Tracy Moving Toward Nursing Goal

2 | February 8th, 2010 | Posted in Members, News

Tracy Gordon Fox sends this update on her status. (Any other alums who want to report to their friends are more than welcome.)

I have started a new job as a certified nursing assistant at St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center on a medical-surgical floor that includes neurology, orthopedics and general surgery.

It is a fast-paced, physically challenging job that is all hands-on care for patients, many who have just come up from surgery or the emergency department. The job compliments my classes so well because I see first hand Read More »

Newspapers, Police Thyselves

0 | February 7th, 2010 | Posted in Opinion

George Gombossy was apparently amused and flabbergasted at the full page  ad that appeared in Sunday’s Courant. It protests a plan to allow government to post public notices online instead of in the newspaper.

Here’s part of it, minus the giant screaming headline “The Government Can’t Police Itself.”

You can read it for yourself, but suffice it to say the quality of the argument and scare-tactic approach are an embarrassment to an institution that is supposed to be upholding  standards of objective comment, intellectual sophistication and integrity. (Not to mention high-quality rhetoric.)

The Connecticut Daily Newspapers’ Association needs to get a better propagandist.

It would have been more honest to simply say…

Dear Readers: We are about to lose one of our last remaining dependable streams of easy revenue, and even though we know the government is in really bad shape, we need the money. So please give us a break (and save a job) by letting us soak the  taxpayers for a service the government could provide at virtually no cost to itself.

That would be the “transparent” thing to do.

Hobgoblins Of Typography

2 | February 7th, 2010 | Posted in Opinion

Perhaps it is a subtle salute to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote:

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall.

In any case, I can tell you that the section headers in Sunday’s Courant are anything but consistent, so my little mind had plenty to do over the morning coffee besides contemplate my shadow.

My wife, who has a typographer’s eye, observes that each section topper in Sunday’s Courant has its own violation of the basic style. Arts, which used to be CTARTS (pronounced See Tarts”), has an orangish A and underline URL setting it apart, while the Living section has a blue lowercase “i” — the only lowercase letter in the collection, excluding the iTowns tab section.

Livesmart of course uses the check mark instead of a V, which makes it unique if you disregard the technique as  just about the oldest typographical cliche in the book.

Sports is all caps, but with a blue O. Opinion is also all caps, but has no blue letters, not even an O.

CTNow retains the only CT prefix, set off by its blueness; and is the only section that also uses The Hartford Courant overline. (I’m guessing that this is a holdover from an earlier update.)

A mind as little as mine can only conclude that such consistent inconsistency is deliberate by the World’s Best Designed newspaper.

So next Sunday I plan to spend the morning putting all the sections in alphabetical order by section letter. That will give me a whole week to find “I.”

Premium Content

0 | February 5th, 2010 | Posted in News

Another spin on charging for online newspaper content: MediaNews has a plan, Bloomberg reports.

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