boblog -- by bob stepno

Yet Another Blog by Bob: and couple of songs

2011-02-08T12:26:00.010-05:00

I've been posting here so infrequently that I ought to mention why: As part of my media history research I've started yet another blog, JHeroes.com -- Newspaper Heroes on the Air, and it's taking most of my blogging time.

I'm exploring how newspaper reporters were portrayed in "popular culture" for a series of articles and maybe a book. The blog will help me sift through and comment on more than 30 years of old time radio: dramatic series, dramatized biographies and historical series.

Why? Partly because I like the storytelling of radio. At its best, it let your imagination paint the pictures, instead of some Hollywood special effects department. Professionally, I'm curious whether any "old media" (newspapers) and "new media" (radio) competition showed up in radio stories, or whether radio simply reflected how important newspapers were in daily life back then.

I also wonder whether radio dramas put newspaper reporters in a better or worse light than Hollywood movies of the same era, including whether radio had strong women reporter characters like the movie portrayals of Hildy Johnson, Torchy Blane and Lois Lane. (For more about the radio version of Lois, and her reaction to that upstart Clark Kent, see this second half of this blog entry.)

So... this old "boblog" blog has slipped off my radar for the past few months. So has music -- the main thing I write about here.

Here's one coincidence: An episode of one of the best old-time radio shows about crime-fighting newspapermen also featured one of my favorite blues singers and guitar players, Josh White.

Listen to Big Town: The Prisoner's Song on another old-time radio blog.

Josh sings original blues songs that parallel the story of the radio play; to be part of the scene, he plays a prisoner on death row.

"He's going to the chair..." the guy in the next cell says. "They let him have his guitar. He wanted it instead of his supper."

Incidentally, Josh White's song here is not "The Prisoner's Song" -- that's just the title of the "Big Town" episode.

The other "The Prisoner's Song" was a huge heart-breaking hit in the early days of recorded music, for Vernon Dalhart (a No. 1 hit for 12 weeks in 1925-26).

Since then has been re-recorded many times. I even remember my mother singing it, sometimes just the line, "If I had the wings of an angel..." when she needed a quick escape from whater was getting her down.

Bells to celebrate many seasons

2010-11-19T21:44:00.004-05:00

Mostly I'm celebrating the discovery that Ellen Kushner's "Sound and Spirit" radio program is available online. I used to be a regular listener to her wonderful mixture of music and stories, but lost track of it when I moved from one NPR/PRI station's listening area to another.

Her website has players and "embed" code for individual episodes. This is my first try at embedding one in a Blogger page. Utterly painless... Odd that it looks like a video player when only audio is involved. The program logo didn't show up properly when I first posted this, but the audio plays -- and that is the point.

Appalachian music themes at Radford University

2010-09-25T15:40:00.010-04:00

Strange coincidence... I just discovered that the RU InterLibrary Loan department I've been using a lot this summer is also home to another banjo player who recently began blogging about Appalachian musical culture under the library's auspices.

Bud Bennett's first few entries look great, from highlighting the library's music collection to pointing out the existence of County Sales in Floyd, an old-time-music record distributor that he and I both discovered, as Bud says, "Back in the mid-to-late 1970s, far from the New River Valley..." (He links to a Roanoke Times story about County that I missed a couple of weeks ago.)

Running into Bud's blog (while on an Interlibrary Loan visit to the library's website) reminded me that I've been neglecting this blog... even more than I've been neglecting my other five or six blogs and Websites.

The most recent things I've posted about music have been some tweets about a local journalist-musician's (highly recommended) new book, which I'll recommend to Bud by posting them here again:

Ralph Berrier's reading at the Radford Public Library even had yodeling! And applause for it -- and his writing... http://bit.ly/9bifS0 http://twitter.com/bobstep/status/21443549249

Rave for Ralph's book: "No matter. If he has yet to master the fiddle, he rarely hits a false note on the page." http://on.wsj.com/cldNOy http://twitter.com/bobstep/status/20497180615

Local journalist fiddler finds fame & WSJ byline with 'If Trouble Don't Kill Me' Book Excerpt - http://bit.ly/boQAK4
http://twitter.com/bobstep/status/20496948825

Speaking of trouble... This week's Roanoke Times headline about an Appalachian music fan with a Radford University connection was less celebratory, but at least it does have a happy ending:

The university is officially yanking the name off one wing its arts and music building, the part that has been called Powell Hall from one end (and Porterfield Hall from the other).

A few years before I got here, an Appalachian Studies class at the university pointed out that the building's namesake John Powell, along with being a composer and champion of Appalachian music, was a notorious racist.

Plans to drop the name were postponed along with plans to renovate the building, until a call from a Roanoke Times columnist reminded the performing arts school's dean of the issue recently, calling Powell, "a terrible and persuasive racist whose work harmed uncounted Virginians."

Dean Joe Scartelli, now acting provost, got the Board of Visitors to act quickly (if belatedly), officially dropping the name last week. I hope the university facilities folks and website editors scrub it away soon, without whitewashing the historical fact that the school let the name stand for 43 years. Was the naming of the building a conscious act of "whiteness" in 1967? That was a big year in the Civil Rights movement, with an important Virginia case before the Supreme Court, the ironically named "Loving v. Virginia," and a future publisher of the Roanoke Times and Radford board member -- covering the "Mississippi Burning" case for The New York Times.

For anyone not familiar with RU and its arts facilities, here's one last coincidence or bit of irony: While plans to renovate Porterfield/Powell were on hold, the school built a fine new performing arts center next door and named it for Douglas & Beatrice Covington.

Along with being a patron of the arts, Dr. Covington, Radford's fifth president, was the first African-American to head a predominantly white university in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Juxtaposition

2010-07-29T16:55:00.004-04:00

I noticed on Facebook that the Carolina Chocolate Drops are in Scotland. Can't find anything of them doing Robert Burns songs, but I wouldn't be surprised if they bring some back...

(One of these is here for comparison...)

In the company of great writers... a Droid blog experiment

2010-07-25T10:29:00.029-04:00

I write like
Kurt Vonnegut

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Maybe I do write like Vonnegut, maybe I don't. But the first paragraph I used to test this promotional text-analysis site iwl.me -- which produced the result above -- actually came from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.

Warning: Geeky section begins here, but I get back to "writers" after next horizontal rule.

This blog item began as an experiment in posting a code snippet online using Blogaway, a Blogger editor on my Droid phone, to see if that attractive "I write like..." box would appear the way the promoters intended.

The bad news: The Droid blog editor converted the HTML tags of the badge's "code for your blog" widget into their encoded-character equivalents, which disabled the code. That is, it created new code to put the symbols like < and > on screen instead of interpreting them as part of the behind-the-scenes HTML code. Instead of the "I write like Kurt..." box, you got something that looked like the garble on the right.

I also wasn't able to edit the code in the"Edit HTML" window of the regular Web interface to Blogger using the Droid's browser, small screen and pull-out keyboard.

The good news: Once I got back to the Mac the fix was a simple copy-and-paste operation.

Bottom line: You'd think a phone using Google's Android operating system would have an elegant and powerful built-in app for editing blog posts in Google's Blogger system. If it does, I haven't found it.

To be fair, Blogaway does seem fine for more conventional posts, but I don't think I'll try it with code again soon. It'll take a while for the eyestrain to wear off after this first attempt.

Here's more information on the program for other Droid users:

http://www.androidguys.com/2009/12/16/app-review-blogaway-android-blogger-client/

http://www.androlib.com/android.application.com-beanie-blog-znnx.aspx

Back to the "I write like..." writing-analysis page... For more background on the iwl.me page, see this interview with Dmitry Chestnykh. Rocket science or not, it's fun to play with. If I give iwl.me the text of any page I've written about the Web, with URLs and computer jargon, including the page you're reading, it says I write like Cory Doctorow. I tried again with a few paragraphs from my home page that talked about teaching and my coming to Radford, and I was back to being Vonnegut. When I pasted in a short paragraph about newspapers (which appears under my grandmother's picture on http://stepno.com), this was the text:

That's probably a Sunday Boston paper or Springfield Union. The past week's Daily Hampshire Gazettes are stacked on the radiator in this photo taken by my father. I started delivering the Gazette in junior high school and still remember columns by Arthur Hoppe making me laugh--the first byline that ever stuck with me.

and this was the report:

I write like
James Fenimore Cooper

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Now that makes me feel old. I wonder what did that? Maybe those old New England places and newspaper names kicked the analysis into "Last of the Mohicans" mode? Anyhow, it's nice to see some variety in the reports. I grabbed a New York Times story about the Supreme Court's conservative shift (by Adam Liptak), and iwl.me said it sounded like Stephen King. Just scary, I guess.

Final test: I went over to http://craphound.com and grabbed a few paragraphs of Cory Doctorow's blog.

It says he writes like Ben Franklin.

No it doesn't. I made that up. You can't always get things to come out as ironically as you want. It said he writes like Cory Doctorow. Except when he writes like Kurt Vonnegut.

Linking around a Web of ragged memories

2010-06-26T19:03:00.005-04:00

As a pre-college-graduation present to myself many years ago, I bought a guitar from a guy who bought it from another guy, named Dave Lindorff... whom I have just stumbled upon, thanks to a Web link to some of his journalistic work. And one link does tend to lead to another.

I'm not sure I ever heard Dave play -- although I did learn a tune or two from his brother Gary. And I don't think I knew that Dave and I both chose journalism as a career some 40 years ago.

Strangely, though, one of the first songs I played on that old red sunburst Epiphone Frontier, with its pickguard decorated in cactus flowers and lariat loops, was "Feel Like I'm Fixin' To Die Rag," which Dave apparently updated a few years ago and still has on his MySpace page, playing roughly the same guitar part... which I guess we all learned from some combination of Country Joe, Jim Kweskin and Dave Van Ronk.

I still use the same guitar lick, which works on a medley I start with "Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate" -- not as politically meaningful, but timeless in its own way.

Mr. Lindorff, however, is now down in my record book as the only person I know of to attempt "City of New Orleans" on the Appalachian autoharp.

(As for the Epiphone, I traded it years ago for a Martin with a fatter fingerboard, but I saw one just like it at Gruhn Guitars last month and was momentarily tempted...)

Bluegrass jam in the evening; strawberry jam in the morning

2010-05-05T10:22:00.003-04:00

The River City Grill, 103 Third Ave. in Radford, Va., isn't just a new home for the Monday night fiddle and banjo jam... It has great food (judging by my first two meals there), a working wifi connection... but no website yet, so I managed to post a Twitter tweet about it with a link to some place with the same name in Irvington, NY. Duh.

Whether by Web or by 5 minute walk, I hope Radford University's seniors find the place in time for graduation on Saturday. If they do, maybe they'll be inspired to re-enlist for master's degrees so they can be regular customers.

Until River City Grill gets a website of its own, I'll post whatever relevant links I find here:

The Radford Fiddle & Banjo Jam home page

Absorb Bluegrass: Good trouble in River City
The tourism folks already have the Fiddle & Banjo Jam on the map; we just need to get the pin moved a few doors down the street and around the corner to Third Avenue.

Those first two meals I mentioned: Crab cakes and a salad for dinner; generous vegetarian omelet for breakfast. RCG had its grand opening last Saturday and the menu says it'll be open 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., seven days a week. This being final exam week in a soon-to-be-deserted college town, I have my fingers crossed...

One swallow doesn't make a jug... I mean a summer...

2010-04-04T14:15:00.004-04:00

A springtime gift of pink azaleas from an old time radio show:

Breakfast in the Blue Ridge - Audition Sales Pitch:

"“Breakfast in the Blue Ridge” was a popular syndicated country music program featuring “National Barn Dance” performers Lulubelle and Scotty. In this post and the next, we hear two sides of the Audition disc for the series, circulated to station programmers and advertisers."

I like the way Rand's Esoteric OTR site even gives you the label of the transcription disc for a programs... In this case the "program" is actually a promotion for the series, interviewing Lulubelle and Scotty about their new morning show... a nice behind-the-scenes look (or listen).

After the sales pitch comes the sample program, so here it is, if you're more interested in the music than how radio was made in the old days.

It really makes me sorry I don't have them to listen to at drive time these days.

Coffee shop withdrawal, but the band plays on

2010-02-24T18:19:00.002-05:00

I'm seriously annoyed that a cold, Tuesday classes, winter weather and general procrastination have kept me away from the Monday night Fiddle & Banjo Jam at the Coffee Mill in Radford all winter... especially since the Coffee Mill was my favorite place in town and has been struggling for a year.

Now it has pulled the plug, at least until some new owner steps up and smells the coffee, or opportunity, or something.

It's hard to believe a college town can't support one independent coffee shop a five minute walk from campus. However, the university houses an on-campus Starbucks, an Au Bon Pain and a Ben & Jerry's with Green Mountain Coffee. I think they all accept students' parent-subsidized meal cards. Even with free wifi, that was a lot for the Coffee Mill to compete with.

On the other hand, closing at 5 p.m. most nights was no way to encourage students to come down off the hill, and a recent decision to close on Sundays killed my pattern of weekly homework-grading visits.

The coffeeshop's only regular evening event was the Monday Fiddle & Banjo Jam, which packed the house, but catered more to bluegrass fans than to the average Radford student... and probably didn't make much money, since the place was so crowded you couldn't get to the counter to order another scone, quiche or latte -- words you won't hear in many bluegrass lyrics.

Anyhow, along with missing some great music on Mondays, I've missed a chance to congratulate maestro Ralph Berrier on his new book, so I'll throw a few links here.

Ralph calls his If Trouble Don’t Kill Me, "the true story of my music-playing grandfather and his twin brother..."

His home page is streaming about 15 minutes of a 1942 Christmas broadcast by Roy Hall and His Blue Ridge Entertainers on WDBJ in Roanoke, complete with Dr Pepper commercial and nice renditions of Fireball Mail, Deep Ellum Blues and more.

If you're not from around here, you may have missed Ralph's project at The Roanoke Times, mapping Virginia's
Crooked Road traditional music events and venues.

Meanwhile, the good news is that Ralph is keeping the Fiddle & Banjo jam alive by moving it a mile or so down Main Street to Wade's Supermarket.

Until I went looking to confirm the rumor, I didn't even realize the session had its own Website!: http://www.radfordfiddle.com.

I've just gotta get out more.

A couple of loosely related stories by Ralph:

Centennial year for gypsy jazz guitarist

2010-01-11T16:07:00.002-05:00

I love coincidences... Another journalist who doubles as a computer geek and triples as a guitar player... (He's terrific at all three, but I'm older and my fingers don't move as fast.) Reading Adrian's interview at a journalism publication tipped me off to a January 23 musical milestone this month...

Five questions: Adrian Holovaty – The Society for News Design:

"5. Is there a bright future for gypsy jazz guitar players?

Yes. Gypsy jazz has enjoyed a renaissance over the last couple of years, probably thanks to the Internet and YouTube. These days, hundreds of videos of world-class players are just a click away, for free, and there’s been an explosion in instructional material. And January 2010 is Django Reinhardt’s 100th birthday. It’s a good time to be playing this type of music."

Django:

Adrian:

Local (Radford, Va.) note: Scott Fore plays a Django style too with his Hillbilly Hotclub, but YouTube seems to know him better for another style... Even though he won't have the whole band, maybe he'll do some Django tunes at the River Company Jan. 22.

Don't ever try to milk a kipper

2010-01-03T13:34:00.008-05:00

"When It's Night Time In Italy, It's Wednesday Over Here"

Why has this old song come at me from three directions today? Coincidentally (thanks, Bill), the Times reflects on how "All the Rules of the Music Business Have Been Remade" with some discussion of YouTube, mashups, MP3 players and more. On first reading, I don't see anything about the phenomenon I've run into lately -- musicians on the Web are competing with a century of recorded history, suddenly available to anyone who pokes into digitized collections of 78s at archive.org or scores of collector sites, or unlikely reappearances, re-reappearances, and flights to space (where the song popped into the plot of a science fiction radio series, no also online).

Is it that this 1924 song, needs no mashing, or is self-mashing? I noticed lines in the last verse, not included on some recording, that add what the scholar's might call "cultural/historical context" and might clarify some of the author's and original listeners' influences (as in "operating under...")

If there’s sunshine in Washington, what makes the moonshine dear?
When it’s night time in Italy, it’s Wednesday over here.

If you lay on a mattress, you’ll find that spring is near.
If you haven’t an appetite, just think of Paul Revere.
By the time that they pass a bill to bring back wine and beer,
It’ll be night-time in Italy and Wednesday over here.

Another attempt at lyrics, and another. And an instrumental version, in case you want to sing it yourself.

Not the Apple iTablet or iSlate -- the OLPC XO-3

2010-01-02T15:07:00.007-05:00

My XO-1 was the proto-netbook, an innovative low-power mini-laptop with wifi, mesh networking, a rotating screen with a "panel" mode (but no touch screen, alas), and a daylight-viewing mode I still haven't seen matched... as well as some fascinating educational software concepts.

And that was the point: One Laptop per Child had/has a goal of getting teaching machines into the hands of children around the world.

Alas, that first XO also had a keyboard that was a royal pain -- not just built for child-size fingers, but prone to "stuck" membrane keys for "ctrl" and "alt," which rendered my XO useless, especially after "pinching" a key to unstick it caused a rip in the membrane. (Presumably school systems met with the same problem acquired bushels of replacement keyboards, along with these easy-repair instructions.)

I wasn't surprised to see the XO-2 "concept" design last year featuring only a touch panel in place of the keyboard half of the laptop, eliminating the XO-1's weakest link and creating an intriguing two-page "electronic book," with either half usable as an iPhone-style touch-panel keyboard or display.

But now OLPC has taken the conceptual evolution another step, simplifying things even more with the

XO-3 concept design.

That first typing-surface image made me laugh, reminding me instantly of the screen-keyboard configuration of my second computer, circa 1985, the Tandy TRS-80 Model 100. It ran on four double-A batteries, had a text editor, communication ports and a programming language, and I used mine for about seven years, including some news-reporting trips on the backroads of coastal New England.

Meanwhile, I'll keep watching the Apple tablet gossip. (There's even some speculation that the XO screen I like so much might play a part.) Whatever happens, I certainly hope they don't seriously call it the "iSlate," no matter how much the name might appeal to procrastinators.

As for the thin just-a-panel XO-3, while folks like Forbes magazine speculate about roadmaps and practicality, I have a mental image of thousands of school kids holding panels above their heads, wirelessly networking their screens together to build a composite-image reminiscent of sports-stadium audience card-stunt displays... but a thousand times more creative... and saying... whatever the 21st century generation wants to say to the world.

New Year traditions...

