Middling.Industries

How I Should Have Seen The Fall Of Alternative Newspapers In 2003

September 6, 2018

[caption id="attachment_188" align="aligncenter" width="550"] New York City newspaper boxes, April 5, 2016. Source: Flickr/Dumbo711[/caption] After years of working in the federal government, the annual conference of alternative newspapers seemed downright...

YouTube

Going Deep On Vacation

September 2, 2018September 2, 2018

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZONVeGOtyo Every summer Teresa, Nicolas and I take a week vacation right before school starts after Labor Day. This year I tried to think hard about what the time off...

American Politics

What The Road Forward Looks Like

August 23, 2018August 23, 2018

[caption id="attachment_167" align="aligncenter" width="550"] Capitol Hill sunset, September 14, 2014. Source: Thomas Hawk/Flickr[/caption] Congressional Republicans are not going to impeach Donald Trump. Let’s be straight up about that. Polling continually...

American Politics

Just Keep Going At It

August 19, 2018August 19, 2018

A precocious child who devoured three newspapers a day, when I was seventeen I decided that I should get involved with politics. Although I read the papers, I didn’t have...

Personal

I Was Raised By A Black Woman

August 3, 2018August 7, 2018

One of my mothers was a black woman and I miss her more than words can convey. I’ve tried countless times to write this essay, because I want to tell...

News Media

It’s Time For Illinois To Subsidize Local News Gathering

July 24, 2018

[caption id="attachment_131" align="aligncenter" width="550"] The Danville Commercial-News building in Danville, Illinois. Once a 30,000 circulation daily paper, it now claims about 15,000. Credit: Randy von Liski/Flickr[/caption] The business of reporting...

News Media

Chance Has Just One To Make Chicagoist Work

July 19, 2018July 19, 2018

This morning Chance Bennett, a.k.a., Chance The Rapper, announced his acquisition of Chicagoist from the shambling remains of Joe Ricketts’ DNAInfo-Gothamist company. It’s a great title with a significant audience,...

American Politics

In Praise of Federal Bureaucrats

July 19, 2018

When I was twenty-eight I owned four dark suits and one light. I kept an extra pair of white shirts in my office because Washington summers were muggy, and you...