All news is the stuff of history. But some deserves more than a dusty archive to be stumbled upon by a research scholar. It is an immediate marker that demands be heeded for the ages. We are living in … Read more
Early in my career, while working in Minnesota as a reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, I fell in love with F. Scott Fitzgerald, the city’s most famous native writer. It may have had something to do … Read more
Now for something fun and funky, or at least distracting, but these days I’m sure we could all use fun and funky, or at least distracting. A starter’s guide to Stephen King, courtesy of … Read more
With a cell phone, an eye for evocative detail and 50 pages of notes, Brittny Mejia of the Los Angeles Times turned a day at a grocery store into a portrait of a community challenged and changed by … Read more
They are no longer novel, these personal stories the front lines of the coronavirus. Reporters are barred from the kind of immersion that allows eye-witness accounts from that expanding front. We can interview people who are at the heart … Read more
EDITOR’S NOTE: This piece is published in partnership with our friends at the Poynter Institute I was half-way through an essay on how the experience of news — especially in the midst of a pandemic — felt like a … Read more
A friend reached out this past week, asking if I would chat with a friend of his. The second friend — I’ll call her J — runs a non-profit news organization on the West Coast. It was barely a … Read more
My wife, Karen, and I happen to have for more than a decade a good Catholic pastor, Msgr. Robert Gibbons. Among his many gifts, he is a news junkie and is endlessly fascinated with language and literature. (He is … Read more
We’re all reinventing ourselves in this suddenly sideways world. So here’s my reinvention story, and the theme that goes with it: Do it for love. The micro of what I did in the last 18 months was teach myself … Read more
The job I moved back to New Hampshire for was not Shift Supervisor at the local branch of a national drug store chain. Back in February, I folded up five years of full-time freelancing to take a “perfect” journalism … Read more
