A risible or banal glut of shibboleths for the feckless?

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."

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...

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

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?

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

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?

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.