I got lead art (on the web)

Well, I may not have gotten front page (yet... oh yes, it shall be mine...) but I did end up scoring lead art on the paper's website. Which I just happened to visit by chance and was pleasantly surprised by.

Not so much that my picture was there, but because the website actually looked pretty nice. A few weeks ago I suggested to my editors that we create a special section for the Balloon Fiesta online. The idea was kind of foreign so I described it as putting the special pull out section online and taking advantage of the web by incorporating multimedia, blogs, user generated content, a daily calender, Flickr and other goodies (more details in another post). I even created a web page for the project and offered to maintain it during the week.

Long story short they didn't go for it, but it was a marginal consolation to see that some of the ideas I was suggested showed up on the front page of our website. "Above the fold" to boot, bravo web guys!

Now, I have no way of knowing if these were ideas they'd already had in the pipeline or if word of my pitch had gotten to the web team, but I'm glad to see that we're thinking this way at the paper. It's promising.

Meanwhile, the balloon fiesta is finally over and not a moment too soon, I was really getting burnt out on the 5am to 1am days all week. Why so long? Well, when you're only going to be here maybe, quite-possibly once in your lifetime, you don't sleep, you get out there on your days off, before work and after work to take in as much as you can. That said, Tuesday can't come soon enough, I've got sleeping to catch up on.