Why Thursdays.

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Back in the day, for several hundred days, I was the editor for three community newspapers and wrote a weekly column for a daily newspaper. That meant that everything I did that week came out on Thursday. It was the one day of the week I could take at least half a breath — and it was the day when it hit the fan. If I wasn’t getting calls about the column, then someone was accusing us of having personal vendettas against high-school kids because his kid’s photo wasn’t in the paper. Despite all that, Thursdays were actually kind of fun.

The B Section: Remember When The Supreme Court was a Thing?

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This story is bananas: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/25/alito-flag-martha-ann-washington-post/  It’s hard to know where to start with this, but starting with how this story demonstrates the failure of local news seems like a good place to jump in.   OK, fine, don’t click the link. This is about Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s house that had an upside-down U.S. flag … Read more

The B Section: The Daily #*$&#(@??The B Section:

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The B Section:  The creators of “The Office” announced plans for a reboot, and instead of a paper company, it will be a newspaper. A struggling one, and the editor will be trying to keep it alive with volunteer reporters.   Honestly, my first thought was, “Yeah, that is basically what is happening now.”   Not for … Read more

The B Section: Liberal bias, intellectual dishonesty and J.K. Rowling

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A longtime editor for NPR recently published an essay about his assertion that NPR had gone astray. If you’re someone who thinks as obsessively about good journalism as I do, ​you should read it​. Unfortunately, it did require me to visit the Free Press website for the first time, led by Bari Weiss, and I … Read more

The B Section: #ThrowbackThursday

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Right around this time in 2022, I was wandering around the University of North Carolina campus finally putting two and two together. I’d been invited to participate in a roundtable about journalism and noticed that the ride from the airport to the university was congested. The Lyft driver said something people being there for the … Read more

The B Section: Issue 2

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Look, I didn’t care about Kate Middleton at all until the Associated Press killed that photo.  Now, she has had to go public to acknowledge a cancer diagnosis and about five minutes after she released her long-awaited public statement, people were shaming the media – and themselves – for forcing the issue with her. And … Read more

Sept. 11, 2001

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The early part of Sept. 11, in my memory, is like in the movies when memories move around the screen with streaks. It’s me, stirring from a sleep, straining to listen to a voicemail being downstairs in my townhouse left by the man who will be my boyfriend, my husband, my ex-husband as he vocally … Read more

Blast to the … Present

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What I’m Working On For years, I’ve been compiling information about a housing development in Polk County called Indian Lake Estates. When we first moved here, we looked at a house there, which was almost perfect. Ultimately, we didn’t get it, but this development was started in the 1960s and is still somehow incomplete. Once … Read more