Archives for 2008

Big news! At long last, the DP has launched it’s first public web site on Drupal at http://34st.com for our weekly arts and entertainment magazine, 34th Street. We’ve been working on developing an alternative to College Publisher since I started my term as Web Editor-in-Chief at The Daily Pennsylvanian in January. After months of waffling and pressure we decided to move ahead with development and committed to launching a new website. And finally, we’re here.

Theming with Zen

Last time, I wrote about the data structure underlying our website running on Drupal and promised that I would write again about theming.

The Drupal theming layer is quite powerful, but can also quickly become incredibly complex. It also depends on module developers to play nicely and make all their code easily themable. It also requires a designer to learn how to work with Drupal and all it’s eccentricities.

Drupal themes depend on layers of overrides and hooks. Drupal core provides a default layout, which can then be modified by modules, then the template engine, then the theme and finally an optional subtheme. At each layer the previous output can be modified or overridden. That way, if someone were designing a set of themes or wanted to present options for a user to customize the site’s look and feel it could degrade gracefully.

Since we weren’t worrying about any of those things, we did nearly everything in the top-most sub-theme layer.

Luckily for us the Zen starter theme makes much of this easier.

To develop our theme, we were lucky enough to have a great starting point in the amazing Zen starter template and it’s great documentation. We made a Zen subtheme as a folder within Zen with their Starter Kit.

Note: One big mistake I made when we started working on our subtheme was naming it “34st”. As it turns out, many of the theme override functions require you to name them THEMENAME_functionname. Unfortunately, PHP variables can’t start with numbers so after some frustration and griping I had to rename the subtheme.

node-type.tpl.php

Content Templates provides a view of all available variables and example values.

Many places advise themers to use the Content Templates module to theme different content types. With Zen however, I found it much easier to just create files in the sub-template directory with certain naming conventions. For our article content type, a file named node-article.tpl.php themes it. For an issue, node-issue.tpl.php contains the theme. Since these files are theming a node, it’s possible to see all the variables in the array by simply doing a <?php print_r($node); ?> in a human-readable format. Content Templates, however can do the same thing, and with a much nicer interface.

For the most part, after finding all the appropriate variables, we simply plopped them into the appropriate places in the template. But, within these template files, we still have complete access to PHP and the entire Drupal API. Which of course means that I get lazy.

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<?php 
//Covering all the different numbers of bylines
if (($node->field_byline[0]['view'] != '') && ($node->field_byline[1]['view'] == '')): ?>
<div class="article-byline">
	<div class="author-teaser-name-nodelink">By <?php print $node->field_byline[0]['view'] ?></div>
</div>
<?php elseif (($node->field_byline[0]['view'] != '') && ($node->field_byline[1]['view'] != '') && ($node->field_byline[2]['view'] == '')): ?>
<div class="article-byline">
	<div class="author-teaser-name-nodelink">By <?php print $node->field_byline[0]['view'] . ' and ' . $node->field_byline[1]['view']; ?></div>
</div>
<?php elseif (($node->field_byline[0]['view'] != '') && ($node->field_byline[1]['view'] != '') && ($node->field_byline[2]['view'] != '')): ?>
<div class="article-byline">
	<div class="author-teaser-name-nodelink">By <?php 
	$numauthors = count($node->field_byline);
	print $node->field_byline[0]['view'];
	for ($i=0;$i<$numauthors-1;$i++) {
		print ', ' . $node->field_byline[$i]['view']; 
	}
	print ' and ' . $node->field_byline[$numauthors-1]['view'];
	?>
	</div>
</div>
<?php endif; ?>

That’s my code for handling all the different possibilities for multiple authors on a single article. For more elegant code, this should be higher up in the templating than the .tpl.php file, but it’s much easier this way.

Teaser versus Full views

For each field, one chooses how it will be displayed in the teaser, and in the full node.

For each field in a content type, you can choose two ways of displaying it. The Teaser is used when the node is being viewed on the front page, or in a section listing, and Full is the whole article is being read. Pretty self-explanatory. But it does mean that in each .tpl.php file you have to theme both. Here’s a sample.

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<?php 
if (($teaser) && (!$page)): 
	/*
	 * This case governs how articles show up in section page views, in the nodereferrer on authors,
	 * and everywhere else an article teaser (not on the front) is shown.
	 *
	 */
elseif (($page) && (!$teaser)):
	/*
	 * This case is for displaying the whole article on its own page.
	 *
	 */
endif; ?>

We also get other fun template variables like $is_front so we can do things like so.

