With the election coming up Tuesday, we're taking some things out of order ... the pre-election coverage illustrates too many principles we ought to be aware of and, as usual, the world refuses to consult with me before doing stuff that we won't read about until later in Vivian's "Media of Mass Communication." Bummer.
But one we've got to deal with.
Please notice hints in red type below. But red type isn't a bummer. Right?
Last week, we were discussing campaign ads - especially the negative ones, since that's about all you see in the last days before an election - and their effect on voters, especially voters of your generation. You're turned off, you say in your comments to the blog, by all the negativity shown by people who say they want to be our leaders but certainly don't act like leaders.
Rich Miller, publisher of the Capitol Fax newsletter and blog, says in his print newspaper column picked up by Illinois Times and other papers statewide, it's turning off the politicians, too. His column is headlined "After the bloodbath, who will pull us together?" His answer: Maybe nobody will.
Among other things, Miller says this year's election cycle of partisan politics and attack ads are making it harder for state legislators to work together. He adds:
... All of this couldn’t come at a worse possible time, of course. The state’s budget deficit is practically insurmountable. Unemployment remains stubbornly and scarily high. People are angry and frightened because nobody can point to any light at the end of this tunnel.
Somehow, some way, the people who lead this state are going to have to find it in them to pull everyone together and address these issues after this bloody fall campaign. But right now all of them are doing everything possible to undermine any sort of resolution.
A similar point is made by a well-researched, balanced backgrounder in the St. Louis Beacon, an online news magazine written and published by veteran journalists in that city. It covers Illinois state politics as well as St. Louis metro and Missouri government.
The Beacon story is by Mary Delach Leonard. (There's more on her below, because she's had an interesting career as a political reporter.) Its headline "Are Illinois voters too turned off by corruption to vote?" tells it all. Leonard quotes Cindi Canary, director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform:
Canary is concerned when she hears voters saying in interviews that they are turning down the volume of their radios and televisions and not listening to the advertising.
"The truth of the matter is that voters who take their responsibility seriously have to choose between one or the other screaming, angry candidate," Canary said. "And it's particularly disheartening coming on the heels of [former Gov. and convicted felon Rod] Blagojevich when my hope would be that we would be talking about leadership. We should be talking about public responsibility to the citizens and the electorate and we should be talking about the very serious problems that we have."
Canary worries that the negative tone of the campaigns will further suppress voter turnout, which tends to be low in midterm elections anyway.
"I think it's very hard not to be cynical in this kind of environment," she said.
Some questions:What can the media do to change this kind of environment? What should they do? How can they balance that with their need to make a buck? You've seen the questions before. You'll see them again. You may even see them on your final exam. Hint hint. Things like Leonard's article and the St. Louis Beacon may be part of the answer.
Leonard was a reporter and features editor for the St. Louis Post Dispatch for 17 years before joining the St. Louis Beacon in 2008. The Beacon is an non-profit, online publication that is, according to its "About" page, "dedicated to news that matters for people in our region. ... Founded by veteran journalists, the Beacon aims to serve and engage citizens by offering a distinctive new news medium. Join in this effort by sharing your experience, insight and suggestions. Together, we can build a Beacon that illuminates our region and shines outward to the world." Surf around the website and see what its funding sources are. Some of the pundits think not-for-profit publications are the wave of the future, at least for news and public affairs content. Others think they're deadly dull and timid, lest they say something that offends their funders. What do you think?
Reminder: State and congressional elections are coming up Tuesday, Nov. 2. Remember, if you don't vote, you lose your right to &#+%^ about politics.
More evidence on what I asked about Wednesday - the effect of campagin ads - and what I asked about Monday - how the internet is changing things - in Rich Miller's Capitol Fax Blog ... which covers Illinois politics and government.
Please note additional class discussion question at end of post.
In terms we've been using in class, I'd call CapFax an online niche publication for people who follow Illinois Statehouse politics closely. Miller is pretty much a one-man band, and he serves readers who can't get the detailed information they need from the commercial or "mainstream" media. He also uses fairly advanced technology (alway has - the name "Capitol Fax" comes from a day in the early 90s when fax machines were cutting-edge technology and Miller would fax his newsletter to clients. Now he has moved online, and offers the blog to promote his $350-a-year subscribers' newsletter.
Since it's a blog, he offers his readers plenty of opportunity for two-way conversation - uses the "interactivity" of the 'net in academic terms. So every day he has a "Question of the Day" - usually humorous - to stir up interest. Today's question was< "Looking back over the past year, what were the campaign moments that will most likely stick with you as you get older?" And one of the best answers was this (scroll down to 1:38 p.m. [they're posted top to bottom in chronological order. We've been talking about Illinois and Alaska, and this brings in evidence from three more states:
- Deep South - Friday, Oct 29, 10 @ 1:38 pm:
Down here in the Deep South, the television market covers four states. That’s four states worth of political commericials on TV….constantly. We get KY, MO, IL and TN. So we get Rand Paul, Jack Conway, Robin Carnanhan, Roy Blount, Joann Emerson, Tommy Sowers, Mark Kirk, Alexi, Quinn, Brady, Madigan, some congressman down in Tennessee,along with variouos amendments and proposition, etc. And in the final days before the vote…we’re getting a bunch of the local candidates on the air. Geez…they’re all the same…one candidate attacks the other, tries to show the other as a liar, a socialist, a crime softie or the fact that he or she has some other evil personality flaw. In fact, you’d think some of these people are running against a three headed monster named Obama-Polosi-Reid. Can’t really learn anything about the candidates or what they stand for….but Gawd they’re spending the money like its going out of style.
Oh, and it seems like half these guys are either cleaning a shotgun, carrying a shotgun or actually firing a shotgun (Tommy Sowers, Democratic candidate for Missouri’s 8th CD fires a shotgun in his ads…in fact, in think he fires it twice in one of the spots.) Guess you need a shotgun to prove you’re aimin’ to go to Washington.
Same question as Wednesday: What is the cumulative effect of these ads on our overall opinion of politics and government?
We're going to take things out of order again for today's discussion question. This column by Julia O'Malley, a feature writer for The Anchorage Daily News, gets into questions of media ethics that we'll read about next month in John Vivian's "Media of Mass Communication." But I really liked it (with usual disclaimer: That doesn't mean you ought to feel like you have to like what I like). And it was a welcome relief when I surfed into it while I was tracking coverage of the U.S. Senate campaign here, which is even more of knock-down-and-drag-out brawl that in Illinois.
Plus, O'Malley is about 10 years out of college, and her career is a very good example of the kinds of careers you can have with a degree from a liberal arts college.
Read the column, and answer these questions ... as comments to this post:
What is O'Malley's role here? Is she functioning as a watchdog? If so, who is she watch-dogging? (Whee! I just made up a new verb.) Are the media and lobbying groups like the Alaska Federation of Natives public institutions in the same way as government is? Who should they be accountable to? Who holds them accountable?
A related question. In this column, O'Malley is focusing on the mass media in much the same way that comedian Jon Stewart focuses on the media. (Oops! I just gave away the answer to the first question.) Compare and contrast the way they do it. If the media don't watch-dog themselves, who else is going to do it?
What is the role of the two disc jockeys here? What responsibilty do radio personalities have to the public? How did the disc jockeys in this story understand their responsibity? How did that understanding change?
The Alaska Natives decided not to go to the media because, "News stories split things into two sides and heighten the conflict." Do you agree? Do the stories have to be divisive? Compare the State Journal-Register's coverage of the controversy a Halloween display - link here and here - in Springfield.
In general, what responsibility do professionals in the mass communications industry have to the overall community? How can they balance those responsibilities with the need to entertain people and make a profit?
Remember: Posting to the blog equals class attendance this week. The week's not over, so you can still get caught up. Link here to Monday's and Wednesday's class discussions.
