So much for the HMR diet. We lasted about a day. It took me another week or so to find the time (and courage) to blog about our failure.

Here's what we didn't like about the diet:

• The shakes tasted OK, but they were like drinking liquid Ex-Lax. I'm sure that's intentional, but it wasn't quite what I had in mind.
  
• The pre-made dinners were OK, but they were sure small. I supplemented a lot of fruits and veggies, but I still found myself hungry all the time.
  

So much for trying it for three weeks. Luckily, we did get our money back -- sort of. Two of Jenny's co-workers who love the diet agreed to buy the food from us, so we only ended up losing about $50 on this experiment.

Now that I've had some time to reflect, I think the biggest thing we did wrong was jump right into it. We went from eating pretty much whatever we wanted whenever we wanted to a highly regimented diet plan that looks, tastes and smells nothing like what we've been used to eating. Gradually getting into the diet would have made it less of a shock and made for a better chance of success.

I will say this for HMR: They're on the front lines of today's social networking tools. When I tweeted that I was giving up the diet already, I got this reply back a short time later:
Someone in their marketing department sure knows what they're doing.

So the best part about dropping the diet? I was officially voted in as an assistant professor (along with my esteemed colleague Laura Johnston) at Friday's faculty meeting. My boss was nice enough to buy a cake for the occasion. Thank goodness I wasn't on the diet then, eh?

So it's been a good, long spell since I last made a real attempt to lose weight. In fact, I've been pretty well satisfied with just existing ever since dropping my gym membership more than a year ago.

But now Jenny and I are determined to try out a new diet that is being offered through her work, Columbia's Women's Wellness Center. The program is offered through Health Management Resources. The specific plan we're doing includes pre-packaged entrees and shakes, plus all the fruits and vegetables we want. As we're actually now on the cusp of doing it (we start in the morning), I'm having second thoughts.

No more Coke. No more sweets. No more eating what I want when I want. Instead, I'll be on prepackaged foods and shakes. I'm going to need a lot of support.

Then there's the whole taste factor, which is the big x-factor for me right now. The chocolate shakes mix with water and ice, or it can be whipped into a pudding. Somehow, this doesn't have me feeling hopeful I'm going to like it.

The food looks tiny. You get two entrees a day, each running around 200 calories. The Bean and Beef Enchiladas comes in an 8-ounce box. This portion size may not work for me.

Fortunately, you can sub all the fruits and veggies you want, which I'll no doubt be doing. You can have a third meal a day if you're really hungry, but mostly you should just drink more shakes (110 calories per serving) when you're hungry.

I can see how it works -- with foods so low in calories, you can't help but burn what you have in reserve. I can also see how tempting it will be to say forget it and grab a cheeseburger.

We have three weeks worth of food with the option of buying two weeks worth at a time after that. We get the food at a discount through Women's Wellness Center, but it's still an investment. Basically, we put our food budget for the next three weeks into this endeavor. So there's no turning back now.

I plan to tweet the experience on my Twitter account using hashtag #shapinupwithsherlock. I hope you'll follow me and give me some encouragment along the way -- it's going to be a long three weeks.

Here's a short video from Christmas of the family opening their presents. I made this as part of my training this week on Final Cut. Enjoy.

 

A little video I took on my cell phone today:

  

I'm spending a couple of days playing with Final Cut; I only purchased it six months ago, but I finally found some time this week to work through the video tutorial at Lynda.com and actually use the darn thing.

Here's the first video. Hopefully I'll have another one coming over the weekend:

 

This video is must-see TV: Click here for the Daily Show.

I would have gladly embedded it here if it weren't for the fact that Spaces (the host of this site) doesn't support it. This is why I'm seriously considering moving to WordPress. Grrrrr!

A friend of mine just asked me for this recipe, which is one I've shared with a lot of friends. It's incredibly easy, cooks in the crockpot in a couple of hours, and is some sweet comfort food on a cold day. Here it is.

