Jim Rittenhouse's semidaily journal of news, commentary and reports
Dayton Daily News article; the reporter’s adopted child from China was first raised by a foster family in China, who the child hadn’t forgotten -and who hadn’t forgotten her. Great story about how the foster family and the adoptive family got in contact… Considering the whole thing with the twins and sisterfar, this hits home [...]
The local suburban daily newspaper, the Daily Herald, is reprinting the Newsweek story on the twins with different photos: http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=342760
Discussion about a bailout bill for newspapers if they reorganize as 501c3 not-for-profits; the President had this to say about it: Obama said that good journalism is “critical to the health of our democracy,” but expressed concern toward growing tends in reporting — especially on political blogs, from which a groundswell of support for his [...]
Note: one of my absolute favorite writers online was and is a fellow named Dan Froomkin – a fearless journalist who writes a blog for the Washington Post Online entitled White House Watch. (He is also found at Nieman Watchdog out of Harvard University.) Essentially, the OpEd area (and reporting) for the WaPo was a [...]
The Dayton, Ohio area authority in charge of public transport is having a banner year in ridership terms; my old hometown is being pounded with the collapse of Big Auto, principally GM. However, sales tax revenues funding the authority have dried up, and they are cutting service and raising fares…but they’re making sure that the [...]
The thing is definitely very useful, and I love it in a lot of ways. I have around six pages of Things To Read on it, and I’ve bought a small handful of books. Bought: Dumb Money: How Our Greatest Financial Minds Bankrupted the Nation by Daniel Gross Escape from Hell by Larry Niven Rolling [...]
If the Seattle Press-Intelligencier survives the next month, it will be as a online paper only. Meanwhile, the Rocky Mountain News of Denver is about to cease publishing. The new US government budget (PDF link) under Obama is going to cap federal employee raises (the automatic kind) to 2% next year; the base this last [...]
It wasn’t the ideology, it was (1) a major and constant sloppiness with factual statements (requiring the paper to apologize and run retractions over and over again when caught), (2) heavy use of using the column for advocacy of his pet pols who he’d fed ideas to, and (3) smacking around the NYT in public [...]
The magazine / publishing industry is badly hurt. New web site: Magazine Death Pool, listing Magazines That Have Gone Under. Electronic Gaming Monthly, Country Home, Plenty, Wondertime and so on. Their lede is that magazines are becoming a luxury if the Internet / Web is available. Mad Magazine is going monthly -> quarterly. Diamond Distributing [...]
William Kristol’s last column for the NYT was in today’s paper.
With a picture front and center of our favorite skater (story found here): caption: “Lombard skating coach Tara Usrey, left, helps Meredith Rittenhouse of Lombard get ready to perform her routine at the Aurora Skate Center.” No, Mere does not live in Lombard, that’s just where the rink is.
On the way to the airport to pick up Meredith Ellen, I was droning on to Susan and Meredith Grace and Kathy about the new Kindle, and all that it can do. (It’s internet-active, and you can tool down the highway and surf the internet…without flash and with problems in rendering graphics and page cosntructs, [...]
I, as some of you have probably figured out, am a total news junkie. Yes, it’s true. However, we don’t subscribe to any newspapers. 99.99% of my news stuff is online. *If* I end up with a Kindle for Christmas, I’m thinking about subscribing to the NYT, and maybe the WaPost or the Tribune. But [...]