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Monday's Online Lt. Guv Debate

The online debate between John Tracy and Matt Dunne is happening at noon on Monday. Some details, via Green Mountain Daily:

There will be only 9 questions. Approximately 5 will be issue-based... Another couple questions will be on leadership-slash-character topics. There will be a "philosophy of governance" question, and also a question that will invite each candidate to contrast themselves with the other. For this contrast question, each candidate will be given a 30 second rebuttal. In the case of the other questions, a 30 second rebuttal will only be triggered if a candidate characterizes their opponent in the course of their normally allotted 90 second answer. Candidates will be given a brief opportunity for opening and closing remarks.

These time limits are not hard and fast - that is, there wont be a buzzer if they're a little off. There will also be a parallel "live blogging thread" on GMD proper for folks who want to make comments.

Jack McCullough and Vermonter will be onsite with each of the candidates to verify they (or their appointed typist, if they don't type very quickly) are indeed answering the questions themselves and aren't doing any cutting-and-pasting from crib sheets.

Interesting. To find out how you can access this debate, follow the link above.

Essex shooting on Free Press website

Is anybody else following the alleged shooting at Essex Elementary School that's apparently in process? The Burlington Free Press is updating their website every few minutes or so with new news. Looks like they're posting stuff directly from the police scanner. Sounds like they're also in contact with neighbors.

Nobody else has any details yet, so I am refreshing the page every few minutes.

A good way to get web traffic, but I wonder how reliable the info is. Not sure if they have anybody on the ground there.

UPDATE: WCAX is also reporting the shooting. The Free Press says there has been more than one.

UPDATE II: The WCAX page has mysteriously disappeared, and there's no link on the homepage. What happened?

UPDATE III: A report from CNN.

Economist says newspapers are getting it

I feel like I've seen other articles recently about how newspapers are finally picking up on online trends. This one from the Economist — More Media, Less News — is a good one. It summarizes some of the latest trends, and offers some rays of hope for our struggling industry, though not many.

Here's something I hadn't heard before:

Gannett, the world's biggest newspaper group, is trying to make its journalism more local. It has invested in “mojos”—mobile journalists with wireless laptops who permanently work out of the office encamped in community hubs.

One question: what the hell is a "community hub" if it's not an office? Is it, like, a shack in the woods somewhere? I mean, it's gotta at least have internet access, right? Am I a "mojo," since I often work from coffeeshops and libraries and places that have wi-fi access? I prefer the term backpack journalist.

How newspapers can use video

This is fantastic. The Willamette Week had one of its interns steal his own bike 7 times throughout the city of Portland, OR. Nobody tried to stop him.

He wrote a story about this experience, which appears in the print version of the paper. And he had somebody shoot videos of him snapping the bike chains with giant bolt cutters. They've posted the footage to YouTube. Smart!

The Weekly Post

I couldn't resist giving Bill Simmon some actual ink for his post on last weekend's air show. To read the Free Press, you'd think the only people annoyed by it were a small group of singing grannies. And that's just not true.

Writes Bill,

These planes fly maybe 100 feet over the [VCAM] studio and are extremely loud. And it's not a gradual build up of noise, it's sudden and explosive. We're a production studio and as such we're pretty sensitive to outside noise. You know, because we use microphones and stuff. These fighters are interrupting us every time they fly over head, which happens about once per minute for a period of an hour or so for the last three afternoons. I'm about ready to call the Burlington police and lodge a noise complaint against the Air Force. I get it, you're doing an air show this weekend. You fly around in tight formation. It's very impressive. Now please go away.

You can read this post in its entirety here, or on the Letters to the Editors page of this week's Seven Days.

Storycorps again

Just got a head's up that a clip from the StoryCorps interview I did with my friend Jules will be on VPR Thursday, at 7:55 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. If you want to hear it and miss it, it'll be available here as a podcast.

Cool.

