What’s on the television?

Last week, the NBC television network featured important stories from Montrose, Colo., and Half Moon Bay, Calif. OK, it featured an important story from Montrose. Actually, the network smashed our annual big-pumpkin winner with a monster truck. I’ll leave it to you, the impartial viewer, to decide which was cooler.

Montrose Daily Press Publisher Steve Woody alerted me to the Today show broadcast that included a three-minute segment from Montrose. It’s part of a recurring series called “In Search of the American Character” that sends Tom Brokaw up and down U.S. Highway 50, which he calls “the backbone of America.” Montrose turns out to be Mile 2,107 on the way west to California.

The Daily Press responded wonderfully to the exposure and the interest it was sure to inspire locally. Staff produced a video for the newspaper Web site, showing Brokaw talking with local farmer Jeff Downs. Staff writer Katharhynn Heidelberg wrote a story about the encounter, including the fact that the television project will turn into a one-hour feature in January…

Sports (Journalism) Center

Sportswriters (and long-suffering editors of sportswriters) rejoice! The Indiana Sports Journalism Center is here and it is bringing Dave Kindred with it.

I was trawling along through the thick swamp of the Interwebs today, fishing for something to write about, and I stumbled on the center’s Web site. It’s a production of the University of Indiana journalism department and a recent development. It offers links to organizations like sportsjournalists.com and stats so that you will know what Tiger Woods shot on Sunday and which women’s basketball player leads the NCAA in rebounds on Wednesday.

But whatever. The point is, it has Kindred. If you don’t already know, he is a truly blessed sportswriter who was a dogged reporter first. He has worked for the Washington Post, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Sporting News and won every award worth winning. Kindred, who serves on the board of the Indiana Sports Journalism Center, is apparently going to write columns on the art of sportswriting every week. I can almost guarantee that if you read one you will look forward to his jewel a week hence. This week, he’s bemoaning the role gambling plays in the nation’s sports pages.

The New York Times noted that Kindred, in his excellent book, “Sound and Fury,” about the intersecting lives of Muhammad Ali and Howard Cosell, quoted Edith Wharton. Her words could have been about any of us who seek to illuminate readers about the lives of others: “There are two sources of light, / The candle, / And the mirror that reflects it.”…

In defense of print

Oh, paper and ink. Why are you deserting me in my dotage?

The evidence is everywhere. E-readers are coming and when they get here in sufficient numbers, they will be impossible to ignore. They will be more sleek and more functional than today’s Kindles and Nooks, which will be remembered as clunky groundbreakers like those early iPods that were four times as big as the one in your purse right now.

And what then? What of your morning newspaper? That’s a good question.

Me, I hope to continue to hear the thud of the morning newspaper on my driveway for a long time to come. But why is that? I didn’t spill many tears over the end of cassette tapes (OK, I still have thousands of vinyl LPs. So I do have a nostalgic streak.) I won’t be sorry to see land-line telephones fade away. VHS tapes? Please. Who cares about them?

But print is different, at least for those of us who grew up with it. Here are some things I would miss, if ink-and-paper newspapers died away entirely in favor of something electronic:…