2010-01-01T13:35:00.007-05:00

Welcomed with a new calendar from the Floyd County Historical Society (bought at the last Floyd ContraDance) and some ritual foodstuffs I learned about when I lived in North Carolina, here's to 2010...

I didn't do anything wild on New Year's Eve, but, if the mountain roads stay driveable, I may try for the “Howl At The Moon” benefit concert with Windfall and others, Saturday, January 2, at 7 p.m. at the Floyd Country Store, although not on its calendar.

How else to celebrate?

(If any of my Web production students are reading... take a look at that Floyd County Historical Society page, figure out why it's in the condition it's in, figure out who is in charge, and make them a redesign offer they can't refuse!)

Alternative to Auld Lang Syne

2009-12-30T22:11:00.005-05:00

I think this song would be a fine one to ring in any old new year... and the video alone is hypnotic... fine for an alcohol-free holiday (or a free-alcohol one).

YouTube - AIN'T WE CRAZY - Harry "MAC" McClintock - 1928

The lyrics are here and here.

And if you need an encore... another from Mac...

Thanks to CDBPDX.com for putting all of this audio history online.

Breaking Up Christmas Before It's Begun

2009-12-23T13:25:00.019-05:00

A Christmas week online media adventure...

(With Dec. 26 update, appropriately enough.)
While I was still in a half-asleep Wednesday-morning fog, the clock radio and WVTF cut through with a short piece about the between-holidays tradition of "Breaking Up Christmas" music parties, and a pointer to http://folklifefieldnotes.org, a Virginia Folklife Program website I hadn't run into before.

I didn't see the item itself on the Morning Edition rundown or WVTF sites. It ran a bit incongruously somewhere around the story about Larry McMurtry's "Literary Life", an interview with Liz Smith recalling "when gossip columns ruled," the news that Arnold Stang has died, and Frank Deford's speculation that multi-product spokesmodel Peyton Manning learned comedic timing from football. (Not the "hardest" of news this time of year.)

Update -- WVTF played the spot again on Saturday morning's Weekend VA, with this lead-in: "When Christmas is over, the fun is just getting started for many in Southern Appalachia. Virginia State Folklorist Jon Lohman has the story behind 'Breaking up Christmas,' a little-known tradition that takes place the week between Christmas and New Year's Day."

Searching for that passage helped me find the program -- and a new resource to bookmark. The segment turned out to be distributed via PRX.org, the Public Radio Exchange, "a growing social network and community of listeners, producers, and stations collaborating to reshape public radio."

The organization has a blog, RSS feeds, Twitter feeds, and services for listeners as well as producers and stations. Cool... but back to Breaking Up Christmas...

The first time I heard the program, I suspected it might be by Paul Brown, but didn't think it was his voice on the item, although I was still half asleep. Paul's the banjo-pickin' NPR news guy who did a documentary on Breaking Up Christmas a dozen years ago (as mentioned here). I think he was the first person I heard play the tune by that name, too, when he was my banjo teacher for a week or two about 30 years ago (photo at right). I couldn't find a link to that documentary of his, but did discover that he's donated his archives to my alma mater down in Chapel Hill. Cool!

In my Googling around the subject, I also found a UNC educational resource for school teachers interested in using the Breaking Up Christmas tradition (and Paul's documentary) to get students writing about their own family or cultural traditions.

The Song of the Mountains page for its 2006 Breakin' Up Christmas party mentions Paul's project and includes this enigmatic lyric:

Hoo-ray Jake and Hoo-ray John,
Breakin' Up Christmas all night long.

Way back yonder a long time ago
The old folks danced the do-si-do.

Way down yonder alongside the creek
I seen Santy Claus washin' his feet.

Santa Claus come, done and gone,
Breakin' Up Christmas right along.

I also discovered the CD of Paul's program through a fan of his in Japan, although he or she doesn't seem to police the spam on that page much. Do Breaking Up Christmas and Viagra ads go together? Who knew?

One result of all this impromptu research: I headed up&down to Floyd to see if the CountryStore had a copy of the record. (It did; I bought a couple of copies -- one for me, one for Christmas giving.)

Video footnotes c/o YouTube: Two great versions of the tune (you'll have to wait a minute for the video on the second one... from the upper Appalachians around Ithaca)

(I first heard the Horse Flies at that same Pinewoods summer camp I met Paul! Time sure flies, and the Web pulls it together... web... flies... Horse Flies... must be a thread there.)

More update: House parties, jam sessions, folk music, public radio, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Blip.tv, make an interesting cross-section of old and new media "social networking." The PRX organization I discovered in my online travels this week is another manifestation... and it has it's own online video item to explain what it's all about. Enjoy:

Online sales: Time travel department

2009-12-04T13:53:00.004-05:00

OK, so the UK TV series Doctor Who is about time travel, but charging such a high price for a USED copy of next year's calendar is ridiculous...

See if the price has changed

When will I have time to Wave?

2009-11-28T00:47:00.008-05:00

Google Wave, that is. This semester has gone by too fast, but I now have an address on Google's still-in-beta "by invitation" collaborative/conversation system. I'm giving it a quick look, so that I can at least wave it at my students before the semester ends.

I was surprised to see how many public Wave discussions related to newspapers I found, once I'd figured out how to search for such things. See this L.A. Times article, How Google Wave could transform journalism, and other links below.

Wave is part e-mail, Wiki, chat, file-sharing and bulletin board. Once you're in, you can search for public Waves (ripples? currents? tides?) such as the daily ones the Chicago RedEye is running. I joined a Wave discussion of ideas for college media projects, which I'll share with Radford students as I get them invited. It already had a few dozen contributors.

Just after my invitation arrived (thanks to Mich Sineath at AEJMC), I stumbled on this article, which suggests that not having a ready-built community to wave with is a common complaint: What Users Like/Dislike About Google Wave along with this, Why Google Wave sucks, and why you will use it anyway

However, there are already 30 people in my GMail "contact" list with Wave accounts. On the other hand, I could say "only 30," since my contact list has more than 1,000 e-mail addresses. I wonder how many of them are in the same boat I'm in: "Intriguing new tool, but no time to use it right now."

My Wave account gives me eight invitations to send, and I'll divide them evenly between students and faculty. I'll seed some invites in my Web production classes next week and next semester, chain-letter style (invite one student, who can invite another, etc.), and do the same with our school website committee, then see if we can use it for a virtual meetings. I'm also intrigued by a plug-in called Bloggy that lets you post a conversation from Wave to a blog like this one... but I'll save that for later.

"Bloggy"? I see there are also "Embeddy," "Tweety" and "Trendy."

I wonder if someone has created a "Cutesy," but that might be redundant.

Here's the first batch of Wave links from my bookmark list:

How Google Wave is Changing the News
Chicago RedEye does daily waves
LA Times: How Google Wave could transform journalism
Google Wave... journalistic tool?
9 Ways to Use Google Wave (in education)
NYTimes Bits Blog tags for Google Wave
Top 6 Game-Changing Features, Complete Guide and More (Mashable)
Wave gadgets tutorial
Tutorial (10 videos) at Butterscotch.com
Google's Long Video (80 minutes?!) about Wave
Google's shorter video on ways to use Wave

Happy Thanksgiving!

2009-11-25T11:42:00.001-05:00

... with thanks to Mrs. G's family archive for putting this on YouTube, including clips from the movie... Should be a wonderful aid to digestion tomorrow.

http://www.youtube.com/v/b8DtpdXZi0M&hl=en_US

Pickin,' grinnin' and politickin' in Floyd, Va.

2009-10-31T13:27:00.000-04:00

Pickin,' grinnin' and politickin' | Blue Ridge Muse

So Virginia is losing a harmonica-playing governor to the Democratic National Committee? Excellent pictures by Doug Thompson, but no audio... Sorry I missed another Friday night at the Country Store in Floyd.

I can't help wondering whether the Democratic tune was the old sea chantey, "Donkey Riding."

More likely candidates for an old-time fiddle-and-banjo jam might be "Flop Eared Mule," "Kickin' Mule" or "Whoa, Mule, Get Up in the Alley," which really is a harmonica favorite of mine... Alas, the only full-length mp3 I've found online does it on banjo.

(This item marks a transition in the kind of content I'll be posting in this blog. I'll be doing my more serious and school-related posting at http://stepno.wordpress.com for now, with items more specifically about newspaper journalism at http://aejmc.net/news )

New AEJMC Newspaper Division Blog

2009-10-14T14:50:00.002-04:00

I have yet another blog... this time with a co-editor, Bill Broun of East Stroudsburg University.

It's AEJMC Newspaper Division Blog at http://aejmc.net/news

For a half-dozen years I've posted all my blog items related to "newspapers" to a special-category blog section for members of the newspaper interest group ("division") of the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication, along with taking care of the group's home page, http://aejmc.net/newspaper

Using blog categories as separate sites was something my old blog software, Radio Userland did automatically, but Userland is ending its blog hosting in a couple of months. So I figured it was time to switch to Blogger or WordPress.

Bill was already familiar with WordPress, and it was already conveniently installed on the http://aejmc.net server that houses our division home page. Randy Reddick from Texas Tech maintains the server, and gave us a hand with a "theme" for the site.

The division blog and home pages have separate addresses, but also have prominent cross-reference links. I've also created an archive of my old AEJMC Newspaper-related blog posts.

LIFE magazine archives now searchable with Google Books

2009-09-27T12:21:00.002-04:00

Not only was there life before television, before television -- and well into the TV era -- there was LIFE, the magazine.

With great photographers and weekly deadlines, it made a visual record of the 20th century, from Vol. 1, No. 1, Nov 23, 1936 (96 pages of text and pictures, mostly pictures).

Now it's all online and searchable with Google, up to the last of the regular weekly editions, Dec. 29, 1972's "The Year in Pictures" issue. You can select by date and cover or search by keyword.

Try it: LIFE - Google Books

Click "Search all issues" in the left column, or "Browse all issues" to flip through those memorable covers.

Search for photographers: Margaret Bourke-White shot the first cover; or try Robert Capa, W. Eugene Smith, Henri Cartier-Bresson or any other famous photojournalist whose name you remember. They're probably there.

Search for 20th century events -- wars, elections, outbreaks of peace...

Search for celebrities. Life liked initials: FDR, JFK, LBJ, MLK. For some, first names will do: Elvis (it'll find Presley, not Costello), Marilyn, Liz, Liza, Judy, Satchmo. Or try Hepburn (for both Audrey and Katharine in one click), Sinatra, Crosby, the Beatles, or Woodstock (add 1969 to narrow the search, or just go to the special edition).

If you haven't used Google's magazine search, that's probably because it's hidden in the "book search" section. For the ability to search by date as well as keywords and magazine titles:

Go to: http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search
Click "Magazines" on the "Content" line.
Put a magazine title in the "Title" field (even though it says "Return books with the title...")
Enter your keywords and dates.
And, if you're like me, say goodbye to a Sunday afternoon.

From Google's front blurb for LIFE:

"LIFE Magazine is the treasured photographic magazine which chronicled the 20th Century. It now lives on at LIFE.com, the largest, most amazing collection of professional photography on the internet. Users can browse, search and view photos of today’s people and events. They have free access to share, print and post images for personal use."

Elsewhere:

For just the photos, without the context, see Google image search and the archive at http://www.life.com/
For a history of the magazine and its competitor LOOK, see this article at magazines.things-and-other-stuff.com, one of many sites for old magazine collectors.

Meanwhile, if you're looking for something NEW in the world of magazines, read this post by Rex Hammock: That Strange Light you’re seeing is the future of magazines -- and add both Rex and Derek Powazek to your blogger-bookmark list.

Is it too late for the Internet to melt our brains? | Salon Books

2009-09-26T13:29:00.001-04:00

The author of a new book, A Better Pencil, says the threat of brain-melting goes farther back than Hulu, the Internet or television.

Dennis Baron, a professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, discusses culture-shifting technology in an interview with Salon Books, aptly titled Is the Internet melting our brains?

"So, what I'm trying to do is put the computer revolution into historical context to see how it fits with previous innovations in communication like pencils, like the printing press, like the clay tablet, like writing itself. A new communication technology does what old technology was able to do – sometimes better, sometimes in a little different way -- and I'm looking at how we make sense of all of this."

Salon's Vincent Rossmeier:

"Baron believes that social networking sites, blogs and the Internet are actually making us better writers and improving our ability to reach out to our fellow man. 'A Better Pencil' is both a defense of the digital revolution and a keen examination of how technology both improves and complicates our lives."

Too many blogs, but a gonzo idea...

2009-09-19T13:00:00.006-04:00

For a possible new blog, I came up with a first post, mirrored below, that I thought might prompt some discussion. Comment here or there, either is OK. (For visitors from other Twitter flocks, AEJMC is the Association for Education in Journallism & Mass Communication.)

Event-design as Rorschach test... Am I the only one who mistook the jagged white Rocky Mountain profile ranging through next year's AEJMC Convention logo for a hint that the organization is fracturing? Or took it for an optimistic graph of media industries' ups and downs, showing a slight upturn on the right? On second thought, the line looks exciting, dangerous and cracked, which reminds me of someone...

Getting a crowd of journalism educators together in Hunter Thompson territory in August could be a lot of fun. I hope I can attend... (I hope anyone can attend, given the state of academic travel budgets, if my own institution is any indicator.)

Thinking of Hunter inspired a rewrite of this post and gave me a panel discussion idea for the event:

"Going Gonzo: From Uncle Duke to Johnny Depp, how do journalism faculty and today's students deal with Hunter S. Thompson's legacy?"

He's in my students' textbook, on a page headed, Journalism heroes, legends and folklore. He's relevant to bloggers and skeptics, rebels and iconoclasts, lefties -- and libertarian lovers of recreational firearms.

So let's make that a discussion question for any journalism educators who see this post: How DO you treat Hunter Thompson in your classes? Is he in the textbook you use? (In my case, it's a "yes" for Tim Harrower's Inside Reporting.) Is he discussed in writing classes? In magazine classes? Reporting classes? History classes? Ethics classes? Do students read him? What do they think?

Background: This paragraph was at the top of this post before the link to it slipped into the Twittersphere, referring to the part above. Rather than be accused of "burying the lead," I've turned things around.

About having multiple blogs. My old Radio Userland blog had an interesting feature: I could tag items with "category" names that actually became separate blogs. I used that to create a subset of my blog posts so that I could link some of them to the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication newspaper division's website, which I've been editing for a few years. I even had evidence that someone read it once or twice.

Now I've been wondering whether to use Blogger or WordPress to recreate that blog as a separate entity, possibly as a more formal adjunct to the Newspaper Division site, which I never seem to get around to updating in a timely fashion.

Among other things, I haven't been able to attend the last few AEJMC conventions, which makes it difficult to spread news about the organization. So here's an experiment: I'm going to point the division officers to a trial site or two and see what they think. With WordPress, I might be able to enlist a co-author or two. Here's the prototype, with a question about Hunter S. Thompson.

Old media to new, we're all old dogs trying to learn new tricks

2009-09-06T15:32:00.006-04:00

I've belatedly discovered Jim Gaines' blog. He's a former managing editor of People, Time and Life magazines, now editor of FLYP (flypmedia.com), which he calls "the first true multimedia publication online." I'll be watching both, and encouraging my students to do the same.

Reading back through his blog posts, this passage caught my eye... I should put it on my office door with a "me too" at the end.

I am the old guy working hard to learn everything, from everyone. I was lucky to leave print when I did, but I take no pleasure in watching the fall of “dead tree” media.

That item is headlined Eyes Wide Shut, but the one that got me reading his stuff in the first place is the latest The Story Is Dead. Long Live the Story, where he observes that "The story is not dead, it's just suffering..."

"The reason is that publishers, journalists and other story tellers have been slow to adapt to a digital world with lots of newfangled pens and pencils, including audio, video, full-motion infographics, Flash animation, various forms of interactivity—and, of course, words, the better the better.
"Some of us have confused the availability of new tools with the need for a new theory of knowledge. To be sure, our moment is revolutionary, and the media disruption we are experiencing now will have revolutionary outcomes. But the story in this revolution is like the axe in the transition from stone to bronze: We still used axes. The edge just got a lot sharper."

His post is partly a response to one by Vin Crosbie, someone I've known for years, and I don't think he was declaring the death of storytelling... but many a good conversation has started with some kind of miscommunication or misreading, especially online where we tend to skim and miss some nuances.

If I read them correctly, Vin was arguing that "stories" aren't the only (or best) way online media can convey some of the things that "local news" sites and newspapers publish in newspaper-story form... while Jim is arguing that storytellers should embrace new media and learn to use them well. I don't think those two ideas conflict.

In fact, putting the two side by side makes me want to go dust off Mitchell Stephens' book, "The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word," and also go search the Web for any more-recent reflections he's had on the state of storytelling. But not this afternoon.

Footnote: For students following my advice to look at FLYP; after you form your own opinions, also look at Is FLYP the Future? and Multimedia Magazine Finds New Ways... and if you're ready to start learning multimedia reporting tools yourself, download a copy of Mindy McAdams' Reporter's Guide to Multimedia Proficiency. It's free, all 42 printable pages, but you don't have to print them -- the links in the PDF document work from with Preview or Adobe Reader.

Journalism students across the globe share a reporting project

2009-09-05T17:50:00.002-04:00

This looks very interesting... An online discussion among journalism students has produced a road map for a "global collaborative reporting project."

The timely topic is health, with sub-topics for feature writers, beginning reporters, "data miners" and investigative reporters.

Suzanne Yada at at San Jose State University has this page about the project: Journalism students across the globe, here is your reporting assignment.

Sarah Jackson at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in British Columbia has this: Eye to eye: #Collegejourn crew is planning a global collaborative journalism project

Josh Halliday at the University of Sunderland (UK) posted the plans to the Online Journalism Blog: The CollegeJourn global reporting project.

That "#Collegejourn" they mention is a Twitter "hashtag," the key to an online discussion conducted via Twitter.

Some participants also will be using the UK site Help Me Investigate, which I haven't had time to investigate myself. (It's partly the work of Paul Bradshaw, online journalism prof at Birmingham City University and publisher of that Online Journalism Blog mentioned above.)

Maybe between h1n1 flu (my school just had its first case) and the U.S. health insurance debate, enough journalism students have become health-issue conscious and will take up the challenge to come up with school newspaper and school website stories, class projects... or maybe to get something published in the off-campus media.

Coincidentally, there's a free 60-minute webinar Wednesday (Sept. 9) on Health Reform Coverage: The Key Issues with Trudy Lieberman, contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review; Kay Lazar of The Boston Globe; Karen Tumulty of TIME; and Robert Laszewski of Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review. Mike Hoyt, editor of CJR, will moderate. Register in advance at the link above. The webinar is also accepting early questions.

