http://www.collegemediainnovation.org/blog/2006/12/12/operationalize-smarten-up/ a group discussion about the future of student media Wed, 15 Oct 2008 22:03:10 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.2.1 http://www.collegemediainnovation.org/blog/2006/12/12/operationalize-smarten-up/#comment-744 Invisible Inkling » Blog Archive » I’m too busy to think, so I’m letting these people do it for me Wed, 13 Dec 2006 16:18:25 +0000 http://www.collegemediainnovation.org/blog/2006/12/12/operationalize-smarten-up/#comment-744 [...] The Future of Newspapers: Len Witt says newspapers need to “dumb down or smarten up,” breaking open the pieces of Gannett’s mojo experiment in Fort Myers and analyzing hyperlocal content to check if it’s useful information or just coverage for the sake of covering something local: “Why not send him into a Ft. Myers neighborhood for a week or a month and make him feel like a member of that neighborhood and meet the people, hear their triumphs and tragedies? I think of my own neighborhood. There is the guy who spends his days cutting other people’s lawns, but with the caveat that he will try to save your soul. The guy who painted his house pink, in a place where no one paints their house pink. And he had a reason. The gerrymandering that separates our white neighborhood from the surrounding black neighborhoods. These are real stories that would smarten up the paper and its website rather than dumb them down by asking some random driver what he thinks of the road repair work on a Ft. Myers highway.”(Len via Bryan and Mindy) [...] […] The Future of Newspapers: Len Witt says newspapers need to “dumb down or smarten up,” breaking open the pieces of Gannett’s mojo experiment in Fort Myers and analyzing hyperlocal content to check if it’s useful information or just coverage for the sake of covering something local: “Why not send him into a Ft. Myers neighborhood for a week or a month and make him feel like a member of that neighborhood and meet the people, hear their triumphs and tragedies? I think of my own neighborhood. There is the guy who spends his days cutting other people’s lawns, but with the caveat that he will try to save your soul. The guy who painted his house pink, in a place where no one paints their house pink. And he had a reason. The gerrymandering that separates our white neighborhood from the surrounding black neighborhoods. These are real stories that would smarten up the paper and its website rather than dumb them down by asking some random driver what he thinks of the road repair work on a Ft. Myers highway.”(Len via Bryan and Mindy) […]

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