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V. 2.0.

I’m in the process of redesign­ing my old web­site, Grosse Pointe Today. Erase and cor­rect: I am a spec­ta­tor and occa­sional con­sul­tant at the redesign of my old web­site, etc. It reminds me once again that noth­ing is more con­fus­ing, unre­ward­ing and oth­er­wise mad­den­ing than design in gen­eral and web design in particular.

This is no knock against design­ers. Some of my best friends, etc. But design­ing for the web is sort of like being asked to design a tire that will work on every vehi­cle now on the road, some of which are pulled by horses. There are stan­dards, yes, but there are many more con­flicts. What works on this ver­sion of Fire­fox will not work on that ver­sion of Explorer, vice versa and dou­ble on Wednes­days. Don’t even get me started on the users, who range from bleeding-edge early adopters who won’t use the site until we roll our own iPhone app to those who believe Google is the por­tal to the entire web.

Add to this the cacoph­ony of expert opin­ion weigh­ing in on what is and isn’t correct/respectful/smart, and you can see why I some­times lie awake nights star­ing at the ceil­ing. I’m a con­tent per­son. I respect design, even love it (see above, best friends, etc.), but I have firm opin­ions about its place in the world, cul­ti­vated after years in the news­pa­per busi­ness, years that coin­cided with the rise of design. Over the past cou­ple of decades in ink-on-paper, there have been many ver­sions of The Thing That Will Save Us, and for a while it was design.

I should pause here to state my prej­u­dices: Design is a pack­age. The pack­age must be attrac­tive or no one will pick it up and unwrap it. But equal atten­tion must be paid to the con­tents of the pack­age, and that got pushed aside dur­ing this era. I tell peo­ple I knew things were dif­fer­ent when I noticed what would hap­pen when a big story was break­ing on dead­line. In olden times, the top edi­tors would come out to the city desk and stand behind the edi­tor as the story was writ­ten and pol­ished, read­ing and mak­ing sug­ges­tions. Then one day I looked up and they were all stand­ing behind the design edi­tor, watch­ing the page being laid out. Their main inter­est in the story was how long it would be, if we could break out the back­ground grafs into a side­bar and whether we had a loca­tor map.

As the phys­i­cal size of news­pa­pers shrank, design­ers were really in their ascen­dancy, because every reduc­tion required a redesign. God, top edi­tors loved redesigns. It was good for months and months of their favorite activ­i­ties — hav­ing meet­ings and offer­ing opin­ions. It would be rolled out with every­thing from free dough­nuts on the copy desk to a front-page col­umn by the edi­tor in chief, tout­ing how the new design would make the news­pa­per so much eas­ier to “use.” I don’t use news­pa­pers, I read them, so you can see why I remained cool to these events.

It’s not unusual today to pick up a major met­ro­pol­i­tan news­pa­per and find no more than three sto­ries on Page One, espe­cially if a new Spider-Man movie is open­ing that week­end, because the flag will have been pushed down three inches by a giant Spider-Man who’s hooked a line to the T in “Times,” pro­mot­ing the six-inch “review” inside. That page will win a design award. The movie critic will be furloughed.

But that’s yes­ter­day. Today it’s all online. Web­sites are both read and used, and so things get really com­pli­cated. What we’re striv­ing to put together at Grosse Pointe Today v.2 is — will be — a com­mu­nity news and infor­ma­tion web­site, and I’ve already accepted it’s the “infor­ma­tion” that peo­ple really want, not the city coun­cil cov­er­age. Fit­ting it all into one easy-to-navigate pack­age is prov­ing to be a huge job, and I don’t envy our designer one lit­tle bit, although she has her own things she likes about it, i.e., “the pic­tures don’t have to be high-res.” But putting together a one-stop shop for All Things GP is not easy.

Of course, as the say­ing goes, noth­ing worth doing, is. And, truth be told, it’s fun to make it up as you go. For all the civ­i­liza­tion out there, the web is still a law­less place, and that’s what makes it interesting.

