What am I doing?

Since I joined USA TODAY a year ago, I have been involved in conversations and efforts to create tools. The beginning of the year finally marked a point where I felt these things were coming together through the creation of some basic templates...

Things like:

* Audio Slideshow utility (based on soundslides production files)
* Graphing Tools (pie charts, bar charts, fever lines)
* Audio-Photo Sidebar & Multiple Audio-Photo Sidebar
* Quiz
* and so forth...

These templates are really part of a bigger vision of newspapers as we try to cling to what we can in the crazy world today. Right now we are looking for ways to speed up production and escape the technology to focus on content. Templates are one means to create an easy way to focus on content and bypass the technology/development effort.

I also think it will be interesting to see who survives the turmoil. Tools and templates are definitely one way to create efficiency, but they also expose bigger holes.

And I leave you with one example...a generic twitter feed reader of Lance Armstrong

More to come...