Diane Simmons new book: "Little America"

Journalists are shaped by what they read, but even more by those they watch.

In my career as a journalist, I observed outstanding talents: Emmett Watson, Barry Farrell, Dick Larsen, Bill Prochnau, Tim Egan, David Horsey and many others. In my first permanent job at a now-shuttered daily in suburban Bellevue, Washington, I spent a summer across from a young writer named Diane Simmons. I watched her cover schools with a speed, skill and smarts that deepened my understanding of what journalism should do.

As a smarty pants just out of college with vain notions of producing Joycean prose for an awaiting world, I thought my job was to write well and get famous. My goal was to move on to a bigger paper. The community was the topic and I would see people for what they were.

Diane brought a maturity to her work. She wrote stylishly and prolifically, as that newspaper's brash talents strived to do. But she also brought diligence to the seemingly small stuff. She knew that, while not every reader would follow her expose of a school district snafu or a witty feature on some personality, parents would certainly pay attention to what the cafeteria was feeding their kids that week. Diane understood that a newspaper existed to serve its readers. She didn't think a school menu was beneath her definition of news. She cared about her audience and minded details.

In 1980, Diane Simmons's first novel came out. "Let the Bastards Freeze in the Dark" told the story of terrorists shutting down a power station in Fairbanks, Alaska. Afterwards, Diane  left Seattle and moved to New York for a career as a college professor and fiction writer. She's done well.

Her latest book is "Little America," a prize-winning collection of short stories.

Settling the debate over Arianna Huffington. Just click it.

A hot issue for freelance writers who wish to market their talent. Arianna Huffington, who founded Huffington Post and now directs AOL's editorial programs, defends her no-pay policy at HuffPo as providing a platform for exposure for writers, and she certainly is proof that exposure establishes a valuable brand. The Newspaper Guild has called for a boycott by its 26,000 members. My solution: Ariana owns the ad revenue for eyeballs and writers get $1 for each clicked "like" button. Okay, 50 cents. Deal?

Casey Corr: Arianna Huffington: genius or artful shapeshifter? The debate goes on

There's a palpable sense of envy around coverage of Ariana Huffington staggering payoff in AOL's purchase of Huffington Post. You detect it here in this Slate piece. 

So she doesn't pay her writers and now is rich. So she's been accused of writing best sellers lifted from other people's work. So she was a conservative before she became a liberal. So Huffpo was a literate platform for big thinking celebrities before it became a search-optimized Google gooser that boosted search hits that drew advertising cash? Let me try: Sarah Palin, Sarah Palin, Sarah Palin. Twitter, you can have this blog for $100 million.

She figured it out.

And to think AOL once was so powerful that it bought the world's greatest communications empire, Time Warner. Now the super blogger assumes command of AOL's future.

The Day Frank Colacurcio pulled a fast one on the Seattle Times -- or did he?

The death of "Seattle nightlife figure" Frank Colacurcio Sr. this week ended a fascinating chapter in local law enforcement and concluded with a long story in the Seattle Times about his career.

Missing from the coverage was what sure looked like a stunt pulled by Colacurcio on his media nemesis. Back in 1995, the Times sent a photographer out to shoot Colacurcio for a feature on the operator of strip clubs. When the photographer arrived, someone else sat for the photo. The Times, embarrassed when the story ran and many pointed out the erroneous headshot, ran a correction.

Was that playful payback by Colacurcio for decades of negative coverage or just a case of a film negative resulting from a simple misunderstanding?

The Times ran a straightforward headline on the correction: "Correction -- Photos Weren't Of Colacurcio."

But couldn't The Times have done a play on that famous NY Daily News headline with something like, "Wrong Head Found in Topless Bar?"

P.S. The image with this posting is purportedly a 1980 Seattle P-I photo of Colacurcio. Or is it?

Exciting news! Nobody is reading what I'm writing

The New York Times reports that nearly 95 percent of blogs are fallow.

Here's the nut graph (old style journo jargon):

"According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.

I find this presumptuous, coming from a newspaper read by less than one percent of readers in America, published by a company losing so much money they are selling space in their fancy new office building. Big shots dumping on the no shots. As old as ink. What would A.J. Liebling say? Piffle.

Fear not, fellow bloggers. Being read is over rated.

Better unread than dead.