Good morning,
The forecast for Whitewater calls for a chance of thunderstorms today, with a high temperature of eighty-six degrees.
The Wisconsin Historical Society notes that on this day in 1919:
On this date the Green Bay Packers professional football team was founded during a meeting in the editorial rooms of Green Bay Press-Gazette. On this evening, a score or more of young athletes, called together by Curly Lambeau and George Calhoun, gathered in the editorial room on Cherry Street and organized a football the team. [Source: Packers.com]
I’ve posted about cycling, and about the opposition of some fans to doping in cycling, and their efforts to root it from the sport. I very much support their efforts. In the New York Times, there was a story that describes the dislike some fans have for doping. In Cycling Fans Root for Dopers to Get Caught, Robert Mackey writes that
As a remarkably entertaining edition of the Tour de France comes to an end this weekend, some of the most passionate fans of professional cycling are paying less attention to what’s happening in the race than they are to news of a federal investigation into the allegation that Lance Armstrong engaged in systematic doping to win it on seven previous occasions.
That is at least in part because some of the best-informed fans, who maintain remarkably detailed and active Twitter feeds dedicated to sharing information about performance-enhancing drugs, remain convinced that some of the top riders have found ways to cheat and avoid detection.
Among the most knowledgeable and entertaining of these feeds are the ones written by the obsessive, recovering fan who use the Twitter handle Cycling Fans Anonymous, an English woman who calls herself Festina Girl, and the bike racers and cartoonists Andy Shen and Dan Schmalz who write as NY Velocity.
As my colleague Ian Austen reported in May, their suspicions are shared by scientists who have demonstrated that a technique known as microdosing could allow cyclists to use the blood-boosting drug EPO, which changed the sport in the 1990s, to “gain a significant performance advantage” while still passing all of the tests currently administered.
I follow Cycling Fans Anonymous on Twitter, and they cover the doping controversy in cycling closely (as much a brief tweet can do). These fans want a clean sport, an honest sport, and they deserve one.
There are videos at the GazetteXtra.com and WalworthCountyToday.com that show how those online publications are making clever use of the web. First the videos, then a few remarks.
At GazetteXtra.com, community blogger Glen Lloyd has a new video about Ronald Reagan and his connection to the Janesville-area Rock River:
Here’s the second, posted at WalworthCountyToday.com, from an AP story at Fox 6 News, showing a case of McNugget Rage:
The videos are different, but they illustrate the contrast between these local publications and others nearby. Only the websites of the GazetteXtra.com and WalworthCountyToday.com show a real understanding for the web, and for what it can do.
The nearby Daily Union site has nothing so lively, of such range. I doubt they’d show a viral video, in any event. It might not seem serious to them, perhaps. In this, they would ignore the variety on the web, limit their traffic, tie themselves to an oh-so-serious but stodgy coverage of events, and reflexive support of public officials. (On the print side, I find it hard to see how an afternoon newspaper has any longterm prospects. If the much livelier Capital Times couldn’t make it in print in Madison as an afternoon paper, I don’t see how the DU can stay an afternoon paper in Jefferson County.)
The website of the formerly-local Whitewater Register is shared between several papers in the Southern Lakes newspaper chain. There’s a video posted there as of this morning, but the link for it points nowhere. The website looks less polished than what an ordinary person could accomplish in a weekend.
Finally, about that McNugget video: the customer’s drunk, but is there something about being drunk that makes McNuggets irresistible? I’ve never heard of a sober customer with such a craving.