In the waning days of my career as a newspaper reporter, my colleagues and I talked a lot about pirate ships. The notion came from a piece David Carr wrote shortly before the death of Ben Bradlee, in which Carr described Bradlee as a pirate, and the Washington Post as his ship. I think it was Jeff Proctor …
I heard a great talk this afternoon by Laura Paskus, a journalist here in New Mexico who recently launched a climate change project under the umbrella of New Mexico in Depth, a non-profit news organization. I also made a financial contribution to support the work, and I would encourage others to do the same. Here …
Continue reading ‘Journalism, “public goods”, and climate change in New Mexico’ »
Oh my, this picture of journalism: That’s my old friend Jim Timmermann, the best editor I ever had, who died last week. He wouldn’t want me to bury the lede. A few days ago, staring at a computer monitor in frustration as I tried to figure out what to type, I quipped thus…. Journalism 1) Understand …
Continue reading ‘The best editor I ever had mostly wasn’t my editor’ »
Ian James at the Desert Sun this week took on the journalistic task of rounding up the back-and-forth over the politics, law, policy, and science of the Cadiz project, a proposal to pump groundwater in the deserts of Southern California and ship it off for use in coastal plain cities. Ian, who’s earned a reputation …
Continue reading ‘Cadiz, scientization, and how Dan Sarewitz almost drove me out of journalism’ »
At the end of a marvelous twitter soliloquy on Hegel, Locke, Dewey, and the implications of last night’s meeting on sex education in Vegas schools, Las Vegas Sun politics editor Scott Lucas concluded with this: Anyways, I'm just a journalist, the fuck do I know? — Scott Lucas (@ScottLucasNV) September 30, 2015 Havin’ that …
Some things I learned from the late Richard Pipes.
I joined the Albuquerque Journal in 1990 in what I now think of as “the golden age of journalism”. That’s shorthand for reliable access to expense account travel, but something more. If, as it often was, the story happened to be at a nuclear waste dump in southeastern New Mexico, or at an Air Force …
Tom Curwen has a great story in today’s Los Angeles Times of the sort that I’d like to see more of – beyond “OMG California is toast” drought coverage to look at what works in the state’s water management, what sort of adaptive capacity exists in the places where water is not running out. Which, …
Brian Devine has written one of those special pieces that made me smack my forehead repeatedly and say, “Yeah, that!”: To conflate the myriad problems of water in California into a single problem is the hallmark of a generalist reporter on deadline, as if I wrote that the Detroit auto industry’s collapse was because they made …
Continue reading ‘Deconstructing media coverage of the California drought’ »
Matt Weiser, who has ably served so many of us as a guide to the complexities of California water, is leaving the Sacramento Bee.