William M. Hartnett

The neighborhood of the week real estate feature is about historic El Cid, one of the oldest in the city of West Palm Beach.

DOWNLOAD THE PRINT SECTION
Print pages in PDF: Right-click and save-as to download (8.6 MB, 8 pages)

• Prius Diary Extra: Toyota Considering a Separate Prius Brand - Green Inc. Blog - NYTimes.com
  "Toyota is considering setting up a separate brand for Prius, and may broaden the Prius lineup with bigger and smaller Prius models, the head of Toyota's American sales arm said today. … The separate Prius brand would be specific to the United States, and is not under consideration for other parts of the world." White people are going to love this! http://is.gd/3NdM
  (tags: auto prius toyota hybrid nyt)

A newspaper job opening in Florida. Weird. The Orlando Sentinel is looking for a computer-assisted reporting specialist:

“The ideal candidate will have at least five years of reporting experience, with an emphasis on government reporting; significant experience in reporting and writing data-driven investigative reports; and an advanced understanding of Microsoft Excel and Access. Proficiency with SQL, ArcGIS, SPSS and Caspio are preferred.”

Click on over to the listing at JournalismJobs.com for more info. It should be noted, as I’ve mentioned before, that the Sentinel newsroom maintains a well-known and long-standing mandatory Disney-oriented dress code. That’s a fact. OK, that’s not really true, but I like to imagine everyone in the newsroom dressed as Disney characters.

Update: And a copy editor, too. Not to mention a multimedia artist. And the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel is looking for a web developer.

This week’s newspaper building as seen in Virtual Earth/Live Search Maps is the Tallahassee Democrat, to which I am officially awarding the prize for newspaper office that looks most like a bank branch. No, seriously, click the picture below to check it out for yourself, and rotate the view so that it faces east. Bank branch, for reals.

The neighborhood of the week real estate feature is about Lake Catherine in Palm Beach Gardens.

DOWNLOAD THE PRINT SECTION
Print pages in PDF: Right-click and save-as to download (7.9 MB, 6 pages)

• Paris Motor Show: Dedicated Hybrids Shape New Honda Strategy - Wheels Blog
  "Honda's Insight hybrid, introduced Thursday at the Paris Motor Show, is designed to take the measure of the Toyota Prius." And boy does it look an awful lot like the Prius. EPA mileage testing not yet complete, but the price is expected to be below $20,000.
  (tags: honda hybrid auto nyt insight)

What a crazy year. I kicked it off by moving out of the metro department, where I’d been a reporter and computer-assisted reporting specialist for more than six years, and onto the editorial web team. That meant a move out of the newsroom, down a long hallway, and into a different building. (Do click on that last link, as it’s so totally sweet.)

More recently, following this summer’s cutbacks, there’s been a lot of restructuring around the office, Read the rest »

I meant to post this four weeks ago based on a Twitter update from Nick Bergus, but I’m only getting around to it today after spotting some particularly silly examples: How embarrassingly mislabeled are so many newspapers’ “breaking news” sections and items?

Most news doesn’t truly “break,” after all, despite the re-branding of some local news and metro departments as “breaking news teams.” So mixed in with headlines of a more credibly breaking nature (”Meteorite impact levels orphanage, causes bus plunge, closes 48 lanes of I-95″) are some of a more, well, pedestrian nature. As always, not to pick on anyone in particular, but to illustrate the breed with a few specimens:

• Draft of Troutdale’s land use plan available for comment
• Sheriff puts training director in charge of jails
• Palm Beach County moves zoning meetings
• Local SPCA needs help with Hurricane Ike animal rescue
• Dolphins have only one turnover, and want to keep it that way

News? Perhaps. Interesting news? Maybe. But breaking news? More like, as Mark Hamilton offered, “the scheduled event is about to begin,” or “stories we happened to have just finished and posted.” Or in all too many cases, if we’re being really, really honest, “stories on which you’ll instantly regret clicking that we almost certainly should not have even bothered writing.”