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…
Author: tom
Get the nearby news
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…
Story idea of the day
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…
Link payback
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…
Smart vs. dumb competition
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…
CJR’s campaign blog rules
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.…
Oops
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…
Big-time copy chiefing
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.…
Two wrongs don’t make a right dept.
Finally, proof of my suspicion that Michael Moore is the Rush Limbaugh of the left. Coming up on Radio of the Left: Our Lies are Better than Their Lies.
A folding screen
For electronic newpapers that can be downloaded from a cellphone. Also adaptable for surfaces like car dashboards (and coming soon: the ability to surf the Web in the shower. I’ve always hated the surfing time lost to personal hygiene. After…