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  • Fame and fortune and Jon and Kate

    Pedaling away in spin class this morning, and when I wasn’t thinking about possibly hurling, I was considering how fame can ruin people.
     

    I’m not sure how exactly I made this jump from queasiness to Kris Allen and “Jon & Kate, Plus 8.” But oddly, I have been feeling sorry for the whole bunch of them.
     

    Maybe it is because I have seen fame relatively close up. And I have observed how, in this country, the more famous someone becomes, the harder, seemingly, they must eventually be brought down. In a broad sense, the profession in which I have made my living has been largely responsible for this.
     

  • Patti B. Won’t Last a Minute in the Jungle

    Took an early-morning power walk today with my friend Shari in which we walk really fast unless, a) Shari is waving to a passing car driven by someone she doesn’t know; or b) we forget to walk really fast because c) we’re talking about something important like how long Shari would last living in a jungle.
     

    This was not idle chit-chat. This was a current events topic initiated by the news story broken exclusively on the Today Show this morning that Patti Blagojevich, wife of disgraced Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, was taking her husband’s place on the NBC reality show, “I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here,” set in a Costa Rican jungle.
     

  • The Future of Journalism – Part II

    So it appears I filed the last blog a little too soon.
     

    I just discovered a Bloomberg.com report that the 136-year-old Harvard Crimson, which has turned out 12 Pulitzer Prize winners among its crop of future journalists, are “fleeing the ravaged profession.”
     

    According to the report, just 3 of 16 of the paper’s graduating seniors who were on the paper’s executive board, plan to pursue a career in journalism. Of the last 10 managing editors, only two are working at newspapers.
     

  • The Future of Journalism

    We were between innings at my son’s baseball game, yesterday. When he was younger, and the kid playing catcher needed half the team to help put back on the equipment, you could basically run home, have a snack, come back and not miss a moment of action.
     
    Now that Alec is 11, it has been cut down considerably. But there was still enough time for a glance at my Blackberry and the e-mail that had come in from an unfamiliar address.
     

  • Why I Love Double Stuf and Dave Barry

    Sometimes I feel like I am getting this unemployment thing all wrong.
     
    For three weeks now (or is it two? Or maybe four?), I have been all charged up (aside from just a few intermittent bouts of crying and that was early on) and excited about the adventure of exploring all the new and wonderful possibilities for the future.
     
    In fact, I have filled up almost an entire spiral notebook with all of these new and wonderful possibilities. And I have spoken with scores of people to gets ideas on even more new and wonderful possibilities.
     
    Up until now, I have not, as I thought I might, retreated to the Double Stuf Oreos (one “f,” I checked, as this was important to me both as a reporter and consumer) or any number of TLC marathons (“Little People, Small World” and  “Half Man, Half Tree,” being particular favorites).
     
    But then yesterday, it hit me. Somewhere between being rejected as a ghostwriter; told I needed to “inform, impart ideals and move minds” if I wanted to be a successful speaker; and finding out that an eight-year-old would soon be covering hockey for the major daily for whom I used to work, I became, well, a little down.