Blogger is capable of more than I remembered

It's almost a year to the day since I've posted anything here. I'm paying a visit today in "how the heck did he DO that?" mode, after spending some time browsing around the "not-just-a-'blog'" sites done with this same Web system -- Blogger.com (a.k.a. yoursite.blogspot.com) -- by an old-time-radio fan and prolific blogger who goes by the handle "Jimbo."

For a couple of years I've been pointing out to students that WordPress can be used for sites that don't really look "bloggish." (http://rstepno.wordpress.com | http://bstepno.wordpress.com | http://stepno.wordpress.com/just-for-326-demo | and http://jheroes.com)

But I'd never tried using Blogger that way -- or noticed anyone doing the kinds of things Jimbo is doing. Here's the list from his "about" page:

• Jimbo's OTR Podcast
• OTR Books
• Silent Radio
• Jimbo's OTR Buffet
• Marxisms
• Imagined Plots of Vic and Sade
• otr photo
• Billboard Magazine OTR Review Index
• OTR People
• Vic and Sade Characters
• Comic Weekly Man
• Golden Age Newspapers
• OTR Advertisements
• Say Hello To...
• OTR Casts
• The Mixed-up World of Uncle Fletcher
• Unfishul Lum and Abner Dictionary
• Peabody's Peabrain
• OTR Audio Interviews
• DUMMY
• Vic and Sade Notebook
• The Crazy World of Vic and Sade

On second thought, "prolific" is a pretty weak word for all of that! I sent him a note via Twitter to find out if he had any magic tricks up his sleeve. Yup, there IS a secret: "Hundreds of hours of work." And that was just for his Billboard Magazine OTR Review Index http://bbotr.blogspot.com -- a terrific mashup of Google's archive of digitized Billboard magazines, searched, "clipped" and indexed for folks interested in particular radio programs.

That site in particular should be a great resource -- and role model/inspiration -- for other kinds of "media history" researchers, like my friend Bill Kovarik, author of Revolutions in Communication and its accompanying website, and his students.

LIFE magazine archives now searchable with Google Books

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.

Off to run 'Tell the Truth and Run'

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."

Finding time for life and "Life Inc."

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."

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.

New York Times Sells Out

Was it the media history students, or the nostalgia fans, or the first-edition collectors? Maybe friends made The New York Times: The Complete Front Pages 1851-2008 the top Christmas gift choice for newspaper reporters who lost their jobs last year.

For whatever reason, in one month, someone has made the book and DVD-ROM collection a best-seller. The New York Times Store (nytstore.com) says its supply sold out -- at $60 a copy. Amazon and Books-a-Million are also sold out, but were offering the package at $37.80.

The Times Store says the collection is only "temporarily out of stock," and will be back sometime this month. (Note: My own copy is back-ordered. If another arrives as a belated Christmas or birthday present, I'll donate it to my university library and ask that it be put on reserve for students in my media history class.)

The Times store site carries one blurb promoting the book. For a subtle comment on the media world of today, notice the source:

“This satisfyingly hefty volume, with three accompanying DVD-ROMs, gives you access to 54,267 pages of pure undiluted history, reminding you of how the experience of reading the newspaper is at once public and intimate, of the enduring, essential, all-important power of the printed word.” – O, The Oprah Magazine

Hmm. The publisher's Web site, Black Dog & Leventhal, differs on the page count -- by one page:

"The 3 DVDs include each of the 54,266 front pages printed by the Times over the past 157 years. Completely searchable and user-friendly, the disks are designed to provide access to the full stories that made front-page news each day since the paper’s founding in 1851. Click on a page—the day you were born, for example—and you're instantly transported to the Times' online archive."

Of course you don't have to buy the book to search the historic back issues of the Times. Every page of every issue of the Times has been part of a searchable online archive for several years -- some of it free, the rest available on a pay-per-view basis to casual visitors, but also available to university students and library patrons through the Proquest Historical Newspapers service.

Audio reports on The Complete Front Pages:

• NPR's Robert Siegel interviews NYTimes executive editor Bill Keller, who wrote the book's introduction. "I like the ones that give you a sense of humility," Keller said, citing a headline skeptical of the future of Edison's electric light, and the way the Times downplayed Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
  
• WAMC's Joe Donahue interviews Times metro reporter James Baron, who wrote timeline summaries for the pages. Baron mentions that the stack of papers would be 300 feet taller than the Empire State Building.

Afterword:
If reading great journalism in PDF files on a computer screen interests you, you also should investigate The Complete New Yorker. The magazine's was founded in 1925, so you won't get the Times' 19th century perspective, but the DVD ROM edition of the New Yorker's weekly editions includes the full text of every page, including ads and cartoons. It's available for $39.99 on DVDs or $179.99 on a palm-size hard drive.

Now if Apple would just introduce a tablet-format Macintosh with internal DVD to read these things...

