Quotes and an article: Literature and journalism

Succinct.

This wisdom comes from a compilation of quotes by Ben Hecht, Chicago newspaper columnist and Hollywood screen writer, who therefore knew what he was talking about:

The rule in the art world is: you cater to the masses or you kowtow to the elite; you can't have both.

And this from Ernest Hemingway, the novelist and former Toronto Star correspondent:

Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time.

The quote, which comes from a Paris Review interview with George Plimpton, is cited in an article titled "Journalists with Literary Ambitions No Less Satisfied with Their Jobs." It appeared in 2006 in the Newspaper Research Journal.

COMM 209: Ho ho ho

Sometimes a headline just catches your eye. That's the way it was with this one, in The Los Angeles Times. It even had a seasonal theme, just perfect for Christmas morning.

Santa in a G-string gets a DUI

Doesn't that just make you want to read the story? Here's the lede, under a joint byline that went to LA Times staffers Richard Winton and Andrew Blankstein:

A famous Hollywood location had a seasonally appropriate visitor Sunday night. But when the man got out of his car in front of Grauman's Chinese Theater, it was clear this was anything but a standard visit from Santa Claus.

The driver -- 6-foot-4 and 280 pounds -- was arrested on suspicion of drunk driving, in this case a misdemeanor, police said. In addition to a red Santa hat, he wore a blond wig, red lace camisole, purple G-string, black leg warmers and black shoes.

"We are pretty sure this is not the Santa Claus," Deputy Chief Ken Garner said.

After giving the standard details -- name, age, blood alcohol count, charges, etc. -- Winton and Blankstein let the cop have the last word. And what a fine last word it was, especially for a metro page story in LA:

"There was no Mel Gibson treatment for him," Garner said, referring to the help the actor received from Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies after his drunk driving arrest last year. "He had to sober up and find his own reindeer."

Basic newswriting students take note how the story is organized around the quotes: (1) There's a lede playing up what a surprise it was to realize the guy with the Santa cap was a drag queen; (2) the best quote; (3) the basic facts of the case, which would be called a nut graf in a longer story; and (4) a pretty good little quote with a twist at at the end. That twist at the end is sometimes known as a kicker, and it's something you want in all but the most serious feature stories.

We'll use this format a lot. It's a variation on the inverted pyramid you may have learned in high school journalism -- basic facts up top, less important stuff lower down in the story -- and will use every day as long as you write news. It just has a little attention-getter in the lede.

Slate.com, the ezine that's part of the Microsoft-NBC-Newsweek-Washington Post media conglomorate, carries a daily feature called "Today's Papers" that summarizes and links to the top stories in the LA Times, the Post and the New York Times (you should get in the habit of reading it, by the way). Here's Slate's treatment of the LA Times' little gift from Santa:

Here comes Santa Claus. Over in the NYT's op-ed page, John Anthony McGuckin, a professor of religious history, briefly goes through the history of how the "super-saint" St. Nicholas went on to become the "Magic Santa." As the morphing began to take place, the new Santa dropped many of the symbolic characteristics of the old St. Nicholas and "the origin of Christmas almsgiving: gifts for the poor, not just gifts for our friends" began to be lost. "I like St. Nicholas," McGuckin writes. "You can keep chubby Santa." Particularly if he's the type of Santa that was arrested last night in front of Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood. The LAT reports that a 6-foot-4, 280-pound, g-string-wearing Santa was arrested on suspicion of drunk driving on Sunday night.

[Link omitted.] The Santa piece, by the way, was at the end of the Slate feature. What would you call that?

A kicker, you guessed, right? Last graf. Little twist at the end of today's news, which was suitably high-minded and serious. Why of course it's a kicker.

Let's reverse the process. The New York Times' op-ed piece on St. Nicholas was actually high-minded, serious and interesting. McGuckin, who teaches at Union Theological Seminary, said our Santa Claus comes from an 1823 poem by Clement Clarke Moore titled “A Visit From St. Nicholas.” And our mental image of Santa -- wearing a red fur coat rather than a G-string -- comes from 19th-century political cartoonist Thomas Nast but also a series of Coca Cola ads from the 1930.

The original St. Nicholas, it turns out, was deeply commited to social justice -- something the modern corporate Santa lost rather quickly. Says McGuckin:

The new Santa ... acquired a host of Nordic elves to replace the small dark-skinned boy called Black Peter, who in Christian tradition so loved St. Nicholas that he traveled with him everywhere. But, some might say, wasn’t it better to lose this racially stereotyped relic? Actually, no, considering the real St. Nicholas first came into contact with Peter when he raided the slave market in his hometown and railed against the trade. The story tells us that when the slavers refused to take him seriously, he used the church’s funds to redeem Peter and gave the boy a job in the church.

Similarly, the story of St. Nicholas' giving presents to poor children comes out of opposition to child slavery. McGuckin says:

And what of the throwing of the bags of gold down the chimney, where they landed in the stockings and little shoes that had been hung up to dry by the fireplace? Charming though it sounds, it reflected the deplorable custom, still prevalent in late Roman society when the Byzantine church was struggling to establish the supremacy of its values, of selling surplus daughters into bondage. This was a euphemism for sexual slavery — a trade that still blights our world.

As the tale goes, Nicholas had heard that a father in the town planned to sell his three daughters because his debts had been called in by pitiless creditors. As he did for Black Peter, Nicholas raided his church funds to secure the redemption of the girls. He dropped the gold down the chimney to save face for the impoverished father.

McGuckin ends his op-ed piece with a kicker:

This tale was the origin of a whole subsequent series of efforts among the Christians who celebrated Nicholas to make some effort to redeem the lot of the poor — especially children, who always were, and still are, the world’s front-line victims. Such was the origin of Christmas almsgiving: gifts for the poor, not just gifts for our friends.

I like St. Nicholas. You can keep chubby Santa.

Which, if you think about it, proves a kicker can be serious and high-minded, too.

BBC newsman on genocide, war, a newborn baby

Please note: The linked material is linked to the assignments in my syllabus for COMM 387 (Lit./Journ.) and is required reading for students in that class. It won't do anybody else a bit of harm to read it, either.

Fergal Keane is a senior correspondent for the British Broadcasting Corp. He has covered wars, genocide, famine and the AIDS crisis, mostly in Africa, but he is best known worldwide, perhaps, for his "Letter to Daniel," a commentary aired on BBC on the birth of Keane's son in 1996. In it he stated some of his values as a reporter in perhaps an especially moving way.

Keane, who is Irish, has had a distinguished journalistic career. Some would say he displays a typically Irish awareness of the moral dimensions of social and political upheaval. His first job was on a small newspaper in Limerick, and he moved on to cover trouble spots in Northern Ireland, Africa and Asia. He now is able to pick and choose his assignments, having recently reported on the aftermath of the government crackdown in Mynamar (a country the Brits still call Burma). But his career was shaped by covering the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

Keane was one of several BBC reporters in Rwanda in the spring of 1994, when government backed militias murdered hundreds of thousands of people. "For some of us," he said years later, "it has left an enduring mark, a sense that we failed, not so much as journalists, but as human beings, because we saw things we were powerless to stop." Ten years later he was interviewed for an American public television show on what he saw and how it changed him. Read it. Read also Keane's more recent commentary from Darfur where a similar holocaust is slowly playing out:

I have no doubt that in a few years time there will be investigations by the United Nations and the EU [European Union] and several others into why the world failed the people of Darfur.

We already know why, just as we did in Rwanda.

We cared, but we did not care enough.

But note also that Keane is still covering the tragedies and still speaking out. This month (December), for example, he helped the Disasters Emergency Committee, a British charity, raise more than £13 million for refugees in Darfur and Chad.

COMM 317 (Spring 08): Magna Carta / REQUIRED

A feature in The Independent, a London broadsheet that recently went to a slightly smaller format, about Magna Carta (Latin for "the Great Charter"). It explains why a copy of Magna Carta brought $21.3 million at auction this week ... and why the American Bar Association sometimes gathers at the spot in England where King John I was bullied by his high noblemen into signing it in 1215:

Clause 39 is possibly the best known. It has never been rescinded and is immediately relevant to the present government. It says that "No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights and possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land." When MPs try to block the [British] Government's proposal to hold suspected terrorists for up to 42 days without charges, they will be, in effect, upholding a piece of law signed by King John 792 years ago.

Clause 38 is almost as important. It said: "No official shall place a man on trial upon his own unsupported statement, without producing credible witnesses to the truth of it." Most of the worst injustices in recent legal history have occurred when people have been convicted on no real evidence other than confessions made under interrogation. Clause 40 promised to end the system by which rich offenders could simply buy their way out of trouble. For a medieval monarch to make promises like these, even with his fingers figuratively crossed, was an extraordinary moment in history.

A reminder that some of this arcane stuff we read about in Communications 317 isn't as arcane as we think it is.

A perfect no-news lede?

Sometimes the best rule is to break the rules ...

