Newsweek has produced a video that recaps the last decade in seven minutes. It’s part of their series 20/10: The Decade In Rewind which takes a look at the biggest moments in the first ten years of the 21st Century.

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Kevin Evans tipped us off to a wondeful archival video of The San Francisco Cacophony Society on news segment called “Eccentric Avenues” produced 1990-91.

The video features many of our friends including M2, Louise Jarmilowicz, Winston Smith, John Law and the late Dave Warren, including footage of him breathing fire to ignite the Burning Man sculpture at Burning Man 1990, the first year it was in the Black Rock Desert (Cacophony Society Zone Trip #4).

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The Awl has created a graphic showing the history of weekday newspaper circulation since 1990. Its amazing to see just how much it’s decreased.

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The next issue of McSweeney’s Quarterly (#33) is coming out in the form of San Francisco Panorama, a one-off Sunday edition newspaper created in the style of an old-fashioned broadsheet that will be distributed on the streets of San Francisco.

It’ll have news (actual news, tied to the day it comes out) and sports and arts coverage, and comics (sixteen pages of glorious, full-color comics, from Chris Ware and Dan Clowes and Art Spiegelman and many others besides) and a magazine and a weekend guide, and will basically be an attempt to demonstrate all the great things print journalism can (still) do, with as much first-rate writing and reportage and design (and posters and games and on-location Antarctic travelogues) as we can get in there. Expect journalism from Andrew Sean Greer, fiction from George Saunders and Roddy Doyle, dispatches from Afghanistan, and much, much more. We’re going to try to sell this thing on the street in San Francisco, but it’ll also go out to our subscribers and be in bookstores all over—sign up now to ensure you see it.

Here’s more on San Francisco Panorama from the New York Times ArtsBeat blog.

via Waxy

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photo by Scott Beale

In a completely non-ironic and potentially exciting move, KQED and the University of California, Berkeley School of Journalism have snatched $5 million in kindling to start the Bay Area News Project. The money is being fronted by the Hellman Family Foundation to create online (and sideline print) media outlets as a “nonprofit, nonpartisan publicly supported news organization.” The first post on their fledgling Twitter account (@bayareanewsproject) announces that they’ve joined forces with the New York Times and the rumor is that it’ll be basically a New York Times West. The veritable Grey Lady herself said — one day after the NYT’s involvement was announced — opines that it’ll be “the largest and most ambitious of dozens of similar local news operations that have cropped up around the country.”

The venture is set to launch next year, which is really just around the corner in old media time, and to get a good sense of what the various people involved have to say about the scope and intention of the next possible Chron/Gate/Examiner killer, there’s a lot to be gleaned in KQED’s roundtable audio interview from Friday. Forum’s recent episode with host Dave Iverson The Future of News? is worth a listen. The topic of local news coverage here in the heart of technology (and the Hollywood of tech) is nothing if not a morbid topic, and there have been many contenders for the title they’re going to be more than a few rounds in the ring for. They’re hiring for freelancers right now (email: jobs at bayareanewsproject dot org). Although on Iverson’s show, when directly asked by a caller self-identified as a journalist, they said there would be compensation but were not transparent about any pay scale. I guess we’ll have to wait until they choose a name for more details (BANP is a temporary title). But they do tell us that distribution will be through a website, mobile applications, KQED will funnel them through radio and television dissemination, and they’re “exploring” print options with the NYT.

On the show, guests (and members of BANP) include Carl Hall, former representative of the SF Chronicle’s newsroom and commercial departments; Jeff Clarke, president and CEO of KQED; Neil Henry, professor and dean of the UC Berkeley’s J-school and author of 2007’s “American Carnival: Journalism Under Siege in an Age of New Media”; Noelle Leca, chair of the board of directors of KQED; and Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. In all it looks to be a very exciting venture, and we’ve been waiting for that local news wake-up call for decades — after all, we really should be leading the world in a revolution for combining democratized reportage and cutting edge technology. But instead most of us just gnash our teeth, watch the lag, read SFist, SF Appeal and SFBG while going elsewhere for… everything else.

Bay Area News Project is nothing if not ambitious. Will they really be the shock troops for journalism’s revolution as they hope? I’m reminded of when GETV was invited as citizen journalists to the 2006 San Francisco International Film Festival in a groundbreaking step to incorporate indie media with mainstream media. Only to discover in our on-the-spot interview with Graham Leggat that while courting us — no: in fact, bloggers and web TV reporters like us were not going to be granted equal access. Bait and switch, or perhaps yet another case of misunderstanding the medium. In the KQED Forum show, they tell us that BANP wants to “engage, listen, communicate with one another… with professional heart for news gathering and dissemination.” While also bantering that unlike citizen journalism, “truth” is at the heart of professional journalism, hence their preference for pro over citizen reportage — a sentiment many of us might find dismaying, at odds with our experience, and simply old fashioned.

