Earl Scruggs, 1924-1912

Bluegrass music lost one of it pioneers when Earl Scruggs, who developed the modern banjo sound, died yesterday at the age 88.  Scruggs and his guitar-playing partner, Lester Flatt, were best known for songs such as "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" and "The Ballad of Jed Clampett."  Flatt and Scruggs were regular guests on the Grand Ole Opry and were heard on the Opry's popular radio broadcasts on WSM.

Great Radio on Hall of Fame Site

The web site of the Radio Hall of Fame is a terrific place for anyone who wants to listen to some of the best personalities and programs in radio history. From Abbot and Costello to Wolfman Jack, and from All Things Considered to Your Hit Parade, the site provides short audio clips of the Hall of Fame inductees. You will be reminded of what made Edward R. Murrow the trusted voice of authority during World War II, and why the Grand Ole Opry is the country's longest-running musical program.

The Artist Revives Lost Art

I finally got to see "The Artist," the black-and-white silent film that is an homage to Hollywood's early years. The charming movie certainly deserves all the accolades it has received, including the Academy Award for Best Picture. "The Artist" is the creation of French writer-director Michel Hazanavicius, who had wanted to make a silent film for years. "A silent film is a very special experience," he said. "It is not intellectual, it's emotional. You take it in the way you take in music. There are times when language reduces communication, when you feel you are losing something when you start talking." "The Artist" revives a lost art and it is indeed a special experience.

Happy Leap Day

Today is Leap Day. Once every four years, an extra day is tacked on to the end of February to calibrate our human calendar to the natural world. The Earth does does not orbit the sun in an even 365 days, but in 365 days, 5 hours, 49 minutes, and 16 seconds.

The Experiment Known as PM

In the current issue of Columbia Journalism Review, Christopher Daly has an interesting story about PM, the ambitious experiment to publish an ad-free newspaper in New York.  The brainchild of Ralph Ingersoll, who had been one of the driving forces behind Time, Fortune and Life,  PM was meant to be a unabashedly liberal writer's newspaper when it was launched in 1840.  It lasted only eight years but during that time the newspaper published many hard-hitting exposes.  It also made innovative use of photographs, graphics and maps.  As Daly writes, today's new media start-ups will recognize in the publication the financial struggle to deliver a new kind of journalism.  But the real message for today, he argues, was PM's attempt "to produce a publication that serves the interests of people who are closer to the bottom than the top in terms of power and influence."

Person to Person Redux

Person to Person made television history 59 years ago. The pioneering interview show on CBS was a marvel of technology with its split screens that allowed Edward R. Murrow to interview a news maker in their home.  The first show aired October 9, 1853, with Murrow talking with baseball star Roy Campanella and conductor Leopold Stokowski.

Now CBS is bringing Person to Person back and the first show is airing tonight. Anchors Charlie Rose and Lara Logan are interviewing George Clooney, Jon Bon Jovi and Warren Buffet. Of course, television technology has come a long way.  But the principles of good journalistic interviewing haven't changed. Now, as then, it's a conversation with a purpose.

Twain on the Press

In giving a guest lecture to a class last week, I was reminded about one of my favorite quotes from Mark Twain. A newspaper reporter in Nevada before he turned to fiction, Twain captured how newspapers had changed in the last half of the 1800s. And, of course, the irreverent Twain did so in his inimitable style: "Our duty is to keep the universe thoroughly posted concerning murder and street fights, and balls, and theaters, and pack-trains, and churches, and lectures, and school-houses,and city military affairs, and highway robberies, and Bible societies, and hay-wagons, and a thousand other things which it is the province of local reporters to keep track of and magnify into undue importance for the instruction of the readers of this great daily newspaper."