Ingredients:
3-4 chicken breasts chopped into bite-size bits (raw chicken tenders, usually right next to the breasts, work even better)
2 cans of cream of chicken
1 chicken bullion cube
1 stick of butter
1 can of milk
1 onion, chopped
1 can of of dough to make jumbo biscuits

Mix all in crockpot except for the biscuits and let cook 5-6 hours until the chicken is completely cooked. Turn crockpot to highest setting. Take biscuit dough and tear apart little into little chunks, adding slowly to the soup. Let cook 30 minutes or until biscuit dough fluffs and slighlty browns on top.

One hint I've found with this recipe is that you can put it all together the night before and let it sit in the refridgerator. Then, let it simmer all day on low, then add the biscuits after work and have an easy, hot meal ready soon after you get home.

This is just an amazing video on so many levels. I'm so sorry to see the Rocky go -- RIP Rocky Mountain News.

 
Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

Here is an e-mail a sent out to our columnists tonight about the new Missourian opinion page. I'm very happy with the design of it, by the way. Emily Ristow gets all the credit.

Dear Missourian columnists,

I'm very excited to share with you the prototypes for the new Missourian opinion page, which debuts on Sunday. Here's what the new print design is geared to accomplish:

• Bring more voices into print by publishing reader comments from the Web site, from Twitter and from Facebook.
  
• Provide a better overall design to the page that will better take advantaged of our limited space.
  
• Provide teaser positions to online-only content or to columns/letters/etc. that are upcoming.

Incidentally, any early heads-up you can give me on what you're writing about gives me more time to tease it for print.

The other new feature with the page is the daily Today's Question column, which takes a skeptical look at an issue and pairs it with a question designed to spark community conversation. It's much like our now-defunct Five Ideas column, only five ideas spread out over five days of print. I hope to get this up to seven on the Web in the near future.

I hope you enjoy the new prototypes. Please e-mail me with any questions or suggestions.

The Rocky Mountain News is no more after Friday.

I'll miss the Rocky, the wars it had with the Post, and the fact that competition made both papers better in their own ways.

Unfortunately, the Rocky may not be the only paper in a joint-operating agreement that's about to bite the dust. From the Rocky's own obit:

"Today's announcement comes as metropolitan newspapers and major newspaper companies find themselves reeling, with plummeting advertising revenues and dramatically diminished share prices. Just this week, Hearst, owner of the San Francisco Chronicle, announced that unless it was able to make immediate and steep expense cuts it would put the paper up for sale and possibly close it. Two other papers in JOAs, one in Seattle and the other in Tucson, are facing closure in coming weeks."

Too many good journalists are about to be out of work, and that's too bad -- for journalism, for democracy, and for America. But we'll survive, if not in print, in some form. I just wish the Rocky would be around to see it.

So over on Facebook, the big thing is to write 25 random things about yourself, then tag 25 friends to do the same thing.

I wanted to be one of the cool kids, so I did it too. Here's what I wrote about me (self-indulgent, I know):

25 -- The age when I bought my first house. What a great place that was -- lived there for 4 years, and turned a tidy profit when I sold it. Along the way, we threw some crazy parties (New Year's Eve became especially notorious), cooked a lot of tasty food (my old roomies Michelle and Kevin are both great cooks) and, dare I say, created four years of amazing memories.

OK, that was a really cheesy opening. I'll try to do better.

24 -- Never seen one episode. But I hear good things.

23 -- On my 23rd birthday, I broke up with my girlfriend at the time. But she still gave me my birthday present and bought me a drink. 

22 -- I credit two men named George with my love of the English language. George Gladney was my mentor in college and is still someone I look up to today. The other George is George Carlin. I'm glad I got to see him live for my 32nd birthday before he died.

21 -- My 21st birthday started with Ahrey and my dad buying me tequila shots at 4 p.m. and ended with me passing out in the hallway of my apartment at 10 p.m. In between, I became the reason Applebee's in Laramie started having a one-drink-at-a-time rule. I'm no longer proud of that, by the way.

20 -- My best friend has been my best friend for more than 20 years. We became dads at about the same time; I had a girl, he had a boy. We're kind of hoping our kids get married, but we're not going to try to force it. Yet.

