Explore Montclair, With Us and the Star Ledger

1. I hate the Ledger. The page numbering is maddening, they have never- despite several attempts- been able to deliver to my house and their website is as bad as you can imagine.
   Really, shouldn’t they perhaps use Baristanet as a portal to the web, rather than Baristanet as a portal back in time to the print age?
   (And can you make sure this “guide” won’t end up thrown all over my yard like those other Ledger “additions?”)

2. I don’t exactly “hate” the Star-Ledger, it is what it is and it’s never going to be very good. I always have the feeling reading it that cozy hackdom nestled up alongside NJ politicians and big advertisers is its true sole ambition.
   But I do wonder how long it’s going to be around. Si Newhouse’s cash cow seems to be running dry, after all, as do newspapers in general. It just seems to be running out of milk a mite more quickly than the Record.
   Still, in the map of places to see and things to do, don’t forget to list whichever porch walleroo currently resides under, along with suggestions on what to feed him if one visits there.

3. Does this mean you are giving up snark? There is little or no snark in the “Star Lecher,” and I suspect that what little is there is unintentional. Why don’t some of the Usual Suspects get together and perpetrate a fantabulous send-up of something Montclarion. On second thought, Montclair already sends itself up pretty well…

4. and a map of alleged Troll sightings from 2006

5. Let’s see, an Ultimate Insider’s Guide to Montclair, published by the Star-Ledger. Would those destination points have anything to do with the fact that they advertise in said Ledger?
   I’d like to see an Underground Guide to Montclair. That’s where the REAL fun begins.

6. and by that Miss M do you places where we can have fun and be home by 9;30?

7. LOL…yes, Ice! There’s under 30 fun and over 30 fun, of course.

8. ROFLMAO, the prof still can’t read the Ledger! Damn, man, you mentioned it here once before and I swear that I thought you were confusing it with the WSJ or the NYTimes. WTF?! Page numbering for the Ledger is as basic as possible. Whew, I have to catch my breath.

9. I should probably note, since others above did not (though Miss Martta got it right) that even if the Baristas wish to hitch their wagon to the fading star and relevance of newspapers in general, it probably helps the partnership along to get the name right. Meaning it is in fact the “Star-Ledger” (yes, the Star-Ledger!) with a hyphen. Good grief.

10. And when you finally do catch your breath, spot, you might wish to think how easily you can be set off in this fashion. (Yet even as you guffawed over page numbering, a missing hyphen seems to have gone right by you.)

11. We use the StarHyphenLedger to paper litter boxes and little else. My cat Tubby must have been paper trained before his previous owners turned him out. He won’t go near a litter box that has anything else in it.

12. Some of the sections are OK I guess (gardening, pets, health & fitness, Paul Mulshine) but I don’t consider it an award-winning newspaper. I agree, it’s VERY poorly organized, especially on Sunday. The sections don’t appear to be placed in any apparent numerical order at all. Plus all that sales glurge in the middle–that goes straight into the recycling bin.

13. Tubby is on the right track, MellonBrush. In his honor, I shall serve the local ferals a few skinless, boneless chicken breasts tonight.
    I trust he goes right to, and on, the editorial pages. And Jerry Izenberg’s column when they drag him “reluctantly” back out of retirement to opine predictablt on a major event like the Kentucky Derby.

14. I do not trust any newspaper that prints the answer to today’s crossword puzzle in today’s paper. This encourages cheating, which leads to worse behavior such as having so many cars you have to park some of them on the street, and other Group W activities.
    But what disheartens me is that I know that this merger of convenience will eventually change the way Baristanet reports, or as Cathar would incorrectly say, butchers, the important news of our micro-metropolitan area. Whereas no communities in Essex County have voluntarily given up any of their expensive infrastructures to merge services toward the goal of lower taxes, residents of Montclair, Glen Ridge, and Bloomfield (along with others from West Orange, Verona, Caldwell, and as far away as Denville in Morris County) have come together unilaterally to ridicule those same local governments for not consolidating their considerable fiefdoms in the spirit of bettering everyone’s pocketbooks.
    I also pessimistically await the day when one of us will include one or more of those forbidden words (like the one that begins with F and ends with UCK) in one of our posts, and the Baristas — bowing to the economic pressures imposed by their entangling alliance with the Star-fucking-hyphen-Ledger — will (GASP!) bleep it out. Nothing left after that but graffiti. Or going back to writing for daytime television.

