Showing posts with label Newspaper. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Newspaper. Show all posts

Monday, November 16, 2009

The Dire Pleas of Missed Connections

Did something I rarely do – read the “Missed Connections” section in one of those tabloid free daily papers the other day.

Had a good chuckle, wondered what kind of person would actually write these things, and how much the paper was making by charging these characters for providing the service – assuming they do.

“Missed Connections” sections are springing up in the “Classified” sections of newspapers and online sites all over the world. Essentially, people write about others they encountered during their daily journeys, but for whatever reason didn’t get a way to reconnect with that person – no

Reading the newspaper: Brookgreen Gardens in P...Image via Wikipedia

phone number, not even an email address to write too. They write in, hoping the exact same person they made eye contact with, or happened to talk to about the weather, reads the very same section of the very same paper or online site, and reaches out to the author.

They read like desperate attempts by stalkers trying to lure victims into their web of psycho-babble. That’s harsh – but if you strike up a conversation with a total stranger on the bus, in the park, or anywhere else, wouldn’t it make more sense to ask that person for their name and number or business card at that point in time? It certainly makes more sense than putting any chance of further meeting into the complete randomness of a “Missed Connection” in a publication which may be read by thousands – but never by the very person you want to read it.

A “Missed Connection” reads something like this:

You were walking your pet poodle through the park. We started talking, sat on the benches by the big oak tree and talked about dogs, work and cooking. I was wearing a green sweater and blue jeans, you wore a neon pink top and hat and bright red shoes. Wanted to ask you out, but too shy, dinner? Call me at . . .

Rejection is one of the hardest things to overcome – I was shy once, I ought know. But if you feel that connection upon meeting someone new, the time is in the here and the now, not the later.

It is like that saying, never cry over spilled milk – it doesn’t make any sense dwelling on the past. Next time you’ll know to make your move. In the here and now, get on with your life.

Apparently though, these “Missed Connections” work. There have been stories about people who met in the park, chatted up a storm, and then went their separate ways. But then they reconnect after one person posts a “Missed Connection,” the responds, and now they are happily married. Speak of target marketing.

Though with all the nuts placing these ads, and all the more nuts responding, makes you wonder just how many of those people who respond are really the person who the ad was meant for? And if the person who wrote the ad even cares – if the shoe fits, wear it – maybe they’ll take

bad newsImage by Stitch via Flickr

someone who is close to their intended person?

You have to be pretty desperate to take out any form of personals ad, especially in this high-tech world, where all you need is a computer and an Internet connection to instantly chat with millions of other people, just as lonely and desperate for some company.

That raises the question of safety too – desperate times call for desperate measures. Just how well can you trust a complete stranger who posts one of these ads?

Not everyone who posts a “Missed Connection” is crazy, but how do you really know the person you are calling isn’t one of the few who is?

Though without some risk taking, none of us would ever really meet in life – we’d all be too afraid to leap out of our own universes.

But if a person is desperate enough to take out an ad in a newspaper or online, begging for you to contact them, is that someone a sweet and romantic-type of person, or a stalking crazy psychopath to be avoided?

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Wednesday, November 04, 2009

Flashback to the Old Hot Wax Days

My age was showing, but I was glowing, as I reminisced about days of old with a couple younger colleagues today.

We were discussing desktop publishing, layout and design, and we were discussing the various software applications people use in this field, when one of my colleagues asked what ever happened to Adobe Pagemaker.

Ah, Pagemaker, that takes me back to days long before computers were popular for layout and design. Incidentally, Adobe Pagemaker was morphed into Adobe’s Creative Suite (CS) and became Adobe Indesign.

But my mind began to wander, as I described the old days of layout and design. Back then, the tools of the trade were anything but high tech. Cork cutting boards, Xacto knives, rulers, scissors, rollers and burning, BURNING hot

Adobe Creative SuiteImage via Wikipedia

wax littered the layout and designer’s desks.

Many times I’d burn myself on the hot wax, rushing to paste together a story in time for a print run. Luckily it was like a candle burn, nothing major.

Back then, printed pages were literally cut and pasted together on long wax coated pages called “proofs.” Hot wax was rolled onto these proofs, and each story was cut into pieces, and each piece was coated in this hot wax. The wax would allow you to slide each bit into the perfect spot in the layout, creating a page in the newspaper. Then the pages were hung like freshly washed clothes to dry.

It was a time consuming process, requiring steady hands, and a solid eye for being able to see when things were aligned just right. The most skilled at this could eyeball a single line of type (say a headline) without a ruler, and just know when it was perfectly straight on the page.

Though each proof came with pastel pink and blue grid lines, showing you the way.

To reduce some of the repetitive tasks of this

Adobe PageMakerImage via Wikipedia

time consuming process, layout designers kept many common elements on the side of their desks ready to go.
The “paste-up board” as it was often called, because it had elements (such as page identifiers, logos, staff by-lines, datelines, place lines and so on) were all lying there, pre-sized and waiting to be pasted-up onto the page.

The area surrounding your pages in most desktop layout design applications is still called the paste-up board today, and is used to story common elements which can be copied into place.