But first, a little background: Alaska Natives include diverse groups of people, including several American Indian tribes and the peoples we lump together as Eskimos. The First Alaskans Institute is a Native not-for-profit agency that focuses on "leadership development, education and public policy." One of the important Indian tribes is the Tlingit (pronounced KLINK-it). The controversy arose last spring when Rochene Rowan-Hellén heard a tasteless joke about "cash for Tlingits" on KWHL and contacted FAI. They met with radio hosts Bob Lester and Mark Colavecchio of the Bob & Mark show, whose joke it was, and their boss Anchorage Media Group General Manager Dennis Bookey. O'Malley continues the story:
At this point, something predictable could have happened, along the lines of what happened to KBFX personalities Woody and Wilcox, who made a similar on-air gaffe in 2008. That provoked rebuke statewide, from the Alaska Federation of Natives, to the mayor, to the Anchorage School District. The dee-jays were suspended and ordered to sensitivity training. And people whispered that Alaska Natives couldn’t take a joke.
Rowan-Hellén didn’t want it to go that way. Humiliating Bob and Mark wasn’t going to make them see things from her point of view, she said.
So instead of going public with the story, they quietly contacted the station and met with the disc jockeys. They promptly acknowledged they'd messed up and took steps to correct it. But it went beyond that, when they met with a group of Natives.
Lester, Colavecchio and Bookey agreed to be part of a working group to come up with ways to make lasting changes at the station and in the community. Lester and Colavecchio went to a training at the Alaska Native Heritage Center to learn about Alaska Native culture. When they were there, they met a lot of Native people who listened to their show.
“The thing that hit me that day was these people love what I do and I let them down. It’s like letting down a loved one,” Colavecchio said.
Out of the meeting came some changes in programming. Says O'Malley:
At KWHL, they reviewed all their radio skits and deleted the ones that had racial overtones. They apologized formally. They started planning some outreach events in the Alaska Native community. They discussed the possibility of having an Alaska Native intern on their show. And, the two guys, who over the years have flirted with shock-jock status because of edgy humor, thought hard about what it means to be funny. Funny can be irreverent. Funny can poke at public figures. Funny doesn’t have to rely on stereotypes.
“If I’m going to have fun, it’s with my arm around somebody,” Lester said. “I’m not going to punch them in the face.”
“You can’t satirize a culture,” Colavecchio said. “If nobody ever tells you that, you don’t know that. You are ignorant.”
For the last three months, they tweaked the tone of the show. And their ratings came back higher than at any time in recent memory. They hadn’t lost their edge. They’d gained audience.
I don't usually like to editorialize too much in class. I'd rather have you develop your own independent judgment. But this time I'm going to: Sometimes you can do well (financially) by doing good.
Students will create a web Log (blog) and write analyses professional writing of 1,000 words each of: (a) a newspaper feature story, (b) a magazine feature, (c) a piece of public affairs reporting and (d) an opinion or op-ed piece on the blog.
This is our opinion piece ... it's not at all like your standard editorial, that harumphs around about some political issue and comes to some kind of conclusion. For that, you can go to the State Journal-Register, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Trib, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch or any other newspaper in the land. I like this one much better. It's by Julia O'Malley, who writes a general interest column in the Anchorage Daily News. (We're reading another column of hers, a feature story.) And it follows a different model.
When I started newspapering, somebody told me the perfect editorial would go kind of like this: "Fact. Fact. Fact. Fact. Fact. Fact. Fact. Fact. The conclusion is obvious." O'Malley's is kind of like that, except she doesn't come right out and state a conclusion.
Even so, her conclusion is obvious.
Well, maybe.
O'Malley's column describes a time she got thrown out of a political rally. Read it and tell me what you think. In 1,000 well-chosen words on your blog. Analyze it in the same terms you did her feature story. Be thinking about Donald Murry's "little green book that won't go away" and ask yourself these questions:
What does Murray mean by "craft?" What do you mean by it? How does "craft" differ from "art?" How does O'Malley's column show art? And craftsmanship?
What is the relationship between the craft of reporting and of writing? To Murray? What might O'Malley say about it? How well reported is her column? What does she gain from being on the scene?
Does O'Malley state a conclusion? What would you say is the overall conclusion you get from reading her story? Would it strengthen or weaken the column if she came right out and said it?
From our syllabus: "Students will create a web Log (blog) and write analyses professional writing of 1,000 words each of: (a) a newspaper feature story, (b) a magazine feature, (c) a piece of public affairs reporting and (d) an opinion or op-ed piece on the blog." As you read the story, be thinking about Donald Murry's "little green book that won't go away" and be sure to discuss these points in your analysis of the story:
What does Murray mean by "craft?" What do you mean by it? How does "craft" differ from "art?"
What the @#$%!& does that have to do with writing? What does it have to do with reporting?
What is the relationship between the craft of reporting and of writing? To Murray? How important is reporting to this story?
Post your analysis to the blog, and email me at peterellertsen-at[spelled out this way here to discourage spammers]-yahoo.com when you do.
This piece appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, an online magazine subsidized by grant funding and staffed by experienced journalists in St. Louis, Missouri and Illinois. It prints the kind of long-form journalism that newspapers no longer feel they can afford.
The story is headlined "Are Illinois voters too turned off by corruption to vote?"
Some key points ... she quotes Cindi Canary, director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform:
Canary is concerned when she hears voters saying in interviews that they are turning down the volume of their radios and televisions and not listening to the advertising.
"The truth of the matter is that voters who take their responsibility seriously have to choose between one or the other screaming, angry candidate," Canary said. "And it's particularly disheartening coming on the heels of Blagojevich when my hope would be that we would be talking about leadership. We should be talking about public responsibility to the citizens and the electorate and we should be talking about the very serious problems that we have."
Canary worries that the negative tone of the campaigns will further suppress voter turnout, which tends to be low in midterm elections anyway.
"I think it's very hard not to be cynical in this kind of environment," she said.
At the same time, Illinoisans say they are ready for state government reform, according to a recent poll of likely voters by the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
More of the Beacon ... from its "about" page: "Founded by veteran journalists, the Beacon aims to serve and engage citizens by offering a distinctive new news medium. Join in this effort by sharing your experience, insight and suggestions. Together, we can build a Beacon that illuminates our region and shines outward to the world."
Students will create a web Log (blog) and write analyses professional writing of 1,000 words each of: (a) a newspaper feature story, (b) a magazine feature, (c) a piece of public affairs reporting and (d) an opinion or op-ed piece on the blog.
As you read the story, be thinking about Donald Murry's "little green book that won't go away" and be sure to discuss these points in your analysis of the story:
What does Murray mean by "craft?" What do you mean by it? How does "craft" differ from "art?"
What the @#$%!& does that have to do with writing? What does it have to do with reporting?
What is the relationship between the craft of reporting and of writing? To Murray? How important is reporting to this story?
Post your analysis to the blog, and email me at peterellertsen-at[spelled out this way here to discourage spammers]-yahoo.com when you do.
Our newspaper feature story is by Julia O'Malley, who writes a general interest column for The Anchorage Daily News. (She also is living proof there is such a thing as life after college for English majors.)
In this story about diversity training for a cpuple of radio announcers in Anchorage, O'Malley works off of a standard event for daily newspaper reporters -- a press conference -- but she talked, apparently at length, with the people who were part of the story, and got the information she needed to humanize it, to turn it into a feature.
The press conference was called by Alaska Native groups to publicize how radio station KWHL made amends after their morning drive disc jockeys Bob Lester and Mark Colavecchio broadcast a tasteless reference to Tlingit Indians.
A little background: Alaska Natives include diverse groups of people, including several American Indian tribes and the peoples we lump together as Eskimos. The First Alaskans Institute is a Native not-for-profit agency that focuses on "leadership development, education and public policy." One of the important Indian tribes is the Tlingit (pronounced KLINK-it). The controversy arose last spring when Rochene Rowan-Hellén heard a tasteless joke about "cash for Tlingits" on KWHL and contacted FAI. They met with radio hosts Bob Lester and Mark Colavecchio of the Bob & Mark show, whose joke it was, and their boss Anchorage Media Group General Manager Dennis Bookey. O'Malley continues the story:
At this point, something predictable could have happened, along the lines of what happened to KBFX personalities Woody and Wilcox, who made a similar on-air gaffe in 2008. That provoked rebuke statewide, from the Alaska Federation of Natives, to the mayor, to the Anchorage School District. The dee-jays were suspended and ordered to sensitivity training. And people whispered that Alaska Natives couldn’t take a joke.
