Powderhorn

Deaths aren't really entertaining, so I'm throwing this here. But holy shit, he was 65? does quick math Yep, that checks out, I'm just also getting old.

A UK paper once again stepping in to the print void in the Rogue Valley, though they leave Medford for this one.

AP has called it. They were about a half-hour late to my mind, but that's how they work.

So, Elon, maybe throwing money at things isn't a repeatable act.

Strom Thurmond must be rolling in his grave that his record was beaten by a guy he didn't consider human.

The comedian Nikki Glaser, one of the few celebrities to walk the red carpet at this year’s Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prizes, now thinks twice before doing political jokes directed at Trump.

“Like, you just are scared that you’re gonna get doxxed and death threats or who knows where this leads, like, detained. Honestly, that’s not even like a joke. It’s like a real fear,” she told Deadline.

The only things really new here are the anecdotal lede and this tidbit, but I thought I'd share for those who perhaps don't follow the news all that closely.

This is very bad.

Tuesday’s drills have differed slightly from more recent efforts, which have not been so explicitly linked to “punishing” Taiwan. They were also launched with little warning. Taiwan’s government and military have been ramping up their response training amid growing concern that Beijing might launch a real attack or blockade under the guise of a drill.

Amanda Hsiao, a director in Eurasia Group’s China practice, said Tuesday’s propaganda “makes it clear that China is breaking from what has been a relatively quiet approach since Trump’s election”.

“This is primarily about Lai’s 13 March speech which Beijing found provocative,” she said. “The publicity around the exercise likely also has the US in mind – they want to persuade the Trump administration that Lai is a troublemaker and to deter the US from maintaining high levels of support to Taiwan.”

The US secretary of defence, Pete Hegseth, has visited several Asian countries in recent days, emphasising that countering China and deterring it from attacking Taiwan was a key priority for the US.

No doubt with several emojis.

Ran into an old Reddit post (December 2022) on an account I no longer use. It's funny how this sort of writing has a binary chance of aging well. There's never like "meh, I don't see any relevance today." Without further ado ...

Today's "Jesus fuck, I wouldn't have run that" in the Post was apparently my lightbulb moment on how the desk — and the recurring rounds of layoffs on what remains — had a far larger impact than anyone seems to be acknowledging widely enough to have hit my radar. If you've got links to stories or studies, I'd like to see them if the hed doesn't start with "Here's"!

As fev has been pointing out for years, the most important function served by the copydesk in its late-20th-century incarnation was the framing. Usually, we see this writ small, sort of easy to identify and purge at the unit level: the individual story, where we call it removing bias.

Something I'm just coming to understand is great copy editors I've worked with knew their fucking framing. And as the word itself implies, everything else is inexorably tied to that skill. Bias, tone, when to turn off proofreading (and yes, there are times to run intentional errors), page composition from a content perspective, when to use uncensored vulgarity.

When to spike. I'd go so far as to consider framing the central pillar of the always-nebulous "editorial judgment."

I think we've all gotten the regurgitated press release from the green reporter we knew was coming from the time we saw the incredibly vague photo assignment. That doesn't need to be spiked, but it sure as fuck ain't running tonight.

What does need to be spiked is naked propaganda like the Post is putting forth in its breathless crusade for a recession at the same time we're finally wising up to the fact that modern recessions are engineered and necessary to transfer wealth from any pesky middle class that are just about to or just bought their first appreciating asset by tanking its value and buying up the fire sale in classic rent-seeking fashion.

I know of no competent copyeditor that would have allowed that shit to print where it did. "Did Editorial accidentally drop this in the A1 queue?"

When you've nailed your framing, you're just using tools to do a job. Everything else can be learned through pattern recognition, which is why most jobs seem so easy after several years.

Here's the thing: If you're doing a job you know you're good at, you're focusing on different aspects of it than a novice. If you navigate InDesign using mostly hotkeys, you have exponentially more time to devote to design and editing than someone looking for the right dropdown menu every few seconds.

When you've gotten 10-inch spot news down to a five-minute science, you have more time to see if the 34th Ld moved before sending A11.

In all cases where you save time on the technical end, not only does the product improve, but you also gain time to ask if you should be proceeding as directed. And if a red flag goes up, no matter how small, the answer is "no."

A competent desk functioned as a bit of a hive mind, with earlier members teaching new members data points as they come up, eventually getting everyone to at least 90% competence and at most 10% questions. If you've ever been floored that a seasoned editor didn't have an answer to something, it wasn't that the desk didn't know, this was just on the long tail ("Well, last time that happened here was '84, and Larry wasn't here yet, so I don't know.").

