1. The Front-Page Mentality: All the most important stuff goes on the front page of a newspaper. But lookee here, on the web we can make our front pages as long and as big as we want! Let’s put all our important stuff on that front page! Make it huge! Yeah!
2. The Deadline-And-Its-Over Mentality (also known as “The Print-It-And-Its-Done Mentality”)
3. The It’s-Got-To-Be-As-Perfect-As-Possible-Before-It-Launches Mentality: This is a sister of “Deadline-And-Its-Over,” and it comes from years spent publishing information with a printing press. With a printing press, the only way to revise information that was published was to issue a correction, which was one of those Bad Things That You Did.
4. The We’re-The-Only-Game-In-Town Mentality: Competition was much easier when the competition was just radio, tv, maybe another daily. Now well … the entire internet is your competition. The.entire.internet. And, know what? There are some folk out there putting a whole heckuva lot more thought and effort into what it means to publish local information than you. Okay okay, that’s just a guess.
5. The Our-Content-Can-Only-Exist-In-One-Place Mentality: This takes a little explaining. A few of the print people doing online work who I’ve talked with about stuff say they have a hard time conceptualizing that an article headline link can be both on the home page of our site *and*, say, the opinion page section front.
6. The We-Don’t-Have-To-Listen-Unless-We-Want-To Mentality: This is a holdover from the days when the letters to the editor were the only place readers had a chance of sharing ink on a page with the professionals.

Got any more? Please, share:

1. You’re not afraid to type a URL in the address bar of a web browser.
2. You know what “URL,” “address bar,” and “web browser,” mean.
3. You’ve used a browser that doesn’t have “Explorer,” “MSN,” or “AOL” in its name.
4. You know how to copy and paste a URL (From the page you’re on or from a link on a page) into an email.
5. You know that “http://” goes at the start of every URL.
6. You know how to clear your browser cache without looking up instructions on the internet, and you understand which situations a clear-the-cache can fix.
7. You know how to (and you do) add commonly-used links to your browser link bar (you get half points if you use your browser’s “favorites” in horizontal sidebar).

It may be proof that there really is gold in them there articles. Probably not, though. The article is dead. Just look at the tree it was printed on.

Here are some of my favorite newspaper black-out poems:

• Agoraphobia
• Public Transportation
• YOU MUST HAVE A PLAN
• OVERHEARD ON THE TITANIC
• How to be an artist

Anyway, so I didn’t do as hot as I thought I would on those quizzes.

I got 53 HTML elements and 59 CSS properties. Beat that.

And if that doesn’t lead anywhere juicy, well heck, then they can go on and file a FOIA on grandpa.

The position will be in a secure location with all housing and food provided. Salary is very competitive with certain tax free benefits.

http://authenticjobs.com/jobs/978/

Spring: At the beginning

• How many times have you been to the park this month?
  ( I’m allergic to parks / 0 / 1 / 2 / 3-5 / 6-10 / 11+ / I don’t know )
• How many t-shirts have you worn this month?
  ( 0 / 1 / 2 / 3-5 / 6-10 / 11+ / I don’t know )
• Do you believe in spring cleaning?
  ( Yes / Kind of / Not really / No / Only if somebody else does it / I don’t know )

Spring: In the middle

• How many times have you gone out without a jacket this spring?
  ( 0 / 1 / 2 / 3-5 / 6-10 / 11+ / I don’t know )
• Does this weather make you skeptical of global warming?
  ( Yes! / Yes, a little / Maybe / Not really / Not at all / I don’t know )
• Does this weather make you skeptical of global warming?
  ( Yes! / Yes, a little / Maybe / Not really / Not at all / I don’t know )

Spring: At the end

• Looking forward to summer?
  ( Yeah! / Yes. / Maybe / No / No way! / I don’t know )

Spring: Just for fun

• Birds or bees?
  ( Birds! / Bees! / A little bit of both / I don’t know )

This is a goofy way to use newspaper content — it’s goofy, and it still means something. “Metaphor watch” is a theme that has come up before… I’m sure it’s possible to chart the rise and fall of the “perfect storm” metaphor in news articles…

Okay, and here’s the point: There’s gotta be more, worthwhile ideas out there like this. It’s “meta” stuff that papers can do with their content that (hopefully) give more context to their content.

» Visit Today’s Rock Stars

1. “Local” means it matters. Take advantage of it.
2. Newspapers harness and print tons of information. Do more with it.
3. There’s an amazing amount of information available in the community. It’s time to harness it, and then reward the community for participating.
4. If you’re not interacting with your audience, you’re not building much loyalty.
5. If you have an advertising-focused registration system, you’re not building much loyalty either.
6. The article is a decent way to tell a story on paper, but it falls way short online.
7. If a local tv news station’s web site gets more traffic than yours, you’ve got serious problems. Start building community now. Already building community? Start rewarding participation.
8. If your workflow still involves online employees cutting-and-pasting the night away, replicating work already done on the print side, that ain’t acceptable! Fix it! Now!
9. The longer you hang out with inadequate content management systems, the more you become like them. Inadequate.