COMM 150: Last day of classes

Some last points about our subject matter in COMM 150, and a couple of housekeeping matters relating to the final exam, grades, etc.

1. Some information on copyright is posted below. Click here to open a new window, or just scroll dow to the next item. Bottom line: You don't have to worry about copyright for school, since you're covered by the "fair use" exemption for educational purposes. But if you publish anything away from school, including on your own blog, you have to be careful. My quick-and-dirty post tells you how to be careful.
   
2. Your final exam is posted below. Click here if you want to see it in a new window, or just scroll down a couple of posts.
   
If you have a solid A in the class, you don't have to take the final. See me after class. If I don't have all your papers, see me after class. If you're not sure what's going on and don't know where you fit in, see me after class.

3. I like to close my classes with a YouTube video (which of course I'm using under the "fair use" copyright exemption for educational purposes, right)? This semester's is embedded below.

"Hallelujah Chorus," Christmas Food Court Flash Mob

Earlier this semester we watched a "flash mob" organized by the Copenhagen Philharmonic in Denmark. This flash mob, in a shopping center food court in Canada, was also superbly organized, choreographed and recorded by Alphabet Photography of Niagra Falls, Ontario. To read more about the agency, link here to their About Us page. Cooperating were Robert Cooper and Chorus Niagara, The Welland Seaway Mall and Fagan Media Group. According to its website (which features a picture from the flash mob, "Fagan Media Group integrates the strengths of like-minded associates who believe in quality production values and captivating content, offering a one-stop portal for all media services including, broadcast, corporate, website, social media and software design." They certainly demonstrate quality production values in the food court video project.



Some of you may also consider the message of the song appropriate to the end of the semester.

COMM 150: A quick-and-dirty guide to copyright law for journalism students

It pays to know something about copyright.

For example, country singer Willie Nelson sold his rights to a song called "Family Bible" for $50 when he was just starting out in Nashville. He needed the money right away. But over the long run, he got screwed blue. Don't laugh. The song has been worth millions in royalties over the years.

But not for Willie Nelson.

Let's give it a working definition: "Copyright" boils down to this, it's the right to make a copy of something you created. Most of the stuff that most of us write - that would include me, by the way - isn't worth enough money to copyright. Sad, but true. Worrying too much about copyright, e.g. registering your rhymed verse about Aunt Gertrude that begins "Roses are red, violets are blue / Aunt Gertrude rocks, / Through and through" with the U.S. government can be interpreted as the sign of an amateur.

For an unusually clear introduction to the whole copyright schmear, go to the Washington State University copyright page at http://publishing.wsu.edu/copyright/ ...

Some points for writers (that would be us), distilled from Washington State and elsewhere:a

• You don't have to register a work with the Library of Congress anymore. You just publish it. "Publish," by the way, means something different in copyright law than it does in libel law. In this case, it is "the distribution of copies or phonorecords of a work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending. " Job tip: Little inconsistencies like that make work for lawyers!
  
• It's still a good idea to register with the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress. Its Web site at http://www.copyright.gov/ tells how.
  
• Books should be registered with a company called Bowker, which issues them an International Standard Book Number (ISBN) and gets them listed in an authoritative catalog of "Books In Print" available at most libraries (including Becker) and on line.
  
• When you sell an article to a magazine, they buy the right to copy it unless you specifically negotiate secondary rights. If you write something on the job, the law assumes you assign all rights to your employer unless you negotiate a more favorable arrangement. That arrangement is called "work for hire," and it's what most professionals are bound by.

Some points for users of copyrighted material. Copyright infringement, unlike plagiarism, is a violation of the law. It is similar to plagiarism in that it consists of the use of another person's intellectual property without permission. It is different in that you can be sued if you violate copyright. [Also see the footnote about fair use and plagiarism below.] The practices you learned in school about avoiding plagiarism, however, will help you avoid infringement. Giving credit, not quoting too much, etc. Here are some things I learned on the job:

• Be very, very careful with the words to songs. Best bet: Always seek permission to quote song lyrics, and never quote more than two or three lines. stuff. Musicians and recording companies are most vigilant about protecting their copyright because the words to a hit song, obviously (think about it), have value.
  
• If you're publishing to the Internet, for example blogging, be very careful. (Are you beginning to see a pattern here?) You can link to other pages without permission, but if you want to copy their stuff, email them and obtain permission first.
  
• Seek permission for anything you use. See the pattern?
  
• Some stuff is copyright free. Examples: U.S. government documents (but not necessarily state government, so be careful). An interesting development in Web publishing is Creative Commons licensing. It's not really mainstream yet, but it's especially useful for bloggers. There's a post on how I use Creative Commons on the Mackerel Wrapper for March 31, 2009.

Two big exceptions for journalism students fall under the legal doctrine of fair use (which is not the same as fair comment in libel law). Fair use, according to Wikipedia, "... allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, such as use for scholarship or review." And covering the news.

So if you're writing a review of a published work for publication, you can quote from it under the doctrine of fair use. (You can say mean and nasty things about it under the doctrine of fair comment, but that's another issue.) Practically everything you write for class falls under fair use, because it's considered scholarship. But if you publish your old term paper, you have to secure permission for extended quotation, pictures and other intellectual property.

Footnote on plagiarism. Quoted from Wikipedia's discussion of fair use: "While plagiarism and copyright violation are related matters—-both can, at times, involve failure to properly credit sources—-they are not identical. Copyright law protects exact expression, not ideas: for example, a distant paraphrase that lays out the same argument as a copyrighted essay is in little danger of being deemed a copyright violation, but it could still be plagiarism. On the other hand, one can plagiarize even a work that is not protected by copyright, such as trying to pass off a line from Shakespeare as one's own. Plagiarism—using someone's words, ideas, images, etc. without acknowledgment—is a matter of professional ethics. Copyright is a matter of law. Citing sources generally prevents accusations of plagiarism, but is not a sufficient defense against copyright violations (otherwise, anyone could legally reprint an entire copyrighted book just by citing who wrote it)."

COMM 150 - final exam

Communications 150: Intro to Mass Comm.
Benedictine University at Springfield
Instructor: Pete Ellertsen eellertsen@ben.edu

Final Exam, Fall Semester 2011

Below are one 50-point essay question and two 25-point short essay questions. Please write at least four pages (1,000 words) on the 50-point essay and two pages (500 words) on each of the 25-point essays. Due at the regularly scheduled time for our exam, 10:30 a.m., Friday, Dec. 16.

Question 1 (50-points). In "Media of Mass Communication," John Vivian says since the 1980s, "sophisticated low-cost recording and mixing equipment gave garage bands a means to control their art" because they were less dependent on studios (119-20). "The result," Vivian says, "was liberation for creativity." Since Johannes Gutenberg's printing press, new technologies have given writers, artists and other creators of content new ways to get around the "gatekeepers" and get taheir art and information to the public. How have technological changes in radio, television and the internet given content creators more direct ways of reaching their audiences? Cite specific examples. Remember: An unsupported generalization is sudden death in college writing. Be specific!

Question 2A (25 points). Self-reflective essay: What do you consider the most important thing you have you learned in COMM 150 that you didn’t know before? Why do you say it is the most important? Be specific in your discussion of how it might fit into your career decisions, or your plans for further study (whether you plan to major in communication arts, another field or are undecided). Consider it in the context of what you knew at the beginning of the course and what you know now. In grading this essay, I will evaluate the relevance of your discussion to the main goals and objectives of the course; the specific detail you cite to support or illustrate your points; and the specific connections you make.

Question 2B (25 points). How does John Vivian define the marketplace of ideas? How does the concept play out in the interpretation of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and in the ethics and day-to-day practice of professionals in the Society of Professional Journalists and the Public Relations Society of America? How is it reflected in the philosophy behind an "multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia project based on an openly editable model" like Wikipedia? Cite specific examples from Vivian, from the codes of ethics and from your own reading. Be specific.

COMM 337: Before we ride off into the sunset ...

Odds and ends for the last day of class ...

1. Your final exam is posted below. If you have questions about it, or anything else, please don't hesitate to contact me by email. My Yahoo! account is best, peterellertsen - at - yahoo.com (please note spelling of last name or copy and paste it from here).
   
2. I've posted some information to the blog about COMM 353, an advanced seminar I'll be offering in the spring. I believe it's required for Writing and Publishing program students and an elective for Comm Arts. It's also about magazines, geared more to editing and production.
   
3. Links at the end of this post to a couple of articles about the European economic crisis we've been reading about this semester. As usual, you're encouraged to take them with a grain of salt. But the crisis isn't going away now the semester's over.
   
4. My favorite political blog, Capitol Fax at target="_blank">http://capitolfax.com/, often closes out the week by posting a music video on Fridays. Since we're closing out the semester, I'll do the same.

So here's some Christmas cheer by one of my favorite bands, an Irish traditional group with punk rock overtones called the Pogues. The song is "Fairytale of New York". It was recorded in 1987 by Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan and guest vocalist Kristy McColl. It regularly tops the charts in Ireland and the U.K. at Christmastime, and it's getting to be kind of a tradition in my fall semester classes.

"Fairytale of New York," the Pogues & Kirsty McColl



The other one has more to do with COMM 337. If there's one major point I've wanted to make this semester that isn't on the syllabus, it's that I think the world belongs to people who have the drive and talent to be entreprenueral.