Check this lede from a story on Sen Barack Obma's visit to an Iowa church in today's Mason City Globe Gazette by staff writer Mary Pieper. It's a perfect example of a no-news lede:

MASON CITY — Today was a big day at the First Congregational United Church of Christ in Mason City.

During the 10 a.m. service the Sunday School and confirmation students presented their annual Christmas program, and the congregation participated in the 40-year-old tradition of putting mittens on the Mitten Tree.

And Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama was in the house.

Obama, a member of a UCC church in Chicago, sat in a pew near the front of the church during the service and got up to speak briefly to the congregation.

The rest of it is a fairly standard speech story. Short. Seven grafs summarizing Obama's homily. Not much to it.

No news, in fact. Hence the no-news lede? I'll bet Pieper used on on purpose.

Compare the lede on this Associated Press writeup of Obama's visit to the church in Mason City:

MASON CITY, Iowa (AP) — Democrat Barack Obama on Sunday confronted one of the persistent falsehoods circulating about him on the Internet.

He went to church.

His attendance here at the First Congregational United Church of Christ, with the news media in tow, was as much an observation of faith as it was a rejoinder to baseless e-mailed rumors that he is a Muslim and poses a threat to the security of the United States.

Obama did not address the rumors, but described how he joined Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago two decades ago while working as a community organizer.

"What I found during the course of this work was, one, that ordinary people can do extraordinary things when they come together and find common ground," he told the congregation. "The other thing I discovered was that values of honesty, hard work, empathy, compassion were values that were spoken about in church .... I realized that Scripture and the words of God fit into the values I was raised in."

And so it went. Introduced by what was, in my opinion, a no-news lede.

Main difference: The AP story is written for a national readership, so the emphasis is -- quite properly -- on the presidential campaign.

No much news in either account, though.

Another term that's commonly used for the kind of account is a "non-story." Jim Kuhnhenn, the AP reporter, chose to peg it on the persistent right-wing nattering about Obama's persumed ties to Islam ... even as he carefully pointed out the nattering had nothing to do with Obama's visit to the church in Mason City. The technical term for this kind of thing is trying to have it both ways.

Mike Royko

Mike Royko wrote a column for the Chicago Daily News, the Sun-Times and, finally, the Trib. I can't classify this column. It was just, well, it was Royko. CNN came close in its obituary of Royko, when it said he was "known for his sarcastic wit and colorful stories of life in Chicago." And the New York Times' obit called him, accurately, the "Voice of the Working Class." Won the Pulitzer Prize, too. Oh, and he was a lifelong diehard Cub fan.

Here are some sample columns. The tribute to Jackie Robinson is widely considered a classic. And the column on the Picasso statue in Daley Plaza, the square next to City Hall, the Thompson state office building and the federal courthouse in the Loop, is pure Chicago. Another sampling of columns has observations on kissing the Blarney Stone and Mayor Daley's ass (the father of the current Mayor Daley) and a meditation on what does and doesn't belong on a Chicago hot dog. Finally, Royko's obituary piece on Mayor Daley captured both the man and the city.

John Simpson and Kathy Gannon in Kabul

John Simpson, longtime foreign correspondent for BBC News sometimes considered the dean of British war correspondents, famously "liberated" Kabul in 2001 when he entered the city with Northern Alliance troops as the Taliban government and militias fled ... before all the shooting was even over.

But he wasn't the first correspondent in the capital of Afghanistan. Reporting from Kabul through the 2001 war, and, as a matter of daily routine, under the Taliban regime before it, was Kathy Gannon of The Associated Press.

No fanfare. No trumpet blasts about "liberating" anything. Just good solid reporting. In my opinion, she's simply one of the best reporters in the business. Anywhere.

Since then Gannon has written a book. Titled "I is for Infidel" (an apt self-description since Gannon is both the "I" and the "Infidel" of the title). She even has a a website touting the book and linking to several articles she's written. Read "Road Rage," a PDF-format reprint from The New Yorker.

Same story, two reporters
Simpson's account of the liberation of Kabul is in the tradition of war correspondents since William Russell covered the Charge of the Light Brigade (later the subject of a poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson) in the 1850s. One of many highlights:

The small BBC team decided to head on into the city, on our own, and on foot - so no-one would think we were soldiers.

We ploughed on - radio side-by-side with television.

As we walked into Kabul city we found no problems around us, only people that were friendly and, I am afraid, chanting "kill the Taleban" - although as we understand it there are not going to be that many Taleban around.

It felt extraordinarily exhilarating - to be liberating a city which had suffered so much under a cruel and stifling regime.

It was 0753 local time (0323 GMT) and Kabul was a free city, after five years of perhaps the most extreme religious system anywhere on earth.

And here's how ">Gannon covered the same story. Notice how the focus is different. But, of course, she was already inside the city:

Groups of five to 10 men huddled in the streets, wrapped in woollen shawls. Northern Alliance fighters sped through the streets in vehicles camouflaged with mud that had been left behind by Taliban troops.

In the northern Khair Khana district, inhabited largely by ethnic Tajiks who fled the earlier fighting north of the city, some people shouted: "Congratulations. Oh my God, they are here." Some men hugged each other.

"We leave everything to God. We don't know what will happen. We pray only for peace," said Sheer Agha, an elderly man wrapped in a striped shawl, his grey beard reaching almost to his chest.

"We are happy. Now I have to go to the barber to shave my beard," said Zabiullah, an ethnic Tajik. "Today is a happy day."

Two men on a bicycle looked at each other. "Do you think I can shave now?" one asked. The Taliban required men to grow long beards and failure to do so invited harsh punishment.

Read both and decide which one you like better. (I know which one I like.) Be ready to compare and contrast the two.

Time magazine's coverage of Hiroshima

A portal page with articles from 1945 and several anniversary pieces. Including the famous James Agee piece in the Aug. 20, 1945, issue ...

William Russell of The London Times

Article about British war correspondent William Russell in Harper's Weekly June 22, 1861. A brief quotation by William Russell describing his meeting with President Lincoln on a historical website.

Addison & Steele -- link

For COMM 387 syllabus for Spring 08 --

Good article in History magazine on The Spectator, a kind of daily literary journal that ran in 1711 and 1712, "'To Enliven Morality with Wit': The Spectator" by Jamie Pratt.

How a band uses 'sticky' website

A band mixing the sound of Afropop, hip hop, soul and, yes, I can hear a little gospel, Soulfège is based in Boston, now doing a Sweet Mother Africa tour. Infectious music.

Also an awesome example of a band using new media. You've read about "sticky" websites? (If you're not sure, see below.) Well, this is how a sticky website works. Here's the band, in their own words:

So what is Soulfège? Glad you asked. Put it like this - if Fela Kuti, Bob Marley, Lenny Kravitz and Gwen Stefani were all jammin' with the same band, it would be this one.

Fusing funk, reggae, hip-hop, and highlife, Soulfège is more than a band...it's a big FUNKY band.

Electrifying audiences, from Boston to Ghana and beyond, with its positive vibe and relentless groove, the members of Soulfège have performed with and for some of the world's most talented artists and distinguished dignitaries, including Debbie Allen, Janet Jackson, Steven Spielberg, Bobby McFerrin, Nelson Mandela, the Reverend Al Sharpton, Dr. Cornell West, and Al Gore.

The group is known for building sonic bridges that fuse the influences of the African Diaspora into a musical vision all its own. Soulfège not only shines with creativity, it thrills audiences with a golden foundation in rhythm and harmony.

In general, the band tries to present a positive view of life and of culture, both American and African. Frontman Derrick N. Ashong, who is from Ghana, told The Boston Globe the band "was in a position to help change misperceptions on both sides." Says Daniel T. Swann of the Globe:

Soulfege has one foot in Africa, one in America. Its core members -- Ashong, Jonathan M. Gramling, and Kelley Nicole Johnson -- were brought together by their alma mater, Harvard, where all had been in the Kuumba Singers, a gospel choir. But Ashong was born in Ghana, and many of the band's lyrics reflect a connection to the African diaspora. "Yaa (dis be fo radio)," for example, includes lyrics in Ga (spoken in Ghana), as well as in Portuguese and English.

Plenty of YouTube clips and other eye candy -- ear candy? -- on their website. Quotes from and links to the Globe's laudatory story on the band and the SMA tour.

Here's how Erin Jansen's NetLingo.com website defines sticky content:

Information or features on a Web site that gives users a compelling reason to revisit it frequently. Stickiness is also gauged by the amount of time spent at a Web site over a given period of time. This is often maximized by getting the user to leave some information behind on the site, such as a personal profile, an investment portfolio, a resume, a list of preferred cities for weather reports, personal horoscopes, birthday reminders, and the like.

How many sticky features do you see on the Soulfège website? How many do you see on NetLingo, for that matter?

