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The “Memindex Method” was a 1906 precursor to the Bullet Journal, Hipster PDA, GTD and related productivity systems. It preceded Vannevar Bush’s seminal “memex” essay by nearly a half-century.

Here’s something I saw immediately after walking the dog.

11 years old. Still gets zoomies.

Many "ews" were said

Last night, Julie went into the pantry to get a snack. She found a pound and a half of sliced deli turkey breast that had gotten lost on the path from the supermarket to the car to the refrigerator.

This explains the unpleasant smell and flies that had been lingering inexplicably in the kitchen for weeks.

Many “ews” were said that night, and the turkey found its way out of the house and into the trash bin. Fortunately, trash pick-up was this morning.

As a pleasant surprise, the smell and flies were gone almost immediately.

A friend said one of my earlier posts about Trump was fat-shaming. Not sure he’s right, but I amend the word “obese” to “with an unhealthy lifestyle.”

Articles I read over lunch today on Fierce Network: Brightspeed’s multi-billion-dollar cash infusion, US and Sweden team on 6G, and Huawei looks to beat Nvidia chips

Brightspeed gets a whopping $3.7 billion to build fiber networks. Linda Hardesty breaks the news.

The US and Sweden are teaming up to develop 6G technology. By Dan Jones

Natural gas companies want to power artificial intelligence. Nuclear power won’t arrive fast enough. By Diana Goovaerts.

Investors are pouring money into hardware to secure sufficient compute power for AI. By Diana Goovaerts

Huawei is developing a new chip to challenge Nvidia and surmount US sanctions

Alert readers will note that last article is not from Fierce Network.

Donald Trump is a 77-year-old obese man who is clearly losing his mental faculties. He can’t even remember who he’s running against half the time or remember her name even when he does. What happens when his decline is obvious even to his supporters? Or if he drops dead? What if that happens before Election Day?

Trump is accelerating AI-driven truth decay

Ina Fried at Axios AI+: AI’s biggest danger isn’t that it can be used to make up lies — human beings are already great at lying. It’s that bad people can claim that inconvenient facts are AI-generated deepfakes.

Many people saw big crowds at Harris rallies, but Trump claims the photos and videos were manufactured by AI.

Warnings about the danger of deepfakes have helped arm the public against an expected flood of fakery.

  • But they’ve also unavoidably made it possible to question the trustworthiness of any evidence you don’t like.
  • The next time a recording surfaces of some private event where a politician said something damaging, it will be that much easier to deny it.

Some Jan. 6 defendants tried to argue that photos showing them attacking the U.S. Capitol were AI-generated fakes, invoking what a recent American Bar Association article calls “the deepfake defense.”

  • “The growing use of AI-generated false and misleading information is exacerbating the challenge of the so-called liar’s dividend, in which widespread wariness of falsehoods on a given topic can muddy the waters to the extent that people disbelieve true statements,” a Freedom House report last year argued.

…

  • A world in which nobody trusts anything is one where autocratic leaders can easily mobilize hate and invent their own realities.

The bottom line: As Yale historian Timothy Snyder, author of “On Tyranny,” puts it, “What authoritarians do is they say, ‘Look, there’s no truth at all. Sure you don’t trust me – but don’t trust them, or them, or certainly not the media. Don’t trust anybody.'”

  • “And so just stay on your couch, basically … just do nothing. Affect a pose of cynicism. Be equally skeptical about everything.”

An appreciation for the under-appreciated, brilliant sci-fi writer John Varley.

Timothy Sandefur at Discourse Magazine:

It was 50 years ago this month that American science fiction writer John Varley – who celebrates his 77th birthday today–published his first short story. It sparked a rapid rise that brought him the praise of the genre’s most prominent figures, along with multiple Hugo and Nebula awards (the science fiction equivalent of the Pulitzer). Isaac Asimov was among the many who called him the natural successor to Robert A. Heinlein.

Yet despite the immense admiration Varley has enjoyed both within the science fiction community and without (Tom Clancy called him “the best writer in America”), he has never gained the following that Asimov or Heinlein enjoyed. That’s a shame because his unique blend of imagination and realism–and his underlying belief that freedom is essential to the human personality–make him one of the finest authors ever to set his fiction in the future….

Varley moved to San Francisco as a young man, and the “hippie element” plays an important role in his fiction, “not (or not usually) in the sense of ‘tune in, turn on, drop out,’ but of rebellion, self-reliance, hard work and creativity that remain underappreciated elements of the ’60s counterculture.”

