GWSchulz

For years and years and years, there was a scrappy little newspaper in San Francisco that warned (very much obnoxiously at times) about PG&E’s continuing private control of energy and power in the Bay Area and Northern California.

That newspaper no longer exists. During my three years as a reporter there, I carefully avoided ever having to write PG&E stories, which were a near-fetish for the publisher, Bruce Brugmann.

But maybe he was right about giving public ownership a real shot in the Bay Area, even if he was annoying as shit about it at times. (It should also be noted that he was from a heartland state where public power is common.)

Hell yeah.

“You can’t trust that bag of bits.” That made me giggle.

Good point. Thx for this comment.

Offensive cyber weapons and their relationship with international arms control agreements, or the lack thereof. Old school, stateless arms brokers like the infamous Viktor Bout are being disrupted by digital as much as hotels and taxis. Code doesn’t need fake air transport documents or any mothballed Soviet aircraft at all. Oh, and pretty much all of IoT as we’ll come to know it. Regs are coming fast and hard for crypto.

Several great books about John Brown, including Russell Banks’s “Cloudsplitter” and a bio from W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois wanted to bio Frederick Douglass, with whom Brown frequently argued over anti-slavery tactics. Booker T. Washington got the Douglass book in the end. Social justice types at the University of Kansas in Lawrence have always kept up his memory in various ways. Despite Kansas being a very conservative place, the statehouse has a radical mural of him inside of it holding a Bible and a rifle and furiously thundering against slavery.

Features like this are presumably what antitrust investigators will scrutinize. It’s Google doing everything in its power to keep users within the Google empire at the expense of potential competitors, of which there precious few at this point.

Didn’t I just see a post on HN that blamed ships for the plastic?

Quietly my ass. Both are promoting it as a way to make an estate or corner of earth internet-connected, rather than just a single structure.

I’ll leave it up to Run DMC. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=word%20is%20...

Word is born.

I’ve been an investigative reporter for a long time, and data like this are essential for reporting on campaign activity in the digital age. Only looking at contributions and expenditures in disclosure reports isn’t enough anymore.

This isn’t the most intuitive viz on the planet. But dear smart tech people and data scientists with a strong public interest streak: Please keep doing this and get it online. At least for me, when I see it, I’ll put it in front of other journos on social. We compete but help each other out by sharing tips like this through professional orgs and journalism boards like Y Combinator (which I’ve followed closely for years).

Many of us are particularly keen on helping young journalists become natural investigators, and the next generation has a huge amount of data smarts already. Let’s put it to work for justice and fairness and all that mushy human freedom and better leadership stuff.

The policy should also require the FBI — prior to utilizing private genealogy sites — add the case details to Justice’s NamUs database and network. The FBI pretends it doesn’t exist, because the bureau doesn’t get to control it. Poor FBI.

I was an early user at the Center for Investigative Reporting. First learned about it at a NICAR conference in Arizona. Still use it to organize and showcase documents and records.

Listening to NPR with my dad on the weekends growing up in Tulsa was my favorite thing on the planet and basically the reason I wanted to become a journalist.

But like everything else in digital disruption that seeks to “make the world a better place,” there are unintended consequences.

NPR’s immense success with podcasting could come at the expense of local public radio affiliates around the country. They pay great sums of your donated dollars to NPR (and American Public Media and Public Radio International and BBC, etc — NPR is sort of the Kleenex of public radio in the United States) for the rights to shows a whole lot of Americans still listen to the ol’ fashioned way in their cars or at work over the air.

Eventually we’ll listen to only streamed or internet-based content, I’m assuming. So the question is what happens to the affiliates most people are far less familiar with than the NPR brand?

(“I heard it on NPR.” You technically heard it on KQED, or KUT, or WGBH, or whatever.)

One suggestion for their future is to take advantage of the strong community trust and ties many of them enjoy and beef up local coverage where newspapers are fading away. Stream the content and broadcast it over the air.

Share resources between stations like several have done in Texas for the morning program Texas Standard. There are numerous stations in other states doing this or attempting to do it. And of course, be savvy with social, and even consider experimenting with targeted ads and paid (or donated) search.

Support these efforts, or better yet, join them. Digital affords an enormous amount of local potential with a relatively small team and budget where newspapers traditionally faced gargantuan printing and operational costs.

If you've never hiked through one, they are quintessential American excess. I know for many of you, their locations are Flyover Country. But actually embark from your stopover next time and spend a full weekend experiencing it. I've lived all over Middle America and the SF Bay Area for several years, and I live in Tulsa now. Nebraska Furniture Mart makes IKEA look like a Mission bodega that ran out of American Spirits and artisan beer.