William M. Hartnett

As Col. John “Hannibal” Smith would say, I love it when a plan comes together.

The pet food story has been chugging along for a couple of weeks now, and Friday’s news that the recall has been extended to dry cat food finally prompted me to vent: If you are a newspaper editor who has not been playing every single one of these stories on your front page, you’ve been [...]

The neighborhood of the week real estate feature is about New Haven in Jupiter. New Haven is part of the multi-neighborhood, New Urbanist community of Abacoa, where yours truly also lives. DOWNLOAD THE PRINT SECTION Print pages in PDF: Right-click and save-as to download (18.6 MB, 18 pages)

Remember what I said about the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association dinner? And vomit? Of course you do, you’re a loyal reader. In case you missed the take of a slightly more obscure source, The Daily Show, here it is:

>German classes cut from last school (Palm Beach Post) The only public school in Palm Beach County still teaching German will drop the class next year. Why would students take German in a metro area where more than one-in-three people 5 and older speak Spanish at home? Well, why not? My very own wife, in [...]

>Correspondents’ dinner features fun, frolicking, and MC Rove (LA Times) (Via Romenesko) Does the very idea of journalists and politicians, regardless of political affiliation, carrying on together in the manner described in the story above cause vomit to rise ever so slowly into the back of your throat? That’s what it does to me, anyway.

>Want to Write for Wired’s Business Blog? (Wired) (Via Ryan Sholin) Wired is looking for a writer to join its business blog, and soliciting a topical blog post of 200 words or less instead of the usual resume. This brings to mind the time I created an interactive mapping web site specifically for a single [...]

Charles Petit over at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker calls our attention to the accumulating anecdotal evidence that “the decline in daily US newspaper science writers seems to be trudging along.” It’s mental, really, that newspaper science writing is, by all appearances, dying. Aside from The New York Times, scarcely any paper in the country [...]

>Why Would You Skin a Kangaroo? (Slate) Slate’s Explainer column never fails to come through with the facts that you really want to know, that you need to know, when the newspaper stories let you down. I’ve been curious about kangaroo skinning since hearing the “Australian Taliban” David Hicks described on NPR as a “former [...]