A weblog for Pete Ellertsen's mass communications students at Benedictine University Springfield.

Thursday, August 30, 2007

COMM 207: News value -- novelty/"the bizzare"

When I was in J-school back in the Middle Ages, the list of news values (newsworthiness) I memorized included this item: "The bizarre." It was the one that's explained by saying if-a-man-bites-a-dog ... and so on. You know the rest. Now I see it listed in journalism books as "novelty" or "the unusual" or something like that. But I still think of it as The Bizarre, with a capital "T" and a capital "B." It just rolls trippingly off my tongue that way.

Well, here's a story in today's Washington Post that qualifies. It's a dog story, too, about how dogs that flunk out of obedience school find a new life as guard dogs in the Middle East.

Here's the lede, by Washington Post staff writer Laura Blumenfeld. It's a standard Newsweek-style soft lede -- I've heard them called a Jell-O lede or a marshmallow lede -- that catches the reader's attention by telling a little story. In this case, a couple of little stories:
The day before Ricky Bobby Baby Jesus was scheduled to die by an injection of pentobarbital, along came the cookie lady. She brought dog biscuits to the Howard County Animal Shelter. When she saw the yellow Labrador -- evicted for feistiness from three homes -- leap to catch a ball, she had an idea.

In a New York prison, Mary Jane, a black Labrador raised by a convicted murderer, was balled up in her cell. Bred from guide-dog stock and trained in an inmate program, Mary Jane flunked her test. "She lacks self-confidence," the evaluators noted. The convict sat on the cell floor and rubbed Mary Jane's belly, reading "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" out loud to her.

How Ricky Bobby Baby Jesus and Mary Jane went from being underachieving curs to canines sniffing out terrorists in Rabat, Morocco, is the story of how some Americans -- or at least their dogs -- are finding second chances through the war on al-Qaeda.
And here's the nut graf. See how it sums up the story in a nutshell? That's why a nut graf is called that. And "graf," by the way, isn't a misspelled graphic. It's a paragraph. Anyway, here it is:
In a 16-week program jointly run by the Justice and State departments, the two dogs, along with four other Labradors, transformed themselves from losers to potential lifesavers. Each canine teamed up for training in the Shenandoah Valley with a Moroccan law enforcement official. They would join more than 700 American dogs who have been deployed with foreign counterterrorism forces.
Read it! I think you'll enjoy it, especially if you like dogs and even more if you can't resist an undisciplined goofball of a dog. You know, the kind of dogs that will never win a dog show.

But also read it for style. Read it for the way the story's put together. Look for the odd little details that make the story come alive. Ask yourself: How did the reporter get that bit of information? Here's an example: When the dog handlers from Morocco ask, "Where's Wal-Mart? Where's Circuit City? Where's Potomac Mills?" Did she see it? Hear it? Did someone let it slip during an interview? How does she let you know? (That's called attribution.) Look for her story-telling technique. What writer's tricks does she use that you can use in your own writing?

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 # 7:42 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. Believe me. This is something we have learned by experience! Review your comment and publish it by clicking on "Publish Your Comment." And that's how you publish your comment. Logical, isn't it?

Saturday, August 25, 2007

COM 150: Why I (kinda) Trust Wikipedia

In class Friday we went looking for "interactive" features on webpages and posted what we found to The Mackerel Wrapper. So today in one of my favorite online magazines, Slate.com, there's a story on on one of the most important interactive communities on the World Wide Web: Wikipedia. Read it. This article supplements and updates several things in our textbook.

(Great job with Friday's questions, by the way, everyone who posted. I like to throw my students into activities without a lot of hand-holding and spoon-feeding, let you figure things out for yourselves because you'll remember them bettter that way. So, especially in the first few days of class, it's kind of sink-or-swim. You guys are swimming! And I think we're off to a very good start as we build our class into another kind of interactive community.)

