Apologies to Joao Silva/New York Times for using their photo. But look: American soldiers walking past a spray-painted blast wall in Al Awad, Iraq, yesterday. The first time I voted in a presidential election was in the 2000 election. I was a senior in college in New Hampshire. I voted absentee in Alaska. Before election [...]
The Hitch is right; San Francisco hasn’t got it. Not anymore. From Vanity Fair (the emphasis is my own): It isn’t possible to quantify the extent to which society and culture are indebted to Bohemia. In every age in every successful country, it has been important that at least a small part of the cityscape [...]
It’s easy to babble. It’s hard to write short. Writing short is a decent thing to do; it saves your reader’s precious time. But once you’re in that mode of writing, it seems even harder to write long. I usually inject a lot of “very”s. I find that very effective. Or, you have to be [...]
There are several interesting stories coming out of the crane accident in New York City. One was Susan Dominus’s portrait of the typical scene at Fubar, which occupied the ground floor of the destroyed townhouse on East 50th. Although the occupations of the regulars comes as a surprise (advertising, television cameraman, programmer) and doesn’t exactly [...]
Matt Krupnick published an article about the fallout from the dean search at Berkeley’s journalism school in the Contra Costa Times yesterday (“UC Berkeley mum on why dean hire bailed out”). I think it’s worth a read, if only for the summing up that hasn’t appeared anywhere else–and he did a good job considering few [...]
“Crunch!”? Really? A huge cargo ship bumps into the Bay Bridge and spills 58,000 gallons of bunker fuel–not just oil, but bunker fuel–and this is the Chronicle’s headline? Is it supposed to be a joke? When I looked at my copy this morning, I originally thought this was a feature recapping some little disaster that I [...]
John Peabody’s got an inside source who says: 1. There were tenure disagreements. And, 2. potential inaccuracies that are minor, if they exist at all, were in Lynch’s CV. John Peabody, don’t you remember the finger-wagging admonition not to traffic in rumor and scuttlebut? From our own interim dean, no less? Remember Day 1 of [...]
Wrote this on Tuesday: John Peabody has a nice rundown of the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism’s meeting on the surprise withdrawal of Dianne Lynch as incoming dean. She is, and will remain, dean of the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College. To recap: Lynch was the favorite candidate among the finalists [...]
In June, the Chronicle ran a good story about a woman who discovered—and pursued—the person who had stolen her identity. It is engaging to read and a lucky score for the Chronicle, a story like that, one that unfolds cinematically and neatly. There are advantages to being the only show in town, as far as [...]
So it’s taken me a while to get around to this but here goes. On the San Francisco Chronicle‘s web site, a new blog popped up earlier this month: “Colleagues Remembered.” Based on the title, it sounds like a bunch of death notices. But it’s actually a series of tributes to various editors and reporters [...]
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