The Mackerel Wrapper

COMM 353: How do you decide how to make a decision? A couple of websites on the fine art of herding cats

2012-02-02T08:29:00.032-06:00

Measure twice, cut once. -- Anon. carpenter's proverb.

* * *
Alwaies measure manie, before you cut anie. -- John Florio, Second Frutes 1591. Qtd. in www.bookbrowse.com

As we plan what's going to go into Bulldog Bytes, I want us to pay careful attention to the steps we follow in planning. We could slap together a publication in less than half the time we're going to spend in COMM 353, and it wouldn't look bad. I have a lot of confidence in the skills and attitudes you bring to the class as upper-division students in Comm Arts and Writing and Publishing. But I also want you to learn something you didn't know before you signed up for the course.

Or at least put what you did know together in new ways. That's the point of all the self-reflective writing we're going to do as the semester goes on.

So as we plan the issue, let's pay attention to process.

Edge Leadership Consulting, LLC of Portland, Ore., has a good summary of different Decision-Making Styles on its website. I strongly recommend we deliberately use a combination of the consensus and delegation models.

Here's why. We're professionals. (Have I treated you yet to my speech that you are already media professionals if you're majoring in Comm Arts or Writing and Publishing? You are.) "[We] want high quality input and commitment, with follow-through, from a group," to quote Edge Leadership LLC, and we can get that level of quality.

Also, we'll learn some management skills while we're at it.

Editing is a management function. You've heard me say that before, and you'll hear it again. Here's something one of my J-school professors at Penn State told me when I was complaining about my newsroom management course, "we're not preparing you for your next job, we're preparing you for what you've going to do three or four jobs down the road when you're breaking into middle management." And in the communications industry, editing is typically the entry-level management position.

Even if you don't break into management, you'll probably be doing side projects where you're calling the shots. Even as a free-lancer, you're part of an editorial team. (You're been reading Carol Saller on that issue, right?) It's a lot like herding cats, and you'll be herding cats -- one way or another -- the rest of your professional life.

Which leads me to another point: We're on the creative side of mass communications. That's true whether our ultimate genre is poetry, advertising layout or television news. According to a Newsroom Management "toolkit" published by the European Broadcasting Union, "Journalism means teamwork. Always begin with an editorial meeting, always review scripts for accuracy before they are broadcast, and end by reviewing what went right, and wrong with the day." And this: "Internal communication has to be multi-faceted to be effective. Oral communication (or email) alone does not work. Reinforce all communication verbally, and leave a written trace (bulletin board, internal memo, electronic database, etc.) ... Intelligence, good will and teamwork are more decisive than equipment and money." There's more, and it's all good.

A very different kind of explanation of the consensus model comes from ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, a gay-lesbian-transgender advocacy group that has more of a reputation for civil disobedience than management style. But it's very sound. Here's what the New York chapter of ACT UP says about the consensus model:

What does consensus mean?

Consensus does not mean that everyone thinks that the decision made is necessarily the best one possible, or even that they are sure it will work. What it does mean is that in coming to that decision, no one felt that her/his position on the matter was misunderstood or that it wasn't given a proper hearing. Hopefully, everyone will think it is the best decision; this often happens because, when it works, collective intelligence does come up with better solutions than could individuals.

Consensus takes more time and member skill, but uses lots of resources before a decision is made, creates commitment to the decision and often facilitates creative decision. It gives everyone some experience with new processes of interaction and conflict resolution, which is basic but important skill-building. For consensus to be a positive experience, it is best if the group has 1) common values, 2) some skill in group process and conflict resolution, or a commitment to let these be facilitated, 3) commitment and responsibility to the group by its members and 4) sufficient time for everyone to participate in the process.

Forming the consensus proposals

During discussion a proposal for resolution is put forward. It is amended and modified through more discussion, or withdrawn if it seems to be a dead end. During this discussion period it is important to articulate differences clearly. It is the responsibility of those who are having trouble with a proposal to put forth alternative suggestions.

