It doesn’t take much to make me smile. The night editor is constantly telling me I laugh, eh hem, giggle, more than anyone she’s ever met. It’s true. I’m probably one of the happier people in the world.

Why am I so happy? It’s not that my life has been amazing. I’m still waiting on the UPS truck to bring me that silver platter and still wonder who stole my silver spoon. Nope, I’m not happy because I’ve had it easy. Because, I learned a long time ago to find pleasure in the small things and to laugh at life’s bumps and learn from its bruises. You can’t really do anything about something that’s already happened except accept it and move along.

“Being happy doesn’t mean that everything is perfect. It means that you’ve decided to look beyond the imperfections.” — Unknown

The truth is, I find joy in the silliest of things. It might be a funny item in the blotter, such as someone getting arrested for underage consumption the night before their 21st birthday or some teens running out of gas while trying to burglarize a home. (OK, so that second one, it seriously made me laugh the whole night.) It might be a vending machine that tells me, “Have a nice day.” It could be not finding a parking ticket on my car, six hours after I should have moved it off the street. It could be flipping a penny face up so the next person to walk by can enjoy the “all day long you’ll have good luck.” Or it could be as simple as a stranger saying hello, a nice breeze as I walk from my car into the building or a glimpse of the skyline on my drive home from work. I’m seriously easy to make happy.

Today, it was the two empty newspaper boxes I saw on my way home from work.

It made me smile so much I took my camera out and snapped a photo. Why? Because, empty boxes means that people were compelled to buy today’s papers. The J&C and the Indy Star made people stop, pull out 50 cents and buy the news. Although I’m all for new media and the Web, there is still that rush that comes from knowing what you produce is being read and seen.

I used to love going to Chipotle in Kent. Not because of the food (though the chicken burritos are amazing), but because standing in line I was always guaranteed to see at least half a dozen students reading the Stater. For some reason, the newspaper box in the front door and the long lines combined to produce a steady stream of readers. I loved to watch them. My colleagues and I used to stand in line and almost squeal everytime we saw someone follow the jump or read something and prod their buddy, “Did you see this?”

It’s one thing to produce the content, to talk about the stories,develop them and lay them out, and even to see that pay off in print. But seriously, nothing can replace knowing that people actually see what you spent your time on. It makes it so worth every sleepless night, every stressful day.

I get a similar rush from story chats, e-mails or phone calls. Likewise, our editors send out a daily online reads telling us the top dozen or so most read stories on the Web the previous days.

Like I said, it doesn’t take much to make me happy.

This comic landed in my inbox today and made me laugh. I figured at least some of you would laugh as well:

Heh. Some of the others I glanced at from What the Duck are pretty funny, too.

“Newspaper stories are fleeting things. The thing that makes this business so remarkable, that every day we get a new canvas to paint on, is also what makes it so unsatisfying. The story, almost always, dies with the day, the pages of the day-old paper turning yellow in the sun.”
— Rick Bragg

Sadly, the Internet makes them even more so. In mere hours, or even before the ink dries on the newsprint, the story is outdated or dead, new developments already known and broadcast. But, as he says about it being remarkable, it’s also exciting. There’s always a deadline to work against, and it’s always ASAP.

(P.S. This quote is from the introduction to Bragg’s book Somebody Told Me, which I came across at a used bookstore this weekend. So far I’ve only read a few of his collected stories, but they’re really good.)

To answer the question in my title, I don’t think so. But, to read this item, you might think so. (Well, maybe it’s more optimistic than that, but you get the idea.)

Apparently, MySpace is looking to jump into the news aggregator business in digg-like fashion. Seems natural to me. They have a huge userbase built it. Why not harness it to let people see “these are the stories most popular with your friends” or “these are the top stories voted on by other MySpace users.”

The Poynter column says:

Now I’m wondering how that audience would use the service — especially with the option for posting articles to personal pages.

What kind of news would the largely young audience post? Would the service, as Heaton predicts, help us understand what kind of news they’re interested in? Would it help engage young people in the news?

WASHINGTONPOST.COM

What bothers me about this is I don’t remember similar questions being raised when Facebook quietly added this ability months and months ago. Yeah, Facebook already allows you to share stories and videos or pretty much anything with your friends. You can post them to your wall. You can pass them along to friends. You can comment on their shared items, and so forth. Although not a rate-the-item community like digg, I do see a number of my own friends posting items or sending me videos or stories they come across.

NYTIMES.COM

Both the Washington Post and the New York Times have a Facebook icon in their share selection. That in itself is significant. The NYTimes has only three icons, digg, facebook and newsvine. Of all the sites available to post stories, it views facebook as one of the top three. For the Washington Post, it’s in the top six. Think about that and what it already says about the value of word-of-mouth (or click) to reach young people in an online world.

Do I think this will be bad for the news business? Not at all. It will get the stories in front of more eyes, eyes that typically shy away from traditional media companies. As the column states:

It seems we could learn a lot from users’ interactions with the news service — not just for getting a better picture of news consumption habits, but for generating story ideas as well.

Agreed.

