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.
I no longer have to shave, wear work shirts, and eschew the Oxford comma. The first two I expected. The third has been a pleasant surprise.
Isabel Sanchez, my editor for many years at the Albuquerque Journal, gave me this hourglass as a going away present. The joke has been that I really need a new watch, and that I was just nine months away from my 25th anniversary at the Journal, which is traditionally marked by the gift of a …
I like how Mary Z. Fuka described yesterday’s John Fleck 2.0 launch party – I’m a “literary startup“. I need a clever name with some sort of capital letter in the middle or something. And a logo. I need a logo, right? This morning, the day after I finished up the last stories of a …
On twitter the other day, I was joking that I’ve adopted a new approach to my book research: when confronted with a problem, I first ask, “Did Elinor Ostrom write about this?” Ostrom won the economics Nobel in 2009 for her work on how communities solve common pool resources problems, work that’s central to the …
Actual blog comment spam: I all the time used to study paragraph in news papers but now as I am a user of web therefore from now I am using net for articles or reviews, thanks to web.
A fresh-looking piece of Colorado River journalism made the rounds this week, by Frances Weaver at The Week, about the Colorado River’s current decadal-scale drought. But some of the language had a familiar ring to it. Here’s Weaver: The most immediate cause is 14 years of drought unrivaled in 1,250 years. Here’s Michael Wines in …
Continue reading ‘If the plagiarism is inaccurate, is it still plagiarism?’ »
The tension between scientists and journalists goes back a long time: The vaporings and idle imaginings of the newspaper man, I am compelled to believe, are more acceptable both to landlords and tourists, than any presentation of actual facts. That’s University of California Professor C.B. Bradley, writing in Overland Monthly & Out West Magazine in …
Last spring, I wrote a half-hearted defense of the New York Times decision to shitcan its Green Blog and related decisions: A Green blog is a place where environmenty people go to look for environmenty news. If we’re doing it right, that sort of news is embedded in all sorts of stories rather than a …
Continue reading ‘New York Times green shift: the verdict’ »