We (CL) opened up our doors Wednesday night for about 50 potential new contributors. There was wine, beer, pizza and a micro-symposium on 21st-century community journalism. We got a chance to recruit some new voices and our guests got to feel out our site editors. Look for their contributions in the coming days.
One of our newbies, Robin Miller, captured the whole thing on video, which you can see below the jump:
Journalist Walter Cronkite is dead at 92.
The word for “anchorman” in Swedish is kronkiter. That tells you an awful lot about how important Walter Cronkite was to broadcast journalism. He so thoroughly defined a role that the job took its name from him.
I believe his genius as a broadcaster was in
coverage of the live event. He gathered information — as a reporter — then knew precisely when to use it (or, rather, download it). He learned how to talk over pictures and not insult the intelligence of viewers by explaining the obvious. He always knew the background, the interesting personal histories, of the people he was covering. And that’s what made his broadcasts superior to those of the other networks.
He also was a great student. In the late 1950s, when he realized that the space race was coming, he learned everything he could about the tools and the technology. And that’s why he beat the socks off of all the other networks during the coverage of the space program in the 1960s. When the inevitable launch delays occurred, all the other networks could say was, “Well . . . there appears to be some delay. The rocket is still on the launching pad . . . .” But Walter not only knew the problem, he could tell us about it in terms we could understand.
Sure, it happens at the movies all the time. Somebody jumps out of the darkness with a knife and we all shudder. A whole film genre has been based on such scares. But when was the last time that happened to you while reading a book?
For me, that happened just last week, at the halfway point of The Scarecrow (Little, Brown, $27.99) by Michael Connelly. Even though you know something is up, the moment that makes you jump and do your Good-God! James Brown impression hits you with the same shock and fear that grips the novel’s hero, Jack McEvoy.
Moments like that make you appreciate what a great novelist Connelly has become. His books will still be read 75 years from now in the same way that college students are required to read Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain. Connelly leaves most of his contemporaries in the dust.
The Scarecrow doesn’t feature Connelly’s main attraction, L.A. Detective Harry Bosch, but instead focuses on newspaper reporter McEvoy, the central character in Connelly’s The Poet and a supporting character in a couple of other Connelly books.
This story grows from the freak show that is the modern newspaper business. McEvoy is a dedicated and talented veteran journalist, so he is laid off from the Los Angeles Times and forced to train his young-sprout replacement, a naïve and ambitious rookie from the University of Florida. Connelly vents a lot about what’s happened to the newspaper business — he was an LA Times star for several years before becoming a novelist — but uses that heartbreak to open the door to yet another thrilling narrative. It’s a great tale about a cast-aside reporter on the trail of a bad-ass computer-whiz serial killer. That the book also shows evidence of the immorality of big-time journalism is an added bonus.
It’s a thrilling, masterful book and it reminds us of why we love to read: we love to get caught in the web by a brilliant storyteller. Connelly lives in the area and he has a few shoutouts to Florida homies that make the book even more fun.
It seems that it was just 20 minutes ago that Connelly published his last novel, The Brass Verdict, and he’s got another one — Nine Dragons, the latest Harry Bosch novel — coming out in October. Janet Maslin of the New York Times is always a tough review, but she praised The Scarecrow, then said at the end of her review that Connelly was too prolific, that he needed to slow down. But Dude — as long as the books are this good, please … please keep them coming.
Crossposted from Political Whore blog
Because Creative Loafing Political Editor Wayne Garcia would be far too modest to tell you himself, I’m reporting that “The Political Whore” won first place in the category of Blog-Affiliated last night in the Sunshine State Awards, the Florida-wide prizes given out by the Society of Professional Journalists/ South Florida. New Times Broward Palm Beach’s “The Juice” and the Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel’s “Broward Politics” came in second and third, respectively.
And Wayne wasn’t alone in bringing back first-place honors for the Loaf. Food Editor Brian Ries won the top spot in Food/Beverage Writing for “Anywhere But Here,” his story on the lack of healthy food options for Florida families on public assistance. The Miami Herald and MIAMI Modern Luxury took second and third places.
Brian also took a third place in Criticism for his review of MJ’s tapas menu when it was under the direction of Domenica Macchia. And CL’s theater critic, Mark E. Leib, took second place in the same category for his review of the innovative American Stage production of Hamlet. The Naples Daily News‘ Harriet Howard Heithaus took the first-place spot.
Finally, the entire staff of Creative Loafing won kudos for our website, cltampa.com, placing third in the News Web Site category. I like the judges’ citation: This is not your typical news site. cltampa.com represents a new way of presenting news and information to its reader/user. Through a simple design, Creative Loafing offers a wide collection of headlines from just as many distinct sources. (Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers and the Orlando Sentinel took first and second in this category, respectively.)