Well, we can take heart that KQED’s Noelle Leca can be quoted as saying (at 37:35, in case we need it later) that Bay Area News Project “is a risk taking venture.” We certainly hope so. And Lillian Hellman was a very interesting and cool woman. BANP, whatever it will be called, could be just the kick in the [body part] that is needed, not just locally but nationally or even internationally. And that would be something to finally be proud of, indeed.

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Time.com is featuring a new video series by Ze Frank called “That Makes Me Think of…”. In the first episode he discusses the Iranian presidental election.

Congratulations Ze, your “time” has come!

via Jay Goldman

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Stephen Colbert was the guest editor of the June 15th, 2009 issue of Newsweek.

So when Jon Meacham asked me to guest-edit NEWSWEEK, I jumped at the chance, particularly because my guest editorship at Mature -Honeys fell through. I guess my photo essay of sexy housewives reenacting the Battle of Fallujah was too “real” for them.

Of course, guest editing is more than just sitting around tanning myself by the gleam of Fareed Zakaria’s teeth. I set the editorial agenda, assigned stories and yelled at Peter Parker to get me more photos of that web-slinging vigilante, Spider-Man. He’s a menace!

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President Obama shows off his advanced fly killing skills during an interview in The White House.

Barely Political takes a closer look at Obama’s Kung Fu fly swat.

via Eddie Codel

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photo by Gero Brelcer

The New York Times recently launched their beautiful new photojournalism blog Lens.

Lens is the photojournalism blog of The New York Times, presenting the finest and most interesting visual and multimedia reporting — photographs, videos and slide shows. A showcase for Times photographers, it also seeks to highlight the best work of other newspapers, magazines and news and picture agencies; in print, in books, in galleries, in museums and on the Web. And it will draw on The Times’s own pictorial archive, numbering in the millions of images and going back to the early 20th century.

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The New York Times has just released Times Reader 2.0, a really nice update to their desktop newspaper application, which now runs on Adobe Air.

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Google has just launched two new services that are part of their Google Labs.

Similar Images

Similar Images allows you to search for images using pictures rather than words. With the similar images feature, most images have a link below them that lets you find other images like them. There’s no need for you to refine the text of your query. Your new results will be tailored based on whatever image you select.

Google News Timeline

A web application that organizes information chronologically. Google News Timeline allows users to view news, scanned newspapers and magazines, blog posts, sports scores, and more on a zoomable, graphical timeline.

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Last Friday our good friend Eve Batey launched her new project, The San Francisco Appeal, a new online newspaper for San Francisco. Laughing Squid welcomes SFAppeal with open tentacles, we’re really looking forward to your coverage of our fine city.

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The New York Times has released an article skimmer interface for their news articles providing a really great way to scan headlines similar to reading a physical paper. It’s part of their prototypes series for projects that are still in the testing phase.

See Previously: A Tour of The New York Times

via ReadWriteWeb

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A couple of weeks ago when I was in New York, my friend Nick Bilton invited me over to The New York Times for a tour (NYT moved to their new location in 2007, an ultra-modern skyscraper designed by Renzo Piano). Nick, a co-founder of NYC Resistor (see previous post) works in The New York Times Research & Development operations. Nick, along with co-worker Ted Roden showed me some of the amazing technologies they are working on, like flexible newspaper, custom print on demand kiosks, data visualization of GPS aware content and a bunch of other really amazing stuff.

While there, visited the main news desk and stopped by the Page One conference room, where twice a day the editor in chief and all of the section editors meet to decide the content for the front page of The New York Times.

Nick and Ted are have also been working on a side project the New York Times, SHIFD, a mobile app that allows you to seamlessly move content between desktops and mobile devices.

Recently Nick and Ted, along with Michael Young launched TwitterSheep, a service that creates a tag cloud from the bios of your twitter followers.

Photo Gallery: The New York Times

photos by Scott Beale

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In 1981 the television station KRON in San Francisco aired a report showing the future of internet news and online journalism. In the segment they mention that it takes over two hours to download the full text of a newspaper over the phone using a modem.

via TechCrunch

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guest post by mikl-em

In one of those unexpected Jon Stewart-y kinda twists, The Daily Show brought out 80’s pop duo Daryl Hall and John Oates to sing a farewell to Alan Colmes, one of Fox News’ few non-conservative voices, who is leaving the show Hannity & Colmes at the end of the year.