The fundamental right of consensus is for all people to be able to express themselves in their own words and of their own will. The fundamental responsibility of consensus is to assure others of their right to speak and be heard. Coercion and trade-offs are replaced with creative alternatives, and compromise with synthesis.

When a proposal seems to be well understood by everyone, and there are no new changes asked for, the facilitator(s) can ask if there are any objections or reservations to it. If there are no objections, there can be a call for consensus. If there are still no objections, then after a moment of silence you have your decision. Once consensus does appear to have been reached, it really helps to have someone repeat the decision to the group so everyone is clear on what has been decided.

IN CLASS TODAY: Please read the three documents linked above and decide what, if anything, in them might apply to: (1) Our group project of editing and producing a magazine project; and/or (2) editorial or other creative projects you might undertake in the future. They might be as ambitious as a university press anthology (say for Carol Saller and the University of Chicago) or as down-home as a three-fold brochure for a local retailer. Post your thoughts as comments to this blog post.

If you're curious about jobs, free-lancing, how to tailor your resume, editorial careers, etc., check out Ed 2010 website

2012-01-29T19:31:00.012-06:00

It's called Ed 2010 ... that's "Ed" like in Ed, a guy's name, or ed., the abbreviation for editorial. "Ed2010," according to its website at http://www.ed2010.com/, "is a community of young magazine editors and magazine-editor wannabes who want to learn more about the industry so we can fulfill our dreams of landing top editing and writing positions in the magazine industry."

How cool can that be? Well, actually, I don't know for sure. But I Googled into their website when I was looking for a definition to put in our class blog. Ed's blurb for the glossary:
FOB’s and BOB’s and TOC’s, oh my! Here are all the terms to know so you’ll be able to talk the talk.
If you don't know what a blurb is in a magazine, look in the glossary. It'll tell you. I'd never heard of Ed 2010 before, but the glossary is kosher. At least, the definitions match what I've heard in the business. The tips on how to write a resume were pretty sound, too, especially strategies like listing your education last that you'll need to start using as you get away from academic life.

Ed 2010 is like any other website you surf into. Check it out. See what you think. Be careful. (My instinct is to keep reading till somebody asks me to spend money on something, and then I'm out of there.) But it has some information I think you'll find useful.

Especially that glossary at http://www.ed2010.com/resources/glossary. Bookmark it. We'll keep coming back to it. There's another one, but it's shorter.

COMM 353: New reading assignments, week of Jan. 30-Feb. 3

2012-01-29T16:29:00.025-06:00

If you think the readings for our practicum in editing are getting pretty strange, just wait. They're about to get even stranger ...

This week I will hand out two excerpts from a book by Nancy Brigham titled "How to Do Leaflets, Newsletters & Newspapers." It's an old book, and the technology is way out of date, but it's the best thing I've ever found on the practical, down-to-earth, everyday reality of getting a publication on the street. Brigham did public relations for the United Auto Workers, and she wrote the book for members of the editorial committees in UAW locals who had the responsibility of getting out a newsletter for rank-and-file members of the local. She speaks from experience. And she is very, very practical.

In class Tuesday, we will go over the first handout, which combines snippets on editorial committees, relating to readers, libel and copyright. How does the way she talks about relationships compare to the way Carol Saller talks about them in "The Subversive Copy Editor?"
For class Thursday, read Brigham's chapter on planning an issue of a publication. A lot of it is about scheduling and keeping track of copy flow. (What's that mean? Link here for a definition.) How much of this can we use in today's world? More than you might think.

"Leaflets, Newsletters & Newspapers" in an old book, and you'll notice right away that the technology is way out of date.

At left, out-of-date technology used in Nancy Brigham's day to resize pictures instead of dragging the corners in a desktop publishing program. Artwork at right, below, shows two of the steps (out of five or six) involved in resizing a picture (Brigham 162-63).

