Nice to see that XL Recordings is a big fan of TXP.
Extraordinary video of a guy trapped in an elevator for 41 hours
Caught on security cameras, he is like a bee in a bottle while the maintenance people work around him.
Gawker sells Wonkette, Gridskipper, and Idolator
I thought Denton would have held on to Wonkette, at least for the influence. The other two were sold to groups which hope to slot the sites into segments of advertising networks. So, goodbye then.
How to squeeze the life out of your newspaper
A recent post by Clark Humphrey recalled this 2003 essay in Times Of London.
From the Anchorage Daily News (Alaska) to the Key West Citizen (Florida), almost every paper in the country is designed to precisely the same template: a broadsheet with lengthy headlines and five main sections: news, local news, business, sport, and entertainment, which will be given a fancy name like Style or Life or Express or Go! This will contain the Dear Abby agony column and the syndicated strip cartoons. There will be extra one-day-a-week sections — Cars, Property, maybe Food and Health. Corporate and flavourless, they are without any sense of idiosyncrasy, eccentricity or risk.
The great papers are more varied but equally grey and dull. Front-page stories are always continued on an obscure inside page, so that reading a paper on a crowded train is a gymnastic exercise. They are nearly always overwritten, from the unwieldy portmanteau intros onward. The design and picture editing would have been passé on an English provincial newspaper of the early 1970s. The use of colour is pathetic. The headlines, almost universally, are turgid. As The New York Times said, over three columns, of Bush’s State of the Union address:
Calling Iraq a Serious Threat, Bush Vows That He’ll Disarm It and Also Rebuild US Economy
(And that’s the country’s best newspaper. You should see the bad ones.)
As Clark argues:
The typical newspaper’s particular package of information, entertainment, and infotainment wasn’t some eternal set-in-stone formula, but grew over decades of industry practice. Why should there be only one paper in most towns? Why should everyone have to get a sports section? Why do those sports sections cover a few big spectator sports in minutae, but ignore most participant sports?
It may hurt in the short term, but there are other models of journalism.
Ryan noticed this bit in the NY Times:
Tim — as in Russert, the inquisitive jackhammer host of “Meet the Press” — is a particular obsession of Matthews’s. Matthews craves Russert’s approval like that of an older brother. He is often solicitous. On the morning of the Cleveland debate, Matthews was standing in the lobby of the Ritz when Russert walked through, straight from a workout, wearing a sweat-drenched Buffalo Bills sweatshirt, long shorts and black rubber-soled shoes with tube socks. “Here he is; here he is, the man,” Matthews said to Russert, who smiled and chatted for a few minutes before returning to his room. (An MSNBC spokesman, Jeremy Gaines, tried, after the fact, to declare Russert’s outfit “off the record.”)
A long and interesting post on the creation of the Monocle website
The designer says that while Monocle’s print magazine was influenced by European newspapers like Neue Zürcher Zeitung and Frankfurter Allgemeinezeitung, the web design was to be influenced by CBS in the 60s.
A map of the Thames by written word and a graphic representation of Kerouac’s On the Road. Both, and more, can be seen in their originals at the Millennium Galleries in Sheffield.
We have long been a fan of fellow Vancouverite-turned-European Dean Allen as a writer, designer, and programmer. He created Textpattern, the typographer-friendly software that I keep coming back to for my client’s sites and for RevMoonbeam. After a three-year hiatus his site, Textism, is back.
The Fair will be at the Rag Factory, 16-18 Heneage Street. (Near Brick Lane.) It’s on Sunday 27 April.