Journalism

Steve Gillmor's Got My Attention

Steve Gillmor parted company with ZDNet and shut down his InfoRouter blog a few weeks ago, stating afterward on his personal blog that there were "real issues, some of which I can't discuss except by indirection." I was upset to see InfoRouter shuttered, because I've come to appreciate Gillmor's bizarre takes on Web 2.0, which read like tech magazine hype filtered through Dennis Hopper. Cracking open the story lines: engaging Hollywood and the record business. Not by embarrassing or attacking ... (read more)

2006/08/14

The Washington Media are a Joke

After declaring that he is well-known for being funny, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen launches a weird snit today against Stephen Colbert for his speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner: Colbert was not just a failure as a comedian but rude. Rude is not the same as brash. It is not the same as brassy. It is not the same as gutsy or thinking outside the box. Rudeness means taking advantage of the other person's sense of decorum or tradition or civility that keeps that other ... (read more)

2006/05/04

Writer Tells Wikipedia He Got a Divorce

I fleshed out a placeholder entry on Wikipedia this morning, giving the Richardson, Texas, high school where "Jeremy spoke in class today" enough substance to inspire future editors to work on it. I've made around 150 edits to Wikipedia in the past year, most extensively on new bios and the unspeakably hideous "alcopop" drink Zima. Starting new subjects is a lot more fun than defending existing ones from vandalism. My Drudge Retort coconspirator Jonathan Bourne and I worked on the Zima entry as ... (read more)

2006/05/04

All Art Bell, All Romance, All the Time

I'm surprised the mainstream media has no interest in the love life of radio host Art Bell, which has become a lot more interesting than you'd expect of a 60-year-old man. In the last three days, more than 3,000 people have hit Workbench from search engines looking for information on Bell and wife, posting more than 480 comments. I covered the news because people were showing up here Sunday looking for it, thanks to this blog's top placement in Google for the term Art Bell's wife. There's ... (read more)

2006/04/19

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