Amidst the slick, coiffed, ambitious and self-possessed multitude responsible for filling the pipelines of our society with relevant, accurate information, you are the plumbers in overalls, the guys with dirty fingernails, overtired from double shifts, trying to figure out how to finish each new job with too few workers. But unlike plumbers, you are the unpaid, the unprofitable, the squeaking-by artisans of heartfelt truth lodged in the souls of people seeking some way of expressing their deepest concerns in a letter, comment, story, critique or poem. [Read more…]
Future of Journalism is in Our Hands
The never ending hunt for truth is a turbulent journey
By Olivia Tai and Ebony Estrada
The future of journalism is in our hands, the younger generation. As young, aspiring journalists, we strive to bring awareness to the industry. With all the talk of fake news and slandering of journalism, people may see journalism in a negative light. We want to change this perception.
Journalism is one of the most essential elements of having a functioning, educated society. However, with the all the chaos and disarray of the modern day, journalism has been met with much skepticism. Cries of “fake news” run rampant, and faith in the integrity of journalism is in decline. The objective of journalism is to inform and educate. It is our goal to bring back the passion for truth in journalism and remember that it is a tool that can truly help the underrepresented, underprivileged, and those without a voice. [Read more…]
The San Diego Free Press Was a Gift
The San Diego Free Press will soon be gone. And with its departure, San Diego will be losing a precious space—the only unapologetically progressive outlet in the city.
We had a good run through some incredibly challenging times locally and nationally and did enough excellent work to irritate a fair number of politicians and local power brokers.
That’s worth celebrating. [Read more…]
Isn’t It Good, Norwegian Wood?
I didn’t think much of the novel, Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami while I was reading it. But just like the Beatles song of the same name, that became a maddening earworm for weeks after hearing it recently, the story keeps creeping into my thoughts and coloring my perspective of life.
Life is dark and sad and fraught with uncertainty, and yet buried in all of that sadness are bits of light and delight – like tasting the fruit of a Peruvian Apple Cactus that seems at first to be tasteless, but suddenly delights your mouth with an irresistible crystalline popping sensation.
Uncovering these hidden gems in a bleak life is the raison d’être of artists. We spend our lives with imaginary magnifying glasses extended, searching for the ubiquitous gems hidden in plain sight. That moment when a reader exclaims, “Ah yes, I’ve had that feeling!” or, “I never thought about it in this way until I read what you wrote,” is when I feel that I have lived with a purpose. [Read more…]
Accolades for the San Diego Free Press | Readers Write
I come not to bury the San Diego Free Press, but to praise it.
I believe in the resurrection of the soul of this Press for the people of San Diego, and the world.
Brief, shining moments have a way of sticking round in our hearts, like Camelot. [Read more…]
San Diego Free Press to Suspend Publication After Dec. 14
We — the people who’ve overseen this platform called the San Diego Free Press — have decided it’s time to move on. December 14, 2018 will be our last day of posting.
We’re going out on a high note. We’ve just had our best two months ever in terms of readership. We have funds in the bank, and — most importantly — all of us on the Editorial Board remain friends. So, sorry to disappoint, but there’s no drama to report.
It’s just time. The political and media landscape is changing. For now, let’s just say we’re suspending operations. [Read more…]
Can We ‘Just Be Friends’ With Facebook?
A long look by the New York Times into how Facebook has responded to “cascading crises — over Russian misinformation, data privacy and abusive content” provides insight into the true nature of the most popular social media platform. And it should inform how or whether you should continue your relationship with (almost) everybody’s favorite social media platform.
Facebook’s pretensions have turned it into a useful idiot of the right, according to Guardian technology writer Alex Hearn.
President Trump Amps Up Crusade Portraying Press As ‘Enemy of the People’
Things Moving Fast Dept: With the firing of racist elf and A.G. Jeff Sessions – and his alarming replacement by Trump’s “Roy Cohn” – it’s admittedly hard to keep up with the Constitutional crises hovering on our fraught horizon, but key amidst the unraveling was the spectacle of our babbling, vengeful tinpot wannabe berating and abusing reporters at his hallucinatory press conference.
