Crazyworld

Click here to see a list of titles arriving Wednesday, courtesy of The Tangled Web.

Marvel's second issue of "Ultimatum" looks to be a good read. The great thing about rebooting the Ultimate Universe is that literally anything can happen. The (relatively) short continuity of the Ultimate universe makes it easily accessible to new readers -- i.e. you don't have to have been reading Spider-Man for 10 years to know what's going on. And the art is top notch.

Spartanburg County Council Chairman Jeff Horton recently told me that he's working on a letter that he'll send to his colleagues over the holidays asking them to listen to a tape of this month's meeting and determine if that sounds like an efficient governing body.

Chances are, it won't. Perhaps it will cause a light bulb to go off above some of the newer faces on Council.

This month's drawn-out meeting featured Councilman Dale Culbreth talking about how much he and a friend of his were going to have to pay in taxes and O'Neal Mintz talking about a neighbor of his who likes to hear roosters crow, among other topics that were only related to the matter at hand peripherally.

Horton agrees that some of the elected officials' questions could've been answered by county staff beforehand, leaving more time for people who had legitimate reasons to speak before them.

"A lot of the commentary was probably unnecessary," Horton said. "A lot of that could have been averted."

He went further saying that old hands like himself, Councilman David Britt and outgoing Councilman Rock Adams probably were able to grasp more of the subject matter Council deals with more quickly. (More on that in a story about Adams which should run in the paper any day now.)

Horton was, in a way, responding to some of the observations noted in my last post regarding the county's one-meeting-per-month setup. We didn't get into some of the finer points -- heck, we were both busy at the time -- but it's always good to see elected officials reading and taking comments and criticism seriously.

Spartanburg County Council needs to start meeting twice a month.

I hate suggesting this. It's not like I want to add yet another meeting to cover to my monthly calender. But having been "temporarily" covering county government for almost a year now, it's impossible to ignore: the current format does not work.

If you go to County Council meeting, look around every hour or so. See people with their eyes glazed over? Antsy, obviously ready to get out of there? Cracking jokes to one another, missing whatever information is being presented? Now, look at the people in the audience. Same thing.

Under the one-meeting-per-month setup, anyone lucky enough to get on a Council agenda early in the meeting -- which tends to start at a different time each month, arbitrarily based on the number and types of items that need to be addressed -- anyway, if someone gets on early, they have the luxury of getting the full attention of the elected officials and often the most time to talk about their cause, issue, problem, presentation.... whatever it is they're doing before Council. But people who go to these meetings for an item near the bottom of the agenda sometimes get skipped (well, postponed), shoehorned into a smaller time slot, and find themselves in a room full of people who are tired of sitting there listening to presentation after presentation. (I was raised Southern Baptist. Ask one what happens at noon on Sundays. It's like that.)

One argument against meeting twice a month is that it's an added burden to elected officials. These people have jobs, and they're giving their time to serve. That's true.

But the current arrangement is a burden for everyone else. Many of the people who go to these meetings have jobs, too -- or, at least, enough responsibility where they would probably choose not to sit through a three-hour meeting to hear five minutes of relevant dialogue. (And, still, without a public comment period.)

There's also the matter of efficiency. When the Council postpones something -- and this happens a lot -- that delays any action on the matter for at least a month. Meeting every two weeks cuts that delay in half. And, if legal ads are timed right for required agenda items like public hearings, then they could theoretically pass an ordinance in six weeks. Of course, I write this as I'm working on a story about an ordinance that's been in limbo for nearly two years -- a billboard ordinance -- but at least the opportunity for efficiency is there.

Meeting every other week can be accomplished different ways. Maybe the county would decide to hold all of its committee meetings one week and then their "official" meeting two weeks later. Maybe they'll divide up the committees so that certain ones conduct their business early in the month and the rest conduct their business later in the month. Maybe they'll scrap committees altogether, which would mean a two-man majority could no longer block something from moving forward. (There's a novel idea.) Maybe they'll incorporate time limits for presentations. There are a lot of options here, all of which could shorten the amount of time the average person would be asked to dedicate to a meeting in one sitting.

Several county elected officials and administrators have begun using laptops during meetings. They're not yet on Twitter, but still, that's a good sign, even if it's a little late. (The county Sheriff's Office still primarily files hand-written reports, which is so 2002.) They should continue to modernize and enhance the way in which they do business.

Meeting biweekly should be a part of that.

Click here to see a list of comics shipping this week, courtesy of The Tangled Web.

The second issue of writer Andy Diggle's run on the Thunderbolts comes out Wednesday. If it wasn't obvious from all the Dark Reign stuff floating around, it's time to start following this. (And Diggle, in his first issue, proved to be a worthy successor of Warren Ellis on this title.)

OK, I have to confess: I've been experimenting with a new lifestyle.

