Halifax Daily News replaced by 7th Canadian Metro

The Halifax Daily News stopped publication Monday as the tabloid's owner, Transcontinental Media, announced plans to start up Canada's seventh Metro free daily.
The company said all but a few of the paper's 92 employees will be let go. The first edition of the new Halifax Metro will be on the streets Thursday.
Transcontinental acquired the Daily News in 2002. The paper had a weekday circulation of about 20,000 and competed with Halifax Chronicle-Herald, which has a weekday circulation of about 110,000.
The paper was founded by David Bentley and Patrick Sims as the Bedford-Sackville Weekly News in 1974. It was turned into the Daily News in 1979, gradually expanded across the metro Halifax market, and was sold to Harry Steele's Newfoundland Capital Corporation in 1987. It passed through ownership by Southam and CanWest before Transcontinental took over.
The Daily News founded Canada's first online news website -- only the sixth in North America -- in 1994. It won a SND award in the early 1990s for a Halifax Explosion graphic by Jamie Hutt.
"It was an extremely tough business decision," said Transcontinental Media official Marc-Noel Ouellette. "(But) in this context, we are delighted to continue our presence as a daily newspaper publisher in the Halifax market."
Transcontinental employs 800 about people in Nova Scotia, most of them working at 11 weekly newspapers, four other dailies and two printing plants.

Flash Quick Course in Ohio

Major breakthroughs were made in Athens, Ohio on February 1st and 2nd at the multimedia Quick Course. All of us learned something about making interactive graphics. See the photos at the Ohio University School of Visual Communication.

See this crude attempt at a daily interactive graphic. It's not pretty, but hey, I didn't know how to do this even 5 days ago.

As promised, this really was 'for journalists, by journalists'. Scott Horner (top photo) and Don Wittekind of the Sun Sentinel and Swarm Interactive taught the state of the art (i.e. efficient) techniques in programming ActionScript and also how to turn an existing print graphic into an interactive one in a few hours. These guys have also done interactive graphics for the Discovery Channel and National Geographic.

The bottom photo is Justin Stahlman (me) from Le Journal de Montréal and Bill Neff of the (Cleveland) Plain Dealer.

If anyone has some basic knowledge of Flash and some interest in multimedia, sign up for this course in Las Vegas. It's going to be pretty much the same, but those who were here tell me it gets more refined each time they teach it.

Leave it to the creators of the exploded-stadium double-truck to also set the standard in interactive graphics: USAToday's interactive election poll tracker. We actually learned how to do most of this stuff in Ohio -- loading images and data from a server, turning items on or off depending on user choices, and more -- but these things aren't created on deadline. They are created by a staff with money.

However, I wouldn't be surprised if Bill Neff were working on something like this in secret. The way he was shouting at the code and cackling like a mad scientist when he debugged it. I can see the lightning striking his house now as he creates the perfect monster Flash graphic, just because he can.