Here at last is the re-designed Night Note, which we hope will accommodate lots of entries and big, beautiful photographs in the year to come.

It has been a busy Fall and holiday here on Covina Ave. Since the Global Economic Meltdown, gone is the season for being a philosopher-artist burrowing her way slowly into the heart of paint. This is a season for readiness. This is a season for keeping the tools sharp. A time to work.

And since the beginning of October, we have been working full-throttle. In the last week in November, Val and I and partner Donna Wares launched Seal Beach Daily — a hyperlocal news project. Think: an online publication — updated multiple times a day — with a mad devotion for one little corner of the world, for its lost pets and city council meetings, for its beach clean ups and Christmas tree lightings, its traffic jams and cable company woes and artists and food and sales tax revenues and what its people have to say.

It’s going great — glowing feedback, good numbers, advertisers, regular contributors, an encouraging community — but it is an all-consuming job. Want to jump into the hyperlocal game? Be ready to get your work on. Be ready to do it all: report it, write it, shoot it, code it, sell it, track it, love it into existence. And you better get yourself an exceptional partner or two, because it is not a one worker business.

So we’re working very hard to start a new business in an historic economic downturn, to be journalists during an historic meltdown of the newspaper industry, to do something satisfying for a living, when most people are just glad to have a job. But, since it has quickly become such a central thing in my life, there will be plenty of time to write about all that in the months to come.

For now, I’m so glad we managed to squeeze in the long overdue Night Note redesign. New: the “latest tweet” in the sidebar in my latest Twitter post. Foodie friends will note I post a picture of our dinner every night on Twitter. And for browsing fun, there’s a continuously updated list of suggested web reads. I’m determined to get posting here into the big blogging mix, so keep an eye on this space.

Above: An osprey photographed taking off at the Seal Beach Pier, the picture originally appeared with this post at Seal Beach Daily.

Seal Beach Daily is off to a wonderful start. The mailboxes runneth over with goodness, good wishes, good contacts, good news. And I have to admit, although it is a lot of work, I am having a good time. And the SBD has hit a nerve in Seal Beach. Readers e-mail that they want this site, with this approach, and that makes me want to be part of creating it for them. I can’t help it; at some level, isn’t it every journalist’s dream to have a little hometown operation?

And sometimes nice buzz happens: An interview with Donna at LAist features SBD and a big Kateco photo. (The one above.)

Buzz update: More mentions. LA Times LA Now Blog. Michelle Vranizan Rafter’s always smart WordCount.

I have grown tired and am now hopping mad over this seemingly endless “Groundhog Day” nightmare. And that is why I decided to take this job. We in the newsroom need to figure out how to break this self-defeating cycle before it does indeed result in our defeat. Our strategy of fight-lose-shrink is not working… Read more at the Los Angeles Times

At the nexus of history geeks, graphics geeks and politico-geeks there are things like these HistoryShots’ posters, “History of the [American] Political Parties I and II”. Fascinating. Whiggy. See them at historyshots.com.

In local news, Reporters Without Borders unveiled their Rose Parade billboard yesterday in Pasadena. The board, bearing the message shown here, is on a street near the route of the famous pageant.

This is the first year China has participated in The Tournament of Roses parade and its entry is designed to hype the 2008 Bejing Olympics. The Parade pulls 60 million television viewers in the US and millions more international viewers in 150 “territories” throughout the world, according to event organizers.

At its press conference, Reporters Without Borders, which calls China “the world’s biggest prison for journalists and cyber-dissidents,” exhorted parade organizers to reject China’s entry. “[The Olympics] means more arrests of dissidents. This means no more social protest, and more censorship,” said Lucie Morillon, U.S. director of the group.

Read more about conditions for journalists and other dissenters in China at Reporters Without Borders. See some local TV coverage here.

]]> http://thenitenote.com/2007/12/04/float-this-china/feed/ 0 http://thenitenote.com/2007/10/26/onn-poll-bullshit-is-most-important-issue-for-2008-voters/ http://thenitenote.com/2007/10/26/onn-poll-bullshit-is-most-important-issue-for-2008-voters/#comments Fri, 26 Oct 2007 07:18:30 +0000 kate http://www.thenitenote.com/blog/2007/10/26/onn-poll-bullshit-is-most-important-issue-for-2008-voters/

The Onion says, for a majority of likely voters, meaningless bullshit will be the most important factor in deciding who they will vote for in 2008. See the video report here. Reason Magazine online asks: Is the Onion our most intelligent newspaper?]]> http://thenitenote.com/2007/10/26/onn-poll-bullshit-is-most-important-issue-for-2008-voters/feed/ 0 http://thenitenote.com/2007/10/25/i-spi-my-favorite-new-seattle-thing/ http://thenitenote.com/2007/10/25/i-spi-my-favorite-new-seattle-thing/#comments Fri, 26 Oct 2007 04:50:10 +0000 kate http://www.thenitenote.com/blog/2007/10/25/i-spi-my-favorite-new-seattle-thing/

It’s the very cool spimerch from spiseattle — the very cool and just-launched real newspaper site of friend Michelle and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. (Hey, it’s in my elsewhere. Is it in yours?) Get your spi-goods at cafe press, like me!

After this segment earlier today, the news anchor Marc Brown said “That was comforting. To see Lambchop.” In a way perhaps it was — for some of us, and you know who you are.

The Night Note has been getting a lot of searches for a current map of the Southern California Fires, so just to help get people where they want to go, I am recommending two often updated maps:

1) The Los Angeles Times: authoritative coverage, updated often. Click here.

2) ABC7.com: TV station’s map with pictures and links to ongoing coverage. Click here.]]> http://thenitenote.com/2007/10/23/the-current-map-of-the-southern-california-fires/feed/ 0