Beyond Alaska Photo
Multimedia journalism in the Last Frontier

And as usual, it’s from the New York Times.

They’re writing about the Monty Hall problem and how it might relate to research on cognitive dissonance. The story is somewhat technical (at least for a newspaper), but the Times’ graphic illustrates this counter-intuitive mathematical brain-teaser beautifully.

It works graphically but it also starts down the game design road, a place I think newspaper web sites in general should go.

Trying on themes for this site grows out of the Design for Publications class I’m teaching at UAA this semester. More than a little concerned that my students don’t have the skill set they need to get a journalism job, I’ve assigned them the task for maintaining a wordpress blog for the class.

I spend a (large) portion of every day mucking about in our content management system and quite frankly I don’t see where we’re going to hire a recently J-school graduate that can’t keep up with our web publishing software.

This particular theme, “The Morning After,” is designed for a web zine and is packed with great features but it may be too much for my purposes here. I can do thumbnails and lede pictures but there’s a little too much, well, content management involved.

And so, unfortunately, the theme revolution may continue.

Yesterday the Daily News reported on a three vehicle accident in the Valley that killed three people. Readers quickly started to post comments about it, and most were the standard this person’s an idiot etc etc, but it didn’t take too long for an industrious reader to run the driver through the public, online Alaska court records and post a link to his driving record.

Nothing too interesting turned up but it’s fascinating how quickly someone — not one of our reporters — posted the information on the Daily News site. We provided the name, which Troopers released to us as a media outlet, and the community carried on the the story.

I found it inspiring, but I think it also raises some potentially difficult questions for the paper.