Last week, I saw “Flight,” the critically acclaimed movie starring Denzel Washington. He portrays an airline pilot who, although in the throes of addiction, does a remarkable job of landing a severely stricken plane and saving most of those aboard. The film brought to mind Denny Fitch. Excepting the drug-and-alcohol demons that beset Washington’s character, Mr. […]
Category Archives: Journalism
Three years ago, in writing about the importance of writing your business biography, my tone was almost apopleptic as I related the widespread absence of such bios. At the time, I conveyed three big reasons why it behooves you to craft your story: 1. Distinguish yourself from the competition. 2. Develop a deeper connection with […]
Growing up in journalism, I would periodically hear of the profession’s learning curve, which included making your first mistakes in smaller markets. The key was to learn from those missteps and thereby become less prone to major blunders at larger publications. That was in the 1980s, when a story I wrote in the Marshfield Mariner took […]
Highly recommended reading: “Penn State, My Final Loss of Faith,” by Thomas L. Day, which appeared last month in the Washington Post. It’s an excellent commentary by someone with extensive experience connected to the now-controversial Second Mile charity founded by alleged pedophile Jerry Sandusky. The piece came to my attention today after Day, a fellow Medill alum, […]
What’s next, URLs by the block? Sure, “hyper-local,” as a way of describing the trend in journalism toward coverage centered on ever-smaller geographic areas, has been overused in recent years. But I can’t help but think that the Chicago Tribune, some four years after launching TribLocal to up the media market’s ante in the suburbs, has […]
Small miracles pop up in the most unlikely places at the most unexpected times. Take two weeks ago, when I sat through a discussion on Tax Increment Financing. Years ago, I thought maybe, just maybe I had left TIF-related matters in my rear-view mirror. I figured I’d paid my penance, having covered TIF issues for […]
747, the digital clock declared. When I first opened my eyes on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, that was the time in Oak Park, Illinois. I thought of 747 model airplanes, then briefly drifted back to sleep. As I later discovered, only a few minutes earlier a group of terrorists had crashed into a tower of the […]
If a picture is worth 1,000 words, then two remarkably reminiscent photos ought to be worth at least a 250-word blog post. Two weeks ago, as I loaded my kids into the family van outside my office near downtown Oak Park, I noticed two men playing chess on the trunk of a taxi. It was too cool […]
Every once in a while, there’s a story that really, viscerally reminds me of why I got into journalism, why I stayed it in for two decades–and why I consider myself a journalist for life even if I’ve been committing repeated acts of public relations for the past half-decade or so. It’s the opportunity to […]