So, it turns out that two of my friends from high school are writers for one of my favorite shows, completely unknown to me. (This is completely awesome, don’t get me wrong.) I participated in theater in middle school and high school, but no longer do creative work. With two other exceptions (both of whom work for non-profit groups trying to influence policy, interestingly), everyone else seems to have kept their hand in creatively, working as photographers, working in theater professionally or doing community theater. Or, you know, actually writing for a successful dramedy. The closest I get to that is listening to Martini Shot on my iPhone.
But there is good news! While it’s not as extensive as Jessica’s or Amy’s, I do have a page at IMDb. The bad news is that it’s for a misspelled version of my name, based on the completely unexpected thank-you credit I got for the original version of World of Warcraft after I left Blizzard. My correctly spelled credits for Warcraft III and Diablo II: Lord of Destruction aren’t in the system.
But just like with discovering that I had a Moby Games profile, I suppose that beggars can’t be choosers.
Now if I could just get a page on Wikipedia …
Although it’s occurring under bad circumstances, the best new music (or alternative/modern rock, whatever you want to call it) podcast is back. Dave Cusick’s That Sound Radio podcast is now in catch-up mode, after six months “off” while he worked as a disc jockey.
That means there’s three hours of the best music released over the past six months and change, all ready for the listening:
* Catching Up with That Sound, hour 1
* Catching Up with That Sound, hour 2
* Catching Up with That Sound, hour 3
For those of you — and you know who you are — who haven’t listened to a new artist (or, worse yet, a new song or album) since you graduated college, listen to these three hours of music and be dazzled by how much awesome new stuff has come out in 2009 alone. Some of the songs are even free MP3s at the links above.
Great stuff. Cusick’s too good at what he does to not be snatched back up by the radio industry again soon, so enjoy it while it lasts.
At least one Rhode Island paper seems to be making online content almost exclusively available to subscribers work for it. From Newsweek:
Spooky things began to happen this summer in the yachting mecca of Newport, R.I., shortly after the Newport Daily News hurled caution to the wind and began charging a $345 subscription fee for its online news—$200 more than for the print edition.
First, the phones stopped ringing in the paper’s circulation department. Fewer subscribers were canceling home delivery of the paper, something they had been doing in droves when they knew they could get the same product for free at NewportDailyNews.com. “Those calls have stopped,” William F. Lucey III, assistant publisher and general manager, told NEWSWEEK.
But something even stranger happened: after the Web site put up a pay wall for nearly all its content, readers would brave driving rainstorms to go out and buy the newspaper. Since then, newsstand sales of the Newport Daily News have jumped by 200 copies a day. For a paper with a daily circulation of 13,000, that’s a significant gain, especially since, in an era in which most papers are seeing steep declines in readership, even holding steady is a success; an increase is a triumph.
The paper has what local papers pretty much everywhere have: A monopoly on professionally generated local news. According to the always-reliable Wikipedia, Newport has a median household income of $35,669, so a $345 annual subscription fee — more than what it costs to subscribe to the Economist — certainly would drive folks to the newsstand, and in large numbers, assuming any interest in the local news. (That end of the equation is a different department’s issue, obviously.)
Former Daily Press Hesperia reporter Hillary Borrud now works at a paper in Oregon that does something similar (and is also family-owned, so decisions to throw up a “pay wall” don’t have to be run past a board or stockholders).
I don’t know that pay walls are the solution for what ails the newspaper industry, but they may not be as crazy as many people (including me) once thought they were. It’d be hard to erect one if your coverage area was served by multiple entities — it’s not hard to get lots of Capitol Hill coverage, for instance — but in a community like Newport, that’s not the case.
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