Movie times to return to Trib?

Looks like on the Editor's blog today that the Tribune is working to return the daily movie times to its Soundlife section.

As a former manager at the Grand and still a strong supporter, I know this will help the small theater. Thanks to the Tribune for trying to make it work.

On a side note, it sounds like they'll be able to do it with an automatic pull from the web, which will save them some staff time when it's up and running. Very cool.

No more showtimes?

I was quite surprised to see on Joe Izenman's blog this morning a post that The News Tribune had dropped daily movie times from their paper. He links to the Grand's homepage which asks readers who use the daily listings to e-mail the Tribune.

I understand that the Tribune is looking to cut pages out of the paper to save on production costs. I just question whether this was the right choice. If you think about the movie theaters that fall within the Tribune's area, there are thousands of people--multiple thousands--who are going to the movies on any given day. How many other recreational activities outside the home can you point to in our area that thousands of people are doing daily?

So why cut something that informs one of the most popular forms of entertainment? I will certainly admit to some bias here, having worked at the Grand, where cutting showtimes might be hardest felt.

When it comes to trimming content, I like Dan Savage's suggestion: quit republishing opinion pieces that are days and days old.

I'm also in favor of cutting the stock quotes. I believe they are still listed as "the most active stocks." This is tough on the reader who a) doesn't know whether their stocks will be listed or not and may spend time looking for something not there; and b) what if your stock isn't regularly active? A stock that lost .1% every day for a year would be down by nearly 30% and it wouldn't be ever be published as a "most active stock."

That all said, I'll alert the world to what the Tacoma twitter community has just discovered: The Tribune twitter feed is suddenly very active. Check it out here.

Where's Erik? Wii don't know ...

Yeah, I've been playing a lot with my new toy: the Wii. Turns out, it's pretty danged awesome. I'm a big fan of the group games like WiiSports and Mario Kart (always a classic!). But I'm also playing Super Mario Galaxy. It's ... great. The game has a spirit of adventure in it that is rather infectious. Just like the original super mario games (for me the big adventure was in Mario 3) it's all about the fun of it.

So if you don't see me blogging, you'll know where I am. :)

(other options for where Erik is: Doyle's, Suite133, the Lake, and the movies.)

Putting "Tacoma" back into the TNT

David Zeeck, the editor over at the Tribune, posted an interesting item today. A reader asked a) why did the Tribune go from the Tacoma News Tribune to The News Tribune and b) would they ever consider changing back.

Zeeck, even though he wasn’t at the Tribune when the name changed, lays out why it was a good idea before saying that it’s doubtful the name will change back to the Tacoma News Tribune. He writes:

The paper’s choice was to stay Tacoma-centric and confine its ambitions and future to a smaller area, or to grow and expand as the population and residential geography of the area boomed. They made the right choice – to grow.

What it would take to change it is a publisher and company ownership that saw returning to the name Tacoma as both true geographically and advantageous from a business/marketing perspective. I don’t think either condition is likely.

Dave, I'd like to make my case for putting Tacoma back in your name.

First, I would not disagree that the Tribune made the right choice back in 1987 when they changed the name. Back then, the need was to get the Tribune onto as many doorsteps as possible, which meant that an expansion into a larger coverage area was a good idea.

But a lot has changed since. So let me try to convince you on the terms you suggest: geography and business/marketing.

Geographically, Tacoma is still the county seat of Pierce County. Tacoma may only be 25% of your readership, but I'd wager that they are a plurality of readers, too. We likely also have the plurality of jobs and the plurality of arts and culture too. To put it another way, Tacoma is the "capital" of the South Sound, so it's not unreasonable that its major paper is Tacoma-centric, even if your market has expanded to Federal Way and North Thurston.

Also, geographically speaking, you're competing with you're own company when you expand your coverage and market outside of the county. 49.5% of the Seattle Times is owned by your parent company. And The Olympian is also owned by them. (I'm not going to count the Hearst-owned PI here since it's supported by a Joint Operating Agreement with the Times.) I think there is a good case to be made that Tribune should pull back from Thurston and some of South King County and invest those resources into a Pierce County focus--Tacoma, Gig Harbor, and all of East Pierce County.

