Annapolis Capital Punishment

The Capital launched a new section called "My Time" which is their reaction to having to pay actual professional reporters as well as concerns that regular folks are just not reading their paper. See here for an explanation of their launch:
http://www.hometownannapolis.com/cgi-bin/read/2007/11_04-30/NBH

and click here for its first issue: http://www.hometownannapolis.com/art/storypics/mytime1.pdf

Yawwwwwn. Big yawwwwn. If it's any indication of what we can come to expect, I think I'll just expectorate. Blaah! Smiley faces, sports, kids, more kids and reading to kids. I'm gonna have a cuteness attack. Is there not already enough sports and smiling kids in the paper?

Maybe their real concern is the increasing influence of blogs such as, well, such as, let's see, maybe Capital Punishment or Annapolis Politics?

But here is the best part:

The Capital says, "MyTime is not only a page devoted to you, the reader, it's a page produced by you." Oddly enough, they call this "citizen journalism." Ha. Ha. The flipside is that newspapers are corporate journalism. It gets worse. They add, "We're going to trust that you have enough respect for your fellow Anne Arundel residents that you won't make up stuff for a laugh. No poetry. And no opinions. This is not a forum for politics." Damn, we can't make stuff up for laughs as Eric and Joe have done for years? But how much of a "citizens" thing is it? Read on, "Like everything in the newspaper, material is published at The Capital's discretion and is subject to editing."

Okay so write for us for free they are saying, and we might accept it, but no politics please. It's just their way to head off the increasingly spinning-around-them-world-of-blogging. But CP just has to laugh after seeing its first edition. Here are the kinds of things they suggest that we can send to them:

"Next week you'll read about a blood drive at the School of the Incarnation. But you can also write about your history or your encounters. Have you met Mother Teresa? Donald Trump? George Clooney? Let us know. Or tell us how you coped with cancer or recovered after an automobile accident."
As if there are not enough sources of feel good trivial stuff all around us? In other words, let's trivialize, personalize and depoliticize everything. Instead of junking Eric Smith, Joe Gross and all the columns about astrology, dogs and who knows what else, this is what we get? Sanitized trivia. Oh boy, this is going to be great fun to observe and write about!! I will be sending in a piece about how I recovered from cancer after an automobile accident in which my car hit Donald Trump's limo. He was inside the limo having sex with Mother Teresa while George Clooney filmed the whole thing. Now that's newsworthy! If only I could have recovered the film. Gawsh dang it!
How about an article about the time I met Jackie Robinson? Oh, sorry, that was Joe Gross! Actually Clooney and Trump were having sex. Mother Teresa was just watching it while clad in a corset and fishnets. Now wait, what really happened was Mother Teresa was driving drunk, while Clooney and Trump were yelling out the window, "You're fired." No wait, what really happened was.......well, I was in the limo with Mother Teresa and then.......