Thursday is ... Wait, Is It still Thursday?
Yeah. Work's had my head spinning. All good stuff, but I've been pretty much enslaved to my desk for the last week or so, getting the new project up and running. And now it's here! Starting today, the Telegram will be publishing the its Pop Culture Notebook! It's just a little thing, really ... a way to catch stories that are buzzing in the arts & entertainment world, but which aren't really being covered on the wires, or to localize national stories by getting local artists to chime in, or to just pick up interesting bits from the local scene that we might not otherwise be able to get in the paper. The Notebook will update daily Mondays through Friday, and starting next week will be digested in Friday's paper. Right now, I'm writing it all, but hopefully soon there will be contributions from the rest of the Telegram staff. So far, it's been a lot of fun, and hopefully, as it finds its voice, it'll give us a useful tool to do a lot of things regarding arts coverage that we've not been able to do before. So that's nice. So please, by all means, if there's something that should be in there, drop me a line backchannel. (But not press releases for upcoming local shows. Keep sending them to submissions@telegram.com. Because if they don't go there, they'll probably not end up in the calendar, which decreases the odds that anyone will think to write about them. And then you'll be sad.)
Also today was the second installment of Scott Croteau's "American Idol" lunchtime chat. A lot of people thought it was odd that a crime reporter would want to do that sort of thing, but you know? In the current newsroom environment, everyone's got to be prepared to mix up what they cover, and how they cover it. Flexibility's the name of the game, and Scott's been doing a great job with this.
In our other arts stuff, I talk bluegrass and duende with legendary local musician and journalist, Paul Della Valle, and Craig talks up the new album by Worcester's eclectic rockers, the Bee's Knees. In TWSN, we have recs for Crystal Bowersox, James Montgomery, Jimmy Tingle, the "Salient Point" art exhibit and the RPM Puppet Conspiracy. And in our "People, Places, Things" page, which runs on Page A2, we had, among other bits, an AP item on the White House Poetry Reading and the flap about Common being invited to perform. On the Web version this morning, we added the video for Common's "Testify," which is a thing we're trying to do more of these days. "Add value," as the people with marketing degrees would say, I suppose. I don't know from marketing, though. If I did, I'd probably not be working in news. I just think it's a good idea to put videos up on the Web so readers can get a taste of the music being discussed. Indeed, somewhere in the links above is hidden a video for Bruce Springsteen's "Human Touch."!
Oh, and on the Common flap -- and it really was a flap -- we'll have a bit more in tomorrow's Pop Culture Notebook, but did anyone else see that Bob Holman was quoted in the AP story linked to above? Go, Bob!
Also today was the second installment of Scott Croteau's "American Idol" lunchtime chat. A lot of people thought it was odd that a crime reporter would want to do that sort of thing, but you know? In the current newsroom environment, everyone's got to be prepared to mix up what they cover, and how they cover it. Flexibility's the name of the game, and Scott's been doing a great job with this.
In our other arts stuff, I talk bluegrass and duende with legendary local musician and journalist, Paul Della Valle, and Craig talks up the new album by Worcester's eclectic rockers, the Bee's Knees. In TWSN, we have recs for Crystal Bowersox, James Montgomery, Jimmy Tingle, the "Salient Point" art exhibit and the RPM Puppet Conspiracy. And in our "People, Places, Things" page, which runs on Page A2, we had, among other bits, an AP item on the White House Poetry Reading and the flap about Common being invited to perform. On the Web version this morning, we added the video for Common's "Testify," which is a thing we're trying to do more of these days. "Add value," as the people with marketing degrees would say, I suppose. I don't know from marketing, though. If I did, I'd probably not be working in news. I just think it's a good idea to put videos up on the Web so readers can get a taste of the music being discussed. Indeed, somewhere in the links above is hidden a video for Bruce Springsteen's "Human Touch."!
Oh, and on the Common flap -- and it really was a flap -- we'll have a bit more in tomorrow's Pop Culture Notebook, but did anyone else see that Bob Holman was quoted in the AP story linked to above? Go, Bob!
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Oh, and then there's that other thing I do. Radius is still kicking along, with poems by Changming Yuan and Janet Barry. As always, more to come.
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