I know more about particle physics than finance, but I remember bidness people talking about how even the biggest economic downturns produce winners. For a batch of reasons, I guess. They sell before the collapse, they get into companies relatively immune to market forces. They hoard precious metals then scoop up bargains as the market […]

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How many times can this hit home? Probably not until I stop going to live sports events. I am not a sports fan. Not of any team. Not of any individual. And never again will be. At least, not in a fashion that would be recognized as fandom by actual sports fans. Why? Because I […]

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I never have liked motor sports. For a lot of reasons. The main one is this: It gets people killed. Scott Kalitta, a two-time Top Fuel champion, was killed during a qualifying Funny Car run in New Jersey on Saturday. You can read the news story here. Basically, you can’t put people in a fire […]

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Of all the sports events I haven’t covered that I would like to … the Euro Cup is in the top five. I’ve been lucky, and covered lots of things I had no expectation of being able to cover, when I got my first journalism job. The obvious big things, plus one-shot dates at the […]

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Newsrooms seem to attract needlers and agitators. Sarcasm passes for everyday discourse. Maybe it comes from the cynicism that overtakes even the most idealistic of just-starting-out journalists. You may still have moments when you feel as if, “Hey, what I just wrote/edited is important.” But on the whole you spend your day sorting out lies, […]

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It was my privilege — for 25 years — to cover high school football teams coached by Tom Hoak. Hoak was a sports throwback. A coach the way coaches used to be. He reminded me of the men I played for in high school, of the legends from decades past. A leader. An exemplar. A […]

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If you’re in journalism, you know how this works. You’re writing, approaching deadline, almost done, even … and you realize that your emphasis, your lead, should be something that is in the body of your current text. So you look at the clock, decide if you have time to tear up what you’re doing … […]

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This site was up and down all day. Well, mostly down, as some of you may have noticed. What was the message I got when I tried to log on? Something like … “error connecting to data base.” I thought it was a “word press” thing, that being the blog site. But apparently it really […]

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Adam Harper was the angriest young man I ever hired. Or ever worked with. And probably the weirdest, too, though he has a lot more competition for that title. Rage simmered below the surface of his personality at all times and percolated to the surface frequently … usually directed at the great amorphous (yet eternally […]

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This is an interesting subplot to the Lakers-Celtics series. At least from the journalism perspective. Throughout the history of professional sports … the primary source of information and intelligent analysis has been newspapers and their employees. Their beat writers, their columnists, their feature writers. In the past quarter-century, TV’s talking heads have stepped up — […]

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