St Petersburg Times Videos
newest 100 st petersburg times videos / st petersburg times widgets / media rss:

Of the nine books I’ve written, it just occurred to me that the first and last have Pulitzer Prize connections—not for my work, unfortunately, but still… The last was Will Eisner: A Spirited Life, a biography of the American master artist and writer, which featured an introduction by Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Michael Chabon. And my first book, Stadium For Rent, features dozens of editorial cartoons drawn by future Pulitzer Prize winning artist Clay Bennett. Back then, Bennett was poking fun at local issues and political figures for the St. Petersburg Times. I’ve always regarded his style as sneaky—the clean lines and bold images let him club you over the head with his message while you’re still chuckling. Bennett left the Times for the Christian Science Monitor, where he ultimately won his Pulitzer. Today, he’s with the Chattanooga Times Free Press, of all places, and we’ll certainly talk about that, I’m sure. You can LISTEN to this Mr. Media interview with editorial cartoonist CLAY BENNETT of the CHATTANOOGA TIMES FREE PRESS by clicking the BlogTalkRadio.com audio player below! Open in your default player Detach into a separate window Copyright 2008 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

The only thing tougher than being a black man trying to hail a cab in Manhattan might be being a black man trying to sell a comic strip into a daily newspaper that already has a strip created by an African-American cartoonist. Charlos Gary knows how tough it is – he’s the man behind two daily strips, the single panel “Working It Out” and the multi-panel “Café Con Leche.” And he’s found an unusual twist: "Café Con Leche" is about the lives of young African-American man and his Latina wife. Sometimes it’s political, sometimes it's as everyday as Blondie. But it’s never dull and it’s always good for a laugh. You can LISTEN to this Mr. Media interview with CHARLOS GARY by clicking the BlogTalkRadio.com audio player below! Open in your default player Detach into a separate window Click here for copyright permissions! Copyright 2008 Bob Andelman

If you wanted to pick a good presidential campaign upon which to launch a political web site devoted to truth, justice, and the American Way – and those are my words, not there’s – this would be the one. You’ve got a man running as the candidate of one party who was in Vietnamese prisoner of war camps for five years, plus the first woman and African-American man to ever challenge for a major party’s nomination – and one of them will win it, one of these days. And before we reached this point, there were so many candidates on both sides that we needed scorecards to keep track. If you haven’t visited it before, take a minute and surf over to www.PolitiFact.com while you listen to this podcast. The site is an online extension of the St. Petersburg Times daily newspaper and Congressional Quarterly and it is just what an election of this magnitude and complexity needs: a lie detector! Literally! Joining me today is the editor of Politifact.com – and Washington bureau chief for the St. Petersburg Times – Bill Adair. (And in the interest of full disclosure, let me say that my wife is a long-time editor at the Times.) open separate window Amazon.com Widgets

