In the newspaper love department, I’m a piker compared to Danny Bloom, an American journalist living in Taiwan. Check out a YouTube of a song he wrote, I Just Can’t Live (Without My Snailpaper). I linked to it earlier from my semi-traitorous post telling how my old factory town newspaper in Ohio could use the […]
Read MoreSally Quinn wedding feud: Don’t fire Ms. Quinn — turn her ‘at large’
My “Don’t fire” headline is for the benefit of out-of-towners. As a close friend of the Grahams, the owning family of the Washington Post, she in fact comes wrapped in asbestos. So why am I writing this generally pro-Quinn post (amid the “dueling weddings” controversy—over the common date of April 10, shared by her son’s […]
Read MoreThe Sally Quinn post
It should be online by 7 p.m. Eastern tonight, and, yes, it’s mostly sympathetic toward her. I’ll make my case in detail. Update, 6:45 p.m.: Here’s the promised post.
Read MoreRexwood Garst and the darker side of ‘meritocracy’ in journalism, politics and other fields
In The Solomon Scandals, I have a little fun with a hyperspecialized Yalie named Rexwood Garst, a reporter at a Washington Post-type newspaper. “Serbo-Croatian,” says this young resume jock who lives in a converted carriage house in Georgetown, “that’s the key. I know how to speak it.” It all jibes with my suggestion that the […]
Read MoreRobert Smith’s death as the W. Post covered it: Nothing on Skyline or secret Ribicoff investment
How did the sprawling Crystal City complex, near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, get its name? In the 1960s, developer Robert H. Smith dressed up his first apartment building there with a chandelier in the lobby, and soon the name spread to other Smith properties. It was, as I see it, a perfect example of […]
Read MoreThe Georgetown name game: Roffman, Rothman, Solomon and The Georgetowner
Two kinds of parties show up in The Solomon Scandals, my D.C. media novel: the private variety (“party-parties”) and “name-in-the-paper parties” (where the givers and the guests want publicity). For both, the location is still the Georgetown section of Washington, famous over the years as home to the liberal elite. I’ve never applied for “elite” […]
Read MoreThe Watergate editor and the society legend: A loving look at them by their son who lives ‘A Different Life’
The Solomon Scandals is not about the Washington Post. I invented not just a D.C. newspaper but also a presidential administration to go along with it. Fiction, as I see it, isn’t about facts—rather, about greater truths. But for those who want a look inside the household of two Post-linked Names, Ben Bradlee and Sally […]
Read MoreThe ACTUAL Telegram?
A friend and I had just seen a movie with a soft-spoken and obscenity-free editor, a balding Boy Scout of the city room. Now she wondered if my novel hadn’t sinned in making such a wild character out of George McWilliams, editor at the fictitious Washington Telegram. Her message couldn’t have been clearer. Ben Bradlee, […]
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