Tales From the MoJo Road –
By Glynn Wilson –
COULTERVILLE, Calif. – Man have we seen changes come in our time or what?
As I was reading The New York Times on Thursday morning the last day of April, 2026, and sharing some headlines on Facebook, I was reading another long screed about the dangers of Artificial Intelligence and changed my profile picture to a photo I saved from about the time I turned 30.
My comment on the story was published in the Times. I asked: “What happens when the bubble goes bust and no one can afford to pay for A.I. agents?”
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I don’t see anyone else asking this most relevant of questions. Of course I’ve long had a history of asking the tough questions no one else had the guts to ask.
About the time I turned 30 at NewsBreak on the Southside of Birmingham, Alabama. Don’t remember who took this photo.
For my new friends in California, some who believe in the hope of saving the Gold Rush town of Coulterville from becoming a ghost town and some who don’t, you should know that I was once like the Lawrence Ferlinghetti of Birmingham. In 1986, after a little more than a couple of years in the newspaper business, I made the move to freelancing for magazines and opened a San Francisco style bookstore-newsstand-coffee bar on the Southside of Birmingham. I was only 26 at the time, ahead of my time.
But the era of Starbucks coffee and the big mall bookstores like Books A Million was coming, and then the internet.
I didn’t really know it at the time. There were hints in some of the writing at the time. But the era of selling print newspapers and magazines and coffee and espresso for a dollar a cup was about to come to an end.
Change, like they say, is inevitable. The key is to figure out how to deal with it, to survive and thrive.
It was there I met my good friend Spider Martin, the photographer who was on the bridge in Selma on Bloody Sunday to capture those iconic images I would later write about and talk about on public radio.
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It was a ball for awhile and I accomplished what I set out to do: Master the art of freelance journalism.
Like all changes in technology, the economic changes come in fits and starts. I had a chance to go back into the newspaper business specializing in covering the science and politics of the environment as a specialty beat at the beach. So I got out of the retail business and took it, moving to to Gulf Shores for a few years.
But change was on the way again. When I moved back to Tuscaloosa to teach journalism in grad school, the World Wide Web came to college classrooms. It was a revolution in publishing that would eventually bring on the end of most newspaper printing and distribution. By the time I moved to Georgia and then Knoxville, Tennessee, I predicted the end of print in a speech at Birmingham Southern College’s annual writing conference. Now not only are there few daily newspapers published in Alabama or anywhere else, Birmingham Southern is now out of business.
Seeing the future coming, we published one of the first online magazines.
But when I moved to New Orleans to teach at a prestigious private university, I had one more chance to make it to the top of the newspaper business in America and wrote for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and ultimately The New York Times. Many of my news clips are still archived on the Southerner.net website.
But change was coming to Times when a kid named Jayson Blair was caught making stuff up, and the editor from Alabama Howell Raines was let go and my friend and correspondent Rick Bragg quit.
What to do next? After a short stint in D.C. and a decade of taking care of my elderly mother back in Birmingham, I finally found a way to live my dream of covering politics in Washington and working for the National Park Service at the same time – by living and traveling in a Roadtrek camper van. This was my answer to a retirement plan. Live cheap and see the country at the same time.
My final dream was to make it to California. I’m now living that dream, enjoying the amazing sunny weather almost every day, while the world still faces nightmares of change on almost a daily basis.
I don’t know where it will all end. Solid, factual information should be needed no matter what else happens, so we are trying to continue that tradition on the web under the guise of radio, a technology that is also undergoing change but still recognizable for a large segment of the population.
As much as I am a critic of A.I., I don’t see that we have much choice but to use it some. We recently created an amazing A.I. promotional video for the Crazy Coyote Saloon. Check it out on YouTube.
In addition to using this Yosemite Radio platform to promote the original entrance route to Yosemite National Park, we are going to try to elevate skills that should not go away due to A.I. – arts and crafts. And we are planting a community garden to grow some good, fresh food for those in need in these trying times.
Wish us luck peeps. Come see us. And help support us if you can.
Help Fund Yosemite Radio, KNHA-LPFM, 100.9
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That Coyote ad is really great…Once KNHA is fully up-and-running, Coulterville will get a much needed shot in the arm.