Marcy Burstiner

Just about this time last year, local financier Rob Arkley was negotiating with media mogul Dean Singleton to kill his 5-year-old Eureka Reporter. Arkley shut its doors Nov. 6 and Singleton folded the ER‘s editorial page into his Times-Standard. I thought about that when I read that San Francisco financier Warren Hellman will invest $5 […]

When I used to live in the Bay Area you could take your kid to the ballpark for a dollar and if you went on Wednesday you could buy her a hotdog for one dollar more. The A’s had empty seats to fill, but it was a great long-term strategy regardless. Children, stuffing their faces […]

There is one national story that will directly affect every resident of Humboldt County: passage of health care reform in Congress. If it passes it promises insurance for those who don’t have it and possibly hundreds of dollars in savings each month for those who do. Over the past two weeks, you could find in […]

Creative destruction. That’s the term people in the news business bandy about these days in a sort of optimistic pessimism about the state of their industry. It comes out of economic theory that referred to constant change within capitalist systems. Out of this constant change comes a "revolt from within" when you have an area […]

Top execs from just about every major U.S. newspaper chain met in Chicago late last month to discuss ways to get you to pay for news you get over the Internet. But you won’t find news of that meeting or what came out of it in any of their newspapers or online sites. Maybe they […]

burstiner Poor Tweety Bird. A friend came down to breakfast wearing a Tweety Bird T-Shirt. It said Tweet! I thought it was her attempt at hipness. (5:00 AM May 4th from mobile web) burstiner Silly me. T-shirts are old tech. It was retro. It didn’t refer to Twitter, the Web site that turns text messages […]

In the Eel River Valley of Northern California everyone is tied by blood or business. That was how New York Times columnist Dan Barry led a March 23 story about how the collapse of the Humboldt Creamery affects dairy farmers here. The column was 1620 words long — almost as long as the first five […]

When you live in the only place in the country where three faults meet, you should keep a larder stocked with gallons of water and food that will last until the Big One hits: Sardines, Spaghetti O’s, Spam, Melba Toast. You’ll need to know the state of affairs — road closures, estimates of when the […]

In the information infrastructure, newspapers represent the outmoded grid. But if you tear down the grid without having a replacement in place you will find yourself in the dark. Think about that as we prepare to spend hundreds of billions on infrastructure projects meant to shore up our collapsed economy. We spent $700 billion to […]

The death of the Eureka Reporter came as no surprise. But no one expected that a piece of it would continue to live, like a severed, still-talking head in a bad ’50s horror movie. Now, I’m not ashamed to say that I enjoyed reading the Eureka Reporter. Its staff worked hard and often produced interesting […]

There is nothing that represents a rural community like a straw bale. Friends in Ferndale built a house out of straw bales this year. And in these pages, Amy Stewart taught us how to build a vegetable garden on top of one. Now I want to show you how you can build a news publication […]

In Humboldt County, some people think about mileage when shopping for food. Not in terms of how much gas it will take to get to the Safeway, but how many miles the food traveled before it landed on the store shelf. Enviro-foodies tell us that if you care about global warming you need to focus […]