Do you love talking about food? Do you flip to the food section of the newspaper before even reading the front page? Is a trip to the grocery store an excursion? For all you foodies, bloggers and lovers of Sacramento’s restaurants and food: The Sacramento Bee and The Sacramento Press have teamed up to bring you “Table Talk Sacramento: The region’s food community comes together for an evening of lively discussion.” There will be two panels addressing different topics, including “What Sacramentans Eat” and the quality of local food writing. Chris Macias will moderate the food writing panel. Macias has served as the Bee’s food and wine writer since 2008. The panelists include: Niesha Lofin

If Daniel Handler had not become a very successful novelist, he could have easily become a stand-up (and sit-down) comedian. Wednesday night’s audience in the Mondavi Center’s Jackson Hall was treated to this side of Mr. Handler and responded enthusiastically. The event was titled “Daniel Handler: Why Does Lemony Snicket Keep Following Me?” referring to his alter-ego author of the hugely bestselling series of children's books, “A Series of Unfortunate Events” and the movie of the same title based on the first three of the books, staring Jim Carrey. Handler has also written three books for adults: “The Basic Eight,” “Watch your Mouth” and the recently published “Adverbs.” Handler is also

As it is today, could the Sacramento Press replace The Sacramento Bee? In a word, no. However, one word is far from the full story. In my last installment of this storyline, I outlined the course I was taking in discussing the future of news, with an emphasis paid to local content, since that is what this publication focuses on. Over the course of the last week, I embarked on the rather epic and tedious task of quantifying exactly what is in a week's worth of The Bee. In order to do this, I purchased a copy each day and as meticulously as possible recorded how many pieces of content The Bee wrote versus content drawn from other publications, and of that content, how much of it was local.

This survey was conducted of The Sacramento Bee, from Monday, March 23rd to Sunday, March 29th. The aim of the survey was to pinpoint how much of the written content of The Bee was written by The Bee and of that content how much was local and how much was not. Each day was divided into the sections of the paper. Sections of the paper that had no attributable articles were simply not included. Within each section, all the different publications were separated out on to their own lines, with special lines for local Bee content and McClatchy content (from the Washngton bureau, or a foreign bureau). Each mark per line denotes an attribution for a piece of text. Shortcomings of this survey:

Newspapers are in peril. There is very little doubt about that, and if you are somehow doubting that, I point you to last week’s news that the revenues of the world’s most-read newspaper, USA Today, are likely down year over year 30%. Aside from industry-wide declining revenues, last week also saw the closure of the Rocky Mountain Post News and the end of the print edition of the Seattle Post Intelligencer. From these events a heated discussion was born. What is the future of news, and if newspapers are heading the way of the Dodo, who will report the news? The goal of this storyline is to address those very serious questions, especially from a local news angle. Over the course of the nex

 I have a simple suggestion for the Sacramento Bee.  It's an experiment.  It might not work, but since the ad revenues for newspapers are drying up faster than the lakes and reservoirs of our drought-ridden state it's time the Bee took a few chances.  Why doesn't the Bee try to sell ads on its Twitter page?   Now before the Bee did that it would have to promote its Twitter page.  Currently, it has only 468 followers, about half as many followers as the Sacramento Press's Twitter page has.  This fact is indicative of the Bee being at sea where new media is concerned.   Twitter works really well for aggregating the content of the Bee's online paper.  I unsubscribed to its RSS feed in my G