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Fade In - Introduction

Fade In is part of The McClatchy Company’s coverage of the 2008 Presidential campaign. McClatchy, family-owned and publicly-traded (MNI), is the third largest newspaper company in the U.S. and is literally reinventing the newspaper business.

As part of its presidential coverage, McClatchy decided to take a look at the issues through a different lens – an alternative lens, if you will – and thus was born the "alt.campaign" project, an aggregation of bloggers, poets, writers and one lonely screenwriter. All episodes of Fade In are available in the box to the right.

The entire project is the brainchild of Howard Weaver, a Vice President at McClatchy, who – having only won two Pulitzer Prizes – nonetheless forged into the newspaper reinvention business like he knew what he was doing.

Fade In looks at the 2008 campaign through the lens of a sitcom, written in the format of a screenplay. Unlike the objective journalistic model of a traditional newspaper column, Fade In makes its observations through a cast of wacky characters at the imaginary Channel 79, a public access channel.

Please feel to forward any comments to joe@zaydoefilms.com.