Free as in Pizza

On Saturday, January 24th 2009, there will be an all day media industry meetup in the Washington DC area. The theme is innovation: creating better ways to deliver news. It’s a chance for journalists, news org techies, bloggers, editors, publishers, and everyone in between to get together and share our best ideas and strategies, and to talk about practical, common solutions to the problems we’re facing. The event will be free and is open to everyone who is interested. The only requirement is that everyone should come prepared to participate.

You can sign up to attend on the NewsInnovation DC wiki page.

The meetup will be held BarCamp style, which means that all of the presentations will be given by participants on a schedule decided by consensus on the day of the event. If you have a success story or strategy that you want to share, a prototype that you want to demonstrate, a discussion that you want to have, or a big question that you want to ask, this is the place to do it.

No special expertise is required to present, just a passion for what you’re doing and a willingness to share. For more background on BarCamps and how they work, see the Wikipedia page on BarCamp.

Similar events are happening in Chicago, Portland and other cities, leading up to a national meetup in Philadelphia on April 25th, 2009. For more information, have a look at the BarCamp announcement page on newsinnovation.com.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me at wamitchell (at) washingtoncitypaper (dot) com. If you’re interested in helping out or sponsoring (sponsors usually provide food or pay for things), let me know. (I’ll take care of providing free pizza for lunch).

Please share this with anyone you know who might be interested. I don’t have very many contacts in DC media, so I can use plenty of help spreading the word.

I just saw a commercial for “Bob Evans Deep Dish Dinners” where fried chicken chunks, gravy, and cheese fall out of the sky into a bowl of mashed potatoes and (apparently) another kind of gravy. A hilarious indictment of existence itself, starting at only $5.99.

I think it’s great when the TV has ads for places that I can’t actually get to, like Shoney’s and Wawa, and especially Sonic. It used to be that way with Checkers, too. There seem to be a reasonable number of Checkerses around now, they just haven’t migrated west of North Capitol yet.

As for Bob Evans, it’s almost like the Beltway is a force field keeping them out:

I don’t need to go to Epcot Center ever again. I’ll just go to the grocery store instead.

When I walked into the Virginia Square Giant supermarket this evening, there was a guy waiting by the entrance to introduce me to their new way of shopping for food: Handheld scanners that you carry with you in the store, checking out items as you go. He did a pretty good job with his pitch, but he didn’t really have to sell me on it. I think I fit squarely in their Early Adopter demographic.

Continue reading “Handheld checkout scanners make the grocery store fun again. Perhaps too fun.” »