With $2.6 billion in assets, the Miami-based John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is the 22nd largest foundation in the United States. Its mission is the betterment of the 26 communities in which it works and the promotion of journalism as a career and industry nationwide. The latter part of Knight’s mission is particularly challenging at a time when traditional newspapers are shrinking and, in many cases, evaporating. That puts Alberto Ibargüen, CEO of the Knight Foundation and a former publisher of the Miami Herald, at the same crossroads that silent movies encountered with talkies, talkies with radio, radio with television, television with cable, and now traditional print journalism with online reporting, blogs, podcasting, v-logs, streaming media, and so on. Since 1950, the Knight Foundation has invested more than $300 million to advance quality journalism and freedom of expression worldwide. It has a vital interest in seeing journalism survive in whatever form it takes. I interviewed Ibargüen recently for an old media business magazine and liked his approach to a rapidly changing world, and I was delighted when he accepted my invitation for a second round of conversation. ALBERTO IBARGUEN AUDIO! Click to open separate window ALSO AVAILABLE AS A PODCAST ON iTUNES. Subscribe to Mr. Media's RSS Feed. BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Reading the newspaper this morning, I see we’ve got more bad news in the business. Even The New York Times is talking about cutting 100 jobs. ALBERTO IBARGUEN: It’s something like eight percent of their newsroom, yes. They’re certainly not immune from the drop in national advertising and the drop in jobs and jobs/classified advertising. Those are two traditional mainstays of newspapers. They represented, for most newspapers, well over half the revenue, and both of those categories are way down. ANDELMAN: How do we square what’s happening, like the announcement at The New York Times today, for example, about 100 jobs -- with the amount of money that someone like Rupert Murdoch is pouring into The Wall Street Journal all of a sudden? How do those two square with each other? IBARGUEN: I don’t think anybody else could possibly have paid that much for The Wall Street Journal or for any newspaper because that’s not, I think, the reason why Rupert Murdoch was so interested in Dow Jones. I think Rupert Murdoch was interested in Dow Jones because he’s starting a competitor to CNBC, and Rupert Murdoch is as committed to news online as anyone else in big media. I’d say more so. So what he was buying was not the newspaper. What he was buying was the best news organization around, and so I would expect that, over time, those resources and that talent, when the talent is enormous at The Wall Street Journal for covering business news, it is a great newspaper, that that talent will be applied on television and online. ANDELMAN: So as far as print journalism goes, that was actually a pessimistic purchase rather than an optimistic purchase. IBARGUEN: It’s hard to call that much money pessimistic, but I guess you’re right. ANDELMAN: What about, if we move further West with that, what about Sam Zell and him buying the Chicago Tribune, plus the Los Angeles Times and Orlando Sentinel? He doesn’t have that same kind of online or electronic package, or does he? IBARGUEN: No, I don’t think it’s the same, and I’m not sure that the deal is the same either. That one engaged a great deal, I think, of employee money. I don’t know if it was their retirement funds. I know that the Tribune Foundation became a contributor to that purchase. I think, in Chicago, the Tribune Company has long had lots of synergy with television and online, and I’m honestly not on the inside so I don’t know how they’re doing with that. In their smaller papers, they may be able, at least for a period of time, and Sam’s in Ft. Lauderdale here in Florida or in Orlando, they may be able to do reasonably well. They are, traditionally, newspapers that were run at very high margins, much, much more profitable on a percentage basis than say The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, but they really did also depend on classified advertising and national advertising. I think the picture for the national papers is actually not bad if they can figure out the online piece because online is part of the worldwide web, not the local, geographically defined web. And by thinking of it as a national paper, you can begin to have the kind of national scale that the web seems to be naturally suited for. The ones that I think are also probably okay, at least for the short-term, are the papers in very small communities where they still can publish the local news, whether it’s the high school football team or what happened at city hall. They can do that better than anybody else. The ones that are really getting squeezed are the so-called major metros, and that would include the Chicago Tribune, The Miami Herald, even the Los Angeles Times because those regional