Did you catch the Fourth of July edition of The Oakland Press? Weeks of dedication finally came to fruition, as we and 18 other daily papers belonging to Journal Register Company produced our products, web and print, to the best of our ability without using our usual software.
Gone were Adobe Photoshop and InDesign. Gone was our normal e-mail system. Goodbye web platform Town News. Hello Scribus for page design, Gimp for photo editing, Gmail for e-mail service and WordPress for our website.
All these tools were recruited online in the theme of the Ben Franklin Project for our patriotic-themed edition.
SportsBeat was full of stories geared toward AAU programs and their influence on high school athletics as well as follow-up blogs by resident prognosticator Kosmo.
Crowdsourced columns from Paula Pasche and Pat Caputo lined the inside as well as fans' guesses at the Lions' 2010 record.
We left a couple pages open for the live news of the day Saturday and sent the final pages to the press when the Tigers wrapped up another quickie over the Mariners.
The one thing we didn't have that day: LeBron coverage. Ah. Maybe we should do this every day.
Where will this lead us from here, who knows, but it's been interesting so far.