Rowan-Hellén didn’t want it to go that way. Humiliating Bob and Mark wasn’t going to make them see things from her point of view, she said.
So instead of going public with the story, they quietly contacted the station and met with the disc jockeys. They promptly acknowledged they'd messed up and took steps to correct it. But it went beyond that, when they met with a group of Natives.
Lester, Colavecchio and Bookey agreed to be part of a working group to come up with ways to make lasting changes at the station and in the community. Lester and Colavecchio went to a training at the Alaska Native Heritage Center to learn about Alaska Native culture. When they were there, they met a lot of Native people who listened to their show.
“The thing that hit me that day was these people love what I do and I let them down. It’s like letting down a loved one,” Colavecchio said.
Out of the meeting came some changes in programming. Says O'Malley:
At KWHL, they reviewed all their radio skits and deleted the ones that had racial overtones. They apologized formally. They started planning some outreach events in the Alaska Native community. They discussed the possibility of having an Alaska Native intern on their show. And, the two guys, who over the years have flirted with shock-jock status because of edgy humor, thought hard about what it means to be funny. Funny can be irreverent. Funny can poke at public figures. Funny doesn’t have to rely on stereotypes.
“If I’m going to have fun, it’s with my arm around somebody,” Lester said. “I’m not going to punch them in the face.”
“You can’t satirize a culture,” Colavecchio said. “If nobody ever tells you that, you don’t know that. You are ignorant.”
For the last three months, they tweaked the tone of the show. And their ratings came back higher than at any time in recent memory. They hadn’t lost their edge. They’d gained audience.
Be forewarned: We're taking this out of order. John Vivian's discussion of the effects of mass media won't come till the end of the semester, but by that time the Nov. 2 election will be over. And nobody will remember all the activity that led up to it. So ... here's the second of our three discussion questions for this week.
What effect does negative political advertising - negative politics in general - have on a growing "sense that our political system is broken" and on our trust in government in general?
Post your answers as comments to this post. Take into account the analytical story and campaign commercials I have linked below.
ANCHORAGE - This sense that the political system is broken, coupled with a lot of anti-incumbent feeling as we head into the election, turned up in a Yahoo!-ABC News poll on the Yahoo! website this morning. They include:
When those who are pessimistic or uncertain were asked whether they believe the problem is the system itself or the people who are running it, a 3-to-1 majority said the people in charge. Some 74 percent said the people running the government are at fault, versus just 24 percent who placed blame on the system itself.
One commonly cited reason: Professional politicians spend too much time looking out for their own interests; they no longer work for the interests of those who sent them to Washington.
OK, as far as it goes, but I think it leaves out a reason.
That reason is the candidates themselves.
I've been seeing a lot of it this week in Alaska. There's a hotly contested U.S. Senate race here, with a lot of outside money behind the two Republican candidates. Here are two of Republican nominee Joe Miller's ads. One is positive, in the parlance of political advertising. That means, in this case, that it mostly talks issues instead of attacking other candidates:
But look at what Miller does with the disclaimer - the tag at the end of a political ad that says the campaign approved the message. Miller looks right at the camera, and says, "I'm Joe Miller, and I approved this message because to change D.C., you've got to change the people who are there." I think it's brilliant. But I also wonder if ads like this contribute to the sour mood recorded in the Yahoo!-CBS poll ... and especially to the sense that the system's OK but "the people running the government are at fault."
The other spot is unabashadly negative. It takes down U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, who lost to Miller in the primary and is now running as an independent in the general election. (You can't do that in Illinois, but you can in Alaska.) Here it is:
Murkowski's ads have to focus on how to cast a write-in vote, and her attacks on the other candidates have mostly been indirect. Here's one that shows how to fill out a ballot for Murkowski, and it takes a sly dig at media analysts who point out how difficult it is for write-in candidates to win an election:
And here's one that focuses on the out-of-state money that's poured into Miller's campaign from "Tea Party" and other conservative sources in the Lower 48 states.
There's a third major candiate in the race. He's Scott McAdams, and he's running behind Miller and Murkowski. (He's a Democrat, and Alaska is a Republican state.) Here's one of his ads, another "positive" spot - it plays up his roots as a small-town mayor ("a long way from D.C.") who's worked in the fishing industry - but notice the digs he gets in at "Joe" and "Lisa."
It's a cute ad. I think I'd like it even if I weren't Norwegian-American (a lot of fishermen in McAdams' part of Alaska are, so it's kind of an inside joke and a little dig at Miller, who moved here from "outside"). But are McAdams' little digs part of the problem, too? Does stuff like that contribute to the sense politicians are just out for themselves? It's all over the Yahoo! poll.
Read it, watch the TV spots (they're only 30 seconds each), and decide for yourself: Do the candidates themselves and the messages they put on the air about each other before elections contribute to a growing sense of pessimism about politics and government. Post your answers as comments to this post. This will count in lieu of F2F class attendance for tomorrow Wednesday, Oct. 27.
Here, in case the story is taken down before you can comment on it in class, is the Yahoo! story on the Yahoo!-CBS poll:
Poll: What's wrong with Washington? It's the people in charge, not the system
Mon Oct 25, 6:25 pm ET By JANE SASSEEN Yahoo! News
As if incumbents didn't already have enough to worry about, add one more thing to the list.
Optimism about the American system of government is at a 36-year low, yet most Americans blame the people in office — not the system itself — for all that's going wrong, according to a new ABC News/Yahoo! News poll.
That means bad news ahead for incumbents on Election Day — particularly those of the Democratic variety. The underlying message of the new poll seems to be that new blood on Capitol Hill is the first step in getting back on track.
"In bad times, people blame those in power: It's got to be your fault — you're in charge," says Larry Sabato, head of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.
There's little doubt that Americans, frustrated by the economy's woes, are plenty worried about Washington's seeming inability to successfully tackle that or many of the nation's other problems.
Only 33 percent of Americans today say they are optimistic about "our system of government and how well it works," according to the new poll, produced for ABC and Yahoo! News by Langer Research Associates. That's the smallest number in the nearly dozen times the question has been asked over several decades. Back in the summer of 1974 — not long after President Richard Nixon resigned in the wake of Watergate — 55 percent of Americans were optimistic that the system was working.
The numbers today suggest levels of unhappiness not seen since the worst of the Watergate crisis, and "a sense that the political system is broken," says Daniel Clifton, head of policy research for Strategas Research Partners. "Independents in particular think the economy is not working and the system is not working, and that has created a very anti-incumbent environment."
Some of that reaction, of course, is cyclical. It reflects how hard many have been hit by the recession and the growing sense that a robust recovery is still very far away.
"This is a bad economic time for all countries," says Richard Thorpe, a 61-year-old retired retail worker from Cleveland, Ohio, who voted for Obama. "It might take the next four years to get things [that are] this bad to what they should be."
Or, as Sabato puts it, it's hard to feel optimistic when pretty much "everything appears to be going to hell in a hand basket."
"When economic or international conditions are unfavorable, Americans naturally reflect that in their view of the system and the future," he adds. "But [those views] will inevitably change once the economy gets better, we get hold of the national debt, and we show we can accomplish some important things."
But the numbers also appear to reflect deeper levels of worry about the position of the country and how well the political system is equipped to handle the challenges America now faces.
According to the poll, it's not just that optimism is declining. A far greater sense of doubt about the system also pervades much of the country. Some 46 percent of Americans say they are uncertain about how well the system is working today, well above the roughly 27 percent who reported feeling uncertain in 1974 and many other years in between.
