Well, this is interesting. I’m not a fan of a lot of moves that Gannett has made over the years — USAToday is arguably everything wrong with newspapers, and its success has dragged more papers down that same path that will eventually, in my opinion, lead to ruin — but their new change in direction sounds very, very good and forward-thinking:
Gannett, the publisher of USA Today as well as 90 other American daily newspapers, will begin crowdsourcing many of its newsgathering functions. Starting Friday, Gannett newsrooms were rechristened “information centers,” and instead of being organized into separate metro, state or sports departments, staff will now work within one of seven desks with names like “data,” “digital” and “community conversation.”
The initiative emphasizes four goals: Prioritize local news over national news; publish more user-generated content; become 24-7 news operations, in which the newspapers do less and the websites do much more; and finally, use crowdsourcing methods to put readers to work as watchdogs, whistle-blowers and researchers in large, investigative features.
As I’ve said before, local news is king. This is the 21st century, and breaking news, particularly regional, national or international, is covered by a myriad of outlets and, more importantly, readers/customers/whatever have so many options available to them, starting with radio and ending with the Internet, that it’s foolish to assume that they’ll sit around and wait to hear about non-local news from your outlet. The media needs to concentrate on what it has a near-monopoly on: local news.
Newspapers aren’t going away, if one (quite reasonably) broadens the definition to include the Internet. The piece of paper with that soy-based ink that rubs off on your fingers might be in trouble, but newspaper printing presses already print other products anyway. Spin off the printing presses into a separate company and have the news outfit just be one of their many customers. There will always be a market for news, even if the medium changes.
Still, it’s going to be a bumpy road leading to the future:
Above and beyond pink-slip considerations, crowdsourcing journalism raises many other thorny issues, said Korte. The paper recently asked the crowd to weigh in on the grisly murder of a 3-year-old foster child.
“All that water-cooler speculation moved online,” said Korte. The readers were convicting the foster parents before charges were even filed. “We wound up having to close down the message boards until an indictment came down. It’s very hard to separate fact from fiction online, and some people expect that whatever’s on our site undergoes the same degree of scrutiny as what appears in the paper.”
Still, it’s good to see one of the major players making a bold step in what I think history will prove was the right direction.
So, I finally come home to await the registrar of voters posting anything but absentee ballots (even if, you know, they SAY all the precincts have reported in, mysteriously having only as many votes as the absentee votes earlier) and find a black widow the size of a cricket walking along the wall towards my front door.
What in the hell does a black widow that size prey upon? House pets? Small children? Shrunken and slow-moving senior citizens?
And what, exactly, in the ecosystem precipitated mutant poisonous spiders that size?
Ugh, ugh, ugh.
When I move back to Virginia, trading in black widows for fireflies, no one should be surprised.
- In other news, it looks like the registrar of voters was just waiting for me to go to bed to post what appear to be final results. Sneaky. The final (for now?) story: Hesperia votes.
Well, maybe iTunes went nuts. Or it could be a momentary loss of control combined with them adding a Latino store for American customers. In any case, they have four free songs up at the moment, as well as a number of TV shows.
Free music is goooood.
I will be the first to admit it: I’m a big dummy when it comes to competitive games. I really don’t “get” how to win them until I’ve had time to play them, by myself, on a computer over and over and over. It wasn’t until I got backgammon on my phone that I finally was able to “get” the game. (The secrets, at least as far as I’ve internalized them, are to never leave a point unprotected if you can help it and to roll that doubling cube over the moment you’re confident that you’ll win. I know, I know: Not great insights. Like I said, I’m a big dummy.)
So, now, after playing Monopoly who knows how many years, I’ve gotten it on my phone, I’ve finally figured out how to win. I think. I don’t have this problem with Trivial Pursuit, which people no longer want to play with me, for the most part, but Monopoly’s always been a craps shoot.
So, with my affable computer opponents, I first played a strictly by-the-book series of games unlikely any that I’ve ever played in real life. There was no magic pile of cash waiting at Free Parking, when someone didn’t want to buy a property it was put up for auction and trading properties was a big part of the game.
In that scenario, my eventual plan was two-fold:
- Get all the railroads ASAP. The computer opponents didn’t value them highly, but four railroads (or even three) get the kind of results you can only get from properties with multiple houses on them, for the most part. And if you get a card charging you maintenance fees for your houses and hotels, those railroads cost you nothing. Railroads are also located on every side of the board, meaning there’s always the chance of sucking a bunch of cash out of your opponent’s pockets.
- Block every monopoly you can. Instead of working on assembling your own monopoly, grab a property from every single set on the board, spending as much cash as you need (even mortgaging your own properities if you must) to do so. If, along the way, you manage to grab your own monopoly, great, but simply preventing anyone else from getting one will give you time to eventually win with just the railroads.
- A third part of the two-part plan, in case the railroads aren’t getting the job done fast enough: Once you’ve blocked every other monopoly and go around the board enough times to put together enough capital to fully develop a high-end monopoly up to hotels instantly, trade with whoever has the other half of the Park Place/Boardwalk top-end monopoly. The best scenario is offering someone the other half of the Baltic Avenue/Mediterranean Avenue two-some, because a fully developed set of those two bring in a pitiful amount of revenue compared to Park Place/Boardwalk, meaning they’re unlikely to make a dent in your bottom line, even if you land there several times.
Obviously, this relies on computer players, who are (at this version of the game) unable to figure out your fiendish plan and work to prevent it. In theory, the players at the board will figure it out at least some of the time. But this strategy should at least be able to beat fellow dummies like me.
It even worked once I tweaked the rules on the phone to get rid of auctions and to stick the big pile of cash at Free Parking. At worst, this all just slows the strategy down, but that’s all.
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