The continuing adventures of Beau Yarbrough
Full coverage the Las Flores fire can be found here:
I was only out at the fire a few hours, and my throat is still hurting and my eyes still burning. (Not to mention every inch of me smells like a campfire.) I can’t imagine how career firefighters are able to handle much more prolonged exposure to smoke and fire on a regular basis.
Now, this is a cool Web site: Image Archive: Top 100.
Of course, they just make me pissed that I was born a century or more too early, but I don’t imagine anyone gets to choose what age they’re born into.
As you might remember (those handful of you who care), last year, the Hesperia Star staff took over management of the content of the site at the same time as we added categories to make it easier for readers to find stories and allowed comments on each story.
Part of the goal was to make for a better experience for users — it was closer to the site I’d make, if I were making a site from scratch — but part of it was also to get our Web hits up, which after working at CBR, the 800-pound gorilla of the comic book industry on the Web, frankly sort of bothered me.
Well, it worked. While I don’t think I’m allowed to release exact figures, I just saw the site’s daily pageviews prior to switching over to the new system. Page hits had doubled by adding interactivity and usability to the site. So it wasn’t just what I wanted, it turns out that the readers responded to it as well. Hopefully the new site, which offers even more interactivity and usability, will have a similar response.
Speaking of the new site, it’s been patched to the next version of the program that runs everything, but the pages haven’t all been tweaked to take advantage of all the new bells and whistles. The current schedule is for the Star, the Daily Press and HighDesert.com to be fully belled and whistled by May 3.
As Marketplace pointed out yesterday, print isn’t dead, and reinvention is the name of the game. The Daily Press papers are currently kicking around some redesign ideas, from the papers’ logos through how they deliver news. Look for more on this later this year.
Like a lot of people who liked the old school Mustangs, I was thrilled a few years ago when Ford suddenly realized “hey, maybe they shouldn’t look like Ford Escorts with spoilers and airdams” and restyled the cars to look more like the classic models.
Now, I’ve never owned a Mustang (I’ve owned a succession of Honda Civics and one ill-fated Hyundai Accent), but these new cars got my attention, as classic Mustangs have for years.
In my case, it all goes back to a Matchbox car I got when I was in elementary school in Virginia.
And, indeed, it’s because of this Matchbox car that, if I got a 2008 or 2009 Mustang (there will be lots of expenses and other complications between now and then to account for first), I might actually break my no-yellow-cars rule and get one that evoked this old toy, even if it didn’t have a supercharger and so on.
Wildly impractical, I know. It’s just a gas-guzzling pipe dream at the moment.
The first few winners of 2006 SPJ Excellence in Journalism award winners have begun to be announced over on the SPJ message board. Bill Norris has begun to publish the names as they come in from the judges.
As usual, the Riverside Press-Enterprise has seemingly half the awards to themselves, but the Hesperia Star, Daily Press and Desert Dispatch have staff members who have picked up awards as well, and no doubt more folks’ names will be added to the list in the next week or two as well.
Oops.
As journalistic windfalls go this is about as good as it gets. There I was writing a story about how Microsoft is on the cutting edge of using the Internet to become more transparent, and there in front of me are the briefing documents they are using to manage the story. The timing was so fortuitous that I wondered whether it was intentional. When I told Microsoft about it, they convincingly told me it was not.
But after I was done reading all 5,500 words I no longer felt elated at the prospect of an interesting scoop. I felt downright peculiar. I’ve been a journalist for more than 20 years and always assumed that the people I interview do as much homework on me as I do on them. So the existence of a document like this didn’t surprise me. But that still didn’t make it any easier to read lines like, “It takes him a bit to get his point across so try to be patient.” I know my long-windedness drives my wife nuts occasionally. I didn’t know it had become an issue for Microsoft’s pr machine too.
I’d be scared to see such a dossier on me. I’d read it, of course. I’d just have sweaty palms while doing so.
A while back, the Washington Post called Peter to talk to him about working at small newspapers. At long last, the article is online:
The combined circulation of all U.S. newspapers in the six months ended Sept. 30 was down 2.8 percent from the comparable period in 2005, according to the Newspaper Association of America. By comparison, the combined circulation in the small-newspaper group was down 2.1 percent.
If that seems like cold comfort at best, consider this: Of the 413 papers in the small-newspaper group, 105 of them — 25 percent — gained circulation over the year, faring better than any other circulation group.
Lee Enterprises, based in Davenport, Iowa, for example, owns 56 daily papers and more than 300 small weeklies and other publications. Three of its papers have a circulation of more than 100,000 — including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch — but the rest of its dailies are much smaller, averaging about 26,000 each.
Over the past five years, the circulation gains at Lee papers have outpaced the industry average; some of the gains came from acquisitions, but much came from the growth of the group’s existing papers. Over the past two decades, the company’s stock price has likewise gone in the opposite direction of large-newspaper stock, climbing steadily from less than $10 a share in 1988 to more than $30 a share today.
“We’re largely in markets . . . that have pretty good local economies, a strong sense of place and strong newspaper readership,” said Mary E. Junck, Lee’s chairman and chief executive. Another advantage: “Many of our markets are pretty homogenous and tightknit,” she said, making it easier to pin down and target readership.
The small-newspaper division of Freedom Communications generated a 30 percent profit in 2006, up 5 percent from 2005. By comparison, a very successful large newspaper typically returns about 20 percent annually.
“In many of our smaller communities, we are the only game in town if you want to reach targeted households,” said Freedom chief executive Scott N. Flanders.
No quotes from Peter, alas, but an article well worth a read despite that.
Coverage of Hesperia in the past week from sources other than the Hesperia Star: