Once upon a less pretentious time, Florida was filled with nationally respected junior colleges. Located within driving distance and priced within the budget of any high school graduate looking for life-changing education, students could come in with a dream and leave with a diploma that opened the door to any career they could imagine.
These junior colleges were real academies run by real academics....
“We Are All Abigael Evans,” reads the Time Magazine headline on its story about the 4-year-old who went viral sobbing that she was “ tired of Bronco Bamma and Mitt Romney.”
The chubby-cheeked moppet from Fort Collins, Colorado was making a Halloween-eve grocery run with her news-junkie mom. Trapped in the car seat, little Abby melted down as way too many reporters gathered around NPR’s microphone...
FT. LAUDERDALE — As a writer of spy novels, Bob Graham is no threat to Ian Fleming. As a statesman, the former three-term U.S. senator and two-term governor is the best of the best.
Graham’s novel, Keys to the Kingdom, is the Hail Mary pass of a dedicated public servant working way beyond the call of duty and well outside his comfort zone to tell the world the unvarnished, uncensored...
The speech was given by a Democrat, Grace Nelson, stumping in Tallahassee last week for her husband, U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson.
It sounded a theme often expressed by another attractive political wife, Cyndie Kottkamp, a Republican, whose husband Jeff is the former lieutenant governor of Florida.
...
To hear Gov. Rick Scott tell it, he’s the most transparent member of the ruling class since Lady Godiva.
Godiva was an Anglo-Saxon aristocrat and Tea Partier who rode bareback and buck naked through the streets of Coventry in a silent tax protest.
Scott, by contrast, never shuts up about transparency...
"Nora Ephron enjoyed and was very kind to all kind of folks; not just big deals," tweeted New York Times media columnist David Carr. Plainly he is right about that, judging by the flood of cyber-comment condolences and commiseration attending last week’s death of Ephron, a reporter-turned-filmmaker, thought-leader, and first person in the room to say what everybody was thinking.
You don’t see much of...
“Don’t schtupp your co-workers, especially if you’re supervising them” has been a management mantra since the Reagan Administration. But that didn’t matter to Jamie Self before he “left” his $103,000 job as executive director of the state’s Family and Community Services Office in January “for personal and family reasons.”
Thanks to dogged reporting by...
In an era when reporters worked sources more and blogged press releases less, many great stories were born in barrooms that catered to newsies on the prowl for a cold beer and a hot tip.
These days, the media’s last great watering hole is in cyberspace at www.jimromenesko.com. There, you can find what’s left of the fact-based community talking shop and saying...
Florida’s governing class has, for decades, valued their spin doctors far more than police, prison guards, child protective investigators and others who risk their lives daily in public service.
Recessions come and go, but the standing army of people whose job it is to talk transparency while obstructing journalism is untouchable.
Florida TaxWatch crunched the numbers last year. As of...
When government doesn’t do its job, when children die in its care, when law enforcement commits wrongdoing, we look to investigative reporters to go beyond a spokesperson’s platitudes and tell us what’s really going on.
But with the bottom falling out of newspapers, Florida has lost much of its investigative muscle -- those extra-curious reporters who keep a watchful eye on how things work....
