It's certainly interesting times for newspapers. Seth Godin has just bemoaned the opportunities missed by the NY Times. Meanwhile Blogs, Twitter and Flickr are stealing the immediacy crown and doing it with added humanity as amply illustrated by the Mumbai coverage.
But there's still some good ideas coming out of them. Here's an example I love (picked up via Jemima's twitter stream) from The Guardian – a collaborative project of photo messages taken by visitors to the Guardian site and a Flickr group. Inspired by Obama's groundbreaking use of the internet, they asked people in the days following his victory to share their personal messages to the new President via the same medium.
And almost 900 from around the world did. So using the on demand publishing service Blurb they've taken the most interesting, funny, thought-provoking ones and commissioned, compiled, edited and printed a book within three weeks. You can see a digital preview and buy it here. It's charming. But more to the point this is exactly the kind of quick thinking, fast-moving, community-driven, collaborative thing they should be doing.
I would have stuck some more images up here (these two are taken from the Flickr pool) but the copyright message on the digital preview is pretty scary so I'm hoping they aren't going to ask me to take this down seeing as how I'm giving props to their book and all that…
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