Autumnal Hiatus

I’m pleased and proud to announce that I now have my own column on Blogcritics (http://blogcritics.com). It’s called

NewsWire, and you can get to it by going to the main site, clicking on the TV/Video category, and if you scroll down the homepage of that section, you’ll see, on the right, a sub-group called Current Features, and you should be able to view the NewsWire title, as well as my logo/icon: an old-fashioned weather-vane, complete with rooster and the four outstretched prongs, each with a directional letter on it: N E W S.

Click on the icon and it should take you to my column’s homepage, which is (or soon will be) topped by a banner, featuring a B&W photo of old-fashioned telephone/utility poles with wires strung from one to the other, many of them, alongside an empty highway leading to a distant horizon. I’m relying on the Blogcritics tech staff to put this together, because all I can manage to do is write and upload an article.

Somewhere – perhaps on the title page, but I really don’t know, will appear my permanent description of the column:

News is the lifeblood of participatory citizenship. Sometimes it's tainted with errors, sensationalism or dull stupidity; sometimes it's accurate, insightful, and genuinely informative. As (sadly) newspapers give way to screen-based news sources, TV news programs play an increasingly-important role in helping us understand what's happening in America and around the world. NewsWire monitors everything from the Sunday morning network/cable line-up, to PBS' Friday night roster of news/current affairs programs (and irregularly scheduled specials, like Frontline), to the comedy-news shows (Bill Maher especially, but also Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert), to the broadcast networks' nightly newscasts and the cable news channels' 24-hour fare. We don't cover everything every day (or even every week), but we eventually touch on it all – to let you know about the style and content of what's happening onscreen (and, when possible, behind-the-scenes).

As you can imagine, it’s going to take a while to get this going and establish a rhythm for it. Meanwhile, to make the process less stressful, I’m putting the Tower on hiatus through October; I’m sure that by November, I’ll be able to juggle both. I love writing Views From the Tower and have no intention of abandoning it. But NewsWire will allow me to immediately reach a broader audience while focusing on the subjects that fascinate me most: the news of the day and the couch potato medium that delivers it.

I’ll be sending announcements (to my corps of regular readers…) each time a NewsWire post goes up, and, of course, I’ll let you know when the Tower re-opens (I’m thinking: fireworks, maybe a Goodyear blimp…). Meanwhile, I hope you’re entering what will be a cool and lovely fall season. Don’t miss the glorious change-of-season colors, if you’re somewhere that the seasons do change. Either way, hang in, be well, and looking forward to hearing from you on NewsWire.