HUM 223 -- today's presentations

Classes are cancelled today. I can't get an answer when I call SCI, but we're on the Channel 20 list of school closings. Those of you who had presentations scheduled today won't have to give them -- I will just count your grade on the written part of your research project.

I'm posting this message to my blogs and the Message Board linked to my faculty page. If you see other students who are in our class, please let them know. And you'll turn in your final exam papers in the Presidents Room at the regularly schduled time Wednesday morning.

If you have questions, please contact me at pellertsen@sci.edu or my email account at peterellertsen@yahoo.com.

-- Doc

COM 221: Assignment for Fri., Dec. 1

Copied and pasted from the message board linked to my webpage at http://www.sci.edu/classes/ellertsen/facultypage.html. While its purpose is to stimulate (a better word might be "create") class discussion, this is a mandatory, graded assignment.


doc
COM 221 -- Friday's assignment
Wed Nov 29, 2006 15:53
216.125.122.175


This will be the basis for class discussion Friday, but it is also a graded assignment. Your grade will depend on how extensive and relevant your discussion is of the point I ask about below.

Go to a college or university website (the one you did your term project on will probably work best but isn't mandatory. Surf around it till you find: (1) the college's mission statement and a statement of core values, vision or similar noble-sounding words; and (2) information about a community relations program it has undertaken.

Answer some or all of these questions on the message board. How does the college translate its core values as expressed in the statements of mission, vision, etc., into community relations? How does that relate to its overall public relations practice?

-- pe

New office -- directions

I'm getting moved into my new office now, so I'm cross-posting directions to my class blogs and the Message Board linked to my faculty page.

I'm in Beata Hall (the old Ursuline convent) across Eastman Street from St. Joe's parish and school. Either Room 31, if you go by the list of room assignments I've been given, or Room 8, if you go by the numbers on the doors. I've also attached my business card to the door.

To get there from Dawson, go out the south entrance and take the walk past Ursuline Academy. You'll go between the buildings, with the old building on the right and the gym on the left. Keep going through the parking lot, and there'll be a porch on the right (women's housing is straight ahead). On the south end of that porch, there's a door with a Christmas decoration. Go in the door, take the stairs just to the left and you'll be on the floor with faculty offices. They're in the hallway to the left at the top of the stairs. It takes a little less time to walk it than it does to give the directions!

Computer and phone are now hooked up ... you can reach me, as before, by phone at 525-1420 ext. 519 and by email at pellertsen@sci.edu. Email is usually better, but the voice mail in my office is working again.

COMM 150, 207: 'Next big thing' on the net?

Cross-posted to The Mackerel Wrapper and my cleverly named http://comm207fall06.blogspot.com/ blog for students in COMM 207 this semester.

Here's kind of a breathless, "gee-whiz" story about the latest round of innovations on the World Wide Web, that also gives a nice profile of Silicon Valley. It was in today's London Observer, the Sunday paper affiliated with The Guardian. I'll just post the lede, the nut graf(s) and an interesting observation or two that came further down in the story, by David Smith of The Observer.

The lede sets the scene:

The people spilling out of Ritual Coffee Roasters on to the San Francisco sidewalk scent more than coffee beans. Inside there are twenty and thirtysomethings, most of them male, working intently at laptops and harnessing the power of the internet. They are not merely logging on to look at MySpace or YouTube or The Next Big Thing. They plan to be The Next Big Thing.

It's boom time again in Silicon Valley and there is opportunity around every corner. Each month $180m (£94m) is invested in technology companies aspiring to change the lives of every person on the planet. A combination of youth, entrepreneurial spirit, technical insight, financial muscle and the American Dream, flavoured with West Coast utopianism, has formed a perpetual motion machine that is driving the information age. The brilliant brains of students and geeks, businessmen and scientists, angel investors and venture capitalists are feeding and thriving off each other, sparking the kind of electricity one imagines filled the air of northern England during the Industrial Revolution. A whole new world wide web is on the horizon.

'If you like the idea of going to a coffee shop and everyone works in software and in the conversation next to you someone is starting a company, this is the place to be,' said John Merrells, 37, who emigrated from Harrogate in North Yorkshire and runs a mobile phone software company here. 'Everyone you bump into is potentially something. The physical concentration of people is phenomenal. Like in the City of London, the continual rubbing up of people is how ideas come about.'

To British readers, the references to Yorkshire wouldn't sound "ye olde English-y," of course. They'd be no more exotic than Decatur or Bloomington.

Did you spot the nut graf, by the way? It's that second graf, that begins "It's boom time again in Silicon Valley ..."

A lot of the story is just a catalog of new ideas. Some, no doubt, will pan out. Others, I am sure, won't. And I wish I could say it held my interest better. But interspersed with the new product reviews are some good insights. Here's one on user-generated content like we see on YouTube or Flickr:

The idea of the moment, over-hyped perhaps, is Web 2.0. Before it, according to the definition, the web was a 'lean back' experience like television, in which official content providers' websites would be passively consumed by the rest of us. No one quite agrees on the meaning of Web 2.0, but everyone thinks it has something to do with social networks and content generated by users - a 'lean forward' experience in which consumers become creators. There are more than 1,000 such sites with prime examples including Wikipedia, an online encyclopaedia written by users; Flickr, a photo sharing site; Facebook, which enables social networking; and Digg, in which the community selects and prioritises news stories like an editor.

Web 2.0's unprecedented army of contributors is capable of providing more detailed information about your special interest or geographical location than any traditional organisation could dream of. The race is now on to turn it into a commercial proposition.

Which leads into one of the clearest explanations I've seen of how they're changing things: "Each of these sites, and their many imitators, is taking something as old as human civilisation - word of mouth - and formalising it in a single space, giving consumers once unimaginable access to the recommendations of friends and the 'wisdom of crowds'."

There's also a very clear explanation -- again, the clearest I've seen -- of the "semantic web," and how it's expected to work. But I'll let you read that.

COM 221: 'Keys to the store'

In class today (Friday) I "gave away the keys to the store," by asking students to get in the Google search engine, search on keywords "community relations," look at the corporate websites in the directory (IBM, the U.S. Justice Department and The Palm Beach Post among others), choose one and post to the message board their answers to two questions:

1. How does your organization do community relations?
2. Why does your organization do community relations?

In this assignment, I was especially interested in how their community relations statements relate to their corporate mission statement, vision, strategic planning and other indicators of corporate values.

Here's why.

As we studied the chapter on community relations in our textbook, and especially as we visited the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship website in class Wednesday, I noticed some of our key concepts in the course coming together. For example, the BCCCC's discussion "What is Corporate Citizenship?" struck me as an excellent statement of core ethical principles:

Minimize harm: Work to minimize the negative consequences of business activities and decisions on stakeholders, including employees, customers, communities, ecosystems, shareholders, and suppliers. Examples include operating ethically, supporting efforts to stop corruption, championing human rights, preventing environmental harm, enforcing good conduct from suppliers, treating employees responsibly, ensuring the safety of employees, ensuring that marketing statements are accurate, and delivering safe, high-quality products.

Maximize benefit: Contribute to societal and economic well-being by investing resources in activities that benefit shareholders as well as broader stakeholders. Examples include participating voluntarily to help solve social problems (such as education, health, youth development, economic development for low-income communities, and workforce development), ensuring stable employment, paying fair wages, and producing a product with social value.

Be accountable and responsive to key stakeholders: Build relationships of trust that involve becoming more transparent and open about the progress and setbacks businesses experience in an effort to operate ethically. Create mechanisms to include the voice of stakeholders in governance, produce social reports assured by third parties, operate according to a code of conduct, and listen to and communicate with stakeholders.

Support strong financial results: The responsibility of a company to return a profit to shareholders must always be considered as part of its obligation to society.

Two other links from the BCCCC menu on Corporate Citizenship (third from the left among the pull-down menus at top of the page) that tell a lot about the concept are "The Value Proposition," which is kind of theoretical but very informative, and the "State of Corporate Citizenship," which gives results of a survey of businesses that summarizes evidence of how it is practiced in the real world.

In chapters 5-8 of our textbook, we learned howto do public relations. In this website, we learn why. Both will be on the final exam.

COMM 150, 221: 'Branding' Britney Spears

No, we don't mean "branding" like what they do to cattle to show who owns the cow or steer. We mean building brand equity in a commercial enterprise. In this case, the commercial enterprise is Britney Spears, and The Mail on Sunday, a British tabloid newspaper, has published a very complete survey of her business dealings. Turns out she's more of a businesswoman than you'd think.

The version of The Mail's story that I'm linking here, headlined "No 'Oops' when she did it again," points up two important trends in mass media. One is about Britney's brand, of course, and what she's done to protect it, or, as some would argue, to run it into the ground. The other is suggested by where I found the story. It wasn't in The Mail, but a rewrite that appeared Nov. 13 in The City Times, on the Khaleej Times website from Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. Don't think we live in an age of globalization? Here's an Arab newspaper's website picking up a story from a London tab about an American celebrity.

Here's how they set up their story story about Britney's financial arrangments:

She has been dismissed as simply a bubble-headed pop princess. So when Britney Spears filed for divorce last week after two stormy years of marriage to Kevin Federline — now dubbed Fed-Ex — many assumed it would cost the 24-year-old singer a hefty chunk of her reported £65million fortune. But it can be revealed that, far from facing financial ruin, astute Britney safeguarded her global business empire with an iron-clad 60-page prenuptial agreement, prior to her wedding in October 2004.