Footnote: Review -- The Platform: Front Pages by
Peter Osnos, The Century Foundation, 12/30/2008

Online commerce failure: A book I'm not reading

I thought I might spend this afternoon listening to the audiobook edition of British journalist Andrew Marr's My Trade: A Short History of British Journalism, but I'm not.

Roy Greenslade of The Guardian said this in his review of the book back in 2004:

It is not, thankfully, one of those hand-wringing laments for a mythical golden past. It does contain anecdotes, though they are always relevant to his wider argument. It is not a sermon, but it does raise questions about the ethical morass of modern journalism. At the same time it is often witty, consistently self-deprecating and, most importantly, makes an important contribution to the increasingly bitter debate about the nature of the British media.

Sounds like just the thing for any of my media history students who become more interested in the British side of English language journalism.

Alas, my library doesn't have it. I was pleasantly surprised when I found it at Amazon, because of a link to a downloadable audio book version. "Great," says I, "I can download it, pop it in the iPod or PalmTX (if not my Sony or Olympus MP3 recorders), and listen on the road..."

You can listen to Mr. Marr himself reading from the book in the Audible.com sample. He's charming, self-deprecating and very funny. I think journalism students would enjoy the book as text or audio. I was a bit disappointed that the audio version was abridged, but decided to create an Audible.com account and buy it.

I went through the process... filled in "shipping information" or "billing information" -- even though both the "shipping" and "billing" would be done online. When I was done with the fill-in form, Audible returned me to a screen that congratulated me on creating an account.

It didn't say anything about downloading my new book.

It didn't give me a receipt for crediting my Visa card.

I checked Audible's "library," "shopping basket" and "your account" pages, but found no record of my ordering the book.

I started worrying that I had been "phished" by some link spoofing Audible's address to steal my credit card information.

I went back to the book's page at Amazon/Audible, and noticed that I was no longer being offered the "first time customer" discount on the sales price. And when I tried to order a copy, I was sent to a new page headed "We are sorry but your geographic location prevents us from selling you this product."

I don't think that screen turned up the first time, because I was redirected to the "create a new account" pages. That would have been a nice place to tell me I was not going to be able to buy the book.

Enough with the computer. I found an 800 number and called Audible's technical support to complain that -- assuming international copyright or a publisher's restrictions are involved -- Audible should have interrupted my transaction much sooner. The customer support rep said they've tried, but couldn't figure out a way, short of putting a disclaimer on all of their pages, which would be misleading to most readers, since (he said) very few books actually have this problem. (A few readers, like me, might be interested in learning about the copyright issues or publisher's contractual obligations involved.)

I think online readers should expect more. Maybe my play-by-play account (which I emailed to Audible as well as pasting here) will inspire someone. If they get back to me about it, I'll add something here.

And maybe they'll pass the note on to the publisher, who just missed a chance to sell audiobooks to anyone reading this blog. As for me.... back to Amazon, but maybe I'm annoyed at them for linking to Audible in the first place. I wonder if its on the shelf at my local bookstore...

Historic magazine archive via Google

Just when my Media History students might need one more source for their final semester projects...

Wonder what the latest technology was in 1905? Go read Popular Mechanics for that year, back when "wireless telegraphy" was the hottest thing since the "horseless carriage." (I guess "...less" was "more" back then.)

This blast-from-the-past search is thanks to a new archive of old magazine articles at http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search

(For more about Google linking to historic newspaper archives, see my blog item from a few months ago.)

For background see this BusinessWeek article: Google updates search index with old magazines:

"Google has added a magazine rack to its Internet search engine. As part of its quest to corral more content published on paper, Google Inc. has made digital copies of more than 1 million articles from magazines that hit the newsstands decades ago."

(Many thanks to Gerald Grow, a magazine-publishing expert and one of the most "sharing" professors on the Web, for an e-mail alert about this new Google search development.)

I haven't explored enough to see what publications are included... but Popular Mechanics and Popular Science are part of the collection, which will be useful for the "Media History" course when we talk about communication technology...

And I noticed New York magazine turning up in a quick search, which will be a resource for research into more recent journalism history -- and for news writing courses. Originally the Sunday magazine of the New York Herald Tribune newspaper, New York published a lot of great "new journalism" in the 1970s, including Tom Wolfe's article "The Birth of 'The New Journalism,'" which I was just talking about in class today, and one of my all-time favorite cover stories on investigative reporters. Amazing.

Here's a surprise: I did a quick search for the words "journalism" and "politics." The top two hits were not the first magazines I expected to see. They were Jet and Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which is archived back to 1945. Jet -- a great resource for studying African-American culture, apparently had regular columns headed "politics" and "journalism." (Ebony and Black World are also part of the collection.) As for the Bulletin, I guess the topics just came up regularly. This quote jumped out at me from a 1985 article, titled "The Media: Playing the Government's Game":

Before the atomic bomb, journalism never hesitated to march off to war, but the news media usually were eager to demobilize once victory seemed at hand ...

