Between Purgatory and Paradise

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Originally uploaded by scully65

MIDDLETOWN, RI __ Ever since I've arrived in Rhode Island, the irony of this sign post has always haunted me.

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Dropping the Paper

MIDDLETOWN, RI __ So, after a 100 years of publishing, The Christian Science Monitor announced this week that its moving almost entirely online. Starting in April, the daily print edition of the paper will be phased out and replaced with a Sunday weekly magazine; the hard news will be moved to the online paper.

Now, for the better part of two years, I've been saying that this is the future of the daily news industry simply because the expense of daily newspapering has become too prohibitive. I mean, consider the costs: The circulation costs alone must be out of sight. And, what's odd, is the simple fact that most daily newspapers read like "old news" simply because most of us have seen the news online or on television.

Of course, I'm a little nervous for the CSM. After all, it's turning its back on 100-years of tradition and the romantic in me would like to believe there may still be a place for great daily newspapering. Still, the CSM is making a very brave move that will either put it back in favor with its audience or will place it the road to oblivion. Either way, I'm curious to see how this -- the great experiment -- unfolds.

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Police Ride-Alongs

BRISTOL, RI __ Nine weeks into the semester here at Roger Williams University, I finally sent my students from my Writing for Mass Media class out into the field to do some features. I told them I wanted them to find a local police department and do a "ride-along" with one of the officers.

Now, here in the East Bay we have a handful of jurisdictions including Barrington, Bristol, Middletown, Newport, Portsmouth, Providence, Tiverton and Warren. I also told them they could choose to meet with fire fighters, ambulance workers and U.S. Coast Guard folks if they so desired.

All 40 of my students scattered in a variety of directions. To its credit, the Portsmouth Police Department easily hosted 10 to 12 students. The U.S. Coast Guard also took a half-dozen of my students out into the field too. Tiverton said "no" summarily and Bristol was distant and stand-offish. Even Providence was more accommodating than Bristol and Tiverton. On this point, I was disappointed at least with the local folks.

The method here: Most of us only encounter police officers after we've been pulled over for speeding. I didn't want this to be the first encounter for my would-be journalists. Instead, sending them out on ride-alongs, they get to see -- first hand -- what it takes to be a police officer and -- more importantly -- they realize that cops are people too. The assignment has real value and I want to say thank you to every officer who participated in this drill. I promise, your good work was not in vain.

As for the essays: They're due on Monday and I remain hopeful. So far, the students are coming back THRILLED with the experience. And that's what it's all about anyway, right?

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Riding the Waves in Rhode Island

MIDDLETOWN, RI __ At Second Beach this morning, at least one surfer braved the 40-degree weather and wandered out into the low tide to ride the waves. I pulled out the Canon Vixia HF-10, set it on cinema mode and shot it at PF30 and aimed it out over the water.

I shot some beauty shots of the surfer, the landscape, St. George's School for the Boys, and other beach scenes. Second Beach is a wonderful place to shoot video because the morning sun comes at it from a profile and lights up Purgatory Point with bright white light. I used the point as a backdrop for the surfing shots.



Now, my shooting and editing certainly leaves a lot to be desired but I'm learning.

The music is "Chinese Checkers" by Booker T and the MG's. It really has no relevance to surfing. I mean, the only lyric in the song is "Yo Hoove!" which I think is terminally cool. Still, the sound of Booker's Hammond Organ echoes of that 1960s trash surf music, so I think it does have some play.

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Wind Power Project

PORTSMOUTH, RI __ I turned up a half-hour early for a meeting and, while standing in the parking lot, was surprised to see this huge wind turbine looming overhead. Inspired, I pulled out my Canon HG-10 and began shooting beauty shots of the wind machine.

To do this, I mounted the camera on a tripod, attached a polarizer and a lens magnifier and aimed it at the tower. At one point, I got very lucky and caught a shot of a flock of birds flying by the tower, which added some brief drama to the shoot.



The music is "Porcelain" by Moby. I hope he doesn't mind that I'm using this audio for educational purposes.