Britney wanted every penny protected by the pre-nup and ordered her vast legal team to draw up a list of all her worldwide assets, held in a myriad of companies including Britney Brands, BritneyFilms, Britney Online, Britney Touring, Fairy Zone Productions, One More Time Music and Britney Television.

To find out exactly how much she was worth, they gathered together hundreds of financial and tax statements. These documents have now been seen by The Mail on Sunday, and they offer a fascinating insight into the finances of a pop phenomenon.

So the news "peg" or hook is Britney's upcoming divorce. And the journos play up the angle of starry-eyed romance -- or lack thereof. Apparently, she and Federline staged a wedding for the celebrity press, but did it for real in private, and only after "after Federline had signed the agreement that banned him from making any future claim against any assets his wife had prior to their marriage."

Britney's financial show her to be anything but starry eyed. Reports the paper in Dubai:

A source linked to the prenuptial negotiations said last night: 'Everyone thinks Britney is this hick from Louisiana but, in reality, she is an extraordinarily astute businesswoman who has built herself into a global brand.'

A great deal of her fortune was made prior to her marriage and, when Kevin signed the pre-nup, he waived any right to any part of Britney Incorporated.

Without a prenuptial agreement Britney, who built her fortune off the back of bubblegum hits such as Oops! I Did It Again and Baby One More Time could have been forced to split her empire 50-50.

The financial statements gathered for the 2004 pre-nup list total personal cash and assets at the time worth £16.92million.

Her biggest year for earnings, according to her income tax returns, was 2001 when she made £10.2 million. Current estimates put the value of her fortune now at £65m.

Britney, who has two sons with former back-up dancer Federline — 14-month-old Sean Preston and eight-week-old Jayden James - broke the news of the divorce to her husband via text message.

Her apparent relief at being free may also be down to the fact that, with her mighty fortune protected, she is still able to laugh all the way to the bank.

But there's another side of the story, and The Khaleej Times gets into that, too, reporting rumors that she's about to start performing in Las Vegas, "kitsch graveyard of the once famous."

Like Branson, Mo., the clubs in Las Vegas have a name for attracting performers whose careers have peaked. Elvis Presley, for example, wound up in Vegas long after songs like "Hound Dog" and "Hearbreak Hotel" made music history.

See how the branding issues play out in The Times' account of Britney's career and how she manages -- or mismanages -- her public image:

A series of dreadful personal and professional decisions has wrecked a career that could once do no wrong. It has changed Spears from being compared to a young Madonna into a favourite butt of watercooler gossip.­

Her first, brief, marriage, to childhood friend Jason Alexander, was conducted in a Vegas wedding chapel. Then came Federline, who was widely seen as using Spears to piggyback his own career. Then came Spears's disastrous decision to turn her second marriage into a reality TV show, Chaotic.­

After that there was a series of incidents involving her young children, including one in which she drove with her baby in her lap. Finally, there is also a rumoured Spears and Federline sex tape. Spears recently sued an American magazine that reported on the existence of the tape. Bizarrely, she sued not over the existence of the tape itself, but because the magazine had suggested she was blase about it. A judge threw the case out, saying Spears had made a career out her sexuality.­

That judgment, sums up what went wrong with Spears's career. She symbolised the hyper-sexuality demanded of American women in the modern era. It was the core of her appeal — but society wants younger, less maternal idols than her.­

But as the Khaleej Times says, and the details of Britney Spears' financial arrangements suggest, "it might be possible to launch a credible comeback."




If you want to find out more about branding ... and you do, if you want to major in communications or just to understand why you pay more for Tommy Hilfiger than you do for a knock-off you get at a "big box" retailer ... DNA Design, a communications firm in New Zealand, has a website called Allaboutbranding.com created to "to begin to reconcile the many and conflicting views of what constitutes brand; and to help our clients and others arrive at clearly defined views of their own brand, how to develop and manage it and how they would like to see it expressed." It is also clearly intended to attract business for the consuluting firm by giving away a free sample of its product.

Dr. Suess does the internet

Here's a rhyme about packet switching and data transmission that has been around since the early days of the internet and you can still find archived here or there. It's usually called "What if Dr. Seuss Did Technical Writing," and it begins:

Here's an easy game to play.
Here's an easy thing to say:

If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port,
And the bus is interrupted as a very last resort,
And the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort,
Then the socket packet pocket has an error to report!

And so it goes. I was assured in the mid-90s that it was technically accurate. It may still be, for all I know.

COMM 207: BP damage control. Read, post and discuss

We've read about crisis communications and damage control in our text Public Relations: The Profession and the Practice, and we've looked at the BP website to analyze how it gets the company's message across. Now comes a news story that deals with how BP dealt with a situation that put the company in a bad light -- a lawsuit filed in the wake of a Texas refinery explosion that cost the lives of 15 people.

The New York Times reports:

Just as jury selection was beginning in what would have been the first civil case to go to trial, the plaintiff, a woman whose parents were killed in the blast and who had expressed eagerness to go to court, settled.

The woman, Eva Rowe, 22, is to receive an undisclosed amount. The settlement also called for BP, which is based in London, to continue to release documents related to the case and to donate millions to schools and medical facilities, including one where victims were treated after the March 2005 explosion. The blast also injured more than 170 people.

“We are happy to have been able to resolve this and spare Ms. Rowe the task of bringing this case to trial,” said a BP spokesman, Ronnie Chappell.

Read the rest of the story, review the discussion of crisis communication in the text, post your thoughts as comments to this blog and be ready to discuss it in class.

COMM 221: Organizational culture in the news. Discuss!

One nice thing about the study of communications is that it's not just a sterile exercise confined to textbooks (although the textbooks are important). It also has application in the real world.

Here's a story in Thursday's Chicago Tribune on former CIA director Robert Gates' appointment to replace outgoing Defense Secretary Ronald Rumsfeld that touches on what we've been studying in class about organizational culture.

And here's one from The Washington Post on the same appointment, and what it might mean for the organizational culture in the Pentagon, the White House and high levels of government in general.

Read both stories, review the discussion of organizational culture in our textbook and post your answers to the following questions as comments to this blog. Here are the questions:

1. What kind of management style did Rumsfeld typify? Why was he sometimes resented by others at the Pentagon and in government? What specific evidence do you find in the two newspaper stories to support your answer? Cite the evidence. Be specific.

2. What kind of management style did Gates have at the CIA? Cite specific evidence in support of your answer. What changes in organizational culture do you think he might make when he takes over Rumsfeld's job?

3. Which kind of organizational culture would be better for public relations purposes? Balance the pros and cons. Consider the two definitions of organizational culture cited in our text. Be specific.

Here are the first few paragraphs of the Trib's story (and below I'll past in the first grafs of the Post story). Read them here get you started and follow the links below to find more evidence:

Gates seen as low-key loyalist

By Greg Miller, Tribune Newspapers
Los Angeles Times
Published November 9, 2006

WASHINGTON -- In turning to former CIA Director Robert Gates to take the reins at the Pentagon, President Bush has selected a low-key loyalist who is in many ways the opposite of outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

While Rumsfeld often seemed bent on running roughshod over the Pentagon brass, Gates is described by longtime associates as collegial and as a consensus-builder.

If Rumsfeld had little regard for the president's father and for many of the elder Bush's pragmatic security advisers, including Brent Scowcroft, Gates was part of that Bush inner circle. He remains close not only to Scowcroft but to other Rumsfeld rivals, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Rumsfeld placed little trust in intelligence agencies and pushed the military to encroach on their turf. Now, in a turning of the tables, a 27-year veteran of the CIA and the National Security Council is poised to take charge of the military.

Democrats praised Gates' nomination, hoping for a less combative Pentagon chief. But Gates has proven controversial in the past and was forced to withdraw from his first nomination as CIA director before winning a split-vote confirmation four years later.

Across the national security community on Wednesday, the deep contrasts between Rumsfeld and Gates were a subject of conversations.

Rumsfeld "is a guy who is kind of burdened with his own certitude at times," said John Gannon, a former high-ranking CIA official who worked with Rumsfeld and Gates. "That is not Bob Gates. He came out of an analytic culture where listening to the ideas of others and questioning your own assumptions is part of the tradecraft."

Link herefor the rest of the Trib's story.

And here's the top of The Washington Post's story:

Robert Gates Lauded As Breaker of Barriers

Military Leaders Describe Bipartisan Appeal

By Ann Scott Tyson and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, November 9, 2006; Page A24

Robert M. Gates, a veteran intelligence official whom President Bush nominated to become his new secretary of defense, is widely viewed as a consensus-builder who may break down barriers between civilian and military leaders -- as well as between the Pentagon and other agencies -- that grew legendary under Donald H. Rumsfeld.

Gates, 63, is a close associate of former president George H.W. Bush and was deputy national security adviser during the Persian Gulf War. He rose rapidly through CIA ranks as a Soviet expert with extensive White House experience to become director of central intelligence from 1991 to 1993. The only setback in his career came in 1987 when he withdrew as President Ronald Reagan's nominee to be CIA director because of his involvement in the Iran-contra affair. In all, Gates has served six presidents in both Republican and Democratic administrations.

A native Kansan with shrewd bureaucratic instincts, Gates lacks the top-down, take-no-prisoners managerial style that won Rumsfeld enemies and instead is more likely to set up task forces and forge agreements behind the scenes, associates said. While Rumsfeld issues flurries of directives and memos, nicknamed "snowflakes," in keeping with his business-executive past, Gates is a listener and leads with the inherent circumspection of an intelligence analyst, they said.

