A new era, star trek, and Mars

As Roy Greenslade noted in Wednesday's Evening Standard, US newspapers are enduring tough, and possibly fatal, times.

Silicon Valley sits between San Francisco and San Jose, and both cities are in real danger of losing their daily papers.

Thanks to cost-cutting, the San Jose Mercury News is a shadow of its former self. The San Francisco Chronicle, meanwhile, lost some $50 million last year. Last week its owners, the Hearst Corporation, threatened to sell or even close it unless it stops losing money fast.

Everyone agrees on the cause of the problem. Websites like San Francisco's Craigslist hijacked papers' classified ad revenue. And readers increasingly like to get their news online for free. No one, though, can agree on the solution.

Not that local digirati are lacking ideas for, or optimism about, the future of news. After Hearst's announcement, Wired staff writer Alexis Madrigal got talking with Dwell magazine editor Sarah Rich and tweeted that: "@sarahrich and I can't be the only people thinking about what a mostly digital post-Chronicle SF paper would look like and getting excited."

They weren't. over 80 people have joined them to collaborate on what they're calling "a model for the daily news organisation of the future". Their "San Francisco-Post Chronicle" wiki joins other digital efforts to produce news in a world without newspapers.

Few here blame Craig Newmark and friends for robbing printed news of its revenue stream. It was his right to compete for classifieds, we feel. Mostly, we're frustrated analogue news owners have taken so long to accept that they now operate in a digital world.

Fingers crossed for tonight's scheduled launch of Nasa's Kepler space telescope. Its mission: to look for Earthlike planets in our galaxy. The science is being directed from our Nasa Ames Research Center, cementing the Valley's reputation as ground zero in the search for extraterrestrial life.

Popular candy brand Skittles received an extreme online makeover this week. Owner Mars Inc replaced the Skittles homepage with a live feed of comments about Skittles on Twitter.

Online wits immediately started tweeting obscene remarks about the sweet. Mars knew that would happen and had planned to change the site after a day.

Its initial "edgy" move, though, had a ton of people talking about the brand.