When Brigham's book came out, the World Wide Web was an experimental program of CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research, originally the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire), Windows 95 lay four years in the future, desktop publishing was a trendy new concept that nobody really understood, and people were putting together publications with manual typewriters, scissors, pots of rubber cement, production wheels and "pica sticks," which were metal rulers marked off in a printer's measure called picas. (There were six picas to an inch, and you learned to convert them to inches in your head when you were laying out a page.) Every single technological point that Brigham mentions is obsolete.

But she has the psychology nailed.

In 1991, Brigham coordinated the UAW's Local Union Press Association and conducted workshops for locals around the country. Later on, she designed the UAW's first website and served as webmaster before getting a master's degree in information science from the University of Michgan. She is now a communication strategies consultant and is active in the National Writers Union (UAW Local 1981). So a lot of her examples are drawn from organized labor, but what she says about publishing a magazine is good advice for everybody.

"Leaflets, Newsletters & Newspapers" out of print now, but it's still widely available. Amazon.com has 11 new copies and 60 used copies available, at prices ranging from 1 cent ($0.01) on up. I'd recommend buying it! Even if the technology is out of date, you can still get a penny's worth of use out of the chapters on editorial policy, style, "the facts, finding and using them," interviewing, composing and cropping photos, "writing for the people," editing and layout. She also has tips on things like how to reach your target audience with flyers and what to put in a three-fold brochure that have obviously been tested in the real world. One example:

"The best way to offend readers is to throw at the top of your flyer a screaming headline saying, "Vote for Tom Gallagher!" People who agree with you will nod their heads and walk on, and those who disagree will shake their heads and move on. Many will mumble to themselves: "Who do they thihk they are, telling me how to vote?!"

She'll even suggest what you might say instead, but to find out you'll have to pay your penny and order the book.

If you do, it'll be a penny well spent. Again, Brigham has the psychology of publishing in the real world nailed.

Besides, you can always look at the pictures in the margins of antiquated technologies that we don't have to use anymore! Something like that can bring you a world of comfort when the latest version of Windows is freezing up on you and you're having trouble getting your software to do what you want it to do.

COMM 353: What we discussed, decided in class Tuesday

2012-01-25T21:05:00.006-06:00

Thanks to Stacie for taking notes on our class discussion Tuesday. Apologies to Stacie for the limited choice of typefaces in Blogger. Otherwise, the notes are just as she typed them up. - pe

Bytes

Zine by Comm Students

Created in QuarkXpress
Benedictine Online Student Magazine

All articles that begin with “What If…” are works of fiction
Literature Section:
“Why You Should Appreciate This” by Van & poem
“Slamming in Springfield” by Stacie
“Poetry” by Robin
Ask Tim about Lit
Sports Section:
“Indoor Hitting” by Glick
“Baseball Season Starter”
“Bump, Set, and Serving Springfield”
Baseball Schedule
See about softball
News Bytes:
“Eastern Garbage Patch” by Stacie
“Something news” by Van
“Something else news” by Stacie

YA KNOW WHAT BYTES?!
Rants, What if’s?, factoids…

COMM 353 b/log 2nd week: Bulldog Bytes ... what's in a name?

2012-01-25T12:26:00.023-06:00

mag·a·zine ... n. 1. A periodical containing a collection of articles, stories, pictures, or other features.
2. A television program that presents a variety of topics, usually on current events, in a format that often includes interviews and commentary. 3. a. A place where goods are stored, especially a building in a fort or a storeroom on a warship where ammunition is kept. b. The contents of a storehouse, especially a stock of ammunition. 4. a. A compartment in some types of firearms, often a small detachable box, in which cartridges are held to be fed into the firing chamber. b. A compartment in a camera in which rolls or cartridges of film are held for feeding through the exposure mechanism. c. Any of various compartments attached to machines, used for storing or supplying necessary material.American Heritage Dictionary, http://www.thefreedictionary.com/magazine

We're off to a better start in COMM 353 than I'd expected, and I expected it to be good. As I said the first day, you come well recommended by other faculty and I know some of you from my other classes. I like the working title you chose for the 'zine, and - more important, I think - I like the way you went about choosing it. (I'm saying "you" here because I think I should try to stay out of creative decisions.) I liked the way the discussion went from "bark" to "bite" to "byte," so we can't really say the name was suggested by any one person - it was a group initiative as you riffed off of the first idea and tried out different combinations.