Any­way, this is one rea­son I’m so dis­tracted of late, as our launch date draws closer and I plow my way through copy, pho­tos, cod­ing and more e-mails than you can pos­si­bly imag­ine. I look for­ward to throw­ing chunks of the AP style­book out the win­dow, how­ever. I plan to utterly ignore the dif­fer­ence between “con­vince” and “per­suade.” (You watch, though — I’ll be lec­tur­ing con­trib­u­tors about less and fewer before the first week is out.)

When we get the site all the way up and run­ning, I will invite your opin­ions, espe­cially from you jour­nal­ists. We’re told there must be mad exper­i­men­ta­tion in our field, and that’s what we’re doing. Empha­sis on “mad.” So I’m off to plow through that 39-page bolus of copy once again.

Posted on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 9:57 am
in Media.

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69 responses to
“V. 2.0.”

  1. MichaelG said on March 26th, 2009 at 10:14 am

    Sell the siz­zle, not the steak.

    “I will invite your opin­ions, espe­cially from you jour­nal­ists”. Why is that? Is the site intended for journos only? If it’s intended for GP folks in gen­eral, maybe the opin­ions of aver­age users might be of some value. So much of our soft­ware is crap because the devel­op­ers and code writ­ers and so on write it for them­selves instead of users. My (free and prob­a­bly flawed) advice? Check out your peers’ opin­ions of course but don’t ignore the thoughts of the users.

  2. jeff borden said on March 26th, 2009 at 10:16 am

    Amen to the design­ers’ rise in power. We had a sit­u­a­tion like that at my last news­pa­per, where a new edi­tor was con­vinced our very wealthy, very pow­er­ful, very edu­cated read­er­ship would be bet­ter served by more charts, pho­tos, graph­ics, etc. than by the in-depth analy­sis for which we were known. This reached its nadir in what became known as the “pigeon page,” when a story filed by one of his pets about the prob­lems these rats with feath­ers cause –pigeons in a big city? wow, go fig­ure– with a huge photo of a pigeon. The page design­ers were involved in every edi­to­r­ial deci­sion and their opin­ions fre­quently out­weighed those of the jour­nal­ists and other editors.

    Maybe I’m a Lud­dite or becom­ing a cranky old man, but I dropped our Chicago Tri­bune sub­scrip­tion after its gaw­daw­ful redesign. We gave it three or four weeks to win us over, but it only made us mad­der and more frus­trated. As you point out, Nancy, the front page had evolved into a giant bill­board for what was inside the paper. So, design changes have ram­i­fi­ca­tions. I’ve yet to see a shred of evi­dence the Trib has cap­tured any mas­sive amount of “younger read­ers,” which is what the effort was allegedly all about, but three other guys on my block put a bul­let in the Trib and started the daily NYT.

  3. Joe Kobiela said on March 26th, 2009 at 10:56 am

    Mark H.
    I had read about sparky in the past, sorry for your family’s loss. I won­der if he got dis­tracted tak­ing pic­tures. The other thing is the prob­lems he had a few days before, could be a health related issue. Ernie Gann wrote a great book that is a must read for pilots. Fate is the hunter. Per­haps Sparky met his fate on that flight.
    Pilot Joe

  4. LA Mary said on March 26th, 2009 at 11:01 am

    The bean counter who sits two desks behind me, cre­at­ing spread­sheets to show how long, in dec­i­mals of work­days, it took for a recruiter to open an appli­ca­tion, review it, screen the per­son then for­ward them(or not) to a depart­ment man­ager, showed his great­est dis­play of emo­tion the other day when he got a report from our big boss. He stood up at his desk, said, “Tom, you’re killing me.” None of really cared in what way he was being killed, but out of gen­eral polite­ness, one of the recruiters asked what Tom had done. His reply? “No one uses Times New Roman anymore.”