"We live in an uncertain time, and people are responding to that," says Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic political consultant. "As the glory of the World War II era fades, we are becoming a very different country. The economic base is entirely different; we are no longer the food basket or the industrial motor for the world. Instead, we're an overextended debtor nation, and people know that."
None of that should bring any comfort to incumbents this year, especially those in the Democratic camp. Whether Americans are reacting to the short-term economic cycle or to the broader, longer-term problems, they are clear on where fault lies: with the political class running the show.
When those who are pessimistic or uncertain were asked whether they believe the problem is the system itself or the people who are running it, a 3-to-1 majority said the people in charge. Some 74 percent said the people running the government are at fault, versus just 24 percent who placed blame on the system itself.
One commonly cited reason: Professional politicians spend too much time looking out for their own interests; they no longer work for the interests of those who sent them to Washington.
"The underlying system is OK; [the problem] is the people who represent us. They forgot they represent us," says Dale Goodno, a 67-year-old semi-retired truck driver from Beaverton, Oregon, who voted for John McCain in 2008. "I think that if you took maybe 10 people from each state who are not professional politicians and if they ran their government like they run their own business or family budget, then the country might make a comeback and might be the great nation it used to be."
It's also the case that, even when the country's problems are at their worst, many Americans remain idealistic and believe in the efficacy of the system; to question it, argues Sheinkopf, feels almost unpatriotic. So when problems arise, "There needs to be a culpable party ... to find a scapegoat," he says. "That means the politicians."
Most voters also recognize that there's little that can be done short-term to change the system. Moreover, points out Frank Donatelli, who was the deputy chairman of the Republican National Committee during the 2008 presidential campaign, the country has rebounded energetically from previous periods, like the early 1980s, when deep economic problems also led to widespread doubts about whether the political system still worked.
Your assignment in lieu of today's class (posted a little before 9 p.m. in Anchorage, where it's three hours behind Springfield and therefore still Monday) goes behind a story we all know - how the Internet was developed by geeks and techies, and how it evolved into something so far-reaching it affects almost everything we do - certainly everything we do in mass communication. It's designed to get looking a little deeper into the history and get you thinking about it. Here are some questions for you to:
Answer the purely factual questions, as comments to this blog post.
Think about the questions that call for your opinion, and
Answer them, too, as comments to this post.
Remember: This online discussion takes the place of our class session today. So I'll be taking names and kicking ... well, I hope you'll all take part in the discussion, and I won't have to do any kicking. If you get my drift ...
Here are the questions:
What was the first message transmitted on the system we now know as the Internet? Why was it so short?
Who developed the Internet and what purposes did they use it for? Who owns the Internet now? How has it changed?
Why has Finland declared Internet access a legal right for its citizens? Do you think it should be in the U.S.? Why (or why not)?
HINT: You'll find some of this in John Vivian. You'll find some of it in an Oct. 29, 2009, National Geographic story by Ker Than titled "Internet Turns 40 Today: First Message Crashed System" and you'll find some of it on your own.
You don't have to be into Irish music to appreciate Cara Dillon's career (altho' it probably helps)! Or the way she uses the Internet to market her music downloads and CDs to a niche market scattered worldwide. And you don't have to be Irish to consider her an example of the trends you're researching for our first documented essay ... if you get my drift. I was tracking down one of the songs she sings, Googled into her website and was really struck by what Dillon's official biography says about her dealings with Warner Music Group(one of the majors, as I'm sure you remember from Vivian's gripping narrative on sound recordings) and the indie labels she's recorded with since she left Warner 10 years ago.
Dillon and husband Sam Lakeman, who backs her on acoustic guitar and produces her records, have this to say about the time they spent with Warner during the 1990s:
... although they look back on that period as an essential step towards affirming their strong musical tastes and developing their songwriting craft, it was full of frustration and the constant pressure from the label to have commercial success. ... But by 2000 they had parted company with Warners without releasing a single track and in stark contrast to their recent recordings with the label began working on an album of mostly traditional material which they quietly released on an unsuspecting audience via Rough Trade Records.
Their contract with Rough Trade, an indie label, lasted until 2008 and gave them more creative control. During those years Dillon's career took off. She has won awards including the Irish Meteor Award for Best Female Singer, and her concert tours have taken her to the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, China, South Korea and Singapore.
None of which would matter to you guys, except for this: I got that information off of Cara Dillon's website. I wouldn't know about her if I hadn't seen her performances on YouTube, which I found when I was doing keyword searches for a couple of songs I wanted to learn. You can learn something about international niche marketing by surfing around her website and her MySpace page (click on "Store" and see what's there, for example, altho' you don't have to buy anything)! See if you think the Internet has changed the way [Cara Dillon and her husband] reach their audiences in an era of 24/7 communication and niche marketing? Ask yourself: How does the "long tail” fit into the picture? Where would Dillon's blend of Irish traditional music and acoustic guitar fit on the cute little long tail frequency distribution graph with the dinosaur that we looked at in class? Up toward the head? Out on the tail? How far out? Do you get my drift?
No F2F meetings in D220 on Oct. 25, 27, 29 … read Chapter 10 (the Internet) in John Vivian, “Media of Mass Communication.” Blogging assignments will be posted on line at
About how small business or niche publications can use the "long tail" to survive in a world of 24/7 mass communication ... if you get my drift (and remember what the red print means on our blog, in this case hints about your paper due Monday, Nov. 1). Capice?
Online marketing consultant Ken McEvoy of SiteSell.com summarizes the "long tail" theory in the introduction to an interview with Chris Anderson. Here's what McEvoy says it means for small business:
... The Internet is transforming from a mass-market, blockbuster culture into a world of infinite niches. Those blockbusters and hits, and all the major brands that we all know so well, live in the head of the curve, a relatively small number of high sales volume products.
Beyond this Industrial Revolution created world, countless niches form an ever growing long tail distribution...so called because the tail is infinitely long compared to the head. The future lies, for us, the small business person, in the long tail of niche markets. Market opportunities abound, and will be growing, in fact, for those who understand and use what Mr. Anderson describes as the "three driving forces of the long tail" [which are: (1) widely available software for creating content; (2) "aggragators" like iTunes that list a lot of different niche products; and (3) "filters" like Google that send customers to niche websites].
A lot of their conversation is technicall, about things like SEO (search engine optimization) strategies to increase the number of hits in Google, but Anderson explains how he thinks small business can thrive in the middle ranges of the frequency distribution curve. That's where consumer interest is focused on a narrow interest, but the Internet can bring customers together worldwide. Examples would be my interest in the dulcimer or Irish traditional music. Anderson's is Japanese wood-cut prints:
I think one of the biggest opportunities is the niche-to-mega-niche, which is to, rather than going broad...rather than trying to be everything to everybody, to find a very focused area that is not fully mined by others, and to be the master of that niche. To take it as far as it goes, recognizing that it wouldn't make sense in a single geography, if your niche was, say... Japanese wood cuts. There's probably, outside of Manhattan, there's probably no single geographic area in the United States where there would be a market big enough to be the world expert on Japanese wood cuts. But if you're tapping a global market, because you have the Web presence as well, then there really is a market for the consummate English language expert in Japanese wood cuts.
That is the perfect example of a niche that's neither too big to be differentiated nor too small to be commercially interesting. And there are thousands or millions of those. The reason I say it's not just an opportunity for small businesses is that, in many ways, it's what big businesses need to do when they go online as well.
According to our syllabus for Communications 150, " Each student will write ... two documented essays (at least 1,000 words of five to eight pages each) reflecting on topics to be assigned by the instructor. The first one is due Monday, Nov. 1 (I had the date wrong in class Friday). Here's the first topic:
How has the Internet changed the way existing mass communications media reach their audiences in an era of 24/7 communication and niche marketing? How does the "long tail” fit into the picture? What opportunities - if any - do you think this might open for you if you plan a career in mass communications?
The paper is documented. In my classes, that means sources of information in all of your writing must be attributed or documented according to an academic system like MLA or APA. Key concept: If you write down anything you didn’t know before, say where you found it! Failure to do so, even unintentional, is plagiarism. In our field, it may also be copyright infringement.
