Spindletop
It’s a gusher! On January 10, 1901, the world changed forever. Captain Anthony F. Lucas was trying his luck drilling for oil in east Texas. The landscape was hot and dry, dotted with salt domes, the remnant from some...
Read moreThe Transcendant Power of Images
Ernest Bujok – ink on paper – silkscreen When I graduated from Williams College, I was fortunate enough to receive a Thomas Watson Foundation Fellowship. That grant allowed me to spend the next three years traveling around the world...
Read moreSouth Africa Heads Toward Zimbabweland
All hail the Glorious Leader! How soon things change. The World Cup from South Africa was supposed to consecrate a new era for South Africa in the world. Modern. Sophisticated. Advanced. Now, President Zuma has made a clear demonstration...
Read moreElisabeth Kubler-Ross and the Newsroom
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross We spent the past few months, off and on, having a series of protracted meetings, demonstrations and conversations with a major US network news organization. Which one does not matter, because in truth, they’re all in about...
Read moreHow Do You Know We’re Living In The Roman Empire?
The idiot in chief… One of the most influential books I ever read was Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. Published in 1984, it was seminal in shaping my thinking about the impact of television on our culture....
Read moreThe McCormick Reaper and The Death of Journalism
When the term Broadcasting meant something else entirely Even though I am sitting on an ‘out island’ in the Bahamas this August, it does not mean I am not working! This morning, I spent an hour on the phone...
Read moreThe Library of Youtube
Yeah…lemme see American Idol from last week…. In 1988 I left my job as a producer at CBS News to go to Gaza with a small video camera and start shooting my own stories. I spent a month in...
Read moreTed Turner and Me, Part II
Pat Mitchell, Dr. Denis Mukwege, Elizabeth Dewberry, Ted Turner OK By popular demand, the continuation of the Ted Turner story. So at the end of the meeting in New York, Ted turned to me and said, ‘You go down...
Read moreTed Turner and Me
You want your ten minutes? Most people spend their lives thinking about or talking about what they are going to do, but few actually do anything. This is because no one ever taught them what to do. When we...
Read moreLessons From The Industrial Revolution
It was the Google of its day… Yesterday, the FT carried a very sobering article about the end of the Middle Class in America. It profiled several formerly Middle Class working families, all of whom are seeing both their...
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