  5. del said on March 26th, 2009 at 11:12 am

    Con­fes­sion — I use Times New Roman. And I sorta con­sider Google the por­tal to the inter­net. And I even have a lamb-skin barca lounger (Nancy). Oh the shame.

  6. jeff borden said on March 26th, 2009 at 11:18 am

    I loves me some Times New Roman. I use 20-point arial for my lec­tures because it pops off the page, but for per­sonal use, its the old school all the way.

  7. nancy said on March 26th, 2009 at 11:18 am

    I love Times New Roman, and I’ll go 15 rounds with any­one who doesn’t. As far as Google, I’d be will­ing to bet, Del, that you know it’s pos­si­ble to get to a web­site by typ­ing its address in the browser win­dow. Whereas, I’m told, there are many out there who believe it only hap­pens via the G.

    Any­way, Del, as a GP rez, you’re one of the opin­ions I’m most inter­ested in. So stay tuned.

  8. Joe Kobiela said on March 26th, 2009 at 11:21 am

    Gas­man,
    Go over to the Chicago Trib sight and read up on your buddy Rahm Emanuel.
    I’m telling you, Dems or Rep They are ALL cor­rupt.
    Pilot Joe

  9. Dorothy said on March 26th, 2009 at 11:28 am

    I’m bored by Times New Roman — I’m always look­ing for some­thing “new and dif­fer­ent” so I must be an anom­aly ’round these parts. My daughter’s boyfriend is a designer at the paper where they both work and he free­lances in web design. He has a tee shirt that says “Ban Comic Sans”.

  10. LA Mary said on March 26th, 2009 at 11:30 am

    One of the other recruiters here sug­gested we use the font Hal­loween for our reports these days.

  11. nancy said on March 26th, 2009 at 11:31 am

    Oh, Bor­den neglects to tell you his best writers-vs.-designers story, about the day the page designer came to him and said, “When you write your Sun­day story, please have it start with the let­ter ‘I.’ It looks best in drop cap.”

  12. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on March 26th, 2009 at 11:36 am

    There is no “I” in team.

  13. Sue said on March 26th, 2009 at 12:07 pm

    Black­ad­der for me, because noth­ing says “pro­fes­sional doc­u­ment” like fake-fancy hand­writ­ing that’s hard to read. (Actu­ally, I have a secret crush on Papyrus.)

  14. Bill said on March 26th, 2009 at 12:16 pm

    “There is no “I” in team.”

    But there is “me.”

  15. Jolene said on March 26th, 2009 at 12:17 pm

    Joel Achen­bach has a brief com­ment on the design vs. con­tent issue on his WaPo blog. In short, he’s a word guy.

  16. moe99 said on March 26th, 2009 at 12:20 pm

    Sue, I received an email yes­ter­day from a col­league that I could barely read. I enquired back as to what font she was using, and she replied: “Papyrus.”

    You’ll have to put me in the camp of Times New Roman. It just looks right.

  17. Danny said on March 26th, 2009 at 12:23 pm

    MichaelG, I LOVE aspara­gus. I am jeal­ous. My fix usu­ally comes from the frozen, Trader Joe’s bags, but I’ve often won­dered what “fresh from the field” would be like.

    Cooz, is it that some peo­ple can’t smell aspara­gus laced pee or is it that some peo­ples’ bod­ies don’t metab­o­lize the aspara­gus fully? A few years back, a coworker claimed he had read some­where that if your urine did not take on that char­ac­ter­is­tic smell after inges­tion of aspara­gus, that that meant you did not have the gene that pro­duced an enzyme for metab­o­liza­tion of the aspara­gus for opti­mum nutri­tional value.

    Is there a gastro-intestinal biol­o­gist in the room?

  18. beb said on March 26th, 2009 at 12:26 pm

    Design is some­thing that works best when it’s not visible.

  19. nancy said on March 26th, 2009 at 12:30 pm

    Or, Beb, to put it another way: Con­tent is the rea­son a beau­ti­ful girl looks as good in plain white cot­ton panties as she does in a black lace thong.