I've tried not to let it take control, but those around me have noticed something's different.

For a little over a month now, I've been on Twitter.

Twitter -- a micro-blog where you "follow" others and others, in turn, can follow you -- combines elements of news feeds, chatting and social networking. It's the epitome of the obsessive, need-to-know-now culture the Internet has spawned. It's kind of like crack for geeks. And it's ever-expanding.

The premise is simple. All you have to do is answer the constant question: What are you doing right now?

But is it useful?

It can be. I'm still learning all the lingo (RT, for instance, stands for "re-tweet," where you re-post someone else's thoughts so your followers see them, too). I don't "tweet" from my phone (yet). And I'm still not sure about all the apps (some grade your performance, which you can isolate by geographic area).

Kathleen Parker, in the link above, asks, "How long before we begin to expect, if not demand, that public officials twitter?"

The thing is, it's already happening.

S.C. state Reps. Nathan Ballentine, Dan Hamilton, Eric Bedingfield, Joey Millwood, Anton Gunn and James Smith all twitter in varying degrees. You can also find at least three candidates for Republican National Committee chair on Twitter: South Carolina's own Katon Dawson, Michigan's Saul Anuzis and Tennessee's Chip Saltsman. U.S. Rep. Bob Inglis twittered just yesterday about the auto bailout, and U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint tweets, too. South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster just joined, and there's a plethora of bloggers, political officials, activists and consultants. If I've missed someone, please forgive me: Like I said, I'm still learning the ropes.

Twitter is like a never-ending conversation, one that offers glimpses into the lives of some of the people online. (Anuzis ate too much pizza last night, for instance. Today, Gunn is attending his first Richland County Legislative Delegation meeting. Bedingfield is having dinner with the Belmont Fire District tonight. And Marvel Comics Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada is, for some reason, musing about "hot spinach balls.") Many Twitterers post links to articles they are reading or enjoyed, which not only helps disperse information, but gives you insight into what interests them. And, you can also use it for self-promotion or to push a platform close to your heart. (Dawson has been hammering on the Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich scandal.)

And then, there's tags. (I think they're actually called hash tags.) They're basically the "#" symbol plus a short description. At the bottom of the Twitter screen, you can search for the tag and see everyone who has contributed to that conversation. The most useful tag I've seen so far was #sc2008, which was used on Election Day and collected information around the state. Some others that are getting a lot of play these days -- at least among the people I follow -- are #scga (I think that's South Carolina state government. Lots of stuff about pre-filed legislation there.), #rncchair (needs no explanation) and #tcot (I think that stands for "True Conservatives on Twitter.")

My Twitter experiment so far hasn't been totally unproductive. I found out about the new school choice group in town from a tweet. I use it to shamelessly promote blog entries that I hope to get feedback on. I'm genuinely interested in the tweets from the House floor. And I've even met one of our readers on Twitter for lunch.

Is it useful?

It will be. I say that because I have one editor -- I like to write long -- who often tells me, "This story doesn't need to be long. I can sum it up in two sentences." Two sentences? That's a tweet.

To me, this goes right along with the "burst culture" I've referred to for a while. Twitter might be a fad, but these short, constant bursts of information from one to many in a two-way information flow will only gain popularity. Maybe the next incarnation will give you more than 140 characters to type your thoughts. Maybe it will be integrated into other platforms. (Hamilton has an interersting new Web site.) Maybe one day this will be an audio platform, so you're not bothered with reading and typing.

So, right now, as Twitter likes to ask, I'm still reviewing the merits of the current setup and how much time I should devote to it. (I did brag to an editor the other day that I knew what a re-tweet was.)

If you give a twit, feel free to stop by and share your thoughts.

... And don't say "news."

We, like most other papers, try to provide our readers with a variety of different stories on many different topics. How well anyone does that is always open to debate.

But following some conversations from my last post, which I now believe should have been called "An initial attempt to save the newspaper industry," one of the points that was brought up was content.

In the course of a conversation with one editor in particular, the idea that newspapers will eventually become an "elite" product surfaced. Not financial elite. Intellectual elite.

Looking forward, this requires a dissection of newspaper content. If we increase the value of the daily paper, then, I think, everyone wins. If we offer a premium product, we should be able to charge a premium price. No, THE COST OF THE PAPER IS NOT GOING UP. Not now, and not to my knowledge, anyway.

Overhauling the content paradigm would require a dramatic shift in the way we go about selecting stories, reporting the news and putting together the overall product. This won't happen overnight. And, keep in mind, this is just another academic exercise, one I hope will stir some debate. (You did notice that the parent company of the Chicago Tribune and L.A. Times filed for Chapter 11 protection yesterday, didn't you? What about the New York Times planning to take out a mortgage on its Manhattan building?)

