Weekend Video Jam: Loose Walk

The saxophonist Dexter Gordon, born 86 years ago on Friday, was one of the first big booming voices of the bebop age and a pretty big fella himself at 6 feet, 6 inches tall. Gordon played in Duke Ellington’s band in the early 1940s and then for Billy Eckstine before falling in with bop crowd [...]

‘Anybody left with the heart of a journalist?’

While many of the now-displaced staffers of the Rocky Mountain News ruminated fondly about their experiences over the years, I found it interesting that two sportswriters were among the few offering openly bitter critiques about the demise of the Denver paper, which published its final print edition and stopped updating its website on Friday. Sports [...]

While I’m shaking off this bug . . .

. . . help yourself to some more sober, somber and hopeful links about the newspaper business and the media industries. There’s no way to sugar-coat the latest news about the news even as I try to remain upbeat about journalists reinventing their careers. The San Francisco Chronicle could be history. Far too many old [...]

Kvetch of the Week: The death rattle that lives on

I was so busy last week continuing to build a sports journalism site, making a freelance deadline for another publication devoted to sports journalism and meeting with fellow journalists involved in an online news startup that I missed one very big development: The news is dying. Most shockingly, the news was given its fatal prognosis [...]

Weekend Video Jam: Midnight Sun

Nancy Wilson turned 71 on Friday.  Here she is at a December 1997 tribute to Ella Fitzgerald:

More signs of hope amid the chaos in journalism

Call me a member of a cult of insane optimists, but I’m constantly encouraged by what displaced journalists are thinking about and doing to recast themselves in their profession. And I’m hopeful about the opportunities that await for the most resourceful journalists even in a terrible economy that’s growing worse. Every week more and more [...]

It’s not the tools, but how you use them

When I first made the switch from print reporter to Web producer, I never thought I’d acquire the initial technical skills that seemed so daunting. That first month on the Web felt like purgatory, indeed the ninth circle. I was convinced I was not put on this earth to do HTML coding or understand the [...]

Some needed talk about the costs of journalism

As the debate continued last week over how to (or even whether to) pay for general interest news online, there were a few insights from bloggers and commenters who had the audacity to bring the subject of journalists — and especially how to pay them — squarely back into the matter. I highlight a few [...]

Kvetch of the Week: Boycott, schmoycott!

This one would be uproariously funny if he weren’t so serious. But Los Angeles-based journalist T.J. Sullivan mobilized the Journosphere into invasion-force strength this week by suggesting that newspapers should shut down their Web sites for a day — he suggests July 4 — to show those Internet freeloaders that what they consume comes with [...]

Weekend Video Jam: My Funny Valentine

There are so many wonderful versions of this jazz classic, but I think Chet Baker’s recording is my favorite. Unlike other videos featured here, I wasn’t able to find a link to a live recording. But there’s a haunting photo of a young Baker, before his heroin and cocaine addictions took their terrible toll. What [...]