Contrary to the popular stereotype of hippies as drugged-out, unemployed hitchhikers, many members of the Woodstock generation (Varley attended Woodstock, by accident, after getting stuck in the traffic jam while driving through New York) put a heavy emphasis on manual trades, intellectual innovation and self-improvement. Many members of the counterculture weren’t anti-capitalist per se, but were committed to what historian David Farber calls “right livelihood”: that is, a life of genuineness not offered by what they called “the Establishment.”

For a research report, I’m looking for companies outside the tech industry that are doing interesting work with artificial intelligence. If that’s you, or if you have any leads, email me at mwagner@questex.com.

Anil Dash: The purpose of a system is what it does

Dash: Unlike physical machines, the institutions that make up society are never broken. They always do precisely what they were designed to do.

… when our carceral system causes innocent people to be held in torturous or even deadly conditions because they could not afford bail, we must understand that this is the system working correctly. It is doing the thing it is designed to do. When we shout about the effect that this system is having, we are not filing a bug report, we are giving a systems update, and in fact we are reporting back to those with agency over the system that it is working properly….

In my own life, I’ve found the greatest reluctance to embrace this idea, and strongest rejection of its obvious truth, comes from the politically moderate, centrist-leaning suburban folks…. “

Accepting the principle of POSIWID is “a prerequisite for optimism that actually has impact. Mindless optimism says, ‘this system is supposed to have a good output, therefore if we support it hard enough, it’ll do the right thing.’”

Canadian sci-fi writer Robert Sawyer has released a free version of the venerable WordStar word processing program

The app includes a DOS emulator so it can run on modern Windows, and Sawyer says it also supports Mac and Linux, according to Lia Proven at The Register.

WordStar users include Sawyer, who’s still using it, as well as Arthur C. Clarke, Anne Rice, George R. R. Martin (who still used it as of 2014), William F. Buckley Jr. and Ralph Ellison.

Sawyer’s project may be illegal — he declared WordStar to be abandonware but it may still technically be somebody’s intellectual property.

I was more of a XyWrite guy. I wonder whether there’s a version that runs on the Mac?

Facebook has decided I want to get notifications anytime somebody posts to any of the dozens and dozens of groups I’m a member of. Spoiler alert: I do not want to receive these notifications.

I have asked Facebook to change the name of the page I manage. Apparently, I have to ask for permission to change the page’s name? Because I’m five years old and Facebook is my auntie?

Facebook is such a shitty platform.

I think I may have figured out how to turn off Facebook notifications when someone reacts to one of my posts. If it works, this would make Facebook a million times friendlier.

I just finished writing and submitted a major report for my editor’s review.

Proofreading it, I was amazed how many ways I could find to spell “Kubernetes.”

For the title of this morning’s blog post about “Battlestar Galactica,” I asked ChatGPT:

What are some playful plays on words for the title of “Battlestar Galactica” that would indicate we think it’s a bad show?

The response:

Here are a few playful and critical wordplays on “Battlestar Galactica”:

  • “Battle-Snore Galactica”
  • “Blunderstar Galactica”
  • “Battlestar Lacklusterica”
  • “Borestar Galactica”
  • “Battlestar Catastrophica”

Not bad.

Battle-snore Galactica

We never got into the 2004 “Battlestar Galactica.” We loved the mini-series, but the first episode of the full series didn’t appeal to us so, we bailed out.

For the next 20 years, I’ve heard people raving about how great the show is. It’s become a classic. I got FOMO.

We started watching the series recently. We rewatched the miniseries and 10 episodes of the series.

And I think we’re done. Every episode is the same. For a space opera, it’s awfully claustrophobic.

“Battlestar Galactica” today looks like a rough draft of “The Expanse” and “For All Mankind.” And, indeed, “For All Manknd” is executive-produced by Ronald Moore, who produced “Galactica.”

I buy audiobooks from Libro.fm rather than Audible, primarily so that I can listen to the audio using the Overcast podcast app. Overcast is more familiar to me than the Audible app, and Overcast has excellent audio quality.

As a side-benefit, I also get non-DRMed audiobooks, which means I’m not locked into the Audible ecosystem. Also, I get to support a competitor to the Amazon monopoly. I buy plenty of stuff from Amazon, but it’s nice to occasionally shop elsewhere.

