I think this man was a little delusional.
The Chrysler building (you can see the storm clouds rolling in)
The top of the Empire State Building (the conference I went to was held in one of the building's below-ground levels)
What good journalist could go to New York City and not take a photo of the New York Times?
Rockefeller Center
My trip to New York City this weekend went well. I attended a conference for journalists and was able to meet up with several people I met a few years ago at a similar conference. The group sponsoring the event was the
World Journalism Institute. The conference itself was great - I took home a lot of great information and made a few friends.
There were a lot of
excellent speakers, including three guys who were at the New York Times from the 1950s until recently. One point I took home from their comments was that the Jason Blair scandal never would have happened if people took the time for face-to-face personal interaction, as opposed to simply sending an e-mail. They also said that because there's so much privacy in the Times' newsroom of today (with voice mail, cubicles, etc.) that it's much harder to detect when something is going wrong. That makes me at least a little thankful that the newsroom at The Star is cubicle and voice mail free. I happen to like the face-to-face interaction and the accountability it affords.
I also got to do some sightseeing Saturday night and had planned to do so all day on Sunday.
Nature, however, blew away that plan.
My flight out was originally scheduled to leave the city at 7 p.m. Sunday (so I could spend as much time as possible sightseeing), but everyone said a nor'easter was blowing. Rumor had it that officials were preparing for severe flooding and that there may be widespread power outages in the New York City area because of high winds.
The more worrisome rumor for me was that scores of flights would be cancelled.
Armed with that information, I called the airline and had my flight changed to one of the first ones out - my goal was to get out before flights started being seriously delayed and/or cancelled. I did not, without a doubt, want to get stuck in
LaGuardia for hours (and maybe days) if the storm plays out the way it was predicted.
On the Fox news ticker outside its building Saturday night, the main story was that the storm was to be the largest one to hit the city in about 25 years.
It was a good thing I left at 11:30 a.m. as a standby passenger. Winds slammed into the plane for the first 45 minutes of the flight and for the last 15. That only left 30 minutes of peaceful flying. I think I took the whole situation rather well, but another woman sitting near me went into a panic as the plane pitched around. I was glad the pilot made everyone leave on their
seat belts for almost the entire flight, because if we hadn't, I think some people would have been jostled out of their seats.
Here's one news report about the storm.Here's what an AP story said about it:
"Airlines canceled more than 400 flights at the New York area's three major airports, said Steve Coleman, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Kennedy Airport, on the wind-exposed south side of Long Island, had sustained wind of 30 to 35 mph with gusts to 48 mph, Conte said."
In any case, I'm glad I'm on solid ground again, and after attending the conference, I'm feeling a lot more refreshed about my profession.
With a little more than a week before the Cleveland County courthouse's centennial birthday celebration, I'm trying to put together some of the final pieces of The Star's coverage for the event. It's a big undertaking for us, and a monumental project for the Destination Cleveland County people like Brownie Plaster and Marta Holden (and many more) behind it. As I've worked on the project, I've come across scores of interesting historical photos. Hopefully, I can post one or two here every now and then. These first 
two images are postcards that were circulated during the last century. The one on the top has people looking at the confederate monument and courthouse on the square. The other is unusual because it's the view of the historic courthouse from a corner. Normally, postcards are looking straight-on at a building.
