What Kyle Cost the Chronicle
Bay Area sports fans are used to painful seasons, but usually it’s a chronic pain. Especially with the Niners, the usual season sees poor play spread out over the entire season. We aren’t disappointed, because we never expected much. Then there was today. Today, 49er faithful and Bay Area-bandwagon hoppers alike felt the most acute sort...
Book Review: Instant City
In “Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi,” author Steve Inskeep explores Pakistan’s largest city, and looks at the impact of cities around the world that have rapidly exploded in size. The instant city, as defined by Inskeep, is a city that grows when “cataclysmic events … tilt the surface of the earth, raising the...
Blogging can’t escape infection in Contagion
[Spoiler info: This post doesn't give much away, but if you're the type who prefers to know nothing before seeing a movie, steer clear until you've seen it] James Huber wrote about Oakland getting its reps in the baseball-blockbuster “Moneyball” earlier this week. Another relatively new movie giving San Francisco some screen time is the disaster-blockbuster “Contagion.” I had looked forward to...
Correct the corrections
Every news organization makes mistakes. Online, in print or on television, facts are gotten wrong. Inevitably they publish some sort of mea culpa, in the form of a “correction.” But here’s my issue with a lot of the corrections out there: They don’t state the error. Compare this, from the New York Times: An article in...
The problem with newspaper sites
My high school library cancelled its subscription to the San Francisco Chronicle after the librarian decided that since the content is free online, there was no need to subscribe. It’s true that SFGate.com has the same articles as the paper. But I almost never read those articles online, and I regularly buy the paper. Why? Because...
A Day of Remembering
It was ten years ago today, standing on the sidewalk outside my elementary school, that my mom called my dad, telling him what had happened. School was cancelled but my parents had to work. I went to a friend’s house, and there, sitting on the couch, we watched smoke plume from a skyline thousands of...
Bar Refaeli’s dad convicted for confronting paparazzi
The father of Bar Refaeli, the stunning Israeli supermodel, was convicted Thursday in Israeli court of “malicious damage” stemming from an incident in 2007. For those of you not following Israeli news, here’s the quick version of what happened: Bar is followed by paparazzi while driving to her family’s house near Tel Aviv in Israel. She...
Posting the paper
One of the coolest features on any newspaper website in the country is the Washington Post’s “Today’s paper” newspaper viewer. The Newseum, a museum in Washington, D.C., has a “front-page gallery” showing the day’s front page from hundreds of newspapers from around the nation and world. You can compare a newspaper in rural Alabama to...
Paywalls, hurricanes, and the future of news
Both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal lowered their pay-walls for Hurricane Irene. They did it for separate reasons, but both papers’ actions raise questions about the flexibility of online pay-walls. The Times offered free access to online “storm coverage”, “During this emergency” evidently so that people in the path of the storm could follow...
Syrian gunmen ‘warn’ cartoonist
Bleeding, beaten, hands-broken, and a bag over his head. This was how Syrian political cartoonist Ali Ferzat was left to suffer on the side of a road. Ferzat, 60, was forced into a Jeep by masked assailants Thursday morning as he left his Damascus studio. After beating him and breaking his hands, the gunmen tossed...
Man U’s Ferguson announces that he’s made peace with BBC
Alex Ferguson–excuse me, Sir Alex Ferguson–manager of Manchester United, has lifted his ban on speaking to the BBC. The shunning of the British television giant came in 2004, after the BBC broadcasted a documentary making allegations about Ferguson’s sports agent son James. The documentary, “Father and Son”, portrayed James as taking advantage of his father’s...
Giants’ misery lands on doorsteps nationwide
The New York Times’ million or so readers flipped through the paper’s news section today and found a big Bay Area-centric sports spread on A11. The main story was supposedly about the effect of the Giants’ mediocre season on the city of San Francisco, but I couldn’t see how it fit in the news section. The...
