Now I’m up against four other spearkers on the first morning. So far I have the longest title: “The Future Doesn’t Need Us: Web Logs and the End of Editing as We’ve Known it.” See, blogging causes a tendency to run on at the keyboard. I’ve got enough remarks to fill about a half-hour...
… with “kinder, gentler.” Can we please toss this one out of the airlock, please? The vacuum of space would do it some good. The tipping-point passage: Toner notes that the candidates as a whole are appealing “to a far more polarized, us-against-them electorate” than existed during the centrist Clinton administration and the kinder,...
Tim Porter links to interesting details about how people are most inclined to open a newspaper for local news — several times more likely than they would be for TV or the Internet. The glass offices where this sinks in are not in papers with circulations below, say, 250,000. The place where it needs...
A filmmaker went on an all-McDonald’s diet and it made him sick as a dog. Within a few days of beginning his drive-through diet, Spurlock, 33, was vomiting out the window of his car, and doctors who examined him were shocked at how rapidly Spurlock’s entire body deteriorated. “It was really crazy – my...
Debra Galant, who writes from New Jersey for the New York Times, has a blog in which she explains the universe. Here’s an Onionesque take on the subject of “Open Heart Fundraisers.” WUTEGGSIT, N.J. — The Wuteggsit PTA was devastated today to learn that its spring open-heart surgery fundraiser will be cancelled because of...
A reporter writes to Jay Rosen complaining about the pressures of of the campaign trail. Reporter thinks he doesn’t want to focus on the horse-race and does want to focus on what voters are talking about, what goes into their candidate preferences, etc. But the bosses back at the main newsroom put constant pressure...
You’d be forgiven for thinking the folks at Columbia Journalism Review are a gang of navel-gazing worrywarts … sometimes it seems like 90 percent of their coverage is of the “latest example of the sad state of modern journalism” variety. If we’re not becoming better newsies and better human beings, it’s not for the...
From Sridhar Pappu’s latest column. While perhaps a reasoned, well-thought basis for a beat, The Times assigning a reporter to cover conservatives still feels strange, if not off-putting?a little like Judd Nelson peering through the bathroom window at Phoebe Cates in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Sorry, Mr. Pappu, that was Judge Reinhold. Update:...
Bill Walsh, national desk copy chief at the Washington Post, on copy chiefing: Doing a copy-chief job is like having 1,000 baseballs simultaneously dropped on you — and then being asked why in the world you didn’t knock ball No. 778 (which, after all, was right in your strike zone) out of the park....
Take me out to the ballbame
It’s funny about how everybody whines about horse-race coverage of the elections and everybody wishes it would go away. Problem is: it can’t. Say you tune in to a ballgame while you’re channel surfing. You see a closeup of one of your favorite players so you pause for a minute to catch a bit...
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