Super Bowl Update

Above, looking south on U.S.-1/S. Federal Highway, in front of Hallandale Beach City Hall. At the bottom of the FDOT sign you'll notice the grafitti that I mentioned two years ago at a HB City Commission meeting, where I noted with disgust how most of U.S.-1, one of the three main roads in and out of the city, had grafitti on nearly every sign and pole -and had for years- due to the city and

otherijustine YouTube Channel video: SEXIEST CHRISTMAS PIX EVER!!!. Uploaded December 25, 2012. http://youtu.be/6dtxA4Mhfr8


Social Media superstar iJustine's antics in December included some things you might've done -gotten holiday photos taken with your siblings- but also some you didn't -dress as a panda for the Grand Opening of an Apple Store. In this case, at the Third Street Promenade in

Above, as previously seen on the blog, the campaign yard signs for Bill Julian, Anthony A. Sanders and Joy Cooper that for months stood illegally on church/non-profit property on N.W. First Avenue & N.W. 3rd Street, in Hallandale Beach, FL. This despite the fact that in the United States, federal law is that partisan campaign signs are NOT to be placed on religious property, since the IRS can

Above, screenshot of Bill Julian's myth-filled campaign website, featuring three photos of mine that he stole directly from this blog, circled in orange, as it appeared when I first discovered the theft on June 19th. Fourteen weeks later, less than 3 days before Election Day, they're still there, hiding in plain sight. http://billjulian.org/ Julian is not just a repeat offender, but lousy at

October 3, 2012 photo by South Beach Hoosier. © 2012 Hallandale Beach Blog, All Rights Reserved.

Let the critics chew over that! 
The best -EVER! October 2012 is THE best month ever at Hallandale Beach Blog with 35,346 individual pageviews - a daily average of 1,140 views; @MayorCooper, @SandersHB, @AlexLewy



My most-read blog post for the month is one from October 15th that really hit

TurnerNordic video: TNT-TV.se's Mad Men Competition Spot SWE. Uploaded August 22, 2012. http://youtu.be/DnhH5naTt34



Now my friends there who don't watch TV -yes, I really do have such friends, hard as that is to believe- will have a reason to watch TV again.

And soon, all will be right again with the world and Sverige as Matthew Weiner finds that Swedes love his insight into humanity,

Thanks for making May 2012 the second-busiest month ever in over four years of keeping track of statistics at Hallandale Beach Blog, with 23,979 individual pageviews, an average of 773 a day for the month.
Busiest individual day was May 24 with 944 individual pageviews.

The top five referring sites for May 2012 were, not surprisingly, all Google sites: U.S.A., Germany, Great Britain, Canada and

Above, my screenshot of today's Miami Herald website showing where the link to their South Florida Blogs are shown on the page by the orange circle, at the bottom of the default, with no icons of any sort to identify it.

Could it be more hidden?

Wow! Very curious but pleasant surprise from Miami Herald! 

Just noticed this NEW change from last week at Miami Herald -they're linking my (our)

View Larger Map

Above, Hialeah City Hall, 501 Palm Avenue, circa June 2009, courtesy of Google Maps



Despite having written myself a few notes to mention it here, I hadn't gotten around to posting the news yet, but Elaine de Valle's smart and knowing Miami-Dade-centric blog, Political Cortadito, blessed with an especially strong intuition and nose-for news regarding the antics and hijinks in

Christer Lindarw ("After Dark") performs "La Dolce Vita" and "Mamma Mia" from SVT's "Den Flygande Mattan."  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boVS7_XETBA

March 2012 was another good month for us here at Hallandale Beach Blog.
In fact, it was our seventh-busiest month ever in five years.
(Earlier I said second but I misread it.) 
With some positive -and long overdue- changes soon appearing here