COMM 150: Final exam - Fall 07

COM 150: Intro to Mass Comm.
Springfield College/Benedictine University
Fall Semester 2007

www.sci.edu/classes/ellertsen/com150syl
[Television] is not a tool by which the networks conspire to dumb us down. TV is a tool by which the networks give us exactly what we want. That's a far more depressing thought. -- "The Vent," The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Jan. 19, 1999.

Final Exam – Fall 2007

Below are three essay questions – one worth fifty (50) points out of a hundred, and two shorter essays worth 25 points each. Please write at least two pages (500 words) on the 50-point essay and page (250 words) on each of the 25-point short essays. This means you write on all three essays. Use plenty of detail from your reading in the textbook, the Internet and handouts I have given you, as well as class discussion, to back up the points you make. Your grade will depend on your analysis of broad trends and the specific detail you cite in support of the points you make. Exam is Mon., Dec. 3, at 1:30 p.m., in D220.

1. Main essay (50 points). Joseph Straubhaar and Robert LaRose, authors of our textbook "Media Now," say postmodernists believe “there is no universal truth, that what you think depends on your own experience, which depends on what groups you belong to, what media you pay attention to, what your family taught you.” On the one hand, the postmodern attitude allows us to experience scientific discovery in what Michelle Thaller of the California Institute of Technology, in an article headlined “A Dinosaur Named Sue, and the Way Science Really Works,” calls “the drama and wonder” of questioning and experimentation “when we admit we aren’t sure what the facts really are.” On the other hand, postmodernism erodes commonly accepted standards, and French philosopher Jean Baudrillard says we are bombarded with so many conflicting messages that “We are not … in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.” How do you define postmodernism? How has the communications industry contributed to this diversity of messages, especially on the Internet? How do new media like the Internet allow writers, artists, musicians and other creative types to exercise creative control? How do they allow anti-social expressions like pornography, hate speech and deceptive advertising to flourish? Are these effects balanced by the pro-social effects of 21st-century media? Is postmodern diversity and freedom a good thing or a bad thing? Cite specific evidence in your answers.

2a. Self-reflective essay (25 points). What have you learned in Communications 150 that surprised you the most? How, specifically, did it surprise you? What was your overall impression of the media before you took the course? How has that changed as a result of your reading, class discussion and research for the course? Consider it in the context of what you knew at the beginning of the course and what you know now. In grading this essay, I will evaluate the relevance of your discussion to the main goals and objectives of the course; the detail you cite to support or illustrate your points; and the connections you make. Be specific.

2b. Short essay (25 points). Brands, branding and brand management are increasingly important concepts in integrated marketing communications. How does a mission statement fit into a well-designed IMC program? How can effective brand management and a well thought-out Integrated Marketing Communications plan help advertisers and public relations practitioners deal with competing messages? Be specific. Always be specific. Remember: An unsupported generalization is sudden death in college-level writing.

Pow, Right in the Kisser! Quote within a quote within a quote

Posted to my mass communications blogs. --pe

The CNN story was headlined "Why bad kissers don't get to second base." Cute enough. Worth a look. But what I really liked about it was the punctuation in the last 'graph! Take a look:

"The best kisses are always the ones that happen accidentally," observes New York City resident Benjamin Kayne, 25, a digital media sales director. "(Planned kisses) are just tedious, and I'm sitting there thinking, 'Is this over yet? The commercial is over and I'm missing "CSI".' "

That's a quote within a quote within a quote. That you don't see every day.

COMM 150: Branding issues

This would happen! As soon as I mention Ben & Jerry's ice cream as an example of good branding and a positive public image, along comes this week's issue of Newsweek with an article on a controversy involving the brand. It's a good example of why I enjoy teaching mass communications -- the world refuses to conform to my neat little academic theories! Let's read it and discuss it in class today (Wednesday). The branding issues it raises come up on the final exam.

While we're on the subject of branding, here's one of those email messages that ricochet around the Internet. I've cleaned it up slightly:

Tue, 27 Nov 2007 20:12:10 -0500
Subject: re: I Hate My Job
From: [deleted]

When you have an "I Hate My Job" day, try this:

On your way home from work, stop at your pharmacy and go to the thermometer section and purchase a rectal thermometer made by [a well-known health care products corporation]. Be very sure you get this brand. When you get home, lock your doors, draw the curtains and disconnect the phone so you will not be disturbed. Change into very comfortable clothing, make yourself a cocktail and sit in your favorite chair. Open the package and remove the thermometer. Now, carefully place it on a table or a surface so that it will not become chipped or broken. Now the fun part begins. Take out the literature from the box and read it carefully. You will notice that in small print there is a statement:

"Every Rectal Thermometer made by [the corporation] is personally tested."

Now, close your eyes and repeat out loud five times, "I am so GLAD I do not work in the thermometer quality control department at [the corporation]."

It's a cute joke, but unfortunately it's one of those urban legends ... stories that sound too good to be true because, well, they are too good to be true. Snopes.com, a website that researches the accuracy of urban legends, actually did a survey in a local pharmacy and reported that many thermometers carry a quality control message, but typically the literature in the package says something like the thermometer has been "calibrated for accuracy." It's still an example of careful brand managment to have a message in the box saying the contents have been tested.

You would recognize the name of the corporation. And even though I've deleted it (because as an old newspaper guy I'm nervous about naming it in a story that's not true), the fact it's mentioned in a widely circulated Internet joke is a good example of brand identification -- the way a firm gets identified in the public mind with the bandages, baby powder, thermometers and other products it puts on the market.

Spring semester mass comm. internship

Project Return, an ecumenical social service program that works with mothers returning to the Springfield community from prison, can use an intern to work with the director in creating or updating a flier, newsletter, website or other promotional material. (More details below copied and pasted from their informational flier.) They are expanding their services and community education efforts, and this would a good experience for an intern who already has some motivation toward social justice issues and an interest in public relations. Internships are open to mass communications students at Benedictine who have a 3.0 average or better.

The intern would work with my wife Debi Edmund, who is Project Return's new director. Before seeking her master's degree in Child and Family Services at the Univerity of Illinois-Springfield, she was a public relations consultant for the Illinois Association of School Boards and is a former features editor of The Rock Island Argus (where I met her). So she is an experienced communications professional who has combined her mass comm. skills with another line of work.

PROJECT RETURN
Our Mission
Project Return’s mission is to help incarcerated mothers reintegrate into the Springfield community by matching each returning mother with a team of trained and supported volunteers for one year. We also educate the public about the barriers these women face as they seek to make a successful re-entry into the community.

Our Program
Paid staff and trained volunteer Partnership Teams help participants address immediate challenges: complying with the conditions of parole, achieving financial stability, finding immediate and permanent housing, accessing health care, reconnecting with family and friends, and resuming parental responsibilities. Without such support, released inmates are at risk of returning to criminal activity, substance abuse, or other self-defeating behaviors. Project Return hopes to break that cycle, benefiting both the clients and the community. Our comprehensive, individualized re-entry services begin prior to the individual’s release and continue for up to a year after release. Services include assistance in finding or accessing short term and permanent housing, employment, education or employment training, child care, health care, mental health care, counseling and addiction support services, reliable transportation and safety net resources. It is hoped that each participant will leave our program with improved self-esteem, better mental and physical health, and increased self-sufficiency, thus reducing the chances that she will re-offend and return to prison.

COMM 150: Media in Springfield / READ

The articles linked touch on topics we covered earlier in the semester and will get back to after Thanksgiving -- the state of the television and newspaper industries and how that affects us as citizens and consumers -- and they detail the state of the news media in Springfield. They're available in this week's Illinois Times. Find it, in print or on line (the links below will take you there) and be ready to talk about the stories in class next week. -- pe.

This morning's issue of Illinois Times has a cover story and a couple of sidebars on the state of the news media. They fit in with the discussion we're having in a couple of my news-editorial classes, and they're important enough I'm assigning them to all of my mass comm. students. Read them, and be ready to cite them in class discussions, on your blogs and/or your final exam essays. You can pick up a free copy of IT from the newsrack next to the Quiet Lounge in Dawson, or read it on IT's website They tell about the pressure of declining circulation, ownership changes and a gloomy job outlook at The State Journal-Register and WICS Channel 20. All this makes it difficult, according to some of the people quoted, to do a decent, ethical job of covering the news -- writing "the best obtainable version of the truth" in Carl Bernstein's words -- in the dominant media in town. More specialized, or "niche," media in the African-American community and public radio are doing better, according to the sidebars.

There's nothing new in the doom and gloom. Ben Bagdikian, a former Washington Post editor now dean emeritus of the journalism school at the University of California-Berkley, summed it up 40 years ago when he said, "Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach's St. Matthew's Passion on a ukulele: The instrument is too crude for the work, for the audience and for the performer."

True enough. But you've got to try.

This week's stories in Illinois Times tell how things are shaking out here lately, and they're not just for students who want to go into the news business. The trends are national, and they're important for everyone who deals with -- or reads, watches, listens to or surfs -- the media. Which is all of us.