19 -- When I was 19, I dropped out of college and worked full time as a DJ at a classic rock station in Casper, Wyo. I went broke within three months and had to move in with my mom for survival (and thanks again for taking me in). You don't know how bad life sucks until your pay checks start bouncing. That's when I decided I was done with radio and was going to try newspapers. The guy I worked for still owes me a couple hundred dollars. 

18 -- When I was 18, my best friend and I schemed a prank for graduation. While the First Lady of Wyoming was speaking, we launched a blow-up doll and batted it around like a beach ball. I had to spend some time in the principal's office after the fact to get my diploma, but it all worked out. I hear now they make the seniors sign a pledge because of that prank. I'm no longer proud of that one either.

17 -- For prom my junior year (when I was 17), my best friend and I decided to boycott it. So the two of us -- along with Meera, our foreign-exchange student friend -- went camping. We drank a lot of rum, and we nearly froze to death camping at Happy Jack in April. But we sure saved money compared to what we spent the next year on prom.

16 -- When I was 16, I I hit a car on my first driving test. I was backing out of a diagonal space and I scraped the car next to me, because I had no idea how to steer my 1963 Cadillac Coup de Ville. Fortunately, the lady I hit didn't really care that I had swapped some paint with her 1978 P.O.S., so it didn't cost me anything except my dignity. My friends weren't exactly merciful mocking me about it. As it turned out, I didn't get my license for another 6 months.

15 -- The number of seniors and grad students whom I will miss terribly after they graduate and leave in May. Little known fact: I get very sad after graduation. I love the celebration that is graduation, getting to meet the parents, getting to see students off to the real world, etc. etc. But afterward, I get really bummed that they're gone and I'll no longer see them on a regular basis. That's going to be especially true of this upcoming bunch.

14 -- The number of months, give or take a year, that I have waited for my promotion to asst. prof. I just found out this past week it's finally happening. Given the congrats I've gotten from colleagues (and that includes students), and the vote of confidence I've received from my superiors, for the first time ever, I feel like I've really arrived as a journalist. Not that there isn't so much more to be learning -- you never master journalism, you can only hope to tame it -- but it's just really nice to feel that validation. In fact, this title for me surpasses my previous No. 2 on the things-I'm-most-proud-of list. It now reads: 1) Audrey and Jenny; 2) Promotion to asst. prof.; 3) Quitting smoking; 4) Thesis; 5) Surviving Jack's bachelor party (see No. 8).

13 -- As in No. 13, a song by my favorite band, the Pixies. I've seen them twice now, both times while on the reunion tour. The first time at the University of Denver was pretty sweet. But the show at Red Rocks was amazing, and I got to spend the show with so many of my nearest and dearest friends. It was also the night I started to first seriously fall for Jenny.

12 -- Speaking of Jenny, her birthday is on the 12th. For her gift this year, I secretly flew her sister in from Colorado so the two of them could hang out this weekend. The look on Jenny's face when she saw that 1) Amber was here, and 2) that I had arranged for her to have a 3-day weekend with her job, was awe-wait for it-some.

11 --One of my favorite sayings for an extremely large amount of money is "eleventy billion." It's something I picked up from Tammy while in grad school.

10 -- I've had my dog Kotie for 10 years now. For those who haven't seen him in a while, he's still pretty much the same -- lovable, hairy, obnoxious, hyper and funny, all in one. Love that damn dog.

9 -- It's been about nine years since I last ate McDonald's.  I had a friend who ate there constantly, and eventually he started to smell like McDonald's. That odor coming out of his ass after knocking back a sixer ruined it for me forever.

8 -- Crazy story for the crazy 8: One of the craziest nights I've ever encountered was Jack Hoffman's bachelor party. About all the restraining order will let me say is this: I was the designated driver; I was in charge of playing the night's theme song over and over (it was Bloudhound Gang's "A Lap Dance Is So Much Better When the Stripper Is Crying."); I may or may not have smoked my first Cuban cigar. Anything more than that, and I'm pretty sure he kills me.

7 -- The number of years I spent in college. For a while, I was a little Van Wilder-like in my approach to school -- I never wanted to leave. I finally did with a bachelor's in journalism and a master's in communications. I missed out on minors in theater and English by one credit each.