"Rumsfeld's a wrestler. Bob Gates likes to hike," said Richard Haver, a former senior official who has worked closely with both men. "Gates is not about to get on a mat with someone and pin him. With Rumsfeld, pinning is the name of the game."

At the Pentagon, senior military officers said that while Rumsfeld is perceived as arrogant and a fierce turf-battler, Gates is viewed as a far less combative and more conciliatory figure. "Gates has a track record of bipartisan support and being respected and accepted by . . . different parties," said a senior Army general, adding, "I think he'll be fine."

Gates could help ease the tensions that arose as Rumsfeld moved to impose greater civilian control on military services and operations, active and retired military officers said.

Military leaders "will find their voice in a way that they were never going to find it with Rumsfeld. My guess is that he'll listen," a retired four-star general said of Gates, whom he knows. Still, while Gates is expected to handle dissent with more finesse, "he won't be snowed or bamboozled" by senior military officers, said a former official who knows Gates well. "Gates will listen, but he will not always take their advice," he said.

Link here for the full WaPo story.

Of course you'll want to read both stories completely and review what the textbook says about organizational culture before posting your answer, because your grade for this exercise will be based in part on the detail with which you support your claims. You may even decide you want to do a Google search and find out more about Rumsfeld, Gates and their respective management styles.

COMM 221: 'Microtargeting' and angry voters. Extra credit

In class Monday, we discussed a Los Angeles Times story that compared get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts in the congressional district that includes Palm Beach, Fla. Incumbent U.S. Rep. E. Clay Shaw Jr., R-Fla., had a very sophisticated "microtargeting" campaign that contacted voters on specific issues of interest to their demographic groups -- Israel for Jewish voters, for example, and Fidel Castro for Spanish-speaking voters -- while his Democratic challenger, state Sen. Ron Klein, relied on traditional door-knocking and repeating the same "time for a change" message over and over. We kind of thought the GOP strategy would win.

Turns out we missed our bet. Klein, the challenger with the primitive GOTV strategy, won. He got 51 percent of the vote to Shaw's 47 percent.

So the simple, repeated message won out over microtargeting. Here's what The Miami Herald said about it:

Klein said Tuesday there was ''no question'' he successfully capitalized on the anti-incumbent, anti-war mood, defined by his apt but simple and oft-repeated catch phrase: ``It's time for a change.''

''I think people are looking for new ideas and new energy and people who are going to stand up for them,'' said Klein, 49. ``They've lost trust and confidence in Washington and they want change.''

Shaw, who was in his 14th term as a U.S. representative, was personally popular. But this year that wasn't enough to overcome Klein's message. The Herald reported:

Shaw, 67, spent the final day of the campaign in radio appearances, thanking supporters, calling recalcitrant Republicans to urge them to the polls, and waving signs and voting in his home precinct.

Ultimately, though, the hometown popularity and grandfatherly demeanor that helped Shaw squeak past previous challengers just wasn't enough to overcome the volatile election politics that swept Republican incumbents out of office across the nation.

Neither was the legendary GOP get-out-the-vote effort, which was dwarfed by widespread dissatisfaction with national Republican leadership.

In the final months of the campaign, Shaw worked to distance himself from Bush -- even as Klein pushed an unrelenting message that his Republican opponent was too closely tied to GOP leaders, including the president.

Does that mean microtargeting doesn't work? Not necessarily. But it does mean it didn't in this election. I am inclined to think you have to do both -- identify your core voters and contact them personally, or have your campaign workers do it, and stick to one message in your public statements. Sell it both wholesale and retail, in other words.

For more on microtargeting, GOTV and elections in general, Donald A. Green, professor of political science and director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University, has a very interesting proposal on on Harvard University's Neiman Watchdog website.

Green, in so many word, says more people would vote if we made more of a party out of it:

Social scientists are far from answering this puzzle, but recent experiments suggest some interesting hypotheses. Here is a bit of background. Voting in the 19th century was an all-day affair. People would mill about for hours, socializing with friends, imbibing free booze supplied by the political parties, and watching their neighbors cast what was until the 1880s a public vote. The advent of secret balloting did not bring about an immediate drop in turnout. In fact, the effects of the secret ballot were initially fairly modest. But the same social movement that cleaned up elections by instituting the secret ballot also instituted the rule that said that party workers had to remain a good distance from the place where balloting occurred. That innovation seems to have undermined parties' incentives to supply booze and food; voting gradually became a sober affair in which voters cast ballots quickly and quietly. As the fun went out of voting, turnout rates gradually declined. In the North, for example, turnout rates in the 1880s were roughly 30 percentage-points higher than in the 1920s. One might suppose this decline was due to the end of petty bribery, but in fact the decline is evident not only in cities (where machine politics was common) but also in outlying and rural areas as well.

In an effort to understand the role that the social environment may have played in the 1880s, recent experiments have investigated the extent to which a festive, carnival-like atmosphere increases voter turnout. Randomized experiments have gauged whether Election Day festivals increase turnout. Potential festival sites are identified, some are randomly assigned to the treatment group, parties are thrown, free food and (non-alcoholic) drinks are served, and votes tallied. Approximately two dozen such sites have been studied, and the results suggest that creating a festive atmosphere generates a statistically significant increase in turnout. Of course, 21st century voters have no idea what to make of announcements of an Election Day festival, so time will tell how this innovation alters turnout patterns over the long term. Nevertheless, the results are an exciting potential development in the understanding of what makes -- and made -- people vote.

For extra credit. What do you think? Would a big election-day party be good PR? Would it be good politics? Would it give us good government? For extra credit, post your thoughts as comments to this blog.

COM 150 -- term paper topics?

Here are some ideas for viable term paper topics in mass comm., to get you started brainstorming your own. Some I'll put in the form of research questions: Ask yourself a question, do a web search or two, find out what's out there, and your answer to the question will do for a working hypothesis. Others may be vague ideas, topics. All will have to be narrowed to make a viable research paper.

Read the ideas, and note the in-class discussion assignment (in bold type) below.

In no particular order:

• Are negative political ads turning Americans off on politics?


• How does a major league baseball team use the media to maintain its fan base?


• How does a singer or a band use the media to sell records or maintain fan base?


• How does a singer or band stick make money and keep artistic control by sticking with indie labels? Or, alternatively, how does a singer work with the major labels?


• What does it take to get a song on the charts? How does radio determine the profitability of pop music?


• How does a corporation use the media to communicate with its customers?


• Do television commercials have an negative impact on teenagers' body image?


• How do category romances (or any other kind of paperback book) use their cover art and blurbs to sell product to their market nitche?

Some other ideas: Go to the Google News page and surf around today's news, and you'll find plenty of current stuff on computers and the internet, the health of the newspaper and television industries, elections (especially today), celebrities, etc. There's a story today on Katie Couric, who's kind of a celebrity and a news person both. A couple of stories on pro football. That's part of the entertainment industry. It doesn't have to be American football, either. I had a student do a really good paper a couple of years ago on how Manchester United uses the internet and other media to reach out to fans in the U.S. In class, brainstorm with the people sitting nearest you and come up with three to five sure-fire topics. As you share them with the rest of the class and hear each other's ideas, you'll be amazed how easy it is to come up with a good topic that interests you.

COMM 207, 150, 221: Bad photo crop!

I'm cross-posting this item to both of my blogs for mass comm. students ...

You'll see why. It's a casebook example of how not to crop a photo -- why you've really got to think about what it's going to look like in print.

Follow this link to Daily Kos, then scroll down till you see this tag, "Update on a completely unrelated matter -- here's a lesson in how NOT to set up a photo shoot if your name is 'Charlie Bass'," followed by the picture.

I don't know who Charlie Bass is, or what he's running for. But I've got to be sympathetic! [See below for update.]

Daily Kos, by the way, is a very partisan weblog for self-described progressive Democrats. Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, the blog administrator, is becoming a force in the Democratic Party, and it's considered a valuable networking tool especially for more liberal Democratic grass-roots activists. Here's what Wikipedia says about Zúniga, and the weblog.

Update. When I was watching Tuesday night's election returns several hours after posting this, I noticed a U.S. Rep. Charlie Bass, R-N.H., who lost his bid for re-election. Talk about adding insult to injury!

COM 221: Targeted vs. message-driven strategies

A very interesting story in today's Los Angeles Times contrasts the Republican and Democratic GOTV (get-out-the-vote) strategies in a Florida congressional district during the run-up to Tuesday's election.

The article, by LA Times reporters Peter Wallsten and Tom Hamburger, sets up the contrast in the lede -- between the Republican's nitche marketing and the Democrat's repetition of a simple message, over and over and over again:

BOCA RATON, FLA. — Jewish voters received a pamphlet about Israel's fight with Hezbollah. Spanish speakers heard radio ads about Fidel Castro. Seniors got recorded telephone calls from crooner Pat Boone, now 72, about Social Security.

As Rep. E. Clay Shaw Jr. (R-Fla.) fights to keep his seat in Congress, he is drawing heavily from the Republican playbook of dividing voters by their backgrounds and interests and appealing to them with tailored pitches. His success — along with his party's hopes for hanging onto its congressional majorities — relies in part on databases and search tools used to identify sympathetic voters and move them to the polls.

Shaw's Democratic challenger has a far different strategy. Instead of specialized appeals, state legislator Ron Klein repeats a simple message to nearly every audience: Iraq is a mess, and it is time for a change.