On to the Business/Marketing argument.

The trends for consumers to get our national and world news has recently gone to just a handful of major online sources: The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN.com, MSNBC.com, etc.

Newspapers have responded with a variety of strategies to compete in the new online world, but the most obvious is that they have gone very very local. You made that case last year that newspapers can stay relevant and continue to compete because they have "boots on the ground" and can focus on their local coverage. Limiting your coverage area to Pierce County would pull some of your reporters back from the fringes of your market and increase your hyper-local coverage here, which would hopefully boost local readership to make up for any you lost in South King or North Thurston county (note: lost to another McClatchy paper). You would also save on your marketing in those areas, or be able to reinvest those dollars in Pierce County marketing.

I would also like to point out that online, names are everything, thanks to Google. In seven years we are going to have the US Open here, and millions of people are going to type in "US Open Tacoma" into Google. Same goes for any disaster or breaking news coverage. Nowadays you are marketing your paper to more than just local residents, you are marketing it to anyone who is trying to find out what's happening in Tacoma no matter where they are.

I typed in "Tacoma Foundry Explosion" into Google and the Tribune came up 8th (after the Times, KOMO, and CBS). That's not that bad, but consider this. If I'm in Kentucky, why would I click on a link to thenewstribune.com, when I don't know what city you're in? You could have just gotten lucky on a Google search for all I know. If you used tacomanewstribune.com as your primary domain, not only would you possibly be higher on the page, but you would be more readily identifable to a random searcher as a Tacoma-based paper, something I can't tell from your current name. There might be hundreds of thousands (millions even!) of page views annually that the Tribune could see with a name change.

As I always try to point out when talking about the Tribune, I'm not a hater. I really like the Trib and read it all the time. But I think there's compelling evidence that enough has changed since 1987 to consider going back to Tacoma News Tribune.

UPDATE: Mark Briggs, the on-line editor at the Tribune, has some additional thoughts on the question.

Why Twitter?

I rather liked this video. Some of the local twitter-ers may as well. It's a good explanation of why Twitter is a fun and kind of addictive web application. This is along the lines of the RSS feed video explain in plain English that I linked to before.

Wii are family

Last night we got our first taste of the "Wii craze." Yeah ... I'm going to need me one of those. We stuck with tennis, boxing, and a little bowling and I have to say it's quite a system. Great times last night practicing the ol' backhand with the family. Kudos to Nintendo.

Spam update

2091 spam message in my spam box right now, up from 2013 this time yesterday. And remember that's the last 30 days, which means that in the last 24 hours, I've received a net of 80 more spam messages than I received in the same 24 hour period a month ago. ... but again, I still haven't see a one in my inbox.

My Spam Inbox

I never bother to clean out my Gmail spam box. I'll check it every so often but there is seldom anything in there that shouldn't be. Which is good, because my spam folder holds spam sent to me in the last 30 days, and it currently has 2,011 e-mails in it.

Gmail is so good at preventing spam that I see spam in my Inbox maybe 2 - 4 times a week (at most).

But consider this: according to Wikipedia right now, there are "90 billion messages a day, although about 80% is sent by fewer than 200 spammers." Wrap your head around that. 15 times more spam is sent every day than people on the planet.

So maybe I don't feel so bad about the 2,011 messages in my spam box ... Oops, scratch that. 2,013 messages.

More on the Internet

I should make things clearer, having gotten that last post out of my system.

Free speech means a lot of things, but a lot of people automatically cry "Free Speech" when it is absolutely irrelevant. I can delete your obnoxious comments from my blog if I so choose. So can the Tribune. I can choose not to run your offensive ad in my paper. I can choose not to give a loony a platform in my paper by not publishing his letter to the editor.

Especially in the age of blogs, there is no reason why I can't be a dictator about the content that goes on my own site. This is true for a couple reasons--I'm libel for content on ErikEmery.com, for example. And because it's my voice here and I don't have to give you the right to voice yours here too. But you can just as easy go get your own Blogger account and set up a blog with an opposing view.

