Wednesday, February 27, 2008

New date for new-media event

Our new-media symposium at NIU has been rescheduled for Saturday, March 15. We hope you can make it. Complete details here.

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Beacon News blog

The Beacon News in Aurora did a big package of stories and multimedia to mark the one-year anniversary of a crash in Oswego that killed five teens. Most interesting, I thought, was the blog on which the paper hosted a community forum. A panel of experts offered responses to reader comments. Many of those comments were very emotional and raw. There was a good mix of comments from teens, parents and experts.

It's a great example of how we can use a relatively simple and accessible technology - blogs - to build community.

Friday, February 8, 2008

Wisconsin paper takes a gamble

The Capital Times in Madison, Wis., is going from a daily p.m. paper to a once-a-week free paper, with the rest of its news going online. I wonder if this represents a suicidal experiment, or the start of a trend.

Story HERE.

Reminder: New-media event

A reminder that the registration deadline for NIU's Feb. 23 new-media forum is Monday, Feb. 11. The event is free, but we need an accurate count. The Northern Star Alumni dinner follows. For complete details, click the link above.

Snow's toll

A story idea that would work anywhere in northern Illinois: I've heard from several people who own auto body shops that this has been the busiest winter they've ever had. With snow and ice events almost every week, the number of fender benders has been huge.

Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Judges needed

I'm looking for a few journalists or former journalists to help judge the IHSA Sectional journalism contest, Saturday, April 19, at NIU-DeKalb. High school journalists come here for the day and compete in various categories. Winners move on to the state competition the following week.
Each judge does two categories and gets paid $100 -- $50 per category. If your round trip is more than 100 miles, IHSA also will pay 25 cents per mile for the excess. You're here from roughly 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.
The event includes 15 categories: Photography, News Writing, Feature Writing, Review Writing, Headline Writing, Editorial Writing, Advertising, Newspaper Sports Writing, Yearbook Layout/Double Page Spread, Computer-Generated Graphics, Copy Editing, Newspaper Design, Yearbook Theme Development, Editorial Cartoon, and Yearbook Copy Writing.
If you or other members of your staff are interested in helping as a judge, please e-mail me and I'll put you on a tentative list. More information to come soon, but I wanted to give you an early chance to save that date.
If you're closer to Lake County, a similar sectional event is being held there that day, at the College of Lake County, and judges are needed there as well. I can direct you to that organizer.
Thanks.

UPDATE: Thanks for the great response on this! We appear to have enough judges. If you'd like to be put on a list as a backup in case someone has to cancel, let me know.