On this day in 1888, Bertha Benz took the first documented road trip in an automobile, to visit her mother, 60 miles away

The German Bertha was born into a wealthy family and married engineer Karl Benz, writes Sari Rosenberg at Lifetime.

Bertha used her family money to finance her husband’s creation of a horseless carriage. Under modern day law, Bertha would have actually owned the patent rights. However, German law in the 1880s prohibited married women from even applying for a patent.

Her husband, Karl Benz, gets the credit for the invention, but her money, marketing “and chutzpah” built the business.

Benz’s Motorwagen was made of wood, with two wheels in back, one in front and a “handle-like contraption” for steering, and could reach speeds up to 25 mph, Rosenberg writes.

People were reluctant to buy a machine that only traveled short distances, and “Bertha realized the only way to sell more cars was if they demystified the public’s fear of driving.”

With only a small amount of fuel in the carburetor, Bertha had to plan her route around where apothecaries were located so she could buy ligroin, a detergent that was used as fuel.

…

When a fuel line got clogged, she used a long hat pin to fix it. She used a garter to repair a broken ignition. At one point, she had to employ the help of a blacksmith to help fix a broken chain. When the brakes on the car began to fail, Bertha visited a cobbler who installed leather on them, hence creating the first brake pads. Meanwhile, at a time before roadmaps even existed, she literally forged her own path on the trip via automobile to her mom’s house.

As Israel braces for attack, ordinary citizens fear that Netanyahu has destroyed a country and a dream

“We used to be better than they are, we used to be good.… Now we are the same.” Journalist Aviya Kushner writes at The Forward about her encounter at an Israeli light rail station with a woman older than the state of Israel itself.

Israelis opposing Netanyahu use the word “hamadena” to describe what Netanyahu is destroying. “For Israelis, that word, hamedina, or ‘the state’ is not just the State of Israel, but the dream of the State of Israel.”

I think the elderly woman is oversimplifying. I, too, used to believe Israel was good. Since the reaction to the Oct. 7 attack, I have come to see that Israel is founded on injustice.

Israel is not unique or fundamentally evil. As Ezra Klein said, nearly every state is founded in blood.

However, Israel can’t just go back to locking the Palestinians in the basement and nailing the door shut. Israel has to do better.

📷 Some things I saw walking the dog

We had stopped for a minute for me to pick up the dog’s by-product. I heard the chickens before I saw them. and thought, “WTF is that?” The sound was simultaneously very familiar and utterly strange.

We live in an ordinary Southern California suburb, not farm country by any means. By SoCal standards, we live in the city. I have heard people keep chickens around here, but have not encountered it in person for 15 years or so.

Auto-generated description: A large carved wooden bear sits on its haunches with its head tilted back, positioned near a blue trash bin and a green leafy plant. Auto-generated description: A vintage beige car is parked on the driveway of a suburban house with a gray exterior.

When you see an El Camino, you are required to photograph it and share the photo. Those are the rules.

“I lost my routine, community and, in a way, my purpose.”

“Why I was gone.” Andrea Lopez-Villafaña, managing editor, daily news, for the Voice of San Diego, is a DREAMer. Brought to the United States as a small child by her parents, she qualified for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, in 2013. DACA requires her to re-apply for the right to work in the US every two years. But the federal government was slow to process applications and in June she was forced to take an unpaid leave of absence from work, returning recently.

I missed her voice on the Voice of San Diego weekly podcast, and was glad when she came back.

People who’ve lived their whole lives in the US should have an easy path to citizenship and not have to suffer this ridiculous bureaucracy

Whether it’s Kamala Harris helping to raise other people’s children or Donald Trump going to Epstein Island to have sex with other people’s children, both candidates have made a lifelong impact on other people’s children.

— New York Times Pitchbot

I tried Stage Manager on the Mac yesterday and loved it instantly, which is surprising because I've tried it a couple of times in the past and hated it instantly.

This time, however, I’m using Stage Manager on my new 34" Dell Ultrawide display, which I received last week, rather than my ancient 14-year-old 27" Apple Cinema Display.

I like to have one app open on my desktop at a time, not a clutter of windows. With the Apple Cinema Display, that was simple: maximize the app. But that result is far too wide on the Dell.

Stage Manager lets me have one app centered on half-width and everything else tucked off to the side, for easy access. Plus I can have two or more apps sharing a screen (Apple calls them “spaces”), which suits me when I have a document in one app and I’m taking notes on that document in another app.

