On Tuesday the blue sky came out again after a snowed-out weekend. On Tuesday and Wednesday, I could see the hills and mountains of Pulaski and Giles counties from my hilltop in southwestern Radford . (The Appalachian Trail may be on top of the farthest hills, with West Virginia just beyond.) As I typed this, I could even hear the steady drip of melting snow and ice from my eaves. But I expect icicles for the coming weekend.
Radford City’s Recreation Center is in the white patch on the left, but rather than try to get there in person, I’ve pointed my classic wood-and-steel Nordictrack Cross Country Ski Machine at it from this upstairs window and pretend I feel the below-freezing temperatures plus wind chill on my face.
The sky may be blue again today, and the plows, salt and sun have turned roads to blacktop again, but the weather forecast does not sound balmy for the month of February, unless by “balmy” you mean crazy, and in this case, “crazy cold.”
Here’s local weather wizard Kevin Myatt, breathing a frosty sigh of relief that while “some of coldest temperatures of the 21st century to date” did arrive as predicted, they were accompanied by “minimal freezing rain,” sparing most of Southwestern Virginia the glacier that had been warned about for last weekend.
Somehow my New Year’s Day web browsing stumbled on a 10 year-old article from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard about the 20th anniversary of The New York Times going online, which inspired me to share it and write this personal note — first as a Facebook post for friends and veterans of World Wide Web news publishing, but expanded here with a ridiculous number of links. The Nieman article was so Times-centric that I felt other organizations deserved to be mentioned, including a couple that I worked for…
It dawns on me that I actually published New York Times stories online before the Times did! I was hired in December 1994 as a part-time “shovelware” editor at the Raleigh News & Observer, updating wire-service stories on the N&O’s 24/7 “NandO Times” website during weekend mornings & grad school vacations. Here’s what 1996 NandO looked like, thanks to the Internet Archive, although some images and animations were not preserved.
The NY Times News Service wire was one of our sources, at least in the beginning, along with Reuters, Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, Bloomberg and many others. As you can see from that last Times link and the image below, the Times wire was not just for front-page news. (I do not remember posting that story myself. In fact, I’d forgotten about that NandoTimes “Third Rave” section for off-beat news until I found it at the Internet Archive.)
Often a disparaging term, our “shovelware” work consisted of writing headlines, editing, and sorting updated wire service content into world, nation, sports, business, opinion and 11 other sections, updating stories as quickly as possible, almost 24 hours a day. To avoid having to be up before dawn to drive to Raleigh, I sometimes used a wire-editing terminal in the Chapel Hill News N&O bureau for my early-morning shift, overlapping with another editor in Raleigh. However, beyond shovelware, the N&O really was a pioneer, not just a republisher. It even sold dialup network access and managed a local bulletin board before the Web began. Later, withnando.netestablished as a separate brand, the N&O was posting its original North Carolina content at newsobserver.com. While I was there, those stories included a 1996 Pulitzer-winning “Boss Hog” expose about pork production, which involved computer-assisted investigative reporting. The company had been sold to California’s McClatchy chain in 1995, which eventually turned the former NandO Times into sections of its other newspaper websites.
As much of a pioneer as the News & Observer was, it wasn’t the first “online newspaper” by a long shot, although it was one of the first on the World Wide Web, and one of the first to attempt an “updated 24/7” format. But the Columbus Dispatch, USA Today and San Jose Mercury News were the first “online newspapers” I’d read, years before the World Wide Web existed. Using commercial services like CompuServe and Prodigy, they were online in the 1980s, becoming well positioned to join the World Wide Web when the 1993 Mosaic and 1994 Netscape browsers made photo-illustrated news sites possible.
*Soundings, “the nation’s boating newspaper,” where I’d worked for from 1989 to 1993 was also ready to go online early — and make money at it — because publisher Jack Turner started converting his classified ad section (boats and waterfront real estate) to a database format with dial-in access in mind. Just as I was leaving in ’93 to apply to grad schools, I wrote him a report on Prodigy, CompuServe and BBS database software for his ad-listings project. Along came Mosaic and Netscape, and in 1995 Soundings went online. I wrote the cover story package without leaving Chapel Hill. In 1997 Turner and his business partner cashed in, selling the company. Soundings and its spin-off business magazine, Soundings Trade Only, are still afloat. Retired, Turner even started a local news blog or two in Connecticut during the last years of his life; R.I.P., Jack.
Footnote: Sadly, I was called away before I could add more images to this article. I did save a few additional image-captures from the Internet Archive collection of Nando Times pages, so maybe someday I’ll remember to put them here. The Web is never finished!
I’m playing catch-up with an overloaded smartphone after months of putting a picture or two on Facebook now and then… while forgetting my plan to use this blog to share pictures and thoughts where they could be seen by family and friends don’t like the walled garden of Facebook….
