When I was teaching at Georgia State University last Spring, I asked a local elected official to speak to my journalism class about media relations. The official showed up, then took me by surprise: He launched into a bitter rant about “so-called investigative reporters” who, he said, twist facts to suit a preconceived storyline. I [...]
Archive for March, 2010
29 Mar
“Put the camera on me.”
Careful what you ask for. When I figured out that the Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Department regularly used a video camera to document its encounters with unruly inmates, it was a “eureka” moment. When the same department told me it had retained the video of more than 400 such encounters in 2009 alone, it sounded like [...]
25 Mar
‘I look good without a shirt’
“Well, this is just great. You go to Suwanee. You’re producing a TV story on the unveiling of an $80,000 piece of public art. You know that elsewhere, cities and counties are laying off schoolteachers and cutting government services. You go looking for somebody who might question the wisdom of such a government purchase in [...]
23 Mar
Local news queen
I don’t know the identity of the blogger who calls herself Local News Queen, nor do I want to know. If you or I find out, I’m afraid she’ll stop writing. She needs to keep writing, anonymously and frequently. LNQ writes what I can’t write — the kind of dead-honest insider stuff that hilariously describes [...]
19 Mar
A night in jail
Two summers ago, following a game in our 35-and-up baseball league, I posed the following question to my teammates: Anybody been to jail? Almost every hand went up. Mine was among two or three that didn’t. One guy had been locked up on domestic violence charges (he told us he was innocent, by the way, [...]
19 Mar
Reporter’s revenge
If this guy’s got the stones to hang out in a convention center and ask these questions to passersby, then who am I to forsake the Friday Open Thread due to mere lack of participation? BTW, his name is Pat Tomasulo. He works at WGN. I swiped this from Lenslinger, who writes, in part: …this [...]
18 Mar
Science, history and buildings
I don’t know of a more haunted place in the world than Central State Hospital in Milledgeville. Picture a huge college-style campus filled with large, empty, hospital-sized brick buildings dating back to the 19th century; stuck hard among pecan trees in a hard-to-reach part of Georgia. Add to it a rough history that began as [...]
16 Mar
Winne Watch 3.12.10
“Fast as he was on the field, you’re saying he wasn’t on the run?” – WSB’s Mark Winne, speaking to an attorney about a former Georgia Tech football player accused of making terroristic threats. Winne stood in light rain in front of the Cobb County jail for the opening of his live shot Friday. He [...]
14 Mar
“Victim”? No.
Generally speaking, police officers expect fair scrutiny from the news media. They know there are bad apples in their ranks. If the media helps weed them out, good cops will cheer us on. But like the rest of us, police officers recoil from cheap shots, real or perceived. More than anything, they get defensive very [...]
12 Mar
Friday open thread 3.12.10
Welcome to the future of TV news, embodied by WXIA’s renaissance man, Bill Liss. Liss has embraced the multitasking reality of TV news in the 21st century. Does Liss complain about having to produce stories for both TV and the web (and his daily business report each morning)? Hell, no. He just does it all [...]
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