15. According to the judges of the latest Society of News Design competition, the best designed newspapers are all abroad, despite the 707 awards for U.S.-based newspapers.
    —————————————————-
    SND Honors Best-Designed Global-Warming News Pages
    1,166 visual journalism awards, including four ‘World’s Best-Designed?’ Newspapers, released
    NORTH KINGSTOWN, R.I. ? In its 29th annual ?The Best of Newspaper Design? Creative
    Competition,? the Society for News Design has named four ?World’s Best-Designed Newspapers?? and issued 1,162 other design awards for journalism published in 2007. The winners came from 14,818 entries submitted by 373 daily and nondaily newspapers around the world. In a new topic, two Awards of Excellence were given for coverage of global warming, to Publico in Madrid and Dagens Industri in Stockholm.
    This year’s ?World’s Best-Designed Newspapers?? are:
    ? Akzia in Moscow, biweekly, circulation 200,000
    ? Expresso in Paco de Arcos, Portugal, weekly, circulation 140,000
    ? Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung in Frankfurt, Germany, weekly, circulation 320,000
    ? The Guardian in London, daily, circulation 355,750.
    Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung and The Guardian were honored previously as ?World’s Best-Designed Newspapers??. Judges said they sought consistency as one key in evaluating the 343 entries in that category.
    In the 18 other competition categories, judges awarded eight Gold medals, 28 Silver medals, four Judges’ Special Recognitions and 1,122 Awards of Excellence. ?Judges selected only the very best entries to win medals,? said C. Marshall Matlock, competition and judging director for the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University and
    the competition committee director for SND. ?It’s a busy time for the industry and an exciting year for design. It’s gratifying so many good designs were honored for 2007’s work. It speaks well for design and newsrooms from around the world, and continues to make the Society’s competition the most prestigious in the world.?
    The competition, co-sponsored by SND and the Newhouse School, recognizes excellence in
    newspaper design, graphics and photography. Former news designer Greg Swanson, promotion and marketing executive for Extreme Challenge Mixed Martial Arts, served as the 29th Edition competition coordinator. Judges from around the globe met in two stages over two long weekends in February at the Newhouse School in Syracuse, N.Y.
    Gold medals were awarded to the Los Angeles Times for Genaro’s Molina’s portrait photo of Joyce Simms Wood and two multiple-photo projects; the Plain Dealer in Cleveland for an Andrea Levy illustration on taxes; The San Francisco Chronicle for an entertainment package, ?The Price of Fun”; The New York Times for an entertainment page on the new season; The New York Times Magazine for a photo series on great performers; and The Guardian in London for a feature spread on the story of O.J. Simpson and the Goldman family.
    The top winner in all 19 categories was the Los Angeles Times and its magazine, with 109 awards;
    Of the 193 newspapers from 33 countries that earned awards, the United States led with 707 awards, followed by 92 for Canada, 65 for Mexico, 43 for Turkey, 42 for Spain, 23 each for Argentina and El Salvador, 21 each for Germany, Brazil and Sweden, 20 for Denmark, 18 for England, and 14 for Portugal.
    Other award winners included newspapers from Australia, China, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Italy, Japan, Norway, Peru, Poland, Romania, Russia, Scotland, Singapore, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates.
    The 14,818 entries were up from last year’s 13,862, but less than the high of 15,020 entries in 2005. Judges honored 1,166 winners, fewer than the 1,748 in 2007, and more than the 1,135 in 2006 and 1,082 in 2005. Newspapers of less than 50,000 circulation earned 144 awards in this year’s competition.

16. MM, you can blame the retailers who put the Sunday newspapers together for any disorganization. They get stacks of the different sections and collate them. That’s why you may often miss one section while you get double of another.
    catheter, I laugh because the prof (another lower case-type) has ragged about the page numbering of the Ledger before when it’s nearly on a par with the Weekly Reader for simplicity. Easy consecutive numbers. Gah!
    And get that plug out of your arse over the hyphen. Please drive through : )

17. Down Spot,
    The numbering while consecutive moves over various sections which are usually out of order.
    So while I understand that page 15 comes after page 8 and before page 32. It’s impossible to follow this “easy consecutive numbers” when pages 8, 15 and 32 are in sections that are not consecutive.
    Regardless, I’ll stick to the Times, Journal and Asbury Park Press (online).
    (Do you have a reason why they weren’t able to process my subscription after 3 tries?)

