Yet Another Blog by Bob: and couple of songs

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 "The Prisoner's Song" episode of the series "Big Town," although you may have to carefully copy and paste this address:
http://otrrlibrary.org/OTRRLib/Library%20Files/B%20Series/Big%20Town/Big%20Town%2049-02-15%20(467)%20The%20Prisoner's%20Song.mp3

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 whatever was getting her down.

100 Best Blogs for Journalism Students??

2013 Update: Better late than never, after four years,  I have just received an email note from the keepers of this site saying that they plan a substantial redesign, and requesting that I remove the link to its old address. 

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. [Link removed by request.]

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. )

Watchdog leaves Hartford Courant, growling

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."

Life with newspapers... and without

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

TVA Coal Ash Flood Coverage

Over at my other blog, which is better for accumulating long lists of things, I've saved a bunch of links to the developing coverage of the Tennessee Valley Authority 'ash flood' in East Tennessee after reading Knoxville bloggers' comments on the slim coverage by national media.

Included are links to brand-name media, TVA, environmental organizations and area bloggers.

Defiantly soothing news

Teaching news writing, I've seen "defiantly" before as a typo for "definitely," but combining it with "soothing" might be ironic juxtaposition. I'm not 100 percent sure what's going on in the item below...

If there's any real threat of people calling a genre of sound-wallpaper "stepno music" (combining "techno" and "dubstep") I'll feel compelled to listen once in a while. The idea was raised in the "comment" thread on this Top 20 list:

Little White Earbuds -- LWE’s Top 20 Singles of 2008 (Part 1):

"If there was a running meme of the techno-dubstep hybrid in 2008, “Circling” was the first to organically complete the cycle. Appleblim and Peverelist created a track with both the sensual space of Berlin with all the tickling Bristol bass. Defiantly soothing, “Circling” is the perfect twist to the cartoonishly aggressive dubstep scene."

Thanks for the musical education... It's nice to have some new music in my ears on Christmas, much as I love Bing. (I don't think the "Berlin" mentioned above was Irving.)

As an admitted ukulele player with ethnomusicological tendencies, whose personal musical goal for a few years has been to successfully merge "I wish I could shimmy like my" Sister Kate with Chuck Berry's "Sweet Little Sixteen," I have to admit I found "Circling" more fun to listen to than many of the 15 items ahead of it on Buds' top-20 list.

The touch of synth rainstick and rainforest sounds is soothing, in a defiant sort of way.

Feliz navidad and happy Chanukkah.

PS If you want one more new audio experience for the new year, a quick search for "ukulele" and "Hanukkah" found this.