Four years ago, toward the end of my stint covering the storied town of Cicero for the Chicago Tribune, I first crossed paths with Dan Proft. He was the campaign manager who helped engineer Larry Dominick’s upset victory over incumbent Ramiro Gonzalez as town president and since then he has served as the town’s spokesman, […]
Category Archives: News Industry
Emperor Rod Blagojevich at this very moment, instead of defending himself before the Illinois Legislature as it proceeds with an impeachment hearing, is in the midst of making the national media rounds. As Rex Huppke so ably noted in a story that appears in the Jan. 26 edition of the Chicago Tribune, Blah Blah Blago’s […]
I had to chuckle this morning when I came across a story online at The Wall Street Journal. It was about the Chicago Tribune’s announcement that next Monday it will soon be offering a tabloid edition (with the same content as its home-delivered version) for newsstand sales Earlier, I had seen the story, by Phil […]
The other day, I posted a news release for the Illinois Association of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine on Triblocal.com. The release (“Acupuncture & Oriental Medicine: Not All Providers Are Created Equal”) joins dozens of other Inside Edge PR news releases (written, as all my work is written, in journalistic style) on the site. Soon, many […]
In yet another piece of News That Isn’t Really News comes a recent report from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. Pew asked more than 1,000 folks where they got “most of” their national and international news. In 2008, the Internet eclipsed print newspapers as their primary news source. You can […]
About 12 years ago, while I was on the news staff at The Courier News in Elgin, Ill., the newspaper began placing advertisements on Page 1. For what felt like months on end, we hawked a chance to win a free Daewoo. I didn’t like it at all. The “journalism purist” in me feared we […]
You may have heard of this woman who lives in Chicago. She goes by the unusual name of–what was that name again?–oh, yeah: Oprah! I jest, of course. Oprah may be more popular than her good pal, President-elect Barack Obama. And she has staying power, now in the midst of what would probably be her […]
Remember Drew Peterson? He’s still in the news, still a free man, and his fourth wife Stacy’s whereabouts remain a mystery. In contrast to his national media exposure (NBC’s “Today” show, People magazine cover, among others) of last November, the intensity of interest has waned since he first became a dubious household name in America. […]
Yesterday, I spoke to 55 graduate students at my alma mater, the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. The topic was “Journalism By the Numbers,” so I shared some pointers on numeracy—using numbers with common sense and context in story telling. As part of my presentation, I coordinated with adjunct lecturer Desiree Hanford to […]