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elseif ((($teaser) && (!$page) && ($is_front)) || (($page) && ($teaser))):
	/*
	 * This first case is for articles that are on the front page or in the sidebar.
	 * articles in the current issue. The second half of the OR only happens when node_view is
	 * manually called like node_view($node_object,$page=TRUE,$teaser=TRUE);
	 *
	 */

For reference, here’s the three different views of a single article.

if ((($teaser) && (!$page) && ($is_front)) || (($page) && ($teaser))):

if (($teaser) && (!$page)):

if (($page) && (!$teaser)):

Importing Data

We received our archives from College Publisher as a set of CSV files. My next post will address how we imported those archives.

What did you think of this post? Got more questions about our Drupal install? Leave a comment. The new website is 34th Street Magazine, poke around and leave us some feedback!

How we did it in Drupal, Part 2 of X

1. How we did it in Drupal, Pt. 1 of X - The Data Structure
2. How we did it in Drupal, Pt. 2 of X - Theming with Zen

Joshua Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard just coined a new term, ““Holovaty’s Law”, that I really like. Well, I believe he coined it because Google turns up no results for “Holovaty’s Law”.

The post linked as Holovaty’s Law, by the way, is a classic. If you haven’t read it and you’re interested in news and journalism at all, you need to.

Let me take the concept and run a little further with it. And thanks to Benton, the law already has it’s first corollary!

Theorem: Holovaty’s (First) Law of Online News

Adding structure to information makes it more valuable

1st Corollary

Adding structure to comments generates interesting data

Thoughts? Refinements? Other corollaries?

It seems like there’s a dearth of math geeks interested in journalism. Searches for “law of online news”, “fundamental theorem of online news”, “fundamental theorem of online journalism”, and “law of online journalism” all turn up nothing.

I wrote before about the new 34th Street Magazine website being in Alpha.

This is the first post of a series on what we did to Drupal to make it behave the way we want it to, how we implemented different features and to ask for feedback and advice on how to do future features.

To start out understanding Drupal, it’s important to understand that Drupal was designed and the developer’s focus is largely on creating flexible websites for communities, NOT for publishing or blogging. For instance, there isn’t a natural distinction between readers and administrators among the user roles. (Adding content is at node/add/* not admin/*) A lot of the work involved in setting up a site on Drupal is to work around the default values and settings and make it behave the way you want to.

Part of the joy of using Wordpress is that it’s defined for a very specific purpose and all the development work that goes into it is designed to make it easier to blog. With Wordpress, it takes very little work to go from a default install to writing your first post.

That’s not true for Drupal. No one would use Drupal with only its core functionality and the default settings. But with a little work, it becomes much, much more powerful and better suited for publishing a news website than Wordpress.

The problem I’m still struggling with now is how to import data into Drupal’s database. The database structure is quite complex compared to our current site, or a Wordpress site, but luckily the Content Construction Kit abstracts all of that when the site is being built. And that’s the topic of today’s post.

Nodes, Users and Custom Content Types!

Everything in our system is a node. Stories. Slideshows. Sections. Authors. Issues.

Content types

The CCK module lets us define all the different information each node needs and tie authors to articles and articles to sections and issues with node reference fields. Each content type is themed separately with a different template and the different ways that piece of content can be viewed are defined by a set of boolean PHP variables.

Our site uses the following CCK content types.

Article submission

At the database level

Creating a new field

When creating fields and content types, this is all you see. Pick data types and title them. For the most part, the rest of the process is completely opaque. To learn more about the database structure of CCK, there’s documentation in greater detail here.

There are several tables that store data for CCK fields.

• node - This table stores the unique nid of the node, and what type it is.
• node_revisions - This table stores the body content of the node, as well as data about which user created it, when it was revised and what’s in the teaser.
• content_type_[type] - If a content type has fields that are only used by that content type, this table contains the values of that field.
• content_field_[field] - Contains the values of that field.

Theming

A lot of the heavy lifting in Drupal is done at the theming layer. Luckily Zen makes it all much easier. That’s what I’ll be writing about next time. Some of the other upcoming posts will address how we handle images (Imagecache and CCK), how we theme our newsletters and how we handle multimedia.

