A few years ago, I went off on the misuse of the word “surreal” by athletes. It’s one of those Crabby Old Editor things. Most athletes don’t know surrealism from the Man in the Moon. What they mean is “unreal”. And here is another horribly overworked word, these past years: “Icon” … and it’s adjectival […]

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A lot of sports editors around the world today weren’t exactly surprised that, with the end of the World Cup, not a whole lot is going on … but it still represents an unpleasant reality. A limited number of scheduled events in the near future. It is the case in the UAE, and it is […]

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For the sixth anniversary of The National, tomorrow, the newspaper at which I work, in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, it was decided by the editor, Mohammed Al Otaiba, to do something different. Something very different. Our four standard news sections … with almost no words. The mission: Telling the news of the day through […]

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I took a break from the production of the sports section tonight to run an errand across the parking lot, behind the back of the newspaper. It was 8 p.m., and twilight had long since turned into night, and as I returned to the newspaper campus. I found myself walking parallel to the windows on […]

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Fascinating bit of video knocking around the web. A 2 minute, 17 second news report from 1981 on a San Francisco TV station. (And note the anchor’s semi-Farrah Fawcett haircut.) The topic? The delivery of news electronically to subscribers sitting at home.  No paper! Also, no worry for the print edition, the TV people suggest, […]

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Sounds medical, yes? In print journalism, it has always meant how well and how predictably a newspaper is delivered, especially to its home subscribers. In the U.S., the circulation department was always seen as mildly disreputable, slippery characters leading a crew of people you might hope did not get on the same elevator as you […]

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One more bite of the apple here … (did you know Brits say “bite of the cherry”?). Some links to interesting post-America’s Cup stories.

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This perhaps should not surprise me. Hoary clues in New York Times crosswords. If you buy NYT crosswords by the book, as I do, 200 of them at a pop … well, some are certain to be less than modern. (And I also doubt that all of these Sunday crosswords actually appeared in print, in […]

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It had never occurred to me. That Vin Scully’s hair might not be his own. It required a British colleague, at The National, to make me confront this. He had seen a photo of the Dodgers broadcaster on a page proof; I had run a small story on our two-page lighter-side-of-sports package in The National, […]

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Today was the final day of the World Championships in Athletics — or track and field, as it is known in North America. It was the first of several big events to be held in Russia in the next few years. The Winter Olympics in Sochi next February, the soccer World Cup in 2018. They […]

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