Tuesday Deadline Linkdump

Long overdue blogroll changes coming this week. I'm going to start categorizing blogs and filtering out the sites that don't get updated. I'll probably also cut a few blogs and keep only ones I want to draw attention to. In other words, it'll start becoming more like a real blogroll and less like a list of any yahoo in Vermont who starts a blog.

My desire to promote all Vermont bloggers decreases as their numbers increase. I think our little community is big enough now to merit some filtering.

Some random VT links:

3 Seconds: via Found Drama.
Caleb Daniloff on Breadloaf: via what i saw today. You have to scroll down to see the Breadloaf entry. You can't permalink to it, apparently.
Mama Says accepting open submissions: via Mama Says.
More mamas: via Breederscafe.
Red Scarf project: knitting for orphans, via Now Norma Knits 2.
More knitting: Drunkenly dying wool, via Fluid Motion.    

Keeper of Net Neutrality

Remember last September, when Leslie Hall brought her Mobile Gem Sweater Museum to Burlington for the Art Hop? What is the Keeper of The Gems doing now,  you ask?

This. Watch the video. It's brilliant.

Front Porch Forum

Wrote a story this week about Front Porch Forum. It's a free, neighborhood email newsletter service run by Burlington resident Michael Wood-Lewis.

Wood-Lewis started Front Porch Forum in his own neighborhood, the Five Sisters section of Burlington's South End. It's apparently been highly successful there — check out this mention in Cottage Living Magazine — so he's now expanded it to include all the neighborhoods in Chittenden County.

It's an interesting concept, though I wonder how well it'll take off in places like, um, Winooski, where I live. I would love to use it to communicate with my neighbors, but I have no energy to promote it. Beyond, you know, writing an article in the paper and mentioning it on my blog.

Politics VT

They're back.

Weekly Post: from Deadbeat Club

This week's post comes from Eva Sollberger, president and CEO of the Deadbeat Club. How could I resist a post called You Tube goes geriatric? Here's Eva:

The event of which I speak is that there is a new YTKP (You Tube King Pin) in town and he is not who you might expect.  The NHSOYT (New HOT STAR of You Tube) is a well-spoken, elderly gentlemen from England named Peter!  (see his videos here)

Watch out you Aussie hussy Emmalina, Peter the British widower is hot on your trail with almost as many suscribers as you - almost 7000 and counting! Peter is also the #11 subscribed channel of ALL TIME!!

How is this possible, you ask? You Tube has been a teenage wasteland from its inception and suddenly, out of the blue, their champion is 78 years old?

How indeed. I edited the excerpt slightly in the paper. You can find it on the Letters to the Editors page of this week's Seven Days.

Politics VT has been hacked

PoliticsVT is down. The virtual political watercooler is run by the anonymous scribes at "the Capitol Bureau," who post to their blog posing as dead Vermont governors. Their spokesperson, Edna Beard, emailed me and a few other VT bloggers this morning.

According to Beard, "Isaac Tichenor" had his laptop stolen yesterday while on vacation in Michigan. Most of the blog info was apparently stored on his computer. She writes,

Whoever stole the laptop gained access to the blog because when Isaac went to check on it to see if it had been touched, it had been reverted back to May postings. Previous posts had been removed, our contact information was almost completely gone, we lost our password and username access but luckily were able to use our secret question to get on.

Whoever stole this did incredible damage to over 2 years of hard work.

We have called the Blogger company and asked them to delete the blog. We deleted the blog as well from our own account, however, it does not seem to have made a difference... I may have us segway over into Wordpress to one of our backup blogs. I am not sure how this is going to pan out but a lot of damage has been done to the blog at this point because Isaac had a lot of contacts on his computer as well as a lot of pictures, story ideas and other information.

Please tell your readers what has happened as we cannot communicate anymore with them and tell them that PoliticsVT will return, bigger and better than ever.

Wonder if they're also worried about being exposed?

As a disclaimer, I should note that I have no way of confirming this account. I've communicated with Edna Beard before, but we've never met. All I know is, the blog's down, and this is how the Capitol Bureau explains it. I'm hoping they return soon.