The former president's keynote remarks on running out of oil and our national energy strategy make an appearance in the new feature-length documentary Sprawling From Grace. The film, which was released on DVD last month, examines the transportation infrastructure and urban planning choices that have led to the current state of suburban sprawl and looks at possible ways forward. The film also features interviews with Michael Dukakis, Denver mayor John Hickenlooper and planning and environmental experts.

Continue ReadingBill Clinton’s 2006 Convention Speech Featured in New Documentary

James Parker's essay in the Boston Phoenix -- "Unauthorized! Axl Rose, Albert Goldman, and the renegade art of rock biography" -- has been selected for the annual book that the Phoenix says has "become, next to free Radiohead tickets, the rock critic's highest professional honor." Rebecca Schoenkopf's piece on Hall & Oates for the now-defunct LA CityBeat is also included in the book, which won't be out until October.

Continue ReadingAlt-Weeklies Make it into ‘Best Music Writing 2009’

The publication will spotlight a different segment of the local economy each month, and its title will change accordingly. The inaugural issue is Shop Local; Stay Local, Dine Local and Eat Local are among the subsequent issues being planned. "Community spirit runs high where the CN&R is read. Neighbors support neighbors," editor Evan Tuchinsky writes. "The Shop Local movement is an extension of that spirit, something the News & Review wants to encourage."

Continue ReadingChico News & Review Launches Monthly Business Publication

When a news website in Pasadena made headlines last year for its decision to outsource City Hall coverage to reporters in India, the group managing editor of the Hartford Advocate, New Haven Advocate and Fairfield County Weekly wondered if his three alt-weeklies could do the same thing. While John Adamian's idea started as a joke, it quickly led to an actual exercise in outsourcing journalism -- and the results are this week's papers, which have been mostly generated by Indian freelancers. The papers say the experiment proves that outsourcing a local newspaper is possible, but not recommended. "Call us old-school, but we think good, old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism is worth the price," the staff writes in an editors' note. "Outsourcing could certainly fill pages, probably very cheaply, but what's lost is the very essence of local newspapers: presence."

Continue ReadingConnecticut Alt-Weeklies Outsource This Week’s Issue

A story written by Matt Aikins about suicides off of Halifax's Macdonald Bridge has been named the best investigative piece by the Canadian Association of Journalists. The piece, "Adam's Fall," also recently won a gold Atlantic Journalism Award for enterprise reporting. Perhaps more importantly, the Halifax-Dartmouth Bridge Commission has decided to reverse course and install suicide barriers along the entire length of the bridge, though the commission denies that the Coast's story had any influence on its decision.

Continue ReadingThe Coast Story Wins National Award, Leads to Action

WW's new, MIT-grad webmaster Seth Raphael leads a double life as a technologically savvy magician, MagicSeth, who performs "tricks involving telepathic Google searches and psychic digital cameras." It is in that capacity that he's been selected as one of 25 fellows for 2009 TED Global, which will be held this summer in Oxford. Raphael will give a three-minute presentation to the invitation-only crowd, which is slated to include speakers like Naomi Klein and black-hole specialist Andrea Ghez. "I've never been nervous before," he says. "I get on stage in front of hundreds of people. I applied to MIT. I wing everything. But this made me nervous."

Continue ReadingWillamette Week Webmaster Invited to Prestigious TED Conference

Two new tools "could potentially reshape how content is distributed and monetized on the web," Forbes reports. Scribd Store, from the company Scribd, uses a secure widget to help publishers control who is redistributing their content and keep bloggers and others from posting the raw text of an article. Meanwhile, the start-up Attributor asks publishers to upload all their content into the company's servers, which then search the web for the same strings of words.

Continue ReadingTwo Tech Firms Build Tools to Protect Content from Digital Thieves