Robert Niles

to Robert Niles.

Robert Niles' work in online journalism has been called "pathbreaking" by noted columnist Dan Gillmor. Robert's "Accident Watch" feature on ThemeParkInsider.com won the 2001 Online Journalism Award for Service Journalism, presented by the Online News Association and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. It was the first example of a "crowdsourced" online report, built on reader-contributed content, to win a major journalism award.

Robert is a native of Los Angeles, and today lives in nearby Pasadena, California. He graduated from Northwestern University, where he majored in the school's program in Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences, as well as in Political Science. He also holds a master's degree in journalism from Indiana University.

Along the way, Robert has worked as a Pirate of the Caribbean and Tom Sawyer Island raft driver (at Walt Disney World) as well as for the (Bloomington, Indiana) Herald-Times, the Omaha World-Herald, the Rocky Mountain News, the Los Angeles Times and the University of Southern California.

Today, Robert runs SensibleTalk.com, ThemeParkInsider.com and (with his wife, Laurie) Violinist.com.

For 10 years, people bought over-priced houses they could not afford without borrowing extreme amounts of money that they would never be able to pay back. When that Ponzi scheme ended and the economy collapsed, the government chose first to bail out the bankers who made those loans.

The losers in that decision? Among others, the nation's kids.
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Which city's sports fans have suffered the most?

As a stats geek, I'm not happy with answers that rely on goats and curses. Nor can I accept that fans of one team have suffered too terribly when the other pro teams in that same city have racked up one championship after another. (Jets fans, I'm looking at you.)

So in 2007 on my ThemeParkInsider.com site I developed a quantitative solution to answering this question: The Sports Misery Index.

In short, here's how it works: A city gets one point for each season played its pro sports teams since the last calendar year in which one of those teams won a championship.
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This is for readers in the Los Angeles area (or anyone who's spent some time in LA).

Which of these old-school LA-area joints would you most like to go to for lunch?

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Tomorrow's BCS championship surely will bring with it calls from some newspaper columnists and TV and radio hosts for a college football playoff. Some of them might point to polls that report public support for the idea of doing away with the traditional bowl system in favor of a playoff.

But how many people would support a college football playoff if it meant, for example, no longer having a Rose Parade on New Year's Day?

Because that's exactly what a playoff system would do.
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I had a dream last night. (No, not that I would begin an entry with a wretched cliche - just indulge me on that, okay?) Laurie and I were going to throw a dinner party with another family, and Laurie had just left for the store to pick up a few final items.

Our guests arrived early, but they weren't the close friends I'd expected. Instead, they were college friends of Laurie's, who just happened to be in town, I guessed. Then the doorbell rang again. It was a high school friend of mine, with her children. But where were my kids? Were they upstairs with their friends? I realized that I didn't know where they were, only that they were not at the party.

More people arrived: People who worked with former colleagues, but whom I hadn't met. High-school classmates of Laurie's, whom I'd met at a reunion. Someone who'd been reading my website and wanted to say hi.
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Here's the long version of an essay that I wrote for the American Youth Soccer Association, which appeared it is Whistle Stop national e-mail newsletter for youth soccer referees.

It's got some good stuff in it for youth sports officials, I hope. Full piece after the jump
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FWIW, This is how you follow a story.

And this is not.
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