Peoria Pundit

I wasn’t all that enthused when I first heard of The Printed Blog. Now, I am sure of it.

Printed on eight, thick, glossy, white pages, each one about two-thirds the size of a broadsheet newspaper page, it is a substantial physical artifact. It seems so expensively assembled, I can imagine deciding not to pick one up because it really should go to someone with enough time to do it justice.

More important, describing the content as a hodgepodge is charitable. There are good pieces (”It’s Time To Shut Up About Cupcakes”), bad pieces (”Pugslee Atomz Keeps It Real”) and a lot of so-so pieces. But what’s missing is much sense of a guiding sensibility, unless you tally up the four sex articles, including the front-page one on a man whose wife wants to be tied up, etc.

Beyond that, posts on politics, blogging tips, music writing, security advice and sports help fill the pages in a layout resembling the wide-column, one-post-atop-another design of standard blogging tools.

Seriously, people. The goal is supposed to be to cure readers of their addiction to words on printed paper and onto the more efficient means of information distribution, the Internet. Taking stuff from the Internet where it originally appeared and running it unedited on paper seems a step backwards.

I sometimes watch those blooper shows — there are too many to remember them all — and wonder why some of these people didn’t burn the tape.

And here comes this guy, and the company he HIRED to film his commercials let this thing get posted on the Intertubes.

Peace out, Mike.

Via the Record Eagle:

TRAVERSE CITY — Ten staff members were let go at TV 7&4 as its parent company reported an “extremely challenging” business climate due to the economic downturn.

Nine full-time staffers, including some on-air positions, and one part-time job were eliminated by the local NBC affiliate this week, station president and CEO Jill Saarela said Friday. The station is owned by Barrington Broadcasting Group LLC based in Hoffman Estates, Ill.

Several people emailed me with links to this article from CNN:

Suddenly, this city’s motto rings hollow: “It’s Better Here” doesn’t match the mood in a place where the recession hit late but is now hitting hard.

“I just felt, I thought I couldn’t lose with this company” is how Chris Gwynn described his motivation for moving his wife and two children to Peoria from Las Vegas, Nevada.

There was a job waiting at Caterpillar, the 80-year-old heavy equipment giant, and “It was a company that you could just retire with, great pension, retirement, 401 and so on.”

Gwynn is one of 20,000 workers Caterpillar will shed by the end of the first quarter of 2009, a decision the company announced this week. The company says the job cuts are necessary because of a decline in orders that it attributed to the U.S. and global recession.

Now, Gwynn is enrolled at classes at Central Illinois College, grateful his wife has a full-time job at a local call center, and was nervously waiting to find out not if but when his last day would be.

I’m sorry for Grwynn and his wife.

I’m annoyed that the writer of this article thinks “It’s Better Here,” is the city’s motto. It’s not. It’s the name of a public service ad campaign that features the mayors of other cities as well. And he got the name of Illinois Central College wrong too.  That’s two fact errors in the top five paragraphs.

Robert Heinlein once wrote that every single time he read a newspaper of magazine article about a event in which he participated, the article would get the facts wrong to some degree. I think some of this is due to different perceptions. But it also points one think that lessens the public’s trust in journalists. The cure is transparency and mechanisms that let the public comment on and make corrections, something that’s not available on this particular CNN page.

At least he didn’t use the “Will it play in Peoria” cliche.

Since you are reading this, you should know that the site upgrade went well.

I swore a couple dozen times at Comcast, since they seemed intent on giving me the lowest cable Internet connection known to mankind.

I’ve eyeballed a dozen member blogs, and all seems to be well.

Unless you are a registered and logged in member, you won’t notice many changes. Members will notice they can use Buddy Press to communicate in many ways with other Blog Peoria Project member. New plugins will allow then to easily pass along links to other member blogs, and keep track up new posts and comments all across the Blog Peoria site.

One of the new features is that is allows for captioning of photos, which I am going to attempt here:

Kevin Connolly is still recovering from the "trauma" of filming a love scene with Hollywood siren Scarlett Johansson, because he perspired so much preparing for his big moment.

Yeah, Kevin. I’d sweat too. But not over this upgrade.

As you can, hopefully, tell by this post, the upgrade to WordPress Mu 2.7 went very well.

I took advantage of the ease of the upgrade to go ahead and install BuddyPress.

It’s too late in the night and I’m too tired to want to give members a tutorial. So, I’m just going to ask member bloggers to click the links in their admin bar or in their dashboards and add a detail or two to their BuddyPress profile.

The upgrade of the Blog Peoria Project site is in progress. That means a full site backup is underway. Any post, comment or change to settings will MIGHT not carry over.if there is a problem with the upgrade. Be warned.

You know, I’m not old enough to remember some of this technology. And I never saw reporters wearing those kinda hats, let alone a suit and tie to work every single day.

But I do remember newspapers that smelled like hot wax and stale newsprint, and when there were people yelling “Copy!” (even when it was to go get coffee) and were you could hear the clacking of typewriters.

Those us us who remember newsrooms before they started to resemble insurance offices will get a warm glow from this video:

Here we go again:

Like a zombie that just won’t die, the DTV delay bill—which was voted down by the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday—has sprung back to life, with a little help from the Senate.Reuters reports that a second bill—”essentially” a twin of the defeated House bill, which sought to push the Feb. 17 shutoff of analog TV signals back to June 12—won unanimous support from the Senate on Thursday, and may end up shambling its way back to the House next week.

Listen to me on this folks. I KNOW what I’m talking about here. The reality is that IT IS GOING TO HAPPEN. Too much money has been invested. Indeed, all of Peoria’s stations have announced they are ending analog broadcasts anyway whether the deadline is moved.

Congress is worried that poor people cannot afford to buy the digital converters. Why? Because the federal government ran out of the money allocated to give out coupons that drastically reduced the price. Why? Well, because the TV stations did such a good job scaring and in some cases misinforming viewers, every over-nervous senior citizen in America went and got a coupon, sometimes multiple coupons, and bought these converters. They did this even if they already owned digital ready televisions and/or use cable television.

So who doesn’t have these converters?

1. People who don’t need them.
2. People who are too stupid to pay attention to the constant, never-ending parade of commercials warning them that they MIGHT need one.
3. People who paid attention, but didn’t bother lifting so much as a finger because they’ve learned through experience that the Nanny State will protect them.

And it looks like group No. 3 is right. Congress can mail these damn coupons to every home in America, there is still that No. 2 group that will no NOTHING until they see the fuzzy screen. Then they will run screaming to Wal-Mart or and pester the support desk of their television manufacturer.

People are idiots. Congress can pander to these morons, but legislation won’t change this simple fact.

Considering I’ve blogged about it, I’ve been remiss in mentioning that GateHouse Media and the New York Times settled out of court on the issue of whether a Web site owned by the NYT can scrape the content of GateHouse newspapers and put in on a competing Web site.

Critics of GateHouse Media was out of their minds with indignation that a media company would object to anyone linking to the content. Others, myself includes, actually looked at the site the NYT had put up and concluded what they were doing wasn’t simply linking or making fair comment, but using GateHouse content to comprise the content of their own portal page. Since both companies sell ads on competing portal pages targeting the same readers in the same geographic area, I could see why GateHouse would object.

Just as they were about to go to court, they settled. the NYT agreed to stop it. GateHouse agreed to stop suing the NYT. In other words, GateHouse won. The people who criticized GateHouse for wanting to end links (which is bull) were happy because they thought it averted a catastrophe for the Internet.

I’m printing the memo GateHouse sent to employees in the New England area. Read more »