I had a delightful conversation yesterday with Don Wasek, co-owner of Buc-ee’s, and an acknowledged novice blogger. “I am new at this,” he said in an email responding to my complaint that the Buc-ee’s blog had lifted my words. Then he asked if he could call me for some advice. We chatted on the phone…
I’ve been doing this journalism gig for a good while now, and never before have I had to take on an imaginary beaver for a very real case of plagiarism. But Buc-ee’s gone and done it now. He stole the words right off of my blog and stacked them over here. If the beaver had…
The Project for Excellence in Journalism just released a nice summary of the content on user-driven news sites Reddit, Digg and Del.icio.us, but I think the authors of the report missed the point. The report found little or no overlap between the stories that were pushed to the top of the page on the user-driven…
Thanks to my dear friend, colleague and adopted sister, Holly Hegeman, who saved and republished on her blog today the words I wrote when I was an editor at TheStreet.com to describe that awful September morning: At 8:26 a.m. I sent an Instant Message to our market columnist, Bill Meehan, asking if he’d be sending…
I once said that I left newspapers in the late 1990s because I didn’t want to be encased in amber. That’s cold, I know, but true. I’ve worked for more than my share of “former” newspapers. And at the surviving papers today, I’m seeing many bosses do the blame game and have ugly public panic…
OK, so we screwed up. By we I mean the people such as me who were running news Websites. When we did it, you rightfully hated it. What’s remarkable is that Facebook is doing it and you love it so much you can’t get enough of it. And I think it has some tremendous —…
Buc-ee’s in Luling, Texas is fast becoming the Wall Drug of the 3.5-hour stretch of Interstate 10 between Houston and San Antonio. They’ve got a couple dozen billboards along the highway, including one that says, “Eat here, get gas,” and my husband’s favorite, “Ice. Made from scratch.” Since we drive the route often to go…
Jay Rosen has some provocative things to say today about how well Karl Rove played the press corps and how, in his opinion, members of the media aren’t writing everything they know about Rove’s wily ways. I really, really respect Jay, but I think he’s gone coastal on us here — East Coastal. News flash:…
Linda Greenhouse’s snit-fit over C-SPAN’s attempt to record her appearance in Washington D.C. at a journalism educators’ conference Friday is a stunning show of arrogance and cluelessness. (Here’s the take on it by Columbia Journalism Review, and here is this morning’s limp defense of her move by Slate.) In an interview with the AEJMC Reporter,…
The other day I found something extremely cool hidden in plain view on Facebook, something that may spell more gloom for online newspaper classifieds, and which might even take a chunk out of eBay and Craigslist. I found myself in possession of two extra puppies, thanks so some lout who dumped them in our yard…