Journalism

College Pals Win Pulitzer Prizes for Katrina Coverage

While attending the University of Texas at Arlington from 1987-88, my wife and I wrote for The Shorthorn, a student newspaper filled with gifted, headstrong and completely insufferable journalists who were already clearing space on the mantle for Pulitzer Prizes. We'd get into such gigantic battles at press time you'd have thought that students at the commuter school actually read the paper. Two of my Shorthorn colleagues just won Pulitzers for breaking news photography: Michael Ainsworth ... (read more)

2006/04/19

Newspaper's Cheapness Hurts My Circulation

When I worked at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in the early '90s, the place was filled to the rafters with copies of the day's newspaper, free for the taking. I loved reading papers that were fresh off the presses and still had "new news smell," and on Saturday mornings I ransacked the place looking for the bulldog edition. The bulldog, a Sunday edition published a day early for people who wanted 24 hours head start on everyone else, came out ahead of the day's news. Editors had license to fill ... (read more)

2006/04/11

East Africa Suffers Worst Famine in Decades

I've written before about the journalist Anna Badkhen, who filed incredible reports from Iraq for the San Francisco Chronicle on the day-to-day lives of soldiers and Iraqis. She's now in Kenya, covering a drought across East Africa that has left millions of people dependent on food aid that's running out: Now Isaaq's family -- her husband, Nur Muhammad, and their children, ranging in ages from 1 to 10 -- have no livestock to sell, and nothing of their own to eat or drink. They left the bush and ... (read more)

2006/03/26

Damon Wayans Makes His Mark

New York Daily News columnist Stanley Crouch blasts Damon Wayans' attempt to trademark the word "N---a" for a clothing line and other uses, a story I covered for Wired News: He wants to put it on apparel and whatnot. So far, he has not been successful but one can imagine young American kids wearing that word emblazoned on clothes and listening to rap "songs" in which the N-word frequently appears, in conjunction with "bitches" and "hos," among other denigrations. Of course, there is a defense. ... (read more)

2006/02/28

I'm a Pig at Breakfast

I turned in a feature story on Tuesday, the first paid journalism I've done for a publication since leaving the Ask Ed Brice column at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 2000. Like many bloggers, I've had a lot to say about journalism over the years, and I internalized the self-glorifying notion that I practice a form of it here on Workbench. But after a few days of conducting interviews, checking facts and documenting all of my sources for an editor, I was reminded of a substantial difference ... (read more)

2006/02/15

My Guid Could Beat Up Your Guid

Workbench was named Feedster's Feed of the Year, leading Greg Knauss to send this congratulatory e-mail: I've thought for a long time that Workbench's RSS 2.0 feed was really well-formed, and its use of optional attributes exemplary. He's got a well-designed guid format, and his output in areas where the standards document is ambiguous* is always consistent. What? They were talking about the content, too? Even better! * No, I couldn't resist. I've been hoping for years that someone would peek ... (read more)

2006/01/04

Little Red Book, Big Fat Apology

New Bedford Standard-Times Editor Bob Unger has responded to the Little Red Book hoax that ran in the newspaper, acknowledging that the original story should not have run until they interviewed the student making the claim: We -- reporter and editors -- failed here because we put our faith in what two college professors told us. We should have held off publishing the story until we had a chance to judge the student's credibility for ourselves. The student's name continues to be kept private, to ... (read more)

2006/01/04

Suck.Com Domain Hijacked by Smut Merchant

Over the holidays, Suck.Com stopped being a failed online magazine for a few days and began a new life as a porn portal. This was apparently a domain name hijack, because the portal's gone and the old site's archives are now restored. While Suck was porn, Steve Baldwin wrote a bitter sendoff: Given that this is certainly the end of suck.com's long journey as a project, one must ask: was suck.com ever really about anything more than the wiles and whims of its owners? Wasn't this the joke all the ... (read more)

2006/01/03

Student's Little Red Hoax Circles the Globe

The Drudge Retort fell for a hoax earlier this month, passing along a newspaper's report that a college student was investigated by the Department of Homeland Security for requesting Mao Zedong's Little Red Book on interlibrary loan. The student admitted on Friday it was a little red lie. I hate falling for stuff like this, because I like to think I was occasionally listening in class when I earned a journalism degree from the University of North Texas. In hindsight there were strong reasons to ... (read more)

2005/12/27

The Story of Jimmy Wales and Bomis Babes

In an interview with Wired News, Wikipedia leader Jimmy Wales renewed his objection to the statement that Bomis Babes was pornographic: If R-rated movies are soft porn, it was porn. In other words, no, it was not. That description is inaccurate. If you're not exceptionally proud of the erotic web site you ran before the dot-com bust, a defense that hinges on the definition of soft pornography probably won't help matters. As someone who grew up after cable television and before the web, I ... (read more)

2005/12/20

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