Text to speech for newspaper sites: my dream

Check this out: a text-to-speech player and download right above the article. Love it. This is how I want to read the paper in the future: through text-to-speech, but via itunes. Like, I wanna subscribe to "Section A" of the New York Times, and each morning load my ipod up with the articles from that section.

NYTimes: photo slider makes me do cartwheels

AAAAUGH!! NYTimes does it again. Look at this incredible thingy: a slider on a photo allowing readers to compare two photos. No arrows, no links. It's all inside one picture window. It's like a child's toy. I bow down to the creatives behind all the cool bells and whistles they keep coming up with. I want the NYTimes to design my house. One teeny request: make these cool things embeddable.

Newspapers: who needs them?

(This post contains some incomplete thoughts. I still want to notate them for possible future use.)

I think news-gathering entities (newspapers, tv news, etc) should die, but one organ should be salvaged: investigative journalism. That is the ONLY part of a news org that does any unique good and is something an average reader cannot do on his own. The rest of the "news" can be delivered to readers via press release. Skip the middleman.

I get press releases from companies because I run a blog. Then I see the newspapers write stories based on the same press releases I'm getting. If I can get a press release emailed to me, why can't average readers get the same treatment? Why am I, and newspaper writer, any different from the readers? Readers don't need a writer to re-write a press release.

Here's what should happen... and this is based off a very brief dialogue in the comments section of this post I wrote asking why Orlando needed so many dang blogs about arts and culture events... Companies, arts orgs, agencies, whatever... they should be responsible for posting their news to a site like upcoming.org. Readers go there to get their news straight from the source. The more press releases readers read, the more they will ee what utter crap they are, and readers will demand press releases get more honest, to the point and less frequent. The PR folks become the new news orgs.

So where do readers get their investigative journalism? Here's one way:

"anyone can propose a story, though the editors... ultimately choose which stories to pursue. Then the burden is put on the citizenry, which is asked to contribute money to pay upfront all of the estimated reporting costs. If the money doesn’t materialize, the idea goes unreported."

I think, bottom line, as I am questioning the reason my blog even exits, newspapers need to seriously question what they have that is (a) unique and (b) a reader cannot do on his own.

Knoxville Blog Network and BlogNetNews

I had dinner last night with a friend from Knoxville, TN. During dinner, she told me about the Knoxville Blog Network, a product of Knoxville News Sentinel and BlogNetNews.com. The local Knoxville newspaper provides this service and gives readers of their website local blogger content. Here's how they describe themselves:

You've seen aggregators before. Knoxville Blog Network jumps a generation ahead. We're not interested in reprinting your posts and we don't have an ideological ax to grind. We are going to use your feeds and the feeds of top bloggers from your online community to create new content and information that will organize this slice of the Internet making it work better for bloggers and their readers.

Our launch version offers these features:

1. The day's top news based solely on what news stories Knoxville bloggers are linking to: no matter what mainstream news source they're in.
2. A micro search engine that will only search the Knoxville blogosphere.
3. A quick guide to the hottest blog comment sections in Knoxville.

I think it's a great idea.