What better way to spend Monday night than watching a documentary about a photographer? I just watched Bill Cunningham New York about the New York Times street-fashion photographer known for riding around on his bike for decades. I recommend it.
“This is the guy that comes on a bicycle.” —Bill Cunningham exuding modesty on the phone with a photography shop
Good declared this week to be Sandwich Week, and I have been playing along on Twitter.
Yesterday as I was lunching on an open-faced crab and artichoke sandwich, I wondered if what I was eating was truly a sandwich.
Well, apparently Good anticipated my semantic confusion about those items that sometimes fall under the “sandwiches and such” menu heading and today tries to answer the question.
Here at sandwich week, we’ve spent the last five days celebrating the staple of the American lunch hour. But what are we really celebrating when we celebrate the sandwich? Is it filling spread between two slices of bread, as Locke claims? “Sandwich,” after all, is a verb as well as a noun. Must the filling be sandwiched between bread? Is an Oreo a sandwich? A quesadilla? Is a KFC Double Down a sandwich?
Can a food become a sandwich simply by calling itself a sandwich? Does an open-faced sandwich constitute a sandwich, despite the lack of sandwiching employed in its construction? If so, is bruschetta a sandwich? Buttered toast? Pizza?
These are the questions that will define our generation.
Earlier, I tweeted about the new BostonGlobe.com:
New BostonGlobe.com is probably the cleanest newspaper site I’ve seen. And use of media queries means no need for a separate mobile site.
Also, BostonGlobe.com will be subscription based, but The Globe will maintain Boston.com with blogs, some free articles and The Big Picture.
In fact, I think The Boston Globe just earned recognition as one of the most forward-thinking “old” news publishers, which maybe shouldn’t be a surprise given that its parent is The New York Times Company.
First, the design: it’s clean, it’s readable, it’s touch-friendly and it’s easily skimmable, as a front page should be. There are not an abundance of nuisance ads flashing and trying to induce seizure.
Speaking of The New York Times, the BostonGlobe.com design calls to mind many of the points Andy Rutledge made in his controversial blog post about The Times online design. I wonder if someone at the sister paper was listening and nodding as the brouhaha over Rutledge’s post unfolded a couple months back.
On a more technical point, the site make good use of media queries. Media queries are a feature of CSS3 (not to be confused, as so many things are these days, with HTML5) that allows web pages to be displayed differently depending on the medium where they are displayed. This isn’t a totally new concept. When I was making websites for the University of Minnesota in 2005, I always included separate style sheets that defined how the printed page should appear different from the screen. But media queries take a step further by responding to screen resolution and orientation. Check out this gallery of media query-enabled sites and resize your browser window to see what I mean. Media queries are slick and, while they’re not perfect, they obviate the need many organizations have for a separate mobile website.
Aside from not being perfect, the main reason I think we don’t see more media query-enhanced sites is that media queries are new and they are not widely understood. It will likely be years before many large organizations start embracing them. So good on The Boston Globe for not being afraid.
That lack of fear is a good descriptor for The Globe’s business model too. While everyone else seems to be either contemplating paywalls or staunchly rejecting them, The Globe has decided it can play both games. BostonGlobe.com offers full access to news about Boston, while Boston.com will still offer a handful of articles, blogs and photo galleries for free.
This makes perfect sense, and I’m not sure why it hasn’t been tried before. I, as someone who doesn’t have any reason to care about Boston news, am probably not going to subscribe to the former for any reason. But there are certainly national-interest stories published by The Globe every day, and I occasionally find myself reading them. These tend to be the type of stories that can get a big social lift from the likes of Twitter, reddit, Fark and StumbleUpon. The Globe benefits from selling ads with higher CPMs against these highly viewed pages. A story about a new business or neighborhood crime report will likely never get as much of a social lift, but as a Boston citizen, I’d likely be willing to pay for it.
It’s a simple, sensible strategy. Will it work? I have no idea. But at least The Boston Globe is trying something new. It’s innovating.
That’s more than I’ve seen from the entire news industry in the past seven years.
Somehow I had completely missed until today that there is a documentary about the making of Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot called I Am Trying to Break Your Heart. The opening credits are beautiful for both their rendition of film’s namesake song and the black and white photography of Chicago. I also caught myself nodding at this quote from the film:
We’re now in a culture, not just a business, but a culture in which we expect everything to happen [finger snap] like that. Ya know, you have people outside, standing around, talking on cell phones, ya know, the gist of the conversation is “I’ll be there in five minutes.” Who gives a fuck? Just be there in five minutes, don’t talk about it.
—David fricke senior editor rolling stone
Oh, and it’s available for streaming on Netflix.
Ed. Note: The above post has actually been sitting as a draft since Nov. 26, but I was just reminded of it as I was watching Ashes of American Flags, and thus finally remembered to hit publish.
Coincidentally, tomorrow is the 10th anniversary of 9/11, which is the date Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was originally set for release.
Nick Bilton, giving a brief history of the mask worn by Anonymous members:
Then in 2008, Anonymous embraced it, explained Gabriella Coleman, an assistant professor at New York University’s department of media, culture and communication. “Thousands of members came out from behind their computer and went into the streets to protest the Church of Scientology,” she said. “Anonymous knew if they were going to meet in a visibly public space for the first time, they needed to conceal their identity. They inevitably chose the ‘V for Vendetta’ mask to do this.”
“It had a chilling effect. There were literally thousands of people standing silently in front of the Church of Scientology wearing the same Guy Fawkes mask,” Ms. Coleman said. “The photos and videos that appeared in the news from the protests cemented the mask as the symbol of Anonymous.”
Eerie.
Everyone said 2011 would be the year mobile, photo, social and local (MoPhoSoLoco), but I just want to know when I will have enough messaging apps to fill this whole folder.
“Every single organisation that is dedicated to digital should be spending the majority of their time, effort and resource optimising for smartphones and various tablets.”
—Bonin Bough, PepsiCo’s global head of digital – “Tablet effect” takes hold: News from Warc.com
I wholeheartedly agree.
(Bonin used to be head of digital at and is now a client of my employer.)
via Paul Isakson
“A lot of people are going to have access to this who haven’t had access before.” —Sanjay Gupta, tonight’s guest host on AC360, describing the updated CNN iOS app that allows cable/satellite subscribers to watch live CNN
Yes, this is going to be great for all those people who pay for cable/satellite service but don’t own a TV.
(About once a month I watch some TV news, and this is the kind of bullshit I get to hear.)
Here in Minnesota we’re a full week into a state government shutdown. Apparently the shuttered state parks are not the only inconvenience being caused by the political gridlock:
“As soon as the Legislature and Gov. Dayton work out their differences, the licensing bureaus will go back to work and we’ll be able to put dozens of topless dancers on the stage and begin contributing much-needed tax dollars to the state coffers,” Langan said.