Saturday, October 28, 2006

Saturday aggregation For variety, anything indented and italic today is from me. All the rest (paragraphs that begin with a linked headline and end with a bracketed source name, in case you can't see the indented italics) comes verbatim from my RSS feeds. This post is mostly a test of some problems with my weblog software &/or server. Main problem: New material seems to be posted OK, but the links on the calendar at the top of the page seem to be jammed, Groundhog-Day-like, at Oct. 24. But you still can see the more recent items by goint to the top of the blog (shortcut: http://couranteer.com) and just scrolling the page. Now, on to the aggregation: Challenge: Cleaning up the wildest county in Tennessee. Welcome to Cocke County. How wild is Cocke County? It's so wild there are state and federal probes underway. It's so wild the Knoxville News Sentinel has a massive timeline of its reputation. It's so wild the wildfire-writing, earthquake-editing, riot-reporting... [On Deadline] Offbeat: Bush-masked robber strikes. From the Connecticut brief in today's Across the USA roundup: Torrington -- Police are looking for a robber whose disguise was a rubber mask of President Bush. The victim, Charles Gardner, told police he was on the front steps of... [On Deadline] (Note: I've spent a few nights in the sleepy city of Torrington, which is pretty far from Cocke County. A Bush mask must be serious 'stop the presses' news there. One of the papers that carried the story once ran a story about a guy inventing a red, white and blue pickle. But that was before the Web. The USA Today blog item on the masked robber has turned into a magnet for political debate, but not the most sophisticated.) Editor at Los Angeles Times Urges Others to Question Cuts. Dean Baquet encouraged other editors to push back more against newspaper owners when they propose staff cuts. By Katharine Q. Seelye. [NYT Media] Radical Militant Librarian Tote Bag. As you might imagine, a few women on my flights today were from Internet Librarian. One of them had a fantastic radical militant librarian tote bag. My favorite part is the saying, "The worst part of censorship is ." (That doesn't really work on this blog, does it?) [J's Scratchpad] (Nice, J. The censorship line reminds me of a computer-geek saying I saw someplace recently: "There are 10 kinds of people in the world -- those who understand binary, and those who don't.") Scott Adams 'Hacks' His Brain. First the Dilbert creator loses his voice due to a rare condition known as spasmodic dysphonia. Now he reveals in an amazingly affecting personal blog post how he learned to speak again. In Bodyhack. [Wired] Reflections on five years as editor. Here's [News Sentinel editor Jack McElroy's] upcoming Sunday column reflecting on five years as editor. A big trend I've seen will be no surprise to readers of this blog -- newspapers attempting to build credibility through greater transparency and interactivity. Has it worked? [Upfront Page] Rather's back to make some news. Dan Rather's HDNet series starts next month. Some 19 months after his last "Evening News" for CBS, Dan Rather will return to the anchor desk on Nov. 14 at 8 p.m., when HDNet launches the new weekly series "Dan Rather Reports." The show, anchored by Rather, will be seen in about 4 million homes receiving Mark Cuban's high-definition network. "I'm as happy as I've been since maybe the day I was first able to make a living in journalism..." Rather told the Daily News yesterday. Source: Richard Huff. New York Daily News [via SPJ Press Notes] American Slang, Adapted and Updated What's a "blurker"? Or a "pavement princess"? Or a "plokta"? What does "peeps" mean? Writer Paul Dickson knows. A confessed addict to collecting and identifying slang words, Dickson has written a new and updated dictionary of American slang. [NPR: Authors] Online revenues to take time catching up to print. Merrill Lynch newspaper industry analyst Lauren Rich Fine's latest report finds that it could take newspapers' digital revenues 30 years to make up half of company revenues. "Even if the rapid [online] growth continues for the next few years, we don[base ']t see online representing over 50% of newspaper ad revenues for at least a couple of decades, suggesting that industry profit could stay flat for the foreseeable future," Fine estimated. [Editors Weblog] Tennessee firefighters charged with arson . A fire chief and three other firefighters were jailed on charges of setting ten fires over the past two years. [WBIR] One of the newswriting assignments in our old textbook was a case like that -- a firefighter arrested after suspiciously being first on the scene and even more suspiciously having fire-starting materials in his truck. Some students didn't believe it. 11:15:36 AM    comment []

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