And the people who put this 2010 video together were nothing if not entrepreneurial.

Something to think about as you graduate and begin your careers.

"Hallelujah Chorus," Christmas Food Court Flash Mob

This flash mob was superbly organized, choreographed and recorded by http://www.AlphabetPhotography.com of Niagra Falls, Ontario. To read more about the agency, link here to their About Us page. Cooperating were Robert Cooper and Chorus Niagara, The Welland Seaway Mall and Fagan Media Group. Vickie Fagan describes the group as a "one-stop portal for all media services including, broadcast, corporate, website, social media and software design." Some of you may consider the song appropriate to the end of the semester, as well.



Footnote on European (and U.S.) sovereign debt crisis. Niall Ferguson, controversial and usually quite conservative economic historian, has a discouraging take on the sovereign debt crisis we've been reading about this semester. It's titled "The Fed's Critics Are Wrong: We Need to Avert Depression" and it's in this week's issue of Newsweek. Ferguson has plenty of critics, but most of them are on the left, and it will be interesting (at least to those of us who care about economic history) to see what the reaction is to this article. At any rate, in Newsweek Ferguson says:

What was the root cause of the financial crisis? Greed? Deregulation? No. It was ignorance of financial history.

Last week the world’s central banks—including the American Federal Reserve—acted in concert to try to prevent history from repeating itself. Their critics on both sides of the Atlantic showed a dangerous ignorance, and not for the first time.

Author of "The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000" and several histories of the Rothschild banking house over the centuries, Ferguson says "In normal times it would be legitimate to worry about the consequences of money printing and outsize debts. But history tells us these are anything but normal times." Instead, he fears a repeat of 1931 when tight money policies made the Great Depression inevitable:

We are indeed fortunate that at least the world’s leading central bankers have studied this history: not only [U.S. Federal Reserve chairman] Ben Bernanke but also the heads of the Bank of England, the Bank of Canada, and the European Central Bank.

The bad news is that so few politicians and voters understand what they are trying to do, or why. The even worse news is that central bankers by themselves may not be able to stop our depression from turning great.

Time will tell. I'm convinced by the parallels to the Great Depression, but I've been worried about things like that before and they haven't come to pass. In the meantime, scary headlines do sell magazines.

There's another story in Newsweek I plan to read. It's by Simon Schama, another British historian who teaches in America, and it's titled "Why America Should Care About the Collapse of European Unity" ... not exactly cheerful holiday reading, either, but I think these things are important.

COMM 337: Final exam

Self-reflective essay (100 points). Write an essay of at least 1,250 words (five typed pages) in response to the questions below. Please feel free (or compelled) to quote freely, and attribute your quotes. Write as if you were submitting your essay for publication. Strive for a conversational tone. The essay is due Thursday, Dec. 15, at 1:30 p.m., at the regularly scheduled time for our final. Email it to me and/or give it to me in person - but let's make sure I get it.

What have you learned in Communications 337 that surprised you the most? How, specifically, did it surprise you? Here are some questions to get you started thinking about your writing. Try to focus your essay on this issue of surprise and work in your thoughts on the questions below. Don’t try to answer them all (but you will, of course, want to convince me of the depth and breadth of your reading in our texts as well as the articles we’ve posted to The Mackerel Wrapper)!

How did you see yourself as a writer before you took the course, and how would you see yourself now you have taken it? Has your writing changed as a result of the course? What worked when you wrote your feature story? What didn’t work? Which of the articles we read for class helped you as a writer, i.e. suggested techniques you might try in your own writing? Which suggested things you want to avoid at all costs! What did you learn from Donald Murray’s “Writing to Deadline” (the little green book that wouldn’t go away) and “The Writer's Digest Handbook of Magazine Article Writing?” What was beneficial? What wasn’t?

How beneficial was the material on free-lance writing and selling your work to paying markets? Did you get any useful tips? More importantly, did it help change the way you think of yourself as an aspiring professional writer? Do you feel like you're ready to start looking for markets that are open to entry-level writers and writing articles for them? Have you been able to find any such markets? If so, what are they and what specific article(s) can you try to get them to publish?

Here are some questions, adapted from an English course at the University of Colorado-Denver, to help you think about your development as a writer:

• How has your writing changed during this semester?
  
• What do you see as your greatest strengths as a writer?
  
• What areas of your writing are you still working on?
  
• What do you think of as “good writing?” How do you evaluate your own writing and that of others?

In grading this essay, as always, I will evaluate the relevance of your discussion to the main goals and objectives of the course; the detail you cite to support or illustrate your points; and the connections you make. Be specific.

COMM 150: Advertising ethics and marketplace of ideads

http://www.aef.com/on_campus/classroom/speaker_pres/data/3001

excerpts from a speech by Chris Moore of Ogilvy & Mather

... People in advertising spend a lot of their time dealing with ethical choices, and those choices are almost never black and white. They're subtle, shades-of-gray choices, juicy enough for a Philosophy major.

---

truth

---

what else? Read and reflect. What is the role of advertisers in a marketplace of ideas?

COMM 337: A shameless sales pitch for COMM 353 and an old editor's note from The Sleepy Weasel

Spring semester I'll be offering another 300-level course at Benedictine. It's an advanced seminar, and it'll focus on magazine editing. Details are not yet final, but it's shaping up to be an another opportunity for you to learn some more about how to get your stuff in print. (Have you read Chapter 10 yet in the "Writer's Digest Guide for Free-Lance Writers?" It's about working with editors.) COMM 353 can also give you a portfolio piece, either for your senior portfolio or for the professional portfolios you'll be schlepping around as you look for communications work. Here's the catalog description:

COMM-353 (3). Advanced Seminar in Writing, Editing and Page Design for Publications. In this seminar, students work on a major publications project, engage in critical reading of media content, discuss writing, editing and page design strategies, have drafts of their work critiqued in class, and develop a professional portfolio of the work. Prerequisite: COMM-150, COMM-207, COMM-208 and COMM-209.

Here's my description, from an editor's note in an old copy of The Sleepy Weasel, a campus magazine I used to coordinate as faculty adviser and de facto production manager. Editing, I said, is "the art of making others look good [in print] without leaving any tracks of your own." Making yourself look good in print, too. (The picture above of a clip art ferret on a stack of books is from an old Sleepy Weasel home page. No animals were harmed in the production of the webpage.) In COMM 353, we'll edit each other's work and we'll get out a demonstration magazine. We'll design it, copyfit it and get the words on paper - or in PDF files - so they can go in your portfolios.

Oh, I almost forgot the reading.

We'll read two little paperback books, the kind that don't go away. One is Carol Fisher Saller, "The Subversive Copy Editor: Advice from Chicago" (Chicago, 2009). When she says "Chicago," she means the University of Chicago Press. Its stylebook is the editorial standard for magazine and book publishing. The other is James Thurber, "The Years with Ross" (ed. Adam Gopnik, HarperCollins Perennial Classics edition, 2001). It's about Harold Ross, a legendary editor of The New Yorker in the 1930s and 1940s. Long time ago, but it was sort of a Golden Age in American culture - and The New Yorker was arguably the best of the best. We can learn a lot about craftsmanship, and art and other things that matter from reading it.

We'll also keep up with The New Yorker online. It's still around, and it's still good. Check it out at http://www.newyorker.com/.

I'm still working on the syllabus, but here are some draft goals and objectives:

A. Goals.
• Students will learn basic editorial principles, attitudes and practices in academic and quality magazine settings
• Students will gain practical editing experience on a demonstration literary magazine.
• Students will gain metacognitive knowledge of their experience and its relation to the practices and principles detailed in their readings

B. Student Learning Objectives. Upon completion of the course, students will be able to demonstrate mastery of specific editing skills required in the preparation of articles and art for publication and in the production of a "little" magazine of literature, the arts and public affairs.

And here's an editor's column I wrote for The Weasel a couple of years ago, lightly edited. The link was dead when I checked this morning, so I copied it from an old flash drive. In spite of my shameless punning, it's a pretty good statement of what I hope my students learn from working on a magazine.

Weasel words: Hickory dickory … mission in action

By Pete Ellertsen

While we were crashing this year’s edition of The Sleepy Weasel the other day, editorial assistant Claire Keldermans asked me what I was going to say in the editor’s column. I told her I’m an old newspaper guy so I'd run out the clock, I probably wouldn’t decide till the very last minute.

“Hickory dickory dock,” she said.

Run that by me again, I asked. Real slow.

“Hickory dickory, Doc,” she replied.

My students call me “Doc,” and Claire said she thought the pun was cute.

Oh, I said.

That’s my usual response to puns. Oh. Anything more would be too effusive, would run the risk of encouraging still more puns. But a good pun, especially on deadline during final edit when we’re all a little giddy anyway, ought not to go unacknowledged.

Hence the headline.

That wasn’t the only pun. This year’s Weasel is Volume 13 of a magazine that grew out of a small group project in a freshman English composition class I taught in 1995. For their project, they put on a “Beat generation” style coffeehouse complete with red-checkered tablecloth, candle stub jammed into an empty chianti bottle and, of course, poetry. The project morphed into a poetry club, and the club quickly reinvented itself as a student publication. Over time it developed into a campus magazine showcasing the creative work of students, faculty, staff and friends of Springfield College in Illinois and now Benedictine University at Springfield.