Here are a few other places students might browse for health-reporting inspiration:

A 2003 issue of Nieman Reports on Medical Reporting
The Association of Health Care Journalists, and its blog.
The UNC Chapel Hill (my alma mater) master's program in medical journalism.
A Journal of the American Medical Association article about Medical Journalism and Public Awareness.
The Journal of Health Communication at George Washington U (more academic research on public health publicity, but could have some story leads).

100 Best Blogs for Journalism Students??

2009-09-04T11:23:00.003-04:00

Just a little bit of critical thinking will help journalism students identify the flaws in this list of the 100 Best Blogs for Journalism Students.

Here are my top 10 clues:

10. It misspells the name of #14 Harvard's Nieman Foundation and Nieman Journalism Lab. (Remember "i before e..."?)

9. It identifies the #12 Columbia Journalism Review as a blog in the "educators" category, when it's a leading magazine in the field.

8. The site is entirely silent about its ranking methodology. Stacking a bunch of categories, starting with "general" and "educators," suggests that numerical rank isn't really the point. And UK journalism blogs are omitted. (See this UK list.)

7. There is no contact information to respond to the creator of the list.
The "reply" area at the bottom of the list says you must be logged in to comment, but offers no way to log in.

6. Descriptions of the sites are very thin, often just the keywords from a site's self-description (including mine).

5. The name of the blog is "Learn-gasm." How serious can you take that?

4. The list does not include a link to this page, at either http://www.stepno.com/blog or http://boblog.blogspot.com , which has been my main blog for the past year.

3. The list also does not include a link to http://www.stepno.com/oldblog or http://couranteer.com, the archive of my old blog posts, whose original server is being discontinued later this year.

2. The list does link to that old blog of mine (#10), on its soon to be discontinued server.

1. Last but not least, it lists my blog (that old one) in the world's top 10 blogs for journalism students! Gotta be something wrong there.

Actually, the list of 100 does include a lot of blogs that journalism students should know about, even mine. I'm happy to be in such good company, but can't imagine how I wound up above most of them (including those Harvard and Columbia sites, Mindy McAdams, Jeff Jarvis at CUNY, Jay Rosen at NYU, and many more.

Here's an idea: Take the numbers off the list, replace them with bullets, and run some program to randomize the order! (But, in my case, if this essay doesn't get me bumped off the list entirely, please use my current address or its shortcut, http://stepno.com/blog, not the one that will evaporate in December. )

Picking the best in online journalism

2009-08-31T16:09:00.001-04:00

Here are the finalists for the 2009 Online Journalism Awards by the Online News Association.

Close to 100 sites are on the finalist list under dozens of award categories, from major news organization sites (bbcnews.com, nytimes.com, Wired.com, washingtonpost.com) to individual stories and multimedia presentations, all organized by topic and size.

Candidates for the Knight Award for Public Service include one site I've blogged about before, The Chauncey Bailey Project, named for -- and continuing the work of -- a former newsroom colleague of mine who was murdered while on the job in Oakland, Calif.

Other public service nominees are Michael J. Berens and Ken Armstrong at The Seattle Times, for Culture of Resistance, The Toronto Star, for Crime and Punishment, and The Wisconsin State Journal for Down to a Whisper: State's Native Languages Threatened with Loss.

ONA says many of the finalists are "pushing the envelope of innovation in digital storytelling and information sharing."

Student online journalism projects up for awards are:

Small Team

Joy Lewis, Western Kentucky University, Sister Wife
Lisa Pickoff-White, University of California, Berkeley, It Happens at Midnight

Large Team

University of Miami School of Communication, Special Olympics Live
NYCity News Service/City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, Election 2008: A Date with History
UNC-Chapel Hill, Andaman Rising
Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, South Africa: At the Crossroads of Hate and Hope

The winners will be announced at the 2009 ONA Conference and Online Journalism Awards Banquet on Oct. 3, at the Hilton San Francisco. The organization's partner in the awards is the School of Communication at the University of Miami.

More information about the awards, judging and organizations is available in the ONA press release.

Maybe I need a new look, with fewer words

2009-08-27T19:57:00.003-04:00

My home page has grown and grown since its early incarnations at UNC and Mindspring. I really should break it into a less verbose, multi-page, standards compliant, CSS supported, thoroughly modern website. But it works as-is, even on my Palm TX and my OLPC XO, and there are so many other things to do... including teaching a couple batches of students to do a better job of staying up to date.

But I did try pumping all that text into Wordle to see what would happen, as a "cool Web 2.0 tools" demo for my class. The result isn't bad as a self-portrait, but I think it needs more music and dancing. Kinda like my life.

Are you a Web designer? Sure.

2009-08-26T11:00:00.002-04:00

Just in time for my fall course on Web design, author, Peachpit book-publishing company blogger and Web designer Jason Cranford Teague has a nice overview of the state of site-building today, under the title "Everyone is a Web Designer."

He lists skills Web designers do and don't need today, differences between being a "Web designer" and a "professional Web developer," and the need for designers to "understand what a developer does and how they are doing it."

Something similar is going on at online newspapers and related forms of journalism: Depending on the size of the organization, one person doesn't always have to do everything. But team members need to know each other's abilities, responsibilities and needs. Some are Web designers, Web developers, database-savvy journalists, "backpack journalists" with multimedia skills, or editors responsible for quality control and pulling it all together.

Speaking of backpack journalism, here's an online example of what a couple of "text-oriented" journalists accomplished in their first day using an inexpensive audio recorder and digital camera, a free audio-editing program (Audacity) and an inexpensive slideshow-creation program (Soundslides). Their (ok, our) training was part of a Freedom Forum Diversity Institute "bootcamp" earlier this month.

Also just in time for my new Web design course, I stumbled on a Ze Frank video from a few years ago that you might call "a meditation on contemporary Web aesthetics." I call it "don't be ugly."

Online college media sites and resources

2009-08-22T12:53:00.006-04:00

With a new semester rapidly approaching, here are a few links I hope the editors of student media websites already have on their bookmark lists. A few are old friends; the others are places I'm just starting to explore. I may add a few more over the next week. Quoted comments are from the sites themselves:

Society of Professional Journalists

"The Society of Professional Journalists is the nation’s most broad-based journalism organization, dedicated to encouraging the free practice of journalism and stimulating high standards of ethical behavior." (Annual convention coming up Aug. 27-30 in Indianapolis. Also see its Student Resources page.)

Innovation in College Media

"The Center for Innovation in College Media is a non-profit think-tank that was created to help college student media adapt and flourish in the new media environment." (Also see this MediaShift column by founder Bryan Murley.)

Journalism 2.0

"Mark Briggs coined the term Journalism 2.0 in 2005 when he was invited to write a book about digital literacy for journalists based on a training program he had created at The News Tribune in Tacoma, Wash. Mark is currently working on an updated version of the book, to be published by CQPress in fall 2009." (The original is still online here.)

ReportingOn

"A professional reporting community for journalists... helps journalists of all stripes find peers with experience dealing with a particular topic, story or source."

Collaborative Journalism | Publish2

"Link Journalism: Bring the best of the web to your readers. Complement your reporting with links to relevant and interesting content." (Newest feature: Social Journalism.)

CoPress

"CoPress empowers student newsrooms to hack the future of journalism." It has a blog, forum and wiki as well as selling hosting service to college newspapers.

Associate Collegiate Press

"ACP is the oldest and largest national membership organization for college student journalists. Since 1921, we've offered our members resources to help their publications - newspapers, yearbooks, magazines, broadcast programs, and online publications - improve."

Education Writers Association

"The Education Writers Association is the professional organization of education reporters and editors. We support the ongoing professional development of journalists as part of our mission to help improve the quality of education reporting in the United States." (That's a link to its higher education resource page; the group also offers $30 memberships for students. Faculty have to pay $100!)

HigherEd Watch

"Analysis, reporting and commentary on the world of higher education, with a focus on college access, affordability, and quality." (A blog at the New America Foundation.)

The Chronicle of Higher Education

"the No. 1 source of news, information, and jobs for college and university faculty members and administrators. Based in Washington, D.C., The Chronicle has more than 70 full-time writers and editors, as well as 17 foreign correspondents around the world." (Long-standing place where professors look for jobs. Some content is free with registration, some for paid subscribers only.)

Inside Higher Ed

"Inside Higher Ed is the online source for news, opinion and jobs for all of higher education. Whether you're an adjunct or a vice president, a grad student or an eminence grise, we've got what you need to thrive in your job or find a better one..." (All free... challenging the Chronicle since 2004, without killing trees.)

Global Student Journalists

"...an online meeting place for student journalists from around the world. Students currently enrolled in a recognized post-secondary Journalism program, anywhere in the world, can create a profile and begin connecting with other student journalists. Members can network, share ideas, upload projects and receive feedback on their work." (New, started by journalism students in Canada.)

... and, last only because I've mentioned Mindy's RGMP recently:

Teaching Online Journalism

"Notes from the classroom and observations about today's practice of journalism online," by Mindy McAdams, including her Reporter's Guide to Multimedia Proficiency (RGMP).

Watchdog leaves Hartford Courant, growling

2009-08-19T00:32:00.001-04:00

One of the first reporters I worked with has just landed in The New York Times, but it's not good news. The headline is Hartford Courant Lays Off Consumer Columnist, and the story starts like this:

"The Hartford Courant and its former consumer columnist, George Gombossy, agree on one thing: that Mr. Gombossy was laid off this month. But was it because he would not stop unfavorable articles about advertisers, or because his job was simply eliminated?"

George became the Courant's Willimantic bureau chief 40 years ago this summer, the same week that I became "the other guy in the Willimantic bureau." I went on to be a bureau chief, too, and made it to education editor before leaving the paper to go into education full-time, one way or another. George did a lot more at the Courant -- went on to be its business editor for a dozen years, among other things.

He has held out through two corporate takeovers (Times Mirror, then Tribune Corp.) numerous buyouts, layoffs and shrinkage at "the nation's oldest newspaper in continuous publication." The most recent cutbacks included bringing the paper and a Tribune TV station under the same management.

These days, most readers know George as the Courant's consumer watchdog. It looks like he's done good work following-up reader complaints, keeping a good relationship with the state's attorney general, exposing faulty products and questionable business practices, and saving people some money.

Now he's started his own blog as CTwatchdog.com and is talking about making it a nonprofit operation, and about suing the paper, the more civilized equivalent of "going to the mattresses," in the Corleone family. He's quoted by the Associated Press as saying new managers are "destroying the Courant instead of saving it" and that he hopes to stop them.

In a more mundane sense, George says mattresses played a part in his leaving the Courant. Here's the AP version: Hartford Courant columnist alleges his departure tied to critical column about advertiser.

The advertiser in question was a big mattress store, the kind that places big ads in newspapers and television, and sometimes draws consumer complaints about bedbug infestations.

The Courant's memos about George's departure are on his blog, headlined "Courant Spin on Watchdog departure."

Along with his remaining Watchdog columns on courant.com, you'll find "The Watchdog's Consumer Resource List," which I'd recommend to journalism students interested in following in watchdog pawprints, looking for local equivalents to the Connecticut offices on his list.

Finally, if you're itching to find out more about bedbugs and mattresses, the "Is this really a new mattress?" question has been the subject of consumer complaints and news investigations for more than a dozen years. A Times story a few years ago pointed out that even new mattresses from reputable stores can pick up bedbugs if they spend a day in a delivery truck carrying away other customers' old mattresses... Those are not the kind you'd want to "go to."

Quite a Rugmap: Do it yourself multimedia journalism education

2009-08-05T21:20:00.003-04:00

For her online Reporter’s Guide to Multimedia Proficiency, University of Florida journalism professor of Web wizardry Mindy McAdams has spent six months compiling a terrific collection of links, lessons and sage advice for would-be multimedia reporters and producers.

(She abbreviates the heading "RGMP" at the top of each page, which I either read as "RCMP" and expect the Mounties, or want to pronounce "rugmap." hence the odd headline on this item. Come to think of it, we've been weaving the World Wide Web so long that we might call it a World Wide Rug.)

The 15 RGMP pages are part of her Teaching Online Journalism blog, where the concluding episode landed today: RGMP 15: Maintain and update your skills.

A key quote:

"... let go of your self-defeating ideas about how you are 'not a computer person,' or how 'computers don't like me.' These attitudes are killing you and your future in journalism."

As she mentions, many well-known practitioners and teachers of online journalism skills have learned how to do what they do on their own, or informally -- from other Web sites, online tutorials and workshops. Even today, when most journalism programs have courses in digital media, every formal college class has to stop somewhere -- but the technology keeps going.

Part of the agenda for digital media students has to be coping with change -- new technologies, new versions of old ones, and new stories to tell. With all of the new things Flashing and Twittering and Huluing around, Mindy makes an especially good point about setting priorities, weighing what to learn. She suggests asking yourself these questions about that shiny new thing:

What will you use it for?
How well does it fit with your other skill sets?
And above all — is it a skill that is going to be relevant for a long time?

The topics discussed on her 15 RGMP posts are the basics of multimedia -- Web publishing (with a blog), digital audio editing and publishing (with a podcast), photography and basic photo editing, video and low-cost video editing, and putting it all together to tell stories. Take a look, starting at the beginning:

RGMP 1: Read blogs and use RSS

For the list of all 15, see the last episode:

RGMP 15: Maintain and update your skills.

Guiding journalists into social networking

2009-08-03T13:41:00.001-04:00

The Journalist's Guide to Facebook is the latest in a series of compilations about online social networking for journalists at the "Social Media Guide" website called http://mashable.com.

Among the others (also listed at the end of the Facebook article) are:

Speaking of online journalism, congratulations to the Roanoke Times (http://roanoke.com) for being cited by the Associated Press Managing Editors Awards in the "convergence" category for its interactive tour of new $66 million Taubman Museum of Art. The announcement is here on page 2 of the award story. (Roanoke Times editor Carole Tarrant's name is at the top of that page because she was a judge in another category of the competition, listed on the previous page.)

Life with newspapers... and without

2009-08-01T17:40:00.003-04:00

Technology PR and marketing consultant and blogger Renee Blodgett still dreams about newspapers, and has written an essay about their role -- in England, at least -- in defining social class and community and meeting other needs: Down the avenue: Who Shot the Paperboy?

Her column, in turn, inspired Chris O'Brien to write a piece encouraging news organizations to focus on local community via the Web and somehow reinvent enough of a local marketplace to support multi-platform professional newsrooms, "as part of local news ecosystem": How Passion for Newspapers Points to a Way Forward.

Since I taught a media history class last semester, those two blog items reminded me of something Archive.org has preserved online. For a look at newspaper audience dedication the Web -- and before TV -- see what happened when New York delivery drivers went on strike 54 years ago:
Internet Archive: 17 Days: The Story of Newspaper History in the Making.

Do watch it... You'll be struck (no pun intended) by not only how many people were willing to line up around the block for a paper during the truckers' strike, but how many papers there were, each with its dedicated audience, much like the London scene Renee describes. That strike, during the last summer of World War II, inspired some serious studies of the audience view of a newspaper's varied "uses and gratifications" -- most of which are met by many different media today.

The 1945 model was still good and strong 20 or so years later when I delivered the Daily Hampshire Gazette around the edges of the Smith College campus. Now I live in an even smaller college town, where the local twice-weekly paper has dropped its price to 25 cents and its reporting staff appears to be one person. The bigger regional paper doesn't seem to give any reporter time to get to know the community. (There have been four in the two years I've lived here.)

Historically, what has been important to readers? Using the headline examples from Renee's London paper for examples, even the 1945 New York crowd was interested in news-you-can-use like "Quest for the perfect bottom," and in being entertained by crime-story sensationalism like "Bright City Star in Death Plunge." Those probably were all higher on the audience agenda than investigative reporting or watchdog coverage of government and big business. So were the "hatched, matched and dispatched" stuff of community (births, weddings, obituaries), the local police blotter and court coverage, along with local help-wanted ads, apt-to-let ads and car-for-sale ads.

Putting that all in one dead-tree package with national and world news sold papers, and it sold local display ads, enough to pay the salaries of a large enough staff to do more civic-minded, public-service investigation, fact-gathering and reporting -- if the publisher was so inclined.

We still have all the pieces... some being taken by blogs, TV (online or off), CraigsList, Amazon, Google, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter... but figuring out where to put the rest, and how to pay for it, is quite a puzzle, especially on a local and regional level.

NPR is often mentioned as a model of non-profit funding that might be adapted by local news websites and citizen journalism projects. (The New Haven Independent is still my favorite.) It will be interesting to see what NPR itself accomplishes with its new www.localnewsinitiative.org

Workaround for archiving my "Other Journalism" blog

2009-07-28T16:38:00.004-04:00

As discussed at Workaround for lack of sftp in Radio Userland

This is more technical than most things I post here, but it may help some folks who find themselves in a similar situation.

I've been using another blogging software, Radio Userland, for seven years, but the company's "radio.weblogs.com" hosting service and its software updates are both being discontinued in December. Rather than have seven years' work disappear into the cosmic bitbucket, I decided to archive the site as http://stepno.com/oldblog

(http://stepno.com/blog is a shortcut to this current blog -- and in the future will remain a shortcut to whatever blogging site I'm using most.)

As mentioned below, none of this would have been possible without help from Richard Silverman, the keeper of the server that hosts my stepno.com pages.

I tried to post this whole description in Userland's support forum, but either a momentary Web glitch or a length-limitation gave me an error message... so I posted a shorter message and linked it here.

The details:

If someone snuck an sftp function into Radio Userland and I never found it, don't tell me... It would have saved me the day's work described here.

Radio Userland was a pioneer blogging package, but has become old-fashioned in a few ways, most notably its lack of support for secure file-transfer with SSH or SFTP. Meanwhile, my personal Web domain's sysadmin hasn't allowed plain FTP on our server.

That's perfectly understandable: He's a card-carrying security expert who has written two books on the subject (http://snailbook.com for one).

So I've used Userland's radio.weblogs.com hosting all these years. After all, it was already included in the annual $40 license for the software -- quite a bargain by any standard.

Now, with Radio apparently headed off the air for good, I wanted to at least archive my old posts for future reference. I do link to some of them now and then. This post is to share the results.

Basically, I found a way to create a copy of the rendered site on my own machine, zip it up, SFTP the .zip file to the server, and unzip it there. I used a Mac; I assume you can do something similar with a PC. Most of these details will make sense only to other users of Radio Userland with the program open in a browser window. (Good bye to the rest of you reading.)

