Category Archives: Uncategorized

When he was a journalist, Ryan Blitstein was one of the best, and he wrote wonderful stuff for me at Miller-McCune and other publications. (One of his pieces I like a lot,about “weathering,” or the negative health effects of long-term, institutional racism on African Americans, is  here.) A while back, he left the scribing biz to become executive director of SCE, a social investment nonprofit in Chicago. But he hasn’t exactly forgotten how to write. Take a look at this piece, “Where Will Digital Learning’s Killer Apps Come From?”, posted on the USC/Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop/Cooney Center Leadership Forum website. It’s the best analysis I’ve seen of the opportunities and difficulties involved in moving forward on the digital education front. And it’s nowhere near as dull as my last sentence might suggest.

When you’ve got a hierarchy of beards, you go with it.

Now I’m not picking on Maine here, or the Bangor Daily News (although that’s one hell of a terrible logo you’ve got there,  BDN), but what’s up with all these godawfully boring stories that, it seems, every damn newspaper in America is doing on the 2010 census? Yes, every 10 years, as the constitution requires, the country has a census. The census information can be used to support and enrich real live news stories in all sorts of ways. But this raft of stories seems to have been ordered up by the stupid assistant city editor of all time, and he must work at most every daily in America, because there are just thousands of non-news “stories” about the census out there, each saying there’s been a census, and our little corner of the world gained (lost) this many people. But wait, let’s reconsider the “daily” I put in the last sentence. This idiocy has infected the new media, too; witness this headline from the Rosemount, Minn. version of Patch.com: “2010 Census Data For Minnesota Expected on Wednesday.” It’s not enough to wait until the census data are out, so you can “report” a newsless story based on the press release the government sent you; to be a truly representative new media reporter of non-news, you have to “advance” something that won’t be news, even when it happens.

With its baroque society murders, ol’-boy corruption, gauche, over the top, nouveau riche style sense and regular outlandishness, Houston has always been a great news town. But this is one meta-step beyond what I thought even Houston was capable of: A county constable is reading the crime news on a major TV station. The constable, Victor Trevino, was in office, I think, in the early 1990s, way back when I was ending my days as a Houston reporter.

As regular readers know, Ed Asner-like curmudgeon though I may be, I’m a sucker for cute animal stories. So here’s a video of otters holding hands. They aren’t important. What they’re doing isn’t really all that interesting. But they are holding hands. And they are otters. And that’s enough for me.

This graphic, from NOAA’s West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center, doesn’t really need any comment, except an expression of sympathy for the Japanese affected by the earthquake.

I am extremely glad to know that Bill Keller’s column yesterday hit its mark,impelling Arianna Huffington to huff and puff and then write this self-involved and defensive rejoinder — and reminding us of the difference between people who type and people who write well. In case you missed Keller’s truly accomplished column, it’s here.

Whoever had the idea that Bill Keller should be a columnist is … a damn genius. If you haven’t already seen this, take a look. Absolutely pitch-perfect, IMHO.

All the Aggregation That’s Fit to Aggregate

www.nytimes.com

How much more of itself can the media consume?

The Atlantic’s Jim Fallows is an interesting, offbeat thinker, and this piece, “Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media,” is Exhibit A in the list of examples that prove his affinity for the counterintuitive. I agree with much of his argument but hold out a bit more hope, I think, that Internet economics will turn around enough so that for profit news operations will be able to support at least some public interest journalism from digital revenues, as Web ad rates rise. Regardless, it’s always interesting to watch Fallows craft an argument in a way that defangs the criticism  he knows is going to come its way.