When editors were mapping out last Friday’s print editions in our Thursday afternoon news meeting, we faced an option regarding the issue of police shootings. Wire news budgets included a selection of second-day follows about the circumstances and victim in the case involving Philando Castile in suburban St. Paul, Minnesota, plus a more analytical look Read More …
Category: Daily Herald Newspaper
Information is power; newspapers must use it responsibly
Read at Daily Herald website Following the terrorist attacks on the Brussels airport in March, news organizations, including the Daily Herald, faced an achingly familiar quandary. What pictures should we publish that vividly depict the horror of the crime without offending readers’ sensitivities or sensationalizing the act? The dilemma had an added dimension in the Read More …
The role of eloquence to nudge the world
Read at Daily Herald website One gropes, one claws, one prays for eloquence. For some of us, words are all we know, our only tool for taking the measure of an often beautiful, often miserable world. How impotent they seem in the presence of awe. A sunrise in the Rockies, for instance. Or a concert Read More …
Candy, meat and the art of making news
There is making the news and then there is making the news. The two aren’t always the same. Lake County Board Chairman Aaron Lawlor made news last week when he withdrew his support for a plan to extend Route 53. Argonne National Laboratory made news Tuesday when it launched a program to help entrepreneurs develop Read More …
Awards or no, newspapers aim to make life better
Read at Daily Herald website Today, some random thoughts journalistic: The Daily Herald works hard to help better the suburbs and the communities we serve. Projects big and small with that purpose in mind won 10 prestigious honors last week in the Peter Lisagor Awards for Excellence in Journalism. But we also make the world Read More …
Tolstoy’s white bear and a gift from the Opinion page
Read at Daily Herald website Today’s Opinion Page is a gift of sorts. Consider it a little cleansing breath before the halitosis that now appears certain to come this summer. With the fallout from Tuesday, it may be the last chance for such a respite for some time, so it seems prudent to take the Read More …
A word to letter-to-the-editor writers: Keep off the AstroTurf
Read at Daily Herald website For many people, the term “AstroTurf” brings to mind images of professional football players, autumn afternoons and damaged knees. For those of us who deal with letters to the editor or other forms of “grass roots” commentary, the term sports an additional variation. But the core idea is still the Read More …
Old mantra still valid for New Media
(Read in the Daily Herald) Useful. Different. Relevant. Time was, those were the three most important words in the Daily Herald newsroom, as close to a collective mantra as a body of committed skeptics is likely to embrace. Our success depended on our ability to provide information and entertainment that aspired to those three standards. Read More …
From Brussels terrorism, the too-frequent deliberations on an iconic image of tragedy
(My most-recent Daily Herald column.) Nearly every afternoon’s meeting of news editors concludes with a review of options for the next-day print edition’s most prominent Page 1 picture. On Tuesday, March 22, the day of the terrorist bombing in Brussels, the selection was especially difficult. Editors sifted through a variety of dramatic images, all showing Read More …
Liberal? Conservative? We let you put the labels on columnists
Read at Daily Herald website If you didn’t know better, you would have thought George F. Will was a run-of-the-mill liberal when he scolded Senate Republicans this week for their refusal to consider any Obama Supreme Court nominee and Merrick Garland in particular. But Will is well-established and world famous, so it’s doubtful many readers Read More …