Of course, there were many madhouse moments:
Bigger Lies, Told More Often: The Trumpublicans’ Final Mid-Term Push
The level of anxiety in the pre-midterm zeitgeist has been cranked up to 11.
It hurts to listen, just like it did at the Newport Festival in 1969 (?) when the band who invented heavy metal, Blue Cheer, took to the stage and literally blew (parts of) the audience away during their rendition of Summertime Blues. I know, I was there. People got up and ran. (I’m just not sure what year it was. It was the 60s, y’know.)
I urge you to remember all this noise is deliberate; aimed at inducing a nihilist stupor on the left and a rabid frenzy on the right. One thing you must not forget is your participation in the election. (Don’t worry, there’s more to do past November 6th. We’re just not there yet.)
Trump Cheers Assault on Journalist as Republicans Smear Murdered Washington Post Columnist
By Mark Sumner / Daily Kos
On Thursday evening, Donald Trump went to Montana to make jokes about assaulting journalists and the rally crowd responded by laughing and making threats against the reporters on hand at the event. If Trump and his followers seemed particularly cruel … that’s exactly where the whole Republican Party is going. Because even as the evidence piles up that Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was brutally murdered inside the Saudi consulate on orders from crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, Republicans are planning their response — smear Khashoggi.
As the Washington Post reports, both conservative congressmen and media hosts have mounted a campaign against Khashoggi to paint him as someone who was friendly with terrorists and who conspired against the United States. The purpose of the campaign is to make the gruesome dismemberment of the US resident acceptable, make Saudi actions ugly but necessary, and most of all to make Trump’s continued refusal to speak out against bin Salman acceptable.
Republicans in the House have been swapping links and posts from alt-Reich websites that have already turned Khashoggi into a founding member of the Muslim Brotherhood, a close associate of Osama bin Laden, and a supporter of terrorists. Those same reports are getting more attention on right-wing talk radio, where they’ve been blown up even larger than the original sites — making the whole idea that Khashoggi was allowed into the United States in the first place seem like a mistake. [Read more…]
The Ups and The Downs | My Reporter’s Life, Part Three
By the late 1970s, I was brought back into the newsroom to do general assignment reporting, a kind of sideways move. I could handle breaking stuff, and innocent features (like my seven-day case of hiccups) but the editors might have figured I offered too much trouble on the beats — police, higher education and investigations.
Once again on the day shift, I made it to journalism’s summa cum laude, or maybe just the magna version.
On September 25, 1978, a fully-loaded PSA liner crashed into a private Cessna in its approach path to Lindbergh Field, leaving 144 dead, most of them the airliner’s passengers. The first call sent all of us to the east windows of the Copley Building, where we could see the white smoke towering over North Park.
I forced myself to ask to go to the scene but the city editor told me to stay and take the reports from the staff sent to the scene, the two of them so horrified I recommended they do what I’d done at less bloody scenes: locate the fireman in a yellow hazard suit or a plainclothes suit and walk toward either or both, looking neither left nor right. They’d have the answers. [Read more…]
Some Big Developments | My Reporter’s Life, Part Two
I didn’t know that the police beat was one of the tests normally applied to newcomers until the San Diego Evening Tribune editors released me from it after six months and, to my surprise, had me cover the County Board of Supervisors.
Developers had been pumping out two-story stuccoes amidst the chapparaled and original Spanish land grants to the east and the north of the city. The collapse of C. Arnholt Smith’s US National Bank was at this time the largest bank failure in US history, so I was a bit surprised to be assigned to cover the Board of Supervisors; after having been in town only 12 months or so I figured I didn’t know f-all about the county.
The Union had a former Associated Press guy covering the Supervisors, a veteran not easily excited or cowed by the job, and he helped me out, as if I were his kid brother, maybe 15 years younger.
Don’t worry, he’d tell me, nothing really happens here. You’ll be fine. Something like that. [Read more…]
- 1
- 2
- 3
- …
- 91
- Next Page »