New York Times best-selling author Jerry Bledsoe has a new book out.
Bledsoe – who was a columnist for the Greensboro Daily News and then the News & Record, as well as The Charlotte Observer and the Louisville, Kentucky, Courier-Journal before he made the decision to leave newspapers behind and write true crime books – is not the most technologically advanced writer I know.
But in this case Bledsoe is trying something new, and his book Do-Good Boy: An Unlikely Writer Confronts the ’60s and Other Indignities is only available in a digital format. So if you want a hard copy you have to print it out yourself.
But it is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble for $9.99.
Do-Good Boy is not a true crime book, although there are some minor crimes mentioned, but it is the story of how Bledsoe became a writer and his first years in the newspaper business.
Bledsoe claims to have graduated from Thomasville High School in 1959 only because the teachers were tired of having him around and not because of any academic success. He then became a newspaper columnist who twice one the prestigious Ernie Pyle Award for Human Interest Storytelling as well as the author of a number one bestseller. Here’s a hint about how he became a writer: He didn’t do it by going to journalism school.
The book opens with Bledsoe on his way to at job interview at the Kannapolis Daily Independent in 1963, where he got his first civilian newspaper job, and then flashes back to his career in the Army from 1960 to 1963. Bledsoe tells his readers that he joined the Army because he was interested in a career in art and the recruiter told him the Army had the best art schools in the world. After he was sworn in, he was told the Army didn’t have an art school at all and he was sent to Information School.
Bledsoe’s newspaper career took off after he wrote an article about a mule in the courthouse in Kannapolis and he ended up at the Greensboro Daily News, first as a reporter and then as a columnist.
Two chapters of the book have previously been published in the Rhino Times. The first chapter and one about the Kennedy assassination. So if you’re reading the book and it seems familiar, it may be.
Bledsoe writes about covering the civil rights movement for the Greensboro Daily News and about interviewing celebrities such as Jimi Hendrix after he opened for the Monkees at the Greensboro Coliseum.
If you enjoyed Bledsoe’s columns and books, this gives you a look at the man behind all those stories.
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The News & Record, the Jamestown News, The Carolina Peacemaker and The High Point Enterprise have filed a lawsuit against North Carolina and Guilford County over the law passed by the legislature last year that removed the requirement that legal advertising be placed in a newspaper with paid circulation. Under the new law, legally required advertising can meet the requirement by buying an ad on the Guilford County website.
The lawsuit is pretty funny. It states that it is a violation of the North Carolina Constitution to not require that advertisements mandated by law, such as notifying people of a public meeting or a foreclosure, be placed in a newspaper of general circulation. But the law didn’t require the ads be placed in a newspaper of general circulation but in a newspaper with paid circulation.
The very idea that the North Carolina Constitution grants a monopoly on legally required advertising to newspapers with paid circulation seems absurd.
The lawsuit itself begins, “As early as 1789,” and goes on to say advertising in newspapers was required. Maybe in 1789 that was a good idea. The choices were newspapers or the town crier, and deaf people couldn’t hear the town crier.
Back in 1789 was before not just radio and television, but before the telegraph. It’s not 1789 anymore and today we have computers, laptops, tablets, smart phones and other electronic devices that give people the ability to get information from anywhere in the world, anytime they want.
The very idea that legally required advertising is made more available to the people of Guilford County by placing an ad in the Jamestown News than by placing it on the Guilford County website is silly.
I hope that when this goes to court and the judge is sitting there looking something up on his or her laptop, the judge realizes the absurdity of it all and throws it out before the state and county have to spend many of our tax dollars defending themselves from a nuisance lawsuit.
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Check out the Greensboro salaries, which start on page 6. For the first time in history Greensboro is paying an employee over $300,000 a year, and it’s not the city manager.
Government salaries went up during the recession and now that the economy is doing better the salaries are going up even faster. When you consider the retirement benefits of government employees, it’s an even better deal, but those of us out here in the private sector are the ones footing the bill.
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I have once again cancelled my subscription to The New York Times, despite the fact that I love reading it. I had subscribed for about 10 years and before that always read the Sunday edition. But I gave it up after the editor admitted that he had allowed reporters to allow their opinions to alter their articles during the 2016 campaign.
I thought that perhaps that The Times had come to the realization that Donald Trump was the president and he should at least be afforded fair coverage, but I found that wasn’t the case.
It’s fine and expected for The New York Times to bash Trump on the editorial pages, that’s what editorial pages are for. But unfortunately they haven’t moved away from allowing the personal opinions of their writers to cloud their articles, and sadly, you can’t trust The Times to be accurate much less fair when the topic is Trump.
It is, for instance, not a fact that Trump had an affair with Stormy Daniels. She says they did; he says they didn’t. There is no proof either way. But how many times have you read they had an affair?
Daily newspapers all over the country are losing circulation. They blame the internet and certainly that is a big part of the problem. The internet has taken away much of the advertising that newspapers depended on. But I think that the internet is also to blame for a different reason. The internet has given regular folks an alternative source of news and they have discovered that what they read in the mainstream media isn’t necessarily true.