Do not write just to fill up space. Create clear, concise, accurate, and relevant thoughts. And convey them to readers in a well-written, grammatical, engaging fashion. If you are majoring in communications, consider yourself a professional writer already. If you're not a major ... consider yourself a professional writer already, too, and consider changing majors to comm arts while you're at it!
Posted to video screen in class today, the question for your 5- to 8-page documented essay:
How has the Internet changed the way existing mass communications media reach their audiences in an era of 24/7 communication and niche marketing? How does the "long tail” fit into the picture?
Chris Anderson, executive editor of WIRED magazine, started it with an Here's the article, in Wired magazine in 2004 called "The Long Tail" ... catchy title, huh?:
Some highlights. The long tail, says Anderson, is:
... not just a virtue of online booksellers; it is an example of an entirely new economic model for the media and entertainment industries, one that is just beginning to show its power. 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.
For too long we've been suffering the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop. Why? Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching - a market response to inefficient distribution.
More on the long tail ...
A sales pitch on the SiteSell.com website, which produces website-building software for small businesses, summarizes Anderson's theory in a sales pitch for its services. Note: I'm not endorsing the product. I just think the summary is useful.
Matt Bailey, the founder of a Web marketing consulting company, discusses in his Search Engine Guide blog how keyword strategies bring customers - and potential sales - to a small business website ... and links to an awesome frequency distribution graph that illustrates the long tail.
Tony Hopfinger, editor of an online journal called The Alaska Dispatch, was trying to interview Joe Miller, Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, after a campaign event at a public school in Anchorage. He followed Miller out of the campaign event - a "town hall" meeting - into a hallway, asking Miller about he was disciplined for using city property for political campaigning in Fairbanks (which is a violation of law). Miller didn't answer, and Hopfinger kept asking for comment. Which is pretty standard. If they don't want to talk to you, you ask them why, and you keep asking ... and anything they say you can report. Anyway, the security guys shoved Hopfinger into a locker and then "arrested" him and put him in handcuffs. They said they'd call Anchorage PD, and Hopfinger said go ahead, good idea. A video shows a reporter for The Anchorage Daily News interviewing Hopfinger before more of the goons came back. There were a couple of other media there, too, including another reporter for the Alaska Dispatch. You'll hear the reporter, Jill Burke, asking a guard to take hands off her. Her report is report linked here. And the video by ADN reporter Richard Mauer is here:
Here's what the ADN's political blog says about the video:
Here's video shot yesterday (Sunday) by ADN reporter Richard Mauer after Alaska Dispatch editor Tony Hopfinger was handcuffed and detained by security guards working for Senate candidate Joe Miller at a campaign event yesterday. The video starts after Hopfinger was placed in handcuffs and before Anchorage police arrived (Mauer interviewed him for several minutes before starting the video). The voice in the video is Mauer.
In order to check out the demographic profiles that Claritas Corp. of San Diego puts up on the Web, I looked up zip code for Clinton, Tenn., the nearest town to the community where I grew up and the county seat of my home county. (My actual home town is apparently too small to have a Claritas profile!) Here it is in all its glory. Note the empty parking lot in foreground.
Clinton, Tenn. Photo Brian Stansberry, Wikipedia Commons
Clinton is located about 20 miles north of Knoxville, on the far edges of a Sun Belt metro area of 750,000 population. It used to be a mill town (in the picture above, you can see the water tower from a textille mill that was the town's major employer from 1906 until 1967 when it went out of business). The local economy is now diversified, although the western part of the county is in the Appalachian coalfields. Clinton is an easy commute to Knoxville, via Interstate 75, and a U.S. Department of Energy lab at nearby Oak Ridge. So it has become a bedroom community for both cities. According to Clinton's Wikipedia profile, Clinton's population in the 2000 census was 9,409, and its median household income was $32,120 -- less than the national median of $41,994, but not very much below the Tennessee state median of $36,360.
Clinton's population is 95.5 percent white and 2.7 percent African American, compared to 80 percent white and 16 percent black in Tennessee. Median age is 39 years (compared to 39.5 years for Tennessee and 35.3 years nationally. Clinton's post office serves three rural routes, taking in a good chunk of rural Anderson County including the parts closest to Knoxville and Oak Ridge, Interstate 75. It is mostly ridge-and-valley country. Farms are small, and their owners typically rely on off-farm income from working in Knoxville. Every I go back there to visit, I see new subdivisions and mobile parks where pastures and cornfields used to be.
So you'd expect a mixture of rural, small-town and blue-collar suburban lifestyles to be reflected in Clinton's demographics. That is exactly what Claritas Corp. finds. It got there by entering Clinton's zip code (37716) in the Zip Code Look-up. Claritas' types, or market segments, for Clinton are are:
Crossroads Villagers. "... a classic rural lifestyle. Residents are high school-educated, with downscale incomes and modest housing; one-quarter live in mobile homes. And there's an air of self-reliance in these households as Crossroads Villagers help put food on the table through fishing, gardening, and hunting."
Heartlanders. "This widespread segment consists of older couples with white-collar jobs living in sturdy, unpretentious homes [small middle-class towns]. In these communities of small families and empty-nesting couples, Heartlanders residents pursue a rustic lifestyle where hunting and fishing remain prime leisure activities along with cooking, sewing, camping, and boating."
Old Milltowns. "Today, the majority of residents are retired singles and couples, living on downscale incomes in pre-1960 homes and apartments. For leisure, they enjoy gardening, sewing, socializing at veterans clubs, or eating out at casual restaurants."
Red, White & Blues. "... typically live in exurban towns rapidly morphing into bedroom suburbs. Their streets feature new fast-food restaurants, and locals have recently celebrated the arrival of chains like Wal-Mart, Radio Shack, and Payless Shoes. Middle-aged, high school educated, and lower-middle class, these folks tend to have solid, blue-collar jobs in manufacturing, milling, and construction."
Young & Rustic "... is composed of middle age, restless singles. These folks tend to be lower-middle-income, high school-educated, and live in tiny apartments in the nation's exurban towns. With their service industry jobs and modest incomes, these folks still try to fashion fast-paced lifestyles centered on sports, cars, and dating."
For a bunch of market research people out of California, I'd say Claritas did a pretty good job of profiling a rural community between the coalfields and the suburban sprawl of a major metro area in the East Tennessee hills.
For businesses of all kinds, detailed information about potential customers is pure gold. Why send direct mail to households not likely to buy certain products or services? Why advertise in newspapers that go to thousands of households when the goal is to reach only families that have kids under 12? Why should a Lexus dealership blanket thousands of households in a ZIP code with fliers if only a hundred are likely to buy luxury cars?
"What retailers are doing now is microretailing their stores specifically to the demographics," says Patrick Dunne, marketing and retailing professor at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. Retailers use the information to determine what merchandise to put in their stores — a rural Wal-Mart, for example, may have more shovels in its aisles than a suburban Wal-Mart.
What would you expect to see in the aisles in Springfield? Then go on the PRIZM zip code lookup page – compare the Zip codes in Springfield in terms of income, diversity, age, and other demographics
And any other Zip code you want to look up. Just get a feel for the categories. Your assignment: Look up your own zip code. (I'll post an example, on my home town in East Tennessee.) Read the profiles. Do they reflect reality as you know it? Post your findings as comments to this blog post.
Read story about AP style and explain what it has to do with convergence... post your answer as a comment to this blog post. (The headnote says "extra credit," by the way, but the red letters mean something else. Remember?) How does this relate to that important trend?
I'll be very interested, by the way, to see who posts and who doesn't.
One of the four 1,000-word analyses assigned in the COMM 337 syllabus (scroll down to section VI ("Course Requirements"), Section C ("Written Assignments") is a public affairs reporting piece. And there's a really good piece in The New York Times on the mortgage foreclosure case that started the current home mortgage embargo. It's by David Streitfeld, and it's headlined "From a Maine House, a National Foreclosure Freeze."
