Two alt papers coming to K-ville

The journalists and staff behind a new independent newspaper in Knoxville unveiled their publication Thursday.

It's called the Knoxville Mercury and it is hoping to fill the void left after the Metro Pulse staff was fired. Some of the editorial staff and the free lance writers from the Metro Pulse will work at the publication.

You can find more on our site RIGHT SMACK HERE. Or over on the hippie's site RIGHT HERE and HERE.

Columbia Journalism Review also wrote extensively about the Mercury over HERE.

Although the ol' Porch wishes both publications well, I suspect neither will be around in two years.

There's a reason newspapers are dying. And I seriously doubt these new start-ups have found the magic bullet. But whatever.

Good luck regardless. I hope I'm wrong.

Too tired for a fancy headline today

Miss me? Didn’t think so. Figures.

As you probably know, the paper laid off four employees. They were good people. That’s all I’m going to say about that, other than a lot of the speculation, the blah, blah, blah, I read yesterday on the message boards, blogs, whatever, is not accurate.

If I didn’t return your call yesterday, then that’s my bad. I’ve got a few days off and I was still recovering from hanging out with the original porch screamer. That and I was catching up on my latest read: The Astounding Wolf-Man by Robert Kirkman.

Good stuff.

I’ll be back later with some more posts.

(By the way, what did you think of that headline? Heh.)

Vote for the 'Best of the Best'

The Metro Pulse is doing its "Best of Knoxville" contest again this year.

Click here for a ballot, or go pick a paper. The things are free, you know. And make for great gift-wrappings.

Anyhoo, it features six sections and lots and lots of categories. (You apparently have to fill out at least 25 for your ballot to count, and any ballot-stuffing goes into the "Extra Scrutiny Pile.")

I'm working my way through it right now.

Here's mine* (the ones in italics):

Best of the Best

Knoxvillian: (you must vote for someone besides previous winners Bill Haslam, Bruce Pearl, or Pat Summitt): Wait, Bruce Pearl won this????

Store: Walmart.

Restaurant: Calhoun's. Best ribs in America. Just ask Mike Chase. He'll tell you that over and over and over and over again.

Bar: Yeah, I wouldn't know.

Band: Tim Burchett and the Balanced Budgets.

Knoxville Life

Best Thing Knoxville needs: A $48 million weight room and a $200 million Neyland Stadium facelift during fiscally tight times. Oh wait, we got that.

Best Local Attraction: Bruce Pearl's wife's Facebook page.

Best Place to Meet New Friends: On the county's audit hotline.

Best Place to Take Your Kids for Free: To school.

Best Reality TV Show Contestant from Knoxville: I don't know. Who was the biggest disaster?

Best Way to Get Tim Burchett to Attend Your Meeting: Hold it at Wright's Cafeteria.

* I did have some input from others. Anything upsetting? That was them. Not me.

More ways to read the KNS

Personally, I think iPads are for women and children.

A real man lugs around a laptop. And preferably one that has nothing to do with Apple. Throw the Steve Jobs' stuff in the iToilet, I say.

(OK, that was stupid.)

Anyhoo, we – and by “we” I mean the people who run the paper and hopefully don’t pay attention to what I write about on this blog – are launching the KNS E-Edition iPad app. Apparently it’s in the app store now. Whatever that is.

For now, it’s free “for a sampling period,” although we’re going to bill you one of these days.

You can find the app (whatever that is) by searching for “Knoxville News Sentinel” in the app store. Apparently it takes a little while after the first time you download an edition of the paper. After that, it moves faster.

This fancy new product also lets users “flip through pages, zoom in by tapping a story with one finger, switch modes by tapping with two fingers and link instantly to hot-linked websites and e-mail editions,” according to an email the company sent me.

Please note, there was no mention on how in the world you’re going to be able to use this sucker as fish-wrap.

But, hey, it does store several editions of the paper (just no screams from the porch stuff).

We’ll also – within a week or two – begin adding a related video and photo gallery each day. And, we have some plans to use an RSS feed (whatever that is) to add breaking news to the app, too.

Like all online-related things that newspapers do, this continues to be a work in development and we’ll be adding more interactivity soon.

And somehow, someway, I just know this will mean more work for me.