This year has been one of transition on campus, and we’ve given some thought to what we’ve been doing with the Weasel and what we hope to do in future. Out of this process, we crafted a mission statement:

The Sleepy Weasel is a campus magazine of the arts and public affairs published by students and faculty of Springfield College and Benedictine University, on the World Wide Web at and in hard-copy format at the College's campus in Springfield. The Weasel seeks to highlight written and artistic work by our students, both in and out of class, and to help promote a sense of community on campus by providing a voice for the creative work of students, faculty, staff, alumni, and others in the Springfield-Benedictine community.

So I decided if we’re putting our mission into action, we can call it mission in action.

Oh.

I could almost read Claire’s mind.

Oh. Let’s not encourage him.

OK, OK, it wasn’t that funny. Like I said, life gets a little giddy during final edit. But the Sleepy Weasel’s mission is real, and we take it seriously.

An important part of our mission is involving students in the editing, design and production of the magazine. This year’s cover is Claire’s. A senior in mass communications, she shot the photo, worked her magic on it in a photo-editing program and designed the cover. And she caught right on to copyfitting, which I’ve heard aptly compared to cramming three pounds of text into a two-pound bag (except “text” wasn’t the word that was actually used). I especially wanted to involve her in editing creative writing for style. Judi Anderson, my colleague in the Arts and Letters Division and co-adviser to The Sleepy Weasel, is a gifted editor in the tradition of the 20th-century book doctors who brought out the best in authors as different as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway and Ring Lardner. So I started Claire out by studying Judi’s edited manuscripts, then turned her loose on some raw copy of her own.

You won’t notice the editors’ handiwork. By definition, good editing is invisible. It’s nothing more – or less – than the art of making others look good without leaving any tracks of your own. By semester’s end, Claire said she was mentally adding or deleting commas, correcting grammatical errors, playing with word order, tightening up copy and generally tinkering with the written word every time she saw a written word.

“I’m beginning to see edits everywhere,” she said. “It’s driving me crazy.”

[… and so on. She even saw edits when she drove past billboards on the way to campus. I’m omitting the description of stories that were in that year’s issue. - pe]

Sleepy Weasel, Vol. 13 (Spring 2009).

COMM 337: Assignment(s) for last week of classes - ** UPDATED 2x ** and fair warning about link to final exam question(s)

** UPDATE ** UPDATED AGAIN 9:15 p.m. WEDNESDAY ** - Here are some thoughts on the final exam, which I will post before class Thursday. I don't have the final wording yet - can we call it the "final final" when I do? - but I've got a general idea of what I want you to do. It'll be a take-home essay test, due at our final exam period - 1:30 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 15. Two One questions, 50 100 points each. Email it to me, bring me a hard copy or do both.

I'm kind of making things up as I go along, and I've been sharing some of my thoughts with students who have emailed me with questions. So in order to level the playing field, I will post the parts about the final here.

The email messages were about Question 1. In one I said:

... I think I'm going to lay another question on you for the final, and talk about it in class Thursday. It'll be to find a viable market - that's "viable" as in market that you feel like you really have a shot at getting a story published in - and doing a little research on it. Check Writer's Market, the "About Us" or "Submissions" pages on their website, etc., and plot out in detail how you'd go about contacting them and shlepping them a story.

And this ...

... So why don't you prowl around the website ... you wrote about at the beginning of the semester and see if they have any guest columns, reader blogs, etc., ways for you to break into print. Look in the "About Us" and "Submissions" pages (whatever they call them), and see if they have writer's guidelines. ... I'm thinking of having that be one of the questions on the final, along with the usual reflective essay. So it won't be time wasted.

The other question will be the usual reflective essay. Here's the exam I gave in 2008. This year's will be an updated version of that. Link here to the exam or scroll up to Wednesday, Dec. 7. I am deleting the question here, since it's posted in full above.


For Tuesday's class discussion -

Since this is an advanced journalistic writing course: Find some websites that you might be able to use as a market or an outlet for journalistic writing ... it can either be a website that might take free-lance stories on a subject you're interested in (either now of later), or one that might have career prospects for you later.

Copy and paste the website's address into a comment to this post, along with the name of the website and a very brief description, just a couple of keywords to let us know what it's about ...

For example, on down the road you might be interested in applying for work at Patch Communications at http://www.patch.com/. They are a chain of "hyperlocal" web-based publications that encourage amateurs - readers - to submit blogs and hire professionals to coordinate newsgathering as well as cover stories themselves. They want at least two years' experience, and they don't seem to hire many pros. But they are interested in communities up to 100,000 that are under-served by traditional media. Sound like anyplace you know? In the meantime, watch for it. They're mostly around Chicago now, but if they expand downstate they might come to Springfield. And they might be looking for bloggers if you're temporarily stuck in a "day job" that has nothing to do with your career goals.

COMM 150 (and 337): Here's the "marketplace of ideas" again, and the 1st Amendment - **UPDATED** IN-CLASS ASSIGNMENT

John Vivian, in our COMM 150 textbook "Media of Mass Communication," credits 17th-century the English poet John Milton with originating the concept of the "marketplace of ideas," which he defines as: "An unbridled forum for free inquiry and expression." In the pamphelet called Areopagitica (1655), Milton said, "Let Truth and Falsehood grapple: whoever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter." Says Vivian, "Milton ... saw no reason to fear any idea, no matter how subersive, because human beings inevitably will choose the best ideas and values." That all makes it sound more like a boxing ring than a marketplace, but Vivian also says:

Milton argued for a free and open exchange of information and ideas - a marketplace of ideas. Just as people at a farmers' market can pinch and insect a lot of vegetables until the find the best, so can people find the best ideas if they have a vast array from which to choose. Milton's marketplace is not a place but a concept. It exists whenever people exchange ideas, whether in conversation of letters or the printed word. (399-401. Bold type in the original)

And Vivian adds:

Milton reasoned that people would gain confidence in their ideas and values if they tested them continually against alternative views. It was an argument against censorship. People need to have the fullest possible choices in the marketplace if they are going to go home with the best product, whether vegetables or ideas. ALso, bad ideas should be present in the marketplace because, no matter how objectionable, they might contain a grain of truth.

Milton and his libertarian successors acknowledged that people sometimes err in sorting out alternatives, but these mistakes are corrected as people continually reassess their values against competing values in the marketplace. Libertarians see this truth-seeking as a never-ending, life-long human pursuit. (401)

Please post your answers to the following question as a comment below:

How does the marketplace of ideas concept play out in the interpretation of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the codes of ethics and day-to-day practice of professionals in journalism and public relations that we studied earlier this week? How does it compare to the philosophy behind an "multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia project based on an openly editable model" like Wikipedia?

UPDATE FOR WEDNESDAY: Let's everybody comment on this. What specific parts of the SPJ code for news writers and the PRSA code for PR professionals are involved with the marketplace of ideas?

ASSIGNMENT FOR FRIDAY: Read the post that I have modestly titled "Copyright: Here's What You Need to Know." I'll update it and post it to the blog, but there's an old version at http://mackerelwrapper.blogspot.com/2010/04/comm-209-copyright-heres-what-you-need.html"target="_blank" ... think of it as my little Christmas present on the last day of class, because it'll explain a way of getting art - visuals, in other words - for school papers without violating copyright.

COMM 150, 337: Newspapering woes

http://capitolfax.com/2011/12/01/report-sj-r-may-sell-its-building-as-parent-faces-a-billion-dollar-debt-payment/

[State Journal-Register publisher Walt Lafferty’s] disclosure came during a recent newsroom meeting called to discuss the efforts of GateHouse Media, the newspaper’s owner, to turn around sagging financial fortunes. GateHouse stock, which sold for more than $20 a share during the initial public offering five years ago, is virtually worthless, selling for as little as four cents a share last week. The company has more than $1 billion in debt due in 2014.

Lafferty told the news staff that he will likely contact a broker about selling the building after Jan. 1, according to multiple sources who attended the meeting.

Rich Miller, Cap Fax editor-publisher

That company simply did itself in. It borrowed extensively to buy papers when the market was hot, and now it’s stuck with all those newspapers while the market is in a deep trough. That $1 billion debt payment next year may put it under.

…Adding… This post in no way should be meant to be seen as gloating over the SJ-R’s troubles. It’s a sad day for the paper and for Springfield. I have friends over there, and stories like this make me worry about them. Try to take this to heart in comments.

- wordslinger - Thursday, Dec 1, 11 @ 12:55 pm:

I don’t think newspapers saw how quickly and devastatingly the EBays and Craiglists of the world would take away their classified ad business. They all thought the papers would always own the local markets.

- Coach - Thursday, Dec 1, 11 @ 1:26 pm:

=== In the meantime, where is the SJR planning to locate their remaining staff? ===

In a two-bedroom apartment somewhere near the Capitol.




- Yellow Dog Democrat - Thursday, Dec 1, 11 @ 1:27 pm:

@wordslinger - you left out the 800 lb gorilla, Google. Which many newspapers still erroneously refer to as a “search engine” when in fact it is a classified ad company.

My grandmother was a reporter for the SJR back before Rich was born, and they are still one of the best sources of state policy reporting, so I wont gloat over their woes.