A sidelight. In Amanda Parsons' story on local TV news, there's a little preview of what Benedictine students can expect from Nathan Mihelich, who will teach TV production spring semester. Formerly a Channel 20 reporter, Mihelich is now information director for the Dominican Sisters of Springfield. Says the IT story:

Mihelich will teach a new television-production course at Benedictine University/Springfield College in the spring, and he says he will use his experiences at WICS and other news stations to teach students about the value of investigative reporting, the importance of quality rather than quantity, and how to turn a story into a presentable piece that people care about and may act upon.

Read the IT stories and be ready to discuss them in class next week.

COMM 150: Journalism and capital-T truth

Cross-posted from this semester's class blog in Communications 207 (copy editing). -- pe

Carl Bernstein, one of the reporters who broke the Watergate story during the 1970s, has a definition that I've liked ever since I first came across it in our copyediting textbook, Modern News Editing by Mark Ludwig and Gene Gilmore (5th ed. Ames, Iowa: Blackwell, 2005). Journalism, according to Bernstein, is "the best obtainable version of the truth" (231). Ludwig and Gilmore add it's "an acknowledgement that the full truth is hard to grab hold of and may shift over time as more facts are revealed."

Turns out Bernstein has been saying it for years. Especially after he and fellow Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward were portrayed in the Hollywood movie "All the President's Men" (1976), Bernstein has been a fixture on the rubber-chicken dinner and lecture circuit. And he gives this definition of journalism to audience after audience. Usually he says it's being undermined by celebrity news and cost-cutting in U.S. newsrooms.

It makes sense to me. I think it makes sense to a lot of people who have covered the news, and who know from the experience how elusive the truth can be. I like it because it doesn't promise too much. It doesn't promise The Truth with a capital "T."

"Truth is the word that summarizes many journalistic ideas," say Ludwig and Gilmore. "But what, philosopy has always asked, is Truth? Working newsmen and newswomen know what truth means on the job and don't worry too much about the big picture, so far as they can discover and portray it." The best obtainable version, in other words, of truth.

Ironically, Bernstein credits Woodward with the phrase. When the two were interviewed by Larry King of CNN, they said:

... it -- but it -- it -- you know, and our concern is that -- and Carl makes this point, and it's a critical one, that the business of this kind of journalism, trying to get to the bottom of something complicated, hidden, scandalous, or important decisions by people who have lots of power, involves lots of sources. Not one source, not 10, but dozens or even hundreds.

BERNSTEIN: You know, Bob said right after Watergate, that really, what this story was about, like all reporting, or good reporting, is the best obtainable version of the truth. And that phrase has always stuck with me about what real reporting is. When we did "All the President's Men," it turned out unintentionally it was maybe a primer on the basic kind of police reporting and slogging and knocking on doors.

They went on from there, on Larry King Live. But for me the best obtainable version of truth has something to do with "the basic kind of police reporting and slogging and knocking on doors."

In seeking the best obtainable truth, Ludwig and Gilmore look for several things.

The most important is accuracy. "Newsrooms rightly develop a fixation on accuracy about names and addresses. But reporters must be at least as careful about accurate quotation, or about the accuracy of the impression that results from the way facts are put together."

Almost as important is objectivity. Ludwig and Gilmore cite the conventional wisdom: "Reporters should keep themselves out of the story, and editors should see that they do."

Closely related to accuracy and objectivity is fairness. Ludwig and Gilmore have a simple standard for editors: "They treat everybody alike."

Bernstein's rubber-chicken dinner speech, as he gave it Sept. 26, 1998, at the annual convention of the Radio and Television News Directors Association, is available on line. In it he says:

The truth is often complex, very complex. “The best obtainable version of the truth” is partly about context and this is perhaps the greatest single failing of our journalism in media today. For too much of it is utterly without context. Facts by themselves are not necessarily the truth. Thus the gossip press, the tabloids, too much of what we see on the air, even when the facts are somewhat straight, they are often a form of misinformation, because their aim is to shock, to titillate, to distort, to give grotesque emphasis.

How did journalists in the good old days -- which happen to coincide with Bernstein's reporting days -- find the best obtainable version? Bernstein suggests they looked for "thoroughness, for accuracy, for context." Hard to do, he adds, when an "idiot culture" demands 24/7 coverage of celebrities and political foodfights:

The hunger for gossip and trash and simple answers to tough questions in our culture today is ravenous and the interest in real truth, hard, difficult, complex truth, that requires hard work, digging, reporting, is waning In America our political system, and I think we are seeing it now, has been failing and with its failure we have been witnessing as well a breakdown of the comity and the community and the civility, that has traditionally allowed our political discourse to evolve. The advent of the talk show nation, not just on radio, but on television especially, with its standards of the grotesque and people screaming mindlessly at each other on the air is part of this breakdown.

Does Bernstein overdo his critique? Probably. But does he have a point there? Probably. His speech has been covered by the Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World and the Daily Texan, student paper at the University of Texas in Austin, among others.

COMM 150: Tom Brokaw's advice for J-students

An interesting interview with NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw on the Time.com website. Brokaw's career spanned a period of great change in television. He began as a TV newsman in Sioux City, Iowa, and anchored NBC's nightly newscase from 1981 through 2004. Interviewed for Time's "10 Questions" feature, he spoke of the diversity of sources American TV viewers have for their news. In general, he thinks its a good thing:

Do you think it's a problem that fewer Americans now get their news from traditional sources? —Max Jacobson, New Haven, Conn.

We're better off. We have so many more choices. What happens is, of course, that the squeaky wheel continues to get attention. I have a little tool at my house—you should get one—it's called the remote control. You can go from those channels that are showing too much of Anna Nicole Smith to, say, BBC News.

This puts pressure on TV news people, he said, but it's better for consumers:

How do you think the role of the news anchor has changed over the years? —Kathy Crawford, Ossining, N.Y.

When I first got into the business, Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley were the only three people who were doing the evening news at the time. There were no all-news cable on CNN, MSNBC or FOX. Most of these journalistic enterprises were organized by and run by white middle-aged men from the Eastern seaboard. That was the prism through which the rest of the country saw the world. That's changed considerably now. The evening news anchors are competing with the internet. They're competing with the all-news cable channels all day long. They're also competing for the attention of a younger audience that doesn't go home at night and sit down at the dinner table with their parents and watch the news.

Brokaw, who majored in "beer and co-eds" in his own student days at the University of South Dakota, says a liberal arts education is valuable, too.

What would your advice be to to up and coming broadcast journalists? —Jen Ayres, Columbia, Md.

Get a broad base of education. I'm not a big fan of journalism schools except those that are organized around a liberal arts education. Have an understanding of history, economics and political science—and biology, these days—and then learn to write.

COMM 393: Reminder on Senior Portfolios

A copy of an email message I sent out this morning to students registered for Communications 393. I'm posting it to my blogs for communications students as well. I have great respect for the Benedictine/SCI grapevine, and I'll appreciate your assistance in getting the word out. -- pe.

A reminder: The end of the semester is only a month away, so it's time to pull together the material for your senior portfolios.

I will need to meet with each of you in order to: (1) inspect your professional portfolio; and (2) receive a Senior Portfolio Folder containing your self-reflective paper and copies of four pieces of work (artifacts) you have done for class, for internships and/or off-campus publications. You will keep your professional portfolio for use in job hunting, but Benedictine University will retain a Senior Portfolio Folder from each student for program assessment purposes.

I am developing a more detailed set of instructions, which I hope to email to you over the weekend, but I wanted to send out this reminder so you can get started how.

THERE ARE THREE parts to the Senior Portfolio procedure:

I. SELF-REFLECTIVE ESSAY. To be turned in, as part of the Senior Portfolio Folder, during a conference with me before the end of the semester.

The self-reflective essay will be 10 to 12 pages in length, in which you reflect on your experience as a communications major at Benedictine in terms of: (a) your progress toward developing or furthering your career goals; (b) your understanding of the profession, its ethics and its role in society. In this essay you should address the following program objectives of Benedictine's mass communications department:

1. Prepare graduates for careers in advertising, electronic and print media, journalism, public relations, publishing, writing or other careers requiring sophisticated communications skills;

2. Prepare graduates for continued study in graduate or professional school;

3. Develop the student's critical and imaginative thinking, reading and writing skills;

4. Develop skills to empower the student to communicate ideas effectively, through speaking, writing and the use of technology;

5. Develop skills for critical interpretation of the media;

6. Foster aesthetic understanding in both production and interpretation of media texts;

7. Develop knowledge of the methods to make responsible social and personal decisions;

8. Develop primary and secondary research methodologies;

9. Develop an understanding of the history, structure and operation of the mass media;

10. Provide an understanding of the impact of mass media industries and messages on the individual, society and culture;

11. Develop professional-level skills in written and oral communication for a variety of media and audiences;

12. Develop professional-level production skills for both print and electronic media;

13. Encourage the development of creative expression; and

14. Help the student develop a professional media portfolio.

II. PROFESSIONAL PORTFOLIO. To be inspected by me during our end-of-semester conference and returned to you. This will be a collection of your best work, preferably gathered in a presentation folder, that you can take with you on job interviews.