What did you think of this post? Got more questions about our Drupal install? Leave a comment. The new website is at http://beta.34st.com, poke around and leave us some feedback!

How we did it in Drupal, Part 1 of X

1. How we did it in Drupal, Pt. 1 of X - The Data Structure
2. How we did it in Drupal, Pt. 2 of X - Theming with Zen

In the course of developing Drupal for the DP, we’ve been fortunate that we’ve had to write very little (themeing layer excepted) from scratch. Chalk it up to to the strength and robustness of the Drupal community that nearly every function we wanted, there was a module for.

One module that I did have to write from scratch was to replicate a function from College Publisher. After copy and pasting a story into CP’s interface, there was a button run all that doubled the line breaks, among other things.

Drupal wraps text separated by two line breaks with <p> tags and uses the <br /> tag to in-between text separated by one line break. By default, text copied out of InCopy only has one line break between paragraphs.

When Sean Blanda posted about the Temple News moving to Wordpress, this was one of the 6 problems he laid out as having.

Keep reading…

Exciting news on the CMS front.

34th Street Alpha

As some may know, The Daily Pennsylvanian web staff and I have been working on using Drupal to run our website and as a replacement for College Publisher on and off since the spring. The first part of that process is now nearly done and we have a nearly complete website for our magazine 34th Street!

We made the decision to go ahead and develop and launch a site in Drupal a few weeks ago and since then have been in a somewhat hectic mode scrambling to get all the launch features ready. A great deal of thanks goes to the folks who made the New York Observer site happen and wrote up how they did it.

Now it’s on to testing and training the other editors on how to use the system and looking for places to make the site work better, and make publishing easier. We also have to write a complete set of documentation for future and current editors on how to use the system, how to modify it, how to deal with Drupal upgrades and what to do in case things go wrong.

Keep reading…

Every post you see before this one (one exception) is imported from my old blog at http://albertgate.blogspot.com. This shiny new site is hosted by WebFaction and I’ve been very happy with them so far even if at $9.50 a month it’s a tad expensive for hosting a personal site. Their servers will let me play around with things like SVN and Django.

Keep reading…

Posts from my previous blog at albertgate.blogspot.com are freshly imported! Unfortunately though, no comments from about the middle of 2006 until now were imported.

This blog still needs lots of work before I start linking it around though.

Since College Publisher doesn’t give its clients access to their own databases or the web server, to do many things (like adding any new feature) requires working around it on auxiliary servers they provide running LAMP.

One feature that CP desperately needs is the ability to create a block of related stories.

So I struggled with the problem a little bit and created a little script to let totally non-tech savvy editors create a block of code to paste in.

You can see a demo of it here.

Related links generator

The source code is here. To run it, your server must allow fopen to open url’s.

Source

This is the first time I’ve released the code of anything I’ve written, so give me some feedback!

The dream jobs for today’s journalists are largely the same as they have always been. The rule was, and still is, the larger the circulation and the more often they publish the better.

As long as this is the case, that’s where all the young talent will go. Unfortunately, right now those are the worst possible places for them to end up.

An awkward transition

In my last post, I wrote recommended some ideas for new revenue to fill the chasm between declining print and rising online ad revenue.

Now I worry that even with as much innovation as they can muster the valiant struggle to save the medium and the famous mastheads will be a fight that is inevitably lost, and the old media dinosaurs will just die by ice age instead of asteroid.

Maybe it would just be best to let them die quickly.

Death of a paper

I link to Mark Potts a lot, but he is amazingly incisive. He’s written a speculative piece about what will happen in the aftermath of a major metro daily’s bankruptcy.

What will happen is the other news sources will have to step up and be more entrepreneurial. The bloggers and TV news and the alt weekly will all have to do more original reporting. New startups will spring up, run by the laid off staffers to focus on local news. Most importantly, it will give everyone a sense of entrepreneurial drive that a slowly dying organizing can never have.

To fill the gap for readers and advertisers left by a newspaper dying a whole new media ecosystem of content producers and distributors will spring up.

That’s where young journalists should be. We should be at startups, innovating and experimenting and taking stupid risks. Doing exactly the kinds of things a risk averse newspaper bleeding to death and busy slashing jobs won’t do.

So the biggest challenge facing young journalists is our own mindset prizing the old media over new.

The business model is still the elephant model in the room, as Ryan Sholin writes.