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Facebook Fan

MIDDLETOWN, RI __ I was teaching at SUNY New Paltz when I first heard my students chattering about Facebook, an online networking community that, at the time, was a domain exclusive to college students. Because I was a communications professor, I yielded to my students' encouragement and joined Facebook using my SUNY New Paltz email address. That was 2004.

Here it is, four years later, and I've learned quite a bit about the value of the Facebook culture. Basically, it allows us, as individuals, to manage more friendships at one time.

I think the affect has what I describe a five-fold value: When all we had was the telephone, I could manage roughly FIVE very good friendships at one time. By manage, I mean, I had time to call each of these friends on a regular basis and share details from my life.

When email came along, that had a five-fold affect on the volume. When I got my first personal email address in 1996, suddenly, I was managing at least 25 friendships simply because the dialog didn't have to happen at the same time. Instead, I'd write; they'd respond; I'd write again. That ease of timing, coupled with the at-your-fingertips culture, allowed me to have 25 strong friendships.

And then along came Facebook: When I registered in 2004, many of my students "friended" me in the community. With that, every time they changed something on their profile, regarding pictures, "relationship status" and so forth, I could -- passively -- follow the progress of their lives.

This passivity: This self-scripted Internet digest allowed each of us to offer constant biographies of our lives. Again, the five-fold effect took place, and now I'm following the progress of at least 125 friends, at least passively. Through these updates, I know what my friend Arik is doing in New York; I know what my friend Lesley is doing in Schenectady; and I know what my friend Jim is doing in Washington. This -- in spite of the fact that I haven't spoken with any of them in months, maybe years.

The result, of course, is community... and the community is growing. A few months ago, Facebook opened the doors to anyone, and now old high school friends (people I haven't thought of since -- ack! -- 1983) are contacting me to simply ask how I'm doing. In many ways, I feel like my old high school yearbook sprung to life, walked onto my front doorstep and is now asking questions through the screen door.

"How you doing? How's it going? What ever happen to?"

You get the idea.

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More Video Play

MIDDLETOWN, RI __ Roger Williams University is gearing up for a big video project and I decided I needed to work on my shooting techniques ahead of any major project. As part of that, I picked up my Canon HG-10 and walked down to Easton Beach at sunset just to see if I could find something to shoot.

Before I got to the beach, I realized the seagulls were swarming the sky and fishing at low tide. So, I shot that. Here's a peek.



Love it? Hate it? Let me know. I need the criticism.

Finally, special thanks to Sonia Dada for their amazing work.

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Visiting Pawlywood

PAWTUCKET, RI __ I'm just back from Pawtucket and an hour-long walk through Hasbro's Cake Mix Studios operation. Let me begin with this: WOW.

Two years ago, Hasbro decided it wanted to consolidate all of its video production facilities and relocated them here to Rhode Island. They did this after the run-away success of the Transformer's movie which was co-produced by Steven Spielberg and Hasbro.

The result of this initiative is the Cake Mix Studios which is located in Pawtucket, RI. The purpose of this Hasbro division is to produce video commercials and short-form and long-form video programming for television, cinema and the Internet. Right now, Hasbro is producing 60 commercials a year, using local actors, producers and other talent.

This is what I saw:

Hasbro took the old Koosh assembly line and transformed it into a state-of-the-art full-on production facility. At the heart of the facility is a television production studio that's roughly 50-feet by 100-feet with a 50-foot-high ceiling. The room is sound proofed and has become the heart of all their productions. When they're filming commercials, for example, they'll build a tiny living room set with hallways and so forth and film it all in-house.

They also use the space to shoot little video projects, each with a cross-promotional link to one of the Hasbro toys. Again, this is all shot on location.

Example of the use: They wanted to shoot video of their Tonka trucks rolling over mounds of dirt... so, instead of shooting it outside, they shot it all INSIDE. They brought the dirt in, placed it down over a specially treated floor, painted the walls green (for a green screening affect) and brought the lights down from the ceiling and lit it all. The affect was nearly flawless.