Please read it, and post your analysis to your blog next week. As you read it, ask yourself the following questions:
Who did Streitfeld talk to in order to get the story? What details by direct observation did he get on the scene? (b) What details did he get by reading? How many written sources - e.g. court files, books and/or magazines, websites, etc. - did he consult? How long would you guess it took him to get all these details in the story? Was it worth his time? What do the details add to the story?
What did he do to get both sides of the story? Was he successful? Are you satisfied with his explanation why he wasn't? [Oops, I just gave it away!] Does the story seem objective to you?
As you read the story, also be thinking about Donald Murry's "little green book that won't go away" and be sure to discuss these points in your analysis of Streitfeld's story:
What does Murray mean by "craft?" What do you mean by it? How does "craft" differ from "art?"
What the @#$%!& does that have to do with writing? What does it have to do with reporting?
What is the relationship between the craft of reporting and of writing? To Murray? To you?
Post your analysis to the blog, and email me at peterellertsen-at[spelled out this way here to discourage spammers]-yahoo.com when you do.
Cross-posted to my blogs Hogfiddle and The Mackerel Wrapper for COMM 150 students ...
The band is an instrumental rock group called The Redneck Manifesto, that plays live venues around Dublin and does very well - artistically and apparently financially, too - without a major record label. DIY albums are do-it-yourself CDs that you record and produce yourself. And the long tail is "a retailing concept describing the niche strategy of selling a large number of unique items in relatively small quantities." We'll meet the concept again as we study the Internet, which makes "long-tail" retailing a powerful strategy, and it will be one of the most important concepts we deal with in the last month before final exams.
(If you get my drift ...)
But first, a video from Redneck Manifesto:
I'd never heard of the band before, but they were mentioned in a story in The Irish Times today headlined "Golden age of Irish music" ... which would be now, even though the big labels just lost a downloading case in Ireland's equivalent of the Supreme Court. "The big guns may be cribbing about illegal downloads and declining sales," said Jim Carroll of the Times, "but in fact this is a golden age of Irish music." Read why, and ask yourself if the same things are going on in America. (Hint: They are, and you may have the opportunity to write about them later in the semester. You may even be able to work them into your midterm if you're alert enough to get my drift. Just sayin'.) Carroll says:
Contrary to the image that the majors presented in court, the domestic music industry is robust and vibrant. Much of this is occurring away from the gaze and control of the major labels and the record industry’s permanent establishment. You could say we’re seeing something of a golden age as new bands and releases come to the fore like never before. ...
* * *
Another reason to be cheerful: the number of new Irish releases is on the increase and the quality is far better than it has ever been. You could easily rattle off a list of home-grown albums from 2010 that more than hold their own with anything released elsewhere.
Carroll compares the scene today to 10 years ago, when "... there was an underground scene in Dublin in particular, with bands like The Redneck Manifesto beginning to take their first steps," but "it was still considered a novelty if a band took the DIY route to record, manufacture and distribute their EPs or albums. ... Most acts were still holding out for that elusive major label deal." Now Redneck Manifesto has been joined on the DIY route by numerous other bands in Dublin, Cork and Ireland's smaller cities. I haven't heard of any of them, but I hadn't heard of Redneck Manifesto either till I read about them in today's Irish Times.
But that's the point. These little bands are doing quite well without the international fan base that comes along with signing with the major labels. And they're more likely to have artistic control over their content. I'd say the production values in their video are pretty good.
And I'd suggest the long tail is what allows these bands to be reasonably successful playing live shows, burning their own albums and using the Internet to build their fan base. You don't have to go platinum to make a living.
Carroll lists "five changes for the better [for artists] in 10 years." How many of them apply in America as well as Ireland? How many relate to the main themes we're studying in COMM 150? Here they are:
1 The DIY ethic Recording and releasing your own album has never been easier. Why wait for a label to put out your masterpiece when you can do it yourself?
2 The gigging infrastructure Supportive venues in Galway (Roisin Dubh), Cork (Pavilion, Cyprus Avenue), Limerick (Dolan’s), Dundalk (Spirit Store), Kilkenny (Set Theatre) and Dublin (everywhere from Whelan’s to the Workman’s Club) mean bands can plan, book and promote national tours.
3 Alternative media Music blogs, online forums and radio shows on local stations dedicated to Irish music (take a bow Cathal Funge at Dublin’s Phantom FM, Colm O’Sullivan at Cork’s Red FM and Rob O’Connor at Waterford’s Beat FM) mean acts don’t have to rely on Ireland’s traditional music media for coverage.
4 Quality control A huge increase in quality means there’s no need for token gestures for Irish music any more. Talk about radio quotas for Irish music misses the point when acts like Cathy Davey, Republic Of Loose and Bell X1 are among the most played records on the radio. Are those seeking radio quotas doing so because their acts don’t get radio play?
5 The internet The internet means equal opportunities for all when it comes to showing off your wares. Yes, the major-label act may have a bigger marketing budget, but Soundcloud, Bandcamp and MySpace welcome everyone, regardless of how much they have to spend or where they’re coming from.
The "You Are Where You Live" feature of Nielsen Claritas' service for advertisers at http://www.claritas.com/MyBestSegments/Default.jsp?ID=20 will give you an idea how marketers can slice and dice the census data and come up with demographic profiles. Use caution as you read: Nielsen has been in the business a long time (they're the people who do the "Nielsen ratings" for network TV), but they're not the only game in town. Nor are they necessarily the best - or the worst. So my linking to their website is not an endorsement of a specific business in a competitive field. It is, rather, intended as an example of what's out there.
Copied from my faculty webpage ... after the following message, which was sent to my COMM 337 students Thursday, October 14, 2010 12:07 PM ...
Hi guys -
I've posted the first email message I sent you to The Mackerel Wrapper, but when I tried the links the one to the story ideas tip sheet on my faculty page didn't work. I don't want the link to get broken with the transition to the new BenU website, so I copied the tip sheet to TMW. Here's the new link:
By the way, did'ya notice how much I want you to have all the information you need to get started RIGHT NOW on the story? And how seriously I'm taking this?
Are you getting my drift?
In any event, please let me hear from you ASAPest.
- Doc
The tip sheet follows:
Profiles --
A guide for freshman English (and journalism) students
Taking notes for a profile. Photo: NASA
In basic newswriting (Communications 209), you will be writing stories all the time. In freshman English, you will be asked to write at least one descriptive essay. For 10 years, students at SCI labored through the fourth chapter of the St. Martin's Guide to Writing, which was about how to write something the authors of the text called a "profile" (some of us suspected it was just a fancy name for a human interest story or newspaper Sunday story). Now we have gone to another text for English 111, but I still assign students to use the techniques of profile writing. Don't get hung up on what to call it. Descriptive essay, profile, feature story, whatever -- good writing is good writing, and it's full of vivid detail. Even if you have no intention of going into journalism, you can profit from it.
"Whatever their subjects or whatever information may be available to them, profile writers strive first and foremost to present a person, a place, or an activity vividly to their readers," said the St. Martin's Guide. "They succeed only by presenting many concrete details that will enable readers to imagine the scene and the people. Most important, writers orchestrate the details carefully to convey an attitude toward their subjects and to offer an interpretation of them" (109). That attitude or interpretation is often known as a dominant impression. It serves the same purpose as a thesis statement, because it ties the essay together around a central idea. It makes one main point.
So how do you do a profile? You observe the thing -- or person, place or event -- you're writing about. Rise Axenrod and Charles Cooper, authors of the St. Martin's Guide, put it like this: "In writing a profile, you practice the field research methods of observing, interviewing, and notetaking commonly used by investigative reporters, social scientists, and naturalists. You also learn to analyze and synthesize the information you have collected."