All the new media in the world won’t save the media, if they can’t figure out how to make money off of it. Will advertising be enough? At the very least there’s a deep chasm to cross, according to some analysis Mark Potts did.

And so since social networks and Web 2.0 companies can serve up page views far cheaper than media companies, it’s time to look at some alternate business models.

1. Merchandising


CNN already does it. Web comics do it. Randall Munroe writer of xkcd and his roommate make a living purely off of merchandising, according to his New York Times profile. xkcd attracts a huge audience but runs no advertising. So sell some t-shirts and sweatshirts with a masthead or a logo on it. Or with headlines. Or let people custom order t-shirts with photos from the paper on it. Or framed copies of stories about them or that they were quoted in. Okay, lots of papers do sell photos, but they’re mostly impossible to find unless you’re specifically looking for them so most readers never find it. There should at least be a link by every photo that runs. The Harvard Crimson does this.

2. Consulting

Among journalists’ skills is the ability to ferret out and synthesize a lot of information and then package it succinctly. Hey, that sounds like exactly the skills needed for a corporate report or to do background research on a new business proposal. Beyond that, they are supposed to be experts in the fields they cover. So let companies or individuals hire journalists as consultants to provide advice or do research for an hourly rate. a HIGH hourly rate.

3. Briefings

Similar to number two, journalists are supposed to be good at presenting a lot of information in an easy to digest format. How then, did they give up the ENTIRE market analysis field. GigaOm is getting into it with a briefing on cloud computing priced at $250 a copy. So is paidContent.org with reports on Social Media and Online Gaming in China for $399. Look at MarketResearch.com. They have reports (information) on a huge range of topics that people are buying at prices from several hundred dollars, to several thousand! Think about all the extra information that’s routinely gathered in the course of reporting a big story. While it’s cut to make the final piece easier to read for a mass audience, there’s also an audience that will pay for a much more in depth look.

Every local newspaper should have a “How to open a retail franchise in X” with information on the retail climate, traffic patterns and other local knowledge. There should be an “Area private schools: where to send your kid”. And more. Compile that information, make it easy to digest, and sell it. But of course, if you’re going to charge it better be damn good.

4. Sell Timeliness

For some people timeliness of information is absolutely crucial. Think professional investors, politicians, corporate executives.
So set up a system to let them see any news that is being broken first. Even just a few hours. Let’s say some news organization got a scoop that Steve Jobs’ cancer is returning. That information would be priceless to someone investing in Apple stock. Or if a strike is brewing at XYZ company, or congressman is taking bribes. There are all sorts of information where getting it even a tiny margin sooner than others is invaluable. Or just to brag to friends. Of course, this only works if the newspaper is regularly breaking news.

5. Deeper sponsorships

There are certain kinds of stories that happen regularly. Crime statistics. Holiday shopping numbers. Weather. So sell advertising tied into it. “This crime report brought to you by Mace” “This consumer spending report brought to you by Target”.

6. Get serious about local communities

Don’t just sponsor events, organize them. Conferences for local businesses. Food tastings from local restaurants. Reading in the park with local authors. Meet local sports stars. Reunion concert for musical acts that got their start locally. Movie screenings. Class action lawsuits. Debates and townhall meetings. Then sell sponsorships and tickets.

GigaOm is a great example of this again. They sponsor three conferences in the area they cover to which tickets are quite expensive. But they are good, well produced events that not only generate a ton of buzz for them, but serve an important function in the community. The Wall Street Journal is getting into it too with their All Things D conference.

7. Get serious about your online community


Look at how Ars Technica does it. They have an amazing online community that has thrived for years and produced millions of posts. The participants on their forums discuss every topic, related to their articles and not. They have classifieds, technical talk, sex, all sorts of random things. People consider the Ars forums their HOME on the internet. That’s because it’s community moderated and idiots get thrown out. Those interested in building online communities would do well to look to the online forums that have been around for so long as a good model. With as much good will as they have from their community, Ars can sell subscriptions giving things that cost Ars NOTHING. Like adding “et Subscriptor” to the end of a profile name. Or posting privileges in a private forum. Or the ability to post in html. People are paying $50 for status symbols in the community.

8. Pay what you will model

Like Radiohead famously did for their album In Rainbows. “Sell” your subscriptions for online (or Mobile or Kindle or heck, even print) for however much customers decide they want to pay.

