William M. Hartnett

Granted, the difficulty I have finding street addresses of newspaper buildings while working on Paper View Monday updates doesn’t exactly top the list of life’s great injustices. It is, however, incredibly annoying in a low-grade way that, like so many things I complain about in this space, is almost certainly unique to me. Nearly every [...]

I’m bringing back the meh T-shirt from my September post on Google hosting wire stories on the occasion of another Google News development. (Note, however, that Howard Owens says in a comment on TechCrunch that this feature isn’t new. I must be thick, because the Google News Blog post was the first I heard about [...]

There’s a chain of free weekly newspapers called Hometown News that circulates in six counties here on Florida’s east coast. Three weeks ago, without prompting, they started dropping their stupid paper on my doorstep. For three weeks, I’ve tried to convince the Hometown News that I do not want their stupid paper dropped on my [...]

Noted in Will’s jambalaya links: This Jeff Croft link to the new Ellington-based Las Vegas Sun site. Noted in the page source of the new Las Vegas Sun site: A bit of humor. Go to the site and view the source for yourself to share in my amusement, or just mash your mouse here if [...]

Addendum to the recent post in which I had a go at the awful vanity writing that pollutes so many of our precious pixels and column inches, in a style I hope will appeal to the main offenders across the country, globe and known universe: Please, newspaper reporters, please, please, please hasten your delivery to [...]

No, seriously, reading so much bad writing in Sunday papers across the country really does make my brain hurt. The problem, of course, is that Sunday is newspaper ego day. We saved up all week for this right? Time to roll out the thesaurus! But not the dictionary. The No. 1 rule of “good” newspaper [...]

Howard Owens touched on an issue I’ve thought about quite a bit lately: Outsourcing of key functions in the newspaper industry. The dangers of over-enthusiastically embracing vendors spread far beyond the specific instance that is the topic of Owens’ post, however. By outsourcing so many of our most important functions, we surrender our expertise in [...]

I still call newspapers “newspapers.” I probably always will, even long after those that survive become almost fully digital operations with perhaps a token print newsletter for the elite and the elderly. Will this prevent me from ever attaining legitimate new media douche bag status? Should I try to kick the habit?
For example, I wrote [...]

The title of this post comes from a line I was happy to see in a job listing for a municipal reporter at the Tribune-owned Sun-Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale. (This being South Florida, the full sentence actually is, “Spanish skills as well as knowledge of computer-assisted reporting are preferred.” Probably in that order.) As Ryan [...]

Just got to my copy of the Sunday Times after being away all weekend. Here’s what was waiting for me:

Oops. Sumthin’s in ur plates, messin’ up ur color separations.

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