I haven't stumbled on a list of which magazines are in the collection, but I've noticed quite an assortment: Ebony, Mother Jones, Black Belt, Cincinnati Magazine, Indianapolis Monthly, Log Home Living, Bicycling, Backpacker, Vegetarian Times, Prevention, Runner's World, Baseball Digest, CIO... The themes suggest that publishers like Johnson, Emmis and Rodale have contributed groups of titles.

Finally, although you can search for any words in any magazine, the results delivered are full-page images. That means you get to see full-spread advertising layouts, which will be appreciated by students and professors interested in advertising and design.

Practicing 'theft superior'

I've alerted the keeper of the W.T. Stead Resource Site, a collection of writings by an influential 19th century U.K. newspaper editor, to what I take to be a wonderful typographical (or digital scanning) error that stumbles into a larger truth.

The essay in question is
W.T. Stead, "The Future of Journalism" (The Contemporary Review, 1886). The passage that caught my eye is this one, with a great opening (emphasis added):

"A man without a newspaper is half-clad, and imperfectly furnished for the battle of life. From being persecuted and then contemptuously tolerated, it has become the rival of organized governments. Will it become theft superior? The future of journalism depends entirely upon the journalist."

True either way, especially that last sentence, but I think "theft superior" is a bad scan of the word "their."

The ironic question today is whether corporate publishers with their eye on profit margins and stock quotes have been distracted by such "theft superior" and have led to the demise of the vigorous public-service newspaper journalism that might fulfill its promise as a democratic force.

(Stead wrote about that, too. See his "Government by Journalism.")

This week's end-of-semester question: Can some new online media financial model, community-funded (spot.us) or non-profit journalistic enterprises and bloggers fill the blank if newspapers are knocked out of Stead's opening line?

"A man without [a blog | Google | numerous RSS feeds | Facebook | Fox News | MSNBC] is half-clad, and imperfectly furnished for the battle of life."

Charlottesville to watch for Martian invaders... again

This looks like fun -- and some "media convergence" to talk about in class.

PR students can see the fine job of "press agentry" by the University of Virginia Film Festival, bringing together the school's observatory, a major studio motion picture, and a series of underground films (described as "most hyperbolic alien invasion spectacles"), all to celebrate the most famous media hoax since the New York Sun's discovery of man-bats on the moon, from early days of network radio:

Virginia Film Festival
Special 70th Anniversary Broadcast of "War Of The Worlds"

"Just to be sure history doesn't repeat itself, we've asked the observatory to have telescopes at the ready to reassure our spectators that the skies are safe," the film festival director said, calling the Halloween show "a great way to honor one of the more bizarre evenings in Charlottesville history."

The UVa school paper's archives ("media history research") are cited as evidence that the 1938 "Martian invasion" panic over Orson Welles "War of the Worlds" broadcast brought people to the observatory, which used its big telescope to show Virginians that Mars was as arid and peaceful as ever.

If you want to get an early jump on Halloween, here's the 1938 radio broadcast that started it all (courtesy of the Internet Archive)...


Back in the spring, WNYC's Radio Lab did a terrific program on the panic over that 1938 broadcast -- and the fact that it wasn't the only incident like it. The full audio of the program is online, along with links to Orson Welles' 1938 script and more. I'll put that link in my official Media History class syllabus page later this semester, since we're not even up to the invention of printing yet...

As for the man-bats on the moon, I jumped ahead and mentioned in my Media History class that yesterday was the 105th anniversary of the founding of the original New York Sun -- I hope I didn't say "100th" the way I mistyped it here a minute ago!...

The Sun reportedly became the best-selling news sheet in this world by printing a hoax series about an entirely fictional telescopic exploration of the lunar surface. News writing students should note that story length and style have changed since then.

On Wednesday I didn't get around to mentioning that there's no connection to the current paper called the New York Sun, whose business troubles are, coincidentally, in the news today. Keep an eye out for circulation-building stories about man-bats or Martians in New Jersey!

Quotes for old or new journalists

A few back-to-school words from the late Joseph Pulitzer:

"Every issue of the paper presents an opportunity and a duty to say something courageous and true; to rise above the mediocre and conventional; to say something that will command the respect of the intelligent, the educated, the independent part of the community; to rise above fear of partisanship and fear of popular prejudice.
"I would rather have one article a day of this sort; and these ten or twenty lines might readily represent a whole day's hard work in the way of concentrated, intense thinking and revision, polish of style, weighing of words."

... and the late Finley Peter Dunne's "Mr. Dooley":

"Th' newspaper does ivrything for us.
It runs th' polis foorce an' th' banks,
commands th' milishy,
controls th' legislachure,
baptizes th' young,
marries th' foolish,
comforts th' afflicted,
afflicts th' comfortable,
buries th' dead,
an' roasts thim afterward."

... and the fictional editor Perry White (in "Superman, the Movie"):

"Lois, Clark Kent may seem like just a mild-mannered reporter, but listen -- not only does he know how to treat his editor-in-chief with the proper respect, not only does he have a snappy, punchy prose style, but he is in my 40 years in this business the fastest typist I've ever seen."