Sentinel.com blog

The Santa Cruz Community Media Lab gathered Monday for its February meeting and talked about arts, entertainment and the cultural life in Santa Cruz.

Longtime Sentinel arts and entertainment writer Wallace Baine talked with Media Lab members at Cruzio. (Thanks Chris Neklason!). Wallace has teamed up with Kirby Scudder to build a new blog for the Sentinel – The Muse Santa Cruz with the intention of becoming the hub of arts and cultural information for the community.

Wallace has pushed ahead with the blog, with some tireless work from Kirby to build and populate the site. They’re planning a launch party Thursday, Feb. 28th 6-9 p.m. at the Tannery, and all are invited.

Wallace talked about a wide variety of possibilities for the Muse. Among them:

• A more realtime orientation to updates about the arts community
• Guest blog posts
• Multimedia
• Outreach to the community for photos, writing and video
• Linking out to creative events and reviews around Santa Cruz County
• Stories and photos that appear in the Sentinel printed Guide, which comes out every Thursday

If you’re interested in connecting with the Sentinel’s arts and entertainment coverage, and the Muse blog, reach out to Wallace.

This month marks a year since the Sentinel launched its Community Media Lab project. More than 200 bloggers have become involved in one way or another. We link out to the best posts every day, promote those links on the Sentinel home page, on the Media Lab page, through Facebook and twitter and other social media sites. Sentinel copy editor My Nguyen does most of the daily updates and also attended Monday. The lab’s page received more than 10,000 page views in 2012.

The people and organizations that have joined the project have been unfailingly helpful (among other cool developments, we started a Facebook group where questions are posed and help is given among bloggers on social, technical and other questions). Participants have provided news tips, breaking news photos, front page story suggestions, promoted worthy causes, and more importantly, shared their voices about what it’s like to live, struggle, create and celebrate in Santa Cruz.

Our face-to-face meetings with with members have been enjoyable without exception. Sentinel reporters, editors and photographers who have attended always come away feeling energized and full of the possibilities for their work and network. The project has informed us about the possibilities for collaboration in every aspect of Sentinel coverage.

We hope (and believe) that Media Lab bloggers come away from the meetings with new ideas and a better understanding of what the Sentinel is about.

Thanks for attending Monday to Sentinel Digital Producer Christina Gullickson and bloggers from:

• Positively Santa Cruz
• The Aums
• Motherhood, A Descent Into Madness
• Seasonal Eating
• Tom Jacobs Photography
• Laugh.research.write.run
• Riding Pretty
• Civinomics

- Tom Moore