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The Rutland Herald/Times Argus has launched a new events application-type site, called InViTe.

From the about page:

From trend spotting to hot local bands to finding the next four-starmeal, inViTe offers residents and visitors to Central and SouthernVermont the latest information about the local club scene, arts,festivals, music, movies, books, theater, restaurants, and other localevents. Fueled by a powerful community-driven calendar, the site offersa comprehensive day-by-day glance at what is happening as well aseditor-selected best bets. User submitted photos, reviews and ratingsgive the site a savvy community flavor while the staff of the RutlandHerald and Times Argus provides a consistent level of local eventcoverage that ensures an inclusive site.

Interesting.

Has anyone had any experience using the Free Press' Get Published service? It seems sort of similar, though not as comprehensive. I'm sure they'll have something like this soon.

Thanks, Morgan, for the tip.

I was just reading a book review of -30- The Collapse of the Great American Newspaper, a collection of essays about the state of journalism, and noticed some comments about St. Mike's prof David Mindich. Apparently he contributed to the book.

Robert Franklin, who wrote this review, was impressed by what he had to say.

...the most interesting ideas come from journalism Prof. David T.Z.Mindich, who argues that solutions lie outside the newsroom and must"create a society in which young people feel that reading qualityjournalism is worthwhile."

Mindich would require more TV newsprogramming, including some for kids. If he ran the world, he'd alsodiversify newspaper and broadcast ownership, test civic knowledge oncollege-entrance exams and promote "meaningful" politics and theteaching of quality journalism. "There is even evidence that, despiteconventional wisdom, quality sells," he writes.

Not sure I like the "more TV news programming" part — I haven't watched TV news in years — but I think Mindich is on the right track.

That said, I think newsrooms need to do more to understand how young people (or wired people in general) communicate. Like, for example, understanding how Facebook works, and why people like it. Wouldn't hurt if reporters actually learned to USE social media tools themselves.

And of course all of you reporters out there are invited to join the Vermont Media group on Facebook. We're up to 19 members now, some of whom are actual, working journalists! Jeezum!

My mom sent me a link to this audio slideshow last week, and recommended I watch it. I just did, and it made me sad, and homesick and grateful for my neighborhood in Winooski.

It's a slideshow of Detroit, near where my father grew up. My dad and his family lived one block away from the family of the guy who narrates this slideshow. You can actually see my dad's old house in one of the pictures of Fletcher Field. He and the Resmer family lived across the street from the park.

I grew up a few miles from this neighborhood, but on the other side of 8 Mile Road, in suburbia — East Detroit, now Eastpointe. I haven't been back to visit my dad's old house since my grandmother moved out in the 1980s.

Most of the houses around there are vacant now. They've been stripped, boarded up. Glad I got this audio postcard, to remind me of what I left behind.

I'm going to be at the Seven Days party for most of the night, which promises to be fun. Tour our offices! Buy limited edition T-shirts designed by our cartoonists!

We've also got some food and a cash bar. No birthday cake, though it is our 12th birthday. I volunteered to be the bouncer. No, really.

But over at the VCAM studios, you can watch two short films (by Candleblogger Bill Simmon) starring two more bloggers (Selene Colburn and Steve Benen).

Though blogging is apparently the subject of only one of the films. Phew.

There's tons of other stuff to do, too.

I just saw this on Morgan Brown's blog, and it made me laugh out loud. I'll never forget this photo, which appeared on the front page of the Burlington Free Press (or was it the front of the Vermont section?) in 2004. It's one of my all-time favorite Vermont press photos. The blood running down Peter's face, Cheryl giving him some eyebrow under the hat — I just love it.

Thanks, Morgan!

Classes have already begun — at the University of Vermont, anyway — and here's one I wish I could take. It's called Composing Digital Narratives, and it's taught by English prof (and blogger) Richard Parent. Here's an overview, from the syllabus:

Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously declared that“hard-core” pornography is hard to define, “but I know it when I seeit.” Digital narrative is a little like that — it’s hard to define, butyou know it when you see it. Or do you? In a later case, Stewartadmitted that his “I know it when I see it” standard was unworkablefrom a legal standpoint. What are we to make of novels written entirelyin text-message, for instance? It might appear that since text-messagesare natively digital, of course a novel written exclusively intext-messages would be digital. In China, Qian Fuzhang has published anovel, Out of the Fortress, written in only 4200 charactersand readable only on cell phones. In Finland, Hannu Luntiala has alsowritten a novel entirely in text-messages, yet the publisher of thiswork, The Last Messages, has published the novel in codex form.  Is this work a digital narrative?

In this course, we will explore the very wide field of digitalnarrative by examining what others have done. We will examine thespectrum of technological tools we have available to us as digitalcomposers. And we will experiment, combining our own imaginations withthese technologies to tell stories no one has told before in ways noone has told them before.

Parent puts assignments and readings and resources on the course blog , so we can sort of see what they're up to. They talk about web-based narratives and games like Zork. In their last class, they apparently watched this "Sims2 machinima" on Male Restroom Etiquette.

One thing I found on their blog that piqued my interest: this digital poetry from Young-Hae Chang.

Anybody out there remember poetry slams? I helped organize the poetry slams in Burlington years ago. Chang's work reminds me of the slams. It's computerized, of course, and meant to be experienced one person at a time, as opposed to slam, which is a performing art. But this digital narrative embodies the spirit of slam — the way it reinvigorated the form by introducing rebellious idea that you could judge poetry, assign it a numerical value. I look at WHAT NOW? and I think of how we used to sit packed into in the Rhombus Gallery, watching teams of touring poets from Providence and Santa Cruz. This seems like an off-shoot of that.

I wish I had the time and money to take this class.