These completed waxed pages would then be sent to the printers, where they would take them and create plates which they’d use for a print run.

When breaking news occurred, the poor layout designer literally had to start from scratch, because nothing was electronically designed, so the page or pages affected by the new story had to be recreated.

This was why deadlines were so very important back in those days, as a breaking news story could delay the print run of a newspaper for hours.

Once a print run begins, it takes some time to get started again, because of the way inks are printed in layers at different stages to achieve different colors and effects. So it still takes time to stop and start the actual production of a paper.

That’s why most major daily papers have two or three print runs, say a morning, afternoon and evening run. Some even have different edition runs, say one for the city, and one for distribution outside the city in the suburbs. If a breaking story changes the paper, they will toss the revised story into the next print run, instead of stopping the presses completely.

Which is partially why newspapers are in the so-called dying medium of print. Often, by the time they have hit newsstands, many of the stories are already out of date.

With 24-hour, seven-day-per-week news channels on television and radio, and with the global reach of the always on Internet, developing news stories change constantly. Newspapers can’t change once printed.

The always on electronic media also has driven us to expect news to be new the second we see it. When you read something in a newspaper, it was current at the time it was written.

And newspapers take so much time to read, while television, radio, even the Internet can broadcast the news to us, while we are making dinner, doing house cleaning, or even while working the very same computers broadcasting all this stuff.

Although newspapers are a dying breed, I miss the old days of the hot wax, Xacto Knives, and paste-up boards. Back then, laying out a page was a much more hands-on process, because you physically placed stories on the page. These days, you usually right-click on “place into frame” to put a story on the page.

It just doesn’t have the same feel.

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Friday, August 21, 2009

Why Amber Alerts Don’t Work in Our Information Society

You’d have to be living under a large rock not to know the age we live in is the information age.

We’re all “wired” and completely connected everywhere, to everyone, all the time. From cell phones, smart phones, BlackBerrys and other mobile devices ringing at all hours of the day, to always on email, online chat sites, remote access to work and home networks, there is no escaping the world in which we live.

Television and radio broadcast useful - and more often these days useless - information all day and all night as well. And if you miss your favor

Image via WikipediaSeveral mobile phones

ite broadcast, often you can catch it onDemand, or via a time shifting channel on digital cable or satellite television. Don’t have those, you may not be out of luck, with Podcasting becoming popular, you can download many shows directly to your mobile device.

With all these levels of technology, it is hard to believe that sometimes, no matter what the information, or how noble the intent of the messenger spreading that information, communications breakdown.

Take a recent case, where police in Canada’s largest province failed to issue an Amber Alert for a missing child. An Amber Alert is the new electronic buzz-term to indicate a missing or lost person, usually a child. Police issue these alerts to the media, and instantly all communications channels screech to a halt, screaming a description of who is missing, where they last were seen, who with, and contact information, in the hopes that someone seeing this will help law enforcement find the missing soul.

In big cities, major highway signs will flash the Amber Alert message, as do most major media outlets on their television, radio and Internet feeds. Print media will run the story in the next edition.

And the Internet - ah yes, the ultimate form of instant communication - becomes the equivalent of a broken telephone.

When I was a kid, I remember being amazed when I was given two Styrofoam cups tied together with string, and hearing the other person’s voice in my coffee cup.

The Internet, for all its awe and power in bringing us closer together is the high tech equivalent of those Styrofoam cups and string.

Every time an Amber Alert occurs, people everywhere take it upon themselves to share this information with their online social networks. People, completely unattached to the actual event, repeat the Amber Alert message to their social networks.

Amber AlertImage by bobster855 via Flickr



In theory, the more people who receive the message, the better the chances of a missing person being found.

But as with everything online, the more removed someone is from the actual events as they unfold, the more garbled the message, until very little of the original message exists.

It is all too easy to just copy and paste whatever someone sends you online, and re-send it to all your friends. But have you ever stopped to think whether the message you received was right, wrong, or even out of date?

I’m on a handful of online social networks, and I’ve seen the same Amber Alert repeated several times - and each time the wording of the message was different. In one instance, I received an online message about an Amber Alert, just as I heard on the radio that local law enforcement had cancelled the very same Amber Alert.

Maybe it is my old school journalistic thinking, a remnant left over from when I was a journalist many eons ago, but whenever someone sends me any sort of news bulletin, I always stop to think about the source of that information. Who the hell is this person, why are they sending me this, and how reliab

USPS AMBER Alert postage stamp.Image via Wikipedia

le a source for this particular information is the sender?

Needless to say, when I receive an online instant message from someone named “HotBlonde75432” I’m not going to take much notice of a news bulletin from this person, even if it really is an Amber Alert. This person may have directly cut and pasted the information right from a legitimate news outlet’s website, or typed exactly what they read, heard or saw in their local newspaper, radio station, or television broadcast.

But so long as the anything, anyone, anywhere, anytime Internet is just that - I will usually chuckle at the wanna-be journalist’s attempt of spreading the news, mumble something under my breath about “wondering what ever happened to the news business, don’t these people have better things to do with their lives,” and move on.

So much for spreading the message.


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