Back after two busy weeks and a short break

Heading into the weekend, my head was ready to explode. I’d had two weeks of lots of Adobe software training — four daylong sessions each week, plus a fair amount of work from my various freelance jobs.

But freelance work tends to come in spurts and, generally, not according to an prearranged schedule. Consequently, I was operating on three, sometimes four hours of sleep a night for much of the past two weeks. Friday night was the first night I got eight hours in bed.

Crashes, consequences, providence and newspapers

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The headlights of the approaching vehicle were all wrong.

Frank and I were headed back to the dorm from a state park near Winona, Minn., when I first saw the headlights moving around the curve. But they were jumping up and down erratically, and then they began to spin.

Pew report notes key weaknesses

March 5 study highlights obstacles to change

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I have been dying for the time over the past week to sit down to write about the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism report about the newspaper industry’s search for a new business model. The report was released Monday and was the subject of a couple of excellent analyses by Poynter.org writers Rick Edmonds and Andrew Beaujon.

Pay wall avalanche gains steam

As expected, the avalanche of newspapers planning to launch pay walls grew substantially in the past week with announcements by the Los Angeles Times and Gannett that they would seek a fee from users of their websites. I believe readers in the Midwest and across the nation should expect to see more of the same for some time yet.

I’ll be curious to see how long the pay walls last.