Once the video is shot, they move all the data to a centralized server and then upload that data to individual editing stations around the Studio.

Other stuff: They also have a MUSIC lab where they're recording and editing audio tracks including voice overs and music. They do this to avoid all the sticky licensing troubles that come along with commercial music.

What it means: The Internet is changing the structure of the commercial communications industries. Newspapers are dying, the music industry is struggling with free downloads, and soon Hollywood is going to have to begin fending off these regional production shops.

Hasbro says its only shooting content for its own product lines. Still, the impact is clear: Hasbro is building -- on some level -- a fertile video production presence here in Rhode Island. As part of that, they hired a dozen or so child-actors and they're building content.

And Cake Mix Studios is attracting interest from other Fortune 500 companies: Basically, if Hasbro can do it, why can't some of the other big companies -- Staples, Gillette, Dunkin' Donuts -- in the region?

Could Pawtucket become Pawlywood?

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Columbus Day

MIDDLETOWN, RI __ Here it is: Columbus Day.

Columbus Day is really one of the last warm three-day weekends of the year here in the Northeast. In Rhode Island, the weather came to us fair and warm and Aquidneck Island is swarming with visitors who came, not only by land, but sea. There were two rather large cruise ships in the harbor Friday and Saturday.

On the History Channel today, I sat through a two-hour pseudo-documentary about Christopher Columbus and his so-called "Lost Voyage." The story really is a sad tale of failure and broken dreams.

Of course, we all know the story of his first voyage where he landed in what is now modern-day Haiti and confirmed the European presence in the Americas. Many historians will tell you that the Leif Ericson and the Vikings arrived centuries before and considered the presence here common place. Now, there's a new competing theory that the Chinese struck out from Asia and actually made all the way to New England in 1421.

All this has the historians reconsidering the Columbus legacy. Did he "discover" America? Or did he simply confirm its existence for the Mediterranean Europeans? Clearly, it seems that Columbus's global and historic image is constantly under attack.

Now, he was certainly a spotty guy. His second and third voyages were about imperialism in the name of the Spanish thrown. When he arrived, again, in Haiti, he established Santa Domingo and then proceeded to terrorize both the colonists and the natives. Hauled away in chains, he actually made his way back into favor with the Spanish crown and was granted a fourth and final voyage.

On this one, he was looking for a water route that he believed connected the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Instead, he sailed through four tropical storms, got bogged down in Panama, fought with the natives and finally found himself shipwrecked on Jamaica. When he was finally rescued, he actually had to pay for his and his crews' safe passage back to Santa Domingo.

He died two years later -- at 55 -- and was promptly forgotten for 300 years, or so says the History Channel historians.

So here we are, now in 2008, staring down his legacy again and contemplating his significance. I'm unsure how I feel about the recent and sustained debate. For me, Columbus Day has always been on my calendar, along with Memorial Day and Labor Day and Thanksgiving. Each is a secular American holiday, and maybe -- based solely on that argument -- it's worth preserving.

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I Blog Therefore I Am

MIDDLETOWN, RI __ I created this Blog back in May 2007, and I've been writing on it with some regularity. I figure I average roughly 25 visits a day depending upon the subject of the day. I've also discovered that my older posts -- on the Flip Video and other cameras -- are constantly attracting visitors who are curious about these tools.

That said, I still don't feel like my Blog is much of a success. Instead, I find myself waiting for "critical mass," a day when there is a systemic surge in my readership. Of course, you never know what will trigger that sort of response.

Last night, I wrote about my car and added a list of tag words that must of hit some of the search engines the right way because, within 20 minutes, I had 80 visitors from around the world. Again, I have no idea who and what they were looking for... but I picked up at least one new subscriber.

As for the mindset of the Blogger: If the Internet is the digital town square, Blogging is how we inject our voices into the public dialog. For now, the Blogging experience is still failing. Sure there are occasional success stories about people landing massive audiences because of their content; but, for now, the Internet is polluted with scores and scores of Blogs and most probably share my traffic numbers: Twenty or so (family and friends) a day, I imagine.