papers are trying to do something in between the national scope that fits the web so well and the very local, local, almost neighborhood scope that the small town dailies are doing. So those are the ones that you’re seeing the biggest stress on, and there are some like the Boston Globe, a great newspaper, that although it made some money last year, I think the year before, they actually lost money. That would’ve been unthinkable five or 10 years before. ANDELMAN: It seems like the smart move 20 or 25 years ago was for these major metros, the Miami Herald, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the St. Petersburg Times, and so forth across the country, to add regional editions and grow and spread out, but now we see some of that coming back, and maybe that wasn’t the way to move long-term. IBARGUEN: Yes, hindsight’s wonderful, isn’t it? ANDELMAN: I thrive on it, frankly. Yes. IBARGUEN: We’re so smart after the fact. I don’t know what they could’ve done. When you were doing your introduction, you were talking about being in the position of the talkies with silent films and so forth. It actually was the position that Jack Knight, our founder, the founder of Knight Foundation, that Jack Knight found himself in at the beginning of the century when he actually built the second biggest newspaper company when newspapers were everything in news. He actually built the second biggest newspaper company by figuring out how to use new technology. Other people were being destroyed by it, and he figured out that because of improvements in transportation, improvements in printing, but mainly improvements in something fantastic and new at the beginning of the 20th century called the telephone, he could actually create a newspaper company that he could run from one place but ultimately in 26 cities, actually in his brother’s lifetime in 26 cities. The point is that he knew, he figured out, how to use this new technology in a way to expand his business from one single newspaper in Akron, Ohio, and to be able to ultimately run a newspaper company out of Miami, Florida, that included Philadelphia and San Jose and Wichita and Biloxi and Duluth and St. Paul, Detroit, Michigan, and be able to do it all from here because of the telephone. That would’ve been unthinkable when that technology was first introduced or when Jack Knight first started to run the Akron Beacon-Journal. And so I think one of the things that we try to do at Knight Foundation is, to be honest, we’re not responsible for figuring out how to keep these jobs. We’re not responsible for delivering a 25 or 20 or even 15 percent margin to investors. We’re trying to figure out, “How do you use that new technology?” Let’s experiment with different ways of delivering news and information because, in the end, we still do all live in geographically-defined communities. We still have environmental policy, education, who fixes the potholes are all ultimately decided by people we elect by geographically-defined communities, and either we change the construct of our governing structure, or we have to figure out a way of getting the people who are making those election choices better information, and it has to be electronic. It has to be digital. ANDELMAN: As you said that, I’m thinking about how things have changed on one level. I think Ed Koch of New York City used to be known as “Mayor Pothole.” IBARGUEN: Yes. ANDELMAN: Right? And now we’ve got Mayor Bloomberg who is trying to affect national policy from his mayor’s seat. It’s a very different kind of world even at that level. IBARGUEN: It really is. And Mayor Koch was fantastic. I happened to live in New York at the time, and there wasn’t a pothole that he couldn’t pay attention to. There wasn’t a ribbon-cutting. And Bloomberg has a different appreciation. Given his background and given what he built in his company, the Bloomberg Business Systems that he built that were an early and phenomenal user of digital technology to deliver business information. There is another aspect, by the way, of the current newspaper problem, and maybe it’s also true of broadcast television, I’m not sure, and it’s the nature of the ownership. When newspapers were owned, up until the 1960s, there wasn’t any newspaper company that was a publicly held company. They were all family-owned or individually owned, and it didn’t matter whether it was the Meyers and the Grahams who owned the Washington Post or the Sulzbergers who owned The New York Times or the Chandlers in Los Angeles, Knight-Ridder, etc. In the mid-‘60s, the companies started to go public. There were great benefits to going public. You could raise a lot of money, you could invest a lot in the business, and it was a terrific growing concern. But as ownership started to shift from the families to people who were interested in newspapers to institutional investors, the demand on newspapers, and at the same time, there was new technology coming along, not just radio then television, which were already there, but with the web and with cable, that