The Public Editor Joins the Cocktail Party

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Arthur S. Brisbane, the public editor of The New York Times, turned his attention this week to the newsroom's use of Twitter. He quoted from an e-mail interview with me, which I am posting in full here, with a few tweaks and links. The Public Editor: I’m working on a column about how Times staffers use Twitter: the journalistic benefits, the marketing benefits and any other benefits – as well as the costs, whatever they might be. I am, I confess, a newcomer to using Twitter and wonder whether it is a boon or a waste of time.

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N.Y.U. Poetry Reading in East Village

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Time for some more plugs. My wife, Jane Rosenberg LaForge, will be joining New York University professors and students at the Liberal Studies Program's Fall Faculty/Student Reading from 6 to 8 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 3, at the Telephone Bar and Grill, 149 Second Avenue (between 9th and 10th Streets) in the East Village. Also, Jane's "After Voices" poetry chapbook -- published last month by Burning River of Cleveland -- is now available at the McNally Jackson Book Store in SoHo, one of the few remaining interesting indie bookstores left in Manhattan.

'Old' Media, 'New' Media, on Twitter

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I jumped into an esoteric debate Wednesday evening: What is the most effective way mainstream media can use social media like Twitter? Should they never post RSS feeds automatically? Must every tweet be crafted by human hands? Notice that I don't say "old media," because I happen to think that term is bull. Plenty of supposedly "old media" outlets have been on the Web since the earliest days and produce innovative multimedia content that is as good as or better than anything found elsewhere in the "new media." But that doesn't make for a good story. (Yes, plenty of old media practitioners still have their heads in the sand. And I don't claim to have figured it all out -- my point is, nobody has figured it out. The Web is 20 minutes old. Nobody knows anything.)

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Standing on the Moon

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There's something magical about the moon. We humans have always felt an affinity for it, that light in the sky. It has kept us company for centuries on lonely dark nights. Maybe we don't think about it so much anymore in this country, now that we have electric lights and good roofs over our heads most of the time. But when I was a kid, it seemed like people talked about the moon all the time. I remember watching the first moon walks in a grainy black and white image. You'll remember this for the rest of your life, my father told me. And now I can watch it on YouTube, too, whenever I want, which is kind of amazing.

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When You're Dreaming and You Know It

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I was walking barelegged across a desert-like blue and red plain with sparse vegetation and rocks. There was a sudden sharp pain in my leg. I turned around and saw something out of the corner of my eye. Then it happened again. What was that? Somebody standing off to the side, out of my line of vision, but a friend, called out, "watch out! there's more of them!" And it happened again.

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'Allenwood' in Makeout Creek

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Good news for my wife, Jane: The second issue of the literary journal Makeout Creek has just been published, including her poem, "Allenwood." The poem itself is not online, but you can buy a print copy. We're still waiting for ours. (You can still find her poem "Lemons" online in the Burnside Review, published over the summer, and a chapter from her novel, published in The Adirondack Review.)

My Old Man, a Blogger Before the Web

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When the news of the day seems particularly big, I wonder what my parents would think about it all. They're dead, and gone with them are all the stories and family lore that I only half-listened to when I was younger. Rattling around in my head are half-remembered snippets of conversations about their childhoods in the Great Depression, long-ago presidents and wars, those scary Beatles with their rock and roll, pulp fiction and radio dramas. They lived through World War II, the atom bomb, the invention of television, Vietnam, hippies, Watergate, pet rocks, disco and the bad old 70's, the Cold War, the Iranian hostage crisis, recessions and more. They never saw my journalism career leap beyond the small-town stage. They never met their granddaughter. Then again, they haven't had to live through the worry of my blood-clot scares nor their other son's repeated deployments to wartime Iraq and Afghanistan.

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