About

After philosophy, I fell more in love with critical thinking when the best reporter on the SF State Golden Gater asked me, “Why are the campus lawns watered to soaking wet while we’re in a drought?” My beat was “Facilities Services,” including the lawns, which I had not looked at critically, and she had. Turns out SF State was incurring huge fines, public money, for ignoring water rationing, which it continued to do after a story ran, allowing a second story with the best headline I ever wrote anywhere – “Wasted Water Woes Wear On.”

These days, it’s not tips, it’s stumbling around the Internet, whenever something big – calamitous – is up. Any name – person, place, or thing--  can be a manhole cover, a door to depth. Directly, indirectly, or remotely, everything is connected. A mass of indirect connections can be worked – I call this “massaged” – into an insightful account. I invite you to try this. As everyone knows, each hit on the Internet tends to lead one, stumbling, to another. Oh, set some Google Alerts on topics you’re convinced are important. This will get you foreign publications’ stories on your topics. The way I work includes contrasting what the US media says with what foreign publications say on a topic.

I’ve forgotten exactly why Gater reporters voted me “Best Researcher,” but I remember what got me an Associated Press award – it was putting myself fully into a “spot” story about an unfortunate man climbing a church roof with a pistol visible in his waistband and how he died after police tried hard to talk him down but may have tricked him in the end to make him legally shootable.