Portugal's daily i.

As I watch the lusciously designed, mainly Western European newspapers roll out at Juan Antonio Giner’s What’s Next: Innovations in Newspapers, I keep wondering what effect something like i would have on urban newspaper sales in North American cities.

i, according to Giner, is something newish: a daily newsmagazine. As you scroll through the pages at this post, it become pretty clear it’s something different, but still recognizably a newspaper. It isn’t all eye candy: my translation of the headline on the lead story on the front page in this post is “The story of a banker who hit bottom.” Sounds like serious journalism.

i isn’t unique. Through Juan Antonio I’ve seen others, including Publico (also in Portugal) and Eleftheros Typos (sadly, now gone). If you search his site, you can find examples of both. All of these newspapers share a bold, lively approach, with great use of colour, design and images. I’m going to presume the journalism lives up to the image.

Now, we know some stuff about North American newspapers. One is that, hidden behind the current panic over the recession-battered economics of newspapering, there remains the long and steady decline in the circulation of printed newspapers.

As part of the desire/need to reinvigorate my blogging, I’ve re-themed the site (using Valdimir Prelovac’s Amazing Grace). That’s meant some backend work and changes.

Amazing Grace uses categories for the lower of the two top index tabs. Given that I haven’t used categories for my posts since 2006, I’m in the middle of adding new categories that will serve, in effect, as separate sections of the blog. I’ve created one, so far, for photographs, as part of my plan to feature some of my photos more often. As I think of others, I’ll be adding them. The General category above contains just about everything at the site, going back to the early ’00s.

(The best way to find specific content at the site remains either search or the tag cloud.)

One other big change may by in the works: I’m investigating replacing Squibs postings with the Publish2 sidebar widget. I’ll let you know how that works out.

All of this effort will, I hope, lead to much more frequent blogging.

Meanwhile, though, here’s an example of me actually doing interactive narrative – and a newspaper writer, from the Guardian (of course), who seems to totally grok what it is we’re after:

But a Vancouver-based studio named Smoking Gun Interactive may be about to merge the worlds of console and alternative reality gaming into one experimental new form. The team has yet to announce a name for the project – its codename is currently X, and there’s an intriguing online preview named, Exoriare, a title drawn from Virgil’s ‘Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor’ – let an avenger arise from my bones.

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• Orin S. Kerr, professor of criminal law at the George Washington University Law School and author of a number of law review articles on the application of the Fourth Amendment to Internet and computer data. 
• Jason Paroff, director of computer forensics operations with the ESI Consulting practice at Kroll Ontrack.

Here’s the preview, along with a trailhead:

http://exoriare.com/

It should be available as a printed volume of 120 pages or so in a few months.

Writing for gamers is harder than writing for regular people because I actually feel more obligated to make it work on many levels at once. Gamers spend thousands of hours in a world, so it really has to be true down to levels of granularity an author could ignore in almost any other medium. But it’s great to know people are going as deep into this material as I am. Way more intimate a sensation, really.

Alas, he’ll be visiting via magnetic recording tape, and not in the flesh. He’s the next in our series of Media Squat Classics – people whose ideas and approaches form the basis of the media squat ethos.

We’ll be talking about Life Inc, especially in the context of how people create value on the net – and whether there’s a way for any significant number of us to make a living at it, anymore.

If you don’t go to Second Life, you can also watch it as live video on the web.

To that end, I’m doing talks at some of my favorite schools in the area, to meet people and let my intentions be known. Two weeks ago, I had a great time at the New School – where I was truly inspired by the radical stripe of the student body. It did not feel fake.

This Wednesday at noon, I’ll be at Polytechnic Institute of NYU, in Brooklyn, speaking about “The End of Narrative.”

A Lecture by Douglas Rushkoff

Presented by The Brooklyn Experimental Media Center and the Dibner Family Chair in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology

Interactivity changes our relationship to stories as well as the technologies through which they are transmitted. Where the power of a story to influence audiences often depended on the mysteriousness of the medium through which it was told, today’s storytellers must actually engender trust and playfulness – and they must do so on an increasingly violent paranoid playing field.

These are the challenges confronting anyone who wishes to communicate in today’s mediaspace. Do we create myths to compete with the ones we hope to dispel? Or do we abandon myth altogether? Is the traditional story itself a relic, incapable of providing meaning over time? Are the kinds of meaning it can convey biased towards creating childlike passivity in the

The PBS Digital Nation team just completed a great new segment on the predator drones being used in Pakistan and Afghanistan. This documentary (I’m one of the writers and commentators) is actually shaping up to be pretty interesting. Here’s my Daily Beast column on some of the issues underlying the use of virtual fighting machines.

When the mortgage industry collapsed, Goldman won very very big. They were right to bet against the investment products they were selling. So they made money on both ends – selling the crap, and betting against the crap. Problem is, AIG was on the other side of those bets, essentially insuring the awful mortgage packages. And AIG didn’t have enough money to pay Goldman its winnings.

Instead of letting AIG fail, and leaving Goldman with only its original profits from selling awful mortgage investments to major American pension funds, the central government (advised by its fiscal staff of former Goldman execs) bailed out AIG so that it could pay back Goldman its winnings. Our grandchildren’s tax money will be used to pay Goldman for winning its bets against the products it sold to our pension managers.

Now that Goldman has paid its executives the biggest bonuses in the company’s history, many people are mad. So the Administration’s bright idea is to force companies who took government bailout money to put caps on such bonuses. Problem is, Goldman didn’t get bailout money – not directly, anyway. They got the money, sure, but the loans were not made to Goldman.

So they get to keep it all. Again.

Kind of makes you wish you’d bought GS stock when it was down around 60 last year…

The last chapter of the book, “Here and Now,” subtitled “The Opportunity to Reconnect,” is in fact better than any marketing book, and may give you great ideas of companies that can make a difference. As the author reminds us in the previous chapter, PayPal’s original plan was to offer an alternative payment service. True, the business model changed as Paypal activity was perceived as a violation of the banking laws. But you may have other ideas… and it’s when they read scouring, abrasive books that entrepreneurs invent new rules — and eventually might pave the way towards a new economy, or creatively revisit Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. “Like the founders of America, who may have differed on almost everything else but this,” notes Rushkoff, “Smith saw economics as characterized by small, scaled, local economies working in interaction with one another.”

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