Things you find in the bottom of a box of old computer disks. In its heyday when I worked there, 1984-87, “MultiMate Word Processor” was not only international, it was a best seller and, you might say, almost matchless. Its…
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When Hearst sang “Cuba, cheer up!”
As the U.S.A. reopens a Havana embassy, and Puerto Rico struggles with financial problems, perhaps it’s time to look back at a century of history — and the news media’s sometimes multimedia role in setting agendas that people might, in…
Hemingway & Gellhorn, and The Newsroom
Things are looking up in the “recent examples” department for my fall course on the portrayal of journalists in popular culture. HBO’s famous-writers docudrama about Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway reminds me a bit of United Press’s “Soldiers of the…
Tagged with: biography, hbo, jheroes, journalists, journofilm, jpop, tv
Posted in biography, History, jheroes, Journalism, popular culture, students, Television
Posted in biography, History, jheroes, Journalism, popular culture, students, Television
When a Pickle Showed Patriotic Colors
A reminiscence: According to one of the authors, this was an April Fool story that got misdirected to the Fourth of July. Back in the summer of 1979, I was writing the daily “People in the News” column that ran…
What writing is…
The “quick Christmas break research project” that I began two and a half years ago keeps leading to new things, most of which I’m recording at my Newspaper Heroes on the Air site (jheroes.com for short), which is primarily about…
Step Away from the Mouse
Macintosh users may just yawn when Jane Wells of WordPress starts out her “Now More Than Ever: Just Write” essay with the demise of Internet Explorer’s old version, but she gets downright inspiring after that: WordPress (and Firefox and Google…
When newspapers had…
Editor Carole Tarrant of The Roanoke Times mentioned this picture on Twitter this morning, noting that the dress is made entirely from her newspaper. (The picture was posted by Brent Watts of Channel 7.) That reminded me of a poem…
Happy 30th anniversary to my first computer
Harry McCracken, who suffered through being my editor at three different magazines, has written a fascinating history of one of the first “boom, then bust” computer companies: The one I bought my first computer from. In fact, its going bust…
Why, Baby, Why? Shaky link to history at USAToday.com
Don’t let your robot-editor hurt your credibility End of summer ‘lull’ opens opportunities – USATODAY.com. The “End of summer…” in that headline link might hint that I’m not keeping up with the news. But I just stumbled on USA Today…
Behind the Microphone
Archive.org has had copies of this film at various resolutions for years, but I just noticed that it’s now at YouTube too, which means I can embed it here for easy reference. Titled “Back of the Mike,” this nine-minute 1938…