The fact is, the newspaper industry is in trouble, and it has been for a long time. Every paper around has suffered through layoffs, some bit by bit, others in large chunks. Ask anyone in this business: It's painful. It hurts seeing people you've worked with go, and it hurts knowing that all of their duties will have to be absorbed by whoever is left. But this is getting off-topic.

So, back to the type and quality of content. The current model is to have "bursts" of information on the Internet, with slightly longer stories in the paper. When I started here, "enterprise" stories -- in-depth looks at a single topic -- could run 80 to 120 inches. Now, there's fewer pages and the paper is smaller. It would be nearly impossible to shoehorn a 120-inch story in the paper.

One conversation I had with a local professional a few months back was to scrap all of the short stuff, and let reporters focus entirely on longer, more in-depth pieces. (And charge more.) That may work, but it's only part of the equation. The word "burst" above was inspired by a comic book writer I follow. The general idea is that people want short bits of information from the Web, and longer stuff from the print medium. Breaking away from Warren Ellis, for newspapers this would mean creating more of a daily news magazine. In my mind, it would mean eliminating (or drastically reducing the space devoted to) breaking crime news and other event coverage, whether it's meetings or parades or whatever. If short stories come from those areas, push them to the Web. If they absolutely have to be in the paper, reverse-publish them. That is, put them on the Web first and then let the paper print the best of the bunch the next day. Ideally, this would allow reporters to focus almost exclusively on enterprise content.

That's one model. There are others. One paper in South Carolina has taken the idea of hyper-local coverage to the max, and now only prints stories about things that happen in its coverage area. This includes a bunch of short stories on everything from city hall to the Rotary Club to school lunches. It's a community newsletter with punch. Is that what people want?

Most newspapers are trying a little bit of everything. Our Town Square page is a good example. That gets a lot of community news into the paper on a regular basis, and frees reporters from compiling that information. I guess one question that needs to be asked is how much state and national news do you want from a local paper? Most of that is wire copy, unless there's a direct local connection. But if you get all of your, say, national news from CNN or The New York Times, then maybe we're wasting crucial space.

I can't help think that's a step down a dangerous path. I think back to a conference I was at a year or so ago. Gene Roberts was the featured speaker the first night. Roberts, the former managing editor at the Times, was a reporter at the time of the Kennedy assassination. He went to Dallas with rolls of coins in his pockets and came back with the famous photo of Lee Harvey Oswald standing in his backyard. He has a ton of other accolades. Roberts, when asked by a reporter about hyper-local coverage, pointed out that the more skilled reporters you have working on a big national story, the more likely it is one of them is going to find an angle that will blow the story wide open.

Of course, I'm paraphrasing. But to me, Roberts' success is proof that newspapers can't afford to go entirely local. Not if they want to continue the larger journalistic expedition in this country.

So, there goes a bunch of random thoughts. I've created a new category on this blog, "Reinventing the American Newspaper," where I hope we can establish some sort of dialogue that in its own small way is conducive to the health of the industry.

If nothing else, I hope it reminds people how important the newspaper is. To paraphrase another person I talked to -- not sure if he wants to be identified -- if you think of your local paper as fishwrap, then that's a problem. But don't just call it that. Tell us what you want.

Click here to see comics arriving Wednesday, courtesy of our friends at The Tangled Web.

"New Krypton" continues to be my favorite DC story. In case you've not been following it, the Bottle City of Kandor has been re-enlarged, and 100,000 Kryptonians are now flying around the Earth, all with the powers of Superman. And not all of them were raised to represent truth, justice and the American way. DC is also releasing a couple of Final Crisis books -- which have gotten progressively better but the delays on this series are killing the energy around them.

As for Marvel, with the Secret Invasion over, this week offers a glimpse into the next "phase" of the Marvel Universe with the Dark Reign special. SPOILER: Norman Osborn (aka Green Goblin) is now considered an American hero, and is plotting some scheme with an interesting mix of bad guys and gals. I'm particularly interested to see how former X-Men nemesis/current lover to the X-Men's Cyclops Emma Frost fits into this equation. The story is by Brian Michael Bendis, so it should be a good read, and a good litmus test to see how much you want to spend on Marvel titles in the next few months.

One of my editors has this whole thing about the time I spend blogging and on Twitter: No matter what I do, it's not going to make money for the newspaper. Newspapers, in case you haven't heard, have been struggling since the Internet went mainstream several years back, and there hasn't really been a successful model built on how our industry can use online content to be profitable -- profitable, that is, to the point where it supplants or (ideally) surpasses the revenue that was once provided by national accounts, automobile dealerships, real estate, classifieds and everyone else.

So, I decided to build one.

This is totally raw, 2 a.m., off-the-top-of-my-head stuff. I haven't sat down and tried to figure out if it's possible or if anyone else out there on the World Wild Web has thought of it. But here goes, anyway.