Michael Butler's Change Hallandale video: http://youtu.be/dyM5P3Kl6iQ 

Here's the all-too-true back-story on the video above created by my friend, and fellow civic activist and blogger, Michael Butler of Change Hallandale fame.
(See more on Michael and his website at the bottom.)
In the summer of 2010, in a Hallandale Beach City Hall room where regular HB City Commission meetings are NOT

iJustine video: Justine at NATPE. January 28, 2012.
http://youtu.be/Q3S1yKyYhyw
http://ijustine.com/natpe-in-miami-2/

Justine Ezarik, a.k.a. iJustine, modern-day Digital Renaissance Woman and well-known  YouTube Partner, back from CES, is in Miami for NATPE and checking-out the South Florida scene.


iJustine video: we in miami, trick. January 29, 2012.
http://youtu.be/gPQFUzahJEM

I

Late Fall evening in 2002, looking south at The White House from Lafayette Park, with statue of Gen. Andrew Jackson in the foreground. Photo by South Beach Hoosier. If only I'd started a blog back then -or earlier!!!


I've been meaning to post this bit of positive news for a while now, but kept shunting it aside because of other matters, including what has been a LOT MORE time this past

Miami Herald vending machine in front of Denny's restaurant, Hallandale Beach, FL.July 3, 2011 photo by South Beach Hoosier

Below is the email that I sent last Friday afternoon to David Landsberg, President and Publisher of McClatchy's Miami Herald, with cc's to Herald Executive Editor Aminda Marques and Managing Editor Rick Hirsch, along with certain Broward County elected officials and

Google video: Take Google Maps Indoors. November 28, 2011http://youtu.be/Gy-DI_bWElgJust when you might've thought that Google has no new worlds to conquer, no new source of hand-over-fist advertising revenue from something that's standing right in front of us that we all take for granted, they show their business savvy and smarts.Yesterday I got word from them that "Google Maps is entering a new

Looking northwest from N. Johnson & N. 35th Avenue in Hollywood at part of the main campus of Memorial Regional Hospital, the flagship facility of Memorial Healthcare System's far-flung Broward healthcare empire. Now if only there was a place where I could get some TLC for my mis-behaving desktop computer that's been driving me crazy the past month. November 1, 2011 photo by South Beach Hoosier.

The pace of internet journalism is anything but measured and contemplative. And blogs are ravenous beasts, always demanding to be fed.

It's true that I write most of this particular blog, but it's also true that I'm writing it as a staff member of WMRA public radio.This makes it an appropriate platform for me to ask hard questions, site incidents from my own and others' experiences, and offer researched information. In my opinion, it does not make it a platform for my personal opinion.

Yes, I am opinionated. Quite heatedly so, at times. So, Tom DuVal, our generally cool, calm and collected (as long as you keep him away from his always-ailing computer) General Manager reads this blog behind me. His mission is not to rewrite as much as it is to remove what an old NPR editor of mine used to call "Martha-isms," those times in a piece or a post when there's too much of me and not enough story. Tom keeps me heeled to my ethical master, the canons of  journalism. For which I am, most of the time, very grateful.

In my opinion (and we'll see if Tom allows me to opine about this), good journalism is the product of the tension between writer and editor. And this is not always a smooth and pretty process. Particularly now that all these reporter-written blogs (mine included) have entered the picture. Blogs are inherently more personal. So where does that leave blogs written by reporters?

Anyway, it was with great interest that I read today's Omblog, in which The Washington Post Ombudsman gives voice to readers' concerns about the paper, both the on-line and on-the-page versions.

It's a long and, to me, interesting column about an internal Post flap, that begins with this,

An "inappropriate" blog item causes a stir

In his “D.C. Schools Insider” blog on Wednesday, education reporter Bill Turque offered a fascinating behind-the-scenes explanation of how The Post’s newsroom and editorial page operate independently.

He described being scooped the previous day by a Post editorial. It had included information from the office of D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee on her recent claims to a national business magazine that some teachers had been laid off because they “had sex with children,” hit them or were chronically absent. Turque wrote that Rhee’s office had provided fresh information to the editorial board -- but not him -- and noted that The Post’s editorial page support of Rhee had been “steadfast, protective and, at times, adoring.” He said this, coupled with Rhee’s comfort level with editorial board member Jo-Ann Armao, who writes education editorials, had assured Rhee a “soft landing spot for uncomfortable or inconvenient disclosures -- kind of a print version of the Larry King Show.”