- Anonymous - Thursday, Dec 1, 11 @ 1:20 pm:

Gatehouse isn’t alone. Lee is in the same boat, saddled with a billion in debt from the Pulitzer purchase, and it, too, has been selling properties. And the staff downsizings continue, with fewer people asked to do more and more. It’s not that local newspapers aren’t viable, though. Lots of people think they are a defunct business model. They’re not. Local businesses still buy ads and readers still subscribe. No, I wouldn’t do what Warren Buffett just did in buying the Omaha publishing company, but there is still money to be made with the right business model, at least for a few more years. Is online the future? I don’t know. When you look at the paltry revenue that comes from online compared to the dead trees product, there’s only enough there to support an editorial staff that consists of an intern typing up press releases. I’ve been doing this for a living for 35 years, and these are difficult days, to say the least

COMM 337: Art, craft, technological change and the nature of news

So I came across this video on The Atlantic magazine's website, and I'm laughing my head off. It was put up yesterday by Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg, an associate editor who curates videos for the website, and it's a hoot.

She's headlined it "So You Want to Be a Journalist — 70 Years Ago," and she gives it a little background:

Sponsored by Vocational Guidance Films, Inc., this promotional film from the Prelinger Archive touts the thrills of working as a newsman in 1940 -- unless you were a newswoman, in which case your were probably stuck writing for the society pages. "Women find it difficult to compete with men in general reporting jobs," the narrator explains, "so girls who want to be successful in journalism should prepare for work in the special women's departments."

Well, the "soc pages" and "cook pages" are mostly gone now, and that's not all that changed. Changed for the better, too. At least most of it's been for the better.

So I start watching the filmstrip (which is what we used to call a video back in the day), and I can't believe my eyes! The technology in is almost completely gone. Manual typewriters. Dial-up telephones. Line-O-type machines. And of course the "special women's departments." But as I keep watching, I start thinking maybe some of this newspapering stuff doesn't change very much after all.

We don't call in stories from a phone booth anymore. (When's the last time you even saw a phone booth?) But we transmit them back to the office when we're working on a story out in the field. In fact, your generation uses phones even more than mine ever did. And the attitudes don't change. The ethics don't change. Human nature doesn't change. And people still want to read the news. They may read it on devices that didn't exist 70 years ago, but they still want to keep up with it. And reporting the news is still a demanding, and essential, job.

I've been reading your analytical papers, and from them I'm learning things - good things - I hadn't thought of before about the nature of art and craft. In a word, the craft changes but the art doesn't.

Well, that's what I think.

Watch the video (10:38) at http://www.theatlantic.com/video/archive/2011/11/so-you-want-to-be-a-journalist-70-years-ago/249205/ and tell me what you think.

COMM 150 and 337: Pepper spray photographer's professional attitude ... and one of Doc's tangents on the marketplace of ideas

In all the reams of commentary about the incident in which a campus policeman pepper-sprayed student protesters, one comment that stands out came from a local television cameraman who covered the protest for Channel 13 in Sacramento. In an interview with Skye Kinkade of the Mount Shasta (Calif.) News, camera operator Dennis Marin was asked his opinion of the pepper-spraying Nov. 18 at the University of California Davis. Very properly, he didn't go there. Kincade reported:

Though he witnessed the entire incident, Marin said he doesn’t have an opinion one way or the other.

“As a photojournalist I observe, capture, and let my camera and the images do the talking for me,” Marin said. “I believe people can draw their own conclusion from the video. I will say this, however. In covering other protests during my career (Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, Redwood Summer protests in Eureka, and the blockade protest at Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant) I have seen much more intense situations as well as a lot less.”

Which makes him one of the few people anywhere who don't have an opinion about it.

What specific provisions of the Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists would apply here?

Kinkade said Marin has been a photojournalist for 35 years. He graduated from College of the Siskiyous in 1974, then transferred to San Jose State where he got a degree in broadcast journalism. He worked for an NBC affiliate in Fresno for seven years before moving to the CBS Sacramento affiliate CBS13.

Tangent (or is it really a tangent)? A few weeks ago in COMM 337, we talked about journalism ethics and the marketplace of ideas (permalink here for Nov. 15 post). And in COMM 150 we're starting to look at the Public Relations Society of America's code of ethics. Would civil disobedience - i.e. deliberately disobeying a law in an effort to get it changed - ever be justified for a public relations professional? If so, what kind of law? Under what circumstances?

COMM 150: Segue to media law and ethics

Reading assignments. For Friday, read Vivian, Chapter 16 on media law. For Monday, read Chapter 17 on media ethics.

Written. Our final exam will be a take-home written exam similar in format to the midterm. I will post it to The Mackerel Wrapper next week, and it will be due during the scheduled exam period, Dec. ___. As with the midterm, you have the option of writing the exam in D220 during the scheduled period.

Since I strongly believe a firm grounding in professional ethics is basic to dealing with issues of media law, we will begin our student of the chapters on law and ethics by looking at the codes of ethics for journalists and public relations professionals. They are linked below.

Today's in-class assignment: Group up with the people sitting next to you and read the ethical canons of the Society of Professional Journalists and the Public Relations Society of America. Brainstorm these questions and post your answers to the class blog. What do you think are the most important points of each? How difficult do you believe they would be to follow? How can you be guided by them now as students? What do they have in common? How are they different? How do they apply their principles to new media? Post your answers as comments to this item on the blog, and be sure to put all your names on the comment so you all get credit for posting.

1. The Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists:

Members of the Society of Professional Journalists believe that public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy. The duty of the journalist is to further those ends by seeking truth and providing a fair and comprehensive account of events and issues. Conscientious journalists from all media and specialties strive to serve the public with thoroughness and honesty. Professional integrity is the cornerstone of a journalist's credibility. Members of the Society share a dedication to ethical behavior and adopt this code to declare the Society's principles and standards of practice.
Seek Truth and Report It
Journalists should be honest, fair and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting information. ...
Minimize Harm
Ethical journalists treat sources, subjects and colleagues as human beings deserving of respect. ...
Act Independently
Journalists should be free of obligation to any interest other than the public's right to know. ...
Be Accountable
Journalists are accountable to their readers, listeners, viewers and each other. ...

2. The Code of Ethics of the Public Relations Society of America

The Code, created and maintained by the PRSA Board of Ethics and Professional Standards (BEPS), sets out principles and guidelines built on core values. Fundamental values like advocacy, honesty, loyalty, professional development and objectivity structure ethical practice and interaction with clients and the public.

Translating values into principles of ethical practice, the Code advises professionals to:

• Protect and advance the free flow of accurate and truthful information.
  
• Foster informed decision making through open communication.
  
• Protect confidential and private information.
  
• Promote healthy and fair competition among professionals.
  
• Avoid conflicts of interest.
  
• Work to strengthen the public’s trust in the profession.

COMM 337: Schedule of assignments - with *UPDATES*

Writing assignments: (1) This week your feature stories are due. (2) For final exams, I will assign a self-reflective essay. You can write it out of class and turn it in to me by the time of the final.

Assiganed reading: For Thursday, Dec. 1, read Chapter 10, "Working with an Editor," in the Writer's Digest Handbook. We will look at blogs and concentrate on getting your blogs in shape during the last week of classes. Semester ends Dec. 10 (our last class is Thursday, Dec. 8).

WATCH THIS SPACE. I will post updates to the assignment schedule here.

COMM 150 and 337: Viral video, blogs get up close and personal with a hungry moose calf, and a wildlife rescue center's operations

• COMM 150: Your documented essay assignment asks, "How are social media ... changing the face of American culture? You may consider entertainment, politics and/or government." You may also wish to consider wildlife conservation and environmental education.
  
• COMM 337: Linked below are a video posted to YouTube by an animal care intern at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center and blogs posted by the intern and the biologist/animal curator. How might you use social media in your careers as media professionals?

"Our first orphaned moose calf of the season has received quite a bit of acclaim and a lot of attention from our animal care interns," animal curator Jordan Schaul reported on his blog on National Geographic's NewsWatch website. In a post headlined "'Gilly' the Moose Calf – Video Gone Viral," he linked to a video by AWCC intern Erin Leighton featuring a 3-week-old orphaned moose calf waiting impatiently to be bottle-fed.

"If you were an intern here at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center you would already have put in your time feeding moose calves around the clock," Schaul added. "This video provides a very authentic perspective of a hungry young ungulate awaiting his milk bottle."

Schaul went on to explain how the wildlife center cooperates with the state Department of Fish and Game to care for injured animals or young ones orphaned by hunters, automobile accidents or natural causes. His blog is informative, and as you read other posts, you get a sense of how important the center's animal rescue work is. It also manages a program to re-introduce wood bison to Alaska.

But Schaul's isn't the only blog being written at the wildlife center. The intern who filmed Gilly the moose not only has a YouTube channel, InternErin, but a blog she calls Moose, Bison, and Bears oh My! It's a personal blog, but it's linked to the Wildlife Conservation Center's homepage. In her profile Erin, who blogs under her first name, said she was a "recent college graduate" who was moving to Alaska, where she "will be training Kodiak bear cubs and helping with the re-introduction of wood bison. I don't know what to expect but can't wait for some adventures!"

