The literary afterlife was oh so simple for Jonathan Stone, protagonist of The Solomon Scandals. While still alive in the corporeal sense, he just turned his memoirs over to the Virginia Historical Society for release back to his family a century afterwards. But what to do in the era of the Internet—not just with text […]
Read MoreHow to read ‘The Solomon Scandals’ instantly, via the Google eBookstore, on your PC, Mac, iPad, Android phone or other gizmo
The new Google eBookstore, a rival to the Kindle Store, didn’t disappoint me when I tried it just now. Books display on PCs, Macs, iPads, nooks and other gadgets (although not the Kindle), even offline—and you can adjust the type size and style, line spacing, and other variables. More info here. Also see Google Blog. […]
Read More‘The Solomon Scandals’ gets a sexy new cover—with a photo from one of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s favorites
What was Sy Solomon—the D.C. real estate tycoon in The Solomon Scandals—-doing on the book’s blue cover shown here? Picking up a refrigerator with one hand? Or a gargantuan keyboard? Or plunking down a high-rise in a favorite location, with a little help from well-bribed zoning officials? The correct answer is the last one. But […]
Read MoreNews site traffic counts: Why hidden? Washington Post Quantcast statistics concealed from public
Update, September 20: The Washington Post tells me that it prefers to stick to Nielsen statistics in public. I’m checking to see how easily available the stats are to the world at large, and if Nielsen can share any server-based numbers from the Post. I’ll also do other follow-up. – D.R. Should news sites hide […]
Read MoreIs a big newspaper a military-style organization—or factory in disguise?
Military veterans have been some of the most appreciative readers of The Solomon Scandals. I’m not surprised. Jon Stone, the newsroom maverick, is rebelling against a Pentagon-inflexible bureaucracy headed by an intel alum wired into D.C.’s old boy network. From Chapter 32: “What was Mac’s city room but a military organization at the core, despite […]
Read MoreScandals and the Internet—or lack of it
The Detroit Free Press and the rival News decided to print home-delivery editions just three days a week. Competition from the Web killed off the other four days. Similar scenarios are or will be unfolding elsewhere, as shown by the move of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to the Web. So how does the Internet figure in […]
Read More‘Solomon Scandals’ goes on sale now as e-book; January delivery in trade paperback
Psst! Advance promo copies of The Solomon Scandals are on sale now in e-book format (retail $5.95 USD). Twilight Times Books is also taking advance orders for First Editions in trade paperback (retail $16.95 USD). The paperbacks will ship in January 2009. These are “pre-release promotional copies.” Twilight’s phone number is 423-323-0183, and other ordering […]
Read MoreDeep Throat is dead—and so are the old rules of investigative journalism
Mark Felt, aka Deep Throat, the whistleblower in the FBI who blew open much of the Watergate scandal for the Washington Post, is dead. Leonard Downie, a Post staffer at the time, writes how much investigative reporting has changed since then—for example, technologically. Imagine staying in touch with a source who totes a prepaid cell […]
Read MoreGSA: A checkered past
A variant of a Shakespearian quote shows up on the base of a statue outside the National Archives, once within the domain of the General Services Administration: “What is past is prologue.” Why have so many scandals broken out at the government’s business agency over the years? And will we see more of them in […]
Read MoreScandals’s origins
Blame The Solomon Scandals on my lack of ESP. Oh, to have read the minds of the people whose lives and deeds helped inspire the novel! Just why did the late Sen. Abraham Ribicoff end up in the 1960s with a $20,000 investment in a building that the CIA moved into? What were Ribicoff and […]
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