First, this has to start at the top. We'll use our company as an example. It would have to start with New York and work down to Boston, Florida and the rest of us in the regional media group.

The newspaper corporation would either purchase or (preferably) develop in house a platform that allows people to buy things through its sites. Think: Google Shop, eBay Stores... You get the picture. This platform would be integrated into each paper's Web site, allowing ad reps to sell "featured advertiser" pages. No longer does some annoying popup or banner ad go by the wayside. You see a Sears ad on the side, you click on it, and suddenly you see, can search through and buy the products Sears has decided to advertise through our company. The purchasing platform would work best with the personality tracking, targeted advertising schemes that Google AdWords or Amazon uses -- i.e., if you always bought electronics, read technology stories, posted on TalkUpstate about the latest iPhone, iPod or iWhatever, you're probably going to be shown the latest selections from that category. This allows readers the convenience of purchasing products through our Web sites, products they would be interested in. Heck, let's throw in a wish list feature while we're at it. We get a cut, and the ad revenue -- which should be substantial because of the targeted, dedicated advertising we would be offering -- and viola, online news is suddenly profitable.

... If the readers log in, that is. Most people don't like logging in to an account to read the paper. Even if it's free. It's a hassle. So, there has to be an incentive on their end, too. (Readers would have to log in so the tracking scripts would have something to, well... track.) I'm thinking a points system like the ones credit card companies use. For every $1 someone spends through our Web site, then they get a couple of "Herald-Journal bucks" or some such. Once they get a certain amount, they can trade it in for something. Gift cards or subscriptions or maybe even a spot on the Stroller cruise. Or something.

Why start at the top? Because advertisers are going to be taking a gamble on something new, and it's best to let them take that gamble on our largest properties (or all of them combined) so that their risk is small and potential payback large. And, because the national advertisers would be best positioned to take advantage of this. But, really, you can order a pizza online these days. Why not order one through GoUpstate.com, the site we would love everyone in Spartanburg to have as their home page? And small mom-and-pops could use this, too. All we'd need would be photographs of the products, the selling prices, and a couple of other bits of information (shops that don't ship might think of an in-store pickup special for a reduced rate). Creative retailers could use this to get ahead.

Newspapers have long had the wall of separation between their ad reps and their news departments. Take Wild Wing Cafe, for example. We covered their opening like it was the best thing since sliced bread a few years back. And now we're covering their collapse. The fact that they've bought a good number of ads -- and even paid to have a Web cam installed upstairs at one point, with the video streaming to GoUpstate.com -- it didn't influence us then and it doesn't influence now. I honestly don't know how much they spent with us. I'm not privvy to that kind of stuff. And, really, the only interaction I have with ad reps is the one or two I see on smoking breaks. (We're a dying breed.)

So, there. It's going to take some up-front work, but if advertisers see news sites as a way to directly reach their customers and our readers have the convenience of shopping directly through the paper -- I mean, there's a reason Sunday and Wednesday papers sell the most copies: that's when the ads come out -- then everyone wins. And then no one else (yes, it's been mentioned here and there) has to talk about bailing out the newspaper industry, which would be a nightmare on so many levels. State-controlled information being foremost.

This issue is vital. Whether my off-the-cuff solution works is up for debate. Please, lavish praise or cut it to shreds. At least we'll be talking about it.

If this works, by the way, I want a promotion.

Had a chance to spend some time with Attorney General Henry McMaster today. McMaster, who almost certainly will run for governor in two years, was in town to see various people this afternoon -- including our editorial board and some local GOP activists.

On our way back from lunch, I asked McMaster almost as an aside if he'd seen the Web site to draft current South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford to run for president in 2012. He said he hadn't, but that Sanford would make an "attractive" candidate.

"He'll get a lot of support nationally. People will be very interested in him," McMaster said. "He is a Southerner. He will have been a two-term governor of a prominent Southern state. On a number of highly principled issues, he is right. And personally, he is a very attractive, personable man."

Sanford seems to have been making more appearances in the national spotlight lately. He appeared on Fox News this morning.

Click here to see the list of comics arriving in stores Thursday, as always, thanks to The Tangled Web.

DC Comics announced today that "Batman" No. 682 -- the beginning of the "Last Rites" storyline -- ties into the mega-event "Final Crisis." Since they're both by Grant Morrison, they're worth a shot. Maybe it will even begin to explain what happened in the recently concluded "Batman: R.I.P." storyline.

Marvel wraps up its drawn-out "Secret Invasion" this week, and big changes are promised -- though hopefully they don't involve a deal with a devil that destroys a superhero marriage fans grew up with and mangles years of continuity. So far, I think Secret Invasion would have been great as a weekly or bi-weekly book. But considering the story covers only a couple of days, and it's taken months to tell... well, that's detracted from some of the excitement the book would have otherwise generated, in my opinion.