Spaces, which is older technology, is very similar. I’ve hated it in the past, but maybe I should give it a try again. Maybe I would like it, too.

I laid my phone down on a window ledge barely wider than the phone and instantly thought, “Bad idea. If there’s an earthquake, the phone will get knocked to the floor and might be damaged.”

I have gone native.

Welcome to the shitpost election, by Casey Newton:

… sharing weaponized misinformation in the form of lazy jokes has quickly come to define the developing presidential campaign between Harris and Donald Trump. Across social networks, Democrats and Republicans are flooding the feed with obviously untrue statements about one another and calling it a joke.

I normally eschew both-siderism but Casey Newton may be right on this one. Certainly, Democrats jumped gleefully on couch jokes.

I am using a Microsoft Teams recording and transcription to take interview notes. It’s the first time I’ve used Teams for that, and it requires me to stare at my own ugly face while reviewing the recording much slower than in real time.

This is excruciatingly painful. I am a slack-jawed baboon.

A conspicuously dressed-down shooter won Olympic silver. Then he went viral.

Rachel Treisman at KPBS.org: While other Olympic shooters showed up wearing “cyberpunk-looking gear … large ear protectors, visors and sci fi-esque shooting glasses, [Turkey’s Yusuf Didek] played it a different kind of cool with regular eyeglasses and barely visible ear plugs.” He wore “a jersey that looked like an ordinary T-shirt, and [shot] with his free hand tucked in his pants pocket,” giving off “a noticeably casual vibe. So casual, in fact, that scores of social media users jokingly wondered whether Turkey had sent a hitman to the Olympics.”

Perry's Cafe, a San Diego landmark for 39 years, will close

I’ve seen this place, with its vintage space-age Googie architecture, from the highway near Old Town often. I’ve never been inside, though I’ve always meant to. Inside, it’s a classic diner of a type that seems to be a dying breed — my favorite kind of restaurant. RIP.

According to Roxana Popescu at the San Diego Union-Tribune, Perry’s will be replaced by a 223-unit residential complex, preserving some of the original building.

Trying to move folders around in bookmarks on Safari is a dreadful experience. I have sometimes wondered why The Youngs today don’t use browser bookmarks — it’s because browser bookmarks are stuck in the 90s, so people don’t use them, and therefore browser developers don’t pay them any attention, and it’s a vicious cycle.

“The political parties are more divided by their views on gender than they are divided by gender itself”

Derek Thompson at The Atlantic, What Is America’s Gender War Actually About?

The left has become more adept at shaming toxic masculinity than at showcasing a positive masculinity that is distinct from femininity. Progressive readers of the previous sentence might roll their eyes at the notion that it is the job of any left-wing political movement to coddle men’s feelings. But if a large shift rightward among young male voters helps Trump eke out a victory in November, Democrats will have little choice but to think up a new message to stop the young-male exodus.

Much truth here I think. I have never been bothered by this because I do not feel at all targeted by progressive denunciations of toxic masculinity, and I don’t look to politicians and political pundits to tell me how a man ought to act.

Then again, I am not young.

The Republican vision of masculinity is not only toxic, but it is also false. Donald Trump is a draft dodger and a coward who hides behind his inherited money, and his lickspittle lackeys are no better. I’m not seeing a lot of astronauts, athletes, military combat veterans or other true adherents of machismo in that crowd. Republican President Theodore Roosevelt would have been disgusted with what his party has become.

Training AI using synthetic data seems like a lot of bullshit to me. It’s like learning to cook by reading cookbooks, watching YouTube videos and talking to other people who are doing the same thing, but never actually cooking. All of those things are useful, but the only way to learn to cook is to cook.

Am I missing something?

I’m pleased to see the Goodlinks read-later app has added support for highlights and notes. My Readwise Reader annual subscription runs out in a few days, and I’ve been looking for alternatives. Readwise Reader is a great product, but it is overpowered and overpriced for my purposes.

Meta’s idiot moderation AI strikes again, this time deleting a meme I posted to Threads weeks ago for allegedly violating Meta’s terms of service prohibiting drug sales. Of course, I was not selling drugs — it was stoner humor. I used to run into this kind of thing several times a month on Facebook before I stopped posting there about two weeks ago.

This incident was particularly annoying because I was unable to dismiss the warning notification to click through to the timeline.

Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day: Conservatives are struggling to get ahead of this whole “weird” thing. (My two cents: That’s cuz they’re weird.)