III. SENIOR PORTFOLIO FOLDER. To be turned in to me during our end-of-semester conference and retained by Benedictine. Since we will keep these folders, I will accept them in an inexpensive pocketed folder; you can find them in an office supply store or the school supplies aisle of most drug stores. In this folder, you will include: (a) the the self-reflective essay; and (b) at least one copy at least one piece of work (artifact) from each of the following categories:

1. A 300-level research paper written for a 300-level theory class (including COMM 317, 385, 386, 387, or 390, and 391 if it is a theory class). It must contain proper annotation, structure, evidence, and methodology. The student must have attained a grade of at least a “B” on the paper in its original form for it to be accepted for this requirement.

2. A print-based publication, defined as an original written or produced work fixed in a printed and published medium (including newspapers, magazines and newsletters). If you do not have print publication credits, class work for COMM 207, 208, 209, 253 (equivalent to SCI's COM 221), 254, 263 (equivalent to SCI's COM 222), 264, 337, 381 or 382 can be accepted.

3. A web-based publication, i.e. creation that has been exhibited on the World Wide Web and is created for a departmental publication, internship, or work-related experience. The Sleepy Weasel counts as a web-based publication. Any other web-based artifact, including blogs or personal Web pages, must be approved by the instructor prior to the submission of the full portfolio.

4. Brochures, fliers, memos or other work product, including advertisements, pamphlets, brochures, letterheads, scripts or other copy prepared for broadcast, memos, creative briefs, campaign plans or other tangible material written in connection with a college course or an internship.

I will send you a formal assignment sheet in a few days, and there is more detail available about the senior portfolios on the COMM 393 syllabus linked to my faculty page at http://www.sci.edu/classes/ellertsen/masscom/comm393syllabus.html

If you have any questions or comments, please don't hesitate to get in touch with me.

-- Pete "Doc" Ellertsen, instructor

COMM 150: Mission statements

Peter Drucker, who was probably the 20th century's most influential management consultant, once famously said "a mission statement should fit on a T-shirt. In an online exerpt from a book called "Managing the Non-Profit Organization," Drucker put it like this:

The first thing to talk about is what missions work and what missions don't work, and how to define the mission. For the ultimate test is not the beauty of the mission statement. The ultimate test is right action.

The most common question asked me by non-profit executives is: What are the qualities of a leader? The question seems to assume that leadership is something you can learn in a charm school. But it also assumes that leadership by itself is enough, that it's an end. And that's misleadership. The leader who basically focuses on himself or herself is going to mislead. The three most charismatic leaders in this century inflicted more suffering on the human race than almost any trio in history: Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. What matters is not the leader's charisma. What matters is the leader's mission. Therefore, the first job of the leader is to think through and deflne the mission of the institution.

And he summed up what he had to say about mission statements with this:

A mission statement has to be operational, otherwise it's just good intentions. A mission statement has to focus on what the institution really tries to do and then do it so that everybody in the organization can say, This is my contribution to the goal.

What does that mean: A mission statement has to be operational? It has to be something you can translate into action. In the portion of "Managing the Non-Profit Organization" excerpted on line, Drucker gives a couple of examples. Here's one:

Here is a simple and mundane example-the mission statement of a hospital emergency room: "It's our mission to give assurance to the afflicted." That's simple and clear and direct. Or take the mission of the Girl Scouts of the U.S.A.: to help girls grow into proud, self-confident, and self-respecting young women. There is an Episcopal church on the East Coast which defines its mission as making Jesus the head of this church and its chief executive officer. Or the mission of the Salvation Army, which is to make citizens out of the rejected. Arnold of Rugby, the greatest English educator of the nineteenth century, who created the English public school, defined its mission as making gentlemen out of savages.

My favorite mission definition, however, is not that of a nonprofit institution, but of a business. It's a definition that changed Sears from a near-bankrupt, struggling mail-order house at the beginning of the century into the world's leading retailer within less than ten years: It's our mission to be the informed and responsible buyer-first for the American farmer, and later for the American family altogether.

Sears has lost sight of its mission in recent years, according to many business analysts. But for a long time, it was nothing if not a farmers' store. Farmers and their families ordered from the Sears catalog (which they also put to other uses), and they shopped at Sears when they came to town. I remember as a kid walking into the Sears in Knoxville, Tenn., and they were selling everything from baby chicks to metal washtubs. You knew it was for farmers. Who are Sears' customers now?

COMM 150: Are the national media biased?

Cross-posted to my mass communications blogs. -- pe

There's a story in yesterday's Washington Post that we need to read, even though it relates to material we covered earlier in the semester and/or will come back to at semester's end. It's a column by media critic Howard Kurtz on right- and left-wing perceptions of bias in the news media. To sum it up briefly, maybe a little too briefly, Kurtz thinks the media are taking fire from both sides. And he implies, without coming right out and saying it, that's about where you want to be if you're covering the news.

Kurtz has been on the talk show circuit plugging his book on network news, and he said the talk show hosts "appear to be living in parallel universes." His column is a good overview of the issue, concluding:

Bobbing along on this swirling sea of opinions, I became increasingly convinced there is a place for newscasts that at least attempt to provide viewers with a straight set of facts. To be sure, these programs make subjective judgments, sometimes miss the boat and appeal to a demographic keenly interested in all those segments on back pain and hip replacements. But it would be a shame if, in an age of infotainment, the new generation of anchors can't find ways to keep their broadcasts vital as well as balanced. Without them, after all, there would be fewer targets for "The Daily Show" to mock.

Read it. Might be a good one to print out for later use, in fact. I don't know how long The Post archives its stories on the open website.

COMM 150: Tangent (that may not be a tangent)

Linked to my blue faculty page is a column by Michelle Thaller, a prof at Cal Tech and occasional newspaper columnist, about a dinosaur at Chicago's Field Museum. It appeared in The Christian Science Monitor in 2002, under the headline "A dinosaur named Sue, and the way science really works." Great head! (At least if you like headlines. And you should. They're difficult, but fun, to write. And the good ones are fun to read.) Keep that part about the way science really works in mind as you read the story.

Spoiler alert. Here's the money graf -- the paragraph, or 'graph as journalists call it, that explains the whole thing -- at the very end of the story:

As I walked out of the Field Museum that day, I heard people talking about Sue, wondering about her forearms, laughing as their kids tried to mimic how a Tyrannosaurus Rex might settle down for a nap. And whether they knew it or not, they were taking home a very different impression about science that I had learned as a child. Science doesn't lose any of its drama or wonder when we admit that we aren't sure what the facts really are. Questions are much more important. ...

Now the questions.

Please answer in two or three sentences each, and post your answers as comments to this post:

1. How is the way the Field Museum presents Sue the dinosaur to the public in the 21st century different from the way dinosaurs were presented when Thaller visited the museum as a little girl?

2. What does the new way of presenting dinosaurs to the public have in common with postmodernism?

3. Was this reading really a tangent? What does it tell you about postmodernism? What does it tell you about communicating with the public?

COMM 150: Postmodernism and media

There's a concept borrowed from 20th-century French philosophy that will make some of the implications of mass communications easier to understand. It's called postmodernism, and it's all over American popular culture. Sometimes it's abbreviated "PoMo" (which must irritate the Pomo Indians of northern California because they had the name first). It's hard to pin down a meaning, but in general it refers to a feeling that modern culture is falling apart. That it's gone so far, it's no longer modern anymore. Hence the word "postmodern."

You see the word used a lot in media studies. In fact, you're likely to see it just about anywhere. I just did a keyword search in Google on "postmodernism," and got 5,740,000 hits in 0.07 seconds. Joseph Straubhaar and Robert LaRose, authors of our textbook "Media Now," say the way we understand the world around us has changed:

We have moved from [a modern] era of universal laws and truths based in rational science to one in which local, particularistic, subjective understandings are more important and more valid. The postmodern view is that there is no universal truth, that what you think depends on your own experience, which depends on what groups you belong to, what media you pay attention to, what your family taught you. ... (41)

Straubhaar and LaRose go on to say what each of us thinks "is just as valid as what anyone else thinks." I think that's going too far. And they go on to suggest "instead of fragmenting into minicultures, the world is reorganizing itself for a titanic 'clash of civilizations,' pitting the United States and its allies against Islam." I certainly think that's going too far. But, hey, it's a postmodern world -- you don't have to agree with me. Or with Straubhaar and Rose.

Postmodernist philosophy can be really hard to read. A famous definition of postmodernism is by Jean-François Lyotard (pron. Lee-o-TAR), who said, "Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives."

Got that?

OK. Let's try to translate it, then.

