Larson Loves Archives

I toured an interesting Bristol business last week with Congressman John Larson, Dupont Business Archives.

This company stores paper and electronic records, manages archival storage and delivery of wanted documents and more. They've got a snazzy climate-controlled, fireproof vault and about three stories of nothing but shelving units with boxes and boxes and boxes.

Larson, whose First District includes Bristol, was riveted.

The congressman is a former history teacher, so naturally he has an appreciation for archives, records and all that. But this went beyond an appreciation. He was truly fascinated by the materials and methods Dupont uses (double walled cardboard boxes are the key in that place) and it didn't take long before Larson had decided he wanted these professionals to take care of his own records.

As someone with a long career in public service -- I think it goes back to his local school board in East Hartford -- Larson has good reason to want to keep his records organized and available.

It's a feather in Dupont's cap if he brings them his business, and I think he will. They do work for many municipalities in Connecticut, including Bristol, East Hartford and Waterbury, to name a few. They store records for law offices, medial professionals and other businesses.

They also sell the materials for the people who want to keep their own records on site. I wrote about all of this for The Bristol Press. I think you can see the story online at http://www.bristolpress.com/.

The reason Larson toured Dupont in the first place is becuase the Bristol business, which got a city grant when it moved to town a couple years ago, also is a beneficiary of the federal stimulus program.

Dupont got a loan through Farmington Bank that was backed by the U.S. Small Business Administration using funds from the Recovery Act.

Larson told me that one of his frustrations is that a lot of Americans don't see the results of the Recovery Act. His stop at Dupont was a way to highlight the stimulus program in Bristol, but I think he was more excited by the arhive possibilities.

As my husband Steve Collins is a former history major at the Univerity of Virginia, and as someone who also loves the written word and keepsakes of all sorts myself, I totally get why the congressman felt he'd struck gold.

I'm glad he found it in Bristol.

Best Wishes to Jennifer Janelle

Jennifer Janelle, a board member of the Bristol Downtown Development Corp., an environmental attorney and a devotedBristol mother of two, was married over the weekend to her beau Don Arasimowicz.

He was her high school sweetheart (collective "awwww....)

I found out about it from looking at my husband Steve Collin's facebook page. He's facebook friends with Jennifer and that's why I got to see the happy couple posing for the photographer. She was looking stunning and he was looking ... right at her, of course!

I am not on facebook and wouldn't post her photo here if I was, unless she said it was okay.

“He and I dated in high school and after painful divorces, ended up back together” about two years ago, she told me in February for a profile I wrote of her published back then in The Bristol Press. “We’re happy. Things are good.”

It seems that things are even better now.

Congratulations, best wishes and a rose to the happy couple.

YJI Delivers on Acadia, Bastille Day and Brisbane

Another stellar package from my students at Youth Journalism International is online now at www.ReadTheTattoo.com, an independent, online teen newspaper that wholeheartedly supports YJI.
This time, it's a travel issue, with photos from Bastille Day in Paris from Caroline Nelissen of the Netherlands that are really something and a hometown article about Brisbane, Australia from a local girl, Nancy Hsu, with some photos showing life in that city Down Under. Finally, there's a lot of photos and an article about Acadia, where the Obamas went on vacation last weekend. That one was penned by my son Kiernan. Photos are by him and my daughter, Mary. Apparently wherever my family goes for a getaway becomes so cool that the First Family also wants to check it out the following weekend.
Incidently, my husband Steve Collins and I have been working with young reporters since 1994, long before we had kids. Now that our children are adolescents and taller than we are, to say we've been doing this work since before they were born kind of makes my head spin.
Of course, watching our former students graduate, marry and have children of their own has the same effect.
Check out www.youthjournalism.org for more information on YJI. If you're on facebook, please become a fan of YJI and then you can read all the clever things Steve posts!

Extra B.S. By the Numbers

Time to take stock.
Six months of blogging.
More than 200 posts.
50 comments, if my tired eyes are counting correctly. At least 24 of them are my own comments, mostly responding to what readers wrote.
Is it all just Extra B.S.?
Blogger King Steve got eight comments on the Bristol Blog just tonight, after his City Hall meeting, that lucky devil. He approved all of them, in case you're curious. Extra B.S. readers are ... shy. Bristol Blog readers? Not so much.