6 -- Blossom's best friend! Speaking of Blossom, she went to the prom I boycotted (see No. 17). I have pictures in my yearbook to prove it. That's how life rolls ya sometimes -- from the Laramie High prom, to the heights of Hollywood, to whatever the hell she's doing now.

5 -- I once won a jackpot on a nickel slot in Vegas. I had been down there with some friends for Spring Break, and I was doing OK at the gambling thing. Then I got cocky, lost all my money playing high-stakes roulette, and left Vegas with my head hung in shame. On our way out of Nevada, we stopped in Mesquite to eat and so my buddy Todd could get rid of a few nickels he had left over in a bucket. He gave me some out of pity, and I hit an $80 jackpot with one nickel. That paid for our gas back to Laramie.

4 -- Number of years since my last cigarette. But in the interest of full disclosure, I have contemplated breaking the streak on several occasions. Once an addict, always an addict.

3 -- Total number of dogs we have. Besides Kotie, there are the pugs, Opal and Jewel.

2 -- The number of kids we're pretty sure we're going to have, though we haven't ruled out a third.

1 -- The number of third-nipples I have. No, just kidding. My No. 1 is always Jenny. Fun Fact: The first time she gave me her phone number, she told me 867-5309. And I knew right then I'd found me a cool girl. I was right.

So, I have some big changes planned for the opinion page when the Missourian drops the Monday and Saturday editions at the end of the month. I feel like this could be a real turning point for the section -- we've gotten some attention with the number of local columns we run, and some of the opinions expressed have gotten healthy debate on the Web site. Now, it's time to take that next step, and the turning point is weeding out the rest of the wire and adding some other personality to the page in print while continuing to grow on the Web.

One plan is to convert the Five Ideas column to a daily idea each day in print. Basically, we'll keep the same format -- analyze the issue with a critical eye, then a question at the end. Now, I just need a name for it. So far, the top contender is "Your Turn."

Any other ideas for the name of the daily idea column?

Falcon Editorial, a miserable little piece of software that never delivered all that it was supposed to do, only frustration and heartache, died Monday, Jan. 5, 2009 in the Missourian newsroom. It was 4 1/2.

Originally billed as the content management system that was supposed to allow for such innovations as electronic budgeting and seamless error tracking, Falcon was buggy from the start. It drove many a reporter insane with its ability to freeze on deadline, and the staff of the production desk was constantly asking if another editor or designer had a file open.

Falcon has been replaced by PlanSystem.

A few alums who wanted to pay their respects to Falcon for this story include:

Allison Hull writes via Twitter: "You can thank Falcon for traumatizing the newsroom Sun. and Thu. nights when I would go on a cursing rant because stories/pages disappeared."

Jennifer Amur, also via Twitter, makes reference to old Facebook group "Falcon is a 2-year-old," so named because it threw tantrums without notice, required long naps of inactivity while the server was rebooted for the 400th time that day, and other such acts: "Falcon was the most terrible 2-year-old I have ever met. And generally, I don't like 2-year-olds."

Isabelle Roughol, creator of the aforementioned group, had this to say via Facebook: "Killing a 2-year-old is despicable... but I can't say I'm sorry."

Here is a list of the stuff I wish we'd pay better attention to at ColumbiaMissourian.com:

-- Excerpts on every story. Without the headlines, landing pages are just a collection of headlines with very little context. I'm not sure what I find more frustrating -- reporters who don't write them in the first place or copy editors and news editors who publish stories without excerpts.

-- Django ID's. The django ID becomes part of the URL, and the URL is what gets searched. So when we use vague slugs instead of thought-out headlines for our django ID's, we really fail to take advantage of Google. It's almost like we don't want people to read our stories.

-- Lack of sectioning. I've yet to see a story hit the Rim this semester that had more than one section of the Web site tagged. Most of the time, there is no section tagged at all. No tags means the story isn't published. Again, do we want readers to see the journalism we're creating or not?

-- An inability to post photos. We miss photos -- and graphics -- constantly. Constantly. Especially in sports (sorry guys, but it's true). Again, why don't we want to show readers the photos we take?

-- Along those same lines, we fail miserably at times in our ability to write headlines for photos and edit cutlines correctly.