Google is not liable for anything we say when we use its blogging platform. And they shouldn't be. Network Solutions, Comcast (or some other provider who allows you to view my site) and any other company is not liable either. It would be like holding Gutenberg accountable because I say malicious things using a printing press (or at least, close enough).

But if they're not liable, they shouldn't be censoring either. I'm looking at you right now, Network Solutions, but Comcast is also on my list after trying to inhibit downloads from users using .torrent files (frequently used to exchange illegal copies of movies, which also happens to compete with Comcast's OnDemand offerings. Funny that).

And Google does have the right to clean up spam-filled blogs. With blogs as easy to create as they are, Blogger and other free and easy blogging platforms should be monitoring spam blogs built to give you a virus, steal your credit card information, or just get you to buy Viagra.

But these companies should not get a say in the content posted to their sites or using the fiber-optic cables that connect the Internet (AKA, a series of tubes).

Internet Censorship Commencing?

This weekend, Network Solutions pre-emptively shut down a website because they were worried that the content may violate their acceptable use policy.

Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician, wants to put up a short video criticizing Islam and the Koran. He believes the Koran is a "fascist book," that it goes against Dutch law and he wants it banned (irony watch: he wants the Koran banned, but his website to promote the view is getting censored). He's quoted on Wikipedia thusly:

Later, Wilders suggested that Muslims should "tear out half of the Koran if they wished to stay in the Netherlands" because it contained 'terrible things' and that Muhammad would "in these days be hunted down as a terrorist."

I'm not as worried about a jingoist and isolationist politician in the Netherlands. I'm far more worried about Network Solutions. In February of 2006 I railed--railed--in multiple posts against Viacom, for not letting South Park show Muhammad, and against those who tried to censor the cartoons. Free speech means pissing people off. It means ignorance, bigotry, intolerance, and even blasphemy can not be silenced.

Network Solutions should not be able to cut off a website because it doesn't like the content. Even if they are afraid of a violent reaction, they should not be able to cut it off. In fact, the telecommunication and domain registrars should be pushing the US the hardest in favor of the Net Neutrality Act that would prevent them from doing crap like this. Why? Because then they are legally obligated not to interfere with a website. If they really are concerned about employee's safety, then passing the buck to the American voters (through Congress) is the best way to go.

Registrars should not have this kind of power. It rewards violence, because it cowers in fear of it. They claim that they want to quell violence, but it only makes it worse. It emboldens other groups to start trying to get websites they don't like shut down.

Stop it now, Network Solutions. You're making everything a lot worse.

Walking on Air

On an excursion to South Center today, Mary and I swung by our favorite store ... The Apple Store!

Our mission: to check out the new MacBook Airs. Not because I actually am thinking about buying one. But because I wanted to hold the laptop that can fit in a manila envelope.

Let me just say, the Air is freaking crazy. You won't believe how light it is until you pick it up. You won't believe how fast it recovers from sleep mode or boots up. It's perfect if you travel frequently and need something when you're on the go.

The downside? It's not that powerful. It's got a 1.6 Gigahertz processor, which just isn't that fast. I don't think I'd miss the CD/DVD port, either. Still. It's freaking awesome. If you want to read an interesting article, here's Steven Levy with a hilarious review of the MacBook Air ... which he lost.

The Future

Placing voiceless phone calls ... asking Google a question by thought ... allowing patients of ALS to communicate.

The future is most definitely arriving sooner than we expected. At least sooner than Arthur C. Clarke expected. Some of these things were in his book 3001. We're getting close to them, just 993 years early ...

"Op Ed" over at Living & Working Virtually

Earlier this week I floated the idea of an "op-ed" style guest post to Andrew Fry, the blogger at "Living and Working in a Virtual World." The topic: When Bloggers Are Neighbors. Check it out.

I had a lot of fun writing it, and it was a cool opportunity to do something different with a post. I'm going to play around with some longer pieces of writing as opposed to the shorter bursts I usually post here.

Amazon calls an Audible

... and other puns.

I didn't really think it was a big deal when I read that Amazon bought Audible. And then I saw this on the New York Times Bits Blog:

Amazon isn’t saying much about what it will do with the company, but bringing audiobooks directly to its Web site and to the Kindle is the obvious first step.