really began cutting into the advertising base of the newspaper model. There was this sort of perfect storm of web and cable cutting into the advertising base at the same time that the investors in newspapers became more and more institutional investors. And institutional investors not only don’t, but cannot care about the basic function of the newspaper - that is the delivery of news and information to a community. Jack Knight cared, and, in fact, when he went to Wall Street, there’s a very famous speech that he gave the only time that he went to talk to analysts, and he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m here to tell you that if you don’t like the way I run Knight Newspapers then I suggest you buy another newspaper company’s stock because I’m not gonna change. I’m running this in the way that I think a newspaper should be run.” And that was a luxury that I think his successors didn’t have when a fella named Sherman a couple years ago decided that Knight-Ridder at, whatever it was, a 20 percent margin, wasn’t making enough money and forced the sale of the company. I’m reminded of that because I saw a note in the paper this morning that said that Mr. Sherman is now 100 percent out of newspapers, zero. He used to own some part of Belo. He used to own some part of The New York Times. He used to own a big chunk of McClatchy, which is a company that bought Knight-Ridder, and now he owns nothing. It’s a different kind of commitment. A newspaper is not going to leave the town. An institutional investor will invest in the newspaper in the same way it might invest in a shoe company, it might invest in a rug company, it doesn’t matter. It’s just simply another type of investment, and they’ll do it for a period of time, and then they’ll either stay in because they continue making money or get out without any sentimentality. A news organization, whether it’s television or cable or even and certainly newspapers, cannot…The Miami Herald cannot leave Miami. And so there’s that institutional part that seems to me to be incompatible with institutional investors. And I think that’s a really big problem for, I believe, for all of the publicly held newspaper companies. ANDELMAN: There seemed to be a time, and again, I go back 20 to 25 years when it almost seemed like a good idea to have people with good business sense to come into the newspaper business and apply some fundamentals to the operation. The problem is, I think, that the business has been changed in the last 10 years by technology and other things. It takes more than just business sense to make a newspaper work. IBARGUEN: I think it’s a combination of problems as I indicated a minute ago. I think there is new technology that is absolutely disruptive – that is cable to television and Internet to both television and certainly to newspapers. So there’s disruptive new technology, and by the way, that’s not a negative. That’s simply a fact. It disrupts the old model in a major way, and so the people who are going to win are the ones who figure out how to deliver what the community needs on the new platforms. I firmly believe that’s what Jack Knight did in his day in the beginning of the 20th century, and I believe that’s what we’re searching for now. But there’s another factor, which is that the institutional investor is looking for a return. The institutional investor, that is the Legg Masons of this world, don’t really care whether Philadelphia is informed, whether Tallahassee is informed, whether St. Petersburg is informed. They care whether you return the amount of money that they planned to have you return. And so if you returned 14 percent, and they were planning 13, then that’s great. And with newspapers, they came to expect somewhere in the 20 to 25 percent range, and that’s a lot of money. And that’s a lot of money when you have your core business, the business side, the core business attacked and under great pressure as in the case of national advertising and with the web coming on so strong on classified advertising for jobs and that sort of thing. Think about it. If you go buy a car, it’s just too easy to look up on the web virtually every model that you can think about. The last three cars I bought I basically shopped for online and sort of gone for the test drive, but I really haven’t gone to do much other comparison. Click Here to Keep Reading! © 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved. Technorati Tags: Alberto Ibargüen, Chicago Tribune, Jack Knight, Jim Knight, journalism, Karen Dunlap, Knight Commission, Knight Foundation, Knight News Challenge, Knight-Ridder, Miami Herald, Newsu.org, Poynter Institute, Sam Zell, Tribune Company, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, blogging, podcasting, future of newspapers, streaming media, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, Rupert Murdoch, Boston Globe, St. Petersburg Times, Tribune Foundation, Ed Koch, Mayor Pothole, Katherine Graham, Sulzbergers, Otis Chandler, McClatchy Newspapers, Legg Mason, new media