So while the tone and goal levers were set from on high, the desk was the engineering crew deciding what the levers did within the less-than-technical spex provided.

While no desk is a democracy, and style dictates do arrive without recourse, I found desks to be surprisingly egalitarian when it came to new ideas, even on desks with burned-out reporters. If the data proved that Method Y was unequivocally better than Method X, Method Y became the new SOP. No one sat around defending inferior methods, even if there was grumbling about relearning. When new data debunked standing policy, policy was changed. The elephant was acknowledged and escorted out of the room. Almost everything not AP Style-related was unanimous consent.

In effect, this led to the desk having a much larger role than I certainly realized in the beginning. If a copyeditor was overruling the city ed and spiking a story, that was it unless they wanted the ME involved, because bringing up a spike meant the desk would not run it, and that is a large problem when it comes to publication.

For those of you for whom this sounds foreign (and you're picturing it in black and white), this was still the case less than 10 years ago, but dying rapidly because buyouts targeted those with the longest service (most expensive), and there were several rounds of those before centralization, furloughs and the layoffs even started.

Copyeditors became superfluous as soon as being first became more important than being right (both are, of course, important, but only the latter must be true). Desks were wound down and centralized, copyeditors forbade from reading copy (Gannett/GateHouse policy from at least my joining in 2015) and turned into movers of rectangles on larger glowing rectangles instead of designers.

And that's all shit we have to deal with for choosing this field in college.

But the impact to society at large is unmistakable: reputable outlets publishing stories that a 20-year desk veteran would have spiked was only made possible by killing the institutional guardrails that underpinned local and national media's gravitas. When everyone's in the first five years of their career, you're not running an established newspaper; you're running the college daily 2.0, clickbait, propaganda and all, because that's all they know.

It was pointed out to me that the following post was inappropriate for !lgbtq+. I said I'd not repost, but as with all useful things in life, the first time is never effective. I'm a biased opinion, but I believe this lies at the intersection of that being appropriate and larger impacts in interaction.

And, I mean, fuck it, if I wrote it, may as well keep it published.

My first kiss was under a table in kindergarten with a girl with short hair.

It would later turn out, as discovered via Facebook, that she’d gone full alt butch. Which, uh … well, that’s my type. The die was cast at 5. I liked her because she didn’t want to act like a girl – the rest were somewhat boring, and I found myself already drawn to the idea of equality sted gender roles.

Not that I knew this at the time. It was 1984 (no, not that one), and I just found myself drawn to her being someone who was fun to hang out with because we didn’t have to play any of the games surrounding other interactions. I have a bit of a guess about what her family structure was like, but such things were not discussed back then and would have anyway been inappropriate for 5-year-olds.

So when I met the now-Rice professor at 17 in the dorm my first summer in college who’d introduce me to the rave scene that year and play a major catalyst role two years later, scrambling my seemingly direct journalism path I’d only stumbled into eight months earlier, it wasn’t unusual but rather a return to form. She ended up marrying a guy, so not fully on brand, but that’s the joy of being bi.

We never got together, much to my consternation. But I remember an email she sent about how the path meant for me was not what society expects. “Don’t follow the light. It works for many, but you belong in the shadows.” Quite a bit to take in at 18, with years to unpack. And, indeed, my role in journalism would not be a byline but rather getting shit done without recognition on the desk.

I’d then finally get laid by a woman who’s cheated on her wife twice with me over the years, in addition to having come out (no, she wasn’t there yet) to visit me in Virginia for a week before she met her. She was crucial as another catalyst, as without her getting me a hotel room, I’d not have met my second ex-wife.

I’ve never had a relationship with a straight woman. I just can’t understand this obsession with things like makeup and celebrities. Those are uninteresting topics.

So, we have all this backstory, and then the college newsroom happens and I’m living with my boss within days. There’s a community where this is a meme, but it rarely involves men. The raver shows back up and shatters this, and while we still never were directly involved, this leads to chartering an international flight after missing a ferry to meet a woman. That girlfriend was the only one I’ve had a threesome with.

The hits keep piling up. After a few years in the wilderness relationshipwise working on my career, I get a note of interest from a woman with hair shorter than mine on OKCupid. And reached out to a second with a collar in her profile pic who wants nothing to do with me. I married both, just not at the same time. The second had a five year gap, and neither of us was actually aware we’d communicated in the past.

