A few thoughts …

• For years as editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education (NEJHE), I invited authors to contribute “issue-oriented, non-marketing” commentaries to our journal. I often told them to write in the style of two of my favorite publications at the the time, The Nation or the Chronicle of Higher Education Review. Some did. Eventually, between Trump-style fake news and the mission creep of public relations, I think I should have added “fact-based” to the requirements. All along, I also encouraged “opinion-based commentary”—more real, I always thought, than pure “objective” reporting.
• Connecticut’s Greenwich Free Press ran a bionote following a recent column on local school politics, noting: “His opinions are obviously his own.” The “obviously” seems gratuitous.
• A skill I thought I had (if I do say so myself) was collecting and juxtaposing obscure but interestingly related facts and opinions. The runaway internet (to say nothing of AI) has destroyed my imagined advantage.
• Reading freelance writer Freddie Deboer’s Substack piece titled, I Assure You, Writers Would Be Fine Without Twitter, I reflected on a few of my own quarrels with the platform. True, I had noted  that NEBHE’s Twitter content allowed us to bring readers a larger resource base than NEJHE articles alone. But I frequently, if subtly, dissed the platform, suggesting that measuring success by more “hits” isn’t everything. As Deboer writes in this Substack piece, “one thing the massively-social internet has done has been to erase the line between drawing validation from a limited intentional community of peers and seeking that validation from everyone.”
• As for Twitter, I don’t ever want to enrich Elon Musk, even practicing the modest civil disobedience of refusing to say “X (formerly known as Twitter).” I’ve hesitantly favored Facebook and the career-obsessed LinkedIn but I doubt they’re much better.
• Becoming editor of a publication changes the joy and stress of writing your own bylined pieces. I read an interesting observation about this phenomenon from James Fallows. But I couldn’t find the exact source and, with the journalism world so full of legal baloney, I chickened out on referencing it.
• My old role as style arbiter for the journal has helped turn me into a grumpy old man. Among recent peeves … Why do today’s journalists say “gifted” where we learned to say “given,” and “loaned” where we learned to say “lent.” Also noted a journalist’s tease that “Local tensions over the conversion of a former prison in Norfolk, a town close to Foxborough, are easing …” Interesting to describe Norfolk by its proximity to Foxborough, which happened to house a stadium vs Norfolk with its former prison.
• Also, why did journalists describing Joe Biden’s debate performance run out of synonyms for “disastrous”? Maybe because the threat to democracy is “existential.”