The food was great and we had good company at our community meeting in Cromwell today at Mitchell's on Main Street.

Tomorrow, Thursday, reporter Jeff Mill and I will be at the Portland Diner from 2 to 3 p.m.

Please come join us!

We held our first community meeting today at Javapalooza in Middletown. Three people showed up to say hi and voice their comments or ask questions about the newspaper.

All in all, we consider it a successful first meeting and we look forward to meeting more of our readers throughout the rest of the week.

Tomorrow, Wednesday, we will be in Cromwell at Mitchell's on Main Street from 2 to 3 p.m. Please come see us!

Tomorrow at 2 p.m., I will be joined by my managing editor Lauren Flaum at Javapalooza on Main Street in Middletown to visit with community members.

Please note that the location has been changed due to the fact that Ford News Diner closes at 2 p.m. and we are unable to meet there.

Anyone interested in asking us questions, telling us how we're doing, coming up with suggestions for how we can improve or just stopping by to pick up a copy of Tuesday's paper is welcome to come see us.

If the table by the window is available, that's where you'll find us.

So, we didn't get to take home a trophy to the Middletown newsroom on Saturday, but Team Newsies still had a good time at the Middlesex Community College bowla-thon in Wallingford.

The event raised over $1,000 for the college's scholarship fund. A team from Student Activities won both the overall trophy and the campus team trophy.

From The Middletown Press, we had Managing Editor Lauren Flaum, copy editor Leslie Parsons and reporter Justin Kloczko compete against three teams from The Flying Horse, the college paper.

Next year, we're hoping to challenge other media organizations to get them to participate as well.

UPDATE: Below are the official scores from the bowling tournament.

Student Senate 854*

Flying Horse #2 847

Middletown Press Newsies 841

Underachievers 841

Flying Horse #3 809

Flying Horse #1 769


*Campus Champions and Top Team

Top Fundraising Team Flying Horse #1

Top Bowler Dale Griffith, Flying Horse #2

Next week, you can come meet with me and another member of my staff as we have lunch at various locations around the county.

We will be available to hear your questions, comments, concerns... anything you'd want to talk to us about, from 2 to 3 p.m. at the following locations:


Tuesday, March 30 - Ford News Diner, Main Street, Middletown

Wednesday, March 31 - Mitchell's, 317 Main St., Cromwell

Thursday, April 1 (no joke) - Portland Restaurant, 188 Main St., Portland

Friday - April 2, Javapalooza, Main Street, Middletown

Managing Editor Lauren Flaum will come along for lunch on Tuesday, and Sports Editor Jeremie Smith will be available to chat on Wednesday. Reporter Jeff Mill will come along on Thursday and Weekend section editor Sean Connor will join me at Javapalooza on Friday.

So you are welcome to bring your questions, ideas and concerns to us between 2-3 p.m. all next week. Looking forward to meeting with you all!

The Middletown Press newsroom team, Team Newsies, will participate in the Middlesex Community College Bowlathon on Saturday at Wallingford Bowl on Route 5 in Wallingford.

From what we hear, the MxCC student newspaper, The Flying Horse, will participate with three teams as well.

Come watch us and cheer us on as we try to knock some pins down. Games start at 1:30 p.m. Champions will be awarded a trophy (of course, we hope to display one in the newsroom after the weekend).

My head is spinning from discussions and presentations at an editorial conference in Philadelphia this week. What will news look like in the future? How do we move our company forward? What does a newspaper need to do in order to survive in this quickly changing climate?

Tomorrow afternoon, I am going to make an attempt to present a compact version of what I learned to my staff with the hope of getting everyone on the same page. Perhaps there will be a blog entry about those ideas later. For now, here's a video clip from our guest speaker, author and journalist Jeff Jarvis. He speaks about links and the value of links on our Web sites.

Those of you following Publisher Dan Moriarty's blog may have noticed that it mysteriously disappeared Tuesday afternoon. His name was also taken off the masthead on our editorial page and replaced with the name of New Haven Register Publisher Ed Condra.

It was the same day the Journal Register Company, our parent organization, announced a round of layoffs under the new CEO.

Three senior vice president positions - one for each of the large JRC clusters in Connecticut, Philadelphia and Michigan - were eliminated. Instead, three senior publishers who already work for the company will oversee those clusters.

"The actions we are taking today will streamline our reporting structures so that ideas, decisions and their implementation and resources will flow more freely," said CEO John Paton in a statement to employees Tuesday afternoon. "These changes are fundamental to the way in which we will approach our business going forward. Now each of the local cluster leaders will be accountable to and for their employees."

Four publishers of smaller newspapers in the company were also laid off as part of the plan - the publisher of The Middletown Press and West Hartford News one of them.

"Our company needs to invest in more resources in the field and less in management oversight," Paton said. "We need more feet on the street and we need to empower our employees and managers in the field to make the best decisions for their divisions and their communities and to be able to do it quickly. We must become a much more flexible and less top-down organization than we have been in the past if we are to succeed."