  20. Sue said on March 26th, 2009 at 12:34 pm

    I won­der if there’s any truth in that story about Babe Ruth at the fancy soci­ety din­ner, being offered aspara­gus and politely say­ing “No thanks, Madam, it makes my piss stink”.
    You have no idea how hard it was to type those last two words! I’m out of your league, peo­ple.
    Now I’ll segue from Babe Ruth mis­be­hav­ing at a fancy din­ner party to the over­looked story of the day: Jim Car­rey as Curly, Benecio del Toro as Moe, and Sean Penn as Larry? Seri­ously? Actu­ally Sean as Larry works for me, Larry being the most cere­bral of the three and hav­ing a lot of the best over­looked lines. I’ll see it right after I catch the remake of Slap Shot.

  21. John said on March 26th, 2009 at 12:38 pm

    It’s worth men­tion­ing that nn​.com looks pretty good. Very clean and crisp. Like white cotton.

  22. Sue said on March 26th, 2009 at 12:44 pm

    John wins. He has achieved com­ment perfection.

  23. coozledad said on March 26th, 2009 at 12:49 pm

    Danny: I don’t know for cer­tain. My source is a Spy Mag­a­zine arti­cle from years back.

  24. nancy said on March 26th, 2009 at 12:51 pm

    John: Indeed, and sec­onded. I owe J.C. pretty much every­thing re this site. (Some­day he will present a bill, and I’ll have to sign over my house.)

  25. LA Mary said on March 26th, 2009 at 1:12 pm

    I was told by a nutri­tion­ist that one third of the pop­u­la­tion has the aspara­gus stinky pee gene. Danny, there is a lot of gor­geous aspara­gus in the farm­ers mar­kets right now. Pen­cil thin and ten­der and noth­ing like frozen stuff.

  26. Dorothy said on March 26th, 2009 at 1:20 pm

    Oh I’ve never tried frozen aspara­gus — prob­a­bly because I’ve only had the fresh vari­ety from the farmer’s mar­ket or Kroger (I know they’re not the same, but what I get at Kroger is not frozen).

  27. Connie said on March 26th, 2009 at 1:20 pm

    When I lived in south­ern Indi­ana one of my girl­friends had a huge aspara­gus patch. She drove by my house early in the a.m. on her way to work and often dropped off a bucket (OK an empty gal­lon ice cream con­tainer) on my porch. Mmmm. Brenda, you know I am only 200 miles straight north, please stop by with some.

    Saw an ad today (back cover of EW) for the Stella Artois short film con­test. Some­how that all seemed con­nected to var­i­ous dis­cus­sions so thought I would share it with you all.

    I won­der if that aspara­gus gene has any rela­tion­ship to the cilantro tastes like bad lawn grass gene.

  28. alex said on March 26th, 2009 at 1:22 pm

    Aspara­gus makes my pee stink, but I’m glad I don’t have the gene that makes cilantro taste bad. Hadn’t heard it described as bad lawn grass, but rather like a uri­nal cake.

  29. Catherine said on March 26th, 2009 at 1:25 pm

    My Pasadena Sat­ur­day morn­ing farmer’s mar­ket. There is a stand which has amaz­ing fresh aspara­gus about 6 months/year. They say it’s from a lit­tle speck of a micro­cli­mate near Lom­poc that is per­fect for aspara­gus. Y’all are mak­ing my week­end plans for me — aspara­gus, a flat of straw­ber­ries and some cheap flowers.

    Re the design and font com­men­tary above, I am nearly done with a 30-page doc­u­ment that the client insisted be entirely in Arial. I mar­ried into a fam­ily of print­ers, and can I just say? I hate that frakkin’ font. It makes the page look clean but it’s not read­able. Serif font for text blocks, people!

