Happy Thanksgiving!

... 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.

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

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

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

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...

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

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.