antimeria

“As the observant may have noticed in this paragraph, now that I am free of the shackles of Associated Press style, I am reverting to the Oxford comma.” – John McIntyre, one of the casualties of the Sun newsroom’s recent haircut.

HT: @City_Paper

You don’t hear “The [Cedar Rapids] Gazette of eastern Iowa” and “leads the way” in very many sentences, least of all from Mark Potts and Jay Rosen. But there it is–my hometown paper is leading the charge in reinventing their product:

[W]hat Buttry is suggesting, correctly, is that the newspaper should strive to be an active, aggressive participant in any sort of business transaction that it touches or causes to happen. Or, as he writes, “We need to connect the business with the customer and collect the money, taking a reasonable cut for ourselves.”

Editorial purists will shudder—it seems so…dirty. But it’s not, if the right protections are in place, and these are obvious revenue—and hell, reader-service—opportunities that papers have been foolishly ignoring for years, or paying little more than lip service. The Gazette is actually trying to do all these things. How radical.

Small newspapers are primarily middlemen–something happens somewhere, they tell us–and don’t have much investigative flex (I can’t remember the Gazette ever breaking a real story), so it makes sense for papers to take Google’s revenue-generation blueprint a step further, using their local connections and knowledge to target a specific niche.

If you’re interested in the fate of newspapers, read the whole thing. It’s long, but it’s worth it.

HT: @Steve Buttry via @Jay Rosen

On a side note, this marks the second time in a month Iowa has been cited as a “leader.” Combined with swine flu, that has to be at least two horsemen, right?

But…but Twitter is the future!

…And if you liked this digression, you’ll love @antimeria.

It’s no secret that I have a mega-crush on St. Vincent, AKA Annie Clark, so it’s pretty cool that she finally has a new album coming out. And here’s the first single, “The Strangers”, announced on Twitter (and now Pitchfork).

But she can find pretty neat things like the Book Cover Archive and the Eyeballing Game (I got a 3.77 update: 2.79 sucka!). It also has a bell graph of the results, which is neat: