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Clay Shriky on twitter and the future of news

While Roman Polanski was the big story on Sunday, I don’t think anyone got the news into their actual morning editions. But below is what I found interesting from more than 100 Sunday papers across the United States this weekend.

…Fed bungled financial oversight

While it doesn’t actually sound like a scoop, the Washington Post uncovers proof that the Federal Reserve was looking the other way when it came to laws protecting the consumers.

…New angle in health care debate

Charles Lane, in the Washington Post, introduces a new angle to the health care debate revealing why the labor movement might not want to lend its support to the Baucus bill.

…Spies in the Southwest

The Santa Fe New Mexican had the most interesting story of the week with this enterprise piece on the various locations in Santa Fe where some of the most sensative nuclear secrets of Cold War were bought and sold.

…Fantastic foliage forcast

The feel-good story of the week has to go to the Boston Gobe with their scientific-based prediction for a particularly vibrant fall foliage this year. Let’s hope so, since leaf-peeping is one of the best parts of living in New England.

…Tune in, turn on, test again

Acid tests are making their way back into the laboratory, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. But not the kind Ken Kesey organized in and around the Bay Area in the 1960’s. These studies are more akin to the ones that studied the human mind that LSD was first invented to explore.

…eUnitary executive

The Arizona Star is one of a few newspapers to run on its front page an Associated Press story about whether or not the White House should have emergency control over the Internet in case of national emergency.

…Comedy connection

Abbot and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, Martin and Lewis, Akroyd and Belushi, Ferril and Vaughn. Now add Homer Simpson and Seth Rogan to that list of great comedy duos. According to the Chicago Tribune, Rogen is not only guest staring on the long running cartoon comedy show, but he also co-wrote the episode.

…Social marketing

Always ahead of the curve, in its reporting if not its actual technoogy, the New York Times reports on how social networking is changing how we market products.

…Race relations

The Kansas City Star has a great piece on how all the rhetoric can seem racist to some and just plain political to others.

Tomorrow I turn 35 years old. For my birthday, Julie got me this blog. I don’t really know how I’m going to use it yet, but I do recognize it is more than just a gift. In some way that I don’t yet understand, this blog is my future.

Allow me to explain…

I am a newspaperman. Or was. My transition has been slow. It started in 2004, while a freeleance reporter for a weekly newspaper. In my spare time, I built my first blog by fooling around with Dreamweaver and teaching myself a little HTML. It was a labor of love and one of the great pleasures of my career as a writer. It helped me get a job with a daily newspaper in Ashland, Oregon.

In my three-year tenure with the Daily Tidings, our print audience shrunk at roughly the same rate as our web audience grew. I actually saw the printing presses moved out and loaded onto a flatbed truck on one particualry poignant day at the office.

There, and at my next gig as a night editor of a daily in southern Vermont, I literally witnessed the newspaper business crumble around me. Then one day about six months ago I saw an ad on Craigslist. A star-up news website was looking to set up shop in my hometown and needed an experienced editor to help build a news operation.

After months of dreaming and creating My02818.com, we are about a month away from going live. At least one result of our efforts is that I can no longer, in good conscience, call myself a newspaperman, a title I hold in the highest regards.

Sad as that makes me, I’m even more excited for journalism’s future on the internet. Newspapermen (and newspaperwomen) aren’t becoming extinct, afterall. Only the paper. Communities, concerned citizens and society in general will still need news. It’s just the paper we don’t need anymore. I am now, more simply, a newsman.

Because I will literally be navigating new online territory when it comes to the community journalism model, I might just use this blog to chart my course. Community journalism is an interesting animal in and of itself, and it is one of great pleasures of my life to get to see how it works through the medium of the internet.

Bob Plain