Intern Erin began her blog when she arrived in Alaska, and her first posts are about getting used to her new job, the weather - and Alaska. It was cold, but AWCC is just a few miles from a world-class ski resort at Girdwood, which certainly didn't hurt. In her first week Erin learned "everyone in Alaska refers to the 'other' states (excluding Hawaii) as the lower 48 which I think is kinda cool." From then on, she started signing off "Good night, lower 48." And she obviously thought the internship was cool, even when she was cleaning out cages. After a month or two, she was explaining how - and why - you have to train bear cubs and keep them in enclosures:

They will live their lives out at a bear park similar to the AWCC. They are unrelated and will not be breed. Since Kodiak Bears are not a threatened bear there is no need to breed them in captivity. It is also hard enough finding room for bears in captivity. They can not be re-released since they missed out on learning fital skills from their mothers. They would also probably become a dangerous bear since they are associated with humans now.

I stumbled across Erin's blog when I was visiting the AWCC website looking for Christmas presents. I was hooked.

As the days lengthened in the spring and summer, Erin kept posting. The moose calves - Gilly was joined by several more orphans - learned to browse on fireweed (an iconic Alaska plant) and grew as tall as the interns. The days grew shorter, and the bears put on weight in the fall, then cut back on eating as they prepared to hibernate. In October, the snow came and Erin was looking forward to the skiing season at Girdwood again.

In the meantime Erin went from cleaning out cages to environmental programs and a kids' puppet show, involving a moose on one hand and an Alaska ranger on the other, at schools in Girdwood, Anchorage and as far away as Fairbanks. Co-starring in her "porcupine presentations" was a seasoned trouper named Snickers (AWCC is a rescue operation, and all the animals that aren't to be released to the wild again seem to have names). Here's one she did this fall at Girdwood Elementary School with another AWCC staffer and, of course, Snickers the porcupine:

This past wednesday we used Snickers for a presentation. We taught kids ages 3-9 about porcupines. After Snickers made his debut we gave every kid some playdo to make their own porcupine. Then they used spaghetti to represent quills on their porcupines. This coming wednesday we will be teaching about insulation animals have in Alaska.

I was pulled into Erin's "Moose, Bison, and Bears oh My" blog because I've visited the conservation center several times and I was curious to see a first-person account of how an intern experienced it. But I kept reading because Erin's detail was fascinating, and I learned a lot about the center's day-to-day operation and environmental education while I was reading. I learned a lot about moose calves, bear cups and porcupines, too.

So ... here's the question again: How might you be able to use the first-person immediacy and narrative format of a personal blog for public education or advocacy in your career?

COMM 150: Kansas governor apologizes to high school student over Twitter reaction - *and update*

How are social media changing the way we communicate? Well, for one thing, when a high school kid makes a snotty remark about the governor on Twitter, it can turn into a political issue. Check out this report on NBC Action News (KSHB-TV) of Kansas City. According to Jake Peterson of Action News, it happened during a student government program at the Kansas state capitol when Emma Sullivan, a senior at Shawnee Mission East High School in the Kansas City suburbs said she thought Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback "sucks" and posted it to her Twitter account. The next day she was called into the principal’s office.

“He explained to me that someone from Brownback’s office got a hold of it and sent it to someone in charge of the [school] district,” she told the reporter.

That was just before the Thanksgiving holiday. But the story went out on the wire services, and Brownback started to take heat for it. Perhaps typical was commentary on Time magazine's website by culture and technology reporter James Poniewozik that said "Brownback’s office did what any mature adults would when wounded by a high-schooler’s comment: they tattled. The governor’s office notified the program, and word got to Sullivan’s principal, who scolded her and insisted that she apologize. You read that right: a state governor’s office lodged a complaint over someone being a h8r on the Internet." At any rate, according to Peterson's follow-up story on NBC Action News, Brownback promptly got out from under the issue.

“My staff over-reacted to this tweet, and for that I apologize. Freedom of speech is among our most treasured freedoms," he said. "I enjoyed speaking to the more than 100 students who participated in the Youth in Government Program at the Kansas Capitol. They are our future. I also want to thank the thousands of Kansas educators who remind us daily of our liberties, as well as the values of civility and decorum."

And the Johnson County (Kan.) School District issued this statement:

The district has not censored Miss Sullivan nor infringed upon her freedom of speech. She is not required to write a letter of apology to the Governor. Whether and to whom any apologies are issued will be left to the individuals involved.

The issue has resulted in many teachable moments concerning the use of social media. The district does not intend to take any further action on this matter.

Fences mended. End of story.

LATER. An Associated Press story in the Kansas City Star tonight (Monday) quotes a self-described "social media lawyer" as saying politicians don't understand social media. It's not a Republicans-versus-Democrats thing, it's a generational thing:

The reaction exemplifies what Bradley Shear, a Washington, D.C.-area social media attorney, called an example of the nationwide chasm between government officials and rapidly evolving technology.

"This reflects poorly on the governor's office," Shear said. "It demonstrates their P.R. department and whoever is dealing with these issues need to get a better understanding of social media in the social media age. The biggest problem is government disconnect and a lack of understanding of how people use the technology."

Brownback's office declined to discuss its social media monitoring in detail, but politicians and governmental offices across the county are increasingly keeping an eye on the Internet for mentions of their campaigns or policies, not unlike the way newspapers and television broadcasts have been watched for decades. Many officials even maintain their own Facebook and Twitter accounts to inform constituents of events or policy announcements.

Shear said the disconnect comes in determining how, or if, to respond in a new age of interactivity.

Read more: http://www.kansascity.com/2011/11/28/3291132/kansas-gov-says-staff-overreacted.html#ixzz1f4H3S68F

COMM 150: Cowboys cheerleader tackled on sidelines, again by management for posting to Twitter account

Discuss: How are social media (sometimes hyped as Internet 2.0) changing the face of American culture? You may consider entertainment, politics and/or government. COMM 150 paper assignment.

Technologies change. But some things never change, apparently. Jerks are jerks, and intellectual property law is intellectual property law.

Cheerleader Melissa Kellerman was knocked down twice, once during a game by Cowboys tight end Jason Witten ... and later by Cowboys management after she posted a couple of messages to Twitter about the incident. According to a story picked up by Chris Chase of Yahoo! Sports, CNBC's Darren Rovell reported Kellerman "was forced to delete her Twitter account after posting two messages on Friday morning about the incident."

Chase quoted her messages and said:

Those were pretty much the perfect tweets: Clever, self-deprecating and a bit funny. (We'll even ignore the winking emoticons.) Why did she have to delete her Twitter account? Do the Cowboys believe cheerleaders are only to be seen, not heard?

Hardly. The team allows cameras to record cheerleader auditions for a reality show on CMT. It's alright when the team controls the message but not when a cheerleader begins to get a following and has the stage to herself? This should have been a win-win for everyone involved. Witten looked chivalrous when he helped up Kellerman, she became endearing with her laughter and positive attitude. Both the franchise and the cheerleaders looked good after this. Now, only Kellerman does.

Remember this story, by the way, as we move into media law and ethics later this week.

COMM 337: Feature story on pagans, witches in Los Angeles Times walks delicate line ... irony tempered with respect

Here's a story in the Los Angeles Times that walks a delicate line between irony and very bland tell-it-like-it-is reporting. It's a feature on "Earth-based" religions at the U.S. Air Force Academy. Since such religions include Wicca, whose members call themselves witches, reporter Jenny Deam had plenty of opportunity for cheap shots and wisecracks.

But she didn't go there - not quite. Instead, she ... well, let's see how she handled it. She set it up by saying the Air Force Academy has "pagans, Wiccans, druids, witches and followers of Native American faiths." Then she interrupts herself:

Witches in the Air Force? Chaplain Maj. Darren Duncan, branch chief of cadet faith communities at the academy, sighs. A punch line waiting to happen, and he's heard all the broom jokes.

For the record, there are no witches among the cadets this year. But the two spiritual leaders for all Earth-based religions — one a civilian, one an Air Force reservist — are witches and regularly cast spells, which they say is not so different from offering prayer. There also are no druids this year. But there could be next year.

All in all, it's a good story about a subject that could have been just awful. How do you write about people who believe in religions that many people would consider odd without sounding preachy, on the one hand, or sarcastic, on the other?

That, in a nutshell, is what Deam had to do in this one.

It's also a good example of a story that's based on one key interview - with chaplain Duncan - plus personal observation and a couple of other, shorter interviews. A good model for the feature stories you're writing this week.

Among other things, she:

• Made it clear the Air Force considers witches and druids protected under the First Amendment just like Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists or members of any other faith. "This is not about religious tolerance — a phrase Duncan, a Christian, rejects as implying that the majority religion is simply putting up with the minority. He calls it a 1st Amendment issue. If the military is to defend the Constitution, it should also be upholding its guarantee of religious freedom."
  
• Made sure readers know what witches, pagans and followers of other "Earth-based" religions believe - "an ancient religion that generally does not worship a single god and considers all things in nature interconnected."
  
• Referred to a controversy in 2005 about "aggressive proselytizing" by officers seeking to convert cadets to a fundamentalist version of Christianity, and quoted critics of the academy in an otherwise positive story.
  
• Worked in some nice on-the-scene description amd explained its significance: "Back at the solstice preparations, with glue guns drawn and takeout pizza within easy reach, the pagan cadets decorated yule logs with bits of ribbon and glitter. Yule logs, whose ritual burning symbolizes faith in the reappearance of the sun, will be displayed alongside the Christmas trees and menorahs in next month's crowded religious calendar at the academy."
  
