Last Best News (https://montana-mint.com/lastbestnews/tag/billings-gazette/page/4/)
Billings Association of Humanists, meeting at First Congregational Church, 310 N. 27th St. Meeting: 1 p.m., Sunday, Nov. 30, 2014
Length of meeting: 1 hour, 30 minutes. Length of sermon: none. Scouting through the Gazette’s “Faith & Values” section, trying to decide what church to visit next, I came across a notice for the Billings Association of Humanists’ Socrates Café, apparently a regular discussion group. Continue Reading →
After 40 years in journalism, Christene Meyers decided to start making things up. The result is her first novel, “Lilian’s Last Dance,” which she introduced to readers here last week as part of Big Read events. Writing the book was, she said in an interview later, the hardest thing she has ever done. (more…) Continue Reading →
In David Crisp’s column this morning, he said he was unable to find any references in any of Montana’s Lee newspapers to the Great Falls Tribune story about the closing of Lee’s Capitol bureau. In David’s defense, he did say he couldn’t find any such reference “as of this writing,” which was Tuesday night. In fact, as I have just belatedly discovered, there are references to the bureau shutdown in the Billings Gazette today. Oddly enough, however, all of them are on the opinion page—guest editorials from Jim Elliott and James Nelson and a letter to the editor from Don and Mary Ann Dunwell. As far as I know, the Lee papers have yet to run a news story on the decision to close the bureau and send their two excellent reporters, Chuck Johnson and Mike Dennison, packing. Continue Reading →
I have a new hero. His name is Bryan Henderson and he is a 51-year-old software engineer from San Jose, California. On Wikipedia, where he is one of thousands of volunteer editors, he is known by the pseudonym “Giraffedata.” (more…) Continue Reading →
Truth can be slippery, as last week’s news showed. Sometimes, the truth comes without relevant facts. In his Sunday column, Billings Gazette editor Darrell Ehrlick noted the decline of press coverage of the federal government in Washington, D.C. It’s a common, and worthy, complaint. (more…) Continue Reading →
If there were any justice in this world, Gregory Frazier would be as famous as that other Montana motorcyclist, the late Robert Knievel. Frazier, who lives in Fort Smith when he’s not on his motorcycle, is not a daredevil in the traditional sense of the term, meaning he doesn’t jump over cars, buses or gorges. But it takes a different kind of guts, and incredible doggedness, to do what Frazier has done on a motorcycle. (more…) Continue Reading →
Reading recent editions of the Billings Gazette—known fondly by some as the Billings Police Blotter—has been an eye-opening and thought-provoking experience. Amid the usual catalog of serial drunk drivers, oil-patch meth runners, girlfriend-assaulting miscreants and keno-addicted embezzlers, there were a few crimes of genuine weirdness, riveting in their strangeness and even, in a couple of cases, their moral ambiguity. (more…) Continue Reading →
In January I wrote about Downtown Businesses Against Advertising in the Billings Gazette, a Facebook group organized to protest a Gazette column by Editor Darrell Ehrlick that they perceived as a slam on downtown. “This group is started as a protest to the Gazette and its editorial board,” the page said, “and we encourage all members to transfer their ad dollars to businesses that support downtown, not tear it down.” (more…) Continue Reading →
The Billings Gazette has written a story on the troubles at the Tumbleweed Runaway Program, following up on the story I posted yesterday. Derek Brouwer, a reporter I have met only a couple of times, did a good job on it. In particular, he had the good idea of asking Yellowstone County Sheriff Mike Linder about the very large encampment of teens that Tumbleweed Director Sheri Boelter supposedly visited during a Youth Count survey in 2013. Boelter’s claims about that camp, and the many discrepancies in her account, are at the heart of allegations of fraudulent activities raised by five current and former employees of the nonprofit agency. Here’s what Linder had to say:
Camps of that size have never been discovered by Yellowstone County Sheriff Mike Linder or his staff, Linder said Thursday. Continue Reading →
When I first saw the subject line on the Billings Gazette website—“Retrospective: Closed Billings bars”—I was prepared to be unimpressed. I didn’t want to be a sucker nipping at “click bait,” those tantalizing packages the Gazette has been running on a regular basis in hopes of generating a lot of Web traffic with a minimum of work. (more…) Continue Reading →
