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
| Mother Jones (@MotherJones) |
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