Welcome back, Speed Sport News!

National Speed Sport News, the granddaddy of American motorsports journalism, is back from the dead. Hallelujah! 

Speed Sport News had been a weekly newspaper until last year, when it folded after 77 years of chronicling all forms of motorsport, from Formula 1 to your neighborhood short track. After the newspaper died, the NSSN website continued to deliver daily updates with many of the same voices, but there's nothing like a print package to curl up with while watching a day's worth of racing. 

Which brings us to the new monthly print version of Speed Sport Magazine. 

Motorsports announcer Ralph Sheheen is among a small group of investors who brought Speed Sport back to life. Rather than dumping money down the drain with a weekly newspaper, we have a monthly magazine that delivers less of the detailed race reports and more of a focus on features and analysis. 

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Quick reviews: Two books from Jeff Jarvis

Updated on Monday, April 2, 2012 at 7:10 PM by Logan Molen

Jeff Jarvis is a prolific digital thinker, sharing his opinions on a wide variety of topics on his BuzzMachine blog, as a panelist on "This Week in Google" and as an author of several successful books. 

I loved his first book "What Would Google Do?" and recently finished two of his newer books -- "Public Parts" and "Gutenberg the Geek" -- all of which further our understanding of digital privacy, entrepreneurial business and history. 

"Public Parts" is a long hardcover issued late last year, and the formal title says it all: "Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live" (Check out a sample here).

I bought the Audible version of "Public Parts" the day it came out but only finished the book a week or so ago. That lag time is no knock on Jarvis, who does a great job reading his books; I'm a heavy podcast listener, so it's simply difficult to find time to listen to books. 

Jarvis is as "public" as it gets when it comes to an online persona, and he shares provocative insights into why we all ought to embrace public transparency as a form of digital currency that enriches us individually and collectively. He supports those personal arguments with dozens of examples of entities big and small benefiting from open and honest interactions with customers. 

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Quick Review: 'Here, There and Everywhere'

Geoff Emerick’s "Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles" is a must read if you’re interested in the history of audio fidelity and strongly recommended if you’re a hardcore Beatles fan. But beyond that, it’s an uneven biography that will leave casual music fans frustrated. 

Emerick’s story focuses mostly on a remarkable period when he lands at EMi as  a teen-age staffer and within a few years finds himself engineering The Beatles as producer George Martin’s right-hand man. The story is as much about Emerick’s revolutionary contributions to The Beatles sound as it is a look at the growth and dysfunction of the world’s greatest rock band. 

Sounds good, right?

Howard Massey -- author of the “Behind the Glass” series of books on studios producers and engineers -- is a co-writer but I’m not sure what he brings to the equation. The book is rich in detail but there are far too many elements that wreak of what we in the journalism business call “dumping your notebook.” In other words, there’s not much editing or weeding of the weaker stories recollections of minor events that do nothing to move the story along. 

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