Category Archives: News
My mismatched inheritances from my father are a yen for the high country and really lousy hip joints.
I wore out my left hip by 40, replaced it at 43 and wobbled along on my cartilige-free right hip until Dec. 19. The Friday before Christmas, Dr. Aaron Hoffman and his team of orthopedic wizards at the [...]
Every caller gets an answer.
It seemed like a simple promise when I made it 12 years ago. It’s easy to stick to it because the payoff is huge: you don’t learn much from the amen chorus of loyal readers. But you discover a great deal when listening to your loyal critics.
Plus, there’s satisfaction in the careful [...]
When you run an all-Spanish notice, without translation, in the Post Register, asking eastern Idaho Mexican-Americans to call you, you hear from more Idaho Anglos than Idaho Hispanics.
The ad ran Thursday on Page One: “…El Post Register ha contratado a un reportero en el estado de Tlaxcala para cubrir la legada de los paisanos a Mexico…”
It [...]
I paid QWest $150 this week to prove someone fibbed about one of our reporters.
I was probably motivated by vanity (I hate to be wrong about a staffer), but we re-learned an important lesson: Feeling vindicated should refresh our commitment to independent buttressing of reports that bear on people’s character.
This started after I threw a [...]
A half-dozen emailers and a pair of callers griped Monday about our coverage of the local protest rally against California’s new ban on gay marriage. Alongside our story, we re-ran the list of eastern Idaho donors to the Proposition 8 campaign. That list was meant to buttress the idea that eastern Idaho played a key role, but it bugged readers who [...]
“In the tank for Obama?”
White House press experts say to expect something more like “trying to get acquainted with Obama” when the new president takes power.
Saturday night at the Nieman Foundation convocation I’ve been covering at Harvard, “On Point” host Tom Ashbrook led a panel discussion about the press and the new Barack Obama administration. Heaven [...]
Nieman Journalism Lab director Josh Benton says in the era of digital social networks, what may help newspapers survive is…love.
What he referred to was the habit of newspaper people to adopt a defensive crouch, holding their readers at a distance and (after a few too many abusive or ill-informed phone calls) even disliking readers. Yeah, [...]
Retired Washington Post Editor Len Downie, speaking at the Nieman Foundation’s 70th Anniversary convocation led his keynote talk by telling the story of Daily Kos posting a false item about Sarah Palin during the GOP convention. Kos, he said, expessed no moral obligation to the truth. He posts what’s out there and lets people have at [...]
Newspapers do a lousy job of labelling and explaining those odd stories that we call “Analysis.” I’ll stipulate that they do us a great deal of harm because readers know opinion when they see it and we’ve told them there’s only one section for Opinion. (see ethics code section on analysis)
But critics should confront the value [...]
If you think the Editor of the Post Register is a self-important windbag, you’ll be glad to know I’m going to spend the weekend feeling like the insignificant rube that I am.
This weekend in the People’s Republic of Cambridge, MA, I get to attend a conference hosted by the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. “True Grit: Advancing Journalism’s [...]
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