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Showing posts from December, 2008

Farewell, Sweet Prince

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We don’t get many mentors. There are parents, sure, and for some the parents we wish we had. A fortunate few get a great teacher who just keeps on teaching long after you have parted company. In our professional life, it is even less likely that someone will have the generosity and temperament to take in interest in a pup without any house training in whom they somehow see some promise. I am among the luckiest. My mentor was a man named Arthur Spiegelman. Art’s importance to journalism, and to the world he made a better place with his fearless, righteous and unfailingly accurate reporting, is legendary to those of us who worked with him and not nearly well known enough to everyone else. Arthur died on Saturday after a long bout with lung cancer. Illness made it impossible for him to speak, depriving those around him of his incredible conversation and infectious laugh. But Arthur was receiving calls, made to a cell phone of a close friend at his bedside, who would hold it up to his ear

What’s The Story, Pulitzer Folks?

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The Pulitzer Board has decided to open up qualifying publications to include some web sites , which is a step in the right direction. But it continues to exclude magazines, broadcasters and their respective websites -- which seems painfully quaint. The Pulitzer Prizes are meant to celebrate journalism — well, U.S. journalism, but that’s another story. When they were created newspapers were arguably the best gene pool of quality journalism. They were also a major source of slipshod, opinionated, careless writing — which does nothing to explain the Pulitzer Board's current Two Internets policy. The term "Yellow Journalism" was coined during Joseph Pulitzer's New York City newspaper war with William Randolf Hearst, for heaven's sake, an era which saw tabloidy excess that would make today's least conscientious blogger shudder. But — and it seems almost ludicrous to argue what seems so obvious — newspapers are no longer the exclusive or even main conduit for qualit

Sunday in the Perk with MSNBC

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NBC, Third Floor Originally uploaded by John C Abell Apparently all is forgiven at MSNBC even though I won't soon be forgetting my embarrasing faux pas with Contessa Brewer . I got a call Saturday afternoon from a producer for an 8:30 a.m. Sunday hit. The call went straight to voicemail. So did the followup call from the wired.com publicist, on vacation in Florida. I was not playing hard to get. I was in a matinee performance of "Equus" with the family on my daughter's (day after) birthday. When I finally powered up my mobile they were still interested in having me on and, since I have become increasingly enamored of the sound of my own voice (and maybe enjoy the application of professional makeup just a little bit too much, though not to a Sarah Palin degree ) I was glad this opportunity had not passed me by as I tried to process Harry Potter as a sexually confused teen . I gratefully accepted the car both ways and, since we had just been in town all day and my daug