Marcy Burstiner

Not everyone reads the New York Times. Some people skip the San Francisco Chronicle, don’t listen to National Public Radio and are too busy putting their kids to bed to watch the network or cable news. They get their news from their local newspaper. What a nice world those people lived in last week. In […]

There is a great American song that goes like this: “Once there was a silly old ram, thought he’d punch a hole in a dam. No one could make that ram, scram. He kept buttin’ that dam. Cause he had high hopes, he had high apple pie in the sky hopes. So any time you’re […]

An old joke in journalism goes this way: A cub reporter comes back from a city council meeting and tells her editor there was no story. “What happened?” the editor asks. “It was canceled,” the reporter says. “City Hall burned down.” How big a newspaper plays a story should depend on how important a story […]

In the last column Rich Somerville penned as managing editor of the Times-Standard, he spoke about the Hawaiian term “huhu”, which he said meant a state of agitated anger. The column was about reader reaction to the paper’s editorial endorsing Clif Clendenen for the Board of Supervisors and the possibility it raised that Johanna Rodoni’s […]

I don’t know Christopher Smead and Erin Miller but I know a lot about them. Miller graduated from Fortuna Union High in 2001 and now works at NetFlix. She married Christopher Smead last June and he works at Logitech in Fremont. They live in San Jose with their cat named Crumb. They didn’t invite me […]

In the last five years, the Times-Standard has gone from a laughable paper to a darn good one. Now when I pick it up I find some solid reporting and intelligent writing. I wanted to say that before I launch into my longest standing pet peeve with the paper. It has to do with how […]

Eureka’s KIEM-TV, Channel 3, isn’t in the smallest television market in the country, but it is near the bottom of a 200+ deck. Why should you care? The bigger the TV market size, the more money a station can command in advertising fees and the more it can spend on its evening and morning news. […]

One day my not-quite-three-year-old daughter looked up at her father with big brown eyes, tugged at his shirt and said: "Daddy, what are you talking about?" That’s how I feel sometimes when I read newspapers, and not just the Times-Standard or Eureka Reporter. I often want to tug at the shirt of the San Francisco […]

A friend once labeled me the ultimate optimist. That was after I confessed that I never threw out unmatched socks; I kept expecting to find their mates. But generally I’m a pessimist. I expect the worst to happen. To me, each New Year’s is the start of what will likely be a worse year than […]

In my favorite movie, Three Days of the Condor, the assassin Joubert advises Robert Redford’s character, Joe Turner, to leave the United States. Turner says "I’d miss it if I were gone." Turner knows that people within the U.S. government hired Joubert to kill him, but he still doesn’t want to leave. He’d miss it. […]

For 10 years, a close friend of mine in Austin talked to a shrink once a week via long-distance telephone to New York. She didn’t trust her sanity to any psychologist in Texas. Sometimes you need an outside perspective to help you understand your own problems. When journalists need to understand a complicated problem they […]