Bob CollinsTodd Keeling, 48, of White Bear Lake, was justifiably proud of his invention and every time you get a beer poured at Target Field in about five seconds or less you should think of him. Read more →
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
The jobs we do
I try not to use the self-checkout lane in grocery and hardware stores. I’m old school; I think people should be able to make a living — or close to it — and the money they earn should circulate around the local economy, helping other businesses and maybe even leaving enough money for people to throw at the local public radio outlet. Read more →
First as a reporter, then as a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Corrections, Michelle Lyons’ job was to watch people being put to death. Read more →
We’ve never met a state climatologist we didn’t like — or any climatologist for that matter — and we suspect Harry Hillaker would continue the streak. Alas, he’s retiring as Iowa’s climatologist, the Des Moines Register says. There’s something comforting about seeing the state’s climatology records are kept in file cabinets… on paper. So old Read more →
Joanne and Tomas Lopez, of Frogtown, provide the perfect example of why we bristle at the dour expressions and tone of media folks when they talk about snow in Minnesota. Read more →
Paul TostoWatch the video and, after your heart stops racing, you’ll have a little better appreciation of the people who run toward danger while you’re running away. Read more →
A Quad Cities woman has become the first to wear a hijab while reporting full-time for a mainstream American TV station. Read more →
I probably would’ve picked up the newspaper on the driveway without thinking about it this morning after walking the BlogDog in the dark if I hadn’t been one of the people who threw one on people’s doorsteps in Woodbury for a decade in the ’90s. Read more →
This tweet, from Rochester Post Bulletin photojournalist Andrew Link, is the sort of thing that can bring a tear to an old-school news junkie. Read more →
Bernie Ockuly took a job as a long-haul trucker when he got swept up in a dying economy years ago, and he’s been driving across the country ever since, stopping every now and again for a bit to eat and a word or two with people along the way about why they do what it is they do. Over the weekend, he learned about what it takes to keep the show going in Fairmont. Read more →
A Texas reporter thinks the news media owes Sutherland an apology and says there must be a better way to cover stories like this. Read more →
The unusual collision of a radio network’s management and a radio network’s newsroom was heard nationwide on Wednesday when NPR CEO Jarl Mohn was grilled by one of his network’s reporters — Mary Louise Kelly — on why NPR fired its head of news only after the Washington Post blew the whistle on Michael Oreskes’ behavior 20 years ago at the New York Times, when he accosted two women in separate incidents.
It was an unusual, and likely uncomfortable, few minutes as Kelly interrogated her boss. It was unusual for the CEO of an organization to be willing to be grilled so publicly. Read more →
If you can spare 3 1/2 minutes, there are worse ways to spend it than watching last evening’s PBS NewsHour segment on a group of swimming instructors in Lesbos, Greece who are teaching refugees another perspective of their enemy: water. Read more →
There may be no other job on the planet that seems as risky as the one Nick Underwood does.
He’s a hurricane hunter and today he was on the crew that flew a plane — intentionally — into Hurricane Irma, providing this video this afternoon on Facebook.
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This picture, from Saturday’s white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, has started a mini-debate that is as old as journalism itself: When should journalists step in to help the subject of a story or photograph?
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