The New York Times throws up its photo morgue — sort of

via livelymorgue.tumblr.com

Check out The Lively Morgue, a Tumblr site by The New York Times. They’re posting photos from their extensive morgue. How many photos are there?

From the About page:

How many? We don’t know. Our best guess is five million to six million prints and contact sheets … and 300,000 sacks of negatives … at least 10 million frames in all.

The picture archive also includes 13,500 DVDs, each storing about 4.7 gigabytes worth of imagery.

If we posted 10 new archival pictures every weekday on Tumblr, just from our print collection, we wouldn’t have the whole thing online until the year 3935.

Soooooooo, they won’t be posting all of goodies, just some of them, and of course reprints are for sale.

In addition to the cutline accompanying the images, they’re also including an image of the back of the photo, which includes hand-scribbled notes about when it was published, crop marks and sometimes even how much the freelancer was paid. Great inside baseball stuff!

SNL sketch about …. wait for it ….. a newspaper

via hulu.com

The current TV “it girl” Zooey Deschanel brings her 2012 sensibilities to a 1941 newspaper newsroom for a few laughs in Saturday’s show.

Did people really talk this rapid-fire way in real life in the way back when? I know that in some movies Hollywood portrayed newsroom speakeese with that Walter Winchell staccato, but I suspect real folks didn’t actually talk like this.

Anyone who was around want to fess up?

Let’s see you try this with your fancy pad/pod/cell/gadget!

via lifehacker.com

My good friends over at Lifehacker shows you how to “Build a Simple, Handmade Cooking Stove with a Log, a Saw, and Some Newspaper“

Like to see the reuse of newsprint, but I can make a better cook top with a couple of logs and some twigs. Not bragging, just saying.

Hang on to that Newspaper, you’ll need it to power your laptop

via editorandpublisher.com

Well so says the BBC News.. which reports that Sony has a

paper-powered battery prototype that generates electricity by turning shredded paper into sugar, which is then used as fuel.

Well, we’re a long way off from newsprint used to power our electronics, but maybe we can use the sugar for our morning cereal.

WTF — New media could ‘destroy civil society’

via rte.ie

Yikes!! Time to make sure the bunker is stocked up and there’s plenty of ammo to go around!

The Chairman of Thomas Crosbie Holdings over on the Emerald Isles suggests that all of this on-line foolishness may actually be bringing civil (polite?) society crashing to its knees.

By extension, does he think that Newspapers are the last bastion of “Civil Society?”

Hit the above link to see what he said.

Newspapers guilty of age discrimination?

My good bud Jim Romenesko has a letter and and lively discussion under the above head.

Young vs. old in the newsroom strikes me as a false choice. Even an old reporter who’s slow to understand (much less embrace) blogging/twitter/multimedia can still turn in great content for the paper (or website). In fact, an older reporter might be best suited to keep doing what they do: chasing down leads, finding interesting stories and reporting them to the readership.

via jimromenesko.com

The letter writer asks about age discrimination and, of course, there are plent of comments.

I’ve found in my neck of the woods, the newspapers make everyone reapply for their positions, eliminate a boat load of positions and then dangle a juicy worm — take an “early retirement” with better than average benefits, or face the real likelihood of not getting the “new” job and being out on the street with only two weeks severance pay.

Well, guess which employees don’t/can’t gamble and grab the extended severance package? Yup, the young’ens don’t have much to lose while us Boomers have lots to lose and can’t take the bet.

Discrimination? Not by the letter of the law, but what about the spirit of the law?

Groan: ‘Dumb F*ckers’

via collegemediamatters.com

File this under “There but for the grace of God, go I.” Never, ever — repeat NEVER EVER type anything that you don’t want to see in print!

I used to have nightmares that I had left a filler hed in by mistake, but I never, ever wrote a filler like this.

Wednesday’s issue of The Suffolk Journal at Boston’s Suffolk University let this little ditty past some napping eds. Oh well, I guess school is for learning.

Bet the saps responsible this will NEVER, EVER do this again!