That contrast underscores a central question to be answered Tuesday in this South Florida House district and other competitive races across the country: Which political force will prove stronger — the niche-marketing effort, led by GOP strategist Karl Rove and powered by computerized outreach methods, or the classic "throw the bums out" mood of an electorate uneasy with the Iraq war and unhappy with one-party rule?

Well, we'll find out Tuesday. But I think there's a broader lesson here -- both techniques are proven, market-tested and effective.

The dynamics of this particular election in that particular congressional district will probably determine the outcome. That's how elections work. But the way the two candidates are going about it is a good, very timely demonstration of the underlying principles of public relations.

And GOTV at bottom is about public relations. It's moving your latent public to an active public, and you can read about in our textbook, Public Relations: The Profession and the Practice by Dan Lattimore et al. So I'll skip over the stuff about Tuesday's election in the LA Times story and get back to public relations.

Here's how "the GOP strategy of narrow-casting and voter identification" plays out in Shaw's campaign:

On Friday, as in GOP campaigns across the country, the Shaw team's "72-hour plan" got underway — its final effort to reach people who, according to their profile in the party's national database, are likely to favor Republican candidates.

At a field office in Boca Raton, dozens of volunteers turned up to knock on doors and talk to voters. A staffer distributed clipboards with printed pages of names, addresses and detailed maps.

The printouts came from the "Voter Vault," the GOP's national database, which tagged voters with labels showing why they were worth contacting: Some were dubbed "socos" (social conservatives) or "fiscos" (fiscal conservatives) or "soft Dems" (crossover voters). Each had already been identified as ready to favor Shaw. The goal was to persuade each one, using hints from the database, to make the effort to go to the polls.

Party leaders have built a 72-hour plan for every significant GOP race in the nation. The effort was developed by Rove and Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman after the 2000 election, in which Democrats outpaced the GOP in grass-roots activism and nearly won the presidency.

The "Voter Vault" is a central element of the plan, and the party invested more than $15 million to update the system this year. So far this election cycle, it has guided 24 million phone or in-person contacts to conservative voters.

Following the plan, over the campaign's final three days, GOP field offices in Shaw's district must file updated spreadsheets every three hours to the state GOP in Tallahassee, showing how many voters have been personally contacted. State party officials report that data to national headquarters, where staff members make sure that individual campaigns are meeting their goals.

And here's what Klein, the Democrat, is doing to hone his message and drive it home:

Klein acknowledges that the GOP has an advantage in voter turnout, but said his campaign has spent a year building a field organization and a competing database. However, his database received only limited help from the national Democratic Party, and it has less detail than the GOP's.

Despite fewer resources, Klein's field director developed a program to reach seasonal residents, or "snowbirds," at their homes outside Florida. Klein's campaign has tried to identify residents of gated communities that are off-limits to candidates and canvassers, and to recruit volunteers within the walls. It also used a visit by former Georgia Sen. Max Cleland, disabled in Vietnam, to reach out to veterans.

Klein says he has employed enough canvassers to contact 60,000 backers in the final three days; on Friday alone, the campaign says, it reached 7,000 people by phone or in person.

And Democrats are counting on additional help from an ambitious voter-contact program by labor unions, though it is not coordinated with Klein's campaign.

Yet Klein's campaign appears to be behind Shaw's, whose workers say they reached 15,000 people Friday and have a goal of contacting at least 100,000 in the campaign's closing days.

Klein's GOTV efforts are more traditional than the Republican GOTV whiz-bangery, relying on volunteers and labor unions, and they're also more reliant on the message. That's why Cleland visited the district.

It's pretty clear Klein is also relying on free media, news coverage of the issues that resonate with voters this year ... the war, stem-cell research, scandals in the House Republican caucus ... and his GOTV effort is primitive compared to Shaw's. At the moment, whatever advantage Klein might enjoy seems like it comes mostly from the free media. The Times reports:

After 2000, Shaw's district was redrawn by Florida's GOP-led legislature to include more Republicans. But this year, even some Democrats have heard from Shaw about his opposition to President Bush's stance on stem-cell research.

By Tuesday night, voters here and across the country will show whether such precision tactics can withstand the broader wave of anger that Klein hopes will send him to Washington. A poll in Sunday's Miami Herald showed Klein with a 10-point lead, suggesting that Democrats may soon be celebrating.

But there's another election in just two years, when Iraq and GOP scandals may not dominate the debate. So what would Democratic incumbents, forced to combat all of the Republican advantages, do then?

"Maybe we can learn from them in the future," Klein said of the Republicans' tactics.

If not, even Democratic strategists concede, their party could soon find itself relegated again to the back bench.

That 10-point lead in the public opinion polls could evaporate by Tuesday's election. Congressional districts are notoriously hard to sample, and the only poll that matters is on election day. But the GOTV techniques being used by Shaw and Klein alike will be around as long as we have elections.

COM 150 students, MIT, Brits study wired world

Shades of Philo Farnsworth, who invented television and wouldn't let his children watch it?

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a key early developer of the World Wide Web, has called for a Web Science Research Initiative that, according to a BBC News report, "will chart out a research agenda aimed at understanding the scientific, technical and social challenges underlying the growth of the web."

A joint project of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Southampton in England, the Science Research Iniative will be cross-disciplinary. Berners-Lee said it is needed because uncontrolled growth of the internet is "a social as well as technological phenomenon." And it's one that worries him. He told a BBC reporter he "is worried about the way it could be used to spread misinformation and 'undemocratic forces.'" The story continues:

The web has transformed the way many people work, play and do business.

But Sir Tim Berners-Lee told BBC News he feared that, if the way the internet is used is left to develop unchecked, "bad things" could happen.

He wants to set up a web science research project to study the social implications of the web's development.

The changes experienced to date because of the web are just the start of a more radical transformation of society, he said.

But Sir Tim is concerned about the way it could end up being used.

He told the BBC: "If we don't have the ability to understand the web as it's now emerging, we will end up with things that are very bad.

"Certain undemocratic things could emerge and misinformation will start spreading over the web.

"Studying these forces and the way they're affected by the underlying technology is one of the things that we think is really important," he said.

While the news media, including the on-line media, have been more interested in things like sex scandals and congressional elections, Berners-Lee's concerns and the MIT-Southampton study group are probably more important than either.

In its Nov. 3 story on MIT's announcement of the group's formation, The Boston Globe gave some of the backstory:

Berners-Lee invented the Web in 1989 as an easy way to share vast amounts of scientific information. He developed HTML, the simple language used to create basic Web pages. But Berners-Lee was as surprised as anyone by the rapid public embrace of the Web. "We really just created the underlying rules," he said, "and then it created itself from a mass of humanity."

As a result, scientists don't have a complete understanding of how the millions of computers now on the Web interact . The institute wants to recruit mathematicians and computer scientists, but also psychologists and other social scientists, to develop models of how information is stored on the Web.

"We need people who understand the social and the technical aspects," said Wendy Hall, professor of computer science at the University of Southampton. This will help them devise better ways to search for data, share it, and secure it against unauthorized access.

And a news report by on the magazine Scientific American's website gives more of the backstory:

In one decade the World Wide Web has exploded into 14 billion pages that touch almost all aspects of modern life. The network has grown in a grassroots way, based on a handful of pervasive protocols and aloof guidance from the World Wide Web Consortium, a forum based at M.I.T. for Web developers. Essentially, millions of devotees have spent countless hours advancing the Web bit by bit. Although forceful, the effort has also been piecemeal and inefficient.

Furthermore, vast emergent properties are beginning to arise on the Web, and no one is studying how they have blossomed or what they may mean for society. E-mail led to instant messaging, which grew into social networks such as MySpace. The transfer of documents led to file sharing sites such as Napster, which led to user-generated portals like YouTube. Tagging documents with identifying labels is prompting the emergence of a Semantic Web, a global effort to allow computers to recognize not just what online documents are, but what kinds of information they contain and what it might mean. The Semantic Web promises to bring all sorts of useful data to users, not just text and imagery.

In fact the Semantic Web, whatever it may be, is one of Berners-Lee's main concerns at the moment.

Among the few U.S. newspapers outside of Boston (where MIT is a local story) that ran a story was The San Francisco Chronicle, which does a creditable job of keeping up with developments in nearby Silicon Valley. A story headed "What are Web's Societal, Scientific Consequences? Academics Begin Studying Impact of Having a Wired Planet" by staff writer Tom Abate quoted several Silicon Valley types on the implications. They're huge. They extend from marketing techniques to freedom of speech and techolology in the People's Republic of China.

Communications 150 students: Read the stories, especially the ones in the Chronicle and Scientific American. Go to the Google News directory. Do a keyword search on Tim Berners-Lee, MIT and web. Decide for yourselves what's going on with the web. How imporant is it? What does it mean for the future? For your future? For your career?

Here's a half-serious footnote on what it means to be wired. It's about coffee, but it's also about how people in authority all too often respond to change. Is it also about the free flow of information?

In a commentary published in The Guardian (U.K.), Calestous Juma, the director of the Science, Technology and Globalisation project at Harvard University’s John F Kennedy School of Government, suggested Berners-Lee was right. Juma said, "What is critical is not simply worrying about spread of 'bad things', but finding a healthy balance between the benefits and risks of the web." He finds wisdom in the history of how coffee came to be accepted, first in the Middle East and then in Europe.

Coffee?