I’m not thrilled with the ageism in the Democrats' new slogan: “Donald Trump is old and weird.” But I’m happy to see it seems to be working. I’ll deal with my issues after President Harris is sworn in.

Also from Broderick: Musk Is Violating His Own Terms Of Service (And Likely Election Law) If You Even Care.

Open standards make podcasting work

A Few Blockbuster Podcasts Are Making All the Money. I listen to about 90 minutes of podcasts daily, but I only listen to one of the listed top ten podcasts. I haven’t even heard of most of these (though some of the hosts are familiar names — they’re real-life celebrities). That’s a testimony to the excellent richness of the podcast landscape, and that richness is, to a large degree, attributable to open standards.

“Nearly 100 million Americans age 12 and older listen to podcasts every week,” according to this article in the Wall Street Journal.

I started listening near the beginning, 20 years ago, when podcasts were very much a nerd affair. It amazes me that they are now mainstream like TV and radio are used to be.

Anchorage [Alaska] will one day be the port of exchange between Asia, North America, and Europe…. I don’t think you all are considering how much an ice free Arctic Ocean will change international trade routes. It will become the very northwest passage explorers had been looking for since like 1500.

— Marginal Revolution

“Bob Newhart holds up”

An insightful essay on what made Newhart’s work genius, by Jason Zinoman at The New York Times:

Before basically inventing the hit stand-up special, with the 1960 Grammy-winning album “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart” — that doesn’t even count his pay-per-view event broadcast on Canadian television that some cite as the first filmed special — he was a soft-spoken accountant who had never done a set in a nightclub. That he made a classic with so little preparation is one of the great miracles in the history of comedy.

Newhart was a master of the slow build and used silence and his stammer as power tools.

Also: Marc Maron interviews Newhart from 2014 and 2018.

Newhart went straight to the top. Unlike other comics, he didn’t have years of playing small gigs to refine his act before hitting it big. He went from nowhere to a #1 album and had to learn his craft in the spotlight.

Newhart repeats the hilarious story about how his wife met Don Rickles. The Newharts and Rickles became lifelong friends. Rickles was an insult comic who spewed racist jokes at a time when a person could do those things, and it was clear they were demonstrating how racism was stupid. But offstage, Don Rickles was, by all accounts, a kind and gracious man—the opposite of his onstage persona.

Newhart shrugs and does not explain how he and Rickles became close friends. But I think a big part of it is that they were both good men who played Rat Pack shows but were not interested in the boozing, philandering lifestyle. They were family men.

Please share tips for managing windows on an ultrawide computer display

I recently upgraded from a 27" 14-year-old Apple Cinema Display to a 34" Dell ultrawide.

Until now, I’ve always run a simple windowing setup: Most of the time, I’m using one app, and it’s maximized to fill the whole screen. When I want to switch apps, I Cmd-Tab between them (that’s equivalent to Alt-Tab on Windows). Often, I use two apps, and I tile them side by side when I do.

But that strategy is not going to work for me on a 34" display because the individual app becomes too big to take in.

If I’m working on just one application, I think I’ll have it centered, full height, 2/3 or 3/4 of the width of the screen. We’ll see how that works out over time. But what goes on either edge?

How do you manage your ultrawide lifestyle?

I use the computer for basic productivity, the web and social media. I’m not a gamer and I don’t generally watch videos or listen to music on my desktop.

I already use Raycast for window management, so I don’t need pointers to software such as Raycast, Moom, or Magnet. However, if there are particular applications you love for window management on ultrawide displays, please let me know.

By the way, I searched the Internet for tips on making the transition and found reddit.com/r/ultrawidemasterrace, where people share tips and photos of their ultrawide setups. 34" seems huge to me, but it barely qualifies for that sub. For example, check this out: a 49" display with another monitor mounted above it.

I finally had enough and deactivated my Twitter account. Recently Musk has revealed himself to be an even bigger schmuck than previously.

Rob Beschizza/Boing Boing: “The New York Times wanted to summon one of its favorite characters: an everyday Dem so upset with the Left that they were going to vote for Donald Trump instead.” They quoted “Anna Ayala, notable to [the Times] only for being a 58-year-old who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 but now likes the other guy.”

But Ayala is “the famed criminal who put a human finger in a Wendy’s chili among various other escapades.”

(Corrected to fix typo, credit Rob, post to correct place. Oy.)