Give Downtown Project a Chance

Yesterday I wrote a story for The Bristol Press (www.bristolpress.com) about the realistic timeframe people can expect for the downtown project.
The deal isn't even signed yet between the city, developer Don Monti of Renaissance Downtowns and the Bristol Downtown Development Corp., but both Monti and Frank Johnson, who chairs the BDDC, kindly spoke with me a little bit about the plans.
I'm sure many people in town are as eager to know what to expect there as I am, and hopefully just about everyone is also as eager to have something good there.
They were honest enough to say downtown won't be built in a day. In fact, expect it to be built in phases, a piece at a time, over a period of years. The whole thing could take the better part of a decade. At the moment, Monti plans what he called a "boutique" hotel as part of it all. That means a small one. That would be part of the big picture of mixed use, commercial, residential, retail, pedestrian-oriented development that Monti is pushing.
As I understand it, the investment could be really significant.
Of course, the anonymoust reaction to this in the stupid blogosphere is outrage -- it'll never be built, why should it take so long, the hotel will be terrible... yada, yada, yada.
My husband and favorite co-worker, Steve Collins, wrote in the Bristol Blog about how shameful this anonymous and moronic tirade is. See what he had to say in www.BristolToday.com.
Now it's time for my two cents.
Too bad the silent majority is so silent. How about a little confidence in the members of the community -- homeowners, business leaders and others like Frank Johnson, Jennifer Janelle, John Lodovico and the rest on the BDDC as well as Mayor Art Ward and the entire city council and a host of professional staff, some of whom live in town and others who are professionally invested-- who have given their own time (well, yes, the professionals were paid) and energy into figuring out what to do with the old mall property and done it all by using their real names, in public?
How about giving Monti, the chosen developer a chance to see what he can do? He's putting his own money on the line, after all.
From my interactions with him, I can tell you that Monti is very high energy. I know Bristol needs that. He's got successful businesses elsewhere and other towns have put their faith in him.
He's got a track record of bringing all sorts of people together and he sees great potential in Bristol.
It seems Monti believes more in Bristol than the anonymous posters who can't wait to go on the attack and trash him, the city and everyone else who is trying to do something for the good of the community.
I think the people of Bristol can return that faith, at least to give him a chance to give it a go. I hope they do, and I hope he ultimately gives them reason to cheer.
I may no longer be eligible to vote in Bristol, but I was for some time. My children were born there and I've invested the bulk of my professional life in the Mum City. I care about people who live there and I truly want good things for the city.

Say Hello to Sam

Let's have a nice American howdy-do for Sam the ducky, named after Sam Yosafi and Sammy Perez, two outstanding alumni of Youth Journalism International who share the same name, sort of. Sammy Perez won't be at the Duck Race on the Pequabuck on Sunday except in spirit. Maybe I can get Sam Yosafi there, though, if he's not working, studying or performing. Sam the ducky will be there, though, along with Sgt. Schultz the German ducky and Moeka the Japanese ducky. More duckies to come, so keep watching!
Now about my two wonderful Sams.
Sam Yosafi is from Bristol, plays rock and roll and takes classes at Tunxis. He wrote many great things while part of YJI, many of them about local events and people, including the Witch's Dungeon classic horror museum.
Sammy Perez is from St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana and is in college there. She's the gifted writer who gave us all a front row seat when Hurricane Katrina devastated her home, her town, uprooted her family and generally turned her world upside down when she was just a senior in high school. Her hurricane journal is an incredible read.
To find the writings of either of these wonderful American Sams, go to www.ReadTheTattoo.com and click on the writer's index, highlighted in yellow in the upper left side of the home page. Then you'll have to scroll down to Perez or Yosafi to find them and what they wrote, but it's worth the time and trouble. As you're scrolling, you might get an idea of the number of students that my husband Steve Collins and I have worked with since we started this amazing adventure of teaching journalism to young people back in 1994.

Other Towns Restrict Vendors

For today's edition of The Bristol Press, (www.bristolpress.com), I wrote about how other towns, specifically Plainville, Southington, West Hartford and Farmington, handle food vendors who want to sell out of a cart or truck.
All of them make the vendor go through planning and zoning applications before they can set up shop.
None of them allow vending on a city street.
Southington came right out and said their policy is for the good of their downtown businesses and that it has helped their development quite a bit.
Today, the city council's ordinance committee is going to take up the issue, after downtown restaurant owners complained about the unfair competition. It could be quite a scene as the vendors have a lot of support.
Steve Collins will be there to soak it all in and report back on the Bristol Blog and in The Bristol Press. I'll be at the capitol watching Gov. Jodi Rell hand an award to ESPN.

