Turning
a New Page
BY
LaSHELL STRATTON
THOSE WHO SAY newspapers are an outdated medium should look
at the newsstand in Scott Walker's living room.
Walker,
assistant managing editor of
The Birmingham (Ala.)
News,
has created a digital newsstand that showcases pages
from his newspaper. The invention is a hodgepodge of an
old newspaper box Walker purchased on eBay, a 17-inch LG
Flatron LCD screen and a Mac mini. Thanks to his
AppleScript programming, files are downloaded daily, and
a slideshow of pages appears on screen automatically.
"This
is just something I did for fun," Walker says. "I sort of
did this as a how-to, and I wanted to document it with
pictures." Walker submitted it to the Web site,
www.makezine.com,
where people find new uses for old things.
Walker
says he finished the project pretty quickly, working only a
few hours every few weeks. "The biggest challenge was just
cleaning the box," he says.
Walker
considered enhancing the digital newsstand by adding an
exterior design or a remote that could allow him to control
the slideshow. But after documenting his project on his
blog, Design on Deadline (www.designondeadline.com),
he has received other suggestions on how to improve his
at-home invention. Walker says he might pursue those
ideas instead.
"Based
on the suggestions that people made in my blog, I'm
wondering if I should use a touch-screen monitor so I can
control what I'm seeing," he says. "Right now, it's just a
timed script. Or I could do more with Flash programming so
instead of...copyrighted front pages I could use Flash to
have RSS headline feeds come in."
Walker
may have a chance to try those ideas on the second version
of the digital newsstand. "The editors at our paper really
liked it," he says. "The publisher wants to put one in the
lobby."