9. Remember customer service

Who are your customers? Advertisers. What service are you providing to them? Reaching their customers. Selling more display ads isn’t always the best way of doing that. If you can help your advertisers succeed you will too.

Some of these may be infeasible, or even unethical so tear em apart and come up with better ones.

Bryan Murley over at Innovation in College Media has posted a few pieces on the launch of Campus Daily Guide by mtvU, the same company that hosts many college newspapers on their College Media Network/College Publisher system. Inside Higher Ed did a write up too, that is fairly definitive.

I’ve responded to a few of the points that Murley made in comments on his blog, but I thought I’d do a longer take.

Let’s look at who the Campus Daily Guide’s will really compete with. CDG has local event listings, upcoming performers and sporting events, movie times, a local restaurant directory and links to things like an academic calendar and Rate My Professors.

Where do college students go to find these things now?

Very, very, few will turn to their campus newspaper website, because with the possible exception of the restaurant directory, none of these things are provided on a campus newspapers website.

Where do we go for these things?

Facebook
Upcoming.org
Yelp
Live Nation
OpenTable.com
outside

(these are true for me at least, leave where you go in the comments)

Last I checked, none of these places have links to content on college newspapers websites the way Campus Daily Guide does.

So we should all be hoping that the Campus Daily Guides take off. It’ll drive at least that much more student traffic to college paper sites that desperately need it.

I can't believe this is still on store shelves. It's been ten years! Ten years of one great game. Seen at Circuit City.

Wow. When I stopped watching the Pistons Sixers game, I was confident the Sixers were out. But not so.

Reading the post game coverage from my two “local” newspapers, the Free Press and the Inquirer I noticed one quote in both stories that seemed uncannily similar, but also totally different.

Both from Andre Iguodala, (great addition to my Fantasy team by the way) and both about sleeping.

Here’s the Inquirer’s version

“I don’t know if Detroit relaxed at that point,” said Andre Iguodala, who had 16 points, nine rebounds and eight assists but shot just 4 for 15. “That is Detroit: They tend to lull you to sleep, and we kept fighting.”

And the Free Press’s

But the Pistons already have given Philadelphia something it may not have had before Sunday. Confidence. A bit of entitlement. When asked about coming back on the playoff-savvy Pistons, forward Andre Iguodala said, “That’s Detroit. They tend to go to sleep at times.”

Doesn’t sound like a guy intimidated to me.

See, similar enough that they’re likely the same quote, but enough words are different that….what on earth were the writers thinking?

Language Log has written about this before, in reference to a Rasheed Wallace quote gone awry.

John Harris of Politico and Mark Halperin, TIME’s Senior Political Analyst, are giving a session on political reporting and the 2008 elections.

Mark Halperin went to Harvard, but didn’t work for The Crimson. Still became a journalist though.

From Jackie Calmes:

“Obama’s a prickly guy and the press all know that and I think it’s reflected in his coverage some.”

And on Clinton.

In ‘93 and ‘94 when her healthcare plan she began to take all criticism of it personally, and ever since then has never really recovered from that.

Josh Benton from the Dallas Morning News just gave a presentation on “Web Tools, Blogging and Multimedia Reporting.” What he really did was give a wake up call to an audience of journalism students, or rather (old men) who are very stuck in the ways and nostalgia of print journalism.

I’m glad to say my friend here, a dead tree and typewriter reporter if there ever was one, has experienced what he calls a total conversion, and offered to come learn and shoot video. The rest of the audience seemed similarly woken.

Josh Benton from the Dallas Morning News “The people who are drawn to newspapers are the very conservative people (small c) who love the smell of newsprint in the morning.”

Journalism is like the priesthood in that it attracts more conservative people, and so over time, filtering it like that, the profession becomes more and more conservative.

“Ivy League newspaper protectionism”

It’s very easy to develop the newspaper habit because it’s free and easily available and has no competition. Once you leave school, this all changes.

I’m heading to Harvard today for the 2008 Georges Conference, hosted by Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism. Strangely, I can’t find any information about the conference online at the Nieman Foundation’s website, and searching for it only brings up this site from last year’s “fourth annual” conference. Here’s the schedule for this year’s conference.

I’ll keep updating as the day goes on.

This seems to be quite the weekend for conferences though. NextNewsroom is happening in South Carolina. I’ve been following it, vaguely live, here on Innovation in College Media. Meanwhile, part of the dailypennsylvanian.com team is headed to Yale for the Yale Daily News’s first ever Web Conference. We’re the only College Publisher hosted site going, and hopefully they can come back having picked the brains of the people at the Cornell Daily Sun and Columbia Spectator, both of whom use Drupal.