Yes. Coffee. And coffeehouses. The problem wasn't so much the coffee, in fact, as it was where people drank it and what they said to each other while they were drinking it. It began in Arabia, says Juma:

In 1511 a viceroy and inspector of markets in Mecca, Khair Beg, outlawed coffee consumption and coffeehouses. He relied on Persian expatriate doctors and local jurists who argued that coffee had the same impact on human health as wine.

But the real reasons lay in part in the role of coffeehouses in undermining his authority and offering alternative sources of information on social affairs in his realm. His masters in Cairo, however, were not amused. They castigated the scientific basis of the claim and ruled that nobody would be denied access to heaven because he drunk coffee.

Europeans were no more receptive. In England, Juma suggests, there may have been an economic conflict of interest, too:

In 1675 England's King Charles II issued a declaration "for the suppression of coffeehouses", charging that coffeehouses were the source of malicious and scandalous statements aimed at defaming the king and undermining public order. He directed that coffeehouses be shut down. His appeal to national security was partly a cover to protect tea interests.

In time, cooler heads prevailed in England, too. Good thing, too. How could books, articles and, yes, student papers, get written without coffee?

Without the internet, for that matter?

COM 150: Read and discuss (post below)

Here are a couple of things for you to read along with the "kid with a modem" piece on the Danwei website in Beijing. They'll give you three points of view on how the internet appears to be opening up the political process to people who aren't traditional "gatekeepers," i.e. interested citizens, bloggers and, yeah, kids with modems. Once you've followed the links, read all three, thought about them for a minute or two and discussed it with classmates sitting near you, post your thoughts as comments to this blog.

Here's a good overview in USA Today. It appeared three years ago, at the end of 2003, and that's a lifetime or more on the World Wide Web. But it gives the main outlines of the blogosphere. Says staff writer :

The freewheeling, gossipy Internet sites they operate can be controversial: Matt Drudge, the wired news and gossip hound who broke the story about Monica Lewinsky's affair with Bill Clinton, is a blogger. Many bloggers are not professional journalists. Few have editors. Most make no pretense of objectivity.

Yet they're forcing the mainstream news media to follow the stories they're pushing, such as the scandal that took down Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott. And they've created a trend that almost every major presidential candidate is following. Even President Bush's campaign Web site hosts a blog.

Lott, R-Miss., is still in the U.S. Senate. And Drudge is still blogging. And the mainstream media are blogging now more than ever before. Here's a link to "The Swamp," a political blog on the Chicago Tribune's website. Unlike the daily Trib (in which it doesn't appear), the blog is updated several times a day -- as the news happens.

I found the USA Today profile by searching keywords "politics" and "bloggers" in Google. Why don't you do the same? Then post your thoughts, along with interesting nuggets of fact you found out, as comments to this message.

BP's operations in Alaska

An Anchorage Daily News story on a new head for BP's Alaska operations gives a good overview of the troubled company's challenges in the past year. The ADN reports:

This has been a tumultuous year for [outgoing BP Alaska president Steve] Marshall and BP, which operates the nation's largest oil field, Prudhoe, on behalf of itself and other owners including Conoco Phillips and Exxon Mobil. BP also runs most of the other North Slope fields.

Industry regulators and lawmakers have condemned BP for failing to safeguard key pipelines within Prudhoe against corrosion, which led to leaks and a partial shutdown of the field on Aug. 6, a decision that briefly roiled world oil markets. Federal criminal investigators are probing a major spill in March, and Marshall and other BP executives have appeared repeatedly before congressional committees considering pipeline reforms.

Yet Marshall has a good reputation in the oil industry, the ADN reported, and BP's troubles don't necessarily indicate malfeasance. Among this year's major events:

• Largest oil spill ever on the North Slope -- an estimated 201,000 gallons from a corroded pipeline -- discovered March 2.

• Emergency shutdown of Prudhoe starts Aug. 6 after another corroded pipe leaks. Production cut by nearly half for six weeks.

• Federal criminal investigators, Congress launch investigations into Prudhoe troubles.

• BP reports $2.6 billion profit on its Alaska oil production in 2005.

• Legislature overhauls tax law to collect more oil revenue when oil prices are high.

• Oil companies negotiate state tax contract to spur natural gas pipeline construction, but deal stalls.

All this can give us a context for evaluating BP's website and its other public relations initiatives.

'Kid with modem' a new Gutenberg?

Here's one to think about -- it's titled "Kid with Modem vs. CNN," and it's by, well, a kid with a modem in Beijing, China, who wrote it for That's Beijing magazine and posted it Jan. 5, 2004, to Danwei, which bills itself as a "website about media, advertising, and urban life in China." Obscure enough?

But from this odd corner of the English-speaking world comes an interesting and, I think, very thought-provoking take on new media.

Goldkorn, who is originally from Singapore, says the world of weblogs is creating a "publishing revolution ... and it's not being funded by venture capitalists nor by the nameless powers that hippies call 'the media'." A revolution, eh? Pretty strong language, isn't it? Well, Goldkorn says it's justified. And I think he makes his case.

That's partly because he doesn't try to hype the subject. He admits, for example, most blogs will make your eyes glaze over:

As in the rest of the world, most Chinese blogs are excruciatingly boring accounts of minor incidents in the lives of college students, and breathless comments about new bits of code written by computer nerds. But there’s other stuff too: well-written observations of daily life in big cities like Beijing but also in small towns that you've never heard of in rural Zhejiang.

And then there is Mu Zi Mei, a young Guangzhou journalist who kept a blog about her one night stands, sometimes naming names and rating performance."

I've never heard of Zhejiang, or Mu Zi Mei for that matter, but what Goldkorn says about them rings true, as well. It also rings true, sadly, that Mu Zi Mei lost her job when word got out about her blog. The same thing happened to a House Republican staffer in Washington, D.C., when she evaluated her associates' performance on a blog.

Then there's this. As Goldkorn puts it:

So where are blogs going in China and elsewhere? You can’t really listen to most bloggers about the subject because they tend to view everything through the prism of their current site traffic, which is about as relevant to the future of media, the Internet and everything as a wok full of cold fish. It is probably better to forget about the word blog which is just the jargon term du jour, and think of it this way:

In Europe, Johannes Gutenberg's invention of a printing press that used movable type in 1436 brought down the price of printed materials and made such materials available for the masses, paving the way for mass literacy and enabling reading and writing to spread way beyond the enclosed walls of the monastries of the dark ages.

In the early 21st century, online publishing technology allows a kid with a modem to compete with CNN for your attention. Wherever the kid is, wherever you are.

Wherever we are, too.

COMM 150: PoMo in WashPo?

... which means, if you keep up with the trendier buzzwords in the national media, postmodernism (sometimes called "PoMo" for short) in The Washington Post. In today's Post, op-ed writer Robert Samuelson has a column titled "Capitalism's Next Stage." It doesn't mention postmodernism by name, but it's surely a clear, crisp explanation of how the postmodern world came about.

At the very least, Samuelson's column shows how economic trends have helped promote the decentering and fragmentation so important to postmodernist philosophers and media critics.

Samuelson's thesis is the 19th-century economy produced a "managerial revolution" that replaced one-man enterprises like John Jacob Astor's fur-trading empire with large, concentrated industries that required centralized management -- and thus, central managers. And in turn, he adds, the giant industries of the 19th and 20th centuries have been all but replaced in the 21st by a scattering of small, specialized enterprises that operate somewhat independently of each other.

Samuelson cites a study by retired Harvard Business School professor Alfred D. Chandler Jr., 88, who said the economy of the late 1800s and almost all the 1900s was essentially managerial. Samuleson says:

Until Chandler, the [history of the] emergence of big business was all about titans. The Rockefellers, Carnegies and Fords were either "robber barons" whose greed and ruthlessness allowed them to smother competitors and establish monopolistic empires. Or they were "captains of industry" whose genius and ambition laid the industrial foundations for modern prosperity. But when Chandler meticulously examined business records, he uncovered a more subtle story. New technologies (the railroad, telegraph and steam power) favored the creation of massive businesses that needed -- and in turn gave rise to -- superstructures of professional managers: engineers, accountants and supervisors.

Take railroads, for example. They required managers to look after rolling stock, coordinate schedules and centralize operations. Samuelson:

Elsewhere the story was similar. Companies didn't achieve lower costs simply by adopting new technologies or building bigger factories. No matter how efficient a plant might be, it would be hugely wasteful if raw materials did not arrive on time or if the output couldn't be quickly distributed and sold. Managers were essential; so were statistical controls. Coordination and organization mattered. Companies that surmounted these problems succeeded.

But now the economy has changed. Samuelson explains:

The trouble now is that the defining characteristics of Chandler's successful firms have changed. For example, many were "vertically integrated" -- they controlled raw materials, manufactured products and sold to the public. AT&T made electronic components, produced telecommunications equipment and sold phone services. But in many new industries, vertical integration has virtually vanished, as economists Naomi Lamoreaux of UCLA, Peter Temin of MIT and Daniel Raff of the University of Pennsylvania argue in a recent study. The computer industry is hugely splintered. Some firms sell components (Intel, AMD), some software (Microsoft, SAP), some services (IBM, EDS), some hardware (Dell, Apple). There's overlap, but not much.

It's also true that old, established firms -- despite ample capital and technical know-how -- often don't dominate new industries. Google, eBay and Yahoo rule the Internet, not General Motors, Sears or Disney.

To be sure, we understand some of these developments. Older firms often suffer from their own success; managers become wedded to existing products, technologies and procedures. We can also identify many of the forces reshaping business: new technologies, globalization and modern finance (pressure for higher profits; corporate "buyouts" by private equity firms). But the very multitude of trends and pressures is precisely the problem. No one has yet synthesized them and given them larger meaning.

