The Brambles

Dumber than <s>Tuson</s> Tucson

Isn’t that a Willie Nelson song?

UPDATE: Wburg pointed out that I spelled Tuson Tucson wrong. How am I going to play the gaff off as if I made it intentionally? Thinking…thinking…no, it can’t be done.

Via The Sac Rag, it appears that some enterprising journalist at the Daily Beast put together a list of the fifty-five smartest cities. Sacramento ranks #35. We share the ranking with Oklahoma City. Here is Sac’s write up:

On paper, Sacramento has a lot going for it, intellectually. It’s the capital of California, a draw for the Golden State’s best and brightest. And it’s just 90 minutes east of the Bay Area, which almost topped this list. Yet Sacramento wound up with below-average scores for almost every one of our criteria.

Somehow Tuson Tucson edged us out, coming in at #34. The criteria mentioned above were the percentage of the population with college degrees, number of colleges and universities in the area, the number of non-fiction book sales and the percentage of eligible voters who voted in the last presidential election. That seems like a jumble of arbitrary metrics to me. Why not just measure the percentage of citizens with graduate degrees? The reason is clear: it would skew the results in favor of university towns, and that wouldn’t be very interesting to the Daily Beast’s readers.

It’s hard to swallow that New York ranked lower than Raleigh-Durham, Baltimore, Philly and Austin. I suppose the winds of change could be blowing, but my hunch is that places like Silicon Valley and Washington D.C. will continue to be nerd/wonk magnets and cultural meccas like New York and Portland will go on getting a steady influx of the best and the brightest. And Sacramento will plod along as always, somewhere in the middle.

news10:

Roaming Buffalo Are Back in Nevada County http://bit.ly/voB8p

News 10 and your ambiguous headlines!

Still, the actual story is heartwarming.

Slow food and a belated hello

I finally got around this morning to picking up October’s issue of Midtown Monthly, and I was pleased to see that the Monthly has Tom Spaulding writing the local history feature this month. You should check out Spaulding’s blog The NorCal Explorer.

And speaking of local history buffs who write for the Monthly, I saw you at a show the other night, wburg, and meant to say hello to a fellow blogger, but en route I unexpectedly ran into a former co-worker and friend, and by the time I got around to looking for you again you were gone.

Well, a belated hello to you, sir.

Web-friendlier

Kudos to SN&R for taking some baby steps towards journalism’s web-based future.

First, they rearranged the blogs. Instead of blogging from one group blog, writers have been assigned individual blogs. Munger has her “gay blog.” Garvin is taking over the hard news blog, Snog. Scheide has a new blog called Bottom Feeder. There is also Green blog that I probably will never read, but hope others will. And, in the basement, Nick Miller is conducting his secret experiment, Sac for Tourists. Groups blog are effective when you want to create a river of content effect (e.g., Huffpost, Gawker, etc), but when you want to highlight individual writers it is best to give them their own blogs (e.g., Atlantic.com). Professional writers is an asset the SN&R has over other new media startups, such as The Sacramento Press, and it should press that advantage as much as it can.

In the same vein, the SN&R has added more columnists. Daniel Barnes has a movie column. The publisher, Jeff vonKaenel, has a column. Rachel Leibrock has a new column called Pop Smart.

Photos of the writers accompany vonKaenel and Leibrock’s columns. It used to be that a journalist labored for decades with the faceless byline as his or her only accreditation. The column photo was only awarded to veterans who had paid their dues. In the future, this tradition will die out. Photos of writers will be more commonplace for two reasons. One, online newspapers will want to brand their writers. Two, the photo will become a water seal authenticating the veracity of the writing. It will signal to readers that what they are reading was written by a real person and is not merely spam.