Finding a lively topic (story idea)
What makes a good topic? Anything that interests you will probably interest your readers. Here are a few suggestions culled from the St. Martin's Guide (133-36). It's available only in a dead-tree (paper) format, but you can find it in SCI's Becker Library if you want to see more suggestions. The call number is 808042 A969 1997:
People. Anyone with an unusual or intriguing or interesting job or hobby -- a private detective, beekeeper, classic-car owner, dog trainer ... campus personality -- ombudsman, coach, distinguished teacher ... [s]omeone whose predicament symbolizes that of other people ... [s]omeone who has made or is currently making an important contribution to a community ... [s]omeone in a community who is generally not liked or respected but tolerated, such as a homeless person, gruff store owner, or unorthodox church member, or someone who has been or is in danger of being shunned or exiled from a community ... college senior or graduate student in a major you are considering ... [s]omeone working in the career you are thinking of pursuing [or] ... trains people to do the kind of work you would like to do.
Places. A weight reduction clinic, tanning salon, gody-building gym, health spa, nail salon ... used-car lot, old movie house, used-book store, antique shop, historic site, hospital emergency room, hospice, birthing center, psychiatric unit ... local diner; the oldest, biggest, or quickest restaurant in town; a coffeehouse ... florist shop, nursery, or greenhouse; pawnshop; boatyard ... facility that provides a needed service in its community, such as a legal advice bureau, child care center, medical clinic, mission or shelter that offers free meals ... [a]n Internet site, such as a chat room, game parlor, or bulletin board where people form a virtual community.
Activities. A citizens' volunteer program -- voter registration, public television auction, meals-on-wheels project, tutoring program ... unconventional sports event -- marathon, Frisbee tournament, chess match ... [f]olk dancing, rollerblading, rock climbing, poetry reading ... [a] team practicing ... community improvement project, such as graffiti cleaning, tree planting, house repairing, church painting, highway litter pickup ... [r]esearchers working together on a project ... [the] actia; [and usually very unglamorous] activities performed by someone doing a kind of work represented on television, like that of a police detective, judge, attorney, newspaper reporter, taxi driver, novelist, or emergency room doctor ... [a]ctivities to prepare for a particular kind of work, for example, a boxer preparing for a fight, an attorney preparing for a trial, a teacher or professor preparing a course, an actor rehearsing a role, a musician practicing for a concert.
Please note (this is important): The above suggestions are intended to get you thinking. They aren't rules. If you want to write about someone, or something that's not on the list, do so. If it interests you, it will interest your reader. If it bores you, it will bore your reader. That's not a rule either, but it works out that way 999 times out of 1,000. [...].
Please also note (and this is just as important), all of these story ideas are about people. Even the ones the St. Martin's Guide classifies lists under places or activities are about people cooperating -- or not! -- in a shared location or purpose. My first editor, who had learned newspapering the hard way working for weekly papers as a teenager in Tennessee, used to bounce my stories back at me when I got too carried away with weighty issues or lush description. "There's no people in it," she'd say. "I can't use this stuff till you put some people in the story." So how do you get people in your writing? Simple. You go out and interview them. Use their exact words. Make 'em come alive in the paper.
Gathering your information
I won't alarm you with the "r" word, but this is really about research. Journalists call it reporting. It's the same thing. "The power of [news] stories lies not just in their evocative use of language, also in the compelling power of facts," says Christopher Scanlan, director of writing programs at the Poynter Institute for journalists. "To gather these facts," he adds, "the reporter should always try to be on the scene ... [b]ut even if the writer can't be present and must reconstruct the action, specific details are needed to bring the story alive in the reader's mind" (423-24). Scanlan's advice for student writers: "Get out on the streets. Don't hang around the campus newsroom or your dorm. Storytellers aren't tied to their desks. They're out in the streets. ... In your reporting use the five senses and a few others: sense of place, sense of people, sense of time, sense of drama. How did it look? ... What sounds echoed? If music is playing, is it the lush strings of a classical piece or the head-banging clang of guitars? Is the wind whistling through the leaves? Are children's cries filling the air? Close your eyes and record in your notebook every sound you hear" (415). Take notes. What do you see? What are people wearing? Is there graffiti chalked on Gingko Square? What does it say? What do you hear (and overhear)? What are people saying? What do you smell? What do you feel? Is it hot? Cold? Get it down. Take notes on everything you might not remember later. That's what notes are for.
"We should all try to make readers see, smell, feel, taste and hear," say Brian Brooks and other journalism professors at the University of Missouri. "One way to do that is to write using scenes as much as possible. To write a scene, you have to be there. You need to capture the signs, the sounds and the smells that are pertinent" (188). Missouri is one of the best journalism schools in the country, and their advice is good: "To create such scenes, you must use all your senses to gather information, and your notevook should reflect that teporting Along with the results of interviews, your notebook should bulge with details of signs and smells, sounds and textures. David Finkel, winner of the American Society of Newspaper Editors Distinuished Writing Award in 1986, says, 'Anything that pertains to any sense I feel at any moment, I write down.' Gather details indiscriminately. Later, you can discard those that are not germane. Because you were there, you can write the scene as if you were writing a play" (189). When I started reporting for newspapers, I was told I needed to know 10 times as much as wrote in the paper. If I didn't know all the facts, I wouldn't know which ones I could leave out.
Here's the Missouri Group again: "Interviewing -- having conversations with sources -- is the key to most stories you will write. ... Information is the raw material of a journalist. While some of it is gathered from records and some from observation, most of it is gathered in person-to-person conversations" (49-50). You probably already have some of the basic note-taking skills you need from taking class notes in school.
A couple of basics from my experience: (1) take down enough key words so you can reconstruct the quote; but (2) don't take down too many. Don't get bogged down. The person you're interviewing might say, "We lived, uh, like, in New Mexico." All you need to take down is, "We lived in New Mexico" -- which might look more like "w lvd N Mex" handwrittten. You'll get in the habit of doing what experienced reporters do: Use abbreviations. Make 'em up on the spot. Write fast. Scribble. Get it down, and fill in the blanks later.
[...]
Works Cited
Axelrod, Rise, and Charles Cooper. The St. Martin's Guide to Writing. 5th Ed. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997.
Brooks, Brian, and the Missouri Group. News Reporting and Writing. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2005.
Scanlan, Christopher. Reporting and Writing: Basics for the 21st Century. Fort Worth: Harcourt College Publishers, 2000.
Click here to return to Pete Ellertsen's faculty page. [rev. Jan. 06]
Emailed today to my students in COMM 337 (advanced journ) ...
Thursday, October 14, 2010 10:07 AM From: Pete Ellertsen To: [names deleted]
Subject line: hi! remember me?
... I'm your instructor in COMM 337, our on-line advanced journalistic writing class, and I'm getting worried. We've still got plenty of time to finish the semester with the style and grace I know you're capable of, but we're past midterms now and time is getting short.
So here's a schedule I want us to follow for the next few days:
1. Please reply to this message ASAPest and set up an appointment with me next week at which we will discuss the topic for your 1,500-word publishable article.
Here's how to get started. Read Chapter 1 in the "Writer's Digest Handbook of Magazine Article Writing." Go to my faculty webpage and read my tipsheet on "Profiles for English 111 (and newswriting) students" (don't be insulted - I got a lot of it from a very good journalism textbook plus my own experience). Link here:
A practical tip - you need to interview at least three people for this story, and interviews take FOREVER to line up, so when you're choosing a topic, start by thinking of who you know that you can interview. I'll post some more thoughts on this to The Mackerel Wrapper. In the meantime, be thinking of people you have access to.
In the meantime (I know, I just said it twice, but we're getting behind and we've got to get caught up), we'd better start churning out our analytical blogs. Let's get started like this ...
2. Here's what the syllabus says: "Students will create a web Log (blog) and write analyses [of] professional writing of 1,000 words each of: (a) a newspaper feature story, (b) a magazine feature, (c) a piece of public affairs reporting and (d) an opinion or op-ed piece on the blog." I've already posted one assignment, a warm-up exercise on a newspaper news-feature story. Here's the link:
Please read the story, answer the questions and post your answers by MIDNIGHT SUNDAY, OCT. 17. No set length. Just get started! In the meantime, I will choose the four stories for the four analyses in the syllabus, email questions to you and post the emails to the blog.