Some of my best decisions have been like that, and they haven't really been mine.

Which may be why they were so good!

(I also like the idea of a magazine as a "small detachable box" full of ammunition. But that's probably because I'm a recovering political junkie, and you can safely ignore it.)

Where should we go from here? What should we do in class Thursday? I've got two things in mind we ought to be doing now.

1. Let's keep filling in details on what we want to put in the magazine. Specific things you guys can contribute ... ideas about artwork, departments or sections, etc. Here's some language for an overall statement that might pull together some of the things you were talking about Tuesday:

... a magazine of the arts, current events, sports and student life."

See what you think of it. Or, better, take it and riff off of it and see if it leads you to something that none of us would have thought of without the group effort.

2. Let's look at other magazines, too. Especially on line. I would never, ever suggest that the youth of America as represented in my classes steal anything. Never, ever. But we can certainly look at other magazines and look for ideas we can use. I'm sure you've heard this: You can't copyright ideas. That's why professional writers keep a clip file of articles they can plunder for story ideas, thing they can adapt and make thier own. (At least it used to be a clip file back in the days of paper clips, or clippings. Now it's apt to be electronic - I do mine with hypertext links like this or this on my personal blog.) Sometimes it's known as a "swipe file" but I would never, ever tell my students to swipe anything.

As you know, I like The New Yorker, and there's some language on their website at http://www.newyorker.com/ about "the New Yorker's signature blend of the arts, entertainment and public affairs." (I'm quoting from memory here. The New Yorker's website isn't particularly easy to navigate, and I can never find the damn quote when I want it.) Even so, they do some things with standing headlines and "dingbats" (the word I use for little graphic elements to mark their departments). It's at least worth looking at.

In a day or two, I'll post a blog question on magazines you read that take the place of what The New Yorker did for my generation. But in the meantime, why don't we look at some of the magazines you read in class?

So Thursday afternoon let's surf around and and find some magazines that we might use as models. What departments do they have? Any other ideas for the "swipe file?" Start with magazines you already enjoy. They don't have to be literary, or college oriented. When you find one that's worth looking at, let me know it address and we can project it up on the screen.

COMM 353: UPDATED Searching for a theme for our (magazine, anthology, what's the best word for it)? BULLDOG BYTES

2012-01-23T12:37:00.012-06:00

~~Editor's~~ Instructor's note - Since I've asked you to email me with your list of possible articles and/or thoughts about possible articles, I have updated this blog entry and plan to keep updating it as your messages/lists/thoughts keep coming in. Until we get something more formal (and foolproof) to track copy flow, etc., this post as updated can serve as one of several informal logs of what we're got for the Bulldog Bytes project. - pe

This week in class ...

Let's see what we've got for our publishing project, and start thinking about how it can all fit together. I like what I'm hearing from you about wanting a theme for the thing. (Let's find a good word for what to call it, too. "Publications project," to quote the catalog description, or "demonstration magazine" are the best I've come up with so far. But we can do better than that!) So far I've only heard from a couple of you ... although I may have inadvertently deleted some others from my inbox ... but I think we're off to a good start.