-- No today, tonight or yesterday on the Web. Ever. Anywhere. It's been years since we've instituted this rule, and it still crops up all the time.

-- We need to think about the presentation of every story and make sure it publishes correctly. We print page proofs of the print paper to make sure headlines are correct, everything looks aestetically pleasing, etc. etc. But how often do we look at a Web page after it's published? I'd contend that most of us don't, which is a big reason why we have the number of error reports we get.

-- Linking. I tried to make a big show of why it's important to link stories in budget yesterday. The crowd yawned. And I thought to myself: "If this is how tomorrow's journalists are approaching their education, they won't be tomorrow's journalists. They'll be tomorrow's burger-flippers."

-- We have to start labeling our multimedia, either visually or with a slug at the start of the description. It's not hard, but it does require some critical thinking, like "how can I best make this accessible to the reader?"

-- EDIT: One more thing that just came to mind: Datelines. Every news and sports story on the Web should have them.

I'm frustrated. I've preached, I've taught, I've instructed, I've offered incentives, I've held training sessions that few people attend. And still, we can't handle a lot of these simple tasks. What am I doing wrong? How can I get us to pay better to the Web site, our primary publication platform? Any thoughts you'd like to share would be most welcome. 

An e-mail I sent around today about the Webinar we're having in Lee Hills on Wednesday:

Want to know what the heck that subject line is about? Want to know how the Semantic Web can help us build readership at ColumbiaMissourian.com?

If so, then you'll want to attend this Webinar on Wednesday. We'll meet at 1 p.m. in Lee Hills 308 (the Missourian conference room). Anyone and everyone may attend.

From the NewsU Web site:

What will I learn? The Semantic Web has the power to transform the way readers find what they are looking for online -- whether they know they are looking for it or not. For journalists, advances in the Semantic Web will dramatically change digital news. You’ll have the power to go beyond simple “tagging” and build rich connections among all your content: articles, images, motion and audio. But how can online journalists consistently and comprehensively semantically tag and, more importantly, semantically associate assets? How can you thrive in the Semantic Web?

In this one-hour Webinar, digital consultant Diane Burley will:

    * Explain tagging, taxonomies, authority files and knowledge bases
    * Show how to expose this rich metadata to create a better user experience
    * Explore ways to research or package news with greater ease
    * Look at some of the online tools and companies that can help Web editors and publishers automatically tag and associate


Want to learn more? Click here.

I received two pieces of really sad news this week:

1. Layoffs at the Tulsa World resulted in two former students being laid off. Both of them are hard-working, talented journalists, both of whom I enjoyed working with very much during their respective stints at MU. Here's hoping both land on their feet.
   
2. My old newspaper, the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle, laid off two newsroom employees this week. This is especially disturbing considering that layoffs like this never happen there or at many family-owned papers. 

Oh, and the Rocky Mountain News is about to tank. At least one person in Denver is trying to do something about it.

Want to really see something depressing about the state of the media? Follow this Twitter feed.

If you hadn't heard, the Missourian is alive and well.

OK, so alive and well is a bit of an overstatement. The Missourian still loses a lot of money, but at least we're being given the opportunity to continue to turn that around.

We've received one hell of a commitment from the MU administration given the potential for disaster the next legislative session will likely involve. Basically, the state is looking at a major deficit, and MU is going to have to take some funding hits. We're doing our part by dropping two days of publication. I hate to see the Weekend Missourian go, but cutting the Monday paper is no loss in terms of advertising or content. The best elements of those two papers -- the Monday feature, the long-form features of the Weekend Missourian -- can potentially be incorporated elsewhere.

Am I happy about the decision to cut two publication days but continue 24/7 on the Web? You bet:

• Cutting two publication days gives us a chance to totally reinvent ourselves for print. Right now, we still fill the paper the way a traditional newspaper does it. We take our fair share of chances, but ultimately we're not that much different than any other daily in America. And if you hadn't heard, a lot of dailies ain't doing so well.
  
• This will give a staff that has been stretched pretty darn thin a chance to breathe and get to those things that are so important to the future of our industry, like refocusing our online efforts. That means lots of training, both in storytelling and in how to operate the darn software.
  
