Dave Brooks's Page

A seasoned reporter here in the newsroom just redefined "beating the competition" for the online age: He was delighted because he posted a breaking news item to our blog before the subject's wikipedia article was updated! Oh, what hath Web 2.0 wrought? (The item concerns Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling probably retiring.)

This may draw hoots of derision (derision only comes in hoots, I believe) from people with technical knowhow, but The Telegraph of Nashua, NH, has launched its first crowdsourcing-ish project, using cut-and-paste, rather than any specialized software-type stuff. The background: Verizon recently sold all its phone lines in New Hampshire (and Maine and Vermont) to a small company, FairPoint. We covered the sale in the usual ways but we weren't sure how to keep an eye on the corporate handoff, sin… Continue

The online project that I'm most excited about at my paper (the Nashua (N.H.) Telegraph) is really boring - thank goodness. There's no video, no audio, no interact maps, no Twitter or other goofy-named app, nary a speck of user-generated content. A kindergarten-level searchable database built on Caspio is the only thing that's mildly cutting edge - but it's a butter-knife edge, at most. The project deals with Town Meeting season, wildly important in New England but loaded with the usual hyper-l… Continue