Posted on January 30, 2009 in Print, Social media, by Bill Hudgins
Though dead these 11 years (as of Feb. 20, 2009), the Nashville Banner, Music City’s conservative afternoon daily, enjoys a resurrection of sorts at the “Nashville Banner RIP” Facebook page. With 56 members as of this posting, the site helps staffers keep up with colleagues and also to meet Bannerites from other eras.
Though deeply conservative in outlook, the Banner made history among major unsegregated Southern newspapers when, in 1950, it hired Robert Churchwell to cover the African-American community. I never knew him, but had heard of him and was sad to see he recently passed away.
Most of us have discovered life after the Banner, which served as a training ground for many aspiring, ambitious and scrappy young journalists, and as a career for quite a few who stayed on. You don’t have to look far around Nashville and Middle Tennessee to find Banner alumni in prestigious positions. Some still work at the Banner‘s erstwhile liberal, Democratic competitor, The Tennessean, though as newspapers writhe in the new communications era, more of them are moving on to other places.
I was at the Banner from July 1982 until late August 1987, moving from a night beat (which included covering Metro Council meetings sometimes and newly discovered corpses a lot more of the time), to the federal courthouse beat to a slot as an assistant editor on the city desk. We had three deadlines a day and most of us (except the night beat) rose in the dark and were on the phone to groggy public officials long before decent folk should be awake.
For a time I shared a desk with a chain-smoking writer who could have been in the Spanish Inquisition — he never let someone go without a comment. I met celebrities, though the person who most impressed me was Dr. Albert Sabin, inventor of the oral polio vaccine, who in his 70s came to a Rotary International convention here to kick off a world-wide effort against the paralyzing disease. Stars and politicians were easy to come by, but a man who had saved millions of lives?
I also wrote an article about the arrival in Nashville of the first Macintosh computers, whose descendants have served me well for more than 20 years. This was shortly after their introduction in 1984, and I thought at the time, “that’s cool, but who needs a home computer?”
Today, the question is, “who doesn’t?” and my Macs make possible the pleasure of communing with my old Banner buddies via Facebook (and playing the occasional game of Wordscraper or Lexulous with them).
I left the Banner a few years before its last edition, with its classic “End of Story” screamer headline.
I don’t know who owns the rights to the Nashville Banner name and eagle logo, but it might be fun to put the Banner back together again, online. But dear God, not to get up at 4 a.m. every day.
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Posted on in Social media, by Hammock Inc.
A recent article on Kiplinger.com says that the number of adult Internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled since 2005 — from 8 percent then to 35 percent now.
But as author Amanda Lenhart of the Pew Internet Project points out, using social networks online is still a phenomenon of the young: 75 percent of adults 18-24 use these networks, compared to just 7 percent of adults 65 and older.
The findings also show some other very interesting facts:
- Personal use of social networks is more common than professional use.
- The median age of a Facebook user is 26.
- Nine in 10 say they use social networks to keep in touch with friends.
- MySpace is still the preferred social networking site with 50 percent of adult users having a profile there.
Ahh, to be 26 again.
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Posted on January 29, 2009 in Magazines, by Barbara Logan
I was very sad to hear the news yesterday from New York that Condé Nast was shutting the doors of their home décor and shopping magazine Domino. I’ve been a loyal subscriber to the magazine and my mailbox is going to be very lonely without it each month. Luckily, I’ve saved copies from the last two years, so I will treasure those.
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Posted on in Content Marketing, by Barbara Logan
Earlier this week, we launched a new Hammock email newsletter. Each month we will bring you insight into the latest custom media, social media marketing and community-building trends. In this issue we hit on topics including partnering with an outside media company, setting social media goals for the year, and 2009 magazine and media predictions.
We hope you are already on our distribution list, but if you aren’t, be sure to signup here.
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Posted on January 27, 2009 in Digital Media, Print, Strategy, by Rex Hammock
Here’s a book publishing news-note that is refreshingly appropriate.
A new book from the the O’Reilly “Missing Manual” series called “Wikipedia: The Missing Manual” is today being published simultaneously in print and is being posted in the Help section of Wikipedia.
In other words, in addition to publishing a $30 version of the book in print, O’Reilly is open-sourcing a free version of the book’s contents in a way that can keep its contents up-to-date — indefinitely.
The drive to post “Wikipedia: The Missing Manual” to Wikipedia was spearheaded by author John Broughton, a registered editor at Wikipedia since 2005 with more than 20,000 edits.
My observation: I have a print version of a similar book sitting on my desk — O’Reilly’s MediaWiki, by Daniel J. Barrett — and I can see how having this new book’s contents online will help promote book sales, rather than cannibalize them. A book that serves as a manual has a certain functionality in print that, despite the belief of many, is unique when working in an environment that is new and complex. My copy is dog-eared and sitting there, just where I want it when I’m trying to figure out a nuanced hack. It’s like another monitor, dedicated to some esoteric stuff.
Having a resource that is simultaneously online and in print adds to the functionality and productivity-enhancing roles of both.
Better still would be also having a video-enhanced version.
[Cross posted on Rex Hammock's RexBlog.]
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