"Increduility" means you don't believe something. And "metanarratives" (which Lyotard also called "grand narratives") are the kind of myths or stories people told to try to explain the world. Lyotard said the world is such a mess, we don't believe those kinds of stories anymore. One of the most important was a belief in progress, that Western civilization was a steady series of improvements from the ancient Greeks and Romans to the present, from Plato and Aristotle to -- what? -- Donald Trump? O.J.? Britney Spears? Another "grand narrative" was the belief that science and technology will always make things better and better. Hard to believe after science brought us World War II, the threat of nuclear warfare, reality TV and really annoying automated telemarketing calls.

Dino Felluga, an English prof at Purdue who has an "General Introduction to Postmodernism" that's actually clearly written, suggests the modern era began with the Renaissance and lasted at least until World War I. In many ways, it lasted until after WWII. The modern era was a age of reason, of science and -- most important for out purposes in COMM 150 -- of printing presses and printed discourse. Some critics, says Felluga, find in the chaos of the postmodern era "a result of new ways of representing the world including television, film (expecially after the introduction of color and sound), and the computer."

One big problem with postmodernism is that it's written by academics. Not only academics but French academics. Most people find their writing difficult. Some of us find it pretentious. Andrew Sullivan, a columnist and blogger for Atlantic magazine, says the postmodernists are "impenetrable bullshit artists." But I think they're b.s. artists who have something important to say, even though I wish they'd say it more clearly.

One of the most important postmodernists for media studies is Jean Baudrillard, a sociologist and philosopher who wrote a kind of travelog called "America." (That's pronounced jahn Bo-dri-AR.) He said Americans -- and everyone else in the 21st century -- is overwhelmed with information. We're so overwhelmed, he says, we've lost sight of what's real and what isn't. I think he's got some very good insights. But I think at best, his stuff reads like a string of one-liners. I got the following from a page of selected quotes:

• Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.
  
  
• We are becoming like cats, slyly parasitic, enjoying an indifferent domesticity. Nice and snug in the social, our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial coziness, and our half-closed eyes now seek little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures.
  
  
• Santa Barbara is a paradise; Disneyland is a paradise; the U.S. is a paradise. Paradise is just paradise. Mournful, monotonous, and superficial though it may be, it is paradise. There is no other.
  
  
• Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema or dispatched as microfilm into the sidereal void [the space between the stars].
  

Doug Mann, who teaches a course in pop culture at the University of Western Ontario, has the best short introduction to Baudrillard that I've found on the Internet. Mann says the Fremchman "concluded that in the postmodern media-laden condition, we experience something called 'the death of the real': we live our lives in the realm of hyperreality, connecting more and more deeply to things like television sitcoms, music videos, virtual reality games, or Disneyland, things that merely simulate reality."

COMM 150: Online books, platforms and the future

A thought-provoking story in The Chicago Tribune this morning on the future for electronic books. Steve Johnson, the Trib's internet reporter, says he tried reading the classic "Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen downloaded to his cell phone, and to his surprise he liked it.

"Against all my own prejudices, all my own pride in the history and tradition of the printed word," said Johnson, playing on the words in the title, "I liked it." He added:

I liked holding it in one hand, having it always with me, and customizing my fonts and screen color. I liked reading it on the train without advertising my tastes; I could have been reading "Tropic of Cancer" or "The Firm."

I really liked reading it in bed without the encumbrance of a book light.

I liked it all so much, I've moved on to Austen's "Persuasion" and am, frankly, halfway annoyed at having to take time away from that to write this. What comeuppance will the vain spendthrift Sir Walter receive, and will his deserving daughter Anne find satisfaction?

There's something important going on here. It's subtle, and it involves a lot more than English major-y talk about a 19th-century English novelist. I think the people who understand it (and I don't claim to understand it all) are going to be the ones who flourish as the communications industry goes through the most radical changes we've seen since Johannes Gutenberg invented moveable type in 1457.

Johnson catches the essence of it when he says:

The experience taught me that a book is not what I had thought it to be. It is not, in any important sense, typeface, paper stock or cover art. A book is, foremost, the arrangement of words in sequence, and they are, to borrow a buzz-phrase from the digital folk, platform agnostic.

In other words, the content of a book doesn't depend on its platform. You could carve "Pride and Prejudice" into the side of a pumpkin, and it would still be "Pride and Prejudice." (You'd have to use a lot of pumpkins, though.) What's tricky is to know what media -- platform -- to use for what message, and how to use it to the best advantage.

Cookies make the World (Wide Web) go round

Please read for COMM 150 --

When you were a little kid, did you leave out milk and cookies for Santa Claus? Well, you still do. Every time you visit a website. But these cookies are electronic, and they make the World Wide Web a powerful medium for advertisers and sales people.

Here's how Wikipedia defines the term:

HTTP cookies, sometimes known as web cookies or just cookies, are parcels of text sent by a server to a web browser and then sent back unchanged by the browser each time it accesses that server. HTTP cookies are used for authenticating, tracking, and maintaining specific information about users, such as site preferences and the contents of their electronic shopping carts.

So they're still sort of like the milk and cookies you left out for Santa Claus. But these cookies, so goes the argument, help Santa Claus know what all the good little boys and girls want for Christmas. At least they help Santa know what the boys and girls ordered on the Internet.

Civil libertarians fear tracking internet purchases can lead to violations of privacy. But David Whalen, an internet pioneer who has written a website called Cookie Central, argues, "The sad truth is that revealing any kind of personal information opens the door for that information to be spread. ... If you're going to single-out cookies as your sole vulnerability to personal privacy, you should re-examine how you live your daily life."

Because the cookies allow websites to track where you've been, their owners can make an educated guess what your tastes are. If you read ESPN every day, for example, they can guess you like sports. Or, more accurately, that someone who uses your computer likes sports. If you buy books from Amazon.com, you'll leave tracks.

For example, when I visit Amazon.com on my home computer, there's a message at the top of the page: "Hello, Peter Ellertsen. We have recommendations for you." If I click on "recommendations" (an active link on my page), I get a list of 15 books on journalism, mass media law, hymns and gospel music, subjects of books I've bought from Amazon. So cookies allow Amazon.com to do a more effective job of marketing when it recognizes my computer.

Similar technology allows website owners to track the effectiveness of ads on the internet, even to get a hard figure on how many people click onto a webpage with their ad. John Wanamaker, a department store magnate of the 1800s and early 1900s in Philadelphia, once famously said, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half." If he were alive today, and using the Internet, he could at least get a handle on it.

Argues the Marketing.fm Blog, a good website to read if you're thinking of a career in communications: "The advent of interactive media and online measurement has allowed marketers to target advertising messages much more precisely. Morover, it is possible to access comprehensive data on the viewers of your campagin: page views, geographic location, clicks, links, etc." Is it time to throw away Wanamaker's quote? Probably not quite yet, according to an unscientific poll of Marketing.fm readers. But the Internet is still a powerful tool for advertisers.

COMM 150: The 'Long Tail' and e-commerce

Friday we started talking about something called the "Long Tail." It's an important concept for understanding the Internet. Basically, as the online encyclopedia Wikipedia explains, it describes online businesses like Amazon.com that "can sell a greater volume of otherwise hard to find items at small volumes than of popular items at large volumes." Wikipedia also has a graph that shows what it looks like -- a mathematical distribution with a steeply descending curve along the Y axis and, well, a long tail along the X axis.

Here's how it applies to CDs, videos, books ... practically anything you can buy and sell on the World Wide Web.

Open another window and go to the Wikipedia article (linked above). Look at the graph. The number of sales on a hit go up the Y axis. For example, let's see where Britney Spears' new single would go on the graph. She's moving lots of product (I'm not going to call it music), so her sales go way up on the Y axis. But there are also little niche markets for all kinds of different specialty genres. For example, I'm ordering a CD of medieval ballads that Norwegian pilgrims sang when they made their annual pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Olav. Not many people in the market for that kind of stuff, so we'd better plot it way out along the X axis. But I can get it on the Internet. Direct from Norway. In fact, the Norwegian record company's website is even set up to convert from U.S. dollars to Norwegian kroner.

The same is true for all kinds of music. Bulgarian folk songs? Out on the X axis, but somewhere in the wide world there's a market for them. Vintage CDs of Stevie Ray Vaughan or 80s punk rock? X axis. Sister Rosetta Tharpe? Sound tracks from Bollywood movies shot in India? Very popular in India, but still out the X axis worldwide. Especially for an American distributor.

Here's what makes the Long Tail so powerful for marketing on the World Wide Web. There are more people out there buying niche products on the Long Tail along the X axis than there are buying the hits up the Y axis. Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine, came up with the concept in an article called -- what else? -- "The Long Tail." Anderson says:

Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it in service after service, from DVDs at Netflix to music videos on Yahoo! Launch to songs in the iTunes Music Store and Rhapsody. People are going deep into the catalog, down the long, long list of available titles, far past what's available at Blockbuster Video, Tower Records, and Barnes & Noble. And the more they find, the more they like. As they wander further from the beaten path, they discover their taste is not as mainstream as they thought (or as they had been led to believe by marketing, a lack of alternatives, and a hit-driven culture).

