Sacramento NBC affiliate gets a tin medal for delaying opening Olympics ceremony

With the Winter Olympics taking place in Pacific time, we residents of the West Coast could at last look forward to television coverage in real time. So it was with astonishment and incredulity I learned this evening that the Sacramento NBC affiliate, KCRA TV, would delay broadcasting the opening ceremonies from Vancouver. I left work […]

Great moments in radio: Drew Brees on ESPN

[picapp align=”center” wrap=”false” link=”term=Drew+Brees&iid=7837401″ src=”c/d/a/5/Super_Bowl_XLIV_adb4.jpg?adImageId=10057853&imageId=7837401″ width=”500″ height=”333″ /] What a kick it was this morning to drive to work and hear Drew Brees on the ESPN Radio show The Herd with Colin Cowherd. This was not your ordinary morning-after interview with the winning Super Bowl quarterback. A few minutes into the interview, Cowherd asks Brees […]

Don’t bother Tiger Woods, officer. He’s sleeping.

[picapp align=”left” wrap=”true” link=”term=Tiger+Woods&iid=7029112″ src=”9/9/1/c/2009_Australian_Masters_8b90.jpg?adImageId=7920619&imageId=7029112″ width=”234″ height=”150″ /]Before the Tiger Woods story erupted this Thanksgiving weekend, I’d been ruminating on the differences between elite athletes and us mere men and women. Highly paid pro athletes like Woods in golf or Alex Rodriguez in baseball or LeBron James in basketball exist on a plane at which most of us mortals […]

The Associated Press in the Internet era

Five years ago today, I quit my job at The Associated Press. After 23 years of assignments from California to New York, I turned in the keys to my company car, said farewell to my staff and walked to the train station in Trenton for a long ride home. Over the next few days, nearly […]

The 2009 U.S. Open at Bethpage Black

Mother Nature isn’t being cooperative, but the U.S. Open Golf tournament is under way at the fabled Bethpage Black course. While conditions have been stormy out on Long Island, here in California they are sunny, ideal for snapping a shot of my U.S. Golf Association 2009 cap. The annual event always stirs up memories of […]

The Yahoo! cap – Cool, in a dull sort of way

At a convention last week in Las Vegas, the presenters tried getting our attention by tossing ball caps into the audience whenever anyone gave a correct answer. I was, naturally, taken in completely at the opportunity to score another cap. On Day Two, I finally found a question I could answer and beat the others […]

How to survive over the centuries, media division

Over the course of many years as a bureau chief with The Associated Press, I stamped the AP logo on a wide range of coffee mugs, fanny packs, water bottles, golf balls and other trinkets for the staff and newspaper editors. I’m a sucker for advertising specialty products, and I was always on the lookout […]

A not-so-fond farewell to 2008 from the newspaper industry

The year is drawing to a close, and I daresay for most of us in the newspaper industry it’s time to say “good riddance” to 2008. According to the trade journal Editor & Publisher, the U.S. Department of Labor estimates that 21,000 newspaper jobs disappeared over the past 12 months. That report totals 3,000 jobs […]

Juxtaposition: New Jersey and Yosemite National Park

What possessed me to take my “Weird N.J.” cap to Yosemite National Park? I guess my subconscious mind was trying to make a statement about the breadth of the American natural experience. Whatever the motivation, I wore the cap yesterday on an absolutely gorgeous fall day. This was my third trip to Yosemite, and the […]

This just in… Caps banned at California credit unions!

Ball cap wearers, we have a public issue. Golden One Credit Union has put a rule in place that customers in its 77 branches in California must remove their hats. I spotted the story this afternoon on the Web site for Channel 13 in Sacramento, which lured me in with a photo of a Los […]