On line, anything that isn't stamped USDA approved mainstream media style patriotic information will be branded as sounding suspiciously like something being prepared for test marketing by the Amalgamated Conspiracy Theory Factory boys (rumored to be headquartered in an abandoned railroad car manufacturing facility in Emeryville CA?) and not worthy of a mention. The catch phrase for the teen years (of this century) might be: "You're on your own, pal." [Bust the unions and stress rugged individualism.]
Didn't a legendary pioneer blogger, whose handle was Plato, once predict that eventually journalism would become a game played by guys sitting in their man cave looking at a computer screen thinking they were grasping reality and making cogent remarks in a process known as "live blogging"? Don't they deserve to get a night out to break the shackles of solipsism?
Sure, it is wonderfully invigorating to see younger journalists tilting at windmills, but don't they need to hear a crusty old reporter reminding them: "Ya can't fight City Hall, kid!"? A Berkeley Press Club would help keep such idealistic young j-students grounded in reality. The flip side of the coin would be that the students could help the old war horse scribblers fathom the mysteries of the laptop.
There is one other stealth advantage to having a local Press Club where journalists can talk shop. If a writer tells his colleagues about a story he is writing and if something happens to him while he is digging for that story, then the others will be able to continue the (hypothetical alert!) the crusade that cost a life.
Wasn't columnist Dorothy Kilgallen working on an angle to the Kennedy assassination when she died suddenly?
Has IBM abandoned their use of plaques that displayed the word "THINK"?
On page 31 of the Crest Book 1962 paperback edition of "A Nation of Sheep," William J. Lederer quotes a Prince/editor from
Now the disk jockey will play the Defiant Ones' 1961 recording of "Defiant Drums," Elvis' "Rock-A-Hula Baby" and Johnny Cash's "Guess Things Happen That Way." We have to go read Edward Jay Epstein's 1973 book "News from Nowhere." Have a "Cross my heart and hope to die" type week.
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