The Libyan civil war apparently ended today with the collapse of the last loyalist stronghold and the death of Muammar Qaddafi, all around weird guy and former president/leader/king of kings/dictator of Libya. It was a weird afternoon, in the offices of The National, in Abu Dhabi. Early in the day came reports that the last […]

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The guy who laid me off 3.5 years ago had his own moment with the sharp end of the “consolidation” side of print journalism last week. That is to say, he’s out of newspapers and apparently is unemployed. Here is the typically code-riddled e-mail to the people who worked for him:

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One of the standards in the doldrums of summer print journalism has long been “the series.” Find a couple of people on the staff who aren’t on vacation, and have them spend a bunch of time reporting, and get the graphics people involved, and the photo editor … And let’s put on a show! Let’s […]

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I’ve known Andy Baggarly since he was a kid from Upland who was going to school at Northwestern. He was good right out of the box, like so many Northwestern J School people are. Maybe we gave him some room to grow, back in the L.A. market, but it wasn’t like we had to mold […]

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I’ve talked about this with sports journalism colleagues over two or three decades. What is the best sports assignment in print? Because I spent three decades in American journalism, the answers sometimes would be “covering baseball home and road” … or “being a major metro’s NFL writer” … and somesuch. Maybe “international sports reporter” which […]

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The guys at Caltech are conditioned to think in terms of big numbers, but this was getting ridiculous. Caltech, one of the world’s leading mathematics and science schools (if not the leading), finally won a conference basketball game today, 46-45 at home over Occidental. The victory snapped a 310-game losing streak in Southern California Intercollegiate […]

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Did an over-and-back to see the UAE national team play Iraq in the second game of Group D competition at the Asian Cup. As I may have mentioned yesterday, the night before the match, I had been struck by a sense that this would be an important game. For good or ill. I became convinced […]

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I believe many of us like to think we’re glass-half-empty people. Doesn’t a sort of world-weariness make us seem, oh, more sophisticated? More realistic? Cock-eyed optimism … doesn’t the “cock-eyed” tell us all we need to know about optimists? Certainly, in the news biz, where we document famine and pestilence and death and destruction, optimists […]

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Even 15 years ago, keeping track of a U.S. sports team from the other side of the world would have been a dicey proposition. The first sport-specific bloggers were just firing up. (This was even before Bill Simmons.) Not every newspaper paid close attention to its website. (I worked at a place where the managing […]

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Allen Iverson, new point guard for Besiktas of Istanbul in the Turkish League. Certainly, the former MVP would prefer to be in the NBA. But after a couple of rocky seasons filled with a lot of off-the-court issues, he was not offered a job in The League, and it’s not as if he had a […]

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