  30. Sue said on March 26th, 2009 at 1:28 pm

    I’ve always won­dered about these “taste like” state­ments. I mean, who chews on a uri­nal cake? I read a col­umn by Miss Man­ners where she com­pared eat­ing some shell­fish thing to bit­ing “fin­ger­nail par­ings”. I thought, AHA Miss Man­ners, gotcha! How would YOU know what it’s like to bite your nails, hmmm? How the mighty fall…

  31. MichaelG said on March 26th, 2009 at 1:29 pm

    I saw a sign in a john once that said “Please don’t eat the uri­nal cakes.”

    I like Nancy 19 (sounds like some kind of bib­li­cal quote). It does nicely demon­strate con­tent and package.

  32. Scout said on March 26th, 2009 at 1:36 pm

    Sue, that’s why I always qual­ify by say­ing, “Win­ter­green gum tastes like toi­let bowl cleaner smells.”

    I sec­ond the clean, crisp linen com­ment about this site. I espe­cially like how huge the TR font is on my screen as I am typ­ing this.

  33. LA Mary said on March 26th, 2009 at 2:11 pm

    In an Indian restau­rant I was unfa­mil­iar with, I had some chut­ney that tasted like a clean­ing prod­uct. It did not taste like some­thing you should eat. It was a funny shade of green.

  34. Dorothy said on March 26th, 2009 at 2:18 pm

    Doesn’t pee smell any­way??

  35. LA Mary said on March 26th, 2009 at 2:22 pm

    Yes, Dorothy, but asapara­gus makes it worse.

  36. Gasman said on March 26th, 2009 at 2:31 pm

    Joe K.,
    I’ll not defend Emanuel, but I don’t accept the “they’re all cor­rupt” charge either. There are plenty of folks in gov­ern­ment who are not. I hap­pen to think that both of our NM sen­a­tors, Binga­man and Udall, are pretty damn good. So far, I have no com­plaints about our reps. either.

    The “they’re all crooks” mantra is really an indict­ment of all of us and of our Con­sti­tu­tion, for it is that doc­u­ment which defines gov­ern­ment as being “the peo­ple,” not some dis­em­bod­ied thing sep­a­rate from the cit­i­zenry. Any­time the Rs have been crit­i­cized in the last 3 decades, they trot out “they’re all thieves; they’re all par­ti­san” argu­ment to deflect atten­tion from their own despi­ca­ble behavior.

    Your list for polit­i­cal schlubs has two, mine a cou­ple of dozen with­out even try­ing. The con­ser­v­a­tive record still is an embarrassment.

    Are there Dem crooks, liars, incom­pe­tents, and horn­dogs? Yep. They have just have been more numer­ous on the Repub­li­can side for at least 30 years.

  37. Richard said on March 26th, 2009 at 3:28 pm

    I’m with the guy who wants to ban comic sans. Yeck!

    For the record:
    I have not eaten uri­nal cakes.
    I have never worn a black lace thong. Yet.
    I have the aspara­gus stinky pee gene.
    I love Geor­gia, the font, not the state.
    Love Gara­mond.
    Noth­ing kills good con­tent like crummy design.
    I’m sick of Times New Roman.
    It’s sunny in Port­land today.

  38. coozledad said on March 26th, 2009 at 3:28 pm

    LA Mary: That may have been a corian­der chut­ney. Some of the prepack­aged ver­sions may taste a lit­tle like Pine-Sol. The fresh stuff is pretty good. Bet­ter still is the hot onion chut­ney.
    My wife and I go through lots of green chili pickle. It’s good on toast with peanut but­ter. I’m still try­ing to fig­ure out what the label means by “edi­ble oil” though. Why in the hell wouldn’t it be?

  39. Dorothy said on March 26th, 2009 at 3:41 pm

    Thx Mary but that was my (lame) attempt at being sar­cas­tic. I’m aware of the effects aspara­gus has on liq­uid waste!

  40. LA Mary said on March 26th, 2009 at 3:43 pm

    I like fresh chut­neys and the Indian places I usu­ally patron­ize make their own. This stuff was vile. I have lime pickle in my kitchen and bran­son pickle. The in house Brit buys this stuff. I’ve got a good Indian gro­cery with veg­e­tar­ian take out sit­u­ated half way between work and home, so I pick up stuff there all the time.

