Tuesday, December 19, 2006

You Must Remember This

The Chad Hermann of the sincere "Insincerity," appearing yesterday on "the next page" at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, is the Chad Hermann of Teacher.Wordsmith.Madman, a brilliant local blog that today skewers the nattering nabobs of plagiaristic negativity. He also happens to be this Chad Hermann, who teaches at the Tepper School at Carnegie Mellon. In the sporting world we call this a hat trick.

"the next page," by the way, is frequently entertaining and altogether too difficult to find. Is it too much to ask of the P-G that it remind people that the thing exists? Even create an easy-to-find web archive?

2 comments:

Dennis Roddy said...

"the next page," by the way, is frequently entertaining and altogether too difficult to find. Is it too much to ask of the P-G that it remind people that the thing exists? Even create an easy-to-find web archive?


How to locate the PG's "The Next Page."

1. Download a copy of the Post-Gazette. This can be done several ways. There are many green-and-white, stand-alone units along sidewalks. More convenient, especially for the larger Sunday files, are purchases that can be made at supermarkets, news stands and the PG also offers a feature in which the Sunday edition can be podcast onto your lawn, driveway or porch. A subscription fee for this services is required.

2. To unzip the PG file remove the thin, green outer wrapper.

3. A rolled, pulpy core will likely unfold automatically. If not, this can be done manually.

4. Scroll through the sections to one labeled "Forum." This is the file in which "The Next Page" is located.

5. Flip the "Forum" file onto its back. "The Next Page" should come up automatically.

NOTE: This version of the PG is highly popular among users because it is largely impervious to viruses, transfers quickly without requiring logging in and is self-powered.

Please click here if you agree to these terms of service:

Mike Madison said...

Thankfully, Dennis, there is no link to click, and the instruction set misses the point.

If you print it, they won't come. That's the lesson that newspapers across the country have been learning, badly, for the last decade. If the paper innovates -- and "the next page" is a neat innovation -- then the powers-that-be need to market it, and they need to market it online as well as in print. Put a colored box above the banner on Sundays ("Find The Next Page -- Back of the Forum Section"), and the same colored box on page 1 on Friday and Saturday ("Coming Sunday: The Next Page"). Create a home for the thing on the website, so that I don't have to put "the next page" into the search box.

Maybe that would irritate some of the P-G's Page 2 columnists; maybe it would irritate others. The view from the cheap seats: They can be irritated and employed, I think, or they can start thinking about their next careers.