It looks like the Spectator has built their site making writers into a CCK node type, while the Cornell Daily Sun is using Drupal’s default user management, with whoever enters the article into the CMS listed as the author. This fits more in with this very ambitious proposal to manage story workflow and assigning online.

Fun stuff.

Courtesy of Major League Baseball.

This article from The Cincinatti Enquirer about limitations that Major League Baseball is putting on credentialed press caught my eye.

But this year came important differences: photo galleries could no longer include more than seven pictures. Web sites are limited to no more than two minutes of audio or video from any game and that content can stay up for no more than seven consecutive days.

Of lesser concern to the sports editors, Cherwa said, is a provision limiting bloggers to posting less frequently than once per half-inning.

Similarly, the NCAA has also put in restrictions on how often reporters can post live to their blogs during games.

Let’s think about this, under these conditions why on earth would you even bother credentialing yourself? I’ve had friends post photo galleries of games onto Facebook with more than seven pictures or two minutes of video, and of course that stays up longer than seven consecutive days.

I understand that live blogging and instant updates can infringe on a leagues deal for exclusivity with a particular media outlet, but the internet changes all of that. Any body with a ticket and a cell phone can be live blogging a game, press credential or no press credential.

Or a laptop with wireless internet access. Or say, a laptop and a video camera. Or even, a laptop, a video camera, and an acccount (free) with ustream.tv then I can stream the game live! Or perhaps I have a Nokia N95 and I can stream live video with just my cell phone!

What are they going to do? Ban laptops and cameras and cell phones from sporting events?

At this point, I assume the perks to being credentialed press, especially for photographers and videographers (court side, field side access) outweigh these restrictions, but for how long?

For live bloggers and sports writers, what benefit does being credentialed give them at all? Access to players for interviews perhaps? Or being able to attend the post game press conference? How long will those perks outweigh the restrictions?

Student Government elections time here at Penn. The Daily Pennsylvanian web team has put together this guide for all of you on who the candidates for each position are, along with their candidate statement. Plus, put a face and voice to each name with video candidate statements.

Or a Newspaper!

Let me put this one to all of you.

Newspaper’s doing video seems to be the latest greatest trend. Every paper imaginable is doing it now that you can buy a $120 camera that plugs into your computer and then send it off to YouTube. Even those staid old business rags the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times have prominent video players displayed on their sites. In fact, the Journal is hiring a video editor.

But it seems like there is a lot of reinventing the wheel going on. Newspaper video people are falling overthemselves trying to get newspapers to do more video and do it better, but more importantly, to NOT be like TV.

And of course, there’s the backlash from TV news shooters who have been doing what newspapers are just no trying to do for years and doing it at a much higher level. Of course, newspapers can learn a lot about video from TV stations.

But does it really make sense in an industry with declining revenues to get into the acquisition of expensive equipment (cheaper than before, and cheaper than TV, but still expensive) and expensive and intensive training for neophytes to video, when just down the street is a building full of video experts?

True, many of the criticisms newspapery people level at TV news are fair and valid points. The coverage is often shallow and flashy and too focused on overly made up news anchors and staged shots. TV’s weaknesses in investigative reporting and in depth coverage are exactly newspapers strenghts!

And now, as the distribution channels for both print and TV are being quickly or slowly obsoleted by the internet, both have to adapt and adjust to a medium where print and video coexist. Just like Newspaper.com’s have videos, websites for local TV stations have to have text. Usually wire stories, or poorly written copy or even worse, transcripts of news programs. If most newspapers are clueless about how to adapt to the web, most TV stations are even more clueless.

Now, usually putting together two clueless people doesn’t give you one person with a clue, but this is a case where with the right injection of innovative thinking, it might. That’s why I was glad to see this story about the editorial staffs of a local newspaper and TV station actually merging. I’m surprised that it’s taken this long, and I fully expect to see more mergers like this in the future.

So go buy yourself a TV station!

Or tell me why I’m wrong.

Bill Clinton is coming to Penn to speak today.

The Secret Service instructed us, The DP to bring our cameras down to Irvine Auditorium at 7AM to be inspected. Our video camera is sitting right next to one from NBC.