  41. BRIAN STOUDER said on March 26th, 2009 at 4:53 pm

    So I was all set with a Fort Wayne riff about Fort Wayne/South Bend’s own anti-Obama Bishop (who, on the national news sto­ries gets iden­ti­fied as the “Bishop from Fort Wayne”) and his silly boy­cott of the com­mence­ment cer­e­monies at Notre Dame, bea­cause of the inclu­sion of Pres­i­dent Obama in the proceedings.….

    but then I thought “to hell with that” — and instead thought I’d share the really cool news here­abouts, which is that Phil* will be stop­ping here in Fort Wayne on his cross-country bike ride.

    “Details when avail­able” they say, but what­ever they are, Pam and I will go see him.

    *Ohhhh — YOU know who he is…‘Amazing Race’ Phil (I don’t remem­ber his last name) — [Australian accent ON] “I am sorry to tell you — you HAVE bean eel­im­i­nated” [Aus­tralian accent OFF]

  42. nancy said on March 26th, 2009 at 4:55 pm

    Richard,

    Wel­come. I like Gara­mond, too. My web guru is always find­ing these great serif alter­na­tives to TNR, like Caslon and Jen­son. I’m such a font moron that I don’t even try to keep up. Once I designed my own let­ter­head using Cop­per­plate and was totally pleased with it. J.C. told me to step away from it, please. Just put it right out of my head.

    What’s wrong with Copperplate?

    Oh, and he would want it stated some­where: He hates Optima.

  43. LA Mary said on March 26th, 2009 at 5:10 pm

    Gara­mond is a nice airy font.

  44. Sue said on March 26th, 2009 at 5:21 pm

    On April 1 Nancy’s going to change the font in the com­ment sec­tion to wingdings, I just know it.

  45. Jean S said on March 26th, 2009 at 5:25 pm

    oh thanks peo­ple, I just wasted 10 min­utes play­ing with fonts.

    Times New Roman rules. Easy on the eyes when you’re plow­ing through a lot of stuff. I wish design­ers would pon­der what hap­pens when I’m faced with their “hot” page designs. Reverse type? too much crap on the page? Oh, go away. I won’t even bother to read the article.

  46. Jolene said on March 26th, 2009 at 5:29 pm

    I like Gara­mond, too. There is, as many of you prob­a­bly already know, a lot of research (actu­ally, there’s a lot of dis­cus­sion and some research) about the read­abil­ity of dif­fer­ent fonts in dif­fer­ent for­mats (print vs. web) and for dif­fer­ent pur­poses (body text vs. headings).

    More gen­er­ally, there are texts on writ­ing for the web. Prob­a­bly mostly a com­bi­na­tion of com­mon sense and stuff peo­ple think they know, but the new text by Ginny Redish is as likely to have a real empir­i­cal foun­da­tion as anything.

  47. nancy said on March 26th, 2009 at 5:30 pm

    Remem­ber Wired mag­a­zine, back in the day? Sto­ries that began with no head­lines, orange ink, lines drawn all over the place. (They were pio­neers of the avant-garde cut­line tech­nique of slap­ping a pic­ture on the page, then run­ning a slash­ing yel­low line from the photo to wher­ever the per­son in the picture’s name appeared in the story text, cir­cled. It was simul­ta­ne­ously con­fus­ing and insult­ing: “This is Bob, you idiot!”)

    I didn’t renew my subscription.

  48. Catherine said on March 26th, 2009 at 7:43 pm

    Another vote for Gara­mond — used it on my wed­ding invi­ta­tions. And Geor­gia (men­tioned above) and Palatino and Book Anti­qua, and all the lovely serif fonts. Had a for­mer boss who was obsessed with hav­ing every­thing in Futura. Can’t even look at that font any­more with­out my stom­ach churning.

