Happy for Dr. Oz

When you’re a freelancer, whiling away your hours as a solitary figure, trying to collect a few shekels and interest an editor (or three) in your work, it helps to have a few online resources in your corner. Mediabistro is a new (old) friend of this sort.

Mediabistro offers resources for freelancers and other media professionals. They publish blogs analyzing the mass media industry, like FishbowlNY. They offer a host of other benefits too that provide far more value to me than let’s say, Maine Writers and Publishers.

I decided to re-up with Mediabistro a month ago, and I’m already reaping benefits, not the least is that FBNY (their tagline is, “Turning the Page For New York Media) offers up daily blogging prompts, if I want them. Like yesterday—if not for this FBNY post extracted from the core of America’s elite media center, the Big Apple—I never would have known that old “friend” Dr. Oz had a good year in 2014. I am so happy for the good doctor, and an apt exemplar of America’s hustling culture. Oh, and so happy for him that Oprah gave him his big chance. It’s a given that if Oprah deems you important, then you most certainly are. She’s one of America’s king (and queen) makers that’s for sure.

Dr. Oz, practicing good hygiene, while toasting Oprah.

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We are all Detroit

Ruins at the abandoned Packard Automotive Plant are seen on September 4, 2013 in Detroit, Michigan. (courtesy of Chicago CBS-2 affiliate)

Ruins at the abandoned Packard Automotive Plant are seen on September 4, 2013 in Detroit, Michigan. (courtesy of Chicago CBS-2 affiliate)

 

“It regards itself as the temple of a new gospel of progress, to which I shall venture to give the name of ‘Detroitism’.”—British historian and MP Ramsay Muir in 1927

“Mayors come and go—it is the footmen that tie the knots and divide the bag—the longtime little men; bureaucrats, cockroaches.”—from Detroit: An American Autopsy, by Charlie LeDuff