John Quincy Adams, Good Friday and ‘the Triumph of the Cross’

April 2, 2010

The story of Cincinnati’s most unique and enduring Catholic tradition — the praying of the Mount Adams steps on Good Friday — actually begins 16 years before the church was built. Our antagonist: John Quincy Adams himself.

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My problem with media criticism

March 7, 2010

Media criticism is a unique undertaking. Critical writing about journalism is itself an act of journalism, and ought to be held to the same standards as the work it trains its eye on. Unfortunately, too much media criticism fails to do some basic fact-checking.

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Why I delve for data

February 23, 2010

Michelle Minkoff, a graduate student at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern, has been doing a series of profiles of some of the smartest database reporters and newsroom developers around. How the heck she came up with my name, I’ll never know.

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Election 2009 result maps

November 11, 2009

Here, all in one place, are links to all the popular precinct maps that ran with various stories in The Cincinnati Enquirer after the November 3, 2009 general election.

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Why I built my own short URL site

(and maybe you should, too)

July 29, 2009

There’s nothing wrong with TinyURL.com, the url-shortening service that started in 2002 to help tame unwieldy links and has become indispensable in the age of Twitter. It’s just that, well, (1) everybody uses it — or a clone like bit.ly or snurl.com or snipurl.com — so it’s a bit impersonal, (2) there’s no guarantee it [...]

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Gregory is

… contemplating the linguistics of statusing

June 5, 2009

(Self-plagiarism disclosure: This post is a compilation of previous observations I’ve made, mostly on Facebook or on in this comment currently awaiting moderation at the Oxford University Press blog.) There’s been much hand-wringing lately about how social networking is changing journalism. Frankly, I’m more interested in how it’s changing language:  How it has forced users [...]

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