“Confused about the Vance couch thing? Here’s a quick rundown”

It started as a a joke on X, with user @rickrudescalves claiming Vance revealed in his memoir Hillbilly Elegy that he lubed up two couch cushions and had sex with them when he was a teenager. It went very viral and a lot of people believed it because, I mean, look at the guy, it seems like something he would do. The Associated Press, however, made the mistake of trying to debunk all this, declaring in a headline that Vance has never fucked a couch. But as many pointed out, can they actually prove that? How do we know? The AP has since deleted the post, but I think we, as a nation, should keep loudly discussing this until November.

— Ryan Broderick, Garbage Day

If you’re participating in get-out-the-vote campaigns, remember that Election Day is when voting ends. For absentee ballots, voting starts Sept. 21. So, get-out-the-vote campaigns start in September.

Julie and I are quite enjoying the TV series “Evil,” which is of the paranormal investigator genre, like “The Night Stalker” and “X-Files.” In this case, the paranormal investigators work for the Catholic Church.

We’re partway through Season 1.

Did “Night Stalker” and “X-Files” invent the genre of the paranormal investigator, or was that trope already around and established?

Today I found my reporter’s notebook for South by Southwest 2007. That was the event where Twitter hit its first tipping point. I remember cruising around in a taxi with a friend who had a 17" MacBook open on his lap, connected with a wireless modem, watching Twitter for news about parties.

The notebook has a page of notes about voicemail messages. Remember voicemail?

I’m planning my first international trip in five years. I can’t find my passport, but I did find a receipt for a fleece I bought from LL Bean in 2011.

Although I have declined to renew my Tumblr premium membership, I’m grateful to Automattic for keeping the service going.

MacStories' Federico Viticci praises wired EarPods as an alternative to Bluetooth AirPods.

I don’t have a use for EarPods because all my sound-emitting devices are from Apple. Weirdly, that makes me more of an Apple fanboy than the editor of MacStories is.

Ghost cities in the Amazon are rewriting the story of civilization

The Amazon rainforests seem like “an environment largely untouched by humans.” But new archeological discoveries are changing that perception.

“With so much evidence of ancient human activity, it is now thought the pre-Columbian Amazon was inhabited by millions of people – some living in large built-up areas complete with road networks, temples and pyramids.”

And they did it all without the benefit of agriculture as we now understand it.

These discoveries defy conventional wisdom about the nature of civilization.

newscientist.com (subscription required)

apple.news

“one of the reasons i have no particular problem with the manner in which harris has become the presumptive nominee is that i think plebscitary participation in internal party processes is overrated.put another way: is the primary process actually better at picking nominees then the pre-1972 system of conventions and party elites? i don’t think so!” — Jamelle Bouie

Tumblr is raising rates for Premium membership by 1.75x. And I'm canceling

I’ve been disappointed in the direction Tumblr has taken under Automattic, though I acknowledge that it’s a hard business. None of Tumblr’s four owners has managed to make the platform financially sustainable, despite an enthusiastic user base.

Also, I acknowledge that I am not the target audience for Tumblr. I am old enough to be the target audience’s grandparent.

The 75 Best Sci-Fi books of all time. esquire.com I added a couple of these titles to my to-be-read list.

Kamala is a happy warrior and that is a powerful political strength for her

America loves happy warriors; it’s why we loved FDR and Reagan. Biden was a happy warrior as VP, but by 2020, his age caught up with him, and mostly, he seemed tired and angry. That’s not his fault, but it worked against him.

Trump seemed like a happy warrior in the 2016 election — or at least he did in the primary — but now he’s an angry, bitter rageaholic, as are his supporters. A happy warrior can do extremely well against angry, bitter rage.

America still employs a ton of news reporters

Wait, does America really still employ a ton of news reporters? Searching for bright spots in the twilight of the newspaper industry. wapo.st

Surprisingly, given the dire state of the journalism industry, America employs about as many news reporters as it did three decades ago.

That’s not a win—America has nearly 20% more jobs and people than it had 30 years ago.

But it doesn’t point to an industry in collapse either.

The catch is that many of these reporters work outside of journalism organizations, often in PR and marketing.

Having read the article, it describes my winding career path well. I’ve been a daily newspaper reporter, covering local government, crime, community and features. I’ve been a business-to-business tech journalist, which some might argue is not actually journalism. I’ve been a content marketer. And now I’m an analyst. During all that time, I’ve been using the same skills. Even the transition from print to the Internet was gradual and involves many of the same skills.