Hot Off the Press: The Star Press

This is today's Star Press in Muncie, Ind.; click on the image for a bigger view. The Press looks very design-driven -- which I like. On a slow holiday weekend, there's nothing wrong with going big with photography, and that's what editors did this morning in a package about Camp Atterbury's 76th Infantry Brigade, gearing up for a tour in Iraq. That's got to be a heartbreaking event for Central Indiana.

"After a huge sendoff Jan. 2 in the RCA Dome, all 3,400-plus members of the 76th will travel to Fort Stewart, Ga., home of the 1st Army, to start intense live-fire training that will ready them for their convoy escort mission in Baghdad," the story says. Theirs will be the biggest deployment of Indiana National Guard troops since World War II, and the largest number of national guard troops sent at one time from any state since WW II, the paper says.

Online, the relatively small Press publishes an impressive 13 blogs. (A small quibble: None of them has an "about-this-blog" explainer, a standard feature telling readers what a blog is, well, about. It's similar to a nut graph in a story. About Gannett Blog is one of my most-read items.) The Press' blogs include one I've never seen at a paper -- a photo blog (there's that design emphasis again). Among its four contributors, Chris Bergin wrote about a new gadget called a Lensbaby. "It's a cheap plastic lens that has a very narrow field of focus,'' Chris says. "You bend the lens to get the focus and effect you want and off you go." Chris offers this example:

The Star Press at a glance:

• President and Publisher: Juli Metzger
• Executive Editor: Gene Williams
• Founded: 1899
• Joined Gannett: 2000
• Employees: 169

[Image: Newseum]