Oct. 12, 2025, another one of my frequent visits to Smart View, this time on a rainy day.
Trails cabin and a stroll around the Blue Ridge Parkway’s Smartview Recreation Area picnic ground loop road with fall colors starting, Oct.1 …
I posted a few paragraphs and a link on Facebook today that got me thinking about my biggest problem being a college professor for a dozen years …
The results were more introspective food for thought and two more background links. I will stack them at the end of this slight rewrite of the Facebook post. I can’t imagine that anyone will read all of this, but maybe someone will click a link or two, at least this first one.
This morning I was particularly fascinated by the extensive use of embedded links from this Thom Hartmann’s latest column on Substack to footnotes & documentation. If I were still teaching about media literacy, the Web tool called hypertext, and its potential for fact checking and transparency, I would go back and count all the links… A.D.D. hyperfocus at work …Then maybe I would convince myself the class could follow them all, put them in a spreadsheet and identify how many are documented facts, how many are opinions, how many arguments are based on logical fallacies (a whole other bunch of links to follow there), and how many are questionable or untrue.
I am afraid that the bored students would decide they would rather follow someone charismatic, either on the right or on the left, who somehow had convinced them to “believe.”
In fall 1978, I took a class on charisma as a social-organizing force.
Unfortunately, there was no follow-up course the next semester to discuss all of the student final essays and ask ourselves how a whole nation, even the U S.S., might break out of the grip of such a leader. I suspect more academic writing on that theme is going on today.
I didn’t make up the idea of Attention Deficit Disorder “hyperfocus”; I just recognized it in my own life and called it by that name, then did a web search and discovered it was a recognized thing.
He left for another university before I could take any follow-up courses with him. However, I still had a splendid time at Wesleyan, following anthropology into ethnomusicology, and learning fieldwork and interview techniques I applied in my mass communication research PhD program (at UNC Chapel Hill), as well as maintaining a curiosity about music and the people who play it, which I’ve continued to “apply” at jam sessions and old time music conventions across four states since my retirement from teaching.
Catching up with one of my favorite public radio programs, also available as a podcast, I was struck by the fact that this excellent West Virginia Public Broadcasting creation is not carried by NPR affiliates in other regions, where it might challenge some stereotypes… while also telling fascinating stories.
For example, an episode that includes an interview with a banjo player friend of mine also covers punk and heavy metal music and Japanese dining in West Virginia, and what cut backs at the National Park Service means underground at Mammoth Cave. . .
Podcast players can find the show with a simple search for “Inside Appalachia.”
I had trouble sharing that second episode on Facebook and I’m not sure why, but maybe I can share this episode of my blog and give people four links to click on for the price of one!
Posted this to Facebook this morning, but folks who just read this blog might be interested.
Because I’m posting this very quickly with my WordPress blog’s new JetPack app, I see that the web link addresses I included in the Facebook version may be turning into photo links or something else, and at least one is failing and giving me an error message, but I’m going to post this whole thing and then go back and look at it in a day or two from a bigger screen computer and make some updates.
This morning I finally started following a very interesting podcast series from Cardinal News … I’m late to the game, starting to listen with its 11th weekly episode.
I also didn’t realize that for the past couple of months Cardinal news has been running “public notices” — what we used to call “legal ads” in print newspapers — and a reliable source of income for old-fashioned daily for-profit papers.
Those are notices governments are required to make about public meetings, public contracts, zoning changes and such, information that used to be so routine that most of us took for granted the stilted legalese “notices” at the top of the newspaper classified section — except newspaper reporters looking for meeting agendas or story ideas to turn into more readable form, or those public contractors and developers for whom following the notices was part of their business.
This week’s podcast by Cardinal’s Dutchie Jessee and Luanne Rife does a great job of explaining why being able to get at Public Notices online as part of their News website is important.
How to get at this stuff: Both the podcast and the public notice “pages” have links on the main menu at the top of the Cardinal website homepage, which I was able to copy and paste into Facebook as visible HTML links, but wordpresses jetpack editing app maybe giving me trouble with them, showing them on my screen as graphical images instead of Link text.
I also was reminded that there is a separate Dutchie Jessee podcast of articles about the history of Virginia in connection with the Commonwealth’s 250th anniversary:
Without those links, on my phone, I can also just scroll past the first four stories on the website to get to the main audio podcast, under a big purple “Weekly Podcast” banner, or watch for the red “Cardinal News 250” banners.
I also suspect I can subscribe to either with a podcast app like Podbean, which I use to listen to podcasts while I’m driving long distances, walking in the woods, or go to sleep. (I’ll go try that as soon as I post this on facebook). Or I (we) can go to them on YouTube. Here’s the public-notices story there:
This all reminds me of a book from the 1940s that I have around here someplace. It was coffee-table big, and interesting to thumb through, and was probably aimed at high school kids back in the day. The title was “How to Read the Newspaper.”
