First thing to know about Albert Bui: He named himself. If Albert wasn’t born in South Vietnam, his parents certainly hadn’t been in SoCal long when he appeared in this world. As he related the story, Young Albert liked watching the Bill Cosby cartoon show, and was amused by one particular character: Fat Albert. So […]

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Who can predict who will be memorable? You work a few feet from a person for five years, believe you know a fair amount about them, they leave … and five years after that … it’s hard to remember their faces. Or three salient non-work facts about them. But sometimes people can be so unremarkable […]

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Jim Inghram may have been The Oddest Kid who worked in the sports department of The Sun in the 30 years from 1976-2006. And that’s covering some territory. He could tell you what was on all four corners of every intersection in just about any city he’d ever been in … but he couldn’t punctuate […]

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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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I’ve been thinking about this for several months now, through the lens of my own layoff and the much bigger picture of the print journalism world’s free-fall — and the daily revelations of more big cuts here, there, everywhere. At what point should a newspaper editor say, “I’m not going to be the guy who […]

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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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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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