• Made sure she talked with a cadet who follows one of the Earth-based religions, a pagan who said she "has taken no serious grief from other cadets, save occasional questions about whether pagans dance naked (she doesn't) or whether she can cast a spell on commanding officers (she wouldn't even if she could)."

Again, there's just the right balance here between humor and respect for the cadet's beliefs.

COMM 150 and 337: le plus de pepper spray cop photo meme, le plus de meme chose?

"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose [the more it changes, the more it is the same thing]." ~ French proverb.

Even after a week that included a major holiday, the commentary on the pepper spraying of students Nov. 18 at the University of California Davis doesn't look like it's going away. Witness an article on the Nieman Journalism Lab's website at Harvard University. Written by assistant editor Megan Garber, it's titled "Image as Interest: How the Pepper Spray Cop could change the trajectory of Occupy Wall Street." If that sounds kind of pretentious, well, that's the way some people talk at Harvard. But what's happening with the iconic cop's picture seems to be real.

Posted five days ago at the beginning of the week, Garber's article about the cop photo keeps drawing attention (at week's end it had 900-plus Tweets, more than any other story on the Harvard lab's homepage. Especially with the financial crisis deepening in Europe, as Belgium's credit rating was downgraded and a German bond offering didn't find enough buyers, the incident at UC Davis may even suggest we're approaching a kind of economic tipping point.

(For background on the crisis in Europe, plus another iconic photo of a sculpture outside the stock exchange in Milan, Italy, see Friday's issue of The Guardian.)

Graber's article tracks media coverage of the Nov. 18 incident in which campus police Lt. James Pike tried to disperse a student demonstration against an $8,000 tuition hike with pepper spray. It made headlines nationwide, and pictures of the cop spraying the students went viral on the internet. Her analysis is very technical, suggesting that "trending topics algorithms ... reward discrete events over ongoing movements, favoring spikes over steadiness, effectively punishing trends that build, gradually, over time." In plain language, that means the news media like to cover one-time dramatic events.

But Graber says the pepper spray incident at UC Davis may change that, because the pictures are so compelling. She says:

This weekend [Nov. 19-20], a series of photographs — images of a riot-gear-wearing cop shooting a group of students in the face with pepper spray — made their transition from journalistic documents to sources of outrage to, soon enough, Official Internet Meme. Perhaps the most iconic image (taken by UC Davis student Brian Nguyen, and shown above) isn’t explicitly political; instead, it captures a moment of violence and resistance in almost allegoric dimensions: the solidarity of the students versus the singularity of the cop in question, Lt. Pike; their steely resolve versus his sauntering nonchalance; the panic of the observers, gathered chorus-like and open-mouthed at the edges of the frame. The human figures here are layered, classified, distant from each other: cops, protestors, observers, each occupying distinct spaces — physical, psychical, moral — within the image’s landscape.

As James Fallows put it, “You don’t have to idealize everything about them or the Occupy movement to recognize this as a moral drama that the protestors clearly won.”

Graber compares the UC Davis pictures to pictures like the young Vietnamese girl fleeing a napalm attack on her village during the 1960s or the Chinese protestor standing up to a row of tanks in 1989. She said she can't predict whether the pepper spray cop pictures will still be looked at 20 years or 50 years from now like those pictures are, but at least for the moment it looks like it's going to be important:

The image of Pike (nom de meme: the Pepper Spray Cop) isn’t the first to reach a kind of iconic status when it comes to Occupy Wall Street. (It’s not even the first to involve pepper spray. See, for example, the horrific image of 84-year-old Dorli Rainey, her face dripping with burn-assuaging milk after being sprayed in Seattle.) But it is the first whose implicit narrative — one of struggle, one of outrage — offers viewers a kind of ethical, and tacitly emotional, participation in Occupy Wall Street. A moral drama that the protestors clearly won. Images, Susan Sontag argued, are “invitations” — “to deduction, speculation, fantasy.” They invite empathy, and, with it, [emotional] investment.

It remains to be seen whether Pepper Spray Cop, as a singular image and a collection of derivatives, will prove enduring in the way that previous iconic photos — Phan Thi Kim Phúc, Tank Man — have done. But Pepper Spray Cop, and his ad hoc iconography, is a telling case study for observing what happens when political images become, in the social setting of non-traditional media, de- and then re-politicized. And it will be interesting to see whether the image’s viral life will affect David Carr’s question of “what’s next” for Occupy Wall Street in the world of traditional media. “Just a week ago,” NPR noted this morning, “it was starting to seem like the Occupy movement might be running short of fuel.” But “now that movement seems to have fresh energy after a week of police crackdowns across the country.”

Nieman Journalism Lab is a project of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. Its website says: "The Nieman Journalism Lab is an attempt to help journalism figure out its future in an Internet age. ... We want to help reporters and editors adjust to their online labors; we want to help traditional news organizations find a way to survive; we want to help the new crop of startups that will complement — or supplant — them."

Megan Garber is an assistant editor at the Lab. She was formerly a staff writer at the Columbia Journalism Review, where she reported on the future of news for CJR.org’s News Frontier section. A winner of a Mirror Award for media coverage, Garber also served as an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. According to her profile on the website, she "plays a quartzy game of Scrabble."

COMM 150 and 337: How a UC Davis student got his photo published worldwide ... and a free-lancer got his story on a national magazine website

NOTE TO STUDENTS IN BOTH CLASSES: I've been posting stories about the pepper spray incident at the University of California Davis for COMM 150 students because it relates to your documented essay assignment: "Discuss: How are social media (sometimes hyped as Internet 2.0) changing the face of American culture?" And social media have been all over the UC Davis story. Now I'm posting this one for COMM 337 because the two stories linked below show a lot of enterprise - one on the part of a UC Davis freshman who shoots pictures for the school paper and the other a free-lance writer who reported a couple of very good stories while he was visiting his parents in Davis for Thanksgiving.

One of the pictures of the pepper spray incident at UC Davis was taken by Brian Nguyen, a first-year student and photographer for the school newspaper. He was interviewed for the Atlantic.com magazine website by Andrew Price, a writer based in southern California who was originally from Davis. Nguyen told him:

"I spent that night emailing different photo editors and my contacts in the industry, but at that point it was too late, around 1 a.m., to really get any traction. A couple of news organizations weren't interested. I gained traction on Tumblr first [...]. I suppose that's when it went viral." (emphasis added)

Note the role of social media here.

Nguyen said a student at the scene of the demonstration texted him before the police moved in to break up. "I had a contact here [at the tents] who I asked to notify me if anything happened, because I have classes and things to go to," he said. "When I saw the text, I ran out here and waited for the police raid."

Price wrote up his interview with Nguyen in Q&A format. In it, they addressed the role of social media in getting the story out:
A

When did you first realize your photo was going to get national attention?
I didn't actually realize that it was going to get national attention until it got national attention I suppose. I spent that night emailing different photo editors and my contacts in the industry, but at that point it was too late, around 1 a.m., to really get any traction. A couple of news organizations weren't interested. I gained traction on Tumblr first, submitting my photos to The Political Notebook, then to James Fallows [also of Atlantic.com]. I suppose that's when it went viral. I wasn't thinking much when I took the photo. I was on autopilot. I saw, composed, and shot.

Do you have a sense of how far that image has spread?
Reuters has licensed my photos. I gave The Guardian and a few other news outlets permission to use my photos the day after for web purposes on Saturday because I felt the story had to get out and my photographs could show what happened. Someone on my Flickr commented from the Netherlands. And my cousins in Vietnam have seen the images and they're all supporting the movement so that's pretty cool.

Price also asked Nguyen for his reaction to the Internet "meme" that has seen satirical mashups showing the "pepper spray cop" in works of art from the Smurfs to Picasso's "Guernica." Nguyen said he thinks the social media had a profound impact.

What do you think of the Pepper Spray Cop Tumblr? Does remixing journalistic images trivialize them? Or does it just help them get wider distribution?
Memes like that give the image wider distribution. They only open up the issue to a wider audience.

Do you think the images of Lt. Pike changed the course of Occupy UCD
Those images, along with the video, have galvanized the Occupy UCD movement. Thursday saw maybe 10 to 20 tents on the quad. Today, there were 74 tents on the quad according to some reports. Monday's rally saw over 4,000 students.

Have Twitter and other near-instant media channels changed the power of photography?
With Facebook and Twitter, rather than seeing a photograph like mine in the paper or on some website, it's right on their feed. It's disruptive and it's juxtaposed by the banality of the day-to-day Facebook or Twitter activity. Not only that, but Facebook and Twitter allow for the photograph to be seen by a wider audience, an audience that may not normally be checking news publications daily or even weekly.

How a free-lance writer got a story (two stories, actually) into nationwide circulation while he was home for Thanksgiving vaction

Andrew Price, who interviewed Nguyen for Atlantic.com about his picture, also got a first-person story about UC Davis into the Atlantic Cities section of Atlantic.com titled "Why I'm Still Proud of Davis." The website has a motto right under the logo that says "Place Matters." Price's essay is based on direct reporting, but his hook centers on the fact that he's from Davis. Hence the title, and some background on the place that seems like a tangent - but isn't.

