Because several of the columnists we were using for our opinion page have retired, The Middletown Press has decided to revise its columnist lineup.

I am also very excited to announce that local journalist and blogger Ed McKeon has been added to a lineup and will be featured in a weekly column every Tuesday in The Middletown Press and at http://www.middletownpress.com/.


MONDAY: George Gombossy/George Will

TUESDAY: Ed McKeon/Chris Powell

WEDNESDAY: Don Pesci/Ralph Nader

THURSDAY: Chris Powell/George Will

FRIDAY: David Ignatius/Eugene Robinson

SATURDAY: Don Pesci/Bill O’Reilly

One of our copy editors and writers, Leslie Poster, is leaving to take a job at our sister publication, The Register Citizen, on Wednesday.

We have hired New Hampshire native Randall Booth to replace her. We were also recently joined by Elisabeth "Liz" Strillacci, another copy editor, and new Middletown reporter Hillary Federico started about a month ago.

Copy editor Sean Connor has been promoted to Assistant Sports Editor, and we also have a new advertising director, Andy Bucci.

If you visit our Facebook page, you can meet our staff. We are in the process of posting photos and videos of all staff members and their contact information - stop by to say hello!

Today I was chosen as an honorary member of our company's ideaLab, which means that we will get some new digital tools here at The Middletown Press to experiment with.

READ MORE ABOUT IT HERE.

I think it's mainly due to our success at going Digital First in our newsroom that we will be able to be a part of this new project (this success was mentioned in The Guardian and at MediaBistro). The ideaLab project will mean we get an iPhone, an iPad and a Netbook for the office, which we can use to get local news out to the public faster than ever.

Do you have experience with these tools? Do you have suggestions for how you think we should use them to improve our news coverage? Leave a comment in the section below.

This week, I spent two days in Kingston, N.Y., to help the Daily Freeman transition to a new editorial system. We made the same transition when I worked at The Register Citizen in Torrington four years ago.

Walking into the Daily Freeman newsroom, it felt like I had been transported back in time. Not only were they using outdated computers with outdated programs (Quark XPress 3.2) up until a couple of weeks ago, but they are still printing pages on film and carrying them out to the press room, where they print the paper on site.

The Middletown Press hasn't had a press since the old building by the South Green was demolished a couple of years ago; Torrington shut its press room down last year. Here you can see the Life section of the Freeman printing:

The Daily Freeman is located in an old building on Hurley Avenue in Kingston that used to be an A&P supermarket. It has many old rooms that host paste-up equipment as well as paper rolls and old issues of the paper. Through a back room, we were also able to climb an old, metal ladder up to the roof of the building to watch the fireworks Friday night.

What's even better is that with all the new technologies, I was able to put out several pages of The Middletown Press while being in Kingston. I chatted with my ad director via Skype, and I talked to the Middletown mayor on my cell phone. I text messaged with Ed McKeon from The Middletown Eye, and a few minutes later I was up on the roof of the building taking photos - 200 miles away from Middletown.

On this Independence Day 2010, we here at The Middletown Press present our Ben Franklin Project to you online and in print.

Named after a journalist, scientist, innovator and founding father of this country, the project seeks to make history by freeing newsmakers from expensive computer programs and involving the reader in the process of journalism.

We did this by asking our readers what they wanted us to work on, through Facebook, Twitter, SeeClickFix and our regular website www.middletownprses.com as well as in our print publication The Middletown Press. We then posted a first draft of our two main stories - one about fireworks and another about dangerous intersections - and asked readers to comment on those. Once we had more input from readers - and a greater idea of what direction to take the stories in - we went back and worked on them some more.

A second part of the Ben Franklin Project is the use of free online-based tools, such as Gimp instead of Adobe Photoshop, Scribus instead of Adobe InDesign, and a free Wordpress site instead of a paid website.

Reporters could use their phones and their computers, but they had to type stories in e-mails, Google Documents or Notepad text files. Our videos were edited using the free Flip software that came with our cameras, and you will see that they have been posted to the free video site YouTube for easy sharing.

Copy editor Leslie Poster organized two live chats with readers using a free program called CoverItLive, which we now hope to use more often for regular chats with our readers.

If you pick up Sunday's paper, the Middletown edition of the New Haven Register, you will notice that our colleagues at the Register went above and beyond for the edition with stories, photos and graphics. The front page is all about Middletown, and that is what we put together here at The Middletown Press.

It was frustrating at times to learn new technologies after so many years using what you know, but we certainly learned a lot. We hope to take this experience and move forward.

Now it's your turn: Tell us what you think about our project, our products and where we should go from here.

CHECK OUT OUR BEN FRANKLIN PROJECT WEBSITE HERE.

Viktoria Sundqvist
Editor
The Middletown Press