Bob Collins
For sure, the business is hard economically, and has been since Marconi. But over the years its method of advancement also provided networks with a steady stream of seasoned journalists. Only the best survived the winnowing process. Read more →
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
By Bob Collins
Bob Collins retired from Minnesota Public Radio in 2019 after 12 years of writing NewsCut and pointing out to complainants that posts weren’t news stories. A son of Massachusetts, he was a news editor 1992-1998, created the MPR News regional website in 1999, invented the popular Select A Candidate, started several blogs, and every day lamented that his Minnesota Fantasy Legislature project never caught on.
Bon Iver frontman Justin Vernon and Aaron Dessner started the festival in his hometown four years ago. But summer music festivals are becoming musical tap rooms — there are too many of them now for even the good ones to survive. Read more →
Here are the stories, topics, and guests you’ll hear today on MPR News. Read more →
Nothing can save a journalism career like a little attribution. And yet, every now and again, we hear the stories of journalists who lift the work of other journalists and pass it as their own.
Read more →
Newspeople can get a bad rap. Sometimes they deserve it. For sure, it’s difficult to condense a lot of information into the bite-sized morsels that result in local TV news. But sometimes, the telling can do immense damage, particular if journalists think that every story must have a good guy and a bad guy.
Read more →
Friday marks the sixth anniversary of the Sandy Hook school shooting in Connecticut.
Each year at this time, Sandy Hook Promise, the group formed by family members of some of those killed in the massacre, releases a devastating PSA to help people recognize the signs of someone who might use violence in school. Read more →
There’s a shortage of pilots in the United States, which prompts us to consider some of the short-sighted decisions of some education institutions in these parts earlier in the century. Read more →
Brainerd school authorities are promising to get to the bottom of who posted an anti-Trump meme to the Garfield Elementary School’s Facebook page on Saturday. Read more →
Joe Gow’s bosses have done everything but draw him a diagram of how to clean out a desk and announce a resignation, but he’s hanging in there at the University of Wisconsin La Crosse, still getting pelted with criticism for paying former porn actress Nina Hartley to speak on campus for Free Speech Week.
Read more →
Roberta Kriegh, 37, has been homeless since the dog she depended on for emotional support died. It’s hard to see how she has any path out of her problem. Read more →
Here are the stories, topics, and guests you’ll hear today on MPR News. Read more →
We are in the time of year when we organize annual lists of top stories. Time today issued its list of the 100 best photos of 2018. MPR News photojournalist Evan Frost made the impressive cut with this one. If you don’t know the story of the raccoon, we welcome you from your slumber. It’s Read more →
We know a little more today about what’s going to happen to Victorina Morales, the undocumented worker in one of President Trump’s resorts, who came forward in yesterday’s New York Times to suggest the resort knows she’s undocumented while the president speaks ill of such people. Read more →
Nobody is in a more precarious position in assessing a person who hasn’t been buried yet than the nation’s journalists, as NPR ombudsman Elizabeth Jensen makes clear this week in her column. Read more →
Mark Brown, of Apple Valley, should just drive without a license. Then ask for a jury trial when/if he’s nabbed by the gendarmes. If there’s justice in the world, a small group of honest men and women will let him skate. Read more →