"I live in Los Angeles now, but I’m proud of my hometown’s quirks<" he says. "Many things that seemed eccentric in the 1980s and 1990s - electric cars, fresh, local food, bike-friendly streets - are urban aspirations today. Davis was ahead of the curve." Then he gets into the meat of the story. He backs into it, actually:

Last Friday, when I read that America’s largest energy-neutral housing project had just opened in Davis, I sent out a proud tweet (Davis, CA, leading the charge) and closed my laptop, wondering if the town’s latest small victory would matter to anyone influential.

A few hours later, when I opened my computer again, Davis was everywhere. The video of Lieutenant John Pike nonchalantly pepper spraying seated student protesters had spread like sticky capsicum. You know a piece of media is in the middle of a genuine Gladwellian tipping point when six unconnected Facebook friends all share it within an hour. By Saturday, the pepper spray incident was all over.

COMM 337 students, note the conversational tone and light irony. COMM 150 students, if you're still with us this far into the blog, note his casual reference to Twitter. How are social media changing the world?
Price continues:

I flew up to Davis to visit my parents for Thanksgiving and spent two days visiting the student occupiers, talking to residents, reading the local newspaper, and also, of course, keeping abreast of the conversation on Twitter.

When I first visited the student camp, on Monday, I was struck by how peaceful and organized it was. People were split up into small groups, quietly talking, eating and playing music. Having read tweets comparing the UC Davis quad to Tahrir Square, I was expecting, I suppose, an atmosphere of high anxiety.

I spoke with two protesters who had attended a number of Occupy events in Northern California and liked the UC Davis group because it had a "good vibe." The Sacramento Occupy group, they said, was "too negative." I asked another protester, Andres Estabanez, whether he thought the pepper spray incident would change how the campus police dealt with protesters. "Oh, I’m sure," he says. "I doubt they’re going to come in here and use brutal violence again."

A handful of volunteers were building a large geodesic dome next to the cluster of tents. Was there some strategic purpose for the dome? I asked. Would it make the quad harder to raid next time? "Yeah, 'strategic,'" the volunteer replied, chuckling ironically. "No, I think it was just an idea that happened. People needed a place to sleep."

UC Davis, in other words, does not feel like a war zone.

Good on-the-scene reporting. But look how Price frames the story at the end, and makes his offhand references to the energy-efficient housing project and even the geodesic dome work for him:

was worried Davis’s fundamental character had somehow changed. It hasn't. People are still idealistic, agitating for change, yet oddly reasonable and low-key. It’s unfortunate that my hometown is on a national stage for a police brutality scandal, but I’m proud of the community’s response.

Oh, and the town also has some great new energy-neutral housing.

COMM 150: Know Your Meme - website's discussion of social media, #Occupy protests (and pepper spray) in NYC and UC Davis

Discuss: How are social media (sometimes hyped as Internet 2.0) changing the face of American culture? You may consider entertainment, politics and/or government. Provide specific examples from Vivian, from your own reading and your own experience communicating with the World Wide Web. REVISED Essay assignment, Dec. 2, COMM 150.

An Internet meme [pron. "meem"] is an idea that is propagated through the World Wide Web. The idea may take the form of a hyperlink, video, picture, website, hashtag, or just a word or phrase, such as intentionally misspelling the word "more" as "moar" or "the" as "teh". The meme may spread from person to person via social networks, blogs, direct email, news sources, or other web-based services. "Internet Meme," Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_meme.

When students at the University of California Davis got pictures of campus police Lt. James Pike pepper-spraying students protesting a tuition hike, they posted them to social networking sites like YouTube. The pictures went viral, and so did artwork ridiculing Pike by Photoshopping his image into scenes ranging from classic works of art to a Pink Floyd album cover and pictures of Bambi and the Smurfs.

Best place to get up to speed on it is a website called Know Your Meme. It has tracked the #OccupyWallStreet protests since September, and now it has a page devoted to "Pepper Spray Cop" (also known as “Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop”). The demonstrations at UC Davis grew out of #Occupy protests at Berkeley and several other University of California campuses.

While it is too early to tell what lasting significance the Pepper Spray Cop meme will have, it has created sympathy for athe protesters. Megan Garber of Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab suggests it is "a telling case study for observing what happens when political images become, in the social setting of non-traditional media, de- and then re-politicized" (Mackerel Wrapper Nov. 26). I have posted several items to the Mackerel Wrapper telling how students took the pictures and how they went viral.



In the video above, "Internet scientist Forest" of Know Your Meme gives some background on how the #Occupy Wall Street demonstrations got started in New York City. He notes that they began Sept. 17 with a flash mob demonstration in lower Manhattan but didn't get much attention until Sept. 24 when demonstrators were pepper sprayed by New York Police Department officers. He explains how social media including Facebook and Twitter were instrumental, and suggests Occupy is "arguably ... one of the first social media driven national demonstration in the United States."

On the "Pepper Spray Cop/Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop" page, Know Your Meme gives background on how #Occupy UC Davis got started and how campus police sprayed the students Friday, Nov. 18. It also explains the Pepper Spray Cop meme and several related memes, including one that ridicules an out-of-context remark by Megyn Kelly of Fox News that "pepper spray is a food product, essentially." It notes:

Two photoshopped versions of the photo surfaced on Reddit on November 20th. The first featured Strutting Leo photoshopped over the Pepper Spray Cop in the original image. The second placed Lt. Pike in the 1819 painting Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull. The same afternoon, Lt. Pike was placed in Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884) by Tumblr blog It Makes No Sense where it received over 2400 notes in a day.

Compilations of the images began appearing on Facebook community Occupy Lulz and BoingBoing on November 20th. The next day, additional compilations were posted on Washington Post, ABC News, the Metro, Gawker, and Buzzfeed. Four separate single topic Tumblrs were also created that day. Redditor andresmh created an interactive Pepper Spray Cop where users can take the exploitable cop and shoot pepper spray throughout the Trumbull painting."

Know Your Meme. According to its homepage, "Know Your Meme is a website dedicated to documenting Internet phenomena: viral videos, image macros, catchphrases, web celebs and more." Its profile in Wikipedia says it has more than 500 entries on memes ranging from My Little Pony / Friendship is Magic to Pepper Spray Cop / Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop Images. It began in 2007 and made Time magazine's 50 Best Websites of 2009. In March 2011, the website was acquired by Cheezburger Network for "seven-figure amount." Significantly, much of the content on Know Your Meme is user generated. Says Wikipedia, "In a manner similar to Wikipedia, anybody with an account can submit meme entries to the website and submit relevant images that help further document the memes. The administrators have say over what gets confirmed and what gets 'Deadpooled' or rejected."

Later - Reuters on "uptick in student activism."In a story datelined in Davis, Noel Randewich of the international news agency reported Friday, "Violent confrontations between police and protesters at two University of California campuses have drawn a new cadre of students into the Occupy Wall Street movement and unleashed what some historians call the biggest surge in campus activism since the 1960s." The other one was NOv. ___ at UC Berkeley. He added:

"When a cop pepper-sprays a student, everyone can sort of imagine their children, or their nieces or nephews, their friends who are students," said Kyle Arnone, a 26-year old teaching assistant at the University of California's Los Angeles campus.

"It's harder for the public to stigmatize student protesters as being a bunch of hippie, unemployed people that are difficult to relate to."

COMM 150: How a student's 'pepper spray cop' photo became an internet sensation

How are social media changing our world?

Chris O'Brien, columnist for the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News, asked the same question on the paper's website Nov. 23. He not only interviewed whose photo of the pepper spray incident at the University of California Davis went viral. Since San Jose is in the heart of Silicon Valley, where people think about things like that, O'Brien also analyzed the phenomenon in the context of Internet culture. Specifically, the creation of a "meme" as users rapidly spread the photo and commented on it. (The best definition, as you'd expect, is in Wikipedia, which defines a meme as "an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.") O'Brien wrote:

As Internet "memes" usually do, the "Pepper Spray Cop" one currently clogging our Facebook feeds started with the simple act of someone posting a photo they wanted to share with a few friends. Three days later, it has been photoshopped and mashed-up more than 1,000 times.

A meme is simply an idea or object that spreads around the Internet. In this case, the photo has been mutated into a wide range of images and captions, some hilarious, some disturbing, some insightful.

The spread of the pepper spray photo captures one of the new ways we now collectively express ourselves. Simple digital tools allow us to edit photos and send them ricocheting around the Internet to be seen by thousand of others.

Like a good reporter, he went to the scene - in this case to the UC Davis campus - and talked to one of the people responsible for starting the meme Friday afternoon. Here's how he tells the story:

Of course, creating an Internet sensation was the last thing on the mind of Louise Macabitas, 22, a psychobiology major at UC Davis, when she grabbed her camera and went down to the protest.

She began snapping photos as Lt. John Pike of the UC Davis police walked along a row of huddled students, spraying a bright orange mist of pepper spray into their faces. He got so close to Macabitas that she got pepper spray on her jeans.

Later, she downloaded the photos, and one in particular stood out, which she posted on her Facebook wall.

That photo was shared by many of her friends. One of them eventually posted it in the online Reddit community, a social news site whose members tend to have a snarky sensibility and strong political views, and who frequently remix various objects to trigger many of the Internet's biggest memes.

The Pepper Spray photo caught fire on Reddit, and then spilled back into mainstream sites, according to Kim. Already, the Pepper Spray meme extends beyond Macabitas' photo.

There are YouTube videos of the incident that have more than 1 million views. People are selling T-shirts with various versions of the Pepper Spray photo. And people have even taken to Amazon.com to write satiric reviews of pepper spray products ...