“I respect the man who knows distinctly what he wishes. The greater part of all mischief in the world arises from the fact that men do not sufficiently understand their own aims. They have undertaken to build a tower, and spend no more labor on the foundation than would be necessary to erect a hut.”
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Last week, I sent my editor a huge list of ideas for ways we could use interactive maps to beef up our Web content on our site. Most of them are pretty straight forward and could be applied anywhere.

One of my ideas was to map wi-fi hot spots in Lafayette and West Lafayette. This was purely self-motivated. I like to take my MacBook and get out of the house/office. As I even said in my e-mail, I may just do it myself. So, I started it. I’ll post it here when it’s worth showing. Unfortunately, that thing called my actual job intervenes for eight or more hours each day, and I can’t just play with new technologies like I otherwise would. (That’s what weekends are for and why you see spikes in posts Friday through Sunday.)

I began my map with the handful of free wi-fi places I know. Then I added Border’s, Starbucks, Barnes & Noble. But I knew short of going through the entire phone book, I wasn’t going to be able to get them all. So I did a Google search to find a base list, which, being the good journalist I am, I will call and confirm specifics.

What struck me as odd was that McDonald’s is a wi-fi hot spot.

Yeah, the fast food restaurant with the golden arches. Call me weird, but I associate dining in at McDonalds with screaming kids running around with their new toy and seniors sipping coffee and hanging out with old friends. Not somewhere I’d want to take my laptop or spend any more time than necessary.

I wanted to find the local restaurants’ phone numbers and also to see if the corporate site had any details on the wi-fi access. So, I typed in McDonalds.com.

I did find the details, but also, across the bottom of the page I noticed a link I never would expect on a fast-food chain’s Web site: podcasts. I know it’s just another form of marketing and advertising for them, and I didn’t actually listen to or watch any of the items. Though, the featured one, “The McDonald’s You Don’t Know: Ever wonder what it’s like to have a McJob?” did pique my interest. I know probably a dozen people who currently or at some point have held that “McJob” and none of them was “lovin’ it.”

But, yeah, McDonald’s does podcasts and wi-fi. What next?

So, I saw this post on E-Media Tidbits. Being curious, I decided to test the Great Firewall of China to see if my blog was blocked. To my surprise, apparently it is.

I’m not quite sure I did to offend the government, but I suspect maybe they just blanket block everything until it’s been approved? Or (look at the disclaimer on bottom) it could be a fluke. Either way, it’s kind of odd. I don’t know.

Want to know if you should feel censored as well? Type in your URL to see if you’re blocked as well.

Julie Doll, the Journal & Courier executive editor, has an interesting column in today’s paper about user comments on jconline.

The column raises issues that everyone’s aware of, the lack of respect for differing opinions, the obscenity, the namecalling, etc. But I think she’s right in the way she ends it. We don’t have an answer yet, and as this type of user interaction becomes more commonplace, we’re unlikely to have a perfect solution anytime soon, if ever:

Some in the newspaper industry have called on newspapers to apply the same accountability standards to online forums as they do to their newspapers. A fine idea, but it ignores what is common practice on the Web. That is, people are allowed to give their opinions, provide information or otherwise sound off without putting their name to their posts.

Would we place ourselves at a disadvantage by setting stricter standards? Would our readers go to other sites? Or would we only lose those who are creating the problems?

Because community conversation through the Web is still evolving, the answers are a ways off.

But what really interested me on the column, ironically enough (though as Julie pointed out in the daily memo Friday, if I need to say “ironically,” I’m probably better off not using that literary device, but I digress), were the comments on her column. It was a relatively civil discussion by a few users on their thoughts. They’re worth reading at least. I’ll excerpt just the last one because it raises a question we discussed a few weeks back when talking about whether/how to police these chats:

It’s donated space, so freedom of speech is a three tiered question or more. Are we free to say something, does the paper wish to carry that message for us, and will there be consequences for saying it?

I’m not sure what prompted this column, though I suspect it might have something to do with the immediate and humorous (from my perspective) response to a story about a new city flag local high schoolers designed. I know some people were concerned about the impact the comments might have on these kids, who apparently spent several months coming up with this design. Personally, I say get a thicker skin if you let anonymous message board comments bother you. I don’t care if you are 16 or 17 or 90 years old. Criticism is part of life, best to learn that (and how to cope) early.

Just because I thought it humorous, I’m going to excerpt my favorite related comments on the flag story:

First: If the Texas flag got drunk and fell over, this is what it would look like.

The response:: the texas flag has gotten drunk and fallen over several hundred times and it NEVER looked like this!

It does remind me of the Texas flag a little.

That flag story was posted as a mid-day update, and it was kind of fun for us to watch the comments on it grow so that it outpaced the other most commented on story from that day’s paper. I think we (and I say we meaning the reporters) like to read the comments posted. They can provide story ideas, raise questions we didn’t think of, or just make us laugh, as we did at the drunken flag comments.

In case you’re interested: The J&C publisher has written a few blog posts about the story chat feature. One asking why do chats turn to race? and another about news versus chat. And as far as I can tell, this post was introducing the concept to the readers. (I obviously wasn’t working for the J&C at the time, so I don’t actually know exactly when the feature was added.)

“Responsibility is the price of freedom.”
— Elbert Hubbard

“We are now at a point where we must educate our children in what no one knew yesterday, and prepare our schools for what no one knows yet.”
— Margaret Mead