Corrections at the top: You’d think we couldn’t screw up a simple news release from our good friends the Fonthill Kinsmen, but somehow we managed. The Kinsmen recently recognized member Jim Jenter for his 50 years of service and for never missing a meeting, giving him a nice award plaque. Trouble is, we called him “Ken” Jenter in the story. If only there had been some obvious way to prevent this error—a photo, say, of an award plaque, with JIM JENTER inscribed on it in bold capital letters. Sigh. Apologies, Jim! Then there was the small matter of implying that Burlington was part of Pelham. This happened in a membership thank-you email that went out Saturday, which we hastily corrected. Not that there’s anything wrong with Burlington—they have a very nice bridge, when it isn’t swaying in a strong wind—but it ain’t part of Pelham...And now a message from our sponsors: Guess what happens when you don’t break so-called three-dot-journalism columns like this one into paragraphs when they run online. The system doesn’t know where to insert ads. Horrors! Let’s pay some bills:
Has it only been a week? I don’t know about you, but whenever I’ve started a new job the first day feels like a week and the first week feels like a month. New processes, new people, new terminology. Back in the mid-’90s, I created one of the first newspaper websites in suburban Philadelphia—anyone remember the app GoLive CyberStudio? (We even had video, tiny, tiny little video.) But holy crap, and rather obviously, website authoring has changed since then! The last seven days (and a week or three before that) have been equally exhilarating and exhausting. Luckily I’ve always been part computer nerd—not as a programmer but as a mere user—so the technical aspects have been relatively easy to comprehend. And it has helped immeasurably that everyone at Village Media is almost scarily good natured. A conference room whose walls are plastered with staff dog photos? You had me at arf...Publishing meets broadcasting: What’s always been true is that the web is part publishing, part broadcasting. The comparatively stately pace of one weekly print edition has been replaced by the daily, even hourly pace of a radio or television newsroom. I started out in radio, and this feels a lot like that, which brings back warm and fuzzy memories of important things like warm and fuzzy hair on my head…Air traffic meltdown: Did you catch the chaos last week in the US (and a bit in Canada) as an important FAA messaging system failed? NOTAMs are short advisories that go out to pilots and towers and en route controllers warning of hazards to aviation. Could be a runway that’s out of use. Could be restricted airspace as Air Force One lands in Des Moines. What “NOTAM” has always been is an acronym for “Notice to Airmen.” Being a former general aviation pilot, I was therefore perplexed to see news reports last week referring to them instead as “Notice to Air Missions,” which doesn’t even make sense. Sure enough—and I know you saw this coming when you read “men”—as part of a 176-page rules update released in December 2021, the FAA decided to drop men in favour of missions. Now, I’m happily woke—that’s a compliment, thanks—but do we have to sacrifice logic in the laudable pursuit of gender equity? These bulletins are entrenched internationally—there’s no getting rid of them or their name. Maybe instead of a silly substitution for “men,” just drop any meaning behind the acronym and stick with an inscrutable N-O-T-A-M.
Speaking of flight metaphors: The launch of this website has been by all accounts a success—I think even surprising the good folks at company HQ. We are averaging over 8,000 pageviews per day, which is excellent for a community our size. (And yep, web lingo makes that one word, “pageviews,” not two.) Reader engagement is also high, with letters and photos coming in, and nearly 1,000 new Facebook followers by last Thursday. In fact, our first story-on-the-fly was prompted by a tip from Beamer’s Hardware staffer Jim Vanderhoek, who alerted us to the sudden appearance of a Canada Post mailbox where it shouldn’t have been last week in Fonthill. Turned out it was stolen...So keep them coming: Story ideas, photos, letters can all go either to me directly, [email protected], or to the news desk, [email protected] And remember to subscribe to our daily news roundup here...Right then: I knew I shouldn’t have said anything about the lack of snow last week (although, really, it’s a welcome change and lovely on the ground), so I’m definitely not mentioning anything about earthquakes. See you next time.
