Here we go again. GateHouse Media is offering a “voluntary severance package” to 220 of its 218 full-time employees at the Peoria Journal Star. The buyout is “designed to help the Journal Star offset rising expenses faced by newspapers throughout the country.”
Translation: “everyone else is doing it … “
The problem at the PJS, as I [...]

A press release from U.S. Rep Ray LaHood’s office, via the Illinois Channel:
WASHINGTON, DC (April 30)—By a vote of 291-117, the U.S. House last night approved legislation authored by Congressman Ray LaHood (R-Peoria) which would establish the Abraham Lincoln National Heritage Area in Illinois. LaHood represents the same 11 counties which Abraham Lincoln represented [...]

Programming alert: Jen Christensen forms me that HOINews’s Ian Schwartz will do a report on concerned Kellar Primary School parents for the shows 10 p.m. newscast tonight. I try to catch the segment on the Web, as I’ll be at Blogger Bash. I’m leaving in a few moments, as a matter of fact. I invited [...]

A headline from today’s Journal Star: “Wonder why students decide to have sex?“
I know it’s been decades, but as a I recall, In my case it might have had something to do with the fact that 50 percent of my blood was composed or hormones. It certainly felt like it.
Tomorrow’s paper will have a follow-up [...]

Via an email:
Tim Wiles, a former Illinois Central College Harbinger staff writer and ICC’s 2005 Alumnus of the Year who now serves as director of research at the National Baseball Hall of Fame & Museum in Cooperstown, New York, will be on Peoria radio WOAM 1350-AM at 7:05 a.m. Friday to discuss his new [...]

Remember Gene Weingarten, the Washington Post columnist whose smart-ass column about Peoria devolved into a pissing match of bad yellow journalism puns?
Well, he just won a Pulitzer Prize.
In fact, his is one of six the Post won this year, the most in the paper’s history. The New York Times won just two.
Kudos to Gene.
And anti-kudos [...]

The following is Air America talk show host Randi Rhodes in the midst of the NOT SAFE FOR WORK tirade against Hillary Clinton, Geraldine Ferraro, Eliot Spitzer and others that got her suspended for her gig:

I didn’t get the update done quite at the start of the month, but better late than never.
It’s a good issue this month, with news articles about upcoming Earth Day festivities, interviews with both Aaron Schock and Colleen Callahan, as well as the usual slate of columnists, including myself.
Also, publisher Debbie Adlof has bitten the [...]

CUTLINE: President Bush hugs a person dressed as the Easter bunny at the start of the annual Easter Egg Roll, Monday, March 24, 2008, overlooking the South Lawn of the White House in Washington.
You mean there’s no such thing as the Easter Bunny? Damn you , Reuters! Damn you for spoiling my childhood. I am [...]

Hat’s off to PeoriaIllinoisan, for catching this gem that I missed in today’s article about med school grads:
Medical students around the country on Thursday performed the annual rites of Match Day, the day they learned where they will spend the next five years as medical residents. The 44 candidates for graduation at [...]

Via Valleywag:
The FCC has announced that it will hold a second hearing on “net neutrality” — the debate over whether broadband providers can favor some kinds of Internet traffic — at Stanford University on April 17 (PDF). We wrote back in February that FCC chairman Kevin Martin was considering a “do-over”; the FCC’s first hearing [...]

I listened to an hour or so of Sean Hannity this afternoon as a ran errands before I had to go to work.
Good Lord. Were it not for the fact that I knew better, I would assume that Barack Obama was an armed militant who wanted to round up all the white people and put [...]

Many moons ago, I was editor of the weekly Peoria Times-Observer, and one of my duties was to upload each week’s articles to the newspaper’s online version.
For a variety of reasons, the company stopped posting articles and switched to a static site with contact information. Those reasons included:

Under-powered, clunky computers that made the task tiresome [...]

Frequent commenter Shaun Bill sent me the following e-mail:
Hey Bill - FYI
I will be on the Doc & Kotter show on 96.5 ESPN between 5 and 7pm tomorrow, March 12. I will be talking about my recent hockey road trip.
Kudos to Shaun. If I cared about hockey, I might listen. Heh. Just kidding. I LOVE [...]

I did a quicky with Jonathan Ahl tonight.
And by that I mean a two-minute telephone interview about Colleen Callahan’s chances of defeating Aaron Schock.
I don’t think any regular reader will be surprised by my assessment. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to tune in and listen.