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…

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…