But what does this have to do with postmodernism? This, I think: It's another form of fragmentation.

And what does it have to do with mass communications? Well, look back at Samuelson's list of new industries. Relative startups like Google and eBay. Dot-coms, every one. Samuelson concludes:

Just as John Jacob Astor defined a distinct stage of capitalism, we may now be at the end of what Chandler perceptively called "managerial capitalism." Managers, of course, won't disappear. But the new opportunities and pressures on them and their companies may have altered the way the system operates. Chandler admits as much. Asked about how the corporation might evolve, he confesses ignorance: "All I know is that the commercializing of the Internet is transforming the world." To fill that void, someone must do for capitalism's next stage what Chandler did for the last.

COM 150 -- Oct. 25 -- QUIZ

Referring to our textbook Media Now and/or information you find on the World Wide Web, post your answers to the questions below as comments to this blog post:

1. What was the first message transmitted over the Advanced Research and Projects Network (a predecessor of the Internet)? What does that tell you about the nature of the Internet, about computers, about life in general?

2. Post-modernist philosopher Jean-François Lyotard says contemporary society is losing its "grand narratives" (the French for "big stories," or commonly accepted myths, values and beliefs). How did he say the communications media contribute to this breakdown? Do you agree with him or not? Does the Internet contribute to a fragmentation of "grand narratives?"

Popular culture -- excellent portal -- COM 150

Here's a website that tells you what you need to know about popular culture and gets you started on finding out the stuff you want to know. It's by T.V. Reed (I'm not kidding about his initials), an American Studies professor at Washington State University in Pullman.

Reed includes resources on "forms of popular culture including music, film, television, advertising, sports, fashion, toys, magazines and comic books, and the medium in which this message moves, cyberculture." He also includes lots of links.

Of the links, Reed says

As with all Internet sites, the locations referenced vary in quality and usefulness. Some are commercial sites valuable more as objects of knowledge than as producers of knowledge. Others are academic sites that teach ways to analyze pop culture, or offer substantial resources for doing your own analyses.

Since the Internet seldom, if ever, provides all the information needed on a given topic, I also strongly recommend that you consult my bibliography of books on popular culture, and use that old-fashioned, non-virtual space known as the library.

Now there's a concept. The library! And you don't even have to go to Pullman, Wash., to fine one. We have one at SCI, too.

COMM 150 -- class discussion

A couple of questions: Please post your answers as comments to this post.

1. Who was Philo Farnsworth?

2. Why didn't he want his children to watch television?

3. What does this tell you about the early development of the medium? Does it still hold true today? Why? Or why not?

Dinasaur watch No. 1 -- news or comedy?

COMM 150 and COMM 207 students take note (and COMM 221 students notice the format for the news release, which is a model of good PR work) --

Want to know why the "mainstream" news media are in trouble? Here's one indicator. It's a news release from Indiana University quoting Julia R. Fox, assistant professor of telecommunications, who did research showing the Daily SHow with Jon Stewart "is just as substantive as network [news] coverage." Says the release:

Not surprisingly, a second-by-second analysis of The Daily Show's audio and visual content found considerably more humor than substance -- Stewart himself has insisted that he is a comedian and not a journalist. A similar analysis of network coverage found considerably more hype than substance in broadcast newscasts. Examples of such hype included references to polls, political endorsements and photo opportunities.

"Interestingly, the average amounts of video and audio substance in the broadcast network news stories were not significantly different than the average amounts of visual and audio substance in The Daily Show with Jon Stewart stories about the presidential election," she wrote in the paper.

"It should be noted that the broadcast network news stories about the presidential election were significantly shorter, on average, than were The Daily Show with Jon Stewart stories," she added. "The argument could be made that while the amount of substance per story was not significantly different, the proportion of each story devoted to substance was greater in the network news stories ... On the other hand, the proportion of stories per half hour program devoted to the election campaign was greater in The Daily Show."

Fox's conclusion was not a happy one -- "neither one is particularly substantive. It's a bottom-line industry and ratings-driven. We live in an 'infotainment' society, and there certainly are a number of other sources available."

Question: If the network news departments are dinosaurs, is The Daily Show one of those sleek little mammals running around in the underbrush waiting to inherit the earth?

Dinosaur watch No. 2 -- is Bloomberg a mammal?

COMM 150, COMM 207 students read --

Today's issue of Slate.com, the electronic magazine, has a story on the Bloomberg business news wire service. It's thriving, and Slate's media critic Jack Shafer tells why:

Daily newspapers didn't see the lucrative news and information opportunity Bloomberg did for the same reason they didn't enter the Web search business when it was green. As mature and graying industries, newspapers are mortified by the creative destruction of changing markets, so they take only tiny and confused steps—mostly backwards. Years after the Web had made newspaper stock tables obsolete, the dailies started to prune and discontinue them, but how many added something of greater value in the form of new columnists or graphs that explained changing markets? Bloomberg's genius, and I don't use that term lightly, was to exploit how deeply people who need information will dig into their pockets to pay for it.

Let's read it and discuss it in class. An alternative: If we don't want to talk about it in class, I can always assign you to write about it.

Colorado school shooting -- privacy issues

Both The Denver Post and The Rocky Mountain News have gone all-out in covering the tragic events this week at Platte Canyon High School in suburban Denver. I'll link to several stories in the next few days and pose some questions about them. See also the posts to my other blog www.comm207fall06.blogspot.com for other stories.

The Rocky Mountain News had an exclusive interview with one of the girls who was held hostage in the school. I thought it was as tastefully and compassionately reported as possible in circumstances like this. But I'm pretty hard-boiled because I used to cover police news myself. What do you think? How do you balance people's right to privacy with the public's right to know?

Here's the lede, bylined by reporter Fernando Quintero:

Lynna Long picked up her books and headed toward the door as her honors English class wound down.
She had nearly reached the hallway when a man wearing a blue hooded sweat shirt calmly walked into Room 206 of Platte Canyon High School, blocking her path.

In that split second, Lynna's world changed.

The girl who dreams of being a doctor became one of Duane Morrison's six hostages. Over the next hours, she was terrorized and she was molested. She thought she was going to die. And when he finally let her go, she felt guilty about the girls left behind.

Lynna, a 15-year-old sophomore, talked Thursday about what it was like inside that schoolroom-turned- chamber of horrors during an exclusive interview with the Rocky Mountain News.

She and her mother agreed to allow her identity to be revealed, but asked that her photo not be shown in the newspaper.

By the way, have you noticed how few pictures there have been, at least on the internet, of the kids at Platte Canyon High School? Partly that's because the community is clearly, and properly, protective of them. And partly, I'm sure, because the media have treated this story pretty carefully.

I'll skip over some of the details, other than to say it's a general principle that when you're describing sexual crimes, you keep the description to a minimum. And Quintero follows that principle. He continues telling the girl's story, partly in her words and partly in his own:

Meanwhile, Lynna also could hear the SWAT teams outside the classroom.

She thought about action movies.

"I imagined that a group of SWAT team guys would bust through the windows. Or that I could fight off the gunman with a kick in the groin. But that just happens in the movies. I guess it doesn't quite work that way in real life."

She also thought about the possibility her life was ending.

"I didn't want to die. I thought about my family. I'm the oldest of three kids. I thought about my 4- year-old brother without his big sister. And my other sister. And my parents and my friends."

Lynna paused at this point in the interview, looking out the window of her family's restaurant to the traffic whizzing by on U.S. 285. Tears rolled down her cheeks.

"I never had a really strong relationship with my mom. But I thought, 'I'll never get the chance to make things better with her.' "

She returned to the retelling of the nightmare.

Morrison began ordering the girls to leave, one by one. " When he was letting a girl go, he would grab one of us as a shield."

It's hard for her to estimate how long it took to be released.

"Time was so slow, and so fast."

Later on in the semester, at least in COMM 207, we'll talk about invasion-of-privacy issues. People like Lynna who are involuntarily caught up in a crime become "limited purpose public figures," because crime and the law are legitimate matters of public concern. That means they lose some of their right to privacy, but only to the extent it takes to tell the story.

Tickle the public, make them grin ... and win?

Today's online issue of The Guardian, a newspaper in London which is arguably the best English-language paper in the world, has a story on the decline of newspaper readership as it plays out in the U.K. In an interesting aside, the Guardian's Patrick Barkham quotes Stefano Hatfield, editor of a free newspaper in London that appeals to readers in the 18-34 demographic:

Newspaper chiefs are no longer so sure. Hatfield edited the Metro in New York. "Research suggests young people don't read newspapers for three reasons," he says. "One, they find them boring - they find the stories and design too dull. Two, the internet has taken away the newspaper imperative. And three, they are sick of left- and rightwing bias."

The free papers try to make up for that by making the news more entertaining, and by giving it away.

(Which he can do by selling ads.)

Barkham also says, "Tickle the public, make them grin, the more you tickle, the more you win."

A sure recipe for media success, or a recipe for disaster?

Read Barkham's story in full, and then media critic Jack Shafer's take on the future for newspapers that appeared a few months ago in MSN's online Slate magazine. His headline sums it up: "The Incredible Shrinking Newspaper: Newspapers are Aying, but the News is Thriving."

Then make up your own mind? What does the future hold for newspapers? How can they appeal to young adults? What are the opportunities for new media?