Jim Melvin has been a friend of mine for more than twenty years and, for as long as I’ve known him, his driving interest has been writing an epic fantasy series, something that might find shelf space alongside J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. But life kept getting in the way. He was married, raised two wonderful daughters, had a full-time job as an editor at the St. Petersburg Times, and did all the other good stuff that eats up time and interferes with achieving those very personal dreams we all entertain. But that’s life, right? Well, a few years ago, Jim decided it was now or never. He retired from the newspaper, took his family and savings, and moved to North Carolina. He put everything else aside to fulfill what he believed to be his destiny and nearly two- thousand pages that became The Death Wizard Chronicles. The first book in the six-book epic fantasy was released in September by Rain Publishing, and a new installment will be delivered to bookstores every thirty days until the entire series is available in February 2008. It’s a hell of a story, a hell of a series, and Jim Melvin is a hell of a guy. DOWNLOAD THE MP3; LISTEN HERE. ALSO AVAILABLE AS A PODCAST ON iTUNES. Subscribe to Mr. Media's RSS Feed. Death Wizard Chronicles Web Site Book Excerpt Meet Jim Melvin at the St. Petersburg Times Festival of Reading Saturday, October 27, 2007 BOB ANDELMAN: Jim, for everyone who knows you personally and your story, let me ask this as plainly as possible. What the hell were you thinking? You gambled an awful lot on your imagination. JIM MELVIN: Well, Bob, I think it was sort of something that built up over 25 years. When I would get in the shower, when I’d drive in the car, when I would fall asleep at night, I would think about this series, and, to me, it felt like this is what Jim Melvin was supposed to do, to create this series. And so many people have dreams in their lives that they’re never able to achieve because of the reality of living and working and raising families and mowing the yard and maybe taking a break at night to watch a little TV that their dreams are set aside. I had an opportunity to live off savings for a couple years and to take this risk and, rather than bank the savings and retire at age 62 and write the book then, I wanted to do it in my late 40s when I had at least a little bit of youth left. I want to be able to look in the mirror and tell myself, “You gave it your best shot.” ANDELMAN: Now, you can affirm to people that I did not exaggerate here. This has been living inside of you for years. And pretty much everyone who’s known you, family, friends, co-workers has been aware of this, right? MELVIN: It’s actually been living inside of me probably since I was a little boy. I grew up in St. Petersburg, Florida, and I lived on a little island called Coquina Key. I was lucky to live on a street that had quite a few boys my age. And, like a lot of boys, we played football and baseball, and we ran around all day long, especially during the summer. One thing we did was we played a lot of imaginary games, and we would get together, five, ten of us and play for hours. And a lot of it was based on things like shows of that time period back in the late sixties, early seventies like “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” and “Lost in Space.” And my imagination was almost as tantalized by fantasy and superheroes and magical powers, and so The Death Wizard Chronicles really were born then. ANDELMAN: Had you written any of this as a teen, in college, any of that kind of stuff, or did it all come after you retired? MELVIN: Well, when I was a teenager, about the age, say, of a junior in high school when you’re really finally starting to try to take seriously what you’re gonna do with your life, it just hit me really hard that I wanted to become a best-selling novelist. I remember even back then when I was what, 16, 17 years old, I was going around and telling people that I was going to be a best-selling novelist, and I was gonna make $75 million. And that’s in the mid-1970s, so that’s probably $300 million of today’s dollars. Then I thought, well, I’m not a rich person now. I need to make a living at least until the first novel hits big. What should I do? Well, I decided then to become a journalist because journalists write. I’ll learn the craft of writing even though, at that point, when I was young, I was so arrogant I really didn’t think I needed to learn the craft of writing. I actually wrote a novel. It was a horror story, kind of a Stephen King-type thing. Stephen King was just coming out at that point. I shopped it around some, and it came actually relatively close to being published. But, at the time, and all writers hear this, that it’s usually not the first book that hits it big. It’s the second or third book that hits it big. So I wasn’t really concerned that the first book didn’t get published. I knew the second one would, only then I began working 50-hour weeks and six-day weeks. And I got married, and I had kids, and I had a house to take care of, and there never was a second book. But for 25 years, The Death Wizard Chronicles were in my mind, and I did try to attempt to write it several times. I would get 30 or 40 or 50 pages into it, and then just it would stop. I would either lose momentum, or I didn’t like what I was doing. As it turned out, the real reason I didn’t write it wasn’t the excuse of working too hard or having a family, it was that I really, as a writer and as a person, wasn’t ready for it. And journalism and living my life, you meet a lot of people, and you have a lot of experiences, and you learn a lot of things. You do learn the craft of writing. And over the years, I became a more worldly, more mature person, more capable of this. And so actually, in the long run, it really turned out for the best because now is my time. ANDELMAN: I’m recalling, as you’re saying that, that