Back to Wikipedia --

As I think all of you know, it's an online encyclopedia. It lets anybody edit the articles, not just the "experts," and sometimes bogus information gets into them. That level of interactivity is controversial, and some instructors at Springfield/Benedictine don't let their students use Wikipedia. I respect why they do that, especially in introductory classes on how to do research, but I take a different angle: I recognize the danger of getting bogus information, but I use Wikipedia myself -- keeping my eyes open for B.S., of course, and not believing everything I read -- so I let my students do the same. Use it, but be careful.

Enough background. Slate staff writer Michael Agger tells about how corporate public relations people use Wikipedia to spin the public by editing out information that's critical of their companies, like some effects of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Agger used a program called by Wikiscanner, designed by a geek named Virgil Griffith who is described as a "future CalTech graduate student." Wikiscanner lets you look up who's been posting to Wikipedia, and let's just say Agger found a lot of spin artists. But he found a lot more to like in Wikipedia. And he found the bogus stuff gets edited out:

Wikipedia vandalism is as old as Wikipedia itself. The Wikipedians have a whole section devoted to the most inspired damage, called "Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense." I especially liked the archive of hoax pages, including the justly celebrated Upper Peninsula War, which details (complete with maps and historical photos) a skirmish over the Michigan's Upper Peninsula between Canadians and Americans during the Spring of 1843. But even a hoax as convincing as this one lasted only two weeks before being found out. Wikiscanner, despite its litany of mischief, points to the success of Wikipedia. The egotistical edits, slurs, and blatant puffery eventually get re-edited and fixed by the community.

As I scanned away, I found devoted Wikipedians who corrected grammar, argued finer points of historical incidents, and updated entries relating to their catholic interests: Jacques Lacan, steampunk, the Rabbit tetralogy, cannabis, the Empire State Building, weather balloons. So, that's the image I'm left with after two weeks of Wikiscanner: a thousand Cliff Clavins, anonymously sculpting the knowledge of Wikipedia during their working hours. No doubt there are subtle Wikipedia vandalism and public-relations black ops waiting to be discovered, but, for the moment, the open-source encyclopedia seems to be holding the fort against the forces of idiocy and spin.
There are links to the "Bad Jokes ..." page and the alleged war in Michigan, by the way, but I'll let you follow them in the original. Same with the reference to a character in the Cheers show that was on TV back in the later Paleolithic period. This will be more incentive to read the the original.

The whole Slate article is worth reading, and the question of interactivity is one we'll be following throughout the course.

Thursday, August 23, 2007

COM(M) 150: In-class discussion questions

Friday in class we're going to go out on the World Wide Web, find real-world examples of the trends mentioned in the first chapter of the textbook and post them as comments to this blog post. (I'll explain how to do it below.) The questions:

1. Find three examples of interactivity (pp. 21-22) on the internet. Describe them and tell specifically how they complete the feedback loop in the SMCR model for the sender of each message.

2. What did Johannes Gutenberg invent? How did his invention change European society? What did it lead to?

3. How are the effects of the Internet similar to Gutenberg's press? How are they different?

How to Post 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 # 4:21 PM ___ 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. Believe me. This is something we have learned by experience. Make a note of it. Review your comment if you wish and publish it by clicking on "Publish Your Comment." Logical, isn't it?

About Me

Springfield (Ill.), United States
I'm a retired English, journalism and cultural studies teacher at Springfield College in Illinois (acquired by Benedictine University and subsequently closed). I coordinate jam sessions for the "Clayville Pioneer Academy of Music" at Clayville Historic Site and the Prairieland Strings dulcimer club, and I sing in the choir and the contemporary praise team at Peace Lutheran Church in Springfield. On Hogfiddle I post links and video clips for our sessions and workshops on the mountain dulcimer (a.k.a. "hog fiddle"), as well as research notes on folklore and cultural studies, hymnody and traditional Anglo-Celtic and Scandinavian music. I also posted assignments and readings in my interdisciplinary humanities classes. The Mackerel Wrapper (now on hiatus), carried assignments and readings for my mass comm. students. I started teaching b/log when I chaired SCI-Benedictine's assessment committee, and reopened it as the privatization of public schools grew increasingly troubling and closer to home.