Brown Targeting Health Care

The Boston Globe has a story today about U.S. Sen. Scott Brown, R-Ma., filing legislation to make changes to aspects of the landmark health care reform bill.
Brown, along with Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden, call for allowing states to opt out of certain portions of the health care.
For example, according to the Globe, some aspects of the bill require states have an individual mandate and a health insurance exchange. States can appeal to the government to opt out of the requirement if the state can prove its system is at least as competitive for residents as the federal one. Currently, states can opt out as early as 2017. Brown and Wyden want to allow states to opt out in 2014, when other aspects of the bill go into effect.
Brown’s calls here to make some changes to are obviously an attempt by Brown to distinguish himself as a moderate, working-class legislator. While mainstream republicans of his party are calling for a full-blown repeal of “Obamacare,” Brown is taking a more centrist approach. He does not want to scare off independent voters in left-leaning Massachusetts where he will be running for re-election in two years.
While not being too polarizing, Brown is also tapping into voter discontent. Republicans were launched to victories in the most recent election, in part, on a platform of repealing some aspects of the bill. Brown wants to show he’s listening, and willing to do that.

Custom Facebook Landing page

Gail Lebert mentioned to me that Deloitte has a cool custom Facebook page. I went and checked it out and was immediately jealous that their page is so dynamic. So I typed "custom Facebook landing page" into Google and found these simple directions on how to create a custom page.

I was able to set up a very basic custom page on the WBJ's Facebook page in a matter of minutes. I'm still trying to figure out how we can use this to enhance our connection with our Facebook fans. Perhaps offer a special promotion to people who come to our Facebook page?

If anyone has any ideas, please let me know, or post a comment below.

Web Team members announced

NEBM's Web Team was announced on April 9. Here are the members and their affiliations:

From the HBJ
Norm Bell, editor
Bill Kenney, events
Chris Wallace, production
David Hartley, advertising

From the WBJ
Christina Davis, editor
Shaun Tolson, custom publications
Kelly Marcimo, advertising

From Mainebiz
Jan Holder, production
Mindy Favreau, staff writer

More details on our first meeting date and agenda soon!

Interesting interview

NPR out of New York produces a great program called "On the Media." A recent installment included an interview with Edward Tufte, the author of "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information." He was appointed by the Obama administration to clean up Recovery.gov. Some good lessons to be learned about design here...

Interesting multimedia presentation

The Harvard Business Review's web site has a lot of things going for it. I particularly like this article, which uses a simple video to illustrate a list of the top ways to block creativity.

The one problem I have is that the video is too long. I wanted to quickly see the list. It seems like the video's creator got a little carried away with the PowerPoint animations.

But I do think we could do something like this in Worcester for our 10 Things I Know About... feature.

Globe's embedded video

I noticed that today's Globe web site has an embedded video called "Globe Today," which is basically a reporter talking about the stories in that day's paper. It's interesting to see how newspapers integrate video directly into their online content. Maybe something we could think about doing...