Richard Prince from the Maynard Journalism institute called me last night to ask about commercialappeal.com’s coverage of Isaac Hayes death. He quoted me extensively on our breaking news coverage in his blog/column. It’s about half-way down the page.

We owned the breaking coverage of the Soul Man’s death, but everyone in the newsroom and online just followed the breaking news process we had set-up– from sending out breaking news emails, text messages and putting up our breaking news bar on every page to putting together a video package and writing the story from every angle.

Since we moved to Memphis, we’ve visited several different churches as we are looking for a church home for our family. When I’m investigating the church the first thing I check out is the church website for some basic information about the church. So the church’s site gives me the first impression of a church. I don’t expect a church to have a fabulous modern looking design, but I do expect a church to have an up to date site with basic information that is easy to find through a simple search.

As a first time visitor, I have a few simple questions that I want answered and a good church site should have this information either on the site’s home page or on a highly visible link clearly labeled for visitors. Here’s what I’m looking for on the church site as a first time visitor:

• Location – Where is it, how do I find it.
• Service Times – So I know when to show up.
• Kid’s Options during service – Do they have a nursery, kid’s church and for what ages so I can let my kids know what to expect.
• Dress – Do they dress up or go casual? I prefer casual, but can handle either.

Besides those first time visitor questions, I have a couple of other things that it would be nice to find out from the web site. These are less church website essentials and more to determine if it would be a good fit for us.

• Beliefs
• Bible Study/Small Group/Sunday School Options
• Missions opportunities
• Children’s ministry information and activities
• Staff Members Background
• Denominational Affiliation

A good church website is not a make or break thing for me about a church, but it definitely makes me feel more comfortable about visiting a new church (something I dislike doing) if I have some basic information.

“I was surprised that Time.com comes out in a paper copy”

-Brian Williams, Anchor of the NBC Nightly News (known for his comedy skills on SNL).

I guess Brian is just like me and gets all of his new online, too.

The Writer’s Guild has been on strike for a couple of weeks now and we are beginning to see the results of the strike as more and more network shows finish their season early, never debut the season or go into reruns. Frankly, I’m a fan of network prime time and late night programming and I’ve been a little upset that my favorite shows are ending their run early this year. Unfortunately, if this strike goes on for a while, I believe we will see the viewer shift away from network TV to cable and the Internet accelerate dramatically. Already, under 30 males spend more time online than watching TV and the elimination of familiar programming will shift that trend to both genders and up the age bracket in the demographics.

I do feel for the writers and understand their demands about receiving more money for the DVD and internet use of their work, but I really do not believe the TV networks are making additional money overall when you include these platforms. The networks overall value is still decreasing from gradual loss of audience, thus the value of the writers work is decreasing as the networks lose audience. If the strike continues, I think the writers are shooting themselves in the foot because the networks will discover that their reality programming helps maintain enough of a audience at a lower cost that they don’t need the writers.

P.S. This post has been bubbling around in my head for a few weeks, but I haven’t taken the time to sit down and write it down until now. The strike info is constantly flowing and changing. I’ve found the LA Times coverage to be the best place to get up to date information.

The 15k circulation Shelby Star has developed the Star Car to make provide their reporters with multimedia tools and make their online presence known. The $60,0000 SUV (lower on the page) features GPS tracking, wifi cloud, wifi camera, dash webcams, video cameras, scanners and multiple laptops. For some reason this doesn’t add up to $60k to me.

The other day I logged into my mortgage company’s site to check what we owed on our house that we are selling. I probably haven’t logged into that site in a year or two. The next day I had phone call from my mortgage company checking to see if everything was OK and if I had any questions. I have never, ever had a phone call from my mortgage company before. Not, when they bought my mortgage, not ever.

So, do you think they trigger a phone call whenever someone logs in for the first time in a while? Are they trying to protect their business and make sure I don’t jump mortgage companies? I guess it could have been a coincidence, but probably not.

Think about it…

Innovator’s and entrepreneurs need to follow Google’s advice…

“At Google, we really focus on failing wisely,” said Matt Glotzbach, Google Enterprise’s product management director, at the Interop New York conference. “There is no penalty for failure. In fact we encourage it because if you’re not failing it means you’re probably not trying.”

The Fayetteville, Arkansas City Councilnow has a blogspot blog where they are posting the agenda’s for the upcoming city council meetings. I think they are looking for citizens to comment on the different parts of the agenda, but there are no comments so far. We’ll have to check back and see if the citizen’s of Fayetteville get involved.

NYTimes.com general manager, Vivian Schiller, reports that their slide show section has taken off accounting for 10 percent of their overall August traffic.

Note to self: Add video AND slide shows to the site.

Which one do you think will be easier to produce?