A couple of things are clear already. We've got a wide range of talents and interests represented in the class, so we'll want to reflect that diversity in the project. I hope we can get a mix of literary stuff, both poetry and prose, as well as creative nonfiction, personal essays, sports, public affairs, whatever. When I worked with SCI's campus magazine, a lot of what we called "creative nonfiction" looked a lot like student papers! I don't want to rule anything out yet. Pictures, graphics, art. Let's just see what we've got, get all our ideas up on the table and take it from there.

I'll copy below the messages I've gotten so far.

And below them I'll include a mission statement from the old Sleepy Weasel that might be helpful.

After I asked you Thursday to let me know what you can conribute, I got two email messages. The first came in at 3:30 p.m. the same day. Stacie wrote:

When I was searching for ideas to "borrow" for our magazine I came across several sentences -or ideas- that I felt fit what we might be trying to do. I think we are going to see a lot of variety with our submissions but within this variety I think we will find many themes. One student magazine said that they primarily focus on campus news, sports, events, people and issues, but coverage also branches out to community, state, national and international stories. Now I think every submission will fit into one of these categories and I think that means we have ourselves a magazine! Seeing as how we have several creative writers in the class I think it would be great to include like a "featured lit" section of the magazine. I am very excited about this project Doc!

These are several of my "copies":
"Bump, Set, and Serving Springfield"- This is in a way a biography of a Benedictine student. I feel like this would fit into a "featured students" or "student interests" section of the magazine. It is less than 400 words.
"Slamming in Springfield"- This is a feature article on slam poetry. It features the accounts of John McCarthy, a BenU student. This would also fit into a "featured students" or "student interests" section of the magazine. It is about 900 words.
"Plastic Island on the Move"- This is an article on the "Eastern Garbage Patch." It is about 600 words. This would fit well into the news section of the magazine.

And the second came in at 8:49 that night ... John wrote:

In regards to the content of this magazine. I have a chronic case of not saving things and throwing writings over the place. I suppose it is the Keats in me. I have a few odd poems from some creative writing classes that I don't plan on doing anything else with, but I was thinking about the eclectic approach this magazine is headed. I was wondering if we could assign positions. From there a managing editor could assign assignments from there. (Run this like the bulldog used to be run, sort of.) I am fond of the New Yorker/ New York Times approach with designated sections on individual topics: entertainment/books/politics/economics/etc. Each person could write a different article, and we could take turns editing different articles so we all get the same experience but a more direct and coherent publication. Just my thoughts. See you Tuesday.

Here's the mission statement from the old Weasel, copied from a blog post about COMM 353 that I put up in December when it was clear the course would be offered this semester ...

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.

Our project will be quite a bit different from The Weasel, but it may be helpful for you to know what's been in the back of my mind as I started planning COMM 353 project. It also has a picture I like of a ... well, not exactly a sleepy weasel but a clip-art ferret perched on a stack of books. I do like the stuff in the mission statement about promoting a sense of community on campus, but I want this to be your project, and I don't want to dictate too much.

UPDATE ** Tuesday night ** MORE COPY

Van wroate, today at 3:05 p.m.: " I don't know if we can use any of these things as articles in Bulldog Bytes, However, untill I revive my computer, this (and the few scraps in my email, or my blog) is all that have at the moment." Attached were:

"A Death Dealer’s Day." Analysis of a story by Sarah McCoy.
"A Tangled Web: The Mind of Hamlet." Analysis of a play by some English author.
"Cardio Kickboxing was a trend in the 90’s, but in the 21st century, the fists are flying as fast as ever." Profile.

What do writers, editors, "mega-curators" and street hustlers have in common in a digital age? And how can you "design your own profession?"

2012-01-18T20:49:00.011-06:00

This from Anne-Marie Slaughter, a politics and international affairs professor at Princeton University. From 2009 to 2011 she served as director of policy planning for the U.S. State Department.

