About the Site

I think there’s a federal law somewhere that requires every journalist and every retired professor to start a blog. The woods are full of ’em. So what the world really needed was for one more of us haunting the blogosphere. But as both a former journalist and a retired pointyhead, I figured I didn’t have much choice. Lucky you.

That’s all I will say about my background, because I think my commentaries should stand or fall on their own, without the help of any my-resume-can-beat-up-your-resume ad hominem horseshit. Plus my resume is fairly weak anyway.

The Jourmudgeon is intentionally shy of bells and whistles. You want them, go to CNN.com. What I hope to do is share with you, periodically, some observations about news media coverage of events and issues. I’ll also share examples of that coverage. You’ll see those in five categories: Sounding Off, Stretching a Little, The Highlight Reel, Bloopers and What’s News.

In Sounding Off I’ll tackle news coverage one topic or issue at a time, summarizing the coverage, sharing observations by media watchers and offering a critique of my own.

Some of you know already that for the past several months I’ve been weighing in on Facebook with snide comments about current events, much of them focused on the 2016 presidential campaign.  I’ve compiled those columns under the header Stretching a Little (Stretching as in the truth). The Jourmudgeon blog has not arisen from those, exactly; it was the other way around. I had planned to start the blog before I started the Facebook posts. But I didn’t want the primary season to go by without weighing in in some fashion, and Facebook offered a quick-and-dirty venue.

The Highlight Reel and Bloopers, as you might have guessed, are a compendium of best-and-worst from news coverage that didn’t quite make the cut for either Sounding Off or Stretching a Little, but needed to be shared, IMHO.

Finally, What’s News will include the sort of Inside Baseball stuff that often acts as a harbinger for the news business – technological developments, mergers and acquisitions, significant people moves, startups and, sadly, the increasingly frequent belly-ups.

It’s not my intention simply to be an aggregator. If you think that’s all I’m doing, I ask you to call me on it. Email me at richardsonb@wlu.edu to scold me. I’ll listen, and either mend my ways or tell you why you’re wrong.

There will also be room to comment, of course, after each post in each category. In the interest of full disclosure, I have given myself approval authority before a comment can show up online. It’s not my intention to stifle dissent; it is my intention to 86 all the disguised ads and come-ons and similar shit that I’ve learned about the hard way when we published student journalism and didn’t ride herd on the comments.

I hope you find the site informative and thought-provoking.