Helen Thomas, Scot Free, Lorem Ipsum, Death of Journalism, Trouble in Paradise, Dan Grobstein File

Helen Thomas died this weekend. She worked for UPI for more than half a century, most of it as a White House correspondent. My time at UPI (1975-76) coincided with her middle period. We were not buddies; I worked in Boston, she worked in Washington. We talked on the phone now and then, I rewrote her copy when she coverted Ford's visit to Boston in April 1975 (it was no secret that she was a better reporter than writer). She gave me a tour of the White House on a Sunday in the summer of 1976, and got me a ticket to the Ford-Carter debate in SF in the fall of 1976 (the one with the failed microphone and the Poland gaffe). Helen  was a perfectly lovely woman, a pioneer, and a special kind of journalist. We will not see her like again. My college roomie, Norm Sandler, worked side by side with her for almost a decade. I'd love to hear what he'd have to say, but he's been gone for six years now.

Turns out I misspelled scot free last week, according to my friend Kevin Sullivan:

So, I seem to have unwittingly developed a hobby of checking the etymology of colorful phrases. The term  'Scott Free' caught my eye., and I was curious about its origin. It turns out it is really 'Scot Free', and refers to taxes (i.e. scots), and not paying the them. :-)

It has been 14 years since I needed to prepare a dummy web layout with dummy text. For decades, the standard for this layout method in print was something called Lorem Ipsum, which is Latin. Nowadays there are generators for pork-based filler, filler based on Samuel L. Jackson dialog from Pulp Fiction, and hipster Lorem. In fact, courtesy of my former boss David Strom, here are 13 Funny and Useful Lorem  Generators. The only problem I can see is that a  couple of them generate readable text, which some reviewers of the design will find distracting. That's the magic of Lorem; it looks like real text (in terms of word length, spacing and punctuation), but can't possibly be read.

My friend and colleague Richard Dalton found two things this week that contain clues to the death of print journalism: a defense of partisan reporting from Jack Shafer, a long-time media critic, and this from Australia (equally true here; I remember the advantage I had in finding an apartment because I worked at the newspaper and saw the ads an hour before the public) from TheMonthly.com.au’s Eric Beecher:

The incongruity in that business model – profits from ads for jobs, houses and cars bankrolling the journalism that is vital to a functioning democracy – took several decades to play out. The “newspaper business model”, as it’s now derisively known, has imploded. People no longer line the streets outside newspaper presses at night to be the first to see the ads. The internet has poached most of Australia’s newspaper classified advertising. The money that financed quality journalism for a century is disappearing, with no likely replacement.

He also discovered a fascinating British screed about the Google Buses in SF.

Dan Grobstein File

Henry Blodget (@hblodget)

7/15/13, 5:10 PM QUIZ: Is This A Gerrymandered Congressional District… Or A Rorschach Ink Blot? [Brilliant by @WaltHickey] businessinsider.com/quiz-gerrymand…

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Mother Jones (@MotherJones)

7/21/13, 9:01 AM "I just heard Roosevelt ask Congress to declare war on Japan." PHOTOS: What it was like to be a reporter back then: bit.ly/18pccxK