• Personally, I hope to find a way to reshape the opinion section into a "conversations" section. I want to spark thought and dialogue about whatever is important to our community -- sometimes that's state government, sometimes it's national, sometimes it's local. This change will give me the chance to refocus how space is allocated, come up with some innovative ideas for conversation starters, and potentially revamp our lineup of regular columnists. 
• I'm hoping this also gives us the chance to go tabloid in size (but not content). The smaller papers just feel more modern, and the potential for design is greater with a (mostly) square pallet than a vertical rectangle.
  

So, if you have any ideas on how we can totally revamp the Missourian into something people will want to read and advertisers would like to frequent, hit me up with a comment or an e-mail.

Today was a very good day at the Missouri School of Journalism. My colleagues on the Promotion and Tenure Committee say fit to approve the dean's request that my title be changed to assistant professor on the tenure tract.

The next step is for the Journalism School to get the OK from Jesse Hall.

I'm thrilled with the news and got a little red-faced when the other editors clapped for me and Laura Johnston, the other person in the same boat as me, when Tom announced the news. Katie Steinmetz, Missourian columnist extraordinaire, gets credit for the jazzy blog title of assistant professor-elect. I like it.

Today was also graduation day, and I said goodbye to some really great seniors and grad students. It was a bittersweet moment, as it always is, because I hate to see them go, but yet I'm so proud of them for making it.

The graduation speaker, Brian Storm of MediaStorm, did a great job. As he stressed throughout the speech: Look for new ways to tell stories, new platforms, etc. etc. Don't try to connect with a mass audience, connect with the right audience.

I was particularly struck by that last line.

As Storm also pointed out (did I mention that I tried to Twitter the speech?), everyone has a printing press now in the form of the Web. So, what do we have to do to find the right audience?

That's what I'm going to go sleep on.

OK, want to know why I haven't been posting much lately? Besides being incredibly busy?

It's because all of the upgrades Hotmail and Spaces has undergone lately are 1) Not Mac friendly; 2) Take too damn long to load.

So, I'm thinking about taking JakeSherlock.com to a new domain and giving up my hotmail account, which I've had forever (and truthfully is the reason I haven't made the switch to Gmail yet, although I did reserve myself an address there). Not sure if I'll do that yet, mostly because it's a pain in the ass to move all my e-mail files (I'm a filing packrat) and blog posts to new servers. Boo-urns.

E.W. Scripps Co. notified staffers at the Rocky Mountain News today that the newspaper is up for sale.

In just a few short weeks, the Rocky is likely to announce it is shutting down. After all, who is going to buy a newspaper that lost $11 million in the first three quarters of the year in this economy? I hate to say it, but an asbestos factory would be a better buy at this point.

And that is a shame, because the Rocky is a great newspaper in a town lucky enough to have two great newspapers. But, like big papers in other two-newspaper towns, something had to give. And in this case, the Post will live on -- hopefully for a good long while -- but its not exactly raking in the megabucks right now either, I'm willing to bet. Who is these days?

Over the years, the Rocky has tried everything possible to connect with readers. I remember as a kid the Rocky drastically cut subscription costs with the idea it could make it up on advertising. It started bold initiatives on the Web, including a political conversation portal that was a lot of fun. The company eventually struck a deal with the Post to create a joint operating agreement, and thus was born the Denver Newspaper Agency.

One thing about that deal: I thought it was designed from the start to favor the Post, and I think readers really picked up on that. I mean, the "joint" weekend editions under both flags were produced by separate newsrooms -- Saturday by the Rocky, Sunday by the Post. And when you're not producing the city's Sunday paper -- which is always the flagship paper of the week -- you look weak.

The Post and News waged one of the last great two-newspaper-town battles seen in a long time. When JOAs were all the rage, the Post and News refused to talk deal. And when they finally had to, the Rocky was already at enough of a financial disadvantage that it had to take the No-Sunday deal. That weakened the paper even more, in my view, and told me then that when the day came one of these giants was to fall, it would be the senior of the two papers.

Barring a last minute miracle, the senior is about to be laid to rest.