In Radio, I edited the preferences within the blog to turn off commenting, since I won't have a comment engine attached to the archival copy. I also edited the main template to identify the site as "2002-2009 blog page archive." The rest of the instructions below use the Radio page "Preferences > Basic Preferences >
FTP option"

In the Mac's System Preferences for Sharing, I turned on File Sharing and set its Options to use FTP. (That's the part that must be different under Windows.)

Then I followed these steps:

1. I set Radio to ftp to the localhost Server "127.0.0.1" with a folder Path of "/users/bob/oldblog/" on my Mac. (If I remember correctly, Radio created that folder for me when the process began.) I identified the eventual destination URL as "http://www.stepno.com/oldblog/" -- clicked "Submit" to save those preferences, then (to be on the safe side) quit and restarted Radio to make sure the setting took...

2. From the Radio menu, chose "Publish/Entire Website" -- which took a long time. (I left home while it worked.)

The resulting collection of nested files looked complete.

3. After some trial-and-error, I used BareBones' free editor TextWrangler's multifile global search and replace to change all the embedded explicit href links within the blog, changing them from http://radio.weblogs.com/0106327/ to http://www.stepno.com/oldblog/

I also used a series of global searches to correct a glitch that left out the slash between ...oldblog/ and subdirectory names like .../oldblog/stories/... or .../oldblog/categories/... (Probably my fault: I left out the slash at the end of ".../oldblog/ in Radio's "Path" setting above.)

(Aside: I bought the same company's more powerful BBEdit for my other Mac, but just had TextWrangler on this laptop and was pleasantly surprised to find the full search-and-replace command.)

4. I used the Mac's built in archive command to turn the whole file structure into a zip file.

5. Then I used (also free) FileZilla to upload oldblog.zip to our Linux server,

6. I used the Mac's Terminal and SSH to log into the server and unzip the file, then..

7. Returned to FileZilla to set world-readable privileges through all those folders. (The Unix equivalent, I guess, would be a recursive "chmod" command.) In FileZilla you Right-click the main folder's name to get to the privilege-setting menu.

FileZilla took a very long time -- more than an hour! -- to work its way through the site, since it sets each individual file. A more experienced Unix commandline user probably has a faster way, but I had bothered Richard enough for one day.

In fact, there may be ten easier ways to do ALL of this, but for a not-ubergeek, my approach seems to have worked.

Meanwhile, I've already had this Blogger blog for years, so I'm using that (with an alias of http://stepno.com/blog). At some point I may install WordPress on my server at that address. I may even explore the arcane rituals involved in exporting the Radio blog to a MoveableType file, then importing it to WordPress. There are instructions for those things floating around the Web, thanks to other former Radio Userland users. But I've had enough geek-type summer fun for now.

Stop in and tell me if you see anything missing!

http://stepno.com/oldblog

formerly (and until December) http://radio.weblogs.com/0106327/

They is coming! They is coming! Or is they?

2009-07-27T14:27:00.001-04:00

"The case of the singular 'they'" sounds like a Sherlock Holmes story.

After discussions of the same subject on Twitter and CNN, here's some fascinating history of English grammar in The New York Times: On Language - All-Purpose Pronoun.

The authors, subbing for William Safire, are Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman, who once titled a book “Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language.”

"They," they say, was once acceptable as an indefinite singular pronoun.

The surprise: The authors blame an 18th century feminist grammarian for our abandoning a once-acceptable "they" in sentences like, "We don't know the murderer's identity, but they may strike again." The result was years of misleading (and sexist) use of "he" as a synonym for "he or she."

However, O'Conner and Kellerman say it looks like "they" may be on its way back:

"...so many people now use they in the old singular way that dictionaries and usage guides are taking a critical look at the prohibition against it. R. W. Burchfield, editor of The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage, has written that it’s only a matter of time before this practice becomes standard English: 'The process now seems irreversible.'
"Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) already finds the singular they acceptable 'even in literary and formal contexts,' but the Usage Panel of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) isn’t there yet."

If asked about this by [a student] (students), I probably would tell (them) [her or him] to listen to the sentence and make up (their) [his or her] own mind (minds) about "they" -- or consider rewording everything to avoid jarring people whose ears are tuned to one sound or the other.

Goodbye to some books at Bartleby.com

2009-07-24T19:56:00.004-04:00

Alas, some old friends have disappeared from one of my favorite free online reference sites...

The "Welcome to Bartleby.com" page now carries this note:

"Due to financial and usage considerations the reference works licensed from Columbia University Press and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt have been removed as of June 2009."

The word "usage" is ironic: My favorite among the missing items is The Columbia Guide to Standard American English by Kenneth G. Wilson, who I knew first as a wise, frank and good-humored professor at the University of Connecticut. He was vice president when I was a reporter covering the campus, and I just noticed that his career at UConn spanned 38 years, a "school spirit" you don't see often. He passed away in 2003.

Oops, that should be "whom I knew," shouldn't it? I'm mortified.

Fortunately, Wilson's 6,500-entry book about the language is still available as a searchable electronic edition for card-holders at subscribing libraries, including our McConnell Library at Radford.

And Bartleby.com continues to publish other mostly copyright-free, but still useful, resources for students, writers and researchers... as long as they can tolerate pop-up ads (with audio) telling them they have won $1,000 giftcard from a discount retailer. (I didn't see a quick place at Bartleby to look up the Latin "caveat emptor" or Tom Waits' more contemporary line, "The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away.")

Included on the long list of titles are the Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction, the Cambridge History of English and American Literature (18 vols., 1907-21) and The Oxford Shakespeare. Harvard, Cambridge and Oxford -- not bad pedigrees, if you don't mind lurking in the early twentieth century.

For American English, Bartleby still has Strunk's The Elements of Style (1918, not the later edition expanded by E.B. White) and Mencken's The American Language (1921), and for that other kind it has Fowler's The King's English, up-to-date... as of 1908.

Oh, there's also Gray's Anatomy... the book, that is... 20th ed., 1918, where you can look up pictures of body parts they don't show on the television version.

In search of critical optimists

2009-07-17T15:19:00.002-04:00

KSU anthropology professor Mike Wesch reports back from a Personal Democracy Forum at Lincoln Center, borrowing the phrase "critical optimism" to describe the crowd of "amazingly creative and concerned global citizens" he met there -- a pretty good description of Wesch himself, and of Paul Jones at UNC, whose Facebook post pointed me to this video of Wesch's talk. Coincidentally, Wesch starts out talking about the book Amusing Ourselves to Death, which Paul may have assigned to a class I was in a dozen years ago.

Digital Ethnography: Toward a New Future of “Whatever...” (Higher def version of the video at Wesch's own site.)

More of his comments on the Personal Democracy Forum audience:

"They were all continually trying to figure out where we are, where we might be going, and the possible downsides and dangers of new technologies so we can use the new technologies to serve human purposes. In other words, it was my kind of crowd."

What we get from good reporters and critical readers

2009-07-10T11:47:00.002-04:00

In Who Needs the NY Times? We All Do. Still, Jim Sleeper points out what a newspaper can do by supporting excellent reporters, even if the same institution has critics who consider it guilty of a laundry list of sins from stodginess to dishonesty.

To make his case, Sleeper discusses three stories and a column that demonstrate reporters' skills, Times resources and something extra:

"Nina Bernstein's front-pager yesterday blew open this country's scandalous post-9/11 immigration policies..."

"Michael Powell's similarly fine-grained, explosive work on predatory mortgage fraud..."

An example of "grounded moral witness" from "Roger Cohen, who stayed in Iran at great risk thanks to a true journalist's passion and courage..."

An example of journalism as a bearer of "public memory as well as moral witness in Bob Herbert's column about the Vietnam War..."

Because Sleeper wrote his defense of the Times in the Talking Points Memo Cafe forum, there's a thoughtful discussion at the end of his column, and unlike too many online writers, he makes it a conversation. I get the impression that some of the participants didn't follow his advice and go read the Times stories themselves. I'm going to go do that now that I've bookmarked them.

This morning, however, I've been distracted by following links to other articles by Sleeper, a writer and teacher with a long resume, on topics ranging from Thucydides and the value of classical education to George Orwell, Tocqueville and journalism.

I've bookmarked his page of articles on News Media, the Public Sphere and the Phantom Public, surprised and embarrassed that I haven't read his stuff before.

Education 2029 and New Liberal Arts

2009-07-07T15:00:00.000-04:00

Here's a look at post-Google education 20 years from now, by Tim Carmody at Snarkmarket, echoing the way his fellow Snarkers got the media thinking about the post-Google future five years ago in Epic 2015.

Tim's piece is part of a Chronicle of Higher Education conversation, "The Faculty of the Future: Leaner, Meaner, More Innovative, Less Secure," which non-subscribers can read for $10. However, Tim put a no-subscription-required version of his contribution on the Snarkmarket site. It starts like this:

"How is academe different in 2029? Let's begin with the basics: reading, writing, and teaching. If anything, Google is even more important. The 2009 author/publisher settlements that allowed Google to sell full access to its book collections didn't revolutionize books in retail, but subscription sales to institutions did fundamentally alter the way libraries think about their digital and analog collections. Access to comprehensive digital libraries allows teachers at any institution to compile virtual syllabi on the fly, seamlessly integrating readings, assignments, communication, and composition."

Speaking of education and Epic 2015, Robin Sloane and friends have a print/online book out, titled "New Liberal Arts," as mentioned at Snarkmarket. Here's a direct link -- and a chance to get in on the ground floor of an interesting print-first, PDF-later model.

Small sense of deja vu and gratification: I like seeing journalism on a list of liberal arts.

Off to run 'Tell the Truth and Run'

2009-07-05T22:19:00.005-04:00

Will today's students pay attention to a 98-year-old on a July morning when they could be at the beach?

As substitute prof for a summer school "Media & Society" class tomorrow, I get to show, watch and discuss the film George Seldes: Tell the Truth and Run. (George is the 98-year-old, not me. At least he was 98 when interviewed for the film. He lived to be 104.)

I first saw the film in 1997, when Rick Goldsmith presented it at a conference in San Francisco. His work was nominated for an Oscar back then, but although well reviewed, it had a tough fight against story of the Ali-Frazier "Rumble in the Jungle," which took the prize that year.

For this course, Seldes is a more appropriate battler than Ali -- as a journalist, as a media critic, and as self-publisher of his "In Fact" newsletter.

Discussion question: How much did he have in common with some of today's bloggers and citizen journalists?

For students who want to get right to the source, some of Seldes's writings are online at PublicEye and brasscheck.com/seldes, including Ten Tests for a Free Press.

That could be a good segue into another piece of early press criticism, Upton Sinclair's The Brass Check, which is also available online.

And the film quotes I.F. Stone, who called Seldes "the father of the alternative press," which might inspire some of the students to peek at Stone's own online archives.

Here's a bit of the blurb brasscheck.com ran about the documentary, probably from the original press announcement. Students should learn the names...:

"Seldes at age 98 is the centerpiece of the film: remarkably engaging,witty and still impassioned about his ideas and ideals. Ralph Nader, Victor Navasky, Ben Bagdikian, Daniel Ellsberg, Nat Hentoff and Jeff Cohen, among others, provide incisive commentary. Stunning archival footage and over 500 headlines, photographs and articles provide a rich historical backdrop."

Hmm. It just dawned on me that one of the narrators of "Tell the Truth and Run" is back in the news this summer. I wonder if the students will recognize his voice. They're probably too young to remember Lou Grant.

Information overload department:

Is the Entire Press Corrupt?
Facts and Fascism
Lords of the Press
Witness to a Century
You Can't Print That: The Truth Behind the News 1918 to 1928
By way of introducing one of Seldes' themes to the class, I should bring my banjo and sing this song... But I'll be kind and just play Pete Seeger's clip of one verse, then read the more pertinent verse about "Press-titution."

Journalism needs pros, amateurs, devout agnostics

2009-06-30T15:38:00.008-04:00

Ellen Hume, one of my favorite authors and thinkers on media-future issues for almost 15 years, is leaving the Center for Future Civic Media at MIT.

Coincidentally, there's a conference this week at MIT on "The future of news and civic media," and Hume's parting message is full of food for thought: The future of news?. A veteran of both the Wall Street Journal and PBS, Hume says major news organizations are still needed, even while many of today's fine journalists have never set foot inside any mainstream media organization.

Snippets:

"Joshua Micah Marshall is I.F. Stone2.0 (http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com)"
"Twitter is dazzling, as a headline service and a conversation. But I need more than Twitter, YouTube and my Facebook social network to understand this complicated world."

"My bottom line has always been: how can people understand their real choices for shaping their own lives and communities? How can the flow of news actually promote personal and community agency? This is why the future of journalism and civic media are important to me."

"If the best and brightest young folks don’t value agnostic, professional journalism, even a dozen new business models won’t work for long."

"I am waiting for a public relations campaign to argue the virtues of Kovach and Rosenstiel-style journalism (http://www.journalism.org/node/71), combined with a comprehensive news literacy curriculum at all levels, in all countries, that invites people to produce, consume and pay for public service news."

"Fair, important, earth-shaking journalism is actually hard to do. It’s harder than simply repeating what anyone tells you, or selecting the facts that support your own biases. That is what all the fuss is about as newspapers around the country collapse and die."

Read the whole thing.

More about Ellen Hume.

More about the Future of news & civic media conference at MIT.

Summer fun for journalism students and grads

2009-06-25T19:47:00.001-04:00

Mark Luckie has an inspiring list of 30 Things You Should Do This Summer for journalism school grads, most of which involve getting practice with new online journalism tools... and they are perfectly good ideas for students a year or three away from graduation.

Meanwhile, the Society of Professional Journalists has a "Journalist's Toolbox Update," with more than 30 resources for reporters, editors and teachers -- from online social network tools to background articles on swine flu and government contractors in Iraq. Exploring any of those would be a good idea, too...

As Luckie puts it, "You could spend this summer working on your killer tan... or you could use the downtime to get heads up on the thousands of other grads competing for journalism jobs."

I added a footnote to his post, suggesting that many journalism grads would also profit from the less technological activity of reading some really good journalism -- both to experience the writing and to think about how the reporting was done. I'm working on Max Frankel's autobiography, "The Times of My Life, and My Life with The Times," myself. Gay Talese's "The Kingdom and the Power" and David Halberstam's "The Powers that Be" are old favorites for J-school grads who haven't read them yet.

Here are some source lists:

Mitchell Stephens' list of 100 top works of journalism

Pulitzer-winning booklength works of general non-fiction and biography

Pulitzer-winning feature stories, investigative reporting, and more.

Those last Pulitzer examples include stories you can read online. The book-length suggestions, on the other hand, are easier to take to the beach.

Searching & graphing public data using Google

2009-06-24T13:59:00.005-04:00

A new data-visualization feature was added to Google search a couple of months ago, while I wasn't paying attention to anything but end-of-semester work. The system uses the latest official statistics available from government agencies, and Google is soliciting more data.

Luckily my Twitter feed brought a couple of tips about it today. Very cool. Try typing "unemployment rate" or "population" in a Google search window, followed by the name of your city or county. This would be very useful for journalism students, once it works as advertised. (See note below.)

Related posts:

Problem:The click-through enlarged graphs shown in the video work for "population radford va" but when I search for "unemployment rate radford va" the enlarged graph page comes up blank. The same happens with the two searches demonstrated by Google. I posted a note in a Google forum asking whether the unemployment data search is broken... and will update this when I get more info. (Or just follow that link to the forum to see if there's any discussion.)

On the population data search, a left column allows you to add other counties or states to the expanded graph, as shown in the video. Using the same technique with unemployment data would be even more interesting, so I hope they get it working.

Footnote: The search should be "population placename, st" or "unemployment data placename, st" -- if you leave out the word "data" in the unemployment search, or include it in the population search, you don't get the data graph. The comma appears to be optional. Also, in some localities, such as Radford, independent city names work with or without the word "city." County searches also work with or without the word "county." (New York City, however, is not the same kind of thing. Apparently "New York County" is only part one of five in the city -- 1.6 million of its 8.2 million people. See U.S. Census QuickFacts. )

Browsing ideas for Boston's news future

2009-06-19T22:46:00.001-04:00

In August the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication will make Boston the scene of its annual convention.

Newcomers might want to start browsing through these two serious discussions of possible futures for The Boston Globe. Both authors suggest paying more attention to the company's Boston.com Web site.

(If you haven't been following the drama, the Globe is currently owned by The New York Times, which has put it up for sale after rough negotiations with the paper's unions.)

Next steps for the shrinking Globe -- Dan Kennedy
Metamorphosis for the Globe? -- Martin Langeveld

The newspaper's section of the Globe Web site is technically boston.com/bostonglobe.

For more browsing: The Globe's main competition is The Boston Herald. One or both of those articles mention a third daily, a free paper aimed mostly at subway-riders, the Metro.

The city's old-established "alternative" weekly is The Phoenix. When I lived there 10 years ago an alternative-alternative was just getting started, the Weekly Dig, probably a reference to the city's "Big Dig" monumental tunnel-building that was going on at the time.

A risible or banal glut of shibboleths for the feckless?

2009-06-18T15:24:00.008-04:00

If you have accidentally double-clicked on any word in an online New York Times story recently, you've seen a question-mark icon indicating that one more click will get you a definition of the word. That's a huge improvement over the previous version of the "feature," which went straight to the dictionary after that second click, interrupting anyone with a twitchy mouse finger, including a journalism professor trying to highlight a well-turned phrase or tightly-edited lead for class discussion.

But here's another bonus: Now that a good many of those mistaken clicks have been eliminated, the Times is able to compile a list of the words people look up... including some word choices that aren't in the news writing textbooks.

See this fascinating report and discussion of the words that generate the most clicks, thanks to Zachary M. Seward at Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab.

My favorite copy editor, Pam Robinson, at Words at Work, found most of these links, including a "Wordle" map of the terms and a list of reasonably correct definitions, rescued from the depths of Metafilter's discussion thread.

Also see this funny list of bad guesses at what the words mean.

Finally, don't miss the lively discussion at Metafilter, or its great headline: "All the news that's fit to cromulate." (cromulate?)

No word on when the Times might add the click-for-definition feature to the print edition.

Finding time for life and "Life Inc."

2009-06-17T10:57:00.005-04:00

Summer reading: I think it was the Frontline documentary "Merchants of Cool" that first put Douglass Rushkoff's reporting and analysis on my radar. I hope I can make time this summer for his new book, Life Inc: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back. The book is a call for small-scale activism, for local community, for "reconnecting with real people, places, and value."

(Will people will only see the first two words of the title and assume it's about a photo magazine, a breakfast cereal, or a board game?)

