Montgomery Community Media

We saw announcements this week from two government entities heading in completely opposite directions when it comes to open government and social media. First, there was our own Montgomery Council announcing a new cross-government initiative. Called “Open Montgomery”, its goal is to allow residents to open up the hood on the county government and not […]

Could Abraham Lincoln have become President if he ran today? Not a chance. With all the buzz over the movie “Lincoln” these days, aficionados of the 16th President are having a field day with all the excitement over Honest Abe. The Oscar-contending film profiles the struggles Lincoln had to overcome in his efforts to abolish […]

I used to produce a TV show many years ago hosted by a man who was a professional investment advisor. His approach to investing was self-described as ‘contrarian’: whichever way the crowd went, he took the opposite approach. Playing the odds that the markets are often wrong about a company in particular or the economy […]

He was the greatest general of his generation, charged to oversee one of the most complicated military campaigns in history. Smart, respected, politically astute. Yet when his extramarital affair became public knowledge, what happened? Nothing. I’m not talking about General David Petraeus, but rather General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Ike went on to become the Supreme […]

Our long national nightmare is over… Well, for those of us in the DC area, it may have felt like a nightmare… weeks of political ads that never seemed to quit. While Virginia was a ‘swing state’ and the DC market thus was inundated with commercials for the Presidential race, there were a couple of […]

It was sad to hear this week of the passing of an American news icon. NEWSWEEK announced it would be folding up its print copies for the last time at the end of 2012, moving to a web-only version next year. Checkout lines will never be the same without those dueling headlines between NEWSWEEK and […]

Not long ago, I received one of those pass-it-along emails that asked me to recall the last several Academy Award winning actors, baseball MVPs and those atop the wealthiest Americans list. Then it asked me to remember my closest childhood friends and favorite teachers. Guess which list I could answer easily? The one that included […]

So after months of campaigning, hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising and endless speeches, Mitt Romney finally closed the gap on President Obama through a few minutes of an unedited debate. The ability to completely change the course of an election can indeed come down to a single moment… and old-fashioned communications is the […]

Following this week’s Presidential debate, all the excitement about Election 2012 seems to be focused on the President and his challenger. Yet as Tip O’Neill once said, “All politics is local”. There are a number of races in this election season that are important right here in Montgomery County. On the November ballot, we have […]

Quick quiz: what company was the first in the world to patent a digital camera? No, it wasn’t Sony, IBM or HP. It was Kodak… the century-old firm that all but invented and popularized photography. The innovative staff at Kodak actually invented the first digital camera and patented it. But Kodak was so wedded to […]