What comes after that? How about a service that allows you to seamlessly switch from reading a book on your digital device to listening to the same book read aloud as you get in the car, or if your eyes are tired, or if you simply want to hear a crucial scene acted out? And then to switch back to the printed page?

Now that's something that caught my attention. As Amazon and Apple both get better at allowing their customers to move around movies, music, and books, people are going to really start using it more. I love that I can watch TV episodes or movie rentals on my iPhone and my computer. That I can order shows from Amazon at work and have them waiting on my TiVo when I get home. Did you know Toni Morrison loves her Kindle? I thought that was surprising.

Of course, for a counter point, here's David Lynch. (warning, vulgar language ahead).



(I'd just like to add that I agree with Lynch in principle: movies are always always better the bigger you can see them.)

Drop Office?

So I'm considering not doing the next version of Microsoft Office ... my account for Office has a three computer limit and I've hit it, which means I can't load it on to my new desktop.

All right. S'cool. The price of the brand spanking new Office Student & Home Edition is about $140 +/-. Or, I could branch out and--for the first time since the early 90's when my family dropped WordPerfect--drop Microsoft Office.

I've been eying Apple's iWork and it's not that bad. I'm using a test version to see what I think, and it's a pretty similar environment to Office. Pages is fully compatible with Word (in that I can open any Word file or export any document as a Word file or as a .pdf). Numbers isn't incredibly powerful, but powerful enough for my needs.

Combine Apple's iWork with Google Docs and I don't know what exactly I'd be missing from Office. It's still kinda scary, I gotta say. Office has just been one of those indispensable tools for so many years. But making the leap to Apple laptops in 2002 was scary (for about 5 minutes) and then it became awesome.

I am using Google Docs almost daily now. I share spreadsheets all over the place and jointly edit documents. It's good for many things and bad for many others (although there's a new feature that shows up every month or two. The question is, can Pages and Numbers fill in the gap enough that I don't miss Word and Excel.

We'll see. I'm going to give Pages a month until my test runs out.

Apple is just cool

So. Apple had their very cool MacWorld event today. Last year, they unveiled the iPhone. They didn't come close to touching it this year, but they still know what's what when it comes to creating absolutely awesome stuff.

I do appreciate the changes that have been made to my iPhone. One cool feature: I can press a button and it will triangulate off of cell phone towers to give an approximate idea of where I am. This is handy if you're in ... let's say an unfamiliar neighborhood of Seattle and want an idea of what the streets around you look like.

I also like that i can add buttons to the home screen, like the cool people who have hacked their phones.

But of course the awesome new product at the MacWorld was the MacBook Air. Why is this so cool? Because it's crazy--and I mean crazy--thin. The thing can fit in to a manila envelope. It has no CDRom/DVD drive, but you can install a program on your home computer that will allow you to "borrow" its drive over a wireless network if you need to upload some software (unbelievably cool). Watch the guided tour if you want an idea of why this sucker is the bomb.

That said, there's absolutely no reason why I need one of these. It will be my present to me when I publish my first novel, but until that point, I'm going to have to stay away. It's crazy expensive, of course, even for Apple. And it's made for someone on the go--mostly planes, I'd say--who has to be able to work in hotels, coffee shops, etc and wants something truly "ultra-portable." And this is it. My tiny 12" powerbook (now discontinued with Apple) used to be about the best choice out there for portability from Apple but this one really blows it out of the water.

Also, if you're one of those folks who dreams of the idea of a computer with not a single moving part (save for the hinge that opens the laptop) you can pay even more--another $1,400 to get a solid-state hard drive. Your entire hard drive would be made out of the same stuff as thumbnail drives, iPhones, etc. It makes the computer incredibly reliable and much closer to indestructible ... but $3,100 for a laptop ... dang.

Makes me want to finish the book up asap so I can get one.

South Sound Technology Conference

I thought I would put a short plug out there: tomorrow I'm going to be leading a discussion after the South Sound Technology Conference. I'll be talking about crafting a voice on-line and blogging "as yourself" rather than an anonymous person.

The conference is at UWT. Adam Smith will kick it off and Derek from Exit133 will be leading a panel on Civic Blogging. Here's a schedule of the day.

