Bob Collins
Trying to pull your truck out of the ice? Lake Onalaska — the part of the Mississippi River separating La Crosse, Wis., from Dresbach, Minn. — is a lake that makes you work for it. Read more →
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
The jobs we do
We shouldn’t be so hard on ourselves. We shouldn’t be so hard on each other. Read more →
Whether it’s on a Willmar, Minn., street or the San Francisco Bay Bridge, It’s amazing how the extraordinary act of saving lives is just another day on the job for cops. Read more →
We’re guessing the trumpeter swans who congregate in the open, warmer water from the Monticello nuclear plant on the Mississippi River, would be just fine on their own.
But a man made a promise to his dying wife.
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Anyone who’s delivered newspapers had to chortle a little bit over the weekend when the Boston Globe announced its reporters and employees would pitch in to deliver the newspaper because of widespread distribution failures.
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When I started NewsCut eight years ago this month, one of the things I wanted to do was provide the occasional behind-the-scenes look at MPR News, an area most people never get to see unless you take one of my patented two-hour in-person tours.
I never got around to it but being called out of radio talk-show retirement in the last couple of weeks to fill in for Kerri Miller reminded me again that radio is an iceberg, most of which lies beneath the surface. Read more →
CBS News anchor Scott Pelley reminds us that if some people didn’t get in the line of fire, the public might never know what happened. Sixty-nine journalists have been killed in 2015. Read more →
It dawned on me the other day that I’ve now been in public radio longer than I was ever in commercial radio, which was shocking because I’ll always consider myself a loyal son of the AM band. It remains for me the most pure form of community media that ever existed, at least when it existed in some abundance. Read more →
A new online ad for toilet paper — toilet paper! — feels like a revolutionary acknowledgement that society has changed. The Cleavers are dead. Read more →
When students set up a camp to protest racism on campus, they declared their public space a no-media zone, then assaulted reporters who tried to do their job and tell the story. Read more →
On the list of great jobs, we’re going to have to put Yves Rossy’s. He’s a ‘jetman.’ He flies around with a jetpack on his back, making appearances at various air shows as he did two years ago over in Oshkosh, his first public flight in the United States.
Now he’s upped his game even more.
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This probably won’t come as much of a shock to mail carriers, but this is a really lousy time to be a mail carrier, according to a new survey. Read more →
If you’re a city slicker and you don’t take a drive to farm country, you’re missing quite a show at this time of the year.
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How’s the view where you work? A small group of craftsmen climbed recently to the top of St. Michael’s Church in Stillwater. The stunning drone video shows it’s not a job for just anybody.
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Last Saturday, Delta Airlines provided a flight from Minneapolis to the Museum of Flight in Seattle, crewed entirely by women and whose passengers were all girls. The effort is part of an extraordinary ongoing mission in the aviation community to show girls that there are careers in aviation. Let the record show that it’s 2015 and these efforts are still needed. Read more →