Last year, Kevin Burke put together a list of blogs by Penn students/faculty/staff/alums/etc. It was a great resource, but it’s about due for an update.

This list isn’t in any order whatsover, but I will try and divide it up between active and inactive ones.

Active
• Martin Gordon’s Blog - Kevin had him pegged as a senior from Miami Beach last year, so I guess he’s an alum now?
• 3000 Miles of Virtual Insanity - Ravi Mishra’s blog about being between Silicon Valley and Penn.
• Progressive Dispatches - a blog by student government member Brett Thalmann about politics mostly.
• The Un-Wharton - Stuart Stein, a Wharton senior studying marketing and management blogs here
• Akkam’s Razor - Staff/Master’s student. one of the most active blogs on the list, he posts nearly every day.
• Jeff Weintraub - a political science professor’s blog on politics and current events
• {metadatta} - a blog by Physics student Sujit Datta about ‘academia, science, or just life in Philadelphia’
• The Spin - the DP’s blog about student life and etc. it’s a group blog with different writers each semester
• The Buzz - a blog by the sports editors of the DP, about Penn sports teams
• DP Photo Department - a blog by the DP photo department about all things photography related
• Scents - Daniel Drucker, a graduate psych student’s blog
• Oikono - a blog by Wharton student Geoffrey (Kok Heng) about economics, poverty, international issues
• Nat Turner - Wharton student/entrepreneur’s blog. Has a company in philly called Invite Media. intriguing.
• Earning My Turns - Computer Science Professor and skiing fan Fernando Pereira’s blog. He was my professor for CIS120 last semester and showed a picture from one of his skiing trips every day.
• Werblog - Legal studies professor and ‘internet expert’ Kevin Werbach
• Language Log - very popular language blog, hosted out of a computer in the linguistics department by Mark Liberman. (he taught LING001 last semester I think) Professors from a whole bunch of different schools contribute
• Mr. Swyx - a blog by Huntsman student Shawn Wang
• The Appletonian - Justin Sykes, Wharton senior. He’s from Appleton, Wisconsin, which I guess explains the title.
• Penn Press Log - blog about books published by the Penn Press
• MBA Admissions Blog - about the Wharton MBA admissions process
• Dept of Anesthesiology - a blog from Penn Med’s Department of Anesthesiology & Critical Care
• Vitale Digital Media Lab - A blog with information about this digital media lab in Van Pelt. It’s actually a pretty cool place and they have video cameras and AV equipment they lend for free.
• colour my world! - a blog by a Penn student who will be doing banking in Hong Kong this summer
• all that glitters - a tumblr blog by Jessica Gold Haralson, who started Quake, a SAC funded erotica magazine.
• ohbadiah - Nick McAvoy’s blog, he used to write on The Spin
• Leighcia - . former Penn student who has apparently decided financial consultant was not the right way to go
• of course I Had a Surprise Birthday Party - Kevin Burke’s blog
• Nathan Ensmenger - blog from the undergraduate chair of the Science, Technology & Society major.
• Dueling Tampons - blog by a Penn alum, about other Penn alums and students
• Critical Mass - a blog by English professor Erin O’Connor about academia
• A Beautiful Mess - Engineering student John Tran’s personal blog.
• the iv-tini chronicles - Penn senior named Dan, originally from Wisconsin, who will be off to med school next year.
• meta.jane - a rather literary blog by assume I’m pretty sure is a Penn student
• Affabillyty - a blog with a lot of good music, by Billy ___, a sociology major.
• I Am Malek - Malek H. Lewis’s blog. Topics for the future include San Francisco, High School Musical, and Gay Videogaming. Purple text on a gray background.
• Blog blah blahg - just a ‘gay boy wading in the murky dating pool of Philadelphia.’
• starlighterx - blog by a Penn student who stresses over midterms and likes to comment on New York Times columnists

Inactive - These were on Kevin’s original list but haven’t been updated in a long time
• curiousgirl’s playground - a blog by Jing Chen, M&T Class of ‘07. It’s on hiatus right now, the last post was in November.
• Cool New Web - a blog by Anton Bernstein. Last update was in November.

Wow there are a lot more than I was expecting to find, and I’m sure there are a lot more that I didn’t come across. If you know of any more, please send them along to me.

Yes We Can - Barack Obama Music Video by Will.i.am
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjXyqcx-mYY&rel=1]

Thanks to Lawrence Lessig.