Monthly Archives: April 2010

media spotlight: pbs tracks trends

a five-member panel hosted by pbs' newshour deliberated the changing media landscape

surviving in a digital tsunami

PBS NewsHour host Gwen Ifill led a five-member panel consisting of local print, digital and broadcast personalities in discussing The Changing Media Landscape, the last stop on a multi-state tour taking the public’s news temperature in cities across the country.

The 90-minute discussion, held today at St. Petersburg’s Poynter Institute, represented community, for profit, consumer and business POVs. It opened to an audience that included a contingent of Iraqi journalists by acknowledging the challenges facing a recession battered journalism that’s also being hammered by social media’s cultural transformation of how consumers take their news. Continue reading

i’m no nostradamus, but…

Looking back (i.e., hindsight) a blind man on a galloping horse could have seen this coming. I’m talking about Jesse James’ walk this way into “rehab”, although exactly how anyone is “treated” for sex addiction escapes me, unless you’re talking eyelids braced open and eyedrops administered frequently ala “Clockwork Orange” therapy. Well, there’s the ultimate sacrifice, but who wants to go there?

Anyway. In 2000, Sandra Bullock, and this is way before West Coast Choppers rolled into living rooms across America, made a little film called “28 Days“, in which she’s an alcoholic journalist whose life collapses around her in a substance abuse haze. She enters rehab for treatment, a role she researched at real life clinic Sierra Tucson in Arizona. The very same clinic where probably soon to be ex Jesse is reportedly receiving therapy right this minute. But that’s not the story. Continue reading

web w.o.m. – careful what you wish for

You! Customer! So What!

Will anyone, anywhere, ever say anything nice about Delta again? The answer is… no. Never. Just when I thought the statue of limitations on self-inflicted airline stupidity had run out after the Pringles/Virgin Air episode, Delta’s merger completion with Northwest last January actually signaled a fresh round of lowering the bar of customer expectations to depths previously unknown.

Reporting for Feministe, Jill Filipovic hit the mother lode of original travel horror story source material on her recent “trip” to Austin’s famously famous SXSW. Lucky for Delta, Jill’s a lawyer with a samurai writer’s instinct.

So even though the year’s still young, here’s my nomination for Best of Show – Travel Horror Stories (Domestic). Turn off the phone, make yourself comfortable, and enjoy.