Gardening and the New Patriot-News

December 26th, 2012

I feel your pain, newspaper readers.

A paper newspaper has been my daily breakfast-table companion since at least the seventh grade, which is a whole lot of years ago. And so like many of you other “old-schoolers” (sounds better than “old-timers”), I’m not sure what I’m going to do next week when The Patriot-News becomes a Tuesday/Thursday/Sunday thing. I really don’t like reading on electronic devices.

Sitting in front of the computer screen is what I do when I’m working. Reading a book, magazine or newspaper is what I do while relaxing in a chair.

It’s just not the same.

So much is in a daily paper that I find it’s also much harder to cram the product onto a computer screen, an electronic tablet or smart phone.

I end up doing a lot more hunting around, waiting for things to load and squinting at the different type sizes that are too small for my aging eyes to make out.

I also wonder what I’m missing if I forgot to search a particular menu or didn’t maneuver my way to all the right pages.

But all of that is beside the point. The world has spoken, and people have voted with their product dollars that electronics is the future and paper is passe.

Newspaper companies like The Patriot-News (now Pa. Media Group) are trying to figure out how to fit into this new order. The choice is pretty much adapt or die a slow death.

The Patriot-News is taking a rather sudden and headlong leap, going from being a daily newspaper company with an online presence to being a multimedia news-gathering company where online content matters first.

I’ve had a fair number of people ask lately where that leaves me and the garden-writing I’ve done for the paper for the last 20 years.

Actually, I’m going to be doing more than ever. It’s just almost all going to be online instead of in print.

The main thing that’ll continue in the “paper paper” is my “Over the Garden Fence” column. It’s still going to show up every Thursday. No change there.

You’ll also see occasional breaking garden news and other gardening articles, but these will be “mined” from what’s being posted on Pennlive.com by “curators,” whose role is fairly similar to what used to be called “wire editors.”

Like all of Pa. Media Group’s “content providers” (“reporter,” “writer” or “columnist” is so 20^th-century), my main focus is going to be feeding Pennlive.com.

For starters, the same “Over the Garden Fence” column that goes in the Thursday Patriot-News will go live early Thursday morning on Pennlive.com.

The Plant Pick of the Week feature that I’ve done every week during the growing season for the last eight years is moving to Pennlive.com. I’m not sure yet if it’ll continue to show up in the paper, but it’ll be online starting the first week of April.

For the last seven years, I’ve also been posting answers to your garden questions on Pennlive.com – one every weekday all year long. I’m not sure a lot of you even know about that.

I’ve posted something like 1,400 Q&A’s, and they’re all archived and sorted by categories at http://blog.pennlive.com/gardening/index.html. You can also get there by hitting the “Pennlive Q&A Blog” button in the toolbar across the top of this site. These Q&A posts will continue in the new year.

Something else new you might not have noticed yet is the weekly garden videos that the Patriot-News’ Christine Baker and I have been doing since September. These are 3- to 4-minute videos on all sorts of hands-on and timely local gardening topics – some of them with guest experts like Susanna Reppert-Brill (The Rosemary House), Mark McCurdy (McCurdy’s Christmas Tree Farm) and Joy Boileau (Stauffers of Kissel Hill).

We plan to keep shooting new ones each week and posting them at www.pennlive.com/multimedia or where all of my stuff gets dumped on Pennlive.com at http://connect.pennlive.com/user/gweigel/posts.html. If it’s easier, hit the “George’s Garden Videos” button in the left menu of this site.

Also in the works: live chats. These are 1-hour sessions where I log in to Pennlive.com at the announced time and post with anyone who wants to “e-talk” gardening.

Bottom line: I’m not headed for the rocking chair yet. You’re just going to have to plug in to find most of me instead of seeing me sprawled over your kitchen table.