By Elliott Brack, editor and publisher | Living in a foreign city for a week certainly gives you another perspective on life.
Our youngest has an Irish-related client and was headed for Dublin, Ireland, for a week. Renting an apartment there with two bedrooms, my wife and I got an invitation to buy a plane ticket and go along. It’s hard to refuse such an offer.
By Elliott Brack, editor and publisher | Communicating.
It’s one of mankind’s more difficult tasks.
Whether it’s one individual to another, one person to a wider audience, or even nation to nation, pitfalls crop up everywhere and often.
Today, Americans are mesmerized by two people trying to communicate, and persuade us, that their approach is the best one for our nation in the next few years. Both are having problems getting that communication to show us.
By Elliott Brack, editor and publisher | Back a few years ago, I was optimistic about the future of newspapers. Since then, my faith in their future has continually declined. The impact of the Internet has been far worse than I had realized. What you are seeing with the Internet isn’t just affecting newspapers. How about banking? Insurance? Automotive sales? Retail …Walmart is fighting Amazon, etc. etc. etc.
By Elliott Brack, editor and publisher | The concerted efforts by many politicians to have voter registration drives seeks to get more participation in our democracy by citizens who so far don’t vote.
On the surface, it seems a reasonable move.
But not to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the former UCLA and Milwaukee Bucks basketball star, who was once known as Lew Alcindor. The other day on National Public Radio we heard him explaining why he thinks such voter registration drives are not a good idea. You may be surprised at the way he reasons …
By Elliott Brack, editor and publisher | If I have heard this once, I have heard it a dozen times this political year. It continues, here two months before the presidential election.
“I just don’t know what I’m going to do in the presidential election.”
It sometimes comes from Republicans. At other times, it comes from people who would normally vote Democratic.
By Elliott Brack, editor and publisher | After a lifetime of teaching school and raising a family, what’s it like to see your book published after you have retired?
That’s what we asked Mary Anna Bryan of Lawrenceville recently. She had her novel, Cardinal Hill, published by Mercer University Press. The publication came after she was awarded their Ferrell Sams Award for Fiction in 2014 for one of the best books of the year. However, the actual printing of the book was not until August of 2016, with no reason given for the gap.
By Elliott Brack, editor and publisher | It was on a Wednesday about 5:30 p.m. back about 1967, when putting together the front page of the weekly Wayne County Press in Jesup. A phone call from the county health director, Dr. Dan Glover, was urgent.
“We’ve got a real problem we just realized, and we want you to put this story on the front page for tomorrow’s newspaper,” he pleaded with me. (That would consist of tearing up what we had laid out previously on the front page, just near the deadline time, not a good time for re-doing this page. I was skeptical.)
By Elliott Brack, editor and publisher | Virtually unrecognized among the many changes in Gwinnett is the way the cities of the county are now providing popular music venues, usually at no cost to concert-goers. People flock to these concerts, often setting up chairs a day in advance to get a good location.
“Bureaucrats write memoranda both because they appear to be busy when they are writing and because the memos, once written, immediately become proof that they were busy.”
— Editor-in-chief of the Washington Monthly Charles Peters (1926-2023).
Gwinnett Forum publisher Elliott Brack suggests that Gwinnett County needs a long-range list of continuing objectives for improving the county. His list:
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