When my brother was about five years old, I gave him a carved onyx turtle for his birthday. I still have a snapshot of his ear-to-ear grin as he clutched his palm-sized prize. He was so innocently oblivious of the war then raging across the American fabric and the death toll in Vietnam. Turtles became…
So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. –Molly Ivins I am one lucky journo. So many times in the past 30 years I paused, looked up to the heavens, and thanked the stars that someone was actually paying me…
What is Twitter? It is like a microblog, a place to say your piece, or Tweet, in 140 characters or less. And it is a place to listen. Unlike my soapbox of a blog, my Twitter home page is actually a waterfall of other people’s words, blended in a real time river from streams around…
I come from the “follow-the-money” school of journalism, so I’ve written about more than my share of billions over the years. But Alan Mutter took my breath away with his post cataloging the staggering volume of dollars that have fled newspaper help wanted, or so-called “recruitment” ads. Newspapers have lost more than half of their…
The students and I talked current events today in my Web Publishing and Design class, and the chit chat wasn’t about the Super Bowl or Super Duper Tuesday. It was about Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo and what that could mean for all of us. One among them knew that Google’s CEO reportedly called Yahoo’s CEO…
Some followup notes from my delightful conversation this morning on KNPR’s State of Nevada, with host Dave Berns and his panel of so-called “witty academics.” (The audio with David Damore, Ken Fernandez and me from University of Nevada, Las Vegas and Eric Herzik of University of Nevada, Reno, is here.) During the show, I mentioned…
That’s one of my basic rules of journalism, and never has it been so delightfully true as today, when we can not only tell you what someone said, but let you hear how they said it — in their own voice. One of my students got a very rude awakening last semester thanks to an…
Thanks to the printing press, the mail coach and the steam packet—gifts beyond the gifts of fairies—we can all see and hear what each other are doing, and do and read the same things nearly at the same time. — Maria Edgeworth, (1767-1849) Irish author (thanks to Ted Pease and his alert WORDster Louise Montgomery)…
J.D. Lasica has a very interesting post here from a session at the Aspen Institute and San Francisco State University’s Roundtable on Mobile Media and Civic Engagement. He poses the notion of a “posse” of collaborators who could use Twitter to send questions to a reporter who is covering a news event. It sounds like…
What’s Happening Cover Originally uploaded by Something To See Thanks to Facebook and LinkedIn, I’ve been stumbling across a bunch of not-so-old friends, people I haven’t seen in many, many moons. Many of them have gone on to do wonderful things while I was in another time zone, doing something else. That’s the case with…