The early news on The New New News is in… and it’s good!
In Mónica Guzmán Preston’s post over at Intersect, “My favorite moment from the @newswrights play ‘The New New News” (a meta- media laced headline if there ever was one), she describes:
… one of those moments in storytelling where, in ways you couldn’t have predicted, disparate elements of narrative and meaning all come together.
For this longtime fan of the much misunderstood mass microblogging service, it was fantastic.
I am one NewsWright who is delighted that Monica enjoyed the show, especially since she helped us so much in the early phases of our research, suggesting leads, pointing us toward whole new stories to run down, inviting us into her “meet-ups”. We do wonder, though, if she recognized herself in any of the characters.
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Jose Amador, at the Seattlest says:
There’s nothing about News that’s passive, or simple; very little that is formulaic… which is unusual and welcome in an age where everything can and will come to you. At the end of the night… one is rewarded with an excess of interesting thoughts about the world we inhabit….
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And then The Stranger’s Brendan Kiley chimed in. He hasn’t seen it yet, but that doesn’t stop him from recommending it:
….[NewsWrights United] put together The New New News—about the rise of local blogs, how the Seattle Times got a Pulitzer Prize for its readers’ Twitter coverage of the Maurice Clemmons manhunt, and what happened to Art Thiel when he started his own blog and had to get tangled with selling his own ads. Judging by their last effort and the seriousness of their material, The New New News should be scarier than the ersatz Mack the Knife.
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I particularly enjoyed Rosemary Jone’s interview at Examiner.com because it gives NewsWrights United’s Managing Producer, Jim Jewell a chance to say why he believes in the work we do.
Right now, theater looks to me like newspapers in the 90’s, watching changes all around them and somehow believing themselves above the change, too venerable to fail. We spend too much time in the theater talking about what theater is instead of actively engaging the form and deciding what it will be, and we aren’t too far from the crisis newspapers have found themselves in: failure to evolve.
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So what does all this good news for NewsWrights mean to you? Well, for one it means that if you had hoped not to leave Capitol Hill to see the show, you better order your advance reservations soon. We have only one week at the Erickson, and it starts tonight. The following two weekends will be staged at Theater One on the North Seattle Community College campus (advance reservations for those performances here).
Of course, you can always risk walking up because we always hold back a quantity of pay-what-you-can seats. You just have to ask yourself, are you really cheaper than the majority of your Capitol Hill neighbors? If so, show up early. All evening performances start at 7:30 pm. The matinee is at 2 pm.