Here's a "Merchants of Cool" crossover observation from one of the Life Inc. online chapter excerpts:

"With no other choice available, we grow up partnering with corporations for our very identities. A kid's selection of sneaker brand says more about him than his creative- writing assignments do, and is approached with greater care."

Along with the sample chapters, this is the first book I've noticed using online video previews... (The first one starts with a 15-second burst of tuning-across-the-dial static, which almost convinced me the clip or my Web connection was faulty, but the noise goes away.)

Episodic videos on Vimeo:

Life Inc. Dispatch 01: Crisis as Opportunity from Douglas Rushkoff on Vimeo.

More at http://lifeincorporated.net

A blurb from another of my favorite authors:

“Read this book if you want to understand how the current economic meltdown started 400 years ago, how so much of what you consider to be a natural evolution of daily life was carefully designed to profit a few, and how corporatism has so colonized every part of life that most of us don’t even recognize how our lives and fortunes are channeled and manipulated by it. Rushkoff is going to be attacked as a communist, but that gets his point wrong. Look at his references — he has meticulously documented his argument. I love that Rushkoff isn’t afraid to think big — very big. He took on the media more than a decade ago. Then he took on Judaism. But now he’s chosen a larger target — the corporation.” -- Howard Rheingold - author, Smart Mobs

So, is Rushkoff out to start a movement? I'd say yes, but he says no -- at least from the excerpts I've skimmed -- that the whole point is to work close to home, "reinvesting in local reality"...

"We’d each like to launch a national movement, create the website that teaches the world how to build community from the bottom up, develop the curriculum that saves public schools, or devise the clever antimarketing media campaign that breaks the spell of advertising once and for all... The temptation to save the whole world—and get the credit—comes at the expense of steps we might better take to make our immediate world a more fruitful, engaging, sustainable, and satisfying place."

Distracted by a Web site covering Dixie like...

2009-06-07T17:19:00.004-04:00

Searching for a D-Day story about a World War II foreign correspondent for a history article, I stumbled on something new instead: Like the Dew, a Journal of Southern Culture & Politics launched in March and aiming to live up to the old Atlanta Journal motto, "We cover Dixie like the Dew."

According to the site's "about" page, Like the Dew plans to draw on free-lance contributors to report on news and life in 16 states from Florida to Maryland and Texas to West Virginia. More than 50 contributors are already listed, but the mainstays are founder Keith Graham of Atlanta, who spent more than 25 years at the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, and site designer Lee Leslie, whose background is advertising, marketing and blogging. Between them, they've contributed more than 80 articles. Other contributors include Mike Williams, a former Cox Newspapers foreign correspondent, and Eleanor Ringel Cater, long-time movie critic for the Journal and Constitution.

(While the Dew falls heaviest in Georgia, the site isn't exclusively Atlanta -- I see a story about a Appalachian trail maintenance here in Southwest Virginia, others from Florida and Alabama, one about a Texas graduation, and there are a couple of my former colleagues at the University of Tennessee on the contributor list.)

So what does any of this have to do with my original search for that D-Day reporter? Not much; just some Web serendipity. The hits at LikeTheDew.com weren't the right ones, but they did include two stories that kept me reading, a D-Day landing account in a 1944 letter from Graham's uncle, and "'Evil Reporter Chick' Moni Basu is OK," University of Georgia journalism student Anna Dolianitis's profile of another Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter, a former war correspondent, but from the wrong war for my search.

Basu was one of 73 of the AJC's staff who took a buyout this year, after working as a foreign correspondent in Iraq, among other things. So far, she isn't on the Like the Dew contributor list, but Basu is still in journalism -- and still in Atlanta -- at CNN Wire.

Journalism as a pro-am lifestyle... sometimes with music

2009-06-06T12:05:00.006-04:00

A UK university offers an MA in Social Media, asking & answering: "Is the MA in Social Media for me? If you are a media or cultural studies graduate, have experience in the web, PR, or marketing industries, and want an opportunity to explore the emerging area of social media through scholarly research or practice, then: yes."

Picking up threads from my recent Twitter obsession... Coincidentally, blogger MarketingProfs offers: "Everything I Need to Know About Twitter I Learned in J School" http://bit.ly/2lEzsm

And NYTimes.com blogs out its requests for local neighborhood citizen reporters to go to meetings: http://bit.ly/dxrW8

... with a Twitter boost from blogger & J-school prof Jeff Jarvis:
"NYT to public: 'Be the journalists.' The Local assigns the locals. http://bit.ly/11GNEB "

Maybe J-schools need a new slogan: "It's not a career; it's a lifestyle"?

And one you can combine with your other talents -- in this case, not the usual underground press, but something I considered when I lived in Boston.

At the time, I even had a line or two from this song in mind... "newspapermen meet the most interesting people..." along with this picture from one of my favorite LP jackets.

New slogan for banjo heads -- or laptop lids? -- "This machine surrounds unemployment and forces it to surrender."

unTimely product launch?

2009-06-04T20:46:00.008-04:00

As a long-time Palm Pilot, Palm Treo and Palm TX user who has resisted getting an iPhone, I think the new Time magazine cover was a very rude thing to do the week of Palm's "Pre" launch.

Something ought to be done...

(OK, so I don't know what PreTwitter will look like.)

Confession: Apple products outnumber Palm products in my house two-to-one. But if a Sprint/Pre will work in Floyd, Va., where my AT&T phone doesn't, I might just switch.

The article, meanwhile, by Steven Berlin Johnson, is worth a read... Says he, "I called my Dad to tell him about it this morning, and his -- typically droll -- response was, 'Well, that's a pretty roundabout way to get your face on the cover of Time.'"

Learning Secrecy 101 on college campuses

2009-06-04T17:49:00.002-04:00

An investigative report in the The Columbus Dispatch, "Secrecy 101", has gone beyond Ohio's borders to uncover colleges' public records policies concerning college sports. From Alabama to Oregon, the Dispatch reporters found examples of schools censoring player information, often citing a 35-year-old student privacy law whose author says it was intended to protect student grades, not athletic records.

From the Knoxville News Sentinel to the Wall Street Journal, other media are picking up on the story. "Unfortunately, that's the way secrecy laws work," News Sentinel editor Jack McElroy said. "Governments find it convenient to err on the side of confidentiality. So one result is that the $5 billion college sports establishment operates with little public scrutiny."

So far I haven't seen any follow-up in Virginia papers, although the University of Virginia and Virginia Tech are both mentioned in the Columbus, Ohio, paper.

"Across the country, many major-college athletic departments keep their NCAA troubles secret behind a thick veil of black ink or Wite-Out," the Dispatch reporters said. For example, under its interpretation of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, one university wanted $35,330 to provide documents that were free of charge at more than half the 69 schools who responded to the reporters' record requests.

The Dispatch asked 119 schools for reports of NCAA violations, football players' summer-employment, players' "comp" ticket guests, and flight manifests for team air travel. Fifty schools, including the University of Virginia, either didn't provide information or wanted too much money to comply with the request, the paper said. Virginia Tech received good marks on some, but not all, of the record requests..

Stories:

The Columbus Dispatch, Secrecy 101 (national schools) and Violations Across the Country, plus a sidebar.
Knoxville News Sentinel: "UT not only school hiding behind FERPA"
Wall Street Journal: FERPA: A Law Grows in Columbus . . . And at a College Town Near You.
AP at First Amendment Center: Report: College sports programs withhold info
Overview of Freedom of Information on Campus

Where do you say the free speech stops?

2009-05-30T16:46:00.001-04:00

Newspaper executives, journalists, bloggers and victims of "vitriolic and hateful comments" on newspaper Web sites got together in Knoxville recently for a face-to-face discussion of community voices, public discussions and the pros and cons of anonymity.

The News Sentinel's Jack Lail has a summary, video clips, and more. See:

Getting the mean out of comments: knoxnews.com

In a column about the event, the News Sentinel's editor, Jack McElroy, said the paper's Web site draws 50,000 comments a month: "Some of the comments are intelligent. Many are inane. A few are downright cruel."

The Associated Press Managing Editors and the News Sentinel put together the "Online Credibility Roundtable," supported in part by the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation.

Connecticut news outsourced to Indian staff

2009-05-29T11:16:00.005-04:00

Hartford Advocate: News - Outsource This!:
"We hired Indian freelance journalists to write the paper this week...

"Vanishing revenues have put the newspaper industry in a death spiral and many papers long ago outsourced other functions (like IT support centers and telemarketing) to India. We devised this issue as an experiment on what outsourced news might look like."

Back when I worked for The Hartford Courant, I remember delivering a bundle of copies of the first issue of The Hartford Advocate to the University of Connecticut for my next-door neighbor, one of the four people who started the paper.

As I recall, Ed, Linda and another couple launched the whole Advocate chain after Ed and the other guy got fed up with "part-time" copydesk jobs at the the now-fading but then-independent Hartford Courant... which eventually was gobbled up by a chain, which was gobbled up by another chain, which then bought the Advocate alt-weeklies.

So much for "alt." But it's good to see someone still has a sense of humor.

UPDATE: The New York Times reports on the same "outsourcing" stunt, but closes with a nice shout-out to former Advocate staffer Paul Bass's New Haven Independent, a Web-only newspaper that has concentrated on what you might call "in-sourcing" his city.

"Mr. Bass said he liked the outsourced issue, but it reminded him, alas, that so much of American journalism these days actually can be done from a desk in Mumbai, and that the threat facing most American newspapers isn’t necessarily outsourcing or even the new frontier of the Internet. It’s dull, stodgy products that have been downsized and bled dry by corporate owners. If what you do can be done, however imperfectly, from Mumbai, he said, then maybe you need to go back to Square One."

To see what I mean by "in-sourcing," which involves having your feet, head and heart in a local community, see this story and this story, including their background links. Nothing there looks "phoned in" -- not from Mumbai; not even from some office across town.

Opening tunnels for data mining

2009-05-24T15:25:00.010-04:00

A couple of mines down the road from me in Pulaski County produce iron oxide pigments, not just the sand and gravel that are more common in local "mining" operations.

OK, that's not what the title means by "data mining," but it's something I didn't know before today, and it was easy info to dig up, thanks to a new project called data.gov -- an initiative to make more government databases easily accessible to the public. (In my case, browsing data.gov links led to a database of active mines at USGS. More interested in coal mines? That took following a few more links.)

In an interesting twist on this project, see Apps for America a contest encouraging data-miners and hackers to build applications that USE such public data.

I'll count the first entry as a "proof of concept," even if it's not particularly useful. It turns FBI most-wanted list photographs into a matching game: FBI Fugitive Concentration

Meanwhile, without entering the contest, SunlightLabs has scraped together Unofficial Data.gov RSS feed that it found missing from the data.gov site itself. It also provides the source code of the Python script that creates the feed, and an analysis of the current contents of data.gov.

Transparency in government, participation and opportunities for collaboration are all topics of discussion at the Open Government Dialogue site from the National Academy of Public Administration.

Here's a New York Times blog entry on data.gov:
Throwing Open Uncle Sam’s Data Mine - The Caucus Blog:

"Back on Jan. 21, on President Obama’s first full day in office, he put down a marker on new standards for openness and transparency in government.
His administration has already done a few things, but on Thursday, it took a big step toward its goal and started opening up vast reservoirs of federal data to the online public at a Web site called data.gov.
So far, there are 47 government data bases available there that you can rummage through, with many more to come over the next months and years. The administration hopes the public will use this information to suggest ways to make the government more efficient, responsive and innovative."

It's a beginning. Those aren't the 47 most fascinating collections of government info, unless you're heavily into geology. But it's a start. On the other hand, at least one database-oriented journalist-blogger sums it up as "lame so far."

I'm still browsing both the Open Government Dialogue and data.gov sites. So far the open-the-books attitude reminds me a lot of Carl Malamud's "Reboot .gov" project at YesWeScan.org, and his creations at Public.Resource.org -- as I keep browsing, I'll be watching for connections.

No cigars or green eyeshades in these new media newsrooms

2009-05-22T17:44:00.002-04:00

From Harvard's Nieman Foundation and Nieman Journalism Lab, what sites, events or issues were worth Twittering about? More importantly, which of those did readers follow? See 40 most recent links from @niemanlab

I liked the "Inside five newsrooms that H.L. Mencken wouldn't recognize," but I wonder what newsrooms he would recognize today.

After all, Henry didn't even live to see the arrival of the IBM Selectric typewriter in the nation's newsrooms, much less the glowing green CRTs of the later 1970s, the PCs of the '80s or the departure of cigar-smoking as a workplace diversion.

(He died in 1956. His father owned a cigar company. The habit stuck. Amazing what you learn on the Web.)

Perhaps he would have recognized the BLOG. Browse these excerpts from his coverage of the Scopes "Monkey Trial."

Anyhow, do check out those Nieman tweets, especially Zachary Stewart's multimedia piece on the newsrooms of Talking Points Memo, Gawker, The Daily Telegram and The Spokesman Review. (See Telegram video above.)

Very effective use of short video clips in Stewart's blog, among other things.

Summer reading: Where the jobs are

2009-05-20T13:19:00.003-04:00

Radford and Blacksburg didn't make the list, but Forbes magazine came up with some interesting locations in its compilation of Top College Towns For Jobs. Charlottesville is number 14, but no other Virginia city made the top 20. (New Mexico, Colorado and Alabama were the only states with two locations on the list.)

The article's "in depth" slide show is rather shallow, but does report the percentage of workers in university jobs and the area's job growth since 2008, along with the name of a local university. (Durham, N.C., is listed with Duke, but no mention of the lighter blue institution less than 10 miles down the road in Chapel Hill.)

“Across business cycles, college towns are steady and predictable,” John Stapleford, senior economist at Moody’s Economy.com, told Forbes, although he cautioned that losses in university endowments may soon have a negative effect on the schools' own spending and new-job creation.

When schools DO have money to spend, the effect is magnified, he said, estimating that each new job on-campus creates a need for another half or whole job off-campus to meet the needs of the school, its students, employees and visitors. The Forbes article doesn't discuss any other forces that might be at work on the local economies, such as cuts in state budgets for public universities, or whether last year's employment data could be a one-time-only "bump" in some communities.

While jobs nationwide were down 3.5 percent for the past year, according to Forbes reading of Moody's March to March stats, 62 college towns showed an increase. Forbes' top-20 list -- In Depth: Top College Towns For Jobs -- is presented as a tedious one-at-a-time slide show in countdown order. If you don't have the patience for that, here are the metro areas, starting with No. 1:

Provo, Utah
Morgantown,W.Va.
Durham, N.C.
Athens, Ga.
Fargo, N.D.
Hattiesburg, Miss.
Iowa City, Iowa
Seattle, Wash.
Baton Rouge, La.
Las Cruces, N.M.
College Station, Texas
Charlottesville, Va.
Tuscaloosa, Ala.
Auburn, Ala.
Fort Collins, Colo.
Oklahoma City, Okla.
Boulder, Colo.
Albuquerque, N.M.
Jonesboro, Ark.
San Jose, Calif.

I wish Forbes also had compiled "job vacancies" data, which might make this a great list of "places to work your way through grad school." I kept looking for a place to click-through to more data. Instead, if you let the slide show keep running, it jumps to a list of "Top 10 Weird Celebrity Family Connections." So much for "news you can use."

Rewriting history at college newspaper sites

2009-05-11T14:40:00.007-04:00

Both of Radford's student publications, The Tartan and Whim (TheTartan.com and ruwhim.com), have changed content-management platforms in the past year, complicating the matter of finding things in their archives.

At first I thought that was a shame, because past contributors might have links to online-edition stories in their resumes or on their personal sites, or might want to retrieve stories or artwork to send to prospective employers. With the changes in publishing systems over the years, some links to individual pages still work, while links to "section" or front pages don't. Some stories may be gone because of redirected addresses.

There may be a bright side to missing archives: At least they can't do the student journalist's career any damage in the future, as reflected in this trend-story from the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Alumni Try to Rewrite History on College-Newspaper Web Sites.

The RU publications have good intentions about preserving their history and resurrecting their archives, but the process hasn't been rapid. Whim has carried a notice that "An archive of previous versions of Whim is forthcoming" since its change to publishing with WordPress last fall. Back then, I tracked down any archives I could.

However, Google was archiving stories from both publications through their homegrown flat-file editions to those done with the Absolut and WordPress php-based systems, which means plenty of old stories still can be found -- something I point out to news writing students as the modern equivalent of the old "check the clips in the morgue" routine and dead-tree newspapers.

While both publications own their own domains (thetartan.com and ruwhim.com), the pages are actually served from the radford.edu domain, usually the PHP server at php.radford.edu. As a result a Google "site:" search of the university domain with the name of the publication or a search keyword can be effective, so I guess student reporters' bylines also could be used by an employer browsing for stories by a job applicant.

For example, a search will produce plenty of stories about past years' editions of the annual off-campus revelry called "Quadfest" (because it was once on-campus). The Google search strings look like this:
site:radford.edu+quadfest+whim or site:radford.edu+quadfest+tartan
(A more refined search might eliminate stories that use "whim" or "tartan" as something other than publication names, but you get the idea.)

Similarly, Google can search the regional daily, The Roanoke Times, whose own search engine has had its problems, although it does a reasonable job "quadfest." Perhaps it has been fixed, even if it doesn't let me save a link to the search results. With Google, it's site:roanoke.com+quadfest Result: What do you know -- the RTimes had an editorial that said the party wasn't all that bad!

(Thanks to Bryan Murley, Steve Yelvington and other folks on Twitter for pointing to the Chronicle of Higher Education story. I really should renew my subscription.)

Sing a song of press-titution?

2009-05-06T09:01:00.010-04:00

With layoffs, buyouts and closings, these days it seems fewer newspapermen each month are "meeting interesting people..." But a friend pointed me to this 2006 video after I posted my blog item (and a flutter of tweets) about Pete Seeger's birthday concert. I haven't heard that this song fit into the program. It would need a pretty serious update, since it dates back to the days of flagpole sitters. I was writing for my school newspaper the first time I heard the song, and found a copy in the old People's Songbook, related to the still-publishing Sing Out!, the folksong magazine. I should renew my subscription and see if anyone has set Phil Meyer's The Vanishing Newspaper to music yet...

Pete doesn't mention it on the video, but the later verses of Vern Partlow's song make it clear it has roots in the early -- and better -- days of the Newspaper Guild union. Now that Pete has taught you the tune, everybody sing...:

Oh, publishers are such interesting people!
Their policy's an acrobatic thing.
They shout they represent the common people.
It's funny Wall Street never has complained.
But publishers have worries, for publishers must go
To working folks for readers, and big shots for their dough.
Oh, publishers are such interesting people!
It could be press-titution, I don't know.

