One of the pleasant aspects of being the editor of Miller-McCune is regular and often unexpected contact with people and entities that are working to improve the world by introducing some small piece of it to factual reality. Look, for just one instance, at the network of investigative reporting and transparency nonprofits — from ProPublica and the Texas Tribune to the Sunlight Foundation and the Center for Public Integrity — that has grown in the last decade or so, and tell me your old daily paper used to do accountability journalism better. Another hopeful part of the media future ... Read More
Foreign Aid for a Frugal Age
February 23, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
As they prepared to take control of the House of Representatives, congressional Republicans were also getting ready to take on foreign aid — with a scalpel or a meat-ax, depending on how one parsed words. U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, conservative South Florida Republican and incoming House Foreign Affairs Committee chair, told Agence France-Presse she wants "to cut the U.S. State Department and foreign aid budgets and use U.S. contributions to force reforms in multilateral organizations like the United Nations." And Foreign Policy magazine suggested that Rep. Kay Granger — a Texan who is ... Read More
The Magic of Re-reinventing Government
December 15, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Last summer I got pick-pocketed in Chicago. I was walking back to my hotel room after dinner when, mid-block, I reached down, found nothing where my wallet should have been and went straight to panic mode. Thanks to FedEx and my passport, I was able to make it onto an airplane and back to the West Coast, where the pocket-picking gave me a delayed lesson in governmental competence, via the seemingly simple and parallel tasks of replacing a Social Security card and a driver's license. The Social Security office in Santa Barbara, Calif., is located in an outdoor mall downtown, but it's not at ... Read More
Desert of Fear
July 27, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
After driving through the slanting light and long vistas of the high Mojave Desert at sunrise, coming down into heat-blasted, midday Lake Havasu City, Ariz., is, literally and figuratively, a downer. I like the desert, but Havasu has a way of exuding tourist-trap despair, even when it's late June and 103 and climbing, and the snowbirds are all intelligently back in Canada and the upper Midwest. It didn't help my mood that I was trying to cover a political campaign event that did not want to be found. Early in May, John Dougherty, an old friend who's the best investigative reporter I've ever ... Read More
Counterinsurgency Training by ‘Virtual Human’
June 16, 2010 • By • 1 Comment
The path to Bill Swartout's office hints that he's involved in something very ... high-concept. The ground-floor reception area, the elevator and the hallway leading to his office are decorated in a combination of brushed metal and sleek curves that seems to have both futuristic and retro influences. When I ask about the techno-deco look, Swartout mentions matter-of-factly that the interiors here were designed by Herman Zimmerman, a production designer who worked on Star Trek. The office itself sits atop a six-story building in Marina del Rey and has a killer view over Los Angeles; on the ... Read More
Knowledge-Based Journalism Is Not an Oxymoron
April 14, 2010 • By • 4 Comments
Early in my career, I attended a daylong court hearing that focused on a court challenge, pursued by large retailers in a major American city, to a so-called "blue law" that kept most stores closed on Sundays. The lawsuit was big news. This city was largely conservative and fairly religious, and the retailers were normally aligned with the right-leaning establishment. All the same, the retailers wanted to make money on the Lord's Day, politics be darned. The case was God v. Mammon, but with a twist, and so it was catnip to the news media. The run-up to the hearing included weeks of news ... Read More
Can California Redistricting Reform Change Congress?
February 19, 2010 • By • 3 Comments
If I taught journalism, the final project would have students write an article about municipal bonds. The assignment would be a reality check: As a profession, journalism is so difficult nowadays that only those young people who have the drive and style needed to accurately enliven the second-most boring subject in the news universe — municipal finance — have any chance of a significant career. If you can make bond covenants sing, you might earn a journalistic living in an age when people dislike paying for news, and countless millions of blockheads write for no money. But even I have ... Read More
The Nine of 2009
January 1, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
When I’m awake, I recoil from two forms of journalism: the simple-minded list that is the staple of service-oriented magazines (“25 Ways to Please Your Man While Reading This Brain-Dead Glossy!”) and the anniversary story. My aversion probably has something to do with having worked, early in my career, for editors who thought stories about the 30-year celebration of any event, no matter how trivial, could be made riveting through use of the bulleted list. The story about the best of this, that or the other from the preceding 12 months is, of course, a list-anniversary combination that ... Read More
Adventures in Capitolism
December 16, 2009 • By • 4 Comments
In the wake of the 2009 elections — really, ever since the stimulus plan passed early last year — a pair of conflicting narratives has dominated the U.S. politico-media landscape. Though told in many ways and forms, the double-story actually boils down to a simple either/or proposition: either ... President Obama is an able, courageous leader who's trying to accomplish, all at once, many difficult, fundamental changes needed to keep America the world's leading economy. or ... President Obama is a silver-tongued, overambitious politician who is stealthily extending the federal ... Read More