An analysis of the sales data and trends from these services and others like them shows that the emerging digital entertainment economy is going to be radically different from today's mass market. If the 20th- century entertainment industry was about hits, the 21st will be equally about misses.

What Anderson calls "misses" in the old economy he calls "sales" on the Internet.

With no shelf space to pay for and, in the case of purely digital services like iTunes, no manufacturing costs and hardly any distribution fees, a miss sold is just another sale, with the same margins as a hit. A hit and a miss are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.

What makes it work, says Anderson, is the fact the World Wide Web is worldwide. It's huge, and you can find willing buyers out there somewhere that you couldn't reach if you had a record store, say, at 6th and Monroe in downtown Springfield. But you can reach them by electronic commerce. Anderson says:

You can find everything out there on the Long Tail. There's the back catalog, older albums still fondly remembered by longtime fans or rediscovered by new ones. There are live tracks, B-sides, remixes, even (gasp) covers. There are niches by the thousands, genre within genre within genre: Imagine an entire Tower Records devoted to '80s hair bands or ambient dub. There are foreign bands, once priced out of reach in the Import aisle, and obscure bands on even more obscure labels, many of which don't have the distribution clout to get into Tower at all.

Oh sure, there's also a lot of crap. But there's a lot of crap hiding between the radio tracks on hit albums, too. People have to skip over it on CDs, but they can more easily avoid it online, since the collaborative filters typically won't steer you to it. Unlike the CD, where each crap track costs perhaps one-twelfth of a $15 album price, online it just sits harmlessly on some server, ignored in a market that sells by the song and evaluates tracks on their own merit.

What's really amazing about the Long Tail is the sheer size of it. Combine enough nonhits on the Long Tail and you've got a market bigger than the hits. ...

COMM 150: Important article on TV, hypertext ...

Here's an article I want us to read and be familiar with as we move on from studying television to the World Wide Web. It's called "Rhetorics of the Web: Implications for Teachers of Literacy," and it's by Doug Brent of the Faculty (or college) of General Studies at Canada's University of Calgary. It's a little hard to follow: It's about something called hypertext, which is the kind of coding that allows us to surf from one website to the next. And Brent not only talks about hypertext, he uses it.

Hypertext allows us multiple entry points into a document. Typically we get into it through a search engine, and we follow the links around. But we don't have to read through a website page by page. In fact, we seldom do. We follow the links till we find what we're looking for. And that's different for every one of us.

COMM 150: Federal regs, media ownership

Imagine. On Wednesday, I lecture on how the Federal Communications Commission regulates mass communications media. And the next day, the lede story in The New York Times is on an FCC proposal to relax the rules on media ownership. While deregulation became federal law with passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, it is an ongoing trend.

The Times reports:

WASHINGTON, Oct. 17 — The head of the Federal Communications Commission has circulated an ambitious plan to relax the decades-old media ownership rules, including repealing a rule that forbids a company to own both a newspaper and a television or radio station in the same city.

A proposal from Kevin J. Martin could change media ownership rules in two months.

Kevin J. Martin, chairman of the commission, wants to repeal the rule in the next two months — a plan that, if successful, would be a big victory for some executives of media conglomerates.

You can read all about it by following the link to the Times' website (it will be up for several days before it goes into the archive and you have to pay to see it). Here's the nut graf (actually two or three grafs), tho':

Officials said the commission would consider loosening the restrictions on the number of radio and television stations a company could own in the same city.

Currently, a company can own two television stations in the larger markets only if at least one is not among the four largest stations and if there are at least eight local stations. The rules also limit the number of radio stations that a company can own to no more than eight in each of the largest markets.

The deregulatory proposal is likely to put the agency once again at the center of a debate between the media companies, which view the restrictions as anachronistic, and civil rights, labor, religious and other groups that maintain the government has let media conglomerates grow too large.

This story relates directly to what we've been talking about in class. Let's follow it.

COMM 150, 207, 337: Obit for 'reporter's reporter'

This morning's Washington Post carries the obituary of a reporter who was shot to death Sunday in Baghdad, apparently by "soldiers from the Iraqi army, believed to be infiltrated by the militia." A sidebar collects appreciations by his colleagues at the Post. "He was a reporter's reporter," says one. "And we all admired his courage."

John Ward Anderson said the reporter Salih Saif Aldin, 32, was tenacious:

Salih loved a scoop, and he reeled in a whopper in the spring of 2005. Like many Iraqis, Salih was deeply committed to justice and democratic reforms. One afternoon, he collared me in the living room of the bureau and, through an interpreter, told an amazing tale of a 37-year-old man in Tikrit who had been arrested by Iraqi police, was brutally tortured and died in police custody.

I was skeptical and told him so. Most important, we needed evidence. He would have to go to Tikrit, hunt down the relatives, confront the police, find the U.S. military officials and get some documentation. There had to be a paper trail, I said. Find it.

Most reporters would hang their shoulders at such instructions. Not Salih. He smiled, and his eyes sparkled. He left for Tikrit the next day.

A few days later, he came back with the story.

And Ellen Knickmeyer recalled he had a reporter's gift for accuracy:

He could be very sweet, deferential, polite and kindly . . . he always called me "Miss," in English. On a trip out of Baghdad last year, he got me past a lot of checkpoints by telling the insurgents I was his mother.

"You couldn't say sister?" I asked him.

"Sorry, Miss, sorry," he said.

xxx

yyy

COMM 207: New blog; as we learn to use HTML tags

By now you should be receiving email messages from Blogger.com inviting you to join a new blog called "comm207fall07." Catchy, huh? Blogger allows you to use simple HTML tags (short for hypertext markup language), and we'll all be posting to the class blog. It can be a frustrating experience at first, because HTML is full of picky little codes. But it's also a good way to get your feet wet in the computer language that makes the Internet such a powerful communications medium. And as you get used to it, you'll discover there's a very simple, elegant logic to the tags and the way they work.

I'll also keep posting messages and links of interest to The Mackerel Wrapper, but some of our assignments will move to Comm207fall07. The link above will take you there.

COMM 207: Where the jobs are (add 1)

A postscript to last Thursday's discussion of jobs in government affairs, lobbying and legislative liaison ... one of the home industries in Springfield ... and a link to a Web page put up by the American League of Lobbyists on how to break into a career in lobbying. An overview:

Most lobbyists are college graduates, and many have advanced degrees. Of these advanced degrees, the most prevalent is legal training, with other common backgrounds being communications, teaching, public relations and journalism. Lobbyists must be able to understand their clients' interests as well as the laws and policies they hope to influence. They must be able to communicate effectively with their audience, both orally and in writing. It is also necessary for them to understand the legislative and political process.

* * *
... The best suggestion we can make is for individuals [wanting to break into the field] to use the contacts they have through previous work or studies, seeking informational interviews and networking as much as possible. As indicated in the paragraph above, political or government contacts are particularly helpful in entering the field.

In short, it helps to know someone. But the way to get to know someone is to take an interest in the political process, volunteer for campaigns and network with people whose politics and philosophies match your own. We have had several students from Springfield College line up internships with local members of Congress, and that is probably the best way to get a feel for the legislative process. The key: Network, network, network.

In class today I will hand out photocopies of the "Illinois" pages in a Springfield telephone book. Most of the listings there, from the Illinois Conference of Churches and the Illinois Conference of Teamsters at the top of the first page to the Illinois Press Association and Illinois Primary Health Care Association at the bottom of the second, are associations that maintain a legislative liaison office in Springfield. Many of them have a full- or part-time communications director on staff. Those that don't sometimes contract out for help with fliers, brochures or other media. You can get a similar list of associations in Springfield, as government affairs offices are often called, by searching in Yahoo! for "Springfield" and "associations."

COMM 150, 207, 337, 393: News or Fark?

Midterm content advisory. This post contains subject matter that relates to the midterm exam in Communications 150 (see post below dated Oct. 6.

I wish I'd seen this before COMM 150 met today!

Jack Shafer, who writes the Press Box media criticism column for Slate.com, has a review of Drew Curtis' new book, It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries To Pass Off Crap As News. Intriguing title? I picked up a copy a couple of weeks ago at Springfield's friendly local neighborhood big box book store, and the book's worth reading. Or at least knowing about.

But what the f--- is fark?

Shafer says it's "[a]ll the garbage the press publishes and broadcasts when it runs out of genuine news." He provides a link to the first chapter of Curtis' book,where Curtis explains the origin of the term in more detail. Fark is also a website at www.fark.com. It's an aggregator, which means it consists mostly of links to other websites, most of them mass media sites. It's hard to classify. Tonight's for example, links to stories about a British teenager who ran "up £1,175 bill by text-messaging votes for herself in online beauty contest in order to win £100 in makeup"; a governor in Brazil who banned "use of the present participle. Yep, you read that right"; and an Episcopal church that "bestow[ed] blessings on cats and dogs" on Oct. 4, the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi, in Bangor, Maine.

