Just this morning in the NPD meeting, I was talking about how eventually even the behemoth Facebook will lose its cool and kids will flee it for greener pastures of the next great thing.

Though I don’t think we’ve reached that point yet, or will anytime soon, I did laugh when I saw this Business Week article today that says Microsoft bought a $240 million chunk of the company, which puts its value in the, oh, $15 billion range. (More about the news.)

It’s good news for Microsoft, which beat out Google for the 1.6 percent share, but as I told the ME when I pointed the story out: This partnership with king-of-the-less-than-hip Microsoft could be the first kiss of death for a company that relies on its cool factor to hold the attention of Generation-Permanently-Distracted.

If not that, this: “Zuckerberg, 23, wants to take Facebook public at some point.” There’s something cool about the site precisely because it started as a college kid’s idea to link up with peers. Though it’s cool to be part of something that big, what really makes it a sticky site is that it seems small and personal. Your network is who you know, and who they know, and who may be in your class or in your city. But it’s defined and not really a free for all. Going public seems like opening some floodgates that I’m not sure wouldn’t wash away some of the roots holding kids down there. It’s not like there isn’t a plethora of other options around that could just as easily become the next big trend. Who knows?

But there’s the rub. Nobody knows. Facebook could continue to innovate, stay ahead and predict the turns in preference and consumption of the kids it’s pandering to. So maybe I’m wrong. Maybe my kids and my kids’ kids will still be posting on their friends’ walls when I’m old and complaining about how “back in my day, we had these CDs and if you so much as sneezed the disk would scratch.” And I’ll be wishing when Facebook had its IPO I’d cashed in. But at the rate it’s going, Facebook’s a bit too rich for my blood.

The J&C’s graphics designer has been really impressing me of late with his quick pick-up of Flash projects.

This week there’s a series running about Purdue in Space ramping up to the official dedication of the Neil Armstrong Hall of Engineering.

I was impressed by the clean presentation in this flash project about the different astronauts to come out of Purdue.

As you can see, it’s very clean. The red arrows scroll between the astronauts, or you can close out the window and pick and choose the ones you are interested in.

I think that’s a very effective presentation, probably the most effective way it could have been presented online. Good job, guys!

Now if we only did a better job promoting it online…

I don’t have anything profound to say today, but there are several random things floating around my head that I figured I may as well share. Feel free to add your own. This could be a fun game.

• UPDATE, I forgot the most important lesson of today. What happens when you go to make cop calls and get a busy signal. You hang up and finish calling the rest and then head back to the busy number? What happens when that number still rings busy. And half an hour later? Still busy. So, then you call the city (housed in the same building), and guess what, it’s busy? Well, I decided something was up. But since I couldn’t just call down there to find out, I did what any enterprising, curious reporter would do. I walked there and found the IT director. Something was majorly up, apparently there was a huge statewide phone outage. Our police, city and the two city school districts both went without phone service until about 3 p.m. as did several other businesses in our community. Just goes to show, there really will never be a true replacement for face-to-face, shoe-leather reporting. There’s no way I could have worked that story through the phones.
• Over the past few weeks I’ve done two different stories involving outages with two different phone companies. In light of this, I really think phone companies need to evaluate their media relations. Neither of the phone companies made it easy to a) locate a media representative, b) locate any live person, c) get a phone number that didn’t start with 1-800 and end with my hanging up after getting stuck in a loop of computer mis-guided menus. To sum up my editor’s response to the first of these stories, “The phone company doesn’t have a phone number on its site?!” And then a laugh and attempt to prove me wrong, as if I would seriously admit both my computer savvy and Google prowess had let me down without first ensuring it was worth throwing in the towel. I’m just saying. In both cases, I now have the phone number, name and e-mail of the person I need to talk to should anything else arise. But why make it so difficult?
• I learned a new word today: akimbo. Apparently it means to put your hands on your hips and bend your elbows. (Think annoyed teenage girl yelling, “But mooooommmm!”) I’m only including this here because I told my editor I would blog about the new word I learned. lol. He used it to describe the “sassy” pose one of the girl’s auditioning for the Purdue Play Boy edition had in her photo.
• This story, which I first saw on Romensko (and first commented on in my education tumblelog — which is off to a good start, thanks for asking) makes me nervous about ever writing about the ISTEP or other major tests. The reporter wrote a light feature about the testing and inadvertently included the essay topics that many students hadn’t yet written about! Now all the kids have to retake the test. Although, reading his explanation, I’d have to say I do understand he didn’t know he couldn’t include the topics — and really he shouldn’t have been let in the classroom and the teachers and administrators should have flagged it for him not to repeat test questions. Still, I’m not sure I like his defense. I think he’s trying to point fingers by his blog post, and really what it boils down to is, yeah, that’s hella embarrassing and really messes with a lot of kids, but take responsibility and go ahead and say, “I screwed up.” Not doing so is just as embarrassing.
• I have decided that while I could work the 6 a.m. shift, as in I am capable of waking up, getting dressed and being at work to start posting and picking up cops stuff from overnight, I reaaallly don’t envy the guys who have that regular shift. Yes, it would be nice to have a set shift that didn’t fluctuate from 8 to 4 through 3 to 11 virtually every day depending on meetings and assignments, and getting off (theoretically) at 2 p.m. is so appealing. But if a wonky schedule and a few late nights a week is the price to pay for getting to work during daylight hours, it’s worth it for now. I am way too tired to actually do anything with the rest of today. And as I told the business reporter when he came in at 7:30 a.m., I’m too young to be up at 6 a.m.
• That’s all I can think of for now.