Colmes is often criticized for being a weak liberal straw man and thus actually perpetuating the Fox News channel’s generally conservative perspective–see “The false balance of Hannity & Colmes“. Sean Hannity himself recently talked about life without Colmes. Here is a 2003 PBS interview of Hannity & Colmes.

Meanwhile, Hall & Oates have a collaboration coming out with the band Chromeo any day now. Daryl Hall in particular has been busy and high profile (relatively to the last decade at least) with his Live From Daryl’s House site and podcast–which includes an episode with Chromeo.

Given the season, I’ve gotta close with the classic Hall & Oates holiday video for Jingle Bell Rock from 1983, they really nail a great schmaltz-y mood in this one…

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guest post by mikl-em

A delicious helping of much-needed political apathy enablement courtesy of The Onion’s fake morning news show Today Now!. It eerily replicates that “feel your IQ-decreasing” sensation of watching a network morning show.

It’s a great reminder of how the The Onion has really nailed parody of all the various forms of news coverage including Sunday magazine covers like below, Sports, and even CSPAN.

See ONN — The Onion News Network for more video reports of the news that no one else will tell you.

via Crooks and Liars

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guest post by mikl-em

On yesterday’s Countdown show on MSNBC, Jason Bateman was a guest, plugging his new flick “Hancock“. Host of Countdown Keith Olbermann seemed a little obsessed with what Will Smith is like, though he does profess to be a huge fan of Arrested Development (probably this mikl’s favorite show of all time).

Another Arrested Development star makes a surprise appearance as well–you just watch the clip to find out who it is. In the process Olbermann asks them about the much rumored Arrested Development movie, which Bateman essentially confirms is in the works, and that the “numbers” are being worked on. That’s a very exciting prospect for all us Bluth fans

To complete the tribute to Arrested D, I’d like to say what I always say about that show: watching it is like getting the shit beaten out of you with comedy. Comedo-Masochists everywhere, unite!

You can watch clips and whole episodes of the show on Hulu. Here’s a taste…

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guest post by mikl-em

A wildfire in the hills of Brisbane, CA threatens homes. There are a lot of close friends of Laughing Squid who live in Brisbane, and we are thinking of them and everyone whose homes are threatened there.

The latest images of the Brisbane fire from Flickr users. Details on the evacuations reported by CBS 5.

There are fires raging throughout California right now, including a 3,500 acre fire in the Napa / Solano county area, most of these were started by lightning strikes.

Cal Fire is the California state department of Forestry and Fire Protection. Here’s a list of current incidents (though I wasn’t able to find the Brisbane fire in this list, I think it’s part of the larger lightining strikes fire). Here’s hoping for low winds and a cool day and thanks to the firefighters who are all working non-stop to keep the damage at a minimum.

UPDATE: Good news! As of 1:30AM Monday the San Bruno fire was 75% contained and all residents were allowed back to their homes.

photo by Adonis Allen

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guest post by mikl-em

JUST MARRIED FINALLY …and… NO STOPPING. I like that.

Four years ago the first same-sex marriage in California history was successfully conducted. That same couple had another wedding ceremony in San Francisco yesterday. This followed a reboot of the legal system which had thrown an error upon seeing two gender=F values on the marriage certificate. Large programs like California sometimes do need methodical debugging. But there’s a history here of gradual improvement on important functions like Environment and Equality. Hoping that this trend continues.

I had the tremendous pleasure of being in a huge crowd yesterday outside San Francisco City Hall to celebrate the first same-sex marriage since this right was upheld in California. It was a great day! Unfortunately we didn’t get a glimpse of the couple, but it was a very exciting and positive nonetheless (in spite of some rather negative protesters, who were few but carried big signs). I took some pix & videos, and wrote it up on Flickr. See the description of each pic for more details.

Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, the couple who were married in SF, are in their 80’s. They have been together for 50+ years and have been activists and community-builders throughout. Gay.com has a great article with more details about their wedding and the wedding of Robin Tyler and Diane Olson from LA (shown below) who have tried every year for 8 years to get a marriage license on Valentine’s Day.

The SF Chronicle’s website has a great archive of coverage of the issue of same-sex marriage in California. Here’s coverage on yesterday from the BBC.

photos by Gay Weddings & mikl-em

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