology) with a few keystrokes.

the utterly beautiful joy of technology…

Sitting in a cafe in Boston with free wireless access and a hanging television showing game one of the Oakland-Minnesota American League Division Series, reporting for a trade publication by calling newspaper editors on my cell phone, conducting preliminary and additional research on my laptop — pausing to watch Oakland’s scoring (The Big Hurt’s two home runs — even you, Johann Santana, can’t slip an inside fastball past Frank Thomas when he’s dialled in, as he is this afternoon) and the Minnesota fielders’ stunning defensive plays…

And the A’s win.

Oh, and did I mention Barry Zito’s curveball? The Zito Special, coming to a diner near you. If you can catch it.

My blog IS my day job…

Maybe the Boston Police Department is approaching the whole blogging thing the wrong way entirely. Maybe instead of regarding it as a means of disseminating dryly packaged information, the BPD could be using its blog as a means of earning serious money.

That’s what some bloggers are doing.

According to a Sept. 8 article in CNN’s Business 2.0 magazine, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Michael Arrington’s blog TechCrunch pulls in $60,000 in ad revenue each month. Arrington didn’t start blogging full-time until earlier this year, when Techcrunch was earning around $6,000 each month from advertisements. That’s when Arrington quit his day job.

And he’s apparently not the only one. According to the Business 2.0 article two other blogs, Boing Boing and Fark, are on pace to gross around $1 million in ad revenue this year. And with extraordinarily low overhead (by comparison with the business model as it has existed for several centuries), the profit potential is 70% – 90% of that gross income.

Like the "dot-com bubble" of the 1990s and the northern California housing market of the past several years, this is bound to even out eventually, but the reality is advertisers — from Coca Cola to Banana Republic to Intel — have become aware of the unique ability of blogs to get their message in front of narrowly definable demographics.

So why doesn’t the BPD try to funnel some of that advertising cash its way?

According to a Sept. 6 article in Boston’s Weekly Dig:

A 1979 city law requires the Boston Police Department to maintain a minimum staffing level of 2500 officers; in June it had around 2,100, over 300 of whom were either injured, in the military or in the academy. Boston’s fiscal year 2007 budget, passed in July, allotted for 140 new police officers (a net gain of 100 after retirements; 45 more officers would be folded into the department under a controversial merger of the BPD and the Municipal Police).

With ad revenue from, for example, the United States Marines, Prozac and a couple of gun manufacturers, the BPD could have an officer on every street corner.

New Media and New Assignments

New media vs old media seems to be all anybody in the media is talking (or writing) about these days. From an article in The Economist of August 26, headlined "More media, less news":

Even the most confident of newspaper bosses now agree that they will survive in the long term only if … they can reinvent themselves on the internet and on other new-media platforms such as mobile phones and portable electronic devices.

I’m not so sure about reading my daily Boston Globe or New York Times or Guardian on the 1.5" by 2" screen of my cell phone, but the matter goes deeper than that. "Most [newspapers] have been slow to grasp the changes affecting their industry," the Economist article continued, " — ‘remarkably, unaccountably, complacent,’ as Rupert Murdoch put it in a speech last year — but now they are making a big push to catch up."

So much for old media trying to catch up with new. Jay Rosen, associate professor of journalism at New York University and author of the widely read, highly regarded and oft pot-stirring blog PressThink, has started something new entirely. With an initial $10,000 gift of seed money from Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and now another $10,000 from The Sunlight Foundation, Rosen has launched NewAssignment.net, described as "An experiment in open-source reporting."

The idea is to have a pool of "citizen journalists" throughout the country (and eventually, I would imagine, the world) gathering information about a specified topic and reporting back to "professional" journalists and editors. From the Web site’s introductory page:

New Assignment.Net is a non-profit site that tries to spark innovation in journalism by showing that open collaboration over the Internet among reporters, editors and large groups of users can produce high-quality work that serves the public interest, holds up under scrutiny, and builds trust.

A truly exciting venture in many ways, but one that also raises a plethora of questions.

Tomorrow, the questions.

I can do this job

Sitting in Schat’s Bakery in downtown Ukiah, northern California. Visible through the window behind me is the Mendocino County Courthouse, an unimaginatively designed building constructed of concrete and plaster — solid materials for its solid function. Out of sight around the corner, my little Toyota sits, a half-inch of snow looking out of place on its California-reared body.

Waiting for the other members of my writing group (we call ourselves The Vaguerants: vaguely ranting peripatetic scribes) to arrive, this past couple of hours, I’ve been applying via email for bottom of the typewriter newspaper reporter jobs. I’d stuffed a stack of them, printed out from JournalismJobs.com, into my backpack as I hurriedly gathered toothbrush and computer around two o’clock this afternoon — wanting to put the hour’s drive behind me before slushy roads became icy. Spending my life by the beach hasn’t prepared me too well for the other end of the climatic arc.

Scanning the job listings and deciding whether and how to apply becomes a rote process. "Knowledge of AP Style" — no but I can fake it; "Bachelor’s degree required" — have that, although German Language & Literature is not quite the same as Communications; "some writing experience" — yep, that I do have, although not much recently, unless you count a scattered trail of partially revised short stories; "photo skills" — yes! That I have unequivocally; "knowledge of Quark Express" — nope, never heard of it, but I learn fast; etc. etc.

Despite the fat green binder of Healdsburg Tribune articles with my name on the byline, I match up poorly on paper with many of the requirements, so how to convey my strengths? Obsessive accuracy with grammar, punctuation, syntax and spelling; fabulous vocabulary and scintillating deployment of verbs. (And I know the rules well enough to know when and how I can get away with bending them.) I can create a story from the driest facts that will capture — even captivate — the reader, that will cause "artsy" people to want to read a high school baseball report and jocks to read about a shoe repairman. Presented with a task for which I’ve not been trained, pride and utter determination propel me: not only will I not fail, I will do it well enough to earn me praise.

Kansas, Missouri, North Carolina — my emails disappear into the ether, bound for the in-boxes of editors across the nation.

Distractions

Taped to the wall beside the round table that serves as my desk is a piece of paper torn from a 5.5" x 8" note book. In light of certain angles, the jagged, ragged edges, where the paper formerly gripped the spiral binding, cast interesting shadows on the pale yellow wood of the wall. But that is a distraction unequal to the one that caused the paper to be put on the wall.

"DO NOT PLAY SOLITAIRE". I wrote that command at the bottom of the paper, in feeble attempt to counteract my brain’s compulsion for the challenge of nimble logic fed to it by Spider, FreeCell and –the version that must have originated in a gold mining town — Klondike.

The top two-thirds of that page is taken up by a list of six creative projects I want to give my time and energy to. Two of them have happy pink marks next to them — Yes! I did these! The other four (one of which reads: Blog) linger desolately, abandoned for the all-consuming, frustrating pleasure of free online solitaire.

There are no games on my computer. Several years ago (in an earlier, initially successful attempt at foiling my brain’s compulsion) I adopted and immediately instituted a policy of deleting all of the games from the hard drive of a new computer as soon as it landed in my hands (and was plugged in and turned on).

But, aha! That didn’t foil me for long. A couple of years later, driven by the persistence, perserverence and cunning that only reach their highest peaks of brilliance when engaged in pursuit of a detrimental goal, I found a site where I could play solitaire online for free.

So now, there are no games on the hard drive of my pretty new silver (with blue accents) Dell Inspiron 600m that arrived at my door two days ago, but tonight I’m happy because Spider, FreeCell and Klondike all fell beneath the superior skill and powerful logic of my brain — AND there’s a pretty pink mark next to "Blog". (As soon as I post this.)