Ting-a-ling-a-ling, advertising.
Ting-a-ling-a-ling, circulation.
Get that payoff, keep those readers;
What a headache, what a mess.
Yes, publishers are such interesting people!
Let's give three cheers for freedom of the press.

Oh, newspapermen are such interesting people!
They used to work like hell just for romance,
But finally, the movies notwithstanding,
They all got tired of patches on their pants.
They organized a union, and got a living wage.
They joined progressive actors upon a living stage.
Now newspapermen meet such interesting people,
Who know they've got a people's fight to wage.

[big rousing chorus now...]

Ting-a-ling-a-ling, Newspaper Guild,
We got a free new world to build;
Meet the people, that's a thrill,
All together fits the bill.
Oh a newspaperman meets such interesting people!
It's wonderful to represent the Guild.

Lyrics from the Digital Tradition database at Mudcat.org

Just a coincidence... Here's the latest on the Guild negotiations at The Boston Globe.

Webby Awards for radio, news, newspapers, magazines...

2009-05-05T18:17:00.003-04:00

Webby Awards -- NPR wins seven Webbies and People's Voice awards for best radio, best music and best podcasts... makes me happy to be wearing my "I gave money to NPR" cap today. However, I was surprised to NOT see NPR winning news awards... maybe there was a coin-flip between BBC and NPR for "best radio" versus "best news"? I dunno...

The News Webby and the People's Voice award went to the BBC's News website http://www.bbc.com/news

The student site awards went to http://missionlocal.org of the UC Berkeley journalism school and a new one to me, http://waylandstudentpress.com -- Yes, it's a High School Journalism project! Maybe there's hope there...

The newspaper award went to http://www.guardian.co.uk/ with a People's Voice to http://NYTimes.com, which also won for "Best copy/writing" and in a "Best Practices" category, whatever that means. (OK, so I'm too busy to look it up.)

Both magazine awards went the http://TheAtlantic.com

Another one of my favorites won for "best use of video or moving image": http://www.TED.com

(Couldn't help noticing the video award went to TED, which is not a "television" network or channel, but a Web-only site from an educational/inspirational conference.)

Here are the rest of the Webby Awards (there are almost 70 categories) from the award home page... and here's NPR's self-congratulation, which I guess might define "media outlets" as "media older than the Internet"... But I don't remember seeing any other kind of site that matched NPR in number of awards...

"National Public Radio led all media outlets by winning seven Webby awards, the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences announced Tuesday. The awards competition, now in its 13th year, honors excellence on the Web.
"NPR won Webbys for best radio site, best music site, best news site in the mobile division for its iPhone site, and best music entry in the online film and video division for Project Song, an online video documentary series."

Meanwhile, I rarely have time for "entertainment" Web stuff, which the Webbies are full of... But after exams I'll go back and check out some of that... including Web therapy, especially if there's an episode about Web addiction and Twitter. (Which, by the way, won "breakout of the year.")

Happy 90th Birthday, Pete!

2009-05-02T22:41:00.009-04:00

An amazing birthday concert is scheduled in New York City tomorrow for folksinger's folksinger, Pete Seeger, but I like the celebration page his local newspaper's Web site has posted up the Hudson a bit from Madison Square Garden:

Times Herald-Record - Pete Seeger Birthday

(Update: NY Daily News covers the show in words and pictures; The New York Times review of the show. More from NPR.)

Meanwhile, here in Virginia, I hear there's a hootenanny -- yes, a hootenanny -- in Richmond.

Now that's a word I haven't seen in the headlines in a LONG time -- one that Pete helped popularize. Ironically, he was blacklisted from the pop/commercial TV show by that name, during what he and others have called the "great folk scare of the sixties."

Pete eventually had his own show -- on PBS, some of which is now around YouTube, if you look for "Rainbow Quest," including interview jam sessions with some folks I never knew were captured on video, and this wonderful duet on one of Pete's songs, with him backing up Judy Collins, who also celebrated a hard-to-believe birthday this weekend. Speaking of Judy, she and the Smothers Brothers were on that original Hootenanny show at times, and both Judy -- and Pete, in a blacklist breakthrough -- were eventually on the Brothers own show. (And now everybody is on YouTube!)

(Disclaimer: OK, I'll admit it. Those folks, that hootenanny thing, and its less commercial echoes in the seventies (especially at this place and that place and other places) left me with a bunch of guitars, ukuleles, mandolins and, yes, banjos that I even play a little.)

Happy Birthday to "the little book"

2009-04-25T15:15:00.004-04:00

“The Elements of Style” by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White just came out in its 50th edition, so The New York Times "Room for Debate Blog" invited fans and skeptics for reactions... asking this question:

"But are its rules the be all and end all of writing? "

Happy Birthday, Strunk and White!

White's original, from before Strunk updated the book, is available for free online: http://www.bartleby.com/141/

Of course not everyone is celebrating, but even if you just want to argue about fine points of grammar, Strunk & White is a great place to start.

For more detailed questions of grammar, I point my students to Ken Wilson's Columbia Guide to Standard American English (close to 500 pages of advice) and the Guide to Grammar & Writing, a site started by Charles Darling in the early days of the Web at what was then Greater Hartford Community College.

(I knew both Ken and Charlie when they were alive, had great respect for both, and was charmed to find them both online.)

For more journalistic style and grammar issues, I suggest Gerald Grow's http://newsroom101.com

Not only the usual suspects win Pulitzers

2009-04-21T09:19:00.012-04:00

Five for the NY Times, plus several signs of the times

The 2009 Pulitzer Prizes in journalism include familiar names like The New York Times, but a few surprises, most notably a public service medal -- the most prestigious -- inspired by the work of a 29-year-old reporter a year into her job at the Las Vegas Sun.

Alexandra Berzon's stories investigated the high death rate among construction workers on the Las Vegas Strip -- a dozen fatalities in a year and a half -- and lax enforcement of regulations. The paper got behind her, giving her six weeks to develop the first stories, and following them with editorials calling for change.

“This story was about the failure of government and an attitude of the people that said it was not important to inspect for safety violations the way they’re supposed to, which results in working people getting hurt,” Sun Editor Brian Greenspun said. “It was a failure up and down the line ... When it gets fixed, that means you saved that many people’s lives. What greater purpose can you have in the newspaper business?”

The Pulitzer citation was "to the Las Vegas Sun, and notably the courageous reporting by Alexandra Berzon."

The Sun's story about the surprise award credited Berzon -- a 2006 Berkeley journalism master's grad -- -- with "persevering against closed doors and intimidation" in reporting the series.

"The Sun’s Pulitzer victory is a win," the paper said, "for the underdog — workers on the Strip, a young reporter and an all-enterprise newspaper that doesn’t cover the ordinary news of the day — and provides inspiration at a time when journalism is reeling from cutbacks."

The Sun report says Berzon's first stories grew to a yearlong project that involved not only dealing with the OSHA bureaucracy, but "ignoring threats of physical harm if she showed up at a union hall."

Web brings winners

Meanwhile, in the National Reporting category, a Web-based project took a major award, and a story first published online took the Breaking News prize.

The National Reporting Pulitzer went to the St. Petersburg Times for “PolitiFact.com,” its "fact-checking initiative during the 2008 presidential campaign that used probing reporters and the power of the World Wide Web to examine more than 750 political claims, separating rhetoric from truth to enlighten voters."

(This is the first year the Pulitzer committee considered projects that were primarily online.)

The non-profit St. Pete newspaper also used the Web creatively to accompany the long-form narrative story that brought it the Feature Writing prize. See winner Lane DeGregory's video comments at Poynter.org on why the combination of awards is especially gratifying, and an earlier story about the project itself.

The PolitiFact project came close to winning the Public Service prize, but was moved to the National Reporting category. The other Public Service runner-up was The New York Times for its "comprehensive coverage of the economic meltdown of 2008." The Times did win Pulitzers in five other categories, for stories including its investigation of the role of retired generals working as radio and television analysts, and its breaking news coverage of the New York governor's sex scandal. The latter citation commended the paper for "breaking the story on its Web site and then developing it with authoritative, rapid-fire reports."

Speaking of Web things, see the Mesa, Ariz., Local Reporting irony below...

The other 2008 journalism Pulitzers:

Five for The New York Times (the second-best year in its 101-prize history)

-- Breaking News Reporting - The New York Times Staff
-- International Reporting - The New York Times Staff
-- Investigative Reporting - David Barstow of The New York Times
-- Criticism - Holland Cotter of The New York Times
-- Feature Photography - Damon Winter of The New York Times

Two for the St.Pete Times.

-- Feature Writing - Lane DeGregory of the St. Petersburg Times for "The Girl in the Window."
-- National Reporting - St. Petersburg Times Staff for PolitiFact and its "Truth-O-Meter."

Explanatory Reporting - Bettina Boxall and Julie Cart of the Los Angeles Times
Local Reporting - Detroit Free Press Staff
Local Reporting - Ryan Gabrielson and Paul Giblin of the East Valley Tribune, Mesa, AZ (With some serious state-of-the-trade and Web irony: By the time the award was announced, Giblin had been laid off -- and launched an online legislative news startup.)
Commentary - Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post
Editorial Writing - Mark Mahoney of The Post-Star, Glens Falls, NY
Editorial Cartooning - Steve Breen of The San Diego Union-Tribune
Breaking News Photography - Patrick Farrell of The Miami Herald

Twitter makes Forbes, tires Times, fills Facebook

2009-04-17T11:56:00.004-04:00

This article titled The Twitter Zeitgeist at Forbes.com says "Twitter became a part of popular culture in less time then it takes to write a 140-character status update."

It adds some details to things I've been telling my students in the past few months, but (more importantly) posting this quick link also gives me an opportunity to test whether I've solved the Blogger glitch that was putting big external links at the tops of my posts and keeping me from editing them for the past week. (See test post from yesterday.)

Now the headline above should be a "permalink" to the address of this particular post. I like that, but can't promise to find time to go back and edit all my previous posts into that format. (For older posts, the "permalink" address is linked to the time stamp at the end of each post.)

Meanwhile (Sunday update), I've decided my own Twitter feed (http://twitter.com/bobstep) is a fine place to post links to mainstream-media stories about Twitter, including a flock of them recently in The New York Times, including a Sunday column that suggests early users are tiring of tweets. My three tweets, easy as one, two, three using http://bit.ly

But my best Twitter-related discovery is how to hide the Facebook posts of a Web-ubiquitous friend who mirrors all his Twitter posts as Facebook status updates. I only need to see his stuff in one place, thanks. Coincidentally, the problem and the solution came from bloggers with the same first name. Poetic.

Journalist killed; journalism continues

2009-04-17T11:24:00.001-04:00

The Center for Investigative Reporting launched the Chauncey Bailey Project in 2007, after the local news editor was shot down in the street in Oakland, Calif. The San Francisco Chronicle mounted its own investigation.

The Committee to Protect Journalists calls Bailey's death the first targeted killing of a journalist in the United States since 1993.

This week, the headlines are Man agrees to guilty plea in Oakland journalist's killing, Chilling account of killing editor, Oakland cops in hot water and Grand jury to probe Oakland editor's slaying.

Meanwhile, Democracy Now has an interview with Chauncey Bailey Project head Robert Rosenthal about the case, how reporters joined together to continue Bailey's work, and whether that model might be the future of investigative journalism, with newspapers all over the country having financial difficulties.

Bailey was a young reporter when we both worked at the Hartford Courant in the 1970s. He went on to the Detroit News and several California papers, and was back in his hometown as editor of the Oakland Post, where his work in community journalism included an investigation into the finances of an Oakland business at the time of his death.

Previewing News: Wall Street Journal on the iPhone

2009-04-16T10:45:00.001-04:00

In a Nieman Journalism Lab interview video clip, the executive editor of The Wall Street Journal Online previews the paper's upcoming Wall Street Journal iPhone reader.

"On the Web you don't get the sense of completing a task the way you do reading a newspaper," WSJ.com's Alan Murray says, suggesting that a top-20 stories "when you're done, you're done" approach will fit the way iPhone readers use the device.

The Journal actually sees its business Blackberry users as a bigger market than iPhone users, and both applications are modeled in part on the paper's half-century-old "What's News" box on page one.

The difference: The Blackberry version is more of a headline-feed of "what's most recent," while the iPhone content will be more "what's most important," with more substantial headlines for a top-20 collection of stories.

"I think people interact with the iPhone in a different way," he said.

Like http://wsj.com and the print newspaper, the mobile device versions will eventually require you to pay for the full experience.

bX-fjm14b means something Is broken

2009-04-16T09:47:00.003-04:00

This is a test. A mysterious Blogger error message coded
bX-fjm14b has been making it impossible to edit items once they are posted.

Has it been fixed? (No, but there's a workaround.)

Update: April 17. It looks like the cause is related to three things -- some recent change in Blogger's software, using the "BlogThis!" script to post a blog item based on a Web site you're visiting, and Blogger's internal "settings" for display of page titles. With the page set to not display titles, "BlogThis" was copying the address and title of the visited site into the hidden "title" area, and displaying it on the blog post.

I've just reset this blog to display page titles, and now I can edit pages again, and make their titles words of my own choosing. That also makes my title/headline link to the permanent address of the blog post, which is the way my other blog works. That's especially helpful if you want to bookmark a particular item, not the address that gets you the most recent post.

Most recent: http://boblog.blogspot.com/

Just one post: http://boblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/l-gordon-crovitz-says-bernard-kilgore.html

The easiest thing in the world for a reader to do is to stop reading

2009-04-14T08:37:00.002-04:00

My newswriting class just wrote about a speech in which Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Gartner gave advice about writing -- and said the best advice he ever got on the subject was one sentence from his old Wall Street Journal boss, Barney Kilgore. It's this item's headline.

(In his speech, Gartner used the Kilgore quote in a plea for simpler, less murky writing -- good advice for any writing class. Coincidentally, the sentence might apply -- for other reasons -- to today's failing newspapers.)

Coincidence #1: I ran into the same quote yesterday in a Wall Street Journal article, "Making Old Media New Again," offering Kilgore's remodeling of the WSJ more than a half-century ago as a road map for 21st century newspapers. I decided to copy the column and pass it out to my classes... Then said to myself, "Why copy it and just give the class a link? I'll find it at wsj.com, assuming it's not behind a pay-per-view firewall."

Coincidence #2: Dave Winer's Facebook/Twitter/Blog/Feed sent me the link to the story before i had time to look it up... and just in time for class.

Coincidence #3: Kilgore is credited with leading the newsprint Journal to a circulation over one1 million readers -- in part by recognizing in the 1940s that "new media" (radio) would give people the breaking news, so newspapers should shift to explaining the news. Crovitz, meanwhile, is credited with "overseeing the growth of The Wall Street Journal Online to more than one million paying subscribers, making WSJ.com the largest paid news site on the Web." (See the "About L. Gordon Crovitz" box next to his online column.)

Along with "what makes readers keep reading?" and "what might make readers keep reading on paper?" we can use the story to start discussing the issues of "authority" and "transparency" (about connections and biases) in today's media.

Crovitz's article in praise of Kilgore is a review of a new Kilgore biography by yet another former Journal executive, Richard Tofel. The book is Restless Genius: Barney Kilgore, The Wall Street Journal and the Invention of Modern Journalism.

Not that those connections mean that Crovitz is wrong about Tofel, that Tofel is wrong about Kilgore, or that Kilgore was wrong about keeping readers reading.

Says Crovitz, "If readers would prefer more-compact city newspapers, a less-is-more approach could help cut newsprint, printing, distribution and other costs that don't add to the journalism. Newspaper editors could craft a new, forward-looking role for print, alongside the what's-happening-right-now focus of digital news."

Meanwhile, Crovitz (with Steve Brill) is one of the founders of journalismonline.com, an attempt to set up a payment system for online news publishers.

Hope for newspapers as collectibles?

2009-04-10T14:59:00.004-04:00

I buried this observation in my Other Journalism Weblog:

"Could collectible front pages pay for investigative reporting, watchdog journalism and the whole 'Fourth Estate' role of the press?
Maybe not, but they might get new readers to open the paper. The next step would be to keep putting something equally valuable inside."

Follow the link for some intriguing examples of new and retro newspaper design, and some recent discussions of the depressing state of newspapers today.

The last link of the item, worth repeating here, is to Investigative Reporters and Editors' Extra Extra! for examples of news worth putting inside those attractive wrappers, if that's what it takes to get it delivered.

What 'the collapse of journalism' means

2009-04-06T19:59:00.014-04:00

In The Nation, Robert McChesney and John Nichols call the fading of great American newspapers "the most serious threat in our lifetimes to self-government and the rule of law as it has been understood here in the United States."

(Meanwhile, Forbes reports today that journalism is still a popular college major, despite diminished job prospects. Maybe those grads hope to find a new way to be the Fourth Estate online, if not on paper. It has some faculty feeling existential.)

Nichols and McChesney have a book coming out in the fall, titled Saving Journalism: The Soul of Democracy, but they give away good chunks of their argument in The Nation article.

While enthusiastic about ProPublica, Talking Points Memo, the Huffington Post and regional online journalism projects with non-profit funding, they call those "mere triage strategies."

Instead, they argue that newspapers' corporate owners carry much of the blame for the demise of professional journalism, and call for fourth-estate funding by the other three estates:

"Only government can implement policies and subsidies to provide an institutional framework for quality journalism... Fortunately, the rude calculus that says government intervention equals government control is inaccurate and does not reflect our past or present, or what enlightened policies and subsidies could entail."

Among those subsidies would be funds for community and public broadcasting and for high school and college papers, along with free postage for publications that limit their ad revenue to 20 percent of the budget. Such journals (hmm, like The Nation?), they note, often do "investigative, cutting-edge, politically provocative journalism."

I'm going to read more of that article later... maybe even buy their book and revive my Nation subscription. But I won't hold my breath about the chance of getting that batch of subsidies through Congress in any big hurry.

Surviving in Roanoke

Meanwhile, back in the cold world of capitalist free-enterprise journalism, here's a business-watcher with a list of 10 Newspapers That Will Survive The Apocalypse

Nicholas Carlson, who covers media and advertising for Silicon Alley Insider, says "his guy" in the newspaper-investment biz has the Roanoke Times on his survivor list.

I guess that's good news for the unwrapped fish of the New River Valley, even if Carlson does use an anonymous source and spell the name of the city "Roanake" at one point:

Our guy likes almost all of Landmark Communications papers in Virginia. They're in isolated, steady markets without a lot of overlap. The Roanoke Times is a 'good product,' a "community type paper.' Roanake is the kind of place where if the car dealers start selling cars again, they'll start taking out ads in the local paper again.

