
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=long-live-the-web Tim Berners-Lee’s “20 years ago this month” article for the December issue of Scientific American is a great issue-oriented summary of Web history — and a plea for online entrepreneurs to adopt policies of openness rather than creating “closed…