20 Years Ago
This Week
The American Society of [Daily] Newspaper Editors is meeting in San Francisco this week. They’re agonizing over why daily paper circulation has dropped like a rock over the last 50 years. There’s even a national pilot program involving eight daily papers, studying the loss of credibility. Those poor saps. The editors probably haven’t noticed that all eight papers are owned by chains. And newspaper chains have only one true goal: to make as much money as possible. (They aim for a profit of 25 percent or better.) So editors are told to slash costs. The product gets worse, people stop reading and the editors say they can’t figure out why. Duh.
—Steve McNamara, April 14–22, 1999
30 Years Ago
This Week
With one exception, the [animation] festival’s best films are ones seen here in previous collections, including this year’s Oscar winner for animated short, John Lasseter’s Tin Toy (from Marin County’s Pixar) and Cordell Barker’s Oscar-nominated The Cat Came Back… Tin Toy uses animated models and toys, with computer augmentation (if terms like “procedural animation” and “dynamics techniques” mean anything to you, you’ll understand more about the process than I do) . . . —Renata Polt, April 13–19, 1989
50 Years Ago
This Week
Shock troops for the concrete crew of Army Engineers came to Kentfield Tuesday. There to meet them in full battle regalia (Kentfield style) were hastily assembled guerrilla forces of the conservationists. Leading them was stylish, attractive and determined Mrs. Clinton Jones III, great-granddaughter of A.E.Kent, the man who founded Kentfield, and granddaughter of Congressman William Kent, Marin’s greatest conservationist and the man who donated Muir Woods to the federal government . . .
—Steven McNamara, April 16–23, 1969