In a recent blog for the Harvard Business Review titled "Design Your Own Profession," Slaughter writes that with the digital revolution in full swing, "many old titles and jobs no longer make sense, and many new functions are just waiting to be claimed." She says:

Between the reporter and the editor is now an entire layer of verification functions. Top magazines have always had "fact-checkers": the New Yorker is famous for theirs. But traditionally the verification of facts reported in a newspaper was performed by the reporter and his or her editor. Considering the countless information streams that can produce a set of facts for any particular story these days, media outlets need "verifiers" who are expert at cross-checking information coming from different sources and assessing the credibility of individuals on the ground. Andrew Carvin, a senior NPR strategist who has become one of the principal digital curators for tweets and posts coming from the ground in the Middle East revolutions, is invaluable in part because he has developed the expertise to evaluate the credibility and accuracy of live sources.

One level up, editors are not only super-storytellers but super-curators, figuring out what streams of information should weave together on the website and in actual stories. Publishers are not producers of one finished stream of information but aggregators of many, from raw to polished.

Well, that's a pretty good description of the megatrends. But how can this information be useful to students in journalism, writing and publishing? Slaughter frames the question like this:

So what does all this mean for job-seekers in this uncertain economy? Forget the titles on the org charts and the advertised positions. Design your own profession and convince employers that you are exactly what they need. In my view, the New York Times and other information hubs ought to be advertising for curators and verifiers, but you shouldn't wait for them to do so. Define the functions you think they need and you can supply, and then apply for a corresponding position, whether or not they've created it yet.

This advice isn't anything terribly new. I remember being inspired when I was in grad school, as I read in a book called "What Color Is Your Parachute?" that you create your own job description.

I'm not sure it always worked like that, but all of us were well aware you had to have the instincts of a street hustler in order to survive in the arts. (I'm counting journalism as an art here.) And successful street hustlers have always had something of the artist in them, right? That was true in the 1970s, and it's even more true now. Read the rest of Slaughter's blog. It may not land you a job, but it can get you thinking along lines that will.

Thanks to Associate Academic Affairs Dean Joanna Beth Tweedy for showing me Slaughter's post.

COMM 353 - b/log - Week 1

2012-01-18T09:36:00.016-06:00

Note to students: I'll be blogging along with you in class, at least in the beginning of the semester, partly as an example of I how go about using the medium to develop my voice as a writer. (Think of it as a voice exercise, like singing do mi sol do sol mi do as a warmup.) You certainly don't have to sound like me. But I encourage you to use your own blogs to exercise your own voice. Blogging is a form of publication, but it's provisional, transitory, written on the run. It isn't a finished product, and doesn't pretend to be. So take advantage of that freedom as you write your own blog. - pe

Getting started ...

In the tentative calendar, I assigned for the first week:

Writing: On your own blog, answer these questions, among others I will post to The Mackerel Wrapper. What can you learn from the two introductions [to the books we'll read this semester] that you can use in your writing and editing career? Who’s blogging for the New Yorker’s website these days? What is their slant on things? What are their backgrounds? What can you learn from them?

Some of that we'll do in class Thursday. But I just went flipping through the introductions. And here's a couple of things I learned.

From Carol Fisher Saller, "The Subversive Copy Editor" I get the following:

Saller deals a lot with the nits we pick under the heading of "grammar," but she isn't concerned primarily with the picking grammatical nits. She certainly does like footnotes, though. Some of that freshman English-y stuff you never get away from. Even it isn't what's most important.
She certainly does get a lot of questions for the Q&A column at University of Chicago Press. And - guess what? - the questions are about "grammar." That's what the general public thinks about when they think about editing. I guess it's something we all have to get used to.
Saller tips her hand, says what she's doing. (Which is why I assigned the intro.) Says it flat out: "You won't learn the fundamentals of copyediting from me. Rather, consider this a 'relationshp' book, because I'm going to talk about the main relationships in your work life - with the writer, with your colleagues, and with yourself - in ways that you might not have considered before. Ways that might be considered subversive."
A grammatical nit: I'm noticing Saller uses the "Oxford comma," that comma before "and" in a series - and I'm going to have to get used to it. Associated Press style omits it. University of Chicago keeps it in. My favorite example of why to use it (even though I usually don't) is the hypothetical book dedication to "the people whom I admire the most, my parents, Mother Theresa and the Pope."
Back to relationships, and what I consider the collaborative nature of editing. I really like this: "Who knows? If we're lucky, in the course of figuring out some strategies for getting along with our authors, our bosses, our colleagues, and ourselves, we might also happen to learn something about getting along in life."