And I'll post copies of the emails to the Mackerel Wrapper, too. You can find posts relating to our class by searching on "COMM 337" in the little internal search engine right after the Blogger logo in the upper left-hand corner of the blog.
As I said above, we still have enough time for all of us to get caught up and do a good job in COMM 337. Good? No, an *excellent* job. But we'd better get started now.
Otherwise, the last day to drop a class is Monday, Oct. 25.
Capice?
Do I make my meaning clear? So let me hear from you ASAPest*.
- Doc
------------ * You probably already know this: "ASAP" means as soon as possible. "ASAPer" is sooner. And "ASAPest" means even sooner than that!
Radio formats, demographics and targeted audiences ...
The New York Radio Guide has a Radio Format Guide that shows the overall diversity of formats in a major metro market. How would these formats appeal to listeners of different demographic segments? See especially the brief "Formats Generally" explanation. RadioStationWorld.com has more detailed descriptions of different formats, along with this definition:
A radio format, or programming format, or programming genre refers to the overall content broadcasting over a radio station. Some stations broadcast multiple genres on set schedule. Over the years, formats have evolved and new ones have been introduced. In today's age of radio, many radio formats are designed to reach a specifically defined segment or niche of the listening population based on such demographic criteria as age, ethnicity, background, etc.
RadioStationWorld's directory of Illinois stations links to Springfield radio stations and webcasters (note they lump Springfield and Decatur together in one market, which in turn is a subset of the Springfield-Decatur-Champaign media market). Before going on to Springfield, notice how Illinois is carved up into different media markets.
Vocabulary from Wednesday ... which is fair game now that I've put it up on the blog:
artistic control - Wikipedia says: "Artistic control or Creative Control is a term commonly used in media production, such as movies, television, and music production. A person with artistic control has the authority to decide how the final product will appear. In movies, this commonly refers to the authority to decide on the final cut. When a production manager/director does not have artistic control, the studio that is producing the project commonly has the final say on production.
A&R - artist and repertory - Wikipedia: "Artists and repertoire (A&R) is the division of a record label that is responsible for talent scouting and overseeing the artistic development of recording artists. It also acts as a liaison between artists and the record label. ... [A&R people] are expected to understand the current tastes of the market and to be able to find artists that will be commercially successful. For this reason, A&R people are often young, well-rounded,[citation needed] and experienced in music culture, and often they are former musicians, music journalists or record producers."
"suit" - as in, any corporate @#$%$$ who wears a suit ...
COMM 150: Introduction to Mass Communications Benedictine University Springfield
[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 2010
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 double-spaced (500 words) on the 50-point essay and at least one 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 primarily interested in the specific factual arguments you make to support your points. So be specific. Remember: An unsupported generalization is sudden death in college-level writing. Due in class Friday, Oct. 22.
1. Main essay (50 points). In what specific ways have magazines tried to keep their share of readers in an era of electronic media domination, niche marketing and specialized publications? How has the magazine industry evolved since the days of mass-market magazines like Life and Collier's? What is CPM, and how has it influenced the magazine industry? What kinds of magazines are most likely to be successful in the 21st century? If you were the publisher of a new magazine, what sort of magazine would you choose to publish? How? Why? If you were an advertiser selling a specific product, what kind of magazine would you choose? Explain what your hypothetical product is and why you would choose the magazine(s) you'd advertise in.
2A. Short essay (25 points). Television comedian Jon Stewart describes the "watchdog role" of the press, i.e. the news media, like this: "...the way I explain it, is when you go to a zoo and a monkey throws feces, it's a monkey. But when the zookeeper is standing right there and he doesn't say, 'Bad monkey' — somebody's gotta be the zookeeper." But he says he thinks newspapers and TV have abdicated that responsibility. Others wouldn't agree, but the question is at least debatable. Do you think the pressures of the marketplace in an era of 24/7 celebrity news and entertainment make it more difficult for the media to meet their responsbility as watchdogs - or zookeepers - and still attract audiences? If so, how? If not, why not? Be specific. If you were a newspaper editor, how would you meet the challenge?
2B. 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 at http://www1.ben.edu/springfield/faculty/ellertsen/reflect.html. 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.
Content advisory: Language quoted in some of the links below may be offensive to some readers.
What's wrong with newspapers these days? New York Times media critic David Carr's story on a pre-pubescent corporate culture at The Chicago Tribune details a lot of what's going wrong at the Trib. But it also, in my opinion, shows something that's going wrong with the Times.
Carr's story came out Wednesday, and it created quite a stir among people who regularly follow the Tribune Co., which owns not only the Trib but also The Los Angeles Times and other media properties. It was acquired by real estate wheeler-dealer Sam Zell in 2007 and went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy about a year later.
Carr mentions that, but he focuses more on changes that Zell's new CEO, Randy Michaels, brought to the Trib's corporate culture.
... Based on interviews with more than 20 employees and former employees of Tribune, Mr. Michaels’s and his executives’ use of sexual innuendo, poisonous workplace banter and profane invective shocked and offended people throughout the company. Tribune Tower, the architectural symbol of the staid company, came to resemble a frat house, complete with poker parties, juke boxes and pervasive sex talk.
A lot of it is shocking, at least if you consider the antics of middle-aged men acting like 13-year-old boys shocking, and some of it goes deeper into Zell's questionable dealings with former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, as Illinois state government blogger Rich Miller pointed out. But it's heavily based on anonymous sources, and I'm going to take a wait-and-see attitude until - unless would be a better word here - others from the Trib come forward to corroborate more of it. The bits about Blagojevich were on the record, by the way, and they came from a former editor who now does community relations for the University of Chicago (Michelle Obama's old job), so they're good as gold. And they're substantive. On some of the rest of it, however, I think national political blogger Mickey Kaus of Newsweek nails it:
Here's $100. Show Us Your Hits! I wish the NYT's David Carr, in his long-awaited takedown of Sam Zell's managment of the Tribune media company, had spent more time documenting the business missteps of Tribune executives and less time detailing their piggish frat boy shenanigans. ... I'm not saying Zell's Tribune execs, who come largely from radio, are good execs. I hear they're not, at least when it comes to newspapers. I'm saying Carr didn't show what was wrong with them—because he was distracted by exactly the sort of prurient sex-over-substance fixation L.A. Times twits traditionally worry about (but in this case have embraced) . . . [elipses in the original]
So ... the story does show what's going on at the Trib. At least in its main outlines, altho' some of the giggly who-did-what-to-whom stuff lacks corroboration. But in my judgment, it also shows the New York Times emphasizing fluff over substance.
Other reaction:
Phil Rosentha's media blog post in the Trib is an interesting document, both for what it says and what it doesn't say. Headline: "Tribune Co. CEO Michaels: 'Ignore the noise' of NY Times story." That sums up the tone of the thing. Good links (altho' none, for some reason, to The Chicago Sun-Times).
Another good set of links is put up by Los Angeles media blogger Kevin Roderick, who noted - accurately - Carr's is "the kind of story that gets media types across the country tweeting late into the night" but added little else.
A pretty informative post by Whet Moser in The Chicago Reader, an alternative newspaper that keeps a close eye on The Trib and The Chicago Sun-Times, that suggests "its value is more gathering what's already known (aside from a handful of seamy new accusations) and laying it out as an indictment. Anyone who's been following the saga will be unsurprised ..."
Another post in The Reader, this one by Michael Miner, with CEO Michaels' statement and this nugget, which leads the item: "UPDATE: Most updates go at the bottom of posts. I'm putting this one at the top because I don't want anyone to miss it. Down below there's mention of a 'consensual sexual act' on a balcony of Tribune Tower. The rumor of this act circulated widely within the building. I just spoke with someone in the Tower, an old hand, who's a friend of the rumored fellationista. She 'categorically' denied it happened, and her friend, who's no fool, believes her. OK, that's for what it's worth."
Michaels' statement was carried without comment, balanced by summaries of the New York Times story, in Crain's Chicago Business and Radio Ink, a trade mag that covers radio. Michaels' background is in radio.
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.