And so on ...

How do Internet technology and user-generated content on social media allow a student with a camera to change the terms of debate in 21st-century America?

COMM 150: How a student with a cellphone uploaded the "pepper spray cop" video and got 1.7 million hits on YouTube

Discuss: How are social media (sometimes hyped as Internet 2.0) changing the face of American culture? You may consider entertainment, politics and/or government. Provide specific examples from Vivian, from your own reading and your own experience communicating with the World Wide Web. Essay assignment, Dec. 2, COMM 150.

The hero of our story is Thomas Fowler, a sophomore at the University of Califoria Davis, who shot a cell phone video Friday, Nov. 18, of a cop pepper spraying student demonstrators on the UC Davis campus.

Another hero is reporter Kevin Fagan of the San Francisco Chronicle, who tracked Fowler down at the scene of last week's pepper spray incident and got the story of how his video went viral and got 1.7 million views (as of Monday). Fowler told Fagan:

"I wasn't involved in the Occupy thing, but I'd just gotten off work at the student center and thought I'd go over to check it out," Fowler said Tuesday. "The cops being there seemed like kind of a big deal, so I shot it."

As the incident ended he showed the video to a friend, "and he said, 'Hey, you should put that on YouTube,' " Fowler said.

That took two minutes. Before the weekend was over, he was fielding calls from dozens of places where it was being aired, from Australia and Spain to CNN. Armchair photo editors have grafted a video still of an officer spraying the chemical irritant onto countless iconic images, from "The Wizard of Oz" to "The Last Supper."

"I guess I'm an accidental journalist," Fowler said. "It's pretty cool seeing my stuff on the Net, and now I'm more sympathetic to the Occupy cause. But I'm sticking with biochemistry."

COMM 150: REVISED essay assignment for the week of Nov. 28-Dec. 2

PLEASE NOTE REVISED ESSAY QUESTION in red type below. We will workshop your papers the day after the Thanksgiving holiday, Monday, Nov. 28.

Your assignment is to write a documented essay five to eight pages in length, reflecting on the following topic:

In "The Media of Mass Communication," John Vivian discusses the worldwide distribution on Twitter of pictures of the 2009 demonstrations against the government in Iran and asks, "Is the Twitter Revolution truly a revolution? Are we at last embracing new media and using them to their fullest potential?" (185). Later he says blogging has "spawn[ed] a wide range of user-generated Internet content." He adds:

The effect has been transformational on the mass media. Just about anybody can create and distribute content - in contrast to the traditional model with munumentally high costs of entry, like starting a newspaper or putting a television station on the air. With user-generated content, the Internet has democratized the mass media by enabling anyone with a computer and a modem to become a mass communicator. (193)

Discuss: How are social media (sometimes hyped as Internet 2.0) changing the face of American culture? You may consider entertainment, politics and/or government. Provide specific examples from Vivian, from your own reading and your own experience communicating with the World Wide Web. Remember: An unsupported generalization is sudden death in college writing. So be specific.

The paper is documented. In my classes, that means sources of information in all of your writing must be attributed or documented according to the basic guidelines of 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!

In researching the topic, you should quote John Vivian's discussion of social media and find more recent examples of the trends he discusses on the Internet or in your own reading or viewing of broadcast media. See also the post on social media links [permalink immediately below], and the post on the "pepper spray cop" internet meme I put up Monday.

I do not require a title page, but you should put your name at the top and center a title above the first paragraph. Please leave two to three inches at the top of the first page. You need to list your sources at the end, by author (when available), title and web address. You can just copy and paste the address into your Microsoft Word document.

Bring me a hard copy of the paper at the beginning of class any day during the week, and email me a backup copy as well at eellertsen@ben.edu.

COMM 150: Social media links, Occupy UC Davis and a message for students who attend class the day before Thanksgiving

"[W]e few, we happy few, we band of brothers [and sisters] ..."

The Saint Crispin's Day Speech from Kenneth Branagh's 1989 film of the Shakespeare classic Henry V. Just before the Battle of Agincourt, in which a badly outnumbered English army defeated the French on Oct. 25, 1415 (St. Crispin's Day). It is considered one of the most stirring speeches (and quotable) in Shakespeare's history plays. The part that sounds kinda like us begins at 2:38.



So, brothers and sisters, how do we read up on social media for the paper that's due Dec. 2?

I'd Google it. (I Google everything.) For example, I did a search on keywords social media and politics, and turned up this Reuters news service story headlined "Insight: Social media - a political tool for good or evil?" Peter Apps, Political Risk Correspondent (I swear I'm not making up either his name or his title!) said, "After the "Arab Spring" surprised the world with the power of technology to revolutionize political dissent, governments are racing to develop strategies to respond to, and even control, the new player in the political arena -- social media."

On Sept. 29, Apps said, "The United States ... has seen some modest signs of social media-organized protest, with hundreds of protesters occupying Wall Street for days this month in anger at perceived excesses by its banks." Then he added, "In Europe, activists have used similar tools to coordinate mass street unrest, although few expect U.S. disturbances on that scale."

Oops. Hard to keep up with, isn't it?

I'm not even going to try. But it's clear that social media, especially if you include blogs, have been driving the story of the protests at the University of California Davis since they got out of hand last week.

The national media haven't exactly been getting out in front of the story. (Nothing unusual about that. They don't know the turf on local stories that go national.) But a "hyperlocal" news site called DavisPatch.com, at http://davis.patch.com/, has several articles that trace how the situation there began a week ago, with a low-key protest against tuition increases on Tuesday, Nov. 15. It was loosely affiliated with Occupy Davis, part of the #OccupyWallStreet movement - if it's proper to say anything can affiliate with a determinedly leaderless movement.

The next day, Patch editor Justin Cox collected some of the Twitter traffic about a demonstration in a campus building for an article headlined: "Government, The Neighborhood Files, Local ConnectionsSocial Media: Key Tool in Mrak Hall Occupation." Cox said, "the Internet played in heavily," and added, "Much of it was projected online via social media such as Facebook, Twitter and UStream." Blog posts in the Patch more typically concern stories like a runaway ferret, but by the weekend local eighth-grade teacher Jennifer Mason Wolfe was comparing the protests at UC Davis to the outbreak of the Revolutionary War.

That was after campus police Lt. John Pike fired what Wolfe called "The (Pepper Spray) Shot Heard Round the World" during an on-campus demonstration Friday.

The first "shot heard 'round the world" was April 15, 1775, when British soldiers fired on minutemen in Concord, Mass., and it was 50 years before Ralph Waldo wrote his poem about it. It only took a few hours for video footage of Pike's shot to go viral. Wolfe said:

Maybe the police didn’t count on the students' ability to fight back with media.

Armed with cell phones and video cameras, our tech-savvy citizens' ability to tweet and harness the power of the web provided them invaluable ammunition to their fight. The cameras do not lie -- they are just another tool for nonviolent protestors to gather their troops and spread the word.

In the meantime, bloggers nationwide have been quick to take up the story. Often they've done better than reporters for newspapers that have decimated their regional bureaus in recent years.

For example, Chicago Theological Seminary professor Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite wrote in the Washington Post's blog On Faith mentioned something I hadn't seen anywhere else. It was how a campus chaplain, the Rev. Kristen Stoneking, and a student negotiated UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi's peaceful exit from campus Sunday after a three-hour standoff outside the administration building.

Thistlethwaite linked to Rev. Stoneking's blog post "Why I walked Chancellor Katehi out of [the administration building] Surge II." Stoneking said she was on her way to an annual meeting of American Academy of Religion in San Francisco, when she got an urgent call from an associate dean saying she was needed back on campus. So she called a student she knows, who confirmed it.

"We turned the car around and headed back to Davis," she said.

Back on campus Stoneking and a student, whom she didn't name, negotiated with Katehi. And something happened that may explain Katehi's apparent about-face on the pepper spray incident:

Before we left, the Chancellor was asked to view a video of the student who was with me being pepper sprayed. She immediately agreed. Then, he and I witnessed her witnessing eight minutes of the violence that occurred Friday. Like a recurring nightmare, the horrific scene and the cries of “You don’t have to do this!” and students choking and screaming rolled again. The student and I then left the building and using the human mike, students were informed that a request had been made that they move to one side and sit down so that the Chancellor could exit. They immediately complied, though I believe she could have left peacefully even without this concession.

Stoneking added:

What was clear to me was that once again, the students’ willingness to show restraint kept us from spiraling into a cycle of violence upon violence. There was no credible threat to the Chancellor, only a perceived one. The situation was not hostile. And what was also clear to me is that whether they admit it or not, the administrators that were inside the building are afraid. And exhausted. And human. And the suffering that has been inflicted is real. The pain present as the three of us watched the video of students being pepper sprayed was palpable. A society is only truly free when all persons take responsibility for their actions; it is only upon taking responsibility that healing can come.

That sounds a little preachy to my ears (hey, Stoneking's a preacher, that's what she does), but it's a perspective I haven't seen in news media coverage.

At any rate, it all shows the power of an amateur video that went viral. And a demonstration of the power of blogging, as Stoneking's post from the perspective of somebody who helped shape the event in Davis, Calif., got picked up by a seminary professor in Chicago and relayed to a blog on the Washington Post website an entire continent away.