For me, travel always comes in inconveniently packed bunches. There must be some such travel corollary to Murphy's Law. My next three weeks look like this:
- Savannah, Ga., one of America's most beautiful cities. Unfortunately I'll be in conference rooms most of that time for business meetings. Thursday I'll be helping run a newsroom training session at which Dan Gillmor of the Center for Citizen Media will appear electronically through a webcam hookup. It's an irony that we who work in this space-collapsing online medium spend so much time in airplanes and do so little with teleconferencing, and I'm looking forward to seeing how well it will work.
- Stockholm, Sweden, one of the world's most beautiful capitals. I'll be speaking at a forum hosted by the Swedish media company Citygate. I'm also reconnecting with Ingrid Meldahl, who was an exchange student staying with my family in 1970-71 and is now a physician and curling champion. To avoid extortionate airline prices I'm also spending a weekend in Brussels, Belgium where I will gorge myself on Moules Frites and some of the best beers in the world. I'll take a camera and post from an Internet cafe when I can, but my boat-anchor laptop is staying behind. Note to self: Next time, choose portability, not power.
- Kansas City, Mo., where barbecue is a local religion. We're having a three-day meeting of Morris newspaper editors with a host of great guest speakers including Tim McGuire, the former editor of the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. Tim was the senior manager who convened and sponsored the Star Tribune Online project back in 1994, and, as much as anyone, is responsible for my leaving print and moving to the online world.