Friends and family: See if you can spot the family member in this video… No idea who was shooting it – I saw a Sentinel photog, but didn’t see the GL2 if he was carrying it.
SENTINEL VIDEO: Halloween – Downtown Santa Cruz – Sentinel Multimedia
Downtown Santa Cruz yesterday in daylight hours, among throngs of candy-seeking children and stroller-pushing parents (notably, myself, the wife, and our neighbors).
I’m the one in the funny hat.
Last year, this costume was quite a bit less baby-friendly.
I’m happy to announce that on Monday I’ll be showing up for my first day of work at Gatehouse Media in Fairport, New York.
I’ll be working with Howard Owens, Bill Blevins, an awesome team of developers and designers, and many more talented folks. (Yes, I will try to pull that remembering-all-your-names on the first try trick again, but O’Hare-induced sleep deprivation may have played a role on my last trip out to Fairport.) My role will be helping many of Gatehouse’s smallest papers give their readers the best online local news experience possible.
For those of you keeping score, yes, this means that I’m leaving my post at the Santa Cruz Sentinel. I can’t thank everyone I’ve worked with at the Sentinel enough, so I won’t try to here. I’m proud of what we put into place in the past year, all difficult circumstances aside. This is a hard business to be in right now in many towns, and the people I’ve been working with know it firsthand, not as some abstract link in an industry blog.
To answer a few questions that keep coming up:
Conveniently enough, I’ll be in New York for a couple weeks, so I’ll be at the Networked Journalism Summit in NYC on October 10th. See you there, or in Fairport, or around town in Santa Cruz.
So we moved. And by “moved,” I mean we loaded our stuff into a truck and drove less than a mile to an apartment with more space, less drunk people throwing up next to our bedroom window (so far), and far more sanity all around us.
The state of our new living room as of a night or two ago:
Yes, we did this with a seven-week-old in our arms the whole time, for those of you taking notes.
Many thanks to all the friends who lent a hand or a back over the weekend.
And thanks to my bosses who resisted the urge to insist that I work today. (We sent an intern to the illegal fireworks at the beach with a video camera – I’m banking on greatness.) I can hear all the action from our dining room table, now that we live on a block that’s actually above sea level.
One of the fun parts about all this packing and piling has been reading Grapes of Wrath in the middle of it all. The Joads just got to California, and they’re hanging out by the river near Needles waiting for the sun to go down so they can cross the desert.
Our short trip wasn’t quite so dramatic, but it was worth it.
Happy Independence Day.
If posting gets a little light around here, it’s because a few projects are working their way toward completion. One is nearly finished (more on that within the next few weeks) and another I just made a big change to get started on in earnest. There’s a third that’s on hold for a few minutes, but I’m sure I’ll be picking it back up shortly.
Anyway, I’m sending you away so you come back for more, later, when things have settled down a little bit here on my overcrowded desk/desktop/brain/life:
That’s it for now. Go away. Come back later.
“About 10:30 tonight a copy editor will drop the last negative of the day down a chute to the pressroom and bang on the metal door to signal that the paper is ready to roll.”
This is the multimedia project I spent all week editing. The reporter recorded all the audio over the last two months. It’s not fancy, but the pieces fit together pretty well. Feedback is welcome…
I’ve been working with a reporter for the last couple months to help him put together a set of multimedia projects to run with his centerpiece in today’s paper.
Here’s the proverbial fruits of our labor: two audio slideshows, a video, and a podcast, all complementing his print stories by taking us behind the numbers (standardized test scores in this case) and into classrooms and homes to find out what a local school (and a community) is doing to deal with the consequences of falling behind under No Child Left Behind.
No, there’s no big Flash interface with a green chalkboard background and a cool navigation scheme. Maybe next time. For now, I’ve been focusing on producing and editing the pieces, rather than wrapping them up in pretty trappings. That will come later…
I’m aware there are things you would have done differently, and I can guess what most of those are, and yet, I still would love some feedback on the project.
Our sports editor’s send off column. Sad to see him go, glad he’s not going far.
Tom Moore: On the way out the door from the best job I’ve ever had