A project that our arts editor Phoebe Mitchell and living editor Deb Scherban had been incubating with local author Lesléa Newman came to fruition last week with the introduction of "Hear a Poet, There a Poet." We'll be featuring a new, original poem in the Gazette and on GazetteNET every other Wednesday; Lesléa, who is Northampton's poet laureate, kicked it off with one of her own works, and we'll have the next one a week from today as I write.
While she was working out the concept, Phoebe asked me about the possibility of doing audio recordings of the poets reading their works whenever possible. The first word of the column's title is "Hear," after all. (I love it when my colleagues kick great ideas into the GazetteNET bucket, which they frequently do; the more that happens, the less you have to rely on whatever weirdness I dream up. I think their ideas are usually better anyway.) I'm especially pleased to be doing this, since poetry is IMO so much more interesting when it's heard than when it's just read. And what could be more authentic than a writer reading his or her own work? That won't always be the case, maybe, but we'll strive to do that whenever we can.
The recordings are pretty simple, just using GarageBand on a MacBook laptop to capture the reading with the MacBook's internal mic in a (hopefully) quiet place, usually our conference room here at the paper. The poems aren't overly long, so the recording goes quickly, and the payoff for you is, we hope, well worth the small amount of time it takes.
For the moment, the recorded poems are mp3 files embedded right into the page; clicking on them should either fire up your browser's associated mp3 player (often Windows Media Player) or play right in the page if you have a plug-in such as QuickTime installed. Shortly, we should be placing them in a little Flash player that will do the job right on the page as well. Give them a listen as they appear; the pace of our lives is often too hectic and the assault of digital information can be unrelenting, but there's still always room for moments of spoken beauty and soulfulness, right from a writer's heart to your ears.
Last night, was, for me, a nice evolution in the slow-but-steady growth of things we can do more easily with this site. The UMass Minutemen were playing in the finals of the NIT basketball tourney, and of course our UMass beat reporter Matt Vautour was down at Madison Square Garden in NYC, covering the story. Matt's pretty aggressive on the curve of "Let's try (X)" on the Web side. He (along with his sports colleagues Mike Moran and Jim Pignatiello) is one of our earliest bloggers, and easily our most prolific one; we worked through the fall and winter on a UMass sports podcast; and he's getting ready to crack the video barrier.
For his stories in the last part of the hoop season and throughout the Atlantic 10 and NIT tournaments, Matt was also sending back audio of press conferences, interviews, and anything else he encountered while out news-gathering. This is as basic as Web stuff gets, really; he uses a digital audio recorder that also functions as a little USB flash drive, pops it into his laptop, dumps the file onto the computer and e-mails it to me. I put the attachment onto my laptop, fix things like volume and add fades at the beginning and end, convert it to mp3, upload it to our site and drop it into his stories. This is completely nothing groundbreaking, but it nonetheless adds to what we can bring you in terms of coverage of an event. More is good, you know?
So, last night, the game ended, and I turned off ESPN and logged into our network. I'd already arranged with our sports editor, Stan Moulton, to put up wire coverage of the final result until we got Matt's story. Easily done. Stan called me at about 11 p.m. to let me know Matt's piece was in and edited, so I went back in and subbed that into the top story slot. Great -- local coverage of the day's breaking story less than two hours after it ended. This is how news is supposed to function in 2008, after all. But before I closed my connection to the network, I checked my e-mail, and lo and behold Matt had already sent along Travis Ford's press conference, which I wasn't expecting to see until the morning. Bingo! It took maybe 10 minutes to get it to my laptop, clean it up, upload it back into the system and get it into his story. Not even 2½ hours after the game's end and probably no more than 90 minutes after his remarks, we were able to bring you a full report with audio included. That's how it's supposed to work on the Web, kids, and I'm really happy every time we can get a story to you like that. Everyone here is.
That accords with many of the wishes I hear from readers in casual conversation around the area -- "Will you have more video?" "Audio?" "What about the report on the zoning issue in my neighborhood -- could we see that?" And this is what we're working to be able to do more often and more quickly. It's gratifying to be able to turn around that kind of story material, and particularly that fast. There's more where it came from: Just this week, we had video on the Amherst Bulletin site of voters at the polls talking about their choices that was produced by our New Media intern Simon Armata (plus more at our YouTube channel), the copy of a proposed ordinance on rezoning of an Easthampton neighborhood that has people over there pretty fired up, and the letter from Northampton's building commissioner to residents working to stop some operations at the city landfill. None of those, in and of themselves, are a major big deal, but they enhance and extend the story in exactly the way a community news organization should be doing these days.
Again, we're not inventing the wheel here; we're not even joining the party, given that we've been doing this since I got here nearly two years ago. But it's getting simpler to do now. Hey, if you're reading this, you could do the same thing. Got a video camera? A point-and-shoot camera? Using those tools to put things on the Web is simpler than ever, and the cost barrier to publishing, if not technically zero (try doing any of this if you haven't paid your broadband access bill), is still cheaper than it's even been in history. It's already a big ol' information party out there. My old colleague Mary Serreze is doing a lot of this at her Northampton Media and Community Radio Hour blogs, and so are tons of other people throughout the area, the country, and the world. More power to them, too. We'll work to hold up our end; there are a couple of projects brewing that we think will make for great reading and viewing, and that will extend the way we can bring you stories.
This is where the folks in New Media (the ones who produce GazetteNET on an daily basis) tell you what's new on GazetteNET, as well as any other musing that's on their minds.
UMass Sports
UMass-St. Bonaventure
High School Sports
Girls Hoop Playoff Picture
NEW! Everything Else
Matt vs. Jim vs. Frank - NFL Season Wrap-up
Readuponit
France has a new Louvre and lots more for 2012
Gazetteer
New Winklepicker festival brings Mardi Gras north
Walking the beat
Dazed and confused
The Conspicuous Consumer
Triple Bagel: A birthday giveaway at Bruegger's