Blog Boredom

Hey readers,
Bristol Blogging King Steve Collins says the chamber's new blog is boring.
I didn't even mention the chamber's blog to all of you because I'm bored with blogging.
I don't like the kind of comments Steve gets on his blog (some are intelligent, but... well, if you read them, you'll know what I mean), so I'm not exactly jealous, but then, without hardly any comments at all on Extra B.S., it's hard to believe that anyone is reading. At least Steve knows he has readers, sort of.
I run out of steam because this blogging stuff feels like a lot of Extra B.S. to me when there's no response from the blogosphere.
Steve said the chamber's blog is boring because it hadn't been updated in a week. Extra B.S. is worse -- no posts since March 23 -- but maybe Steve has more compassion for me, given that he knows how hard concentration has been in recent weeks with my stuffy head, or maybe he wrote off Extra B.S. a long time ago.
I'll give it another go, though. I'm not quitting.

Documentary on the Press Airing Tonight

Anyone who cares about the near-death experience of your favorite hometown newspaper, The Bristol Press and how it was saved should watch a new documentary airing tonight at 8 and tomorrow night at 10 on CPTV.

Titled, "On Deadline: Is Time Running Out for the Press?" the film is only an hour long and packed with a lot of footage of people connected to the Press and to Bristol. I am sure you will see some familiar faces. You might learn more about what happened and you might have a few laughs along the way.

I don't want to give away all the good parts, but I will say that some of the finest moments include footage of the magnificent Steve Collins (cue cheering!) at work inside City Hall and giving a tour of the new Press office. It's riveting television, truly.

I'm in it, too, but I didn't say it was all good!

Filmmakers John and Rosemary Keogh O'Neil did a great job making everyone look and sound a lot better than they usually do. I know I speak for both Steve and myself when I say that we sincerely appreciate their interest in newspapers but especially in the Press.

We also are grateful to the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, which hosted the first screening of the documentary on Tuesday at a gala event. Gala? well, for journalists, anyway. It was the closest I'll ever come to the red carpet, for sure.

There was a panel discussion afterward with a number of journalists, including Steve, who made the excellent point that The Bristol Press was a good paper worth saving, which is why we tried so hard to get noticed and stir up enough attention that a buyer might hear about us. Ultimately, that's what happened. Steve has written extensively about it in The Bristol Blog, and this week posted a memo he wrote a little more than a year ago to state officials laying out the case for using what resources they had -- emphatically NOT asking for a bailout -- in hopes of saving 100 jobs and 13 community newspapers. It's worth looking at: www.bristoltoday.com.

Mike Schroeder, our publisher, was also on the panel. He said when he bought the papers last year he was investing in journalism, not in a printing press. He said it is something that will never decrease in value.

"It's like buying gold," he said.

Twain House to Host Forum, Film, on the Press

The Press, that's with a capital "p," is the star of the show tomorrow night at the Mark Twain House and Museum.

The new CPTV documentary about the near-demise of your beloved hometown newspaper, The Bristol Press, will be shown for the first time. In addition, there will be a panel discussion that includes some wonderful people, not the least of whom is my own dear husband, Steve Collins.

That alone ought to be worth the price of admission.

If that's not enough, Press Publisher Mike Schroeder is also on the panel, along with Hartford-area media types.

So come one, come all! The auditorium is filling up, I'm told, but there are still seats available. Come to support The Bristol Press, or newspapers, or journalism, or documentaries, to catcall, hoot or applaud the film, to say hello to me, or just to support the museum.

The museum, which is an absolutely awesome place to see all by itself, so if you haven't seen it, you absolutely must go, is celebrating newspapers this month.

The author Sam Clemens, of course, was once a newspaperman. But don't hold that against him. It happens to the best of us.

Lt. Gov. Takes a Pro-Rail Stand

Lt. Gov. Mike Fedele jumped on the pro-rail train, along with Dan Malloy and Ned Lamont. Wonder who will be next to see that taking a good look at the wisdom of spending almost half a billion dollars on a nine mile road between New Britain and Hartford is a good use of all those clams.
I wrote about what Fedele had to say about the rail and other things at this morning's chamber of commerce coffee chat. You can read all about it in The Bristol Press on Friday (www.bristolpress.com).
Steve Collins, who gets more comments than I do, not that I'm jealous of The Bristol Blog, wrote about Malloy. I wrote about Lamont's stand last week.
Momentum for rail is growing, which can only be good for Bristol and, dare I say, it the future of our state.

Happy Birthday, Steve!

Here's a public Happy Birthday to my husband Steve Collins, who is also my co-worker at The Bristol Press and best friend in the whole world. Not to get mushy or anything.

This is not the best picture of him, but it's what I've got today.

So if you see us at the Bristol Home and Business Show listening to the Bristol Reunion Jazz Band this afternoon or just wandering around, say Happy Birthday to Steve. But give the guy a break. It's his day off. No stories. No notebook. And no Bristol Blog.

MingleStick Ho!

