Barry I. Friedman

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Category: Media (page 1 of 2)

Precision in Reporting

When I formed LkldNow in 2015, I became a reporter again after 38 years as an editor. 

At first, it felt like it was taking me longer to write articles than  when I was a fresh-out-of-college rookie in the mid-1970s. I thought it was because I was re-learning the craft — and that might have been true.

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Where Did the Lkld Hashtag Come From, Anyway?

I’ve felt a bit like a proud parent as I’ve watched more businesses and organizations in Lakeland include the abbreviation Lkld in their names and online identities.

LkldNow, the news website I founded, wasn’t the first; I believe LkldTV gets that honor. But I was there when some early Twitter adopters decided more than eight years ago to formalize use of #lkld to identify posts about Lakeland.

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Ledger Redesign: Some Perspectives

Somebody posed the right question the other day when I asked on Facebook for reactions to the new design of The Ledger’s print edition: Why did they do it?

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What’s new? lkldnow.com

logo400It’s been a busy month in Lakeland, Florida. I finally launched lkldnow.com – mobile news to connect you to Lakeland.

Reaction has been great. I had my best day ever yesterday, driven by a story I broke about a $13 million plan to buy and renovate Lakeland Cash Feed into a much larger home for Catapult.

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Ledger Headquarters Listed For Sale

Screen Shot 2015-07-30 at 3.18.29 PM

A screenshot from the real estate listing.

The Ledger’s headquarters building  in downtown Lakeland is up for sale, as is its office housing The News Chief in Winter Haven.

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Sunshine Skyway — 35 Lives, 35 Years

Skyway book

It’s been 35 years, but I have vivid memories of the morning of May 9, 1980. I left home for my job as city editor of The Tampa Times during a blinding rain. Fearing flooding on my usual scenic route of Bayshore Boulevard, I took the higher-ground Crosstown Expressway instead.

As I approached the door of the newspaper building around 8 a.m., the early-morning copy editing crew was leaving; they had put out the first street-sales edition of the afternoon newspaper and were heading for breakfast before diving into the home edition.

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Citizens Share Strong-Mayor Pros and Cons on Facebook

In Lakeland, the revolution might not be televised, but it will play out in social media.

There’s a push to replace the city’s council-manager form of government with a strong mayor system, and the people promoting it are using Facebook as a listening post to get feedback before they even offer a formal proposal.

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Ledger Lays Off Eleven Newsroom Employees

Eleven news employees, including four reporters, three photographers and three copy editors, were laid off by the Ledger Media Group this week.

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Hey, Lu – Shouldn’t I Have Your Music?

Hey, Lu —

Lucinda Williams

Lucinda Williams

I hope you don’t mind the informal greeting. I figure we’re on a first-name basis since we exchanged tweets recently.

I’m listening to your new album now. I just bought it from iTunes. I don’t buy much music these days. Mostly I rent it. I subscribe to Beats Music, and for the most part its 20 million songs are enough to keep me happy. I know I don’t own the music, but it satisfies my musical curiosity, and the $10 a month it costs me is less than I’d probably spend to buy albums, many of which I’ll rarely return to after a few listens.

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Social Media as an Act of Journalism

Bob Turner

Bob Turner

Bob Turner, my first city editor, didn’t do social media. His heyday as a journalist was in the 1950s through 1980s, and he was more comfortable with a typewriter than a computer. (When I moved into his old desk at The Tampa Times, I had to switch things around so that I faced the computer terminal instead of the old typewriter.)

But if Bob were a reporter now, I think he would embrace social media – mostly because it would expand the number of sources he could talk with.

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