I love old postcards. They seem to capture history, the way it was really lived by ordinary people, in ways textbooks cannot. Here is a scan of the picture side of a postcard I found yesterday at a collectible store in town. It’s a scene of Chicagoans riding on horse-drawn carriages along Lake Shore Drive …
Facebook is so strange, when you stop and think — so unlike anything we knew in pre-FB life. I’ve been trying to come up with an analogy for social networking, if it were a “real” thing. How’s this? You decide to send out invitations to every person you’ve ever known to a huge party. The …
So there was a guy in a wheelchair on the corner of Belmont and Broadway in Chicago. He had a paper cup and was shaking coins. I grabbed about 50 cents and tried to throw it in his cup. He stared at me, and smiled a bit, and drank from the cup. The “coins” were …
. . I was saddened and dismayed last night to watch “Nightline,” one of the cherished news shows of my teenage years, and see how much it has changed. During a week of critical and frightening news coming out of Korea, when two nations with huge armies and powerful allies stand at the brink of …
. My journalism school, at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, is changing its name from The Medill School of Journalism to The Medill School of Journalism, Media and Marketing Communications. This development culminates several years of changes instituted by the new journalism dean, who has shifted the focus of the school from news writing and …
Here’s some thoughts. 1. As obvious as this sounds, write like crazy for your high school newspaper no matter how lame it might be. If it’s lame, become an editor and strive to write investigative stories about things above and beyond the call of scholastic journalism: teen life, abortion, bullying, gay and lesbian struggles, suicide, …