A lot of Internet tech talkers are preparing a coffin for electronic mail. Some are even shoveling dirt on it. And while it’s pretty obvious that email is not dead dead at age 41, it’s looking pretty pallid. Those of us who must swim through a daily email stream of spam, scams, advertising pitches and […]
The Incredible Shrinking Newspaper
Posted June 29th, 2012 at 6:56 pm (UTC-4)
If you’re a regular reader, you know a bit about New Orleans, the old, southern seaport where I once lived and that I still love. When my family dwelled in that historic, dreamy place for five years in the 1980s, I had four daily rituals: • drink strong chicory coffee, preferably accompanied by a […]
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Posted November 14th, 2011 at 2:31 pm (UTC-4)
As those of you who check in regularly know, I was away for a couple of weeks on a trip from which I’ll have a few stories for you in the days ahead. I returned to find 1,800 emails on my office computer. These included faithful reports by my colleagues to their editors that, yes, […]
Hello? Who’s There? No One
Posted April 18th, 2011 at 1:40 pm (UTC-4)
Let’s talk telephones, with a big nod to Pamela Paul, editor of the New York Times Book Review, who recently wrote about phones in the Times. At the risk that you’ll go there and not return, I’m going to link to that story — though the Times’s pay wall could possibly keep you from reading […]
Curating Fun! 21st-Century Style
Posted April 5th, 2011 at 1:31 pm (UTC-4)
At times during January’s uprising in Egypt, 1,000 people or more were tweeting on a single hash tag every 10 seconds. Let me explain hash tags and then take you on a brief tangent before I tell you about all the fun that curators are having, as mentioned in my title. A hash tag is […]
Potting It Down
Posted March 10th, 2011 at 2:44 pm (UTC-4)
At the risk of agitating reader Brad, who already calls me “old and cranky,” let me tell you about a nostalgic email that I got from Dean Everette, a friend and old radio hand who laughs that he, like many in that transient profession, “was fired every couple of years or so.” (I was fired […]
Radio Daze
Posted December 13th, 2010 at 2:53 pm (UTC-4)
In 1897, the gifted American humorist Mark Twain dashed off a note to the New York Herald newspaper. The recent rumor of his death, he wrote, “was an exaggeration.” Can the same be said for the death knells that are ringing for American radio? Let’s look back. Television was absolutely going to kill off radio […]
Bad Fruit on the Email Tree
Posted October 21st, 2010 at 2:05 pm (UTC-4)
Once you start forwarding lighthearted email — jokes, puzzles, wacky cat videos — to friends and colleagues, you’re sure to get a blizzard more in return. Many of the messages will contain amazing purported “facts” that seem perfectly plausible. A lot of them turn out to be blatantly inaccurate “urban legends” or worthless bunkum. I […]