On the story's opening page, Carlson says:

Our guy is convinced that underneath the mess, there are plenty of local newspapers that, after cutting newsroom bloat and R&D costs, would be plenty profitable. He says these local newspapers just need to stop "spending on trying to find their way out" and 'instead run their current good business.'
"What does our source think of newspapers on the Web? Not much. He says local papers should have a Web site run by two people that links to international and national news and keeps all local content behind a pay wall or off the Internet entirely.

Speaking of surviving the apocalypse, Tim Thornton, an award-winning environmental journalist and the first Roanoke Times reporter I've had as a guest speaker in class, just got the ax... a bit mysteriously.

The many words of support in comments on those two NewRiverVoice stories about his departure, and elsewhere, should make Tim feel at least a tiny bit better.

The comments also include links to last fall's item on the paper in the Columbia Journalism Review. It ran with the provocative headline "Something's Rotten in Roanoke." CJR's story had several readers leaping to the paper's defense; so far none of the comments I've read about Thornton's case have taken the newspaper managers' side.

2009-04-06T10:32:00.003-04:00

Digital Video Photojournalism Experiences & Tips

Photojournalism guru Ken Kobre has put together a special video-focused edition of The Digital Journalist, with newspaper and Public Relations or organizational/institutional communication crossover articles. More evidence that, online, video isn't just for television anymore.

Ken says:

"The Digital Journalist (TDJ) has been on the front lines of reinventing photojournalism since its first issue 11 years ago. This month, the issue is devoted to videojournalism, and we’re blessed to have some of the nation’s top practitioners in this emerging field contribute. They tell and show how they are changing this emerging field..."

Samples:

From TV News Shooter to One-Man-Band VJ

When I am out on a story and I tell someone I'm from The New York Times, the immediate response is usually a certain respectful recognition. People know the name; they know it stands for good journalism.

10 Tips for Dramatically Improving Your Videojournalism Stories

The problem with many videojournalism stories is that they are neither good video, good journalism, nor good stories.

Institutional Videojournalism

AARP Bulletin Today launched online in May 2008 as the daily-news counterpart to the AARP Bulletin, a monthly print newspaper sent to all 24 million AARP member households.

2009-04-03T11:22:00.002-04:00

The State of the News Media 2009:
"Online Journalists Optimistic About Revenue and Technology, Concerned About Changing Values"

"Journalists who work online are more optimistic about the future of their profession than are news people tied to more traditional media platforms, but at best their optimism is an uneasy one, according a new survey of members of the Online News Association produced by the Association and the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism."

Convergence News from My Old Hometown

2009-03-31T10:41:00.009-04:00

"The nation's oldest continuously published newspaper" is about to be "published" by (another) television executive -- with plans to combine the paper's news operations with those of two local TV stations, especially the local Fox affiliate.

Here's the story in two pieces:

The new guy, Richard Graziano, has been general manager of the two Hartford-area stations for the past four years, previously being credited with raising ad sales at a Boston TV station.

He replaces the last TV exec that Tribune sent to Hartford, who has been there overseeing early retirements, buyouts and layoffs for two and a half years, along with general shrinkage of the paper itself. I think the Courant's news staff was once more than 300; last summer it was chopped to about 175, and now is around 135. The front page took on a new look last year, too -- over there on the left, with its nameplate turned sideways.

No word yet -- as far as I've seen -- on the news-management organization of the converged organization, or what role the Web will play. Compare http://courant.com and http://www.fox61.com

Chicago's Tribune Co. has owned The Hartford Courant ("Older Than the Nation," founded 1764) since acquiring the Los Angeles's Times-Mirror Company, which acquired the Courant about 30 years ago. (That's when I turned down a raise, took my small employee stock investment, and went back to grad school full-time.)

Tribune says its going to combine the operations of the two TV stations with the Courant in a high-definition TV studio they'll start building in the newsroom sometime this summer. I don't know what to think of the fact that the station's Web site still has 2008 job openings posted.

Exactly how the news-reporting convergence will be organized hasn't been announced... Perhaps some version of the Tampa model.

The New London Day notes that "Up until 2007, Tribune's ownership of The Courant and the two television stations violated the Federal Communications Commission's ban on cross-ownership of newspapers and broadcast outlets in the same market. The FCC relaxed the rule in December of that year."

I haven't seen anything that explains the relationship of a Tribune-owned Fox network affiliate with Fox's corporate owner, NewsCorp, or what part that might play in editorial policies. (None, I hope.) Things were a lot simpler back in 1764, or 1979.

Editor & Publisher story.
Hartford Business story.
The Hartford Courant Alumni Association and Refugee Camp
New London Day story.
Denis Horgan on the last cuts.
Paul Bass on the last cuts.
Convergence research article.
Convergence newsletter from USC.

2009-03-22T17:13:00.004-04:00

New research on "Missing the newspaper"

Time magazine for March 22 has the first summary I've seen of a Princeton study of voter behavior after the demise of a local newspaper, putting a new twist on the phrase "people could care less."

In What Happens When a Town Loses Its Newspaper?, Time notes that the study is, well, timely, given the recent closing of the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. (Time ran a list of "the 10 Most Endangered Newspapers" and summarized the latest Pew State of the Media report earlier this month.)

It's too soon to read the impact of the most recent closings on their communities, so the smaller-scale report by Princeton's Sam Schulhofer-Wohl and Miguel Garrido looked at communities affected by the closing of the Cincinnati Post at the end of 2007. (A full text of the report is linked to the Time article, but I haven't read it yet.)

One troubling conclusion Time mentions (emphasis added):

"...in towns the Post regularly covered, voter turnout dropped, fewer people ran for office and more incumbents were reelected. That is, when there were fewer stories about a given town, its inhabitants seemed to care less about how they're being governed."

Smaller towns seemed to be less affected by the closure than larger ones, which Time called the report's "the only possible hint of a bright spot."

Imagining Hartford without its daily

2009-03-19T10:51:00.004-04:00

Even though my media history class was discussing "What 'missing the newspaper' means," I missed David Folkenflik's NPR piece last month that used my alma mater, The Hartford Courant, as a "what if?" example of just that topic. I'm glad I stumbled on it today. And, thanks to NPR's use of the Web, a transcript and the original audio are online...

See Imagining A City Without Its Daily Newspaper. As Folkenflik mentions, the Courant is the nation's oldest continuously published newspaper, as well as being the main source of news in the capital city of one of the wealthiest states in the union.

Here's one telling scene:

"In the State House press room, unopened mail was piled high on the desk set aside for The New York Times on a recent day. The Times stopped covering Hartford altogether last year. Some in-state dailies no longer send reporters either. The retreat by other news organizations makes even the diminished Courant more relevant than ever."

Folkenflik's follow-up story discusses the nonprofit model for newspapers, and one of his examples is another Connecticut publication, the online-only New Haven Independent, started a few years ago by former newspaperman Paul Bass.

Note: "What 'Missing the newspaper' means" is a classic study by Bernard Berelson, conducted during a newspaper delivery strike in New York City more than 50 years ago. For a good summary, and a follow-up, see "No newspaper is no fun--even five decades later," by my friend Clyde Bentley.

Related stories:

2009-03-18T10:32:00.005-04:00

Growing a new forest of news while dead-tree media fall

Seeing a new media ecology

My headline takes some liberties with Stephen Berlin Johnson's ecological metaphor for the current transition in the reporting and delivery of news, but I recommend his essay, one of several good ones this week on saving the news or finding a sustainable model for civic or public affairs journalism. Johnson's discussion leads to his information flowchart at the right.

For more about the trend in newspapers going online-mostly, online-only or out of business, see these:

Johnson's thoughts came out of the much-blogged-about South by Southwest (sxsw) conference, while a panel discussion on the future of The San Francisco Chronicle -- and local news reporting -- inspired Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg and blogger Dave Winer to write equally thoughtful essays, each finding some room for optimism -- if not about newspapers, about the future of news itself.

(Also see Rosenberg on journalism schools, and Clay Shirky's piece I mentioned a few days ago.)

2009-03-15T14:34:00.004-04:00

Learning from history: Saving journalism, not newspapers

As part of this essay, Clay Shirky goes back to Gutenberg to analyze what happens in a communication revolution: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable.

Among his conclusions:

"Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.
"When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work."

There's a lot more in his essay, which I'm going to assign to media history students and to students looking for journalism careers.

Who's Clay? See his home page

Footnote: I had a sense of deja vu after writing that headline... See Saving journalism may not mean saving newspapers from December 2004.

2009-03-12T01:29:00.004-04:00

Newspaper's story of coal country health care project wins video journalism award

A Washington Post report about Southwest Virginia has won an international video journalism award. Titled "The Healing Fields," the story by Alexandra Garcia took first place in the Concentra Award competition, which concluded last week at the DNA2009 conference in Brussels.

Garcia told the story of the Remote Area Medical volunteer corps, which brings more than 800 doctors, dentists, nurses and other health-care workers to Wise County Fairgrounds in July to offer free treatment to those who cannot afford it -- treating more than 2,600 patients in three days.

The two-part video originally accompanied Hidden Hurt, a Washington Post Magazine story by Mary Otto, subtitled "Desperate for medical care, the uninsured flock by the hundreds to a remote corner of Virginia for the chance to see a doctor."

The Concentra Award is sponsored by Avid and Panasonic. Its stated goal is to promote healthy competition in television news, and "to stimulate journalists to film and edit their own pieces, so they master the entire production process themselves." The Concentra Web site includes videos of winners and nominees for this year and the three preceding years.

In addition to Garcia's winning entry, two more of this year's eight finalists were from the Post, the work of Emmy award-winning video journalist Travis Fox. The competition is international, with entries from the BBC, Al Jazeera, and producers in Canada, Belgium, Germany, Norway and more -- all provided in English or with subtitles.

2009-03-09T15:34:00.012-04:00

Radford University makes the Times, the Post & more

The folks in the RU public relations office have two reasons to celebrate -- not only did the school's basketball team score its way into the NCAA tournament, the university's RU Facts Web page scored a link at nytimes.com... Well, a nytimes.com sports blog, at least:

Little Ol’ Radford’s Big Man - The Quad Blog - NYTimes.com:

"Radford students skipped spring break to hang around campus for the weekend. With good reason. The Highlanders clinched an N.C.A.A. tournament bid on Saturday by wiping out a 13-0 deficit and coming back to defeat Virginia Military Institute, 108-94, for the Big South Conference title."

RU's President Penelope Kyle didn't make the New York Times, but she was the lead of Aaron McFarling's story in the Roanoke Times: What a reward for those who stuck around. Let's Dance!

RADFORD--The university president held out her right arm and swept her hand across the front of her body -- past the student revelers on the court, past the team in its championship T-shirts and hats, past the second-year coach engulfed by well-wishers, past the fans still in the stands applauding and reluctant to go.
"Look at those students," Radford University President Penelope Kyle said. "They did not go on spring break. Some of these students have been out of class since Thursday. We asked them to stay and support the team.
"And look at them. They did."

Senior guard Kenny Thomas won the most-quotable lottery, though, with everyone using his line, "Finally, Radford isn't little ol' Radford for once."

There's nothing like March Madness to shine a spotlight on a college. USA Today used the AP wire right after the game, but came back on March 12 with a comprehensive story of its own, headlined Season of wonder at Radford, along with two good photos and an info box about the school. ("Radford is the first men's or women's team in Big South history to improve from seventh place one year to regular-season champ the next.")

In case any of my news writing students missed the stories (Hah!), I'll save them a few links here. Among other things, they'll see how the AP story was used:

Coincidentally, the game wasn't the only thing that put Radford in the Washington Post over the weekend. Sunday's paper carried a column headed "Second Class Citizens in Virginia," which had nothing to do with the game -- it was a wrapup on the legislature's decision not to solve the confusion over student voting rights, with Radford as a key example.

2009-03-07T12:01:00.003-05:00

Business journalism and lines it sometimes blurs

Ryan Chittum at the Columbia Journalism Review provides a Jon Stewart clip with his column, The Daily Show Eviscerates Santelli and CNBC:

"But what makes this so interesting is what Stewart does to pierce the CNBC bubble on several different things that make the network so disliked by business journalists generally:
"Its lack of a line between opinion and reporting (and lack of disclosure about who’s a reporter and who’s not). Its Siamese-twin closeness to Wall Street. Its rah-rah rooting for the stock markets. Its inanity in interviews that too often veers into sycophancy.
"On the other hand, if there is a discomfort among the business reporters with CNBC, it might be because the network’s bad practices are only extreme manifestations of wider cultural problems in their profession.

USA Today's report on the same Stewart episode has drawn more than 80 comments already.

New York Times business columist Joe Nocera, who was also on the show, posted a clip of his own interview, but the discussion thread includes both segments.

"You should be a financial columnist. You've got the whole thing figured out," Nocera says to Stewart... then catches himself using Stewart's analytical language, referring to the financial industry's "crappy loans." He also joked that Stewart's analysis of the financial industry would give him his Saturday column.

So here's Nocera's Saturday column, actually not based on the Stewart interview, but focused on G.E., which (coincidentally?) owns CNBC. I'll recommend it to my students when we talk about thorough business journalism, versus the kind that blurs those lines between billionaire-celebrity-chat, opinion pieces and real "You're mother says she loves you, but check it out" reporting.

(Students also might be interested in discussing the interplay between Nocera's blog at nytimes.com and his column in The New York Times.)

2009-03-06T10:16:00.005-05:00

Look who's talking... anonymously

Just a day after my introductory news writing class started asking questions about "anonymous sources," Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald has a column titled "The casual, corrupting use of anonymity for political officials."

Greenwald includes links to official policies at The New York Times and Washington Post that set reporters' ground rules for granting anonymity to news sources -- and points out widespread violation of those rules by the Washington press corps, under both the Bush and Obama administrations. He gives examples of columnists quoting "people at the White House" on issues of policy and intention, but without naming anyone who might be held accountable for those statements in the future. Says Greenwald:

This practice was so widely abused during the Bush presidency that journalists and their news organizations engaged in all kinds of tortured public discussions -- and even promulgated guidelines for the proper use of anonymity -- all of which, since then, have been almost entirely ignored.

There are, of course, narrow circumstances in which anonymity is not only justifiable but crucial -- namely, when whistle-blowing government officials risk their jobs or even careers to divulge damaging information that the Government wants to hide -- but that obviously isn't how anonymity is being used in the vast majority of cases by Beltway journalists, such as those documented here.

Instead, anonymity is now eagerly granted to any government official the minute they ask for it -- even when they are doing nothing but spouting the official, pro-administration line -- by journalists eager to be chosen as the White House's anointed message-carrier and who are therefore willing to agree to any conditions imposed by the White House in exchange for that "honor."

I encourage students to read the whole column -- and follow the links to the newspapers' policy statements, the I.F. Stone archives and the Nieman Watchdog site.

Times Policy | Post Policy | Roanoke Times Policy

2009-02-28T15:44:00.011-05:00

Official University Twitterers Lead Students?

Both the Radford University and Virginia Tech public relations folks are already using Twitter.com, but the majority of my RU students hadn't heard of this rapidly growing social network site before I mentioned it in class.

Is this the first time college PR departments have been ahead of the students at adapting a new technology? Maybe its too similar to the status-update feature on Facebook, which most students seem to be familiar with. Well, if they want to see what the college publicity folks are saying, here are the local feeds:

http://twitter.com/vtnews
http://twitter.com/radfordu

Forget http://twitter.com/runews ? Someone in the .ru domain apparently grabbed it -- all tweets are in Russian

A sports stats outfit is also using college names and logos on its tweets, such as http://twitter.com/RadfordStats

In addition, there is a twitter account for http://twitter.com/RUHighlanders, but nothing had been posted when I looked.

I wonder whether the VT and RU public information offices' interest has something to do with the presence of Roanoke Times (roanoke.com) refugees on the staff at both universities. The newspaper's blogs and editorial pages have had twitter feeds for almost a year. http://twitter.com/roanoketimes

In fact, media organizations and college journalism faculty members were the first people I saw using Twitter, after the Web technology insiders like Dave Winer (http://twitter.com/davewiner), who is "following" 879 feeds on Twitter, has 19,068 "followers" and has posted 12,750 updates to his Twitter feed as of a few minutes ago.

The TV Watch - Media’s Big Names Can’t Resist Twitter - NYTimes.com:

"The Internet has revolutionized society by giving anyone an instant and unfiltered outlet for self-expression. But it has also turned journalism into a year-round, ever-updated “Dear Friends and Family” Christmas newsletter."

Speaking of media and twitter, I noticed the other day that the Charlie Rose Show has had a twitter feed -- but that that it missed posting the news that Charlie was interviewing twitter's Evan Williams. Weird.

Meanwhile in London, The Independent says "February 2009 might well go down as the month when Twitter replaced Facebook as the hottest and coolest company in Silicon Valley."

Unless you read it there (or somewhere else), you read it here first.

2009-02-26T00:50:00.001-05:00

"Reboot .Gov" campaign for Internet public info

Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.org has been making imaginative contributions to the Internet since before the Web began, especially by campaigning to get more and more technical and government documents online.

(He also started the first Internet radio station in 1993 for his "Geek of the Week" interviews.)

Now he is asking President Obama to consider him for the position of "Public Printer." See his platform at Yes We Scan!

Check out his site, or watch his speech at Google about some of the things Washington could be doing to make government more open online.

Case in point, here's a recent New York Times story about his efforts to get more court records online in a free and easy to use system.

2009-02-24T09:49:00.009-05:00

So who and what is Twitter good for?

A tech-savvy guest coming to one of my classes assumed college juniors would know all about Twitter. Either my media studies crowd is being shy or Radford students are out of the loop.

I asked who used Twitter in one class of 24; I don't remember anyone raising a hand. Maybe there were a couple of nods, but definitely no enthusiasm. I'll ask my other classes today. (I did -- and found a half-dozen Twitter users in the crowd.)

Perhaps that (media history) class's advertising, broadcast production and journalism majors just aren't interested in something the campus PR folks and student entrepreneurs started using before them? I think they -- the journalism students, at least -- should be more curious.

Anyhow, I've been looking for a good, recent, novice-friendly introduction to Twitter, and Andrew Ratner at the Baltimore Sun has one here: Twists on Twitter, by the people who use it:

"About a year ago, the free micro-blogging service got about 100 mentions in all media in a given week. Maybe a dozen or so of those were in major newspapers and magazines. Last week, by comparison, Twitter was mentioned more than 1,000 times in all media, and more than 200 times in major publications.
Twitter users are overwhelmingly young, but unlike most of the other social networks, Twitter is not dominated by the youngest of young adults, according to a new survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project."