The IndyStar has a great package about life in the city’s most crime-ridden apartments. Life on the edge is a three-part series, with today kicking it off. I can’t wait to read the next two.

This is an immensely important topic and the writing by Matthew Tully is exceptional. I love the way he repeatedly makes his point using short sentences that all end in “the Phoenix”, dropping these lines in for emphasis throughout.

Here’s the basic outline of the first part of the series just based solely on this effective writing tool.

• Talking about the gun-fights that keep a woman and her nephew awake at night, the writer makes the point: This is life in the Phoenix.

• Explaining how it came to be, section-8 housing is largely to blame according to the article: This is the story of the Phoenix Apartments.
• Talking about the criminals harbored there and the daily cop calls: That’s life at the Phoenix.
• Discussing the failed initiatives of a former mayor: The Phoenix is a mess.
• Following from the failed programs he details the sorry state of the current complex, the roaches, bullet holes and crumbling sidewalks for a start: This is the Phoenix.
• Showing the complex to the State Rep. who initially thinks the cut grass is a sign nothing is wrong but gets schooled pretty quickly: Another day in the Phoenix.

The second story also uses dates and lines taken from police reports to break up the story of how crime-ridden the area is and the police struggle to calm it. This tool makes the story not only more credible but more readable.

I should also note, as anyone who clicked through has already seen, this is a multimedia presentation. And the designers well anticipated my questions. I’m not from Indianapolis, and aside from the visits I’ve made down there since moving here and the stories I read in the Star, I don’t know much about the city itself. I’d never even heard of this place before. As soon as I started reading… I wanted to see where it was in relation to the city and what it looked like. The additional graphs of census data shows the dramatic shift in the make-up of the population since its hey-day. Finally, the video ride-along with police gives you a taste of the problems the officers are up against.

I’m looking forward to the next two installments.

It’s a quarter to 2 a.m., and I’m still awake. I don’t have a good excuse except spending too much time on Yahoo! Answers and the New York Times and losing track of time.

A good friend of mine also is up at this hour. But he has a damn good reason, and as I just finished telling him over Gmail Chat, he’s hard-core.

The state of Michigan is on the verge of a shut-down, with 35K state employees waiting to hear whether they will report to work today. The legislature is pulling an all-nighter — and so are the reporters. Check out LSJ for updates and the Free Press has them, too. So does the Detroit News. (I’m not linking to specific stories because they’re updating and I don’t want to end up w/broken links.) There may be others, but that exhausts my knowledge of Michigan media outlets.

Ryan, who just started as a mojo about two weeks ago at the Lansing State Journal, was one of the lucky ones tapped to report on the events unfolding in the capital city tonight.

At first I thought it was crazy because there’d be no one up reading the stories anyway. But I stand corrected. There are several post-midnight comments posted on the stories. I guess it makes sense: If I was a government employee unsure if I’d even need to get up in the morning, I’d be hanging out for any word of progress, too.

