Ideas from Show and Steal

• It's time to start planning for holiday lights.

• Girls shop for prom dresses in January.

Here's something we ought to do: LA Times Show Tracker. Various staffers who are obsessed with TV shows are allowed to write about the shoes they're watching — overnight reaction to shows. This is  a web-only feature, and the staffers aren't paid to do it. Actually popular with the unpaid staff.

• In South Carolina you can only do things outside in April or October.

• Baltimore and Pittsburgh pick out a belle of the ball at their society soirees and photograph her in her gown, with a cutline that details the labels she's wearing.

• nola.com asked nutritionists what they snack on for a package on healthy snacks.

• San Antonio Express News moved its weekend section to Friday trying to regain movie ads, but the name of the thing is also the name of their website AND the name of another section, too. My idea: Never kill MovieStyle.

• One of the Pittsburgh papers had their photogs do a series of beautiful profiles of bridges in the city, with some history of each structure.

• Very sad, don't let's do this: Seattle Times did a large series of covers during their state parks centennial, one for each of the parks.

• San Antonio did a cute quiz about food in the city — who serves what where.

• Alice Short of LA Times says they DID have big problems with editing the food pieces written by popular chefs in the city.

• Looking at someone's food section featuring zucchini, I thought what if we did a bizarro story on ideas for things to do with zucchini?

• This is different: Colonoscopy, the game. Full page graphic. Times Union in Albany.

• Florida Today has readers sending in pictures of their meals and describing them and where they ate them.

• Houston Chronicle's Health Zone is a once a month 12-page editorial section that this year accepted only ads from hospitals; full page ad costs $35K. Made $1.5 million in the year. Diane Cowan, the editor, says the paper has three medical beat writers, but the section's contributors are the full newsroom, and there's no extra pay for those people, who, she says, are delighted to have their bylines in a publication that made money. Most stories are 20-25 inches, 40-inch cover tends to focus on medical science and research, not personal health.
   Hospital communications departments do try to control access. The private doctors, though, will talk directly with the paper.
   Big problem she has is hospital comm departments expect to be getting lots of fawning coverage for their money, and she's trying to produce an editorial product, not advertorial.
   Starting now the section is opening ads to other businesses, CVS, for instance.

• Times Union in Albany has a social media editor who compiles the Kristi's List feature about what people in the area were talking about on social media using analytics.

• Virgina Pilot: How to make your own snow globe. 12 days of holiday craft, one for each holiday.

• Roanoke got the photo department to try out cellphone camera apps and review them.

• When a cover fell through, Virginia Pilot did a full-page menu pronunciation guide and glossary, and repeated it inside as a "pocket size" version.