KPBS Staff Write Memoirs In Six Words

Last week a book arrived on my desk called Not Quite What I Was Planning:  Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous & Obscure.  It's a collection of six-word memoirs submitted to an online project launched by SMITH magazine.  They made a book out of it and I'll tip my hat and make a blog post out of it.   

Of course, the original hat tip goes to Ernest Hemingway.  Legend has it Hemingway was challenged to write a novel in six words. Lord knows how many bottles of booze it took for Papa to brilliantly write, "For sale:  baby shoes, never worn."  Inspired by the legend and aware of a national memoir craze, the editors over at SMITH launched sixwordmemoir. com and received thousands of entries.  It didn't take long for the likes of Stephen Colbert, Dave Eggers, and Joyce Carol Oates to submt their versions. 

I decided to write my own.  Unfortunately, nothing came right away.

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Is PBS Still Necessary?  A Response

For the last couple of days, I've had many people send me Charles McGrath's editorial on the relevancy of PBS in today's media market.  In light of the many emails and discussions I overhead in the hallways here at the station, I asked KPBS Program Director for Television, Keith York to respond to McGrath's editorial.  He sent me the following thoughts:

New York Times writer Charles McGrath asks the perennial question, in light of recent stabs at CPB appropriation in the recent Bush administration budget proposal, is public television still necessary? McGrath’s question isn’t any more thought-provoking than when Newt Gingrich questioned the institution’s existence a decade and a half ago. Unimpressed by the basic premise, I should also add that a few of his facts are either incorrect or poorly contextualized.
 
Thankfully the article is nothing more than an editorial. Causing many readers to ask themselves “Are newspapers still necessary?”
 

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