In the 1970s, Big Media had more money than the boards of directors knew what to do with. Wall Street took notice, and, soon, consultants in gray flannel suits started showing up in newsrooms with binders full of advice about how to “improve the product for the consumer.”
Publishers pretended to listen to these people so that their line editors and beat reporters didn’t have to. Like Orson Wells in the...
Mad Men is back on television, reminding us how far the science of selling has fallen since the Age of the Three Martini Lunch.
Don Draper, the sexiest advertising man not really alive, and his partners at the fictional 1960s Madison Avenue agency Sterling Cooper Draper, might seduce their secretaries and play their wives for fools, but at least they aren’t insulting the intelligence of the...
850 calls itself, “The Business Magazine of Northwest Florida,” but Florida’s players and taxpayers call it required reading.
850’s profile of Don Gaetz (R-Niceville) is one-stop shopping for anyone looking to get inside the head of the man who, as Senate President this year and next, can make or break the plots and plans of practically anybody .
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It wasn’t Marco Rubio’s fault.
Not the facial Niagara Falls that tormented the Time magazine cover boy “Republican Savior” as he delivered the GOP response to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address.
Not the hand jive that made Florida’s junior senator look like malfunctioning...
For folks like me who spend way too much time watching police procedurals, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) was the last place we’d expect to find bumbling bureaucrats.
Decades of “Law and Order” and “CSI” have conditioned the most cynical Floridians to view our top cops as an East Coast version of “Hawaii Five-0,” where elite squads of avenging angels pursue truth and justice...
A recent feel-good feature in the Florida Bar News tells the remarkable story of 18-year-old foster care survivor Amanda Alvarez and Ashley Wilson, a dogged 20-something lawyer who guided Alvarez through a thicket of bureaucratic indifference to a shot at a real life.
Alvarez had done hard time in the convoluted hell that too many children suffer. With a father in prison and a mother whose idea...
Roy Boldt, 81, was acting so strangely last week that a concerned friend called the police.
By the time they tracked him to Clare Bridge of Tequesta, the assisted living facility that was now home to his wife of 56 years, Roy, an Air Force veteran and long-retired commercial pilot, had fatally shot Virginia, and then himself.
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Florida once had a howling wolfpack of higher education reporters competing for scoops about small-time shenanigans. These days, the education beat is pretty much on life support. And in the absence of swift and sure journalism justice, the shenanigans are morphing into national scandals.
Last week, CNN’s Anderson Cooper was keepin’ ‘em honest at Florida Atlantic University (FAU). Steam poured out of the...
Lucy Morgan didn’t aspire to a career in journalism. Like many women of her generation, she married as a teenager and planned to live happily ever after.
Not too long later, she was a single mother in Middle of Nowhere, Florida, with a high school education and three small children. Her entertainment budget consisted entirely of a public library card.
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News does not have a virgin birth. It is not delivered by the Stork.
News is midwifed by people whose egos are large enough to support the notion that what they think is important is what all of us should think is important.
Not so long ago, the news was delivered exclusively by editors and...