Looking forward to it! And maybe I'll see you there.

Broadcasting the Problem

There's a trend that's been going on recently: publishing photos and videos of alleged criminal behavior online. And it's troubling to me.

Here's the recent Tribune article and the Erik B. blog post about some videos that came out this weekend.

I have to ask ... is this effective?

It seems that the intended goal of the videographers is to get the word out about crime in their neighborhood by posting videos on YouTube and distributing them. Clearly that phase worked, as many blogs and the Tribune have picked it up.

But why YouTube? I assume that the videos are posted for the public's consumption and not for the Tacoma Police (after all, you could just send the videos straight to them if you wanted). Why do that? Here I would assume that the videographer is fed up with the TPD and wants to get the public behind him or her to essentially shame the police into action. So the police try to fix what they might perceive as a black eye, they put more beat cops on the street, and run more patrol cars. Eventually the crime goes away.

Fair enough. It's not that I don't see the logic of the plan, and if you've spent months--if not years--feeling like the police aren't doing their job, I can understand the motivation behind it.

But let's go back to the first part: you are announcing to the world that your neighborhood has crime. So much crime you can film it from your front stoop. It's 24/7, you can literally just walk onto the street and film some crime happening right then ... now come move in to my neighborhood and shop here and go to restaurants so it becomes more vibrant.

The assumption these video posters are making is that crime is keeping people away. And it may be, I suppose. Some people might see a movie at the Grand and then see a drug deal going down on a side street and they might not be willing to come back. But it seems like a lot more people will pick up the paper tomorrow and see, wow, there's crime near the Grand and the police aren't doing anything about it. Maybe I should see a movie at the AMC in UP instead.

It feels to me that sometimes the people giving neighborhoods a bad reputation are the people most invested in seeing it succeed. I don't hear about how bad Pacific Ave is from patrons and customers, I hear it from the owners. But Suite133 is down there, I have dinner down there all the time, and I just don't see the major problems people say are there (admittedly because the problems that do occur largely happen well after I've gone to bed).

A few years ago when I was at the Grand, Marty Campbell and the Stadium Business District worked very very hard to get their neighborhood cleaned up. They had a police representative at monthly meetings. They trained store owners on how important it was to call 911. They cut bushes down that drug dealers would hide behind. They removed pay phones so dealers wouldn't call. They added small spikes to railings so dealers couldn't sit on them. And things got a lot better.

One thing they didn't do was go out and tell their customers through the Internet and the press that their neighborhood was hurting from crime.

Some of my frustration about this issue has been with the response to crime on Pacific Avenue, so I don't mean to harp on the recent videos. But these videos are of my neighborhood, and so I felt compelled to post about it. I've lived here for four years and driven by one of the worst places in town--the so-called Molester Motel on 4th & St. Helens to get to my garage. I've seen many of the problems photographed or filmed.

But the surest way to fight the problems is to get people down here and out on the street (also converting the "Molester Motel" into market rate apartments like the owner promised would be a good start too). And the surest way to keep people away is to let them watch home movies of prostitutes getting in to a john's car on the next block from the safety of their home in a suburban gated community.

I'm not saying that we should lie to people or cover things up. I'm saying ... let's just stop broadcasting it. Keep filming, by all means. It seems to scare drug dealers and johns off the street, so kudos for that. But why broadcast it? Does it really need to go on YouTube?

Something that really bugs me

Why is that when I dial a 253 and dial a 1 first that I get an error message? Correct me if I'm wrong but aren't there some places where you need to dial a 1 even if you're within your same area code? So why isn't the system smart enough to understand that I didn't need to dial the 1 that time, but I only dialed it on the off chance the number was far out?

If I do the same thing on a cell phone I don't think it flips out. But a land line gives me an error message and makes me re-dial.

How annoying.

Federal Way Tech Academy

I saw in yesterday's Tribune that the Federal Way School District is starting a high tech middle-school project called the Technology Access Foundation Academy at the Totem Middle School.

So this might be a good time for me to once again plug my idea for a tech high school centered at the Foss Waterway Seaport and Urban Waters. The School of Maritime Science ... I'm telling you we could rock the house with it.