Nope, I haven’t changed jobs, or: Welcome to NBCNews.com
But my employer changed names:
NBC News has acquired full control of msnbc.com and its digital network from Microsoft Corp. and is immediately rebranding the site as NBCNews.com.
Many details of the arrangement remain to be worked out, and financial terms weren’t disclosed.
But NBC News President Steve Capus said the site — one of the news industry’s earliest and most successful online operations — would become part of NBC News Digital, a new division led by Vivian Schiller, the former president and chief executive of National Public Radio. Schiller joined NBC News as chief digital officer last year.
Full story (M. Alex Johnson/NBCNews.com)
Police Blotter of the Day: Assault with a deadly sausage
The victim told police he was riding his bike about 8 a.m. Sunday when Michael A. Baker, whom he does not know, came up to him “and started swinging sausage links at him,” Lt. David Dickinson said Sunday.
“He said he was trying to hit him with that. The victim had no idea why,” Dickinson said.
Full story (Brockton, Mass., Enterprise)
Language curmudgeons: the next generation
Over at msnbc.com, I recently chronicled the announcement that the Queen’s English Society is disbanding after 40 years of fighting to preserve the language in amber against the impurities of modern speech and Twitterese.
In the spirit of fairness, I wanted to point you to this gloriously dyspeptic objection in defense of the society and of “proper” English by Brendan O’Neill, the editor of Spiked, an author whom I admire.
I vigorously disagree with O’Neill here, but I get a big kick out of his precocious curmudgeonry. It’s worth a read.
And from the archives, here’s an explanation of why I write the way I write, for those of you who may wonder why I disagree when my own writing seems so formal.
‘Alternative story telling’? No — just telling the story
Sometimes reporting, editing and producing a breaking news story can be frustrating, because two new developments land on your doorstep before the last one has made it through the production process.
That’s what happened when a gunman entered a real estate office in Valparaiso, Ind., today and took about 10 hostages. So in parallel with writing msnbc.com’s running main story, which you can read here, I also set up a Storify stream, immediately publishing news, images and local reaction as they came in. By the end of the day, it was a lively, largely unintermediated narrative of the entire drama as it unfolded:
Police Blotter of the Day: Darth Vader. Robbing a bank. On a bike.
Really, there’s nothing else you need to know, other than that it was in Toledo, Ohio:
Full story (WNWO-TV of Toledo, Ohio)
