My ebook Comic-Con Heroes: The Fans Who Make the Greatest Show on Earth is finally up on Google Play, after long delay (in part because of Kindle Store’s exclusive). Google Play cut the price to […]
Category: Storytelling
It’s Not a Fad
“Selfie” may be Oxford Dictionaries Word the Year 2013, but is there anything really new about the practice? My wife, at age 21, from the glorious days of film photography. Photo Credit: Anne Wilcox
Netflix should be Proud
Classic! Who says newspapers are dead? New York Daily News delivers some of the best tabloid headlines/covers anywhere.
My First Kindle ebook: Trials, Tribulations, and Triumph
Yesterday, my first ebook published to Amazon, with the strangest of titles, having nearly nothing to do with the contents. In May, I submitted “The Principles of Design” to the bookseller for consideration as a Kindle Single. Singles are curated, short-form works, between 5,000 and 30,000 words. Amazon acts as editor and publisher. Four weeks later to the day, I received a rejection letter, without any explanation.
That put me squarely down the self-publishing path, which is exactly where I didn’t want to be for this first work. Books are a strange frontier to me, a vaguely familiar landscape but alien—like Mars is to Earth. I wanted Amazon to walk me across this domain. Besides, to start, I plan to write mostly shorter non-fiction essays, which look to be perfectly-suited for Kindle Singles. But the rejection email, and realization that editorial approval takes up to a month, changed plans.
Some Advice to the Washington Post's New Owner
Today, in the Guardian, former CIA analyst John Kiriakou accuses the Obama Administration of abusing the 1917 Espionage Act, claiming that “only 10 people in American history have been charged with espionage for leaking classified information, seven of them under Barack Obama”.
From Day One, the Obama Administration sought to plug any leaks. What’s said in the Oval Office stays in the Oval Office. That’s context for understanding the aggressive approach to whistleblowers. It’s philosophical. The current White House sees leaks as betrayals, so why not view whistleblowing as treason?
Pixel Me Perfect
For most of July, I used a 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display and iPhone 5, abandoning Chromebook Pixel and HTC One during the last few days of June. I’m moving away from writing principally for the web to ebooks, following the advice authors Guy Kawasaki and Shawn Welch give in APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur—How To Publish a Book. I chose these tools based on recommendations they, and other writers, made. Also, my Apple boycott ended in January. I’m not anti-Apple.
There are many things I like about MacBook Pro, which screen resolution is comparably high to Chromebook Pixel: Audio fidelity of streamed music is punchier, my Sony MDR-1RBT Bluetooth headphones work, battery life is longer and Chrome tabs don’t idle and force refresh (the 8MB memory makes a difference). There is the promise of better digital content manipulation, like photos or properly formatting ebooks for submission to major ebook stores.
Rolling Stone's 'The Bomber' hits target
Last night I came home from San Diego Comic-Con Day 1 to find the newest Rolling Stone open, facedown on the living room carpet; the controversial cover, with Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, stared up like Jim Morrison. I had heard about the controversy over the photo, and accusations that the magazine somehow glorified the bomb suspect, for days. So had my wife, who finished Janet Reitman’s riveting account, soon as we both settled in for the evening.
Anne never reads Rolling Stone. But the cover caught her attention enough that she consumed this one article, neglecting the New Yorker, which also arrived in the mail yesterday, coincidentally containing a smart editorial defending RS editors. She doesn’t approve of the cover, and yet it clearly was effective enough. As an editor, I must commend Rolling Stone for doing with a picture what tabloids like the New York Post or online aggregator Huffington Post does with snarky headlines: Get people to read the story.
Better Place to Be
My last post on this site is dated December 2010. Luckily no squatters took residence in my absence. I stopped writing here simply because I didn’t have time. My responsibilities for BetaNews commanded too much of me, and I shifted personal blogging to Google+. Both are fine places to live—shared common areas—but I seek solitude and escape from the daily news grind; also, I’m sick to death of tech.
I’m not a computer or gadget geek. It’s just my career path. Twenty years ago this autumn, what was then Washington Journalism Review, now American Journalism Review, posted a story that changed my life: “The Future is Now” by Kate McKenna.
Our Half Decade in San Diego
Five years ago today, my wife, daughter, and I relocated to #sandiego . We came here to be close to my father-in-law, who turns 91 before this year ends. Much has changed since Oct. 15, 2007.
Toilet Training
If you’re one of those offensive people who talk on the cell phone in bathrooms—particularly public loos—your behavior stinks more than your poop. There may not be more appropriate place to assert that you’re on my shit list, bud. Bathroom phone calling is bad etiquette by just about any measure.
I cringe when walking by a public toilet stall and hearing someone talking into their cell phone. I’ve heard men taking what clearly are business calls. Oh, please! I’d fire your ass, for sitting it on the toilet seat and talking to me (your client or boss). Could toilet talking be the real reason for noise-cancelling cell phones or Bluetooth earpieces? Surely someone will hear you doing your toilet business—or that of the person in the next stall—while you’re taking the call.
Non-Top-10 List for Journalists
I have come to loathe top-10 lists, and I have stopped writing them. They are a sucker’s play for pageviews, although I have always used top-10s mainly for their presentation value. Now that they’re everywhere and displacing original content, I’ve got something of a personal boycott going (hence, why there have been none from me recently at Betanews). It’s with that introduction I come to maim a top-10 list posted last week. “The truth about the newsroom—straight-up!” offers 10 things reporters “want from [public relations] pitch to coverage”.
Deanna White tweeted about the post, to which I responded after reading: “My list would look nothing like this. If that’s what my peers want, someone pull out journalism’s obituary & run it” (News organizations generally keep prewritten obituaries ready to run the second someone famous enough dies).
Matt Taibbi Wits British Petroleum Senseless
It was sickening enough when British oil giant BP set new standards for corporate scumbaggery in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, turning the Gulf of Mexico into its own personal toilet and imperiling entire species […]