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The TerryReport started a net4news.com and newslineusa.com in the late 90s, when the Internet was young and hearts were gay. Or something.
Now, it is primarily a personal news site edited and reported by Doug Terry, a veteran radio and television news reporter and manager (as in Bureau Chief, news service manager, etc.) based in Washington, DC, with reporting stints in more than ten countries overseas. Terry has covered the White House, Capitol Hill and other federal government beats, as well as served as Bureau Chief of a news bureau in Austin, Texas, a local news anchor (Dallas) and managing editor of a regional radio news network. He covered the space program and other stories at NPR.
The new items are listed first on the buttons at the left. So, the reader can easily trace back through the development of ideas and commentary by following the buttons to the earlier postings. Once a subject matter has been chewed over for a few days, items are often organized under a single topic, which you can then explore by clicking on the first topic to see the later filings in buttons.
The front page or home page varies. Right now, it has the first posting on the Christmas day pants bomber. Usually, the front page is the most immediate post along with links to all major posts over the last few weeks or months. Anything that might be of further interest and some things that clearly aren’t.
Since we are based in DC area, politics and government are a natural and consistent focus, but, we hope, not obsessively. Literature, film, books in general, history and social commentary are equally important, if not reported on as frequently. Travel, and a loose comparison of cultures and lifestyles, is another passion.
Watching news media and pointing out mistakes or omissions would, itself, make a complete website and it would be reported on here extensively, save one factor: there is too much of it (both media and mistakes) to make up a good meal. So, we content ourselves with an occasional blast of disdain, not aimed at former colleagues, but at the hypocrisy and short comings of the news media generally.
The TerryReport is not a blog, not a web log, in other words. It does not generally digress to random, thoughtless postings on whatever pops into the head over toast and bacon in the morning. Oh no. As the primary writer, I try never to write about subjects about which I have not given years of thought, consideration, reading and at least a small measure of direct experience.
In the case of the hassles of traveling through airport security in the post 9-11 world, I write as one who has more than half a million miles in the air (yeah, I know that is not much compared to those who have been on the road, daily, for years) and one whose experience of commercial and private aviation includes some pilot training and being a frequent flier back in the days when getting on an airliner was still considered fun, something that has quickly receded into ancient history. My first flight in a small plane came in the 9th grade in western Pennsylvania where I had joined the Civil Air Patrol (it was a point of pride that I later learned an astronaut had taken his first jump in a small plane at the same airfield.) So, I study these and other issues carefully before hitting a single key on the computer, but whether that results in valuable insights is up to the reader.
A PERSONAL NOTE:
I have had very little direct communication from readers through the TerryReport. My postings on The New York Times Online have received some direct response, a few in great praise and one, in particular, of an odious, greatly offensive nature. In the latter case, that seems to be the way of the Internet: millions of people are using this random, online forum to work out some deep psychological trouble by heaping scabrous, often scatological, scorn on anyone they can find. One imagines millions of lonely people sitting at computers just waiting for the moment to pounce and, then, going online, finds that they are, indeed, pouncing from coast to coast, without end. I can’t imagine a more wasteful human activity. In the end, these sort of people, no matter the harm they imagine themselves doing, are little more than the strangers who bump into you on the subway and are immediately forgotten.
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