I moved in with her after 12 days, which involved jettisoning her boyfriend Christmas Eve. She had a girlfriend for much of our marriage, as denying her pussy access seemed unfair.

The day that marriage fell apart, I was again in my boss’ bed. Lesbian, of course. I’d no idea she wasn’t straight, but I damn well should have from prior art. She was a femme (and likely still is), but I was attracted to her competence and saw my marriage collapsing from outside factors, and she had that “get shit done” attitude that’s an aphrodisiac.

After cohabitating for a time, my kink side reared its ugly head. She was as vanilla as they come, which strained things to the breaking point.

I’m heavily aware of my needs at this point and thus not interested in unmodded straight vanilla women. This generally leads to bad outcomes via batshit, but the heart wants what it wants.

It’s just crazy that this whole thing started when I was under a table at a private school at 5. Who knows their trajectory from then?

“Once they get out of jail, they often keep using, their probation gets revoked and they return to jail,” said Colin Murphy, another public defender. “It’s the same cycle I saw before we decriminalized. If this approach to getting rid of drugs in our community actually worked, it should have worked by now, because we’ve been doing this since the 1970s.”

The strategy diverts police away from serious investigations, he said: “We’re told law enforcement has very scarce resources. But in these possession cases, I see five cops standing around investigating one unhoused person because she had a baggie in her pocket.”

I'll try to keep this brief, as all of this is in my wheelhouse; being homeless with my family in Medford is ironically how I got back into journalism after phoning in a tip to the Mail Tribune about a SWAT standoff at a motel just down the road from the photos in the article while evacuating.

That paper no longer exists, so I'm glad someone is covering Medford.

This sort of crackdown is on brand for MPD. It's an incredibly conservative city where people fully believe that the biggest threat to them is ... the homeless keeping to themselves, because the only cause of homelessness is drug use. Can't possibly be the housing crisis or shit job market.

Addiction services are just this side of useless. I went through OnTrack about 20 years ago, and it was a joke; one of those programs where all they provide is group sessions where we're all taught to will ourselves out of addiction without any further resources. I still vividly remember that depressing wood-paneled room.

This is a crackdown on people the system has already failed. But we can't address systemic change when just rounding up the "undesirables" puts the problem out of sight, and no one in power wants to address the causes.

I spent eight months looking for work after (knowing I would be upon being hired) I was laid off. I did not want to move to Texas, where my job was centralized to. But the job market was such that the small market for people with significant journalism experience was oversaturated, and after having done marketing for Harry & David, I was not going that route again.

People act like homelessness and drug addiction are personal choices and failures. They aren't.

The bullying of Columbia is the canary in the coalmine which reveals the Trump-Musk junta has it in for American universities. There are two reasons for their hostility. The first is that, as elite institutions devoted to freedom of inquiry and the telling of uncomfortable truths, they are anathema to the new autocrats in Washington. The second is that some of them (the so-called Ivy League) are fabulously wealthy, being for the most part hedge funds with nice universities attached. And if there’s one thing that Donald Trump cannot abide, it is large pots of money that he and his ghastly tribe can smell but not touch. So if the aloof trustees of Harvard, Princeton, Yale et al think that their august institutions lie beyond his reach, perhaps they should understand that Trump looks on them much as Henry VIII looked on the rich monasteries of his heyday.

“I live in an age of fear,” lamented the essayist and author EB White in 1947, after the New York Herald had suggested that all employees be forced to declare their political beliefs to retain their jobs. He was, he insisted, less worried “that there were communists in Hollywood” than to “read your editorial in praise of loyalty testing and thought control”. It is a perspective as vital now as it was then, and as necessary on this side of the Atlantic as in America.

The U.S. Institute of Peace, a government-funded think tank, has terminated nearly all of its U.S.-based employees and is drawing up plans to fire its remaining overseas employees, escalating an ongoing legal battle over whether President Trump has the authority to dismantle organizations created and funded by Congress.

The firings come after a federal judge declined to block the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) group from taking control of the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) earlier this month.

The termination notices, sent out starting around 9 p.m. on Friday to more than 200 USIP employees, are effective immediately, according to five USIP employees who received the letters. They all spoke to NPR on condition of anonymity, because all had also been given a confidential severance offer of two to four weeks' pay if they waived all rights to take legal action against the think tank.

Emphasis mine. Nothing good happens on Friday nights in Washington these days. They keep pulling this shit to avoid the news cycle.