a couple years before you retired from the newspaper that -- correct me if I’m wrong -- you had taken kind of an interest in Eastern philosophy and things like that. Am I on the right track here? MELVIN: That’s correct, actually. The Death Wizard Chronicles actually were based on Eastern philosophy even before I knew much about Eastern philosophy. It’s just sort of a coincidence. I got divorced and remarried, and my second wife was a long-time Buddhist, and she introduced me to Buddhism. It was a religion that I really embraced. I embraced the religion in a philosophical sense. It really spoke to me in terms of the tools it offers to live your life. And once that happened, I think all the pieces fell into place. ANDELMAN: It’s in the very first book, The Pit -- there’s a reference to karma. MELVIN: Right. Karma, in the Buddhist sense, is the philosophy that all of your actions, whether it good, bad, or neutral, have effects. Good actions create happiness. Bad actions create unhappiness. And neutral actions basically don’t do anything. What you are is an accumulation of your karma. One of the other aspects of Buddhism that most attracts Westerners to Buddhism is meditation. Through meditation, you’re able to relax, slow your heart-rate, and also begin to see certain truths that are all intertwined in Buddhism. My main character is called a “Death Wizard” because he’s able to meditate so deeply that he literally stops his heart and temporarily dies. And there’ve been studies with Tibetan monks that have shown that when they’re through long stretches of meditation, they can slow their heart rate to like under 10 beats per minute or even less. Well, my character can take that to the extreme, and when he dies, he temporarily enters the realm of death and enriches himself with magical powers. ANDELMAN: Since you mention the Death Wizard, this might be a good time to tell people listening and reading a little something about the series, six books. And you can’t use the whole half-hour for the synopsis. MELVIN: Well, it’s difficult to do a fantasy synopsis, and I’ll tell you why. But imagine giving a synopsis for Lord of the Rings. You would say very short people with hairy feet save the world from monsters. That doesn’t sound that interesting. But I’ll give it a shot. My series is, as you said, it’s six books. It’s about 700,000 words, which sounds like a ton, and I guess is, but there’s a lot of fantasy, very popular fantasy, written now-a-days that is quite a bit longer. For instance, there’s someone named Steven Erikson who’s doing a ten-book series called The Malazan Book of the Fallen, and each one of his books are about 300,000 words. So 700,000 words now-a-days is pretty average in the fantasy world. But, at any rate, my series involves a character who is called a Death Wizard, and actually throughout the series, he’s actually more accurately called a “Death-Knower.” And he’s called a Death-Knower because he literally dies and returns. He has seen what happens when you die, and none of us, of course, have ever done that. And the crux of being a human being is being aware of our own mortality. The evil character that he combats throughout the series is called a “Sun God.” And he’s called that because he derives his power from sunlight. If you get into the world of Carl Sagan, suns and stars are the creators of life in the universe. Our bodies are made of things that come from the stars. So this creates a paradox in my series in that the good character is based on death, which human beings traditionally see as being a bad thing, and the evil character is based on life, which human beings traditionally see as a good thing. The entire series revolves around that paradox with a lot going on between the lines. ANDELMAN: And folks, as I said, he’s been thinking about this for a long time. So, Jim, are any of these characters, are they based on real life? Is there anybody that you want dead? MELVIN: Well, Torg, my main character is seven feet tall and weighs 300 pounds and is really good-looking so I based him on me. I would say that none of the characters are really based on anyone I know. Obviously, all of your life experiences create characters that you write, but they’re not based on people that I know. But they are characters that, very intensely, I’m sure this happens to most writers, but very intensely, I’ve grown to love them. And in fact, right now, I’m in the editing process of Book Six, and when that completes, I’m gonna feel kind of sad. I’m gonna feel like I’ve lost some family. The series, for the most part, takes place over a thousand years, but the vast majority of the series really only takes place over about a four-month period. Anytime in fantasy, when you write fantasy, you have to try your best to interweave backstory because backstory creates context that gives your characters meaning. Once I’ve gotten most of the backstory out of the way, it’s really just a rollercoaster ride to the finish of good versus evil, wars, fortresses, castles, monsters, vast amounts of magical power, and it’s kind of sexy too and R-rated. So this is not Harry Potter. This is not recommended for kids or even young adults. This is an adult, R-rated series, which again, a lot of the most popular fantasy now-a-days is. Click Here to Keep Reading! © 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved. Watch the latest videos on YouTube.com

Journalist and Florida native Deborah Sharp shares a bar room experience that yields a bit of mature wisdom.

Cathy, Steve and their guest explore their dark obsession with Robert Smith and The Cure.

Honoring 80s comedy king Michael Keaton

Go on a Vision Quest with Steve and Sean

Yes! YES! It's "When Harry Met Sally."

Van Halen fans - David Lee Roth or Sammy Hagar?

When it comes to rockin' podcasts, this one goes to 11. Hosts Gina and Steve invite Times pop critic and '80s addict Sean Daly to join their tribute to Spinal Tap.