“I became a newspaperman. I couldn’t find honest employment.”
– Mark Twain
The Digital Clip File of One Jeff Chappell
I have worked in the news biz in various incarnations for a long time. In fact I go so far back, I remember when pagination was done on physical mock-ups. I remember when photos were printed in a dark room. From film.
So far back that my clip file has actual, physical clips — you know, pieces of paper that were once parts of trees and have ink printed on them.
Astonishing, isn’t it? Call me Methuselah.
But there’s no need to travel that far back in time. Here on Jeff Chappell dotcom I’ve compiled a bunch of clips from the latter part of my career, that which has witnessed the 21st Century, i.e., links. What is now referred to in today’s vernacular as content.
Why Are These Stories Hosted Here?
Consequently much of that older stuff is getting harder and harder to track down on the Internet. Where these stories do still exist, out there in the digitized ether as one’s and zero’s, I have linked to them within the version that is posted/hosted here. I make no promises, though, that they are current as of this exact moment — things change in Internet time, these days.
But then, that is the point of reproducing them here: I no longer have to worry about updating outside links, or my older stories sinking down into the detritus of the Internet and becoming some sort of digital fossil fuel for a later age. Furthermore, they are easier to sort and organize for your viewing pleasure (the magic of WordPress as CMS).
You can navigate these pages by following the drop-down menus at the top of the page, or you can follow the links below.
No, that’s not everything, of course. That would be hundreds of stories; possibly even thousands (several thousand, surely, if you were to include every short, non-bylined piece of copy). Here are just a select few (relatively speaking), of course — blog entries, editorial columns, news stories, etc. and so forth.
If you prefer to drill down a bit, chose one of the following links. You can always try your luck with the tag cloud over on your right, as well.
The following link provides the copy I filed from China as part of a month-long special editorial project for Electronic News Online.
Is That All?
I do have some scans of some earlier clips from my 18-month stint in Sedona, Ariz., where I was at the Sedona Red Rock News. I also have some clips from my Athens News and Alpena News days — before the advent of the Internet — mouldering in a box in a basement back home on the other side of the planet. Maybe I’ll get around to scanning them posting them here … someday.
“There are men who can write poetry, and there are men who can read balance sheets. The men who can read balance sheets cannot write. Of necessity, we made the discovery that it is easier to turn poets into business journalists than to turn bookkeepers into writers.”
— Henry R Luce, on recruiting staff for Fortune
A Note on Copyright ©
To the best of my knowledge, Electronic Design News, a former sister publication of ENews, now holds the copyright for all of ENews’ material; when I last worked for Reed, Electronic News Online had been folded into EDN (this was shortly before I was laid off — a second time) and since then has been fully absorbed, but you can still find ENews stories in EDN’s digital archives.
EDN itself has been through several owners in recent years; it is currently published by UBM Tech.
So who owns the copyright to what? I honestly couldn’t say authoritatively, at this point. In any event, I think my reproduction here of the stories that I wrote constitutes fair use (each story is clearly cited as to its origin; and I’m not making any money from this site), but I just wanted to make it clear that I don’t actually hold the rights to these stories as such.
All original content posted here -- words and images -- are copyright © Jeff Chappell 2009-2012 unless otherwise noted.
Jeff Chappell: journalism nerd; web geek. That's the short story. Want the longer one?