Mark Buehrle of the Chicago White Sox pitched a perfect game last week, and it strikes me (pun mostly intended) that the perfect game is the perfect convergence of two of the ways that you can understand and enjoy baseball (for those who do so): statistics and stories. It’s also a good way to understand […]

I tweeted a few weeks ago about the New York Observer firing my favorite movie critic, Andrew Sarris, and a week ago, the NY Times ran an article calling him a “survivor of film criticism’s heroic age.” But I hardly care about Sarris championing auteur theory or about his rivalry with Pauline Kael (even though […]

I had this article by Clay Shirky up in my browser while writing that last post, but hadn’t yet read it. I think it touches on some of the same idea of “value” as my previous post, though Shirky calls it “leverage.”

I hate to cite Mediaite, both because I dislike the word, and also because it’s de rigeur these days to either criticize or mock Dan Abrams and his site. But here goes. This story exemplifies something I started thinking about last night while listening to Jeff Jarvis’s Media Talk USA. In the Mediaite story, Rachel […]

C.W. Anderson posted a version of a talk he gave recently on the future of j-schools. While I don’t necessarily agree with every point, this is a person I could have a reasonable discussion with–unlike the boobery of the kill-j-school-now crowd. A brief excerpt of his argument: A paradox of the current media moment is […]

I haven’t been blogging much on my own blog, but in the last few months, I’ve come across two articles/blog posts on other sites that got my dander up enough for me to comment. Herewith, those two responses. First one was a response to an article on New York Magazine’s Daily Intel site. The article, […]

The NY Times has started, in the last week or so, to note when an article on nytimes.com has appeared in print. It gives the date, the section, and the page number. I don’t know what prompted this change, or what good it does, unless you’re trying to put together a bibliography for an academic […]

I was working on my PowerPoint for my presentation today at the AEJMC convention, trying to find online photos of University of Wisconsin journalism instruction pioneer Willard Bleyer and found a Wisconsin page that mentioned that he and First Amendment theorist and philosopher Alexander Meiklejohn overlapped in their time at Wisconsin, and that both were […]

I really like a lot of what ProPublica is doing. I think the not-for-profit model is a good idea, if not the future of professional journalism. And I don’t just say this because I met Paul Steiger in his last week at the WSJ. But their daily email is impossible to read. It’s like a […]

Proposition, in re the “wardrobe malfunction” decision: The Federal Communications Commission is at best an out-of-touch relic from an earlier era (that of the “mass media”) and at worst is unconstitutional. Discuss.