COM 150: Wikipedia discussion question

Here's the question: Should Jimmy Wales use Potter's Box to think through the ethical responsibilities inherent in screening who posts information to an online encyclopedia? If you were him, what would you put in the different quadrents of P.B.? What would your final answer be?

Please note: To answer this question, you'll want to know who Jimmy Wales is and what Potter's Box does. Link here for a two-part story in The Boston Globe that will help you answer question No. 1. I can't link you to our textbook for question No. 2, but you'll find Potter's Box in Chapter 14. But you already knew that, right?

Post your answers as comments to this post. There will be prompts in the comment field that show you how to do it.

COM 150: Wikipedia, read and discuss

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, is nothing if not controversial. It's been heralded as a new way of getting around the gatekeepers (HINT: please note vocabulary term likely to appear on midterm, final exam, etc.) and gathering information in the most democratic and self-correcting way possible. And it's been denounced as a vehicle for defamation that lets anybody post wild-eyed slander about anything in the world.

Here's a recent example of what goes wrong with Wikipedia. When crocodile hunter Steve Irwin died Sept. 4, the NEWS.com.au network service, a part of Rupert Murdopch's media empire, reported:

INTERNET encyclopedia Wikipedia was forced to remove an offensive message posted on its entry for Steve Irwin within minutes of the Crocodile Hunter's death earlier today.

Within minutes of the news of Irwin's death breaking this afternoon, someone had written: "Steve Irwin's dead! LOLOLOLOLOL!" on the biography of the Australian icon.

The entry was quickly spotted and removed from the page.

Typical, both the encyclopedia's critics and its defenders would say. Malicious information was broadcast immediately, as the critics maintain. And it was swiftly corrected, as the defenders are equally swift to reply.

Wikipedia even came up in class the other day. I like to use it myself -- carefully! -- as a starting point for research. Other instructors at SCI stay away from it, and not without good reason. Let's read up on it, decide what some of the issues are and come to our own evaluation of Wikipedia as a class. In addition to its usefulness -- or lack of usefulness! -- as a research tool, I think some of the stuff that's written about Wikipedia tells us something about the nature of the internet and the role of mass communications in general.

Here, for starters, is the Wikipedia entry on, yep, you guessed it, Wikipedia ... of course, it might be kind of suspect, because it's Wikipedia writing about Wikipedia, but then if everybody can write in, then it should be objective, shouldn't it? Read it and decide for yourself!

And here's what an opinion writer for the British Broadcasting Co. News website has to say about it. "The Beeb" is arguably the most objective news site in the world.

A longer look at Wikipedia appeared in The New Yorker a couple of months ago. I think it's the best thing written on the subject. You may not have time to read it in class, but I'll bet you will between now and the midterm.

(BTW, do you realize what I just told you?)

So, google around, see what's been written pro and con, and make up your own mind. Here are some questions to ask yourself as you read:

1. How trustworthy is the information? Does the "self-correcting" nature of a wiki work, or is it a handy-dandy tool for character assassination?

2. What does Wikipedia tell us about free speech on the internet? What does it tell us about building cyber-communities on the internet?

3. Would you use Wikipedia for a term paper? If so, what precautions would you take to verify information?

COM(M) 207, 221: Ethics, doctored pix

Here's a link to an Associated Press story about Katie Couric. It seems like somebody in the promotions department got a little carried away and Photoshopped about 20 pounds off a picture of the incoming CBS News anchor. Here's CBS' explanation:

Gil Schwartz, executive vice president of communications for CBS Corp., said Wednesday in a phone interview the photo alteration was done by someone in the CBS photo department who "got a little zealous."

But he dismissed any notion of heads rolling over the matter.

"I talked to my photo department, we had a discussion about it," Schwartz said. "I think photo understands this is not something we'd do in the future."

A couple of questions:

1. What are the ethical issues here?

2. What are the public relations issues for CBS News?

Print woes, Time Warner bottom line

There's an interesting story about Time Warner today in Slate.com, the online magazine launched by Microsoft Corp. and now part of the same group of media properties as The Washington Post, Newsweek and MSNBC. They're competitors of Time Warner's, so reading a Slate story about the competition is kind of like hearing what a Cardinals fan has to say about the Cubs. But it's still a good look at some of the bottom-line considerations of a media conglomerate.

As Slate's financial writer Daniel Gross explains it, Time Warner shows signs of being ready to sell off Time Inc. He says:

... Home to such powerhouses as Time, Sports Illustrated, People, Fortune, and InStyle, Time Inc. has always been regarded as a corporate crown jewel and probably America's greatest magazine publisher. But, while I can't claim inside knowledge, there are signs that the empire founded by Henry Luce—which began in 1923 as just a single magazine, Time—isn't exactly pinning its future on the periodicals business.

Time Warner is composed of five broad units, in descending order of size: cable, networks, filmed entertainment, AOL, and publishing. In a few of these units, the company has recently made bold long-term investments. The cable unit recently spent several billion dollars to acquire the assets and subscribers of bankrupt Adelphia. In early August, AOL announced it would offer free subscriptions to broadband users, sacrificing short-term cash flow from the dwindling core of dial-up customers in favor of potentially larger advertising revenues. Meanwhile, the networks business (TNT, HBO, etc.) in May spent $735 million to buy the half of CourtTV it didn't already own.

But publishing? That's another story. As the most recent earnings release shows, the magazine business accounts for less than 13 percent of revenues and operating income. In the first half of 2006, magazine revenues fell about 1.3 percent, while operating income fell 9.6 percent. Time Inc. is a monster business with truly impressive numbers. Its Web site notes that last year it had three of the top four grossing magazines, and seven of the top 25. Time Inc.'s properties (at least 145 magazines) alone account for about 23 percent of U.S. magazine advertising. Which is precisely the problem. The economy is slowing: Advertising for mass-market print publications is not going to soar in the coming year.

COM 150; Media convergence

Two interrelated trends we will follow in Introduction to Mass Communications are media convergence and the concentration of ownership of media outlets. To see how some of this plays out in the real world, go to the MSNBC.com website and take a look around. In another window, read the online Wikipedia encyclopedia's article "Concentration of Media Ownership". Then answer these questions. (Or try to. Some of them may now have good answers.) Post your answers to the Message Board. Here are some questions:

1. How does our textbook define "convergence?" Do you see examples of this on the website? Or does the website make you want to revise the definition a little?

2. How many different media or types of media -- e.g. newspapers, TV, magazines, etc. -- do you see represented on the website?

3. What is MSNBC's relationship to Microsoft Corp.?

4. Who owns MSNBC?

5. How many different editorial voices do you see represented? What do we mean by "editorial voice?"

6. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? For the different media? For the stockholders? For us as consumers?

We're not going to settle any of these issues today. In fact, I don't think we could even if we wanted to. Some of them we're going to keep coming back to all semester. I just wanted to pose them early, as we go over the introductory chapter in the text.

Trib gooses Chicago's foie gras ban

Chicago Mayor Richard Daley doesn't always talk in complete sentences. A trait that endears him to City Hall reporters in the Windy City, by the way. But does have a way with words. Which also endears him to reporters.

First, the quote from Daley. The issue: Chicago City Council's ordinance banning foie gras, a type of goose liver paste, on humanitarian grounds. Here's how today's Chicago Tribune set up the quote, about midway into the story:

Call it the City Council's foie gras faux pas.

The ban began with the outrage of animal rights activists, who cited the cruelty of force-feeding ducks and geese with tubes until their livers swelled to 10 times normal size.

But Tuesday brought an opportunity to goose the ban's proponents.

"Why would they pick this and not anything else?" Daley asked. "How about veal? How about chicken? How about steak? Beef? How about fish?"

If a foie gras ban is OK, Daley said, "all of a sudden, you can question any type, basically, anything that can be served in a restaurant. The poor snails and the mussels and the shrimp. I could go on and on. The lobsters."

Daley's quote was "billboarded" on page 1 (which means it was set in 16 - or 18-point type as an eye-catcher). But the Trib went all-out on the story. Starting with the byline, which shows how many reporters went fanning out from the Tribune Tower to talk to diners:

By Josh Noel, Brendan McCarthy and James Janega, Tribune staff reporters. Tribune staff reporters Michael Higgins, Gerry Doyle and Mickey Ciokajlo contributed to this report
Published August 23, 2006

Foie gras appeared on pizza on Archer Avenue Tuesday, complemented cornbread and catfish at a South Side soul food place, and was stacked on sausages like pats of butter at a gourmet hot dog joint on the North Side.

Chicago's immediate reaction to a city ordinance banning foie gras--the French dish made from the livers of force-fed ducks and geese--was to embrace the gray goo like never before, in flights of culinary imagination.

Rhetoric and pate abounded on the first day of the City Council's ban, as restaurateurs and gourmands openly flouted the prohibition -- cultured, giddy, goose-liver-fueled acts of defiance.

On Tuesday morning the Illinois Restaurant Association filed a lawsuit in Cook County Circuit Court seeking to overturn the ban, accusing the City Council of overstepping its authority.

All in all, it's a cute story. And I think Daley's quote is one of the best from a public figure since former President George H.W. "Poppy" Bush banned broccoli from the White House and Air Force One: "I'm President of the United States, and I'm not going to eat any more broccoli!"

COM 150: Comics on 9/11

Can a comic book do justice to a serious -- very serious -- government report on the 9/11 tragedy? Well, the electronic magazine Slate.com is excerpting The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colóna this week. Follow the link, read it and decide for yourself.