I bet you've all been on pins and needles to know what happened when the chamber unleased the provocatively-named MingleStick on Tuesday. I got one and trying it out was the most exciting thing I did that entire minute, honest. I can see where this is going, however, and soon we'll all be mingling like maniacs. I don't believe it will completely replace the business card, but soon we'll all be toting electronic/digital/techno gizmos like the MingleStick or something similar to get our discounts at the grocery store, gas pump, you name it. Maybe it'll be the new library card or driver's license, too, in the future. Who knows? Too bad we can't ask Madam Marie.
Anyway, here's what I wrote for The Bristol Press (http://www.bristolpress.com/) for Wednesday's paper:

The MingleStick hit Bristol Tuesday amid much fanfare and some skepticism.
Introduced by the Central Connecticut Chambers of Commerce, the small handheld device – which later plugs into a computer USB port – is for collecting and trading contact information.
Proponents say the MingleSticks, which use infrared technology to transfer data from one to another, will eliminate the need for business cards.
“You simply meet, click and connect,” said Eric Shadd, a self-described MingleStick evangelist for Mingle 360, the company that sells the device.
Chamber President Mike Nicastro, who wants to develop the MingleStick as a loyalty program similar to the chamber card, said his organization is only the third chamber nationally – and the only one in New England – to get the MingleStick.
“We’re excited to launch this,” said Nicastro, urging members to use it as much as possible and bring it to future chamber events.
The chamber handed out MingleSticks to everyone attending the annual economic forecast luncheon, and many there took advantage of the situation to try it out, using the device to collect contact information from each other.
Shadd spoke briefly at the event. He said the device does not store any information, so losing it does not put a user at risk. The information is stored in the company’s database, Shadd said, and is kept private.
“We don’t sell your information, ever,” said Shadd. Users can download their own contact information, he said, or just access it online, similar to a LinkedIn account.
Some people embraced the idea.
“With this, I don’t have to worry about misplacing a business card,” said Susan Warner, who works in marketing and sales for the Lauretano Sign Group. She said she liked the fact that the MingleStick information includes a photograph along with the contact information like name, company, phone number and email address because she can remember faces better than names.
But some weren’t so sure and others didn’t know what to make of it.
“It’s quite different,” said Bud Funk, owner of Fourslide Spring and Stamping.
“It seems very unnatural,” said attorney Karen Gallagher, who arrived at the chamber event with a pocketful of business cards that went unused.
Though everyone at the chamber event could get a MingleStick, they’re not common, at least not yet.
“The question is, how many other people will have them,” Gallagher said.
Accountant John Letizia was blasé about the potential for his MingleStick.
“The problem is, I know most of the people I mingled with,” said Letizia, scanning the room. Letizia said the device is like so much new technology in that it reduces interpersonal contact.
“I miss that part of communication,” Letizia said.
Ed Pelkey opted to leave the luncheon without a MingleStick. He said he has enough trouble keeping his computer operating.
“I’m with the Stone Age,” Pelkey said, joking, “They wouldn’t let me.”
Getting basic information might take on a whole new meaning using a MingleStick instead of asking a new contact for a business card. It could be awkward.
“Now you gotta ask ‘em if they have a MingleStick,” said Funk.
“That opens up a world of possibilities,” observed Steve Collins, a Bristol Press reporter.

High Noon for Train / Busway Collision

The Central Connecticut Regional Planning Agency is gearing up for a doozy of a meeting Thursday. Steve drew the short stick, so he'll be there until the cows come home. It could be a long night. I don't know if he'll be live blogging, but if I get any updates from him, I'll post them. I'm sure he'll put something on the Bristol Blog at the end of it all. You can see that at http://www.bristoltoday.com/. Cheeze, with all the free publicity he's getting from me and Extra B.S., you'd think I'd at least get a mention in the Bristol Blog!

In unrelated but still important news, I'll be at the Bristol Cares meeting early Thursday, so I'll be reporting on that later in the day.

Don't Miss the Train... Stories Today

Don't miss all of Steve Collins' stories in today's Bristol Press (www.bristolpress.com) about the train and busway battle. He's doing his best to outline the issue before the hot potato lands with the Central Connecticut Regional Planning Agency Thursday night. You can find some, if not all of it, on the Bristol Blog (www.bristoltoday.com)

Abandoning the Bristol Blog for greater things

Steve Collins is out of town tonight, so don't bother looking at the Bristol Blog for awhile, not that you would, unless you like that kind of thing, I guess.
Anyway, Steve has been invited to speak to a Rotary Club about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s history of picking tobacco in Connecticut as a teenager. I heard his speech yesterday -- he gave me a sneak preview. I'd say those Rotarians picked the right man. It's interesting, as Steve so often is, when he's not blogging.
I hope he gets something good to eat.