The Carton Networks Adult Swim Aqua Teen Hunger Force guerilla marketing campaign in Boston was mistaken for a terror plot as their magnetic lighting devices placed around Boston were mistaken for bombs. The Lost Remote’s Steve Safran broke the news that it was not bombs, but actually a marketing campaign.

I am all about telling a good story and that’s what journalism is all about for me– using the right medium to convey your message to your audience. One essential to good journalism (and good storytelling) is editing. Behind every wonderful writer is a wonderful editor. The site editTeach is a wonderful resource I just found for editing including tips on improving content, language skills and editing resources.

ChurchReport.com recently published their list of the 50 Most Influential Christians in America. The list is a very interesting collection of people, but I don’t think that I agree with their rankings.

What struck me about the whole list is that just about every person on the list is a media creator of some sort. Most of the people on the list are authors. Many of them have their on national television or radio program. The only ones without some form of media to their credit were the two politicians (President George Bush #11 and Senator Sam Brownback #41) and a CPA that I have never heard of (Frank Somerville #50).

There were four what I would call “pure media” people on the list who made the list solely for media ownership/creation rather than creating media out of some other ministry. They included Paul Crouch (#6), founder of Trinity Broadcasting Network, his son, Paul Crouch Jr. (#18), the VP for Administration of Trinity Broadcasting Network, Marcus Lamb the founder of Daystar TV Network and Phil Vischer, the creator of Veggie Tales.

My wife said she thought the list skewed Pentecostal (but of course we wouldn’t identify ourselves as Pentecostal) and I was pleasantly surprised that the list skewed modern and younger with Leonard Sweet, Rob Bell and Erwin McManus all being listed before the first traditionally identified Southern Baptist Convention person, Al Mohler (#23).

In a memo sent out yesterday and posted on Romensko today, Craig Dubox, the CEO of Gannett, makes plans to turn all of Gannett’s newsrooms into a platform agnostic information center that ensures that the right news and information will be delivered to the right media. After piloting the project in 11 locations over the past year, the information centers will be built around seven areas: digital; public service; community conversation; local; custom content; data; and multimedia.

Fast Company has an interesting article about Rob Curley, the newspaper new media guru who is now VP of Development at Washington Post/Newsweek Interactive. It tracks his career from Kansas to the Post and his interest it making it all local.

In the news website contest a key piece of the puzzle is breaking news. For local news websites it has always been the local TV stations vs. the newspaper. The TV stations have always had to compete, but competition is new to most monopoly newspapers. This morning in Memphis the TV news websites scored big points in the breaking news battle over the regional newspaper’s website (note of potentional conflict: I used to work for the newspaper, The Commercial Appeal. and helped start their new media department in 2000).

As I woke-up this morning and turn on the news around 6:15 a.m., the Little Rock station KARK is showing live video from a three building fire in downtown Memphis as I turn to Fox News they are promoing an upcoming story on a big fire in downtown Memphis (as they show all of their 10th anniversary celebration which I could care less about). After I have a chance to sit down at breakfast, I grab my laptop and go check out the newspaper’s website, commercialappeal.com, for more information on the big fire.

Nothing, nothing at all on the newspaper’s website about the big fire. I mean if it’s on the national news station you should have a big banner photograph, a story, a slide show and probably some video on it. So, I try a Memphis TV station, WMC-TV. The TV station has a locally written story, photos of the fire and on the story page three video clips of the fire (one set from a helicopter), a map of the eight blocks of downtown Memphis that are closed from the fire and a list of closings and delays due to the fire which include two courthouses and the county government complex. The TV station is also streaming their station live which I watch at full-screen on my laptop until I leave to take the kids to school and head to the office.

Once I arrive at work, I checked the CA’s website again around 8:05. Nothing, nothing at all, again. WMC-TV is still going and they have updated their story. Finally, I check again about 8:40 a.m. and Yes, yes the CA has a story on their website posted at 8:35 a.m. Unfortunately, it is a three paragraph AP story. No photo, no map, no video, no closings. In fact it even has a typo in the byline.

Yes, admittedly, the story occured at the worst possible time for the newspaper. The fire started at 3 a.m. An hour after the paper was put to bed and the last editorial staffer left the building, but that is no excuse for not having one word about the fire on your site until 8:35 a.m. Nothing for commuters to check before they leave. Nothing for those “early morning take a peak at the paper” before I do my actual work visitors.

Newspaper websites must move beyond the shovel the news from the print edition onto the web stage and realize they are in a competitive 24 hour breaking news cycle and staff accordingly. At least have a breaking news dayside staffer come in at 5 or 6 a.m. to get the top stories updated before the majority of traffic hits the site as they get to work. The dayside staffer can then work on dayparting the site’s lead stories, multimedia stories, rewriting call-ins from morning news and monitoring the newspaper’s citizen journalism initiatives.

An Indiana University study has shown The Daily Show to be as substantive as network news.

Julie Fox, assistant professor of telecommunications said, ” there is some substance on there, and in some cases, like John Edwards announcing his candidacy, the news is made on the show. You have real newsmakers coming on, and yes, sometimes the banter and questions get a little silly, but there is also substantive dialogue going on … It’s a legitimate source of news.”

On the other hand their study found that The Daily Show’s audio and visual content contained more humor than substance, but their study also found more hype than substance in broadcast news.

“Interestingly, the average amounts of video and audio substance in the broadcast network news stories were not significantly different than the average amounts of visual and audio substance in The Daily Show with Jon Stewart stories about the presidential election,” she wrote in a paper to appear in the summer 2007 edition of the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media published by the Broadcast Educator’s Association.

A new newspaper in Nova Scotia is returning two newspaper traditions: afternoon publication and paper boys.

According to an article in the Globe and Mail the newspaper is targeting readers who “are up and going pretty early and don’t have a lot of time in the morning to read… the evolution of the media industry could make the evening paper more relevant than ever. With cable networks and the Internet driving a 24-hour news cycle, appetite for a late-day newspaper exists.”

Furthermore, the late afternoon delivery with youth newspaper carriers could be a great money-saving move as morning newspaper struggle with rising fuel costs and hiring and retaining an early morning delivery staff.

Personally, I love the concept of bringing back the paper boy. I got my start in the news industry as an 12-year-old carrier on a route with 56 customers that I delivered rain, sleet, snow or flood off the back of my bicycle. I stayed with it until I was 18 ending up with 325 customers. I’m proud to say that more than a couple of times over those six years I was named The Evening Times Carrier of the Month.

I know you probably haven’t seen this, but Veggie Tales is now airing during NBC’s Saturday morning kids show block. NBC’s Program Standards has required them to edit out any reference to God or the Bible to put the show on air. At the same time, NBC is promoting airing a live concert of Madonna’s where she sings suspended from a mirrored crucifix. The other day I found Phil Vischer’s (the Veggie Tales creator) blog and he says,

“I know the audience and time of day is completely different, but it is a bit ironic that telling kids God loves them is “not okay,” but singing a song while mocking the crucifixion is fine and dandy. Let us Christians never forget that we are strangers here. We don’t fit in. It’s ok.”

Vischer’s blog is pretty good because it chronicles the story as he keeps sending them episondes with God in them and they keep making him change them. He also some introspective posts where goes back and looks at what went wrong at VeggieTales and why they had to sell out to another company.

Brian Williams outwitted Jon Stewart yesterday on the Daily Show inviting him to cross over the line from his “fake comedy” to the real news and go visit “the Lebanon.”