  49. whitebeard said on March 26th, 2009 at 8:32 pm

    I had one news­pa­per boss, who boxed one story on Page One with two-column wide type, had reverse white on black type for another story, had cen­tered type in a brief note point­ing to some­thing inside, ran four airy columns of type on a six-column space (remem­ber those wide broad­sheet pages) and mis­tak­enly asked me how to make his fifth story stand out and I sug­gested, in a seri­ous tone, to make it regular-width type, because noth­ing else on the page was nor­mal.
    He was the same boss, who, as the first edi­tion was being printed with a lead story about a man who died after hang­ing him­self in a jail cell, let the presses keep rolling full-tilt after I told him that my mother, who worked at the hos­pi­tal, said the “dead” man ate a hearty lunch under her super­vi­sion. He took the time to find the police reporter to find the police chief who repeated his ear­lier state­ment that the man hanged him­self, “we never said he died,” added the chief.

  50. beb said on March 26th, 2009 at 9:38 pm

    Amer­i­ca­blog just redesigned its pages. On dial-up it takes for­ever for the blue back­ground to be replaced by a white back­ground. Until it does you can’t read the frick­ing page. That’s the kind of over-design that should be resisted.

    I like Gara­mond and Palintino.

    I try not to smell my own piss so I don’t know whether aspara­gus makes it stink.

    How does one know that some­thing tastes like a uri­nal cake? I sup­pose it has some­thing to do with smell, since taste turns out to heav­ily depen­dent on smell.

  51. Jean S said on March 26th, 2009 at 10:26 pm

    Nancy, re: Wired…yep yep yep. I just sent those issues right to recy­cling, do not pass go.

  52. Rana said on March 26th, 2009 at 10:50 pm

    I’m a Palatino woman myself.

    I think I’ll have to check out Garamond.

    I’m also rather fond of Zapf Chancery — but only as an accent!

  53. Dexter said on March 26th, 2009 at 11:00 pm

    WJR had peo­ple from the Detroit dailies on tonight. Mon­day both dailies switch to a “more mod­ern for­mat”.
    Papers will be free Mon­day, with edi­tors and man­agers and colum­nists pass­ing out free papers.
    “Just buy a paper…it’s only 50 cents, and we can’t make any money from our online edi­tion”, said the Freep dude.
    News­boxes are free Mon­day — Nance let us know how that works out, because I don’t believe they will change every coin-box to “free“for just one edition!

  54. Dexter said on March 26th, 2009 at 11:03 pm

    So — I finally found out what hap­pened to Susan Wat­son, the coura­geous for­mer colum­nist at the Freep, fired for stick­ing with the strik­ers.…
    http://​www​.hushy​our​mouth​.com/​s​u​s​a​n​_​w​a​t​s​on.htm

  55. MarkH said on March 26th, 2009 at 11:33 pm

    Jeff(tmmo), Brian(?), other Pur­due fans, my sympathies.

  56. brian stouder said on March 26th, 2009 at 11:58 pm

    Well, Grant and I spent a few hours at a Mad Ants bas­ket­ball game, where they gave us NCAA updates…the Ants put a whip­pin’ on the team from Los Angeles -

    but what caught my ear was that ol’ Dorothy is prob­a­bly a pretty happy camper right about now (if her heart isn’t still in her throat!)

  57. CrazyCatLady said on March 27th, 2009 at 12:25 am

    Beb — MMm­m­mmm, cake!

  58. moe99 said on March 27th, 2009 at 12:42 am

    Aw, c’mon brian, don’t let those of us out of the know stay that way. What hap­pened to Dorothy?

  59. Jolene said on March 27th, 2009 at 1:54 am

    Dorothy’s team, Uni­ver­sity of Pitts­burgh, won its game.