If the old (Dylan, wasn't it?) line about not trusting anyone over 30 holds for this campus generation, maybe that explains it. That Pew survey Ratner mentioned gives 31 as the median age for Twitter users, compared to 26 for Facebook.

I'll admit to using LinkedIn.com, median age: 40.7, but I'm trying to keep up with all the others, too. Hence this blog and my token twitting @bobstep.

Here's a slightly older post on Five ways smart people use twitter, including both news and marketing folks. And another, coincidentally picking the same number: five ways to use twitter for good. Or does twitter have some connection to the number five?

2009-02-21T14:48:00.013-05:00

Drive-by shooting at edge of campus

Radford University has been the victim of a drive-by -- of a non-violent kind -- by whoever shoots street-level photos for Google Maps.

The pictures are a shot of reality when compared with Google's local map, which leads visitors into a couple of dead-ends. If you browse around the university with maps.google.com, you get a map that ignores several years of campus construction and omits the campus entrance at Jefferson and Fairfax streets.

Ask for the School of Communication offices at 702-704 Fairfax St., and instead of a straight route down Jefferson, you get wild goose chase directions down the wrong ends of former cross-streets Adams or Fairfax, which have been campus cul de sacs since before I got here.

With the addition of street-level photos, Google's Rt. 177 (Tyler Avenue) map shows an Oscar-like golden figure you drag to the roadway for a street-view color photo. The photo above clearly shows the campus gates where Tyler meets Jefferson -- an intersection the map version underneath insists does not exist, the gray swath in front of the forlorn golden guy.

In another Radford reality check, at the foot of Tyler Avenue you can enlarge the T-intersection's photo just enough to see a street sign saying "East Main" while the map insists you are turning onto "Norwood Street." (Maybe that was its name once?)

I hadn't noticed the local street-level pictures until a student pointed them out in class last week. I'm not sure how long they have been online, but I estimate they were taken last summer, since they still show the much-missed Joe's Diner, whose site has been a vacant lot for six months.

Google's photos show only Tyler and part of East Main; the drive-by shooters apparently crossed the New River and never came back, but you can trail them into Pulaski. The City of Radford, meanwhile, has an online Geographic Information System that provides up-to-date maps. No street-level pictures, but it has more detailed aerial photos than Google. See City of Radford GIS or www.radford.va.us/BasicGIS/

Footnote: Yes, I'll mention my headline when we have class discussions of yellow journalism.

2009-02-17T19:39:00.006-05:00

New Ways to Read the Times

NYTimes.com has an experimental new interface intended to simulate Sunday Times tabletop browsing.

Says the FirstLook blog:

"Here at The Times, we often hear a common story of usage from our customers: Reading the Sunday Times, spreading out the paper on a table while eating brunch. For many of our customers, this ritual is fundamental to their enjoyment of the weekend, and its absence would be jolting.

"With this in mind, we present an as-yet-unnamed article skimmer. Think of it as an attempt to provide the Sunday Times experience anytime. Of course, there are parts we can’t replicate: the satisfying crinkle of the paper; the circular stain of your coffee; the smell of newsprint."

The prototype ArticleSkimmer gives you 17 "section" pages, each a 5x4 display of story summaries in 19 boxes -- one double-size at the top. You browse from section to section with the space bar and can choose stories with the mouse or a keyboard shortcut.

Hold down the letter "a" for "article," and numbers appear in all the story boxes. Type the number to load a story. (I learned about the shortcuts by clicking a question mark at the top of the page.)

It's fast. It's easy. It's free, and no ads jump out at you until you go to a story page. Presumably "monetizing" this interface somehow will come along if the word "prototype" drops out of the address.

If the traditional newspaper section names (World, U.S., Politics, Technology, Sports etc.) aren't your style, try Dave Winer's "river of news" approach, the time-stamped latest items from Times RSS feeds, at nytimesriver.com

(Dave's blog, Scripting News, is where I heard about the Times article skimmer item.)

Related -- the Times also has expanded the ways that Web developers can make use of Times material. For an only slightly technical discussion, see this Poynter.com column on what the developers call the Times Article Search API.

2009-02-15T14:44:00.005-05:00

New media tools Sprouting on Web

Thanks to a Facebook post by Paul Jones at UNC, I'm taking a first look at Sprout Builder, a Web2.0 tool for sharing multimedia content.

Paul pointed to some Sprouts by Howard Rheingold, whom I expect to be ahead of the curve and teaching about it. I also see that Sproutbuilder is already in use by Gannett newspapers, so here's my first attempt at embedding a Sprout in Blogger:

2009-02-14T14:00:00.003-05:00

Journalism: Mindset, profession or citizenship?

Some links for a possible class discussion...

Salon's Glenn Greenwald goes after Washington Post columnist David Brooks for being part of an "inside the Beltway" cultural mindset that makes the press less of a critical fourth estate.

"... One of the most predominant attributes of the contemporary Beltway journalist: Because they are integral members of the Washington establishment, rather than watchdogs over it, they are incapable of finding fault with political power and they thus reflexively defend it and want it to remain unchanged."

Greenwald, Bill Moyers and Jay Rosen discussed the same issue last week on Bill Moyers' Journal, now available as transcript, podcast or video stream. Rosen got in the last word, emphasizing the two-way Web:

"It's just as good at enabling us to send messages to them as it is for them to tell us. And I think what people have to do is remember the internet runs two ways, and to use it to tell Washington what to do."

Meanwhile, Dave Winer at Scripting.com started an interesting discussion of participatory journalism, under the heading One more time--open the news industry!

Says Dave, a longtime two-way Web writer:

"I want to be a reporter, but a new kind of reporter. Instead of one of the few, I want to be one of the millions. And I want technology to find a way to do what reporters of the 20th century used to do, to organize all the information from what they used to call 'sources' into reports that people like you and me can read and think about and discuss."

2009-02-11T09:52:00.003-05:00

What's to become of newspapers? The debate goes on

Battle Plans for Newspapers is the current topic in the "Room for Debate Blog" at NYTimes.com, starting with the blunt statement that, "In some cities, midsized metropolitan papers may not survive to year’s end."

The question is: "What survival strategies should these dailies adopt? If some papers don’t survive, how will readers get news about the local school board or county executive?"

The voices starting the "debate" are listed below, but the blog is open for comments and there were 184 of them when I started reading. The last one was "WOW!! There are many wonderful, insightful comments here. Read them all folks. These are not your usual pablum. Read on!!" I agree.

* Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia Journalism School
* Joel Kramer, editor of MinnPost.com
* Steven Brill, founder of The American Lawyer magazine
* Geneva Overholser, Annenberg School of Journalism
* Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist.org
* Andrew Keen, author
* Edward M. Fouhy, founding editor of Stateline.org
* Rick Rodriguez, former editor of The Sacramento Bee

Lemann's first comment is "In many cities, newspaper readers are already seeing a much thinner, less complete paper than the one they used to read a few years ago."

Coincidentally, this week our local daily, The Roanoke Times, began consolidating sections, but editor Carole Tarrant said, "We don't expect this reformatting of the paper to result in a considerable reduction in the news we deliver, particularly local news. We realize that many of you look to us, foremost, for our daily community coverage. We appreciate that you value the work of our 100-plus journalists who report on and explain the significance of news happening in Southwest Virginia."

In its first 48 hours online, Tarrant's blog had comments from just two readers, both suggesting that the paper is too liberal, and one of them complaining of the paper's November price increase. (The daily paper jumped to 75 cents from 50 cents; the Sunday edition rose $1.75 from $1.50.)

2009-01-28T21:29:00.002-05:00

Advice to journalism job-hunters

The folks at NewsLab have posted a nice collection of short interviews with people who hire young journalists (or would like to) at places ranging from local television stations to the Washington Post.

NewsLab Resources: Job Hunting

Key phrases: "know the current media landscape," be prepared with "journalism-plus," "be tech savvy," "learn Spanish and HTML," "be able to shoot video better than the standard wedding video," and "The written word is still the most important thing."

2009-01-28T18:36:00.002-05:00

Jim Meskauskas at MediaPost has an essay on why he reads magazines as well as being an inveterate online newspaper reader...

"Part of living successfully in a democracy is being exposed to the people and things that share your world even if they don't share your views. Reading through a magazine is like riding the subway: You eventually get where you wanted to go, but you get there by going through where you aren't headed while sitting next to people you don't know. You see, hear and smell things that you may not have chosen if left to your own devices, but you still end up where you wanted to be. Only now, you have at least passing familiarity with people and things you didn't before."

MediaPost Publications The Biz: A Paean to Print 01/27/2009

2009-01-27T21:03:00.010-05:00

Folksongs and singers in the news

A folksong-savvy friend in Boston alerted me to this month's stories about William Zantzinger, just as I was about to talk about oral traditions in news reporting in my Media History class. Here's the link he provided and a few more:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/10/us/10zantzinger.html

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2009/01/26/090126ta_talk_simon

http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/slant/2004/11/10_200.html

http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~trent/ochs/hattie-carroll.html

http://www.bobdylan.com/#/songs/lonesome-death-hattie-carroll

http://www.peteseeger.net/Brdside1.htm

Since my search brought me to Pete Seeger's site for an old issue of Broadside, the 1960s folksong magazine, I can't avoid pointing out Pete's most recent performance.

YouTube had taken one copy of a video of that song offline, so I went looking for alternatives. This one is still there via video.aol.com, but not high quality. Is that from an international station's copy of the HBO footage? Does HBO have a free "official" copy? Is this "not currently available" notice all there is?

Aha... found it. There are some official clips posted on YouTube by "Inauguration," and Pete and Bruce are there with "This Land is Your Land" (followed by Beyonce doing "America the Beautiful") in the final ten minutes of this two-hour coverage: We Are One: Opening Inaugural Ceremonies at the Lincoln Memorial.

But I've come in late on this controversy. We may have to come back to this for discussion of private property and copyright law... or maybe that's a whole other course. Come to think of it, maybe that Dylan video is a copyright violation that YouTube will be "taking down" sometime.

2009-01-27T20:23:00.003-05:00

Ribs, river-view and environmental journalism education

The East Tennessee chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, right on the front lines of the TVA coal-ash spill story, will have a mini-conference about environmental journalism Friday, March 27, 2009.

Location: the banquet hall above Calhoun’s on the River -- The Tennessee River, not the one the ash dumped into.

"The day-long conference will address many of the difficulties journalists face when covering the environmental beat such as understanding and translating legal, technical and scientific issues; finding sources; using different angles and approaches; dealing with ethical problems; packaging stories for today’s media market, and more.
"The objective is to prepare present and future journalists to handle the massive amount of information related to environmental topics."

East Tennessee Society of Professional Journalists Environmental Journalism Conference

2009-01-25T16:35:00.003-05:00

Wikipedia raises warning flag

After the latest high-profile cases of wiki-editing abuse, "Wikipedia May Restrict Public’s Ability to Change Entries," the Times says.

The user-edited encyclopedia has tightened things up in the past, notably after what it called the Seigenthaler incident.

Coincidentally, the names of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy came up that time; this time their younger brother is involved:

Kennedy, Byrd the Latest Victims of Wikipedia Errors

(If you want to keep watch for further abuse, or check the "history" of Senator Kennedy's page, here it is: Senator Kennedy's Wikipedia page)

For a demo of how drastically a Wikipedia page can change over time, see Jon Udell's webcast analysis of the Heavy Metal Umlaut page -- and here's the current metal umlaut page, which has lost the word "heavy" over the years.

2009-01-25T15:37:00.002-05:00

Back to Sunshine?

Will the new president's statements regarding public records, transparency and the disinfectant qualities of sunshine ripple into state and local government?

Freedom of Information Act memorandum from President Obama

A democracy requires accountability, and accountability requires transparency. As Justice Louis Brandeis wrote, "sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants." In our democracy, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which encourages accountability through transparency, is the most prominent expression of a profound national commitment to ensuring an open Government. At the heart of that commitment is the idea that accountability is in the interest of the Government and the citizenry alike.

The Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails.... (read more)

On First Day, Obama Quickly Sets a New Tone - NYTimes.com

Obama Reverses Bush Policy, Opens Access to Some Records, WSJ, Jan. 21.

(Comparison: Government Openness at Issue As Bush Holds On to Records, NYTimes, Jan. 3, 2003)

Closer to home, the Virginia Coalition for Open Government, calls itself "one of the few places the average citizen in Virginia can turn for a solid answer to a question about access to public records and meetings." Check out its newsletter, its blog, and other information on its site, such as this article on The shady (as in no sunshine) General Assembly.

2009-01-25T15:18:00.003-05:00

RU to study Randians and Randroids?

I think this is the first time a Google search for Radford University has led me to the Web site named crooksandliars.com, all thanks to Ayn Rand, some innovative course financing, and a Wall Street Journal Story.

See Atlas Wanked: From Fiction to Fraud in 52 Years | Crooks and Liars and continue into the discussion thread...

Which leads to this December Tim Thornton story in the Roanoke Times...

Which refers to this announcement last fall from the university.

2009-01-18T23:40:00.003-05:00

Catching up with local news

This blog post by Tonia Moxley of the Roanoke Times not only alerts us that Blacksburg rolls out sunshine law web page, but also gives a rundown on other local communities' public information Web sites.

I think I'll have my students take a closer look at them in anticipation of Sunshine Week in March. Students also should follow up on the voter registration issue from last fall, including the possibility of other town-gown repercussions mentioned in the same Roanoke Times blog a couple of months ago.

See my other FOIA links here.

2009-01-16T11:22:00.004-05:00

Cybergeeks Goosing the Gray Lady?

New York magazine has great fun with headlines... I borrowed a couple of key words for mine from its fascinating article about The New York Times online development team and what New York's Emily Nussbaum says may be "the only happy story in journalism."

The article discusses some new features I hadn't been paying attention to at http://nyt.com (or http://nytimes.com -- in this age of Internet journalism even "main stream media" can be flexible about its identity).

For Emily's full magazine story (a few thousands words, plus comments), see: The Renegades at the New York Times

Despite the swiftness of these changes, certainly compared with other newspapers’, their significance has been barely noted. That’s the way change happens on the web: The most startling experiments are absorbed in a day, then regarded with reflexive complacency. But lift your hands out of the virtual Palmolive and suddenly you recognize what you’ve been soaking in: not a cheap imitation of a print newspaper but a vastly superior version of one. It may be the only happy story in journalism.

Speaking of change and evolution in the media, New York magazine traces its roots to the Sunday magazine of the old Herald Tribune. See my December item, Historic magazine archive via Google. The magazine kept going after the daily paper stopped publishing in 1967. (For more of its history, try its Wikipedia page.)

2009-01-15T20:47:00.005-05:00

Watch U.S. Statistics in motion

You can now use the statistical analysis site Gapminder to visualize U.S. statistics for population, immigration, unemployment, health and income, comparing regions wthin in the United States -- as well as comparing U.S. stats with other countries in the world.

Examples:
See gaps within the U.S.

You may have seen Hans Rosling's incredible TED conference demos of the same software, which he uses to point out false assumptions about -- and dramatic change in -- the "first" and "third" worlds.

If not, watch these:

"The Trendalyzer software (recently acquired by Google) turns complex global trends into lively animations, making decades of data pop. Asian countries, as colorful bubbles, float across the grid - toward better national health and wealth."

Blog site for Gapminder

About:

Gapminder is a non-profit venture promoting sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by increased use and understanding of statistics and other information about social, economic and environmental development at local, national and global levels.

2009-01-12T19:35:00.004-05:00

Retiring editor tells all...

I've just listened to this on the radio, but thanks to the Web I'll be going back again... Former 'Post' editor details the 'Rules Of The Game' is the headline NPR's Web site put on Terry Gross' wide-ranging interview with Leonard Downie Jr. on his retirement from the position as executive editor. 'Rules Of The Game' is also the title of his new novel -- about an investigative reporter in Washington.

Len Downie spent 44 years at the Post, starting as an summer intern in 1964. He had been executive editor for 17 years when he stepped down last September; he remains a vice president of the company. In the interview, he answers Terry's questions about "to publish or not to publish" decisions, confrontations with the government, and the "end of an era" for big financially strong newspapers.

Speaking of "rules of the game," here's something I didn't know: While editor, Downie did not register to vote or read the paper's editorial page. He tells Terry why... and where he thinks journalism is going. (If you think his novel might be interesting, there's an excerpt on the NPR Web page.)

Later on the same show, Terry interviews Christian Science Monitor editor John Yemma on the paper's move to become a Web-only daily with a weekly print newspaper. Yemma mentions that the Monitor has already moved away from the standard model of a daily newspaper -- it hasn't owned its own presses or delivery trucks for years.

For class discussion: Downie and Yemma tell Terry about "firewalls" within their organizations -- between the news and editorial-page staffs or between news and advertising.

2009-01-09T12:50:00.007-05:00

Broadband and fair use fan Rick Boucher new 'Internet overlord'?

[Revised] OK, that may be the most exaggerated title for a subcommittee chairmanship, but it could get you to read to the end of this item about a Southwestern Virginia congressman in the news... First, some sources:

Copyright Reformer Lands Key Legislative Post

"Some digital rights advocates cheered the appointment of longtime copyright-reform champion Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) as chair of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet.
"Boucher is taking over for Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), who will now head the Energy and the Environment subcommittee, the lawmakers announced Thursday."

From Dow Jones Newswires, via CNNMoney: US Rep Boucher Headed for Telecom Subcommittee Chair

"The recording and movie industries may suffer some heartache with Boucher leading the telecom subcommittee. For several years running, Boucher has sponsored bills dictating 'fair use' of copyrighted material, for example, allowing individuals to copy music or movies for their own use without violating copyright laws."

Here's the congressman's press release about his new chairmanship.

In the 111th Congressman Boucher will oversee the digital television transition and work toward reform of the federal universal service fund, promote broadband deployment and work to enable local governments to offer broadband in communities not fully served by commercial carriers.

Background: The online office of Congressman Rick Boucher

Geek cred: Boucher is a co-founder and co-chair of the Congressional Internet Caucus and back in 2001 (a "first"?) was interviewed by readers of Slashdot, the "news for nerds: stuff that matters" Internet forum.

Result: Here's Slashdot's discussion of his new chairmanship. I wonder if the congressman has noticed that someone is calling him "our new sane, Slashdot-answering, fair-use-aware internet overlord."
Another "/." comment: "He's honest, smart, knowledgeable. Yet despite those handicaps he's served in Congress for many years."

Finally: Also thanks to a link from Slashdot, a relevant cartoon, although Boucher doesn't have quite the track record of the guy in the hat.