• Dashboard cookies: a new take on the old heat-wave story

• Black Friday shopping fun

• In All Fairness, Year 2

• The Yule Blog

• How to blog a state fair

So we could debate for days about what constitutes “news” and “journalism.” But sometimes the thing that everyone is talking about — the “news” in a community — has been written about until reporters’ eyes are ready to bleed.

Take a heat wave, for instance. Go to the cooling center. Check. Call the hospitals and the coroner. Check. Catch up with athletes at practices. Check. Find some people with hot jobs. Check. Who’s at the pool? Check.

You get the picture.

Such was the case this past August, when oppressive heat and humidity settled on Springfield like a wet, wooly blanket. We’d been wanting to do some kind of video project about the heat, but didn’t want to do the old fry-an-egg-on-the-sidewalk number. I’d noticed that some colleagues at the Post-Dispatch in St. Louis had tried to bake dashboard cookies in the heat a day or two earlier, and I figured why not give it a whirl here. So I picked up some cookie dough at the store and grabbed my cookie sheets. SJ-R photographer Justin Fowler rigged up a camera inside a car to take photos of the cookies every few seconds for a time-lapse video. I posted occasional updates about the status of the cookies and the temperature inside the car, which essentially became an oven, reaching about 175 degrees inside.

The result was a fun, memorable project that generated buzz and page views for SJ-R.com and got people talking about [...] Read the rest of this entry »

As I’ve said before, covering Black Friday shopping madness in Springfield is one of my favorite assignments. Yes, it’s cold. Yes, it’s the middle of the night. But there is such a feeling of excitement and fun in the air that I can’t help but enjoy being out and about with some of central Illinois’ most hard-core bargain hunters. I absolutely love it.

The last several years I’ve blogged Black Friday throughout the night, updating readers on the length of lines, posting photos and talking to shoppers about what they’re after and how they’re holding up in the cold. Two years ago I used a laptop. Last year I was able to blog solely using my smart phone. This year I’ll be using an iPad and Cover It Live, which I’m really looking forward to because it will enable me to post real-time updates and also chat with readers throughout the night. Check in at SJ-R.com closer to Black Friday for more details.

This is the newspaper story that resulted from last year’s Black Friday live-blogging.

Black Friday trumps Thanksgiving for some shoppers

Nov. 26, 2010

If you want to talk about folks who take their Black Friday shopping serious, meet the four women who were at the front of the Springfield Toys R Us line Thursday night - Desiree Embree, Darcy Miller, Jessica Hamblin and Teage Marcum.

Embree, of Riverton, and Miller, of Petersburg, are sisters. Hamblin, of Oakford, and Marcum, of San Jose, [...] Read the rest of this entry »

This year I again landed the gig of Illinois State Fair blogger for the newspaper, which is fine with me because I really don’t mind the fair. Plus, it’s nice to work away from the office for a stretch.

Just as I did last year, I donned jeans, sneakers and sunglasses, grabbed a laptop computer and backpack, stocked up on extra batteries and headed out with a point-and-shoot camera, Flip video camera, the computer equipment and miscellaneous fair schedules and news releases.

I blogged six of the 10 days of the fair, plus preview day, logging nearly 70 blog posts that documented everything from vendors and attendance to the weather and fair food. I rode out two mid-afternoon summer storms, including one that prompted officials to set off the fairgrounds’ tornado sirens and sent people running for cover in the tunnel beneath the Grandstand.

I saw concessionaires fry up Pepsi and sundaes, rode the Sky Ride for the first time even though I’m terrified of heights and learned a little bit about harness racing.

The 2009 Illinois State Fair is in the books now, and I expect 2010 will be just as memorable.

I blogged Black Friday shopping in November 2008. I’m not sure who was up in the middle of the night reading about all the shoppers standing out in the freezing cold in anticipation of rock-bottom prices on DVDs and toys, but the blog was a hit the next morning once people got up.

You can read my black Friday blogging here.

Throughout the holiday season we posted various seasonal news items, videos, links, recipes and other tidbits at the Yule Blog. We also posted on the blog a fun little idea I came up with and executed with the help of photographer T.J. Salsman. The idea was to solicit from readers messages they might want Santa Claus to recite to their children on video. We dubbed the project “Santa Shout-outs.”

We asked parents to submit their children’s names, ages, hometowns and an item they had on their wish list for Christmas. We had dozens of replies — so many we had to break the video into three segments to make it easier for parents to find their child’s shout-out.

The response from parents was fantastic. Many wrote us to say their children were amazed or speechless when they watched the video and heard Santa with a personalized greeting for them.

Go here to watch the shout-outs, as well as an interview with Santa in The State Journal-Register press room.

I’ll admit it: I’m a state fair junkie. I love the state fair.

It’s a good thing, because that’s where I spent about two weeks straight in August 2008. I was the “fair reporter.” Each morning I donned a backpack with a laptop computer, a point-and-shoot camera, sunglasses and a good pair of sneakers and drove to the city’s north end to cover the fair. I stayed on the grounds until 5 or 6 p.m. each night, filing updates to the blog and rewriting blog entries for use in the newspaper.

Among the sights I saw at the fair: former Gov. Rod Blagojevich and his family prior to his indictment; a senior spelling bee I thought would never end; several carnival rides you will never, ever, catch me on; an auctioneer contest; and a record-setting crowd.

The name of our blog was “In All Fairness.” You can check it out here. (By the way, other reporters contributed to the blog on weekends and at night.)