Editor, revised

This via cyberjournalist: An interactive map of newspaper layoffs and buyouts this year at graphicdesignr.net. The listed total is more than 4,880. You can also find one for 2007, which includes the cuts at my newspaper, The Spokesman-Review.

Two points: First, this map is more affecting than the daily reports on Romanesko or a simple number. Which is another example of why multimedia just makes information crackle.

Second, take a look at Erica Smith’s site while you’re there. She’s an accomplished news designer at a major metro who also has chops in flash design and mashing up data.

My news design background is scantier, limited to the B section and wire pages at the S-R and a few A1 design shifts at the Missourian. But I would love to develop skills and a portfolio like Smith’s. It’s one big way I can help avoid becoming part of her next map.

At right, one of my better page one efforts.

On Monday we ran a story about the Old City Drive in Spokane, an excursion mapped out by the visitors center folks to highlight points of interest and charm in the Lilac City.

The city editor sent me a page of typed directions and asked me to post them with the story. I said OK but thought I’d go one up and replicate the drive in Google Maps. It was quick and the result, below, is embarrassingly plain. But I thought it might add something useful for a few readers.

On Monday morning, I was linking up content and read in the story that there was an online map of the new, longer city drive. When I found it at the Spokane Regional Convention and Visitors Bureau website, I had to laugh: the folks there had also used Google Maps, and it looks like this.

View Larger Map

As a vegetarian, summer grilling can sometimes seem limited. Fortunately, with encouragement from my friends, I’ve started a quest to diversify my options.

Not content with freezer-aisle hockey pucks or the quotidian portabella, I’m taking recipes for nonmeat burgers and giving them my own twist.

The action is under way at www.burgerrevised.com. Check it out, and share your ideas!

Last month I posted about story lengths for online news.

The general idea was that shorter is better.

In the meantime I haven’t necessarily practiced at work what I examined there. Then again, I’m an editor not a writer.

Yesterday I came across this article on Slate (thanks Journerdism). It’s been circulating; I even heard a city editor at work discussing it. That, for those in journalism, is amazing.

Basic premise: It’s just length that matters.
It’s style. Short paragraphs. Short sentences. Bullet points. Frequent subheds. Periodic bold-facing of words. Lots of links.

You should really check the link at the end.

So I thought I’d play a little game. Take a graf from a wire story and rewrite it like the Slate article.

Which really stems from this guy.

Here’s the original, as run in today’s Spokesman-Review (credit to Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post):

INDEX, Wash. – With little fanfare, Congress has embarked on a push to protect as many as a dozen pristine areas this year in places ranging from the glacier-fed streams of Wild Sky Wilderness here to West Virginia’s Monongahela National Forest. By the end of the year, conservation experts predict, this drive could place as much as 2 million acres of unspoiled land under federal control, a total that rivals the wilderness acreage set aside by Congress over the previous five years.

Now I shall butcher it.

INDEX, Wash. - Congress is trying to create about 12 wilderness areas.

They include:

• West Virginia’s Monongahela National Forest.
• Also, Wild Sky Wilderness near Index.

How much we talking?

Some experts predict more than 2 million unspoiled acres will be protected by December.

That means the feds will have say-so.

And that’s about what Congress has set aside in the past five years.

Not exactly poetry. But easy to digest. Maybe.

So, would you accept news written like this from the standard bearers?

Just got a new iMac. It’s speedy and has a much bigger monitor than I’ve been using. If you want a gushy description, I’ll just refer you to Apple.

In the picture below, my 2004 iBook is above.