News Media

I've covered a few natural disasters in my time, and the evacuation scenes looked something like this: rooms abandoned in a hurry, filled only with ghosts. Mail piled up, unopened. Phones that kept ringing, with nobody left to answer. The latest civic emergency comes not with a rush of flames or jolt of earth. It has crept up slowly in an unexpected place: the Los Angeles County Hall of Administration press room.

When George Bush's people put on a $42-million inaugural program four years ago, many editorial writers and columnists around America came unglued. A St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times commentator said the president needed to prove that his call for sacrifice "is more than just empty words." A Washington Post columnist suggested Bush & Co. should be ashamed of staging lavish parties in the face of their debacle in Iraq. A columnist at the New York Observer evoked images of Louis XIV.

Would you be willing to kick in $20 to have someone get to the bottom of the murky finances at your kid's school? How about contributing $30 to find out if your trash haulers really sift recyclables from the garbage, like they claim? If that sounds intriguing, I give you David Cohn. Cohn is a skinny young man of abundant enthusiasm who's primed to pump energy, and cash, into what sometimes feels like the world's most beleaguered profession: journalism. He is the founder of Spot.

Shifts in the way news is reported in Washington mean that average citizens find information about the government harder to come by, while an "elite" specialty audience has access to more information than ever, a study to be released today has found.

Muscling the "hot" and "cold" handles didn't work. So I removed them altogether and cranked down on the valves with a set of pliers. Still, water flowed out the spigot, into the bath and down the drain. The plumber arrived not long after and, in no time, ended the deluge. I was $180 poorer, but it was worth it to have a professional make sure I didn't create Pasadena's newest wetlands.

Every week, Air Force cargo jets land and taxi down the runway at Dover Air Force Base, Del., carrying the remains of fallen U.S. troops. After a chaplain says a simple prayer, an eight-member military honor guard removes the metal "transfer cases" from the planes and carries them to a mortuary van. The flag-draped coffins are a testament to the toll of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as of the sacrifice borne by those who serve in the military and their families.

Twitter always reminded me of my dog, squirming around, tail wagging -- demanding a little more attention than I felt I could give. But when I devoted a few minutes of attention, it was usually worthwhile. The Internet-based status-update service has been all the rage of late, with master Twitterers receiving awards, celebrity journalists pledging their allegiance and a research paper showing just who uses the micro-blogging system that delivers news morsels, 140 characters at a time.

While the New York Times awaits a postelection sit-down with President Obama, Ebony magazine already nabbed its interview, the first given when Obama was still the president-elect. Once Obama was sworn in, he granted one of his first Q&A's to the editor of Black Enterprise magazine. His first known radio interview went to host El Pistolero, followed last week by a friendly phone-in to another giant of Spanish-language radio, Los Angeles-based Piolin.

Visitors to Austin's South by Southwest conference arrived Friday to a sky like a wet blanket. A cold, wet blanket. We traipsed our way from panel to panel, grumbling from beneath convenience-store umbrellas, wondering about the possibilities for eating barbecue in a rainstorm. In the same kind of way, discussion at the new media portion of this year's conference was shot through with a chilly strain of winter.

When Brian Williams asked at the end of the "NBC Nightly News" three weeks ago for viewers to send along good news, he couldn't have imagined the thousands of e-mails that would pour into the network overnight. The resulting stories on "acts of kindness in this cruel economy" have made NBC the most visible of many media outlets pushing to give audiences some good news in the midst of bad times. The trend-bucking features might have the public wondering: What took so long?