‘Whatever the hell is west of Roanoke.’ Them’s fighting words! Dwayne Yancey at the non-profit news website Cardinal News just responded to a “Whatever the hell is west of Roanoke” snarky comment about southwest Virginia with an entertaining column that reminded me that 2024 is my 20th year living “west of Roanoke” in Virginia’s section of the New River Valley. I’ll have to check my old files sometime and put a summer anniversary date on the calendar. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve set foot in Roanoke itself more than a dozen times in those 20 years — a few contra dances, a couple of shopp ..read more

Thinking aloud here… As mentioned in the article below, free tuition at journalism schools would be a good thing, especially if journalism schools have a way to teach students how to make a living at journalism today, not just how we lucky folks born in the first half of the 20th century made a living at it. I wrote the first draft of this posting on Facebook to share the New York Times op edit below, but also after speaking to a journalism class at the university where I quit teaching 11 years ago. I was talking about my quirky Jheroes.com media history research. When the professor and I aske ..read more

This is why I have accounts on WordPress, Mastodon, and the X formerly known as Twitter. And trust newspapers on the “open web” and Google searches to find answers. I’d fallen asleep to a replay of a Meredith Axelrod and Craig Ventresco livestream concert from the night before, started it playing again on my phone at the breakfast table, then after a while got a never-before-seen Facebook message informing me that I had been logged out. It may have said something like “session expired,” at about 10:30 a.m., and since I normally don’t watch Facebook replays of livestreams, I wondered if that w ..read more

That’s the title of a song by Lou and Peter Berryman that you can find on their website or YouTube, a prequel to their even more profound song “April May.” But I’m just stealing it as a heading for my latest collection of “photos I posted last month on Facebook that I’d like more people to be able to see.” I was in the woods at the Rocky Knob picnic ground on the Blue Ridge Parkway when the sun went down, so I finished a quick and chilly 1 mi walk as the temperature ducked beneath 40, and swung up onto the Saddle Overlook for a just-after-sunset photo silhouette of Buffalo Mountain against th ..read more

My writing & Web career, by the cupful What started as a reply to a former colleague’s reminder of a 1994 Web journalism anniversary turned into this verbose reminiscence, trying to explain how I wound up spending my weekend mornings 1994-98 helping destroy the newspaper industry by setting the precedent for giving away all the news that was fit to upload. And that meant pretty much all the news there was. Bruce Siceloff of the Raleigh News & Observer (N&O) was the editor who introduced me to NandO Net in December, 1994. And he was the one who tagged me in his post about the annive ..read more

A university president who blogs! I may have to buy Wesleyan University President Michael S. Roth’s latest book, which gets a gentle promotion in his latest blog entry, along with issues that came up at recent public events. The new book is about being a student, including the kind of “being a student” that takes a lifetime, which he makes a very good case for… I’ve been there more than once… I’ve never met President Roth, having arrived at Wesleyan as a grad student the year he graduated, 1978, and having started my last teaching job here in Virginia the year he became president of our shared ..read more

YouTube just brought me a movie I’ve been wanting to watch again for years, but just haven’t gotten around to tracking down a copy. It is forever linked in my memory with another film, but I bought a DVD of that one a while ago. Maybe I will watch it tonight… I think my mother was in the hospital for (or recuperating from) serious surgery when my father took me to the movies, the one time that it was just the two of us. I was 11. The movies were probably a way to get us both out of the house, and make it appropriate for him to just say “shh” and pass the popcorn when I asked too many questions ..read more

June 10, 2023, Radford, Virginia, photos by Bob Stepno Facebook friends have given 72 “likes” on the sunset telephoto from my upstairs window, so I’m putting it here for friends and family who don’t do Facebook. By the way, the tree line in the foreground is here in Radford, a glimpse of some low-lying trees is down toward the New River, the city line; the first ridge is across the river in Pulaski County. The clock on the tallest Radford University dormitory is a little over a mile away, hidden by trees at the right edge of the zoomed out photograph. The farthest ridge visible in the zoomed i ..read more

… especially other newspaper folks. Oh, that Thompson! … I never thought I’d actually know someone who was a character in a “Peanuts” book alongside Charlie Brown and Snoopy! But Doug Thompson of Floyd, Virginia, tells that story, and several others from his (cherished) journalism and (somewhat regretted) political career, in today’s entry at his blog, “Blue Ridge Muse.” I recommend it to journalism students who are not yet convinced that reporting careers like his might still exist. Doug’s lead photo reminds me that I, too, met and photographed Paul Newman during my (also cherished, but shor ..read more

I made it to both the Rocky Knob and Smart View picnic areas on the Blue Ridge Parkway last weekend, just down the road from my favorite place to play music in Floyd, Virginia. Friends on Facebook have said very nice things about some of these photos, so I’m putting them out here for non Facebook friends and family. Smart View first… And Rocky Knob, including both the picnic area, where I hope to help with some pre-season cleanup work later this month, and some views from the Rock Castle Gorge overlook just across the two-lane blacktop, and a few shots from the Saddle Overlook… sorry for the ..read more