But I also think this is changing. A few months ago, I wrote about Hurricane Gustav as it made its way towards the Gulf Coast and CNN, which uses a Blog search engine called Sphere, placed a link to my Blog on its news site and I got a 50 or so hits in an hour. I think it's just a matter of time before these networking initiatives sear the Blogging universe together and -- boom! -- the Blogging culture will be legitimized.

In the meantime, I'm discovering that there all sorts of wonderful, thoughtful things being posted on the Internet.

My friend Katheryne has a Blog cleverly entitled "Marbury v. Madison Avenue," which is a pun on the first real Supreme Court case "Marbury v. Madison." Anyway, she tends to write about the things going on in her life including her career, her marriage and her young daughter. The writing is refreshingly candid, smart, funny and thoughtful.

This week, she crafted a list of life rules, which I thought was very lucid and smart:

1. Make your life good;
2. Invest in what’s real;
3. Cook a meal for someone you love;
4. Pause before reacting;
5. Clean out your space;
6. Read something beautiful;
7. Treat yourself to something;
8. Go to a city you’ve never been to;
9. Learn something new;
10. Don’t be lazy;
11. Workout and stick to it;
12. GOOP (a reference to Gwyneth Paltrow's blog);
13. Make it great.

It's these little gems of wisdom that make it all worth while.

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Burning the Carbon Out

THE METROPLEX __ It's Columbus Day weekend and we were blessed with a little brief Indian Summer weather, so I fired up my little sports rod and pointed it towards central Connecticut for a brief professional visit.

To get there, I snaked down Rhode Island Route-138 to Interstate-95. As expected, the holiday traffic was teeming the minute I crossed from Rhode Island into Connecticut (the land of the under-powered Toyota Rav4).

Now, I have to confess that it's been months since I'd gotten behind the wheel of my 2002 Mercedes C230 for a little high-speed pleasure cruise. Sure, I've been dashing around Aquidneck Island, and occasionally, I've been J-hooking through Massachusetts for a brief sprint down Route-24. But this trip was truly about dropping the hammer and letting the machine just cruise.

Of course, when I bought the car, I knew what was getting. Mercedes put two engines in this car: there's a weanie little 1.8 engine and then a bigger 2.4 liter. When I went shopping, I went looking for the 2.4 liter, with the supercharged engine and that's what I bought.


What I noticed about this car was the fact that while it is rather quick off the line, the real muscle comes when I get on it and hustle it from 55 mph up to 80 mph. This is when the car -- which I call the White Shark -- really shows its muscle.

Today, the White Shark did not disappoint. With the windows open and the radio playing loudly, I punched it just as I crossed into Connecticut and let it all hang out. At one point -- and forgive this confession -- I looked down to see I was topping out at over 90 mph. Now, I wouldn't advise anyone to drive this way... but... yeah... I just needed to burn the carbon out of my system... and that felt GOOOOOOOD.

QED

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ProJo Cuts Jobs

MIDDLETOWN, RI _ Being attached to the news industry, rumors from the regional newsrooms tend to gravitate in my direction. One of the more fertile rumors was about The Providence Journal laying off newsroom staff. Yesterday, The Editor & Publisher finally confirmed those changes.

Announced on September 24th, the ProJo began purging full- and part-time newsroom members probably in an effort to groom the bottom line. The E&P says 31 folks are destined for the unemployment line.


Clearly, newspapering is dying but I'm often surprised by the steps newspapers are taking to ease the pressures. These ProJo layoffs are typical of the industry response: Kill the quality of the content just as long as the support departments -- classifieds, advertising and circulation -- keep the bandwagon rolling in cash.

As for the other rumors spilling out of the ProJo:

1. There was a battle among the management these last few weeks to discontinue offering the zoned editions -- which offer local, local content to the readership -- of the paper. This week was supposed to be the end of it; but clearer heads prevailed and the zoned editions are still with us... at least for the timing being. There's now chatter about offering the zoned editions on Thursdays only.