Maybe we citizens of the internet all need to be re-educated with a new paperless version of that book!
Podcast-reader update.. all I had to do was type “Cardinal news of Virginia” into my podcast player search window to subscribe painlessly — and discover that I’m even farther behind on the podcast listening than I realized, since there are episodes going back to January. Now I know what I’ll be listening to when I take my next walk in the woods!
On my Android phone I use the free app Podbean, one of many to choose from. On iPhones, Apple tried to corner the market on podcast player apps with its own iTunes, but podcast syndication is an open standard and other programs can use it.
I wonder if anyone else who never heard the song “Take the skinheads bowling” has just heard the new song, “I Wrote a Song Called Take the Skinheads Bowling,” and backtracked into the land of Camper Van Beethoven, wondering wtf? My reaction may be unique.
It reminds me that bowling put *me* on a different trajectory… I met the son of a fencing coach on my bowling team… joined a fencing class in a dare with another friend… then a Shakespeare student learning fencing for a play invited me to a theater workshop… where a theater lighting tech asked me to be copy editor for his college newspaper…
Result: I had a career in journalism (etc.) for 40 years until I retired to play music and write on blogs and social media apps for fun, but so far none of the local jams is doing songs about bowling. Need a good song to an oldtime fiddle tune and inspired by the book “Bowling Alone,” explaining how oldtime jams and ukulele clubs can be another answer… a way to Team Human, perhaps?
Thank you David Lowery for this somewhat derailed train of thought, even if no real bowling was involved in your personal trajectory. (Found lyrics to the original song here…)
Feeling guilty again for only writing on Facebook and Bluesky, where some friends and family can’t see my neuroses in action. So I’m making a couple of text only posts here based on what I’ve been writing there…
A facebook ad about Macintosh trade-ins and recycling inspired these first two comments… which I’ve expanded.
Probably just need to drive stakes through the private-data-filled hard drives of two orphaned old iBooks, an early iPod and an old iPad, and get them out of my life. Still keeping three Powerbooks or MacBooks running… wish they were stable and internally upgradeable with removable batteries and no need to be linked to any cloud. Then I’d only need one.
Even those 25-year-old iBooks might still do everything I need to do if I could get batteries for them, and a replacement power-jack for the older one, and a replacement DVD drive for the newer one. Alas, I can’t erase the drives if I can’t turn them on.
If I had the patience to undo 1,000 screws I’d see if I could merge the 2002 & 2004 iBooks (G3, G4). But my 2007 Black polycarbonate MacBook still works just fine, even though its replacement batteries have had problems. The 2013 Powerbook mentally lost track of its AirPort card in the last OS upgrade, so no wifi… a problem I’m told an OS reinstallation might fix if I take it to the university and plug it into Ethernet. But I kind of like the idea of having a completely offline laptop for writing and listening to music and old radio shows.
So here I am #procrastinating again by writing social media posts about fighting the temptation to fix iBooks instead of just writing a book or two or a song or composing a symphony or joining a picket line… I think I’ll go for a walk.
Anybody (insert names of Facebook friends who might help) know some sharp young hardware hacker who wants any of those? There’s also an early iPod, an early iPad, an original release One Laptop Per Child laptop, a 2004 DELL Windows XP tower and a bunch of Palm Pilots…. and a (fully functional, last time I looked) a sleek black 1988 NEC Ultralight running text-only DOS 3.something with Lotus 1-2-3 and WordStar on proprietary ROM cards with big books of documentation, like the ones I used to write for MultiMate and Ashton-Tate.
Looking West from Radford, Jan. 9, 2025 (Bob Stepno photo)
The New River is at the bottom of its valley behind the trees in the foreground. West Virginia is just behind the farthest ridgelines, past Giles County, Va. Closer to me are Pulaski and Montgomery counties.
A friend tells me the Appalachian Trail area called Angel’s Rest is near the top right (north) in this picture, near Pearisburg, and that the closer peaks so nicely shaded and frosted by last weekend’s snow are Flat Top Mountain and Dismal Mountain.
I will need a bigger screen than this Smartphone to find them all on a real topographical map. A compass might help too.
I can’t believe I haven’t even posted some walk-in-the-woods photos here in months! Maybe I’ve just been distracted by my two other blogs, editing and repairing old radio-show links at JHeroes.com and writing about music, most recently, turning a Facebook post about not getting to the new Bob Dylan bio-pic at the movies into an extensively hyperlinked reminiscence about my own 50 years of being a musical complete unknown over at my music-focused blog. Give a look, especially if you want to follow a lot of hyperlinks down musical rabbit-holes.
Bob Stepno's Other Journalism 