That my friends is why this is not only hard-core but a perfect example of the mindset we need to take. This is information people need and want to know. They don’t want to know in tomorrow’s paper (which was put to bed hours ago, before the midnight deadline passed) or even on the morning newscast. They want to know asap. They want to know now. This is the 24-hour newsroom people talk about. So maybe it’s not hard-core, maybe it’s the new necessary.

One of the first things I was told I would be charged with when I came to the J&C was helping create high school micro-sites at each of the county’s high schools.

The first of those sites finally launched Friday: Today at West Side

I’ll be honest, this was the product of a lot of hard work by a lot of people. (Full disclosure: hardly any of it was really mine.) My task was to help brainstorm what we could include and who we should involve. My main and hardest task was then to use the connections I had made — little though they were, especially when we first started and I had literally just arrived — and try to get the high schools on board. Once I had administration on board and kids lined up, my editor and our online team really took over and made this happen. Though, the enthusiasm of the principal and students helped a lot.

Our first attempt, even with my editor at my side, was a huge strike out. An adamant no-go. And rather than fight the administration, we moved on.

Fortunately, I think the only person more excited about the concept than we were when I pitched it was the WL high school principal. He saw it for exactly what we hope it will become: A great way to get more news out about the good things happening in his school.

I’ve often commented that there could be a half dozen education reporters in this community, and we’d still never be for want of a story. That’s one of things I love and hate about my beat. I always have more than enough I can do, and I will always be missing things I wish I could get to. That’s the void the printed Schools Page we launched this spring and these micro-sites will help fill.

The micro-site, if you can’t tell from the screen shot, is mostly populated by student work. There’s a tab for J&C headlines, but the content you read or see in every other section is WL student work. We decided to team up with the high school’s newspaper to have a guaranteed stream of reliable students and content (they publish every three weeks, but the kids are really excited about the idea of being able to do breaking news between that cycle). We’re also continuing a relationship with the art classes to run student photo galleries (click on the “latest media” tab). We’re working on technical issues of uploading student films from the film lit class, which previously had been seen by a small audience and uploaded in a non-uniform way on YouTube. Eventually we will include the school’s daily Red Devil TV segment on the site. Comments will eventually be implemented on the stories — another thing the kids are excited to have is feedback on their work.

In each of the cases, it broadens the audience of the kids’ work, AND gives the community more insight into what’s happening at the school.

It’s also a great learning opportunity for those students. They are the ones uploading their content into our CMS, and they’re the ones calling the shots on story placement and breaking news stories (something they’ve never been able to do before because their Web site was literally a collection of PDF archives). I can’t think of a newspaper who wouldn’t like to have a staffer who can say they did those things as a sophomore or junior in high school.

But a key component of the site I haven’t mentioned is the wlhsVoice feature, which you see in the right corner. It’s basically the GetPublished feature, but we’re hoping kids who aren’t on the newspaper staff or in the art classes or who just want to be published take advantage. We’re leaving it pretty open to whatever they want to write about or shoot pictures of and, as long as it’s clean and not libelous or anything, we’ll put it up on the site.

You know the past few weeks as I’ve been out at the local schools, especially the high schools, later in the day when classes are out, I’ve really been reminded just how much a school really brings together the community. In a lot of cases it really gives the community an identity and a gathering place. When it really gets off the ground, this site, we hope, will be a way to get more focused and deeper coverage of the school and community on a level that the J&C could never provide on our own. And it will give the power to be heard to the people, so to speak, most impacted.

Eventually, now that we have this template down and once we work out some kinks and figure out our system, we’ll try and port this to the other high schools in our county as we planned. I can’t help but think even the original no-go will give a green light when they see how this positively affects the community.

Somehow, knowing that even the NYTimes does a first day of school story makes my barrage of them (one for each county district and the catholic schools) last month seem somehow less tortuous.

Their first day was decidedly more eventful than any of mine. My biggest task was finding four different news angles to get into it. (And to be honest, by the last of the four I covered, I was fresh out and just went with a straight feature.) They also had a whole troop of reporters canvassing the city, whereas I was puttering myself across the county every day to get to multiple schools. It’s kind of funny to me. How many reporters does it take to cover the first day of school? Apparently two to write it and another four to contribute additional reporting. That’d be like half our local reporting staff.

Oh well, it’s reassuring to know even the best get this assignment. And really, I didn’t mind so much once I was doing it. It was the idea of doing it that I hated.