2. There's talk of giving the ProJo a total facelift: As early as January, the ProJo could be transformed from a broadsheet paper into a tabloid. What this means: The paper will stop looking like The Boston Globe and will begin looking like The Boston Herald. The idea here is to save money in printing costs. Still -- phew -- what a huge change!

Of course all this is related to the bottom line: Now, I've also heard rumors of the profit margins for newspapers: Typically, the management -- according to the industry buzz -- will skim 30-percent off the top as profit. I'm unsure how true that figure is. If it's accurate, the margin is obscene. In a better world, the publisher should be taking that money and reinvesting it in Research and Development (which can later be written off as an R&D tax credit).

Yes, sure, the newspaper industry is at least 400 years old, but with the introduction of the Internet, everything has changed. The library scientists are comparing the impact of the Internet to the seismic cultural changes caused when the printing press was perfected (read: the birth of mass media circulation of the Bible and the subsequent Protestant Reformation). You'd think the news industry would consider rethinking itself.

So far, the efforts on the part of the traditional press have been dire. For now, most are taking content from the traditional medium and are placing that on line. Some are adding photos from the archives; others are experimenting with video. No one has figured it out.

As far as I can tell, all they've determined is that the economics have changed... radically. I'm on record here saying that the cost of traditional media is 13-times more expensive than Digital Journalism. I maintain that that fact is still true.

And while the publishers haven't figured the exact impact of the change, they are certainly dealing with the disparity: They're hacking away at the overhead. Unfortunately, every time you fire a newsroom worker, you reduce the quality of the content.

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Red Tide

NEWPORT, RI __ I've been walking down to First Beach just about every evening just to watch the surf splash down over the sand. It's the off season, so the beaches are almost nearly empty, save for the seagulls.

I've also noticed that the Red Tide has gotten especially heavy. If you don't know, Red Tide is an algae that flowers in coastal areas saturated with nitrogen runoff. Basically, because Aquidneck is farmland, the nitrogen fertilizers used in the planting season tend to run off into Narragansett Bay after heavy rains. As a result, this red algae flowers and then washes ashore staining anything.

Last summer, I swam in a little of it, and these little curls of red seaweed stick to everything. When it falls on the beach, it forms this red seaweed mat that sticks to everything.



During my walk today, I pulled my Flip Video out of my pocket and shot two minutes of raw footage. You'll notice the ocean breezes blowing over the diaphragm of the camera; please forgive the white noise.

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The Feed Reports on Hawking the Vote

BRISTOL, RI __ This week, the Feed reports on Hawk the Vote, a voter-registration initiative on the Roger Williams University campus ahead of the November general election.

Voting for Obama?
Voting for McCain?
Voting for Pat Paulson? (You know who you are!)

You have until Friday to register here on campus.

"I've upped my standards. Now, up yours."

-- Pat Paulson

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Thoughts on Daily Newspapering

BRISTOL, RI __ There's been some confusion on the campus here at Roger Williams University about my thoughts on the future of newspapering. Although I think I've been quite clear on these points, I'm going to take a moment here to clarify my thinking.



I think that the future of DAILY newspapering is dire. In fact, I think it's just a matter of time before a large urban daily decides to simply put itself out of business and leave their host community without a daily newspaper read. The industry is really that bad.

That said, I think the future of newspapering is going to be with the WEEKLIES. I think that weekly newspapers are going to continue to flourish simply because they're doing all the right things: They're covering local issues and they're writing for a local audience. Two things the big dailies can no longer to because they don't have the staffs to perform properly.

Finally, I think that television is growing but it's also changing. It's becoming more localized simply because it's gotten cheaper to produce and edit and publish. I also think that DIGITAL journalism is the future.

Soon, and for a very long time, I suspect most daily news content will move from the print vehicle to the online site. Ideally, that daily newspaper would be transformed into a weekly, offering more in depth reporting and analysis.

QED

Those are my beliefs.

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