The New Haven Register publisher now overseeing us is set to take over the Philadelphia cluster in about two months. Then, it will be announced who the new senior publisher of Connecticut will be (That publisher will oversee The Middletown Press when Ed Condra leaves).

Until then, if you have any questions about editorial coverage, please feel free to contact me at (860) 347-3331, ext. 235 or via e-mail at vsundqvist@middletownpress.com and if you have questions about advertising, please contact Russ Lennon at rlennon@middletownpress.com.

After some requests, we have started a book blog at The Middletown Press.

You can check it out here.

Our photographer, Catherine Avalone has also started a blog called The Photo Club, which you can find here.

And don't forget that we also have Live to Eat, a blog written by our managing editor, Lauren Flaum.

This week, everyone's desks in the newsroom were spotless.

We talked for days about the Nutella cupcakes our managing editor, Lauren Flaum, were going to make, and we hung pictures and awards that had been sitting in boxes since last year's move to our new office in the Main Street Market.

When our company's new CEO, John Paton, stopped by The Middletown Press for a visit on Thursday, we were ready.

Paton spoke to the staff about his vision for the company, which you can learn about here.

We also got a chance to brag a bit about how we at The Middletown Press have embraced the new Flip cameras we received by taking 106 videos in just two weeks. That's right - a newsroom of only 10 people took more than 100 videos in just two weeks - and we got them all posted on our Web site.

The only problem? The site isn't quite ready for that many videos, so the new ones keep bumping the old ones off the front page in just a couple of days. (I've been told we will soon have several pages so people can scroll through our older videos as well).

To show Paton how much we like the new cameras, our photographer also recorded some of his visit to our office, which you can watch below.

While my collegues were over at Wesleyan University for a press conference about a new coach on Monday, I headed over to Middlesex Community College for a visit with President Wilfredo Nieves.

Nieves took me on a tour of his 4-building campus.

A graduate of Westchester Community College in Valhalla, N.Y., I do have a special place in my heart for community colleges. It is where I learned the most in my college career. Sure, Quinnipiac University was good, too, but the community college helped me build a solid foundation for all future learning.

As I was a communications major and later journalism major, I find college television studios interesting. I like to look at the equipment - look, but don't touch. Here's the one at MxCC, which is used throughout the semester and also during the summers to teach special film and TV production classes:



More videos from Middlesex Community college can be found under our "Video" tab on our home page or by clicking HERE.

Videos by Catherine Avalone and Viktoria Sundqvist:
Intro to Physics
Wilfredo Nieves
Game Room in Founders Hall
Magazine Room at MxCC library
Chemistry 112
Digital Photography
3-Dimensional Design

After a day full of reading articles, thinking up Twitter phrases and browsing Web sites, I find it difficult to pick up a real book when I get home - especially a non-fiction book.

Sometimes I'll let myself escape reality for a few hours by re-reading "Harry Potter" or a "Mrs. Pollifax" book. Other times, I just crash in front of the TV - or do more work in front of the computer.

When I do read, I have a hard time sticking to just one book at a time.

Right now, for example, I am reading Merrick Alpert's "Morning Sun: A Story of Hope, Purpose, and Power of Family." (Alpert is a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate and we had him here in the office a couple of weeks ago). But I am also reading Jeff Jarvis' "What Would Google Do?" that I got in the mail from our CEO John Paton.

Since Paton is coming to Middletown for a visit next week, it seemed like a good diea to pick up my "homework" book. So far, it's been very rewarding.

It talks about how we can distribute our news better and how to learn to be where the readers are, instead of just forcing readers to come to us.

Publisher Dan Moriarty is reading it too, and I'm sure we'll have lots to discuss when we're done. You'll also be reading more about our thoughts for the future on these blogs.

Alpert's story about growing up in Colchester, serving in the war, and starting a family is just going to have to wait.

We've got work to do.

Twitter is serving an increasingly important role for newspapers.

With the help of our Twitter account, we can reach out to a wider audience and draw them back into our web site with enticing tweets in less than 140 characters.

Headline writers are often the best at writing Twitter updates, because their job already consists of mending the words so they fit just right.

Last Friday, I received some ideas from our online specialists in the company on how to increase our Twitter audience, and I've spend almost the entire weekend engulfed in Twitterland. It worked, though, since our followers (the people who sign up to read your Twitter updates) more than doubled by Monday morning. When I last checked a few minutes ago, The Middletown Press was at 578 followers - and we surpassed our sister paper in Torrington, The Register Citizen, around 6 p.m. tonight.

The only problem with Twitter is that it can be very addicting, especially as you sit there and watch the numbers slowly go up, up, up. "Just one more," I thought to myself this afternoon. "Just one more tiny follower and then I get to go home."
An hour later, I was still sitting in front of the computer.

If you want to see what The Middletown Press is up to on Twitter, CLICK HERE.
If you want to follow our sports department on Twitter, CLICK HERE.