  60. Dexter said on March 27th, 2009 at 2:05 am

    http://​susan​ager​.com/​i​n​d​e​x.html

    The above link is to Susan Ager’s home­page. She wrote a col­umn in the Freep for years , tak­ing a buy­out last August. The past years her date­line was her North­port, Michi­gan home.
    I had got­ten a bit nos­tal­gic for the old days at the Freep when we could read Fitz, Tal­bert, Ager, Wat­son, Neil Shine, and good old Mitch, the scourge of NN.C. Fitz still lives as far as I know, Bob Tal­bert and Neil Shine left us, Mr. Shine just last year. Another great writer was News sports writer Shelby Strother, dead way too young of liver can­cer.
    Eigh­teen years ago he had a col­lec­tion of his columns pub­lished:
    http://​open​li​brary​.org/​b​/​O​L​1​7​5​9​6​7​6​M​/​S​a​d​d​lebags

  61. Dexter said on March 27th, 2009 at 2:17 am

    Talkin’ sports: Who in the h-e-double hockey sticks ever thought Miz­zou would take out Mem­phis? And Duke really sucked, and Philly’s got a win­ner in ‘Nova.

  62. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on March 27th, 2009 at 8:25 am

    What a night — Pur­due loses and they toss the smil­ing oil rig worker from Idol, then Cat Cora lost on the replayed Iron Chef from Sun­day, which i already knew, but i only saw the end of “Bat­tle Cof­fee” Sun­day, so it was a tri­fecta of fail­ure. Cof­fee braised fen­nel? Won­der what that makes one’s exc­reta smell like … which was the defense Pur­due used against UConn.

    By the way, i just went and looked at the front page of Nancy’s GPT web­site, and was some­what star­tled to find she’s an out­let of FoxNews. Who would have known? Never, never judge too hastily, i have to keep remind­ing myself. It must be kind of like a Juan Williams thing. Look­ing for­ward to read­ing Karl Rove’s take on Pointe-d Disputes.

  63. brian stouder said on March 27th, 2009 at 9:08 am

    Jeff’s Fox ref­er­ence intrigued me, so I clicked on the GP2day site, and imme­di­ately got a chuckle! — and indeed — quite a lovely site; crisp and clean, pleas­ing to the eye and and inviting.

    Makes me wish I was one of the elect

  64. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on March 27th, 2009 at 9:16 am

    She’s fair and bal­anced, you’ll have to con­cede that.

  65. brian stouder said on March 27th, 2009 at 9:23 am

    I have decided — she reports

  66. Jolene said on March 27th, 2009 at 9:32 am

    There’s a right paren miss­ing in Ben Burns’s bio.

  67. Connie said on March 27th, 2009 at 9:50 am

    Wish my byline were North­port. Of course one of these days I am going to inherit a lit­tle cot­tage some miles south of there, for which I will prob­a­bly not be able to afford the prop­erty tax bill. Mario Batali and fam­ily live in North­port in the summer.

    Hey Sue, looks like last week in July for us. And you?

  68. ejohnson said on March 30th, 2009 at 11:54 am

    I’ll be watch­ing the evo­lu­tion of GPT with great inter­est. I’m two years in to my own hyper­local blog­ging exper­i­ment and have yet to fig­ure out the design chal­lengers or even to find some­one who can help poor techno-feeble me. (My hus­band tries but it’s not his first line, either.)

    Look­ing for­ward to more on this topic. I’ve got enough for a book, let me tell you.

  69. Your Uncle Ben said on May 18th, 2009 at 1:13 am

    Wait a fuckin’ minute !
    I’m 70 yrs. old and I was tired of lis­ten­ing to this tired shit when I was 20. Get some enthu­si­asm ; Find the pos­i­tive vibe ; move for­ward.
    All I heard in your first para­graphs was the neg­a­tive. That has been done. So done . So 40’s . 50’s. 60’s. .….….…70’s …etc.
    Do you get it ? What is new to you .…. ain’t New !
    Why do you think that the owner put blind­ers on race horses. ???
    ANS: So they don’t see and care about what is around them !
    Do your thing with­out regard . WITHOUT REGARD !!!

    your Uncle Ben

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