18. Conan, you have no idea what I’d say. For any given situation or happenstance, no matter how much phlegm you’re clearly trying to summon up. (As usual, I might add, you seem to have pretentsions to play at being Andy Rooney.) Try not to ever presume that you “know” what I’m thinking or will post, there’s a good chap. (God, I feel like Boris Johnson having to tell you that, even if you, sir, are surely no Ken Livingstone.)
    The real “danger,” if there is one (I doubt there is), to Baristanet’s linkage with the Star-Ledger is that it will only repeat, in a bound, printed format, the cronyism which already permeates this site. (All those mentions of Steve Adubato, I humbly submit, are not just a reflection of the sparkle of his opinions; the cooperation with the Star-Ledger, which uses this scion of a North Ward political boss for its own seminar-selling purposes, is just an inevitable confluence of forces.)
    The Baristas, in other words, really and truly and obviously are wired in locally and socially. This is as it should be, though it also sometimes forces and shapes coverage (I wouldn’t generally call it reporting of the kind that snaps at Pulitzers) into predictable ways. The concept of “knowing who your friends really are” rules as much here as it does in Hudson County politics.
    But Baristanet is clearly on an upsurge and the Star-Ledger is probably dying. It’s definitely wriggling on the floor like a stranded eel. Even as it foolishly imagines itself totally wired in on a statewide level, thus immune from collapse. So it launches into publishing some sort of guide to Montclair (who knows at this point what it will read like?) in a hope for relevance, another attempt to pull in some advertising dollars. That this apparently comes about as a result of aid from Jeff Jarvis, who has his own occasional delusions re his importance to the Internet and new media, is just a lagniappe.
    So let us wait and see about this guide, okay, and also about any other fruits of what you incorrectly term a “merger,” hmmmm? Personally, save for the possibility that said guide will recycle several of the bromides that preside at this site (and will offer them up from the most bromidic of in-town voices), I’m positive that Baristanet can and will do a MUCH better job than the Star-Ledger could itself do alone in its “coverage” of Montclair as a destination unto itself. (Phil Read, so to speak, is neither Arthur Frommer nor the very good Rick Steves.) Baristanet really is the future in many often good ways, though I hesitated to write that for fear it would swell Jeff Jarvis’s already over-stuffed head to bursting, and the Star-Ledger is hurtling towards becoming just so much fishwrap.
    As for your other worry, that this at some point in the future will impede you or some other verbally forthright soul from posting profanities, that’s just silly. You can always go stand at your back door and offer up imprecations to the world, after all. That you seem to think posting obscenities represents a cultural advance, however, may say more about you than you intended. Especially in the limited context of BAristanet.
    Still, there are obscenities and then there are obscenities, no? For any dirty word you may wish to post here, Conan, or nod approval at from others, the Star-Ledger (yes, the Star-Ledger!) has already topped all conceivable ones a while back by consistently terming, in its woefully done retrospective of the events, the riots of 1967 a “rebellion.”

19. Oh, and Spot, you seem to desperately need some “walkies” this morning. Your post above was the printed equivalent of kidney-driven pacing in a circle.

20. Cathar: It is spoofery. I appreciate the fact that gasoline is now around $3.50 a gallon and that you get paid by the word, but it remains spoofery and does not require impertinent and irrelevant back-sass.
    (And Andy Rooney died in 1976; he was drunk and run over by a train at Rowayton Station. CBS just doesn’t know it yet.)

21. Conan, pay no attention to cathar. You are much wittier than he is and that makes him jealous. Phlegm and bile do not equal wit.

22. Would that I were paid by the word, Conan. Here or anywhere else. But few pay for impertinence, or else we’d both be millionaires. (We should really become “communications experts,” the Star-Ledger with or without a hyphen might then seek us out to expound on most anything.)
    Whether or no Andy Rooney resides/d in Rowayton, I salute your noting it as his place of death. I had a total prep of a boss who lived there (he would even announce to the office his choice of pipe tobacco for the day), and your implied assessment of the place seems dead to rights.

23. Oh, Spot, back from your walk already? I say, if only for your sake, God bless that new dog run in Brookdale!

24. Andy was a neighbor in Rowayton in the late 70’s, and a surly SOB he was. And, funny you should mention it, but my agency MOS was Communications Specialist (a synonym, these days, for expert). Perhaps I should update my Web site and Virtual Business Cards.
    And I always pay attention to Cathar, Looney. In our case, perhaps we two half-wits create one whole… 🙂

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