The best opening sentences in literary history. Always a fun exercise. This has been going on pretty much forever. An early leader for “best opening line” has to be Genesis chapter 1, verse 1. “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.” There’s a book you want to check out, just from the […]

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In conversations with journalists, over the years, I have found a common denominator: A significant percentage of them were thinking about journalism — and even practicing it — at a young age. This comes to mind after seeing a call from officials of the Mubadala World Tennis Championship, later this month in Abu Dhabi, for […]

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Pretty much everyone who has worked in print journalism nurses a grudge toward people who crumple a newspaper while paging through it. Today’s paper, especially.

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  The wind blows sometimes, here in the south of France. In the summer, that can pose problems with slamming doors, because we like to keep the windows open throughout the season, when it can be a bit warm. And gusty. Thus, we prop open the doors with compact and heavy things lying about. An […]

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This seems quaint. Print journalists are making a case to management that a planned layoff of dozens of veteran copy editors … is a very bad idea. It seems like such an Aughties thing, this push back. From 2007, 2008, 2009 — the opening years of the Great Newsroom Layoffs. Of late, in an industry […]

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A newspaper in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, has announced it is giving up publishing from a fear of its journalists being killed for doing their job. It certainly gives American journos reason to pause and reflect on the difficulty of putting out the paper in a difficult economic times … and conceding our colleagues in Mexico […]

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The mystery of Tom Brady’s missing Super Bowl jersey has been solved as well as resolved. A Mexican national with a media credential apparently snatched the No. 12 Patriots jersey after New England’s dramatic 28-25 victory in Super Bowl 51, but the jersey is back in the U.S. along with what appears to be the […]

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We left Abu Dhabi a year ago today, and it seems more distant in time than that. Adapting to the south of France, buying a house, getting key renovations made, moving in … that seems like the effort of more than a year. Meantime, lots of things were going on back in the UAE, a […]

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A compelling article from the Columbia Journalism Review is making the rounds in print journalism, and the whole of it rings true: In a piece entitled “Print is dead. Long live print.” … the author suggests newspapers have no future online. Never have. Never will. Chasing hits is pointless and profitless and newspapers should instead […]

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It was the last official act of the American-owned newspaper that had been published in Paris since 1887. A party. A month ago, the Paris newsroom was all-but shuttered and most of the remaining staff was laid off at what had been known, going back 129 years, as the Paris Herald, the Paris Herald Tribune, […]

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