Friday was Talk Like a Pirate Day. On Tuesday, I mentioned I wanted to do something for the “holiday” and asked others for ideas. As often happens, work (the dead-tree edition) got in the way and I didn’t think about it again until Thursday. So I put together a pirate name generator. It was a [...]

KTVI, the local Fox station, and KPLR, the local CW affiliate, will move to KPLR’s Maryland Heights offices and share a newsroom in an attempt to cut costs. Newscasts will not overlap. (We thought it strange when KPLR started an hour-long newscast at 7 p.m.) The new agreement goes into effect on Oct. 1. A [...]

On Wednesday, the Austin American-Statesman started a new Twitter account to track Hurricane Ike: @trackingike. Reporters Marty Toohey, Tony Plohetski and Patrick George, and photographer/videographer Jorge Sanhueza-Lyon (who Twittered about Hurricane Gustav as @trackinggustav; he has renamed the account @digitaljournals) all updated @trackingike from Corpus Christi, Houston, Galveston, Beaumont. Internet editor Robert Quigley provided updates, [...]

It’s a day no one really wanted to see, but the 87 buyouts at the Sacramento Bee pushed this year’s total of layoffs/buyouts at U.S. newspapers above 10,000. That’s 39.39 jobs per day. The total doesn’t tell the full story, though: More layoffs and buyouts have not been reported. Earlier this week, the Billings Gazette [...]

I’m leaving for the Online News Association conference in Washington, D.C., early tomorrow. Follow the conference on @ona08, through podcasts and RSS. I’m sure folks will be live-blogging too — rumor is there will be free wi-fi. Check Twitter to see who’s doing what. I’m looking forward to a day of Ruby on Rails, and [...]