Nick Leyva rarely failed to amuse me. He was an agitator. A teaser, A pot-stirrer and a trash-talker. And that’s good, 99 percent of the time. You don’t want a newroom or a section that takes itself too seriously, and Nick Leyva — at least, the young one we knew — made sure we didn’t.

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I began veering off into this topic in the previous post, about the Gannett-oriented blog (the one now on my blog roll). Then I decided the concept was worthy of its own post. Gannett vs. Singleton. Those of you who worked for both chains … what do you think? To me, it’s not an open-and-shut […]

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I worked for Gannett for 23 years, from 1976 until 1999, when the sale of The San Bernardino Sun (by Gannett, to Dean Singleton’s MediaNews) was completed. Looking back, I recall the Gannett Era as a time of something like opulence. Real money spent on real projects and real journalists. But that could be a […]

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Weird experience, today. I went “home” to the building where I spent 29 years as a working professional. To the 399 North D Street offices of the San Bernardino Sun. The Sun abandoned the site in October of 2005. And sold the whole-city-block property to a Korean-born businessman named Harry Hwang. The newspaper and its […]

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James Curran was the ultimate Sun sports department prodigy. He showed up pretty much fully formed, as a writer, at the age of 16. He could report, keep statistics and file on deadline when he walked in the door. When he was barely old enough to drive. He had spent some time at a weekly […]

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We keep hearing about our presumed longevity, as a population, and our extended health and vitality. And it leads to silly statements such as “40 is the new 30” and “50 is the new 40.” And so on. Perhaps 100 is the “new” 80, for all I know. Print journalism has not embraced that concept, […]

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I have never been unemployed, before this. Actually, I was employed long before I wanted to be. My father ran a gas station in the Belmont Shore area of Long Beach, and he thought it a grand idea to take his 12-year-old son to work with him on Saturday mornings so the kid could do […]

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How valuable was Cindy Robinson to a sports section? Well, I hired her five times, if that gives you any indication. Yes. Five. In violation of Gannett corporate policy at least a couple of times. (You get two bites of the apple in Gannett, unless you get special dispensation.) As far as I was concerned? […]

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I’ve been reading the Los Angeles Times my entire adult life, and I’m fairly sure I’ve never seen anything weirder — and stupider — than what it has done on its sports section cover the past two days. Did someone kidnap Randy Harvey? He’s the sports editor there, last I heard, and I can’t believe […]

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Well, actually, 12 is how many I covered. So this list includes all of them. “Favorite” is a personal thing here. It has nothing to do with performances or where the U.S. finished in the medals standings. It’s a sort of amalgam of “interesting, memorable, scenic, decent housing, media center/local hospitality/internal transport.” Once you do […]

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