If you're really, really into cat pictures, be sure to check out the blessing of the pets in The Bangor Daily News. Otherwise you can safely ignore all this stuff. That's Curtis' point. And Shafer's.

Says Shafer, in terms that remind me of Neil Postman's take on television news:

... High-octane blends of fark contain celebrity news, press coverage of itself, and news served in the context of no context. When Shepard Smith screens, say, five seconds of a burning skyscraper in Brazil, followed by five seconds of a cat rescue in Montana, followed by five seconds of a flood in Thailand on the Fox News Report, you're sucking his fark.

Curtis is irreverent, and sometimes he isn't above taking cheap shots. But he has some dead-serious points to make:

... Whenever Mass Media is really fulfilling its intended purpose, generally something bad is going on. Wars, blown elections, bad weather, you name it -- when people need to know something, it's probably because it's likely to kill them. We'd be much better off living in non-interesting times.

This presents a problem for Mass Media, however, when we are not living in interesting times. This has been further compounded by the advent of twenty-four hour news channels and the Internet as a news source. Back in the days when TV news concentrated most of its resources on one half-hour blocks of news, finding material to fill the time slot wasn't difficult. Nowadays cable news networks have to scramble to have something to talk about for twenty-four hours a day, even when nothing of important is going on. Sales departments are still selling advertisements, after all. Mass Media can't just run content made entirely of ads (with the possible exception of the Home Shopping Network). Something has to fill the space.

Over the years Mass Media has developed several methods of filling this space. No one teaches this in journalism school; odds are Mass Media itself hasn't given much thought to the process. It's a practice honed over the years by editors and publishers, verbally passed down from one generation to the next. They're not entirely aware they're doing it, although the media folks who read advance copies of this manuscript all had the same reaction: "I've been saying we should stop doing this for YEARS."

Some media people even feed him copy, anonymously, of course, if they want to keep their jobs. Says Curtis:

One interesting thing about Fark is how many Mass Media people comb Fark for story ideas, not just for radio but for television, newspapers, and Internet media outfits. Once we switched to Google Analytics for Web traffic tracking we discovered that the number one highest-traffic corporate Internet hitting our servers was CNN. Number two was Fox News. Mass Media even submits a lot of their own articles to Fark, sometimes with taglines so outrageous it's hard to believe these are the same people who run Mass Media. I can't even give any examples; it would be too easy to track back to the source and get people in trouble. The most I can tell you is that it happens multiple times every day. And we really appreciate it.

But also notice that some of the media people who hit the Fark website seem to be looking for material ... for, yep, fark they can fill their newscasts with too. How does all this relate to the social responsbility theory of the press?

COMM 150: Network TV anchors and Iraq

Important story in The Washington Post today. It's by Howard Kurtz, the paper's media critic, and it tellls how ABC, CBS and NBC news anchors have felt about covering the Iraq war. Kurtz tries hard, and I think successfully, to keep his opinion out of the story. But the headline catches its overall tone: "As War Dragged On, Coverage Tone Weighed Heavily on Anchors."

(I'll try not to think about the cheesy pun there. Remember the old Navy song, "Anchors Aweigh?" I recommend you do too.)

Network TV news has been accused of hyping coverage of the war, both "for" and "against" U.S. policy in Iraq. But the reality is more complex than that. Here's what Kurtz said about it in a live discussion forum at noon (Eastern time) today on the Post's website:

It's crucial, because they are far more than newsreaders. As "Reality Show" demonstrates, Brian, Charlie and Katie -- like Dan, Tom and Peter before them -- play a crucial role in shaping their broadcasts. How do they decide when to lead with Iraq and when the news is too incremental? How do they balance the continuing violence with other kinds of reporting from Baghdad? How do they deal with criticism from the administration? How do they press Bush about the war when they have a chance to interview the president? Plus, both Williams and Couric have reported from Iraq this year. So what they think matters big time.

Note (if you're interested in media convergence, or even if you're not and want to know all about it before it appears, as is likely, on the final exam in COMM 150): Kurtz will be blogging about the book at http://anchorwars.blogspot.com/. So here's a newspaper guy (one medium) using a blog (another medium) to plug a book (a third medium). That's what we call convergence.

COMM 150: Midterm study questions

COMM 150: Introduction to Mass Communications
Springfield College in Illinois/Benedictine University

www.sci.edu/classes/ellertsen/com150syl

[Television] is not a tool by which the networks conspire to dumb us down. TV is a tool by which the networks give us exactly what we want. That's a far more depressing thought. -- "The Vent," The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Jan. 19, 1999.

Midterm · Fall Semester 2007
Below are three essay questions – one worth fifty (50) points out of a hundred, and two shorter essays worth 25 points each. Please write at least two pages (500 words) on the 50-point essay and page (250 words) on each of the 25-point short essays. Use plenty of detail from your reading in the textbook, the internet and handouts I have given you, as well as class discussion, to back up the points you make. Your grade will depend both on your analysis of the broad trends I ask about, and on the specific detail you cite in support of the points you make. I am more interested in the specific factual arguments you make to support your points than in whether you like or dislike a particular piece of music. So be specific. Remember: An unsupported generalization is sudden death in college-level writing.

1. Essay (50 points). Neil Postman, media critic at New York University, once said “Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world.” Postman was talking about television, but his critique can be applied to newspapers as well. How do newspapers attempt to strike a balance between entertainment and their duty to give citizens the information they need to function effectively in a democracy? How successful are they? How could they do better? Or can they? How can a mass market communications medium balance entertainment and information without losing customers.

2A. Self-reflective essay (25 points). What have you learned about mass communications in this class so far that you didn’t know before? Consider what you knew at the beginning of the course and what you know now. What point or points stand out most clearly to you? What points are still confusing? In answering this question, please feel free to look at the “Tip Sheet on Writing a Reflective Essay” linked to my faculty webpage. In grading the essay, I will evaluate the relevance of your discussion to the main goals and objectives of the course; the detail you cite to support or illustrate your points; and the connections you make.

2B. Short essay (25 points). How do independent record labels allow creative artists (like musicians and songwriters) to do an end run around the “suits” who often act as gatekeepers in the music industry. What freedom does an independent record label have that the major labels don’t? What limitations does an “indie” have? What is the relationship, generally speaking, between indies and major labels?

COMM 150: Class discussion question

For Friday's class --

Post as a comment to this message your answer to the following questions: Philo Farnsworth was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century. What was his main claim to fame, and how much TV did he allow his children to watch as they were growing up? Why? What does that say about the quality of TV programming? Publish your responses as comments to this blogpost, and we'll talk about them in class. Here's how:

How to Publish Your Responses
Scroll down to the bottom of this post. On the right side of the last line, there will be a link that says "Posted by Pete # 9:33 AM ___ comments" (with a number filled in where I've left a blank, depending on how many comments have been posted). Click on that " ___ comments" link and fill in the comment field on the right. Sign in. You'll have to do something to register for Blogger. Do it. Make a note of the username and password you choose because we'll keep on posting to the blog, and if you don't make a note you'll forget it. Please believe me. This is something we have learned by experience! When you've reviewed your comment, publish it by clicking on "Publish Your Comment." And that's how you publish your comment. Logical, isn't it?

COMM 150, 207, 337 etc.: Where the jobs are

Cross-posted to my mass comm. blogs. -- pe

In Communications 207 (editing for publication) this afternoon, we got off on a tangent about lobbying ... mostly because of a front-page picture in today's State Journal-Register showing people leaning on the third-floor rail of the state Capitol rotunda where lobbyists often gather.

Most comments from COMM 207 students were neutral and process-oriented. "I don't really know much about lobbying." Or a general sense lobbyists influence the government to take action on things. But some reflected a negative attitude often heard about lobbying, one that's described by the American League of Lobbyists as a "caricature" of "portly, cigar-smoking men who wine and dine lawmakers while slipping money into their pockets."

Even more than most stereotypes, the caricature is unfair. In fact, adds the ALL:

Simply put, lobbying is advocacy of a point of view, either by groups or individuals. A special interest is nothing more than an identified group expressing a point of view — be it colleges and universities, churches, charities, public interest or environmental groups, senior citizens organizations, even state, local or foreign governments. While most people think of lobbyists only as paid professionals, there are also many independent, volunteer lobbyists — all of whom are protected by the same First Amendment.

Lobbying involves much more than persuading legislators. Its principal elements include researching and analyzing legislation or regulatory proposals; monitoring and reporting on developments; attending congressional or regulatory hearings; working with coalitions interested in the same issues; and then educating not only government officials but also employees and corporate officers as to the implications of various changes. What most lay people regard as lobbying — the actual communication with government officials — represents the smallest portion of a lobbyist's time; a far greater proportion is devoted to the other aspects of preparation, information and communication.

What's more, the Lobbyists' league has a code of ethics. Linked at the top of the ribbon at the left of its webpage, no less.

The main thing to know about lobbying, especially for those of us who have or plan careers in Springfield, is the associations that lobby the Illinois Legislature are one of the important employers of communications professionals in town.