Scott Kingsley, formerly the assistant manager editor for visuals at The Providence Journal until the layoff of 18 newsroom staffers in February, has folded the print and online Stimulus Times he and a handful of other former staffers launched April 15. They produced three issues.

Scott emails, in response to my query,

Well ... When we were first laid off I was worried that that I needed to do something ... fast ... just to keep moving to get off the end of the couch. So we cooked up our plan and moved forward, never anticipating that we would have other things to do to take up our time. For a month or so we killed ourselves. We produced and distributed three issues we are proud of and readers seemed to like. (Meredith Marsh) had the website looking good and it was receiving a little traffic (mostly from curious newspaper connections, I'm guessing). And we were exhausted.

(Former Projo.com reporter) Brandie Jefferson was hitting her groove with the Stimu-Bits. David DelPoio had a home for videos. Denise Bass was doing some ad design and helping with delivery. My wife, Coleen, was writing, editing and working hard to keep me from embarrassing all of us.

In a month we went from being sketchy unknowns to being warmly greeted by most shop owners when we delivered on Wednesdays. Folks inquired about advertising and made positive comments on the content. Most people assumed we had a political agenda ... I swear we didn't ... but it made for some interesting conversations as we walked around the East Side. It was good to get out on the street again and talk to folks. More newspaper managers should do it. I'm not taking a shot at anyone, it was just eye-opening to be out in the daily mix again.

The short answer is that while it was fun, none of us has the time and money for a hobby. We could have worked ourselves to death to break even if we didn't pay ourselves. And realizing that, putting a fork in the project seemed like the smartest thing to do.

The rap video on the site now was in the works for weeks so we finished it up and posted it. Kai is smart and wrote a fun piece so it would have been a shame to waste it. We have no immediate plans to do anything else with the website, but it's a good name and we might morph it into something useful.

Here's that video, from Stimulus Times:

Video by David DelPoio
"Stimulus Package" - a music video featuringMC Kai Huang, B-boy Reed Frye and beatboxer Kurt Walters. Kai penned the rap about our current economic situation, he is an emcee and spoken word poet from Brown University.