It is entirely coincidental that -- while I was reading Knightfall: KNIGHT RIDDER and How the Erosion of NEWSPAPER JOURNALISM Is Putting DEMOCRACY AT RISK by Davis Merritt (AMACOM, 2005) -- the National Conference on Media Reform should be taking place in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, last week. At the conclusion of the conference, on Sunday, 15 May, 2005, Bill Moyers, a journalist I have referenced before in this space, made another stirring speech -- part of which I shall cite and share related links to with you below. The two influences proved fortuitous, I believe.

Despite my disclaimers about not being a book reviewer, the publicist for Mr. Merritt's book had contacted me about producing a potential review, believing that the topic was "up my alley," so to speak. (It seems that people take my whining about not being a book reviewer as seriously as my former whining about preferring not to be considered primarily an editor.) Mr. Merritt is an excellent person to write this critique of the decline of newspaper journalism and of the Knight Ridder news organization, having spent four decades with Knight Newspapers and Knight Ridder. What he has to say is both insightful and disturbing to anyone who believes that newspaper journalism is a point of reference and sets the agenda across all of our news media and anyone who takes seriously the idea that journalism is a public trust. I am still debating whether or not I am up to producing a suitable review for this important book.

To get back to the point of this riff, I'll share with you what Mr. Merritt has to say at the conclusion of Knightfall.

For newspapers driven by the bottom line, people are seen as customers to be wooed rather than citizens to be helped, and the nation is seen as an audience to be accumulated and tallied rather than a democracy to be cherished and sustained. ...

READ MORE

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ETHAN CASEY AT THE ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY:

London, UNITED KINGDOM - My life as a traveling writer has alternated between long stretches spent entirely alone, writing, and peripatetic, vivid, often exciting and fascinating periods spent "in the field" or "on the ground" in places like Haiti and Cambodia and Zimbabwe and Pakistan, imposing my curiosity on local people minding their own business. In such a life, evenings like this one come few and far between and are good for the soul, so I'm delighted to be here.

All the time spent traveling has exacted a price, not least in loneliness. But travel has also given me great blessings. The greatest of these is expressed by the title character of one of my favorite Graham Greene novels, Travels with My Aunt. Of the narrator's Uncle Jo she says, "He wanted to slow life up and he quite rightly felt that by travelling he would make time move with less rapidity." That is, he wanted to live longer by living more. When I first read the novel in Bangkok 12 years ago, Aunt Augusta's notion rang true, though I understood it less well than I do now. On the cusp of 40, it gratifies me: my life has been full to the brim with richly human encounters and friendships.

None have been more richly human than in Pakistan. An invitation to spend a semester teaching journalism at the new Beaconhouse National University in Lahore in 2003 gave me the proximate occasion to write and publish Alive and Well in Pakistan. ... READ MORE


BRAD BALFOUR WITH JESSICA ALBA:

NEW YORK, NY, USA - Having initially made her mark in "Titanic," director James Cameron's quasi-science fiction TV series "Dark Angel," 23-year-old Jessica Alba makes"Sin City" her true Hollywood debut. Since Robert Rodriguez's comic book-based film "Sin City" is creating such an incredible buzz -- not just for males stars Bruce Willis, Clive Owen and Benicio del Toro -- but also for its cast of hot women such as Rosario Dawson and Alba, who plays a tough stripper with a risqué lasso routine. Not only has such an ensemble come together, but they are wearing some of the hottest, most suggestive outfits seen on screen in a long time, especially for Alba. Though she had previously done a relatively tame (and lame) hip-hop teen dance flick, "Honey," she hasn't been seen being this provocative before.

G21: Did working in front of the green screen (to place the CGI) let you be more creative?

Alba: All I did was go on these little stages and imagine things, but they were in small rooms, so the difference is you still had to shout and project your voice, but everything was little bit bigger and with Robert, it's very specific. He fine-tunes your performance so it's kind of a marriage of film and theater. I'm not very experienced in theater. The only training I ever had was David Mamet's theater company, the Atlantic Theater Company.

G21: How was it to take direction from both Robert and the comic book's creator, Frank Miller?

Alba: It was very self-indulgent because we just got to talk each director's ear off about our characters, and we really like talking about characters we play and ourselves because we're all kind of narcissistic. ... READ MORE