And what if he weren’t a journalist?

I wrote a post over at the Idea Peepshow, a site that’s team-written by all of us at Fast Horse, that I thought y’all might find interesting. Feel free to pick up the discussion here or there; either way, I’m eager to hear what you think about this:
New York Times reporter David Rohde had been [...]

The Daily Show Visits the New York Times

Why would the folks at the New York Times think they could come out ahead when The Daily Show calls? (Sorry: Can’t get the vid up.)
Enjoy.

One More Technology on the Scrapheap

Being an old guy has very few advantages as far as I can tell, but one is the perspective of time.  In my 50 years I have seen more technologies than I can remember arrive with the herald of great expectations only to expire with a whimper.

CB radios
8-track cassettes
Cassettes
Film
VCRs
Floppy disks
CDs/DVDs
Zip Drives
Fax machines
Blogs

Blogs?  Wait a minute, [...]

Erasing the past

If you speak with a more cautious type, he might remind you that you shouldn’t publish anything on the Web you wouldn’t show your mother (happy pre-Mother’s Day, by the way) — you know, because once you hit “publish,” it’s “out there” forever.
Well, sure, that’s true. Kinta*. But there are plenty of cases where that’s [...]

‘I love the Weather & Opera section’

Have you seen the TV ads for the New York Times’ “weekender subscription”? The ones in which the paper is dumbed down and made to seem more hip for folks who’d only care about the fancy boots blathered about in the Style section?
Then you’ll love this. When you’re done watching it, get away from the [...]

Fixing the Newspaper Business or “Do I Have to Do Everything Around Here?”

This has been on my to-do list for a while but it keeps getting pushed downstream by other, more pressing issues.   The volume of whining – along with the complaints about the whining – has gotten so loud, though, I figured I’d better take an hour or two and get it done:
“#23: Fix newspaper business.”
Pay [...]

The New York Times Sells Herself

The Gray Lady began selling herself Monday—she sold an ad on the front page. The front page has long been considered the one place in a newspaper you would never allow advertisers to contaminate. And now our nation’s newspaper of record, the New York Times, has committed an act comparable to Joseph Pulitizer’s running sensationalized [...]

Still ‘obliterated’

This spring, three of us wrote about 7,700-word New York Times analysis of the “Pentagon’s hidden hand” behind the retired generals who were paraded around major media outlets as objective commentators.
At least one of those generals is still rockin’ the “objective analyst” gig on a regular basis.
Access like this does not come cheap, but it [...]

“…On the Shoulders of Giants”

“If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
- Sir Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac had it right.  Even a pygmy like me can see further by building on the works of others.  One of those I’ve leaned on heavily during the last several months of increasing election addiction has been [...]

Weapons of Mass Deflection (WMD)

Trailing candidates often try to deflect the charges that are hurting them by changing the subject. So with McCain palin’, McCain-Palin is deflecting charges about the economy by accusing Barack Obama of “palling around with terrorists.”
Palin’s pallin’ accusation refers to Bill Ayers, who was on the run in the 1970s after a bomb he [...]