The legendary Sun-Times columnist is dead at 91. He was still on the job as recently as last week.
Author: tom
How to get rich in newspapers
It used to be you had to spend your entire career in Milwaukee, where the Journal’s employee-ownership setup made fatcats out of lots of ordinary newsies. Those days are gone now, because the company’s publicly held and the money that…
Take your medicine
And read up on the lessons the Arab version of CNN is supposed to be teaching us.
Imagine that…
A music mag for people over 30. Mr. Light said virtually all the current music publications are youth-oriented, without much of interest to someone over 30 who purchases boxed sets by artists like Bob Dylan and samples the work of…
Riding with the Marines
John Koopman of the San Francisco Chronicle was embedded with a Marine combat unit in Iraq. The first chapter of his account is posted here. He’s the rare newsie with a military background, having done a four-year peacetime hitch in…
Tracking police hiring
Derek Willis of The Scoop points to an interesting bit of reportage in the Dallas Morning News: One recently hired officer had to pay $1,200 in traffic tickets and drove with a suspended license 8 months before being fired. The…
Concert account
We saw Ramsey Lewis and Nancy Wilson. Summed up here.
Deep Purple CDs found in shuttle wreckage
… and the husband of the astronaut who took them into orbit gave them to the band. I’m sure that any minute now the RIAA will sue, claiming that taking CDs into space was a violation of copyright law. Link…
Hot times in Wisconsin
I got this tale of old-timey newspaper technology from Rich Eggleston, who works for the Wisconsin Alliance of Cities. Tom… In the age before computer prices came so far down that even the AP could afford to buy them in…
West Coast newsies, fess up:
Your paper probably did a stroke piece on that new Disney Hall in Los Angeles, didn’t it? Seems everybody was mad for the thing; William Powers of National Journal describes the carnage, then offers this aside on why we write…