Is Paris burning? On MSNBC she was

A nice little bit of journalistic theater Friday on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program, when co-anchor Mika Brzezinski refused to read an hourly lede story on Paris Hilton, tried to set it afire with a cigaret lighter and ran it thorugh a shredder that conveninently happened to be on the studio set. Staged? Well, MSNBC isn't saying. But a nice bit of stage business, anyway.

"I hate [the Hilton story], and I don't think it should be our lede," said Brzezinski.

The moment was captured on YouTube in all its glory. BBC News carried a brief account of Brzezinski's shtick in the entertainment section of their website. And Jemima Lewis, a columnist for The Independent, a center-left newspaper in London, commented on Brzezinski and the American media in general. What Jenkins said, I think, is important and right on target:

There is a thin line between respectable and supine, and American journalism has settled on the wrong side. Our own press [in the U.K.] is no less obsessed with celebrities, but we specialise - too much so, you might think - in tearing them down. In America, to be famous is to be worshipped unquestioningly. Hollywood stars demand copy approval, and get it - which is why you will never read an interesting celebrity interview in an American magazine.

It is also why the public loves Mika Brzezinski. Americans suspect that something is rotten in their Fourth Estate. They listen to the anodyne newsreaders, with their big hair and Colgate smiles; they munch through the dry, cautious news that's fit to print - and they wonder if they are being told the whole truth. They imagine that what's missing is "seriousness", but that isn't quite it. They need a press that is generally fiercer, more anarchic, less obedient. The word we're groping for, I think, is feral.

Feral? Why say that? Jenkins was giving a backhanded nod to former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who had accused the British media of acting like animals that have returned to the wild. She also said, and I think she was right, the Brits glory in a press that still retains the values of its working-class origins:

The British long ago accepted that their press is, as Tony Blair would have it, feral. Journalists in this country are despised, and we know it. Indeed, we embrace our lowly status with a perverse, distinctly British pride: we call ourselves "hacks", lest anyone should think we take ourselves seriously, and delight in Fleet Street legends of debauchery and low cunning. British journalism - both the profession and the end product - is tough, unscrupulous and, at its best, riotously good fun.

In America, different standards prevail. When I went to work at a current affairs magazine in New York a couple of years ago, my editor warned me that I was in for a culture shock. "American journalists," he said, "believe they belong to a kind of priesthood. Ever since Watergate, we have seen ourselves as guardians of the truth. That," he added ruefully, "is why our newspapers are so boring."

It wasn't always that way. When I started in the newspaper business in the 1970s, a lot of older reporters still only had a high school education. They were working stiffs, and they were proud of it. Now they're gone, and you have to have a master's in communications to get in the newsroom door. Nothing wrong with being educated. But I think we've lost something valuable, and I wonder if it's why newspapers -- and network television news programs -- are losing readers and audience share as the news product gets blander.

COMM 207: "Golden ratio" and page layout

It's a long way from copyediting and page makeup to the ancient Greek mathematician/philosopher Pythagoras -- about 2,000 years, to be exact -- but one of the principles goes back to the ancient Greeks. It's a proportion sometimes known as the "golden ratio" and still followed (usually by intuition).

Basically the golden ratio is the ratio between the sides of the Parthenon or, for that matter, the human face. There are pictures, diagrams and -- for those whose minds are capable of understanding them -- mathematical equations in the basic Wikipedia article on the concept.

Explains Bruno Maddox, in a June 1 article on classical proportions in plastic surgery (!) in Discover magazine:

... The ancient Greeks, for their part, were convinced that an explanation of, and definition for, Beauty was as concrete and discoverable as the answer to why the days got shorter in winter or why your toga weighed more after you’d gone swimming in it. Indeed, no less a thinker than Pythagoras, he of hypotenuse fame, logged some impressive early results. In music, Pythagoras showed that the notes of the musical scale were not arbitrary but reflected the tones produced by a lute string—or any string—when its length was subdivided precisely into such simple ratios as 2:1 or 3:2. In architecture and design, similarly, he managed to show that the shapes people found most pleasing were those whose sides were related by the so-called golden ratio.

The golden ratio, briefly, is the proportional relationship between two lines a and b such that (a + b) is to a as a is to b; in other words, the ratio between the whole and one of its parts is the same as the ratio between its two parts. This doesn’t sound like much in algebra form (a/b = (a + b)/a) and still less when expressed as a decimal (1:1.61814). But draw a rectangle—or build a Parthenon—with sides of a and b, and the sheer cosmic rightness of the thing leaps out at you. If you were to be stranded on a desert island with one particular rectangle, that’s the one you’d go with. Palpably, it’s the first rectangle that occurred to God when he realized he needed another four-sided, right-angled shape to complement his juvenile masterpiece, the square.

This was good enough for Plato, the 800-pound gorilla of ancient Greek intellectual life, to include Beauty as one of his famous forms: those transcendent, invisible archetypes of which this reality is nothing but a set of blurry ramshackle imitations. Beauty was not in the eye of the beholder. On the contrary, to borrow Plato’s legendary cave metaphor, the beholder had his back to Beauty, able to see only its flickering shadows on the grimy cave wall of reality.

In short, the Science of Beauty was inaugurated by the two classical thinkers upon whose shoulders the science of pretty much everything else would eventually come to rest. Among historians of science, that’s what is known as a rollicking and auspicious start.

Maddox is suspicious of any claims to precision in the theory, which was explained to him in great detail and with breathtaking precision by a Southern California plastic surgeon, but he thinks there's something to it ... especially if you stick to ballpark figures.

So, after laying out too many newspaper and newsletter pages to count over the years, do I.

If you're interested in learning more, see also Wikipedia's article Canons of Page Consruction. And if you're really interested, scroll down to the links at the bottom of the page to terms used in typography. Follow those links, and you'll find the difference between a "widow" and an "orphan."