More judges’ comments follow after the break. Read the rest of this entry »
Time to get caught up. As the T-shirt reminds us, “So many books, so little time.” Let’s hit the road.
AMERICA THROUGH THE WINDSHIELD: We’re all about road trips here at Creative Loafing and so imagine this: The dude who pulls up next to you at the Tastee Freeze parks a little too close. You glance at him when he gets out of the car and I’ll be damned if it isn’t the former president of the United States.
Don’t worry. W isn’t behind the wheel. This is the absolutely true story about a much-more-wonderful time when the president could move out of the White House and on to the highways.
Harry Truman’s Excellent Adventure (Chicago Review Press, $24.95) by Matthew Algeo is the thoroughly charming story of how the former president and first lady drove across country in 1953. It was for fun, not publicity. At first, you might think this book is science fiction, since the guy playing the president of the United States is so bullshit-free. But this is an all-true story.
Algeo pulls together the narrative of the trip and retraces the route in his own car. It’s part road-trip meditation and a wonderful morsel of American history. We learn all kinds of things, including that Truman was a shitty driver. He paid off the other drivers in his prolific fender benders, mostly to keep Bess Truman from chewing his ass.
Back then, ex-presidents didn’t have Secret Service protection or even a pension plan. It was, as I say, a different world. This wonderful book allows us the opportunity to get a glimpse of that America.
This state inspires so much great prose, it’s amazing we can keep up.
Here’s a half dozen great new Florida books you need to get your mitts on.
THEY PUT UP A PARKING LOT: From some of the same folks who brought you a Pulitzer Pri
ze comes Paving Paradise (University Press of Florida, $27). Craig Pittman and Matthew Waite tell a complex and on-its-face unsexy story about water in Florida. But it works, drawing readers into its difficult subject by resorting to the dirtiest trick in the journalist’s bag of tricks: great storytelling.
Pittman and Waite use several people – some heroic, some shady – to examine the political shell game that makes white equal black and no equal yes. They tell the story through the eyes of politicians, developers, bait-shop owners and a league of people who mourn what’s happened to this state.
Based on their award-winning series for the St. Petersburg Times, Paving Paradise is the perfect way to give a longer shelf life to a vital work of journalism. Pittman and Waite are a couple of the best journalists practicing the craft in the country today.
It makes us wonder if there will be a place for journalism like this in a few years. If newspapers still exist, will they give over this much space to an in-depth report. Will book publishers then give reporters the space to expand on their work?
This isn’t a story that works well on Twitter.
The NPR program On Point spent an hour this morning trying to decide: “Can Bloggers Save Journalism?” Most of it was fairly on point (heh) but it quickly became apparent that a more apt name for the show would have been “No One Knows Shit About The Future Of Journalism.”
Andrew Sullivan — editor at the Atlantic, popular blogger of The Daily Dish, and writer of pro-blogging articles like “Why I Blog” — acted as the voice of optimism, which makes sense when you realize that his blog gets more hits than the Christian Science Monitor. Dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism Nicholas Lemann (author of the seminal anti-citizen journalist piece “Amateur Hour”), served as party-pooper and realist. They also threw in Tina Brown — journalism’s kid-genius of the ’70s who recently started The Daily Beast — to add a few moderating tidbits. In the end, though no one could come up with an answer to what journalism is going to look like in 20 years. Or five, for that matter.
The death of traditional journalism has been on the minds of reporters for years now, brought about by a synergy of falling ad revenue and the inevitable migration of readers to the great, democratizing power of the internet. Likely, it’s a little too inside baseball for many of our readers, at least until the news that CL filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection a month ago. Even then, the average Joe the Reader probably can’t summon up much concern, since he can find News of the Weird and local events listings on a number of other sites.
For us — journalists, editors and media moguls — it’s about all we can think about. I started writing for CL a little over five years ago as little more than a hobby that happened to bring in extra dough and some free meals. Last year, I made journalism my sole source of income. Great timing.
Now, CL — and every traditional media outlet in the nation, from alt-weeklies to national dailies to broadcast news — is bumbling along the muddled and obscured path to the future of journalism. Don’t think that we’re just not adapting quickly or are innovative enough to make the switch, ’cause we’re smart, and trying to forge ahead. Truth is, the entire industry is desperately grasping for the elusive business model that makes bringing you the news (and criticism and local flavor) profitable over the long haul. No one’s found it, yet. Read the rest of this entry »
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