Reasonable Reporter ventures out with a camera

No hint of recession at the Reno Barnes & Noble on Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend. The café was packed with latte-sipping book lovers. Customers browsed the shelves. Some leaned over the second-floor railing and watched a women’s choral group tucked between the escalators below, singing Christmas carols.  Nearby, a table, where mother-and-daughter authors autographed books. [...]

Lessons from Las Vegas: What happens in the database should stay in the database.

Any shred of information about the daily lives of citizens not currently contained in a government database will certainly be captured soon, as federal stimulus dollars create new opportunities for state and local agencies to track the activities of the average guy.
Raise any questions about whether the average guy wants to be tracked – and [...]

A new Thanksgiving Day epithet: “F the Jews”

When one encounters the politics of race on of Thanksgiving Day, it’s often devoted to the ambivalence of Native Americans toward the holiday. Native American writers have published, with some bitterness,  many a piece taking aim at the American folklore — myth some would call it — of a warm-and-fuzzy harvest feast shared by the [...]

Social Engineering: high tech crimes require low tech legwork.

This is a true story. It happened in one of America’s most technically literate cities. A municipal employee was on the street, tinkering with a “smart” parking meter. This meter accepts credit and debit cards, and recognizes pre-paid parking cards.  A young man approached the technician and gushed about the gadget. He said he’s fascinated [...]

If you like the bloggers you have, you get to keep them.

Choice and competition, by God, energize every field of endeavor. Here’s hoping you’ll welcome this humble offering of choice and competition. Of course, if you like the bloggers you already have, you get to keep them.
After a somewhat miscalculated career change, the Reasonable Reporter returns, with high hopes and apparently decent prospects of rejoining what [...]

Pulling the plug on radio

Today, the Reasonable Reporter will pull the plug on her radio career, in favor of a challenging new pursuit that starts in mid-September. The new gig is outside the media. It’s an exciting and long-overdue change. There is nonetheless an emotional tug-of-war in process, as the professional comfort zone is left behind.
The broadcaster’s life [...]

McCain leaves everything on the table in Sparks.

In an odd exchange following John McCain’s town hall meeting in Sparks this week, the candidate deflected a question from the Reasonable Reporter by suggesting that she might be a conservative. There would be no justification for telling the story, and it would remain untold, except that Anjeanette Damon alluded to the moment both in [...]

Presidential candidates should be protecting the personal information of reporters.

The Reasonable Reporter is good and steamed.  She has lost track of the times since Nevada became a swing state in 2004 that she’s been asked to send personal identifying information via unsecured means to the Secret Service for a background check. To protect elected officials, the federal government asks reporters to compromise their own [...]

Nevada voters do not have the luxury of being dumb.

Are the voters in Nevada a bunch of dummies?
The question was posed before the Supreme Court this week by Las Vegas attorney Dominic Gentile. He argued that the term limits question was not complex, and the voters understood quite well the initiative’s potential effect, regardless of technicalities now raised by the legislature, which [...]

Rush Limbaugh, big money, and Marconi’s old medium

Traditional media, recently declared dead, or at least critically ill in the face of new media’s rising commercial viability, has a pulse after all. Rush Limbaugh’s new contract is a 400 million dollar expression of confidence in traditional media, and such expressions of confidence have been rare in recent years.
But news of Rush Limbaugh’s record-breaking [...]