A public conflict between Editorial staff member and beat reporter is, itself, interesting. But what really set me thinking as a reporter/blogger were these three paragraphs from deep in the piece (bolding and italicizing were done by me).

Turque said his original item had been read by his editors, including education editor Craig Timberg and Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, a high-ranking editor who oversees The Post’s local coverage. Both took the blame.

“This whole thing was my fault,” Garcia-Ruiz messaged me. “I saw the original post, approved it, and should have edited the opinion out of it. The issue of beat writers straying from analysis to opinion in blog posts is one we dealt with when I was [in his previous job as Sports editor] and I know better. When it was brought to my attention last night, I edited the piece as I should have done originally, called Bill to explain why I made the changes I made, and then republished it.”

Similarly, Timberg said he had approved the post. "I feel really badly about the way this turned out," he said. "I feel as though I misjudged the extent to which there was room for a rough and tumble conversation" in the blog. "I feel like I've embarrassed the news organization and I wish that weren't so."

That's the end of the "Omblog" excerpt.

What I'm curious about is your take on the issue of opinionated reporters who blog. Is it still possible for you to trust the impartiality of our news reporting once we stray on-line, unchecked, from "analysis to opinion?" You know we all have opinions, so are we being transparent or simply taking advantage of our blog pulpits when we express them on these ephemeral on-line pages?

I just finished doing a piece for NPR's monkey see blog. It's generally on Picador's re-issuance of a whole slew of Tom Wolfe books; specifically on his just re-issued first book, a collection of essays called The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.

If you're interested in reading the piece, here's a link to it on NPR's website.

To write about any book, one has to read it first. And although I've read quite a lot of Tom Wolfe over the years, I'd never read this one, so into it I dove. The first essay, "The Marvelous Mouth" (written for Esquire in 1963) is about Muhammad Ali.  Or, more accurately, it's about Tom Wolfe hanging out with Muhammad Ali and reporting the experience in great detail.

Oh golly, did Wolfe's experiential take on Ali take me back in my own life. And seeing as I was writing for a blog and not for a more formal entity, I could begin my own snippet of a piece this way:

Many years ago, say in 1966, I ate dinner in the same Rice University college dining room as Muhammad Ali and fell in love with the man's mouth, his attitude, his playfulness, and his ability to make us lily-white, well-mannered, certifiably intelligent college kids a wee bit nervous. We were of one culture; he was of another. Or rather, we were of one culture; he was Muhammad Ali -- a culture unto himself.

What fun I had writing that! Because I was blogging, I didn't have to not include a personal experience because of journalistic conventions.  And so it was only while reading Tom Wolfe's essays and writing about them for NPR.org that I realized why I resonate so with blogging.

Tom Wolfe, and the other New Journalists, bodaciously, flagrantly insert themselves into their stories. Yet once you stop and think about it, reporters are present in all reporting, whether acknowledged or not. A reporter's personal experiences, prejudices, education inform their use of language, their decision to include some facts and exclude others, their selection of detail.

There's no way to avoid this -- to keep reporters out of their pieces -- because all reportage, no matter how objective its format, is limited in scope, because it's limited in time on the air or space on the page. Yet conventional, formal journalism demands that we disguise our presence as thoroughly as possible. And claim it isn't there.

Tom Wolfe, and the rest of the New Journalists, took a truth out of the closet and flaunted it; boldly recognizing that every report of the news has a human being's point of view embedded in it; that the reporter's education, experience, knowledge and, yes, prejudices cannot help but come into play.

Blogging is New Journalism unchained. It's relaxed, it's personal, it's driven by personal voice; it's honest about being only as honest as the person writing it.

Plus, it's fun,

And so, for this reporter, blogging is the bomb!