Leap year and Mammy McDaniel

You might know today is Feb. 29 (Leap Year day), but how about Mammy McDaniel? Hint: She was born on Leap Year.

Okay, she's the first African-American to win an Academy Award--for her role in "Gone With The Wind."

This blog's for you, Mammy!

Newspapers fighting for survival

It's been known for some time now that newspaper circulation and ad revenues have been sagging.

Because of those twin pitfalls (low or stagnant circulation and likewise with ad revenue) some say the newspaper industy is dying--kind of like a media dinosaur.

Enter Quandrant One, where four large newspaper-heavy companies--Gannett, New York Times, Hearst and Tribune--are combining their resources so that an advertiser can make one buy and be on all these publications' Web sites.

Strikes me, in a way, as a band aid approach to a huge, daunting problem, but maybe it's one small step to help a struggling industry.

Giving "Shoeless" his due...

I'm getting a lot of ink with my op/ed piece on Shoeless Joe Jackson. Today, Rock Hill's hometown newspaper, The Herald, published it.

Go Shoeless!

Hope he gets his good name back and gets voted into baseball's Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.

Harvard taking scholarship online?

An intriguing article in today's NYT focuses on how faculty at Harvard University might soon be posting their scholarship online for all the world to see (instead of, for example, having it published in esoteric academic journals with scant readership.)

I wonder if my Winthrop University faculty colleagues would be open to this idea.

Perhaps there could be a link on the university library Web site?

Duo from Fort Mill go for "Idol"

I'm not a big "American Idol" fan but when two people from Fort Mill, S.C., (close to where I live) got the green light for their audition, I got interested.

Watch their performance and enjoy.

Student journalist faces death

Do those who practice journalism, even if they are students, run the risk of being convicted of a capital crime?

Can a person's words and images put him or her at such risk?

In Afghanistan, that seems to be the case.

A student journalist there has been sentenced to death for distributing (not necessarily writing or creating) a document that questions why Islamic men can have multiple wives when the latter can only have one husband.

Legitimate question, one would think.

Risky question in Afghanistan.

Decline of journalism

Are print journalism's best days behind it?

Has bottom-line, shareholder-conscious newspapering led to the decline of quality reporting and editing.

This article gives us journalists a lot to ponder--and then some.