Tribune Company

Michelle Shocked's Short Rise and Long, Confounding Fall

"She's all heart and no brains." By LORI SELKE In the wake of folk singer Michelle Shocked's anti-gay tirade at Yoshi's on Sunday, many of her old fans were stunned and dismayed, in large part because many were convinced she was a lesbian. And not without reason, although Michelle Shocked had be ... More >>

Hepcat Michael Wolff: Facebook is 'Square'

When you're trying to decide what's hip and what's square, there's really only one place to look: Michael Wolff writing in USA Today. Wolff is a serial Internet failure who is nevertheless a highly successful self-promoter. The two don't go together at all, especially considering that he promotes h ... More >>

Todd Akin: Reaction to Rape Comment Shows the Real Power of Social Media

Social media is no doubt a powerful force. But in what ways? How does this power manifest itself? Some people, perhaps confused by the word "media," seem to think it's a replacement for dying traditional media outlets -- particularly newspapers -- despite there being zero evidence that this is takin ... More >>

Here's How Easy it is for a Hacker to Wreck Your Life.

Mat Honan of Wired is a better man than me. In exchange for his promise not to prosecute, he got the hacker who ruined his digital life to talk to him. If it were me, I might have left my need to know the details of the attack, along with my inherent desire to tell a good story, to one side so that ... More >>

Google Goes to Washington

During the SOPA debate, many opponents of the anti-piracy bill often tried to portray Google and the rest of the tech industry as a champion for all that is good and true as opposed to what it really is: an increasingly powerful, self-interested industry like any other. This happened particularly in ... More >>

Viacom's Insane Move to Yank Shows From The Web

Viacom's decision to yank its programming from the Web last week as a tactic in its dispute with DirecTV was absolutely insane. The last people to realize this fact were Viacom's executives. As of Tuesday, the company had restored The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Since it's the middle of summe ... More >>

Music Labels Make Life Tough for Spotify

​Patrick Carney of the Black Keys is not a fan of Sean Parker, to say the least. Parker is an "asshole," Carney told NME.com on Monday. It's hard to blame Carney, though his rage might seem a bit misdirected -- or maybe just too concentrated on one person. Parker of course was the guy who brought ... More >>

Mike Daisey's "Truthiness"

​This week's episode of This American Life is both fascinating and painful to listen to, as many of the show's best episodes are. I came away from it still enraged at Mike Daisey and his lies, but also a bit sympathetic toward him. The show made it clear, without saying so, that he's dealing with ... More >>

Debates over the Internet Bring Out the Inanity

​The Internet conundrum is so difficult that it, like all difficult problems, has tended to attract people who don't want to address it, but to oversimplify it and then fight full-tilt for whatever far-end-of-the-spectrum "side" they've chosen. This is true of all complicated matters of public c ... More >>

Sonic.net: The Li'l ISP that Stood up to the Feds

​I way overpay for my monthly Internet service. There are a bunch of reasons: Sonic.net, my ISP, has great customer service. It almost never goes down. The website is simple and user-friendly. It updates it quickly with service info. When you call them, they talk to you like you're a fellow human, ... More >>

Netflix Chief, Please Stop Talking

​Netflix CEO Reed Hastings should be applauded, I suppose, for trying to communicate with his customers directly -- apparently in an attempt to add the personal touch. But he's no good at it, and he should never do it again. On Sunday, Hastings posted what was ostensibly an "apology" for the ... More >>

Yahoo's Chairman Must Go

​Much of the coverage of Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz's firing last week assumed that the company will now try to make a fresh start with a new leader. The fact that Yahoo's stock price has risen about 10 percent is an indication that some shareholders have made the same assumption.But Bartz was only a s ... More >>

Michael Arrington's Rhetorical Jiu Jitsu

​ The defense that Michael Arrington and TechCrunch have mounted against charges that the tech-news site has violated ethical norms comes down to: "Trust me." But of course, that won't cut it. As with laws, ethics rules exist because people can't be trusted to always police themselves. Even if m ... More >>

How Google Ended the 'Browser Wars'

​Today is the 16th anniversary of Netscape's initial public offering. It occurs to me that many of you might be only vaguely aware of Netscape, and of what it meant to us in the mid-'90s. That's because many of you were toddlers, or perhaps not even born yet. That's depressing and mindblowing ... More >>

Judge Halts Weird Online Movie Service Zediva

​In March, Zediva, a really weird online movie-rental service, told Wired that "it doesn't expect legal trouble over its service," which allows users to watch actual DVDs, played on actual DVD players, via the Internet. A couple of weeks later, the Motion Picture Association of America sued Zediv ... More >>

Massive Job Cuts Coming at Cisco

​Cisco Systems is planning to cut up to 10,000 jobs, Bloomberg News reported late Monday. That's obviously a huge number, but it seems even huger if you think of it this way: It represents more than half the number of jobs the entire U.S. economy created in June.​The numbers will be large en ... More >>

David Chiu Strategist Josh Pulliam Brawled with L.A. Dodgers

Fourth and Inches

George Clooney's ode to screwball comedies of yore is sooooo close. But yet.

Folkster Jim Post Performs Songs About Mark Twain Feb. 2

Chron 2.0

KRON's Last Gasp

How a once-proud San Francisco television station became ground zero in the nation's most controversial experiment in local TV news.

Sex and the Single Psychologist

Should Dr. Al Cooper's fuzzy data and controversial subject stop him from becoming a media darling -- or getting a date?

Think Different

Could it be that this year's crop of summer movies actually requires a brain cell or two?

Absolutely Fabulous

Transformed by a romanticized airport novel, our heroine constructs a strangely compelling life

Yellow-Bellied Journalism

Hearst executives' behavior in the Examiner sale was nothing less than cowardly

A Chance for Respect?

How to tell whether the San Francisco Chronicle is becoming a great newspaper, or another nondescript Hearst money-machine

Night + Day

Thirty-two years of Satan in popular culture

Net Loss

How LatinoNet -- the poster child for Washington's attempt to empower the poor with technology -- wasted money and networked almost no one

Recordings

Mondo 1995

Mondo 2000 nailed the emerging cybersexcomputerdrug Zeitgeist with its first issue in 1989, making media mavens out of its founders, Queen Mu and R.U. Sirius. But the trippy, fractious family that was Mondo began to implode in 1993, torn asunder by inter