YOUR SPACE: The news is real. But not the newscaster
She's got Katie Couric's savvy and Nancy Grace's eyes.
Too bad she isn't real.
Amy Sweets does the newscast on the High Plains View Web site and sometimes gets her picture in the weekly paper that reports on the plains east of Colorado Springs.
She comes from an Internet avatar service. She's a lowbudget animated character, not to mention cheap employee, costing the paper only $9.95 a month.
Instead of denim and boots, she wears suits and fashion jewelry.
"Readers enjoy what she brings to the table," says Toni Gibbons, founder of the year-old paper. "She brings something new, something fun. They never know quite what she's going to say or do."
Gibbons, a writer and Calhan rancher, was a newly divorced mother of three sons when she started the paper with $10,000.
"One of my goals in starting this paper was during that whole toll road thing. They kept saying, ‘Well, it's just trailers out there.' I wanted to prove to them there's a life and personality on those plains," she says.
"Out east, we're construed as trailer trash, but behind the trailers, even if they are trailers, we have amazing people. We have beautiful farms and ranches. Those stories weren't being told."
Gibbons and her sons put out the paper, along with a half-dozen others whose mugs and bios are on the paper's Web site, www.highplainsview. com.
Sweets, a hip, dark-haired cyberchick with dainty mouth and piercing eyes, is there, too, between the gray-haired Cowgirl's Kitchen food writer and the homespun Coffee on the Rails columnist.
"Prior to coming on board with the View, Amy worked with the Cyber-Bits Newscasting Crew and, later, with the Lunkhead Bloggers," Sweets' bio reads. "For the fashionconscious she sports a new outfit every week. Amy brings her unique brand of professionalism to our staff. She is single and lives in downtown Cyberspace."
She also has an e-mail link.
"It helped to increase Web traffic when we introduced her," Gibbons says. "Right there she's talking, she's highlighting stories, she's putting out information and getting people involved in the paper. We've been able to feature our writers and stories better. She's so different. She creates this whole contrast."
That's part of the charm of this avatar with attitude.
"We tried her once to go cowboy, but it was so urban cowboy we were embarrassed," Gibbons says. "If I weren't such a cheapskate we could go the $19.95 package and probably have more clothing to choose from."
Christopher Fox, the paper's webmaster, gave the avatar the name Amy Sweets, liking the country ring to it. He puts words in her mouth for the site's weekly newscast using a text-to-speech function. He has to spell words a certain way, otherwise she's prone to call Limon "Lie-Moan."
Fox chooses her clothes and jewelry from a virtual wardrobe.
"If you ever saw me, I'm the most unlikely person in the world to dress a woman," he says. "I'm a big farmer, rancher guy."
She has limitations.
"I can't make her smile," Fox says.
"I wish I knew how to get her out to the rodeo," Gibbons says. "These cowboys would really enjoy meeting her."
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