Questions to think about as you read it:

1. An NBC News reporter took exception to the comic book treatment of the tragedy, conventions like writing "POW!" in big letters to indicate an explosion, for example, and said it was insensitive. I'm not sure I agree, but it is an issue worth debating. Is the comic book format intrinsically sensationalized, insensitive and incapable of dealing with serious issues?

2. Isn't it kind of ironic for TV guys to complain about another visual medium for being too visual? Is the TV format intrinsically sensationalized and insensitive, too?

3. Are newspapers intrinsically ... etc., etc., etc. ... can you see where I'm headed with this?

4. Can we ever write up events in the media without being sensationalized and insensitive? The old police reporter in me says no. The old police reporter in me also says we need to lean over backwards to be sensitive to the victims of any crime, though. So in the end, I don't have a good answer to the question(s). I just think it's important to ask them.

LATER: The "Public Eye" blog put up by CBS News has a pretty good post on the issue today, with some of its own commentary and a link to an excellent story in USA Today. Here's the quote from USA Today:

Neither author nor illustrator calls the work a comic book, even if it uses a comic-book format, including sound effects: R-RUMBLE when the South Tower of the World Trade Center collapses, or BLAMM! when American Airlines Flight 77 crashes into the Pentagon.

It pictures scenes aboard the doomed planes and towers. But, [artist Sid] Jacobson says, "it's not a dramatization," unlike the movies World Trade Center and United 93. "It's the story of an investigation. ... It's graphic journalism."

Like the original 9/11 Report, the graphic version is less about one day in September 2001 than about what led up to it and the inner workings of government agencies, often at cross-purposes. When the report, by a bipartisan commission, was released two years ago, it was published in three paperback editions. It was praised for its criticism of government failures and nominated for a National Book Award.

And here's what CBS has to say about it:

Some people will never take this sort of effort very seriously and that’s fine because those are the people who have probably read the original 9/11 report. But if this graphic version reaches those who won’t pick up a seemingly dense, 500-plus page book and helps them understand the content, isn’t that worth it? As long as it provides an accurate version of the report, and the [9/11] commissioners seem to think it does, then more power to this “comic” effort.

Follow the links, and see the originals on the CBS Newswebsite and USA Today. Go to the Google News search engine, too, and see what other people have to say about it. Then make up your own mind.

COM 150, COMM 207 -- good news-feature story

This one is about good reporting more than anything else ... but at least in newspapering, good reporting is good writing is good journalism is good reporting. It's a story in The Anchorage Daily News about flooding in Alaska's Matanuska-Susitna Valley. Look at all the details you just don't get unless you're at the scene, from the smell of wet dogs to the different kinds of boots the guys were wearing as they hustled their way out of the flood.

The story is by Joseph Ditzler, the ADN's Mat-Su editor. Here's his lede. See how it sets the scene and draws you in:

MOOSE CREEK -- The floodwaters had crested by midafternoon Saturday, but amazement ran at full surge.

A knot of locals clad in Carhartt pants, camouflage hunting jackets, ball caps and knee-high gumboots gathered on the plank-topped bridge where Petersville Road crosses Moose Creek. The creek tumbled and rolled beneath their feet, the color of wine mixed with rust, fast and angry.

The bridge was closed to wheeled traffic, barred by a flimsy screen of perforated orange plastic of the type common at construction sites.

There, pointed Ron Robbins, 64, who lives in a house atop a knoll nearby -- that's where the creek ran so hard and fast it washed the earth away from the piling, the very bridge foundation. A smell of creosote wafted up from the northeast piling, a stout piece of railroad tie surrounded by rushing water.

Don't know how they'll fix that, Robbins said.

I would have used quotation marks. But after reading the way the ADN handled it, I'm glad they didn't.

Throughout this passage, Ditzler captures the tone and cadence of common speech. But I doubt he was taking notes on that bridge. Here's my guess (and it's only a guess): It's a paraphrase, reconstructed from the reporter's memory. Hence no quotation marks. But it's an awfully good paraphrase.

Reporters move around a lot to get a story like a flood, which affects a lot of people over a wide area. Later, Ditzler interviewed several people at an emergency evacuation center. Here's how he handles one of the interviews:

At the Willow Community Center, 13 people had checked in as evacuees. Red Cross volunteer Rainey Miller said people started showing up at 1 a.m. Saturday.

Jerry Greschke, 62, arrived sometime after 7 a.m. He told his story in the center parking lot, still wearing the soggy snowmachine boots in which he beat a hurried retreat from his flooded home, a travel trailer. He steadied himself with one hand while standing in a pickup bed. With the other hand he grappled to slip a harness over his dog, Queen. A steady rain fell. The aroma of wet dog hung heavy.

"A million thumbs up for the Willow Fire Department," he said.

Members of the local fire station waded chest-deep through the backwaters of nearby Willow Creek to pull Greschke and two of his neighbors on Stinson Road to safety in an inflatable raft, along with their six dogs and a cockatiel named Dusty Rose.

"They had to make three trips," Greschke said.

The water was five feet deep and rising, he said. One volunteer firefighter, noticing Greschke lacked a life vest, gave Greschke his own.

"He gave me the life vest right off his back. Now, that's a hero," Greschke said.

Now, that's good writing. And good journalism.

Of WMDs, an IED and the Tooth Fairy

Half of adult Americans still believe Sadam Hussein's Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in 2003, according to an Associated Press story that's making the rounds in today's papers. Not reported was how many adult Americans believe in the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny or all the different reasons, whatever they may be, advanced for the latest spikes in crude oil prices on world futures markets.

Said The AP's Charles J. Hanley, reporting on a public opinion poll taken last month:

The reality in this case is that after a 16-month, $900 million- plus investigation, the U.S. weapons hunters known as the Iraq Survey Group declared that Iraq had dismantled its chemical, biological and nuclear arms programs in 1991 under U.N. oversight. That finding in 2004 reaffirmed the work of U.N. inspectors who in 2002-03 found no trace of banned arsenals in Iraq.

Despite this, a Harris Poll released July 21 found that a full 50 percent of U.S. respondents -- up from 36 percent last year -- said they believe Iraq did have the forbidden arms when U.S. troops invaded in March 2003, an attack whose stated purpose was elimination of supposed WMD. Other polls also have found an enduring American faith in the WMD story.

Hardly surprising. Consider well more than half of adult Americans believed, equally erroneously, Hussein was somehow linked to the 9-11 terrorist strikes in America.

Hanley's lede is a classic feature treatment. He begins:

Do you believe in Iraqi WMD?

Did Saddam Hussein's government have weapons of mass destruction in 2003?

Half of Americans apparently still think so, a new poll finds, and experts see a raft of reasons why: a drumbeat of voices from talk radio to die-hard bloggers to the Oval Office, a surprise headline here or there, a rallying around a partisan flag, and a growing need for people, in their own minds, to justify the war in Iraq.

People tend to become "independent of reality" in these circumstances, says opinion analyst Steven Kull.

The reality in this case ...

Nice lede. It sums up the information, and it establishes a light tone that I think is appropriate for the subject matter. The often reported facts are as Hanley states them, and the reality is the Bush administration's claim of WMDs in Iraq was used as a pretext for invasion.

What's more interesting than the AP story, which I read on The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's website, was the array of opinions posted to the PI's "SoundOff" forum on the story. The first was posted by "Swiftsure" at 4 p.m. yesterday:

It just goes to show that people are easily deluded by propaganda against all evidence to the contrary.

The next, posted three minutes later by "High Desert Coug," took an opposite point of view:

He DID have WMD. This poll only shows that 50% of the people don't understand the news.

Remember when the insurgents used that VX shell as an IED?

Oops...VX is a WMD. You know, the WMD's that Saddam supposedly destroyed.

The 100% truth is that he had WMD's. He said he destroyed them all, and he didn't.

It's undisputed. The fact that 50% of the public DOESN'T believe it is to the credit of the liberal smear machine.

I'd forgotten about the VX shell, if I was ever aware of it, but a web search turned up a May 2004 story in Chemical & Engineering News, an organ of the American Chemical Society, about a leftover artillery shell used in an improvised explosive device that contained sarin, a nerve agent similar to VX. It was thought to date from before the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

At exactly the same time as "High Desert Coug" mentioned the old artillery shell, at 4:03 p.m., "theedge98074" weighed in with a blast at the mainstream media:

this is just another excuse to encite more anti-Bush retroic from everyone. Why don't you write what you want to write: "There are idiots out there who still believe that there were WMD's". Getting tired of this crap, we all know where you stand and you do not need to keep pressing it into our heads. And, in doing so, you are basically called people who do not agree with your view stupid.

I'd like to say the tone of debate in the PI's forum got more civil from there.

But it didn't.

Typical, perhaps, of one side was "Chantel," who posted at 4:20 p.m.:

Poor Coug. A shell, child, is not a WMD. See, it would have to have a rocket or some means of propulsion, plus the ability to affect a wide area (that's the meaning of "mass" in the phrase 'weapons of mass destruction') in order to qualify as a WMD.

Still, son, if it helps you - just keep believing. There is a Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy loves you, and there were WMD in Iraq. Believe, child, believe!

And so on in that vein, on both sides, through the night. Here's part of the thread posted in the wee hours:

Posted by vette_demon at 8/7/06 4:22 a.m.

I can't believe how hateful and arrogant you people are...it's sad.

Posted by Sirrider at 8/7/06 5:37 a.m.

I have to agree with vette_demon--you folks are generating a lot of heat, but very little light.

And that, I'd say, pretty well sums up the whole thread.