Local GOP Party inside baseball

Brian Hornback, the great agitator of all things related to Scripps and the News Sentinel, published a few interesting posts recently on is blog about some inside baseball going on in the Knox County Republican Party and its move to reorganize.

Now, I did hear a week or so back that the reorganization was set for next Friday, also the day that the school kids will be on Spring Break and the building will be closed. I guess they’ll just pay a janitor to show up in let them in. Or not.

Anyway, I confess to not knowing all the intricacies about what’s going on, so you should probably check out his post here.

Local GOP Party chairman Ray Jenkins also posted a note here on the organization's website.

(By the way, what's up with excluding county Law Director Joe Jarret - a Republican - from the site? All the other local Republican officeholders are on there, even a few I think are really Democrats in disguise.)

Anyhoo, a few days later the Scripps agitator talked about a TN GOP probe into the local Republican Party for possible bylaw violations in this post. It all has something to do about when a meeting was supposed to be advertised in the KNS.

He wrote:

“It is clearly 3 days late of the TN Republican Party bylaws. State Chairman Chris Devaney has referred this item to the bylaws committee. It seems that the spin to Chairman Devaney is that the News Sentinel delayed publishing the notice.”

Even Hornback, who can’t stand the paper, says this is crap.

I’ve got to agree.

We need the money.

Heh.

So we’ll publish a legal ad as soon as possible. We don’t like losing customers.

Although I’m sure there are plenty of folks out there who would argue with me on that one.

On a side note, I'm not a big fan of just linking to other blogs without doing my own research first. But it's Sunday night and I just ate a bunch of horse tranquilizers, so I'm lazy.

Kidding.

Or not.

Who really reads the KNS

Funny thing about reporting.

You write something that’s agreeable to your sources (or readers for that matter) and you get a pat on the back.

You get an “atta boy.” You get a “good story, man.” You get a “way to go.”

You get a “hot damn – make the bad man go away!”

Whatever.

You write something that’s not agreeable and all of a sudden everyone forgets about that last story.

You get a “don’t you have anything better to write about.” You get a “you’re biased – why don’t

You write about the corruption going on in the (insert whatever department you want here).” You get a “and you call yourself a journalist – you suck.”

You get a “damn you’re bad, man – go away!”

Whatever.

So, I’ve got to do this blog. It’s a little snarky, I suppose. But I get bored easy, so if I offended you, then I apologize.

Kidding.

With that said – and in the spirit of having a good time – I’ll poke a little fun at something else for a change. I’m sure everyone but my bosses will like this one.

And I'm also sure someone out there will say “at least you got something right – your best post yet!”

Whatever.

Anyhoo, it’s an email I got awhile back. (You might have seen it before. I don't know where it originated. It's not mine. Well, the email is but I didn't write it.) I did have to tweak it a little bit. Been saving it for a slow day. (And by slow I mean when I’m not at work.)

Here ya go:

How to keep all the “political news” in perspective:

1. The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country.
   
2. The Washington Post is read by people who think they run the country.
   
3. The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country and who are very good at crossword puzzles.
   
4. USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don't really understand The New York Times. They do, however, like their statistics shown in pie charts.
   
5. The Los Angeles Times is read by people who wouldn't mind running the country, if they could find the time - and if they didn't have to leave Southern California to do it.
   
6. The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country and did a poor job of it, thank you very much.
   
7. The New York Post is read by people who don't care who is running the country as long as they do something really scandalous, preferably while intoxicated.
   
8. The Miami Herald is read by people who are running another country, but need the baseball scores.
   
9. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is read by people who want only the score of the Cardinals game. They drink Budweiser, Budweiser, and - wait a minute - what was the question?
   
10. The San Francisco Chronicle is read by people who aren't sure if there is a country or that anyone is running it; but if so, they oppose all that they stand for. There are occasional exceptions if the leaders are handicapped minority feminist atheist dwarfs who also happen to be illegal aliens from any other country or galaxy, provided of course, that they are not Republicans.
    
11. The National Enquirer is read by people trapped in line at the grocery store.
    
12. The Seattle Times is read by people who have recently caught a fish and need something to wrap it in.
    
13. The Knoxville News Sentinel is read only by my loving mom.
    

There ya go.

Have a good weekend, folks.