You'll no doubt find other things you like - or don't like - about Saller.

And these are some of the things that struck me in James Thurber's "The Years With Ross" about the early glory years of the New Yorker under founding editor Harold Ross:

First thing I learn right off the bat: I really ought to go back and look at the damn book before I write out assignments! This book doesn't have an "introduction." It has forewords. A couple of them. The first, and most important, is by the New Yorker's cultural affairs writer Adam Gopnik.
Gopnik tells us what to look for in the book, too. Here's one thing: "... the story it tells [is] about how writers and editors together, in the years between [World War I Gen. John] Pershing and Pearl Harbor, made a new kind of American music ... a style emerged that still strikes a downbeat for most good American writing today." Gopnik is using "music," of course, as a metaphor from writing.
And this: "... there is something permanent in The Years with Ross about how a writer learns to write, what an editor can teach him, and how the tone they shape together can be around for other writers when both of them are gone."
A comment about Thurber, but it applies as well to the "music" or prose style that The New Yorker did so much to develop: "No one worked harder or went further to slim down the space between American speaking and writing voices, between the way we talk and the way we write."
Gopnik writes for The New Yorker, and he says that style survives today. "Those of us who draw our paychecks at that particular window think it still goes on at the magazine itself, and we knock ourselves out trying to make sure it can. But it doesn't belong to us any more than it ever did. ... I sometimes think of Thurber's late, lovely fable of the last flower, where the world contines because one man, one woman, and one flower are left after the Apocalypse to continue it. Ross's years, Thurber's tone, will go on, I blieve, if there remains onlyh one weird and moving fact, one writer to point at it, and one reader to take heart at its presence."

Notice how the world wars, WWI and WWII, defined the New Yorker's moment in history? What defines our moment in history in the early years of the 21st century? How is it different? How is it the same?

An animated version of "The Last Flower," Thurber's cartoon fable published in November 1939 (two months after the outbreak of World War II), is embedded below. There's a very nice soundtrack to the YouTube clip, but it isn't Thurber's. He drew "The Last Flower" as cartoons on the printed page. So after a minute or so I turned the soundtrack off.

comm 353 syllabus

2012-01-15T15:12:00.014-06:00

SPRING 2012 --
INSTRUCTOR: Pete Ellertsen -- 2125 S Lincoln Ave, Spfld
eellertsen @ ben.edu (copy and paste into address field and delete spaces)
Dawson 220 -- 2:30-3:45 TR

I. COURSE 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.

II. TEXTBOOKS. (1) Carol Fisher Saller, "The Subversive Copy Editor: Advice from Chicago" (Chicago, 2009). ISBN 978-0226734255. (2) James Thurber, "The Years with Ross" (ed. Adam Gopnik, HarperCollins Perennial Classics edition, 2001). ISBN 978-0060959715. We will keep up with The New Yorker’s website at http://www.newyorker.com/ and read selected articles therein assigned by the instructor and/or suggested by students. The Associated Press Stylebook will be used as the stylebook for the course. Optional but also recommended are: “The Chicago Manual of Style” (15th or any recent edition, used copies widely available on line); and Ben Yagoda, “About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made” ISBN 0-684-81605-9.

III. MISSION STATEMENT OF BENEDICTINE UNIVERSITY. Benedictine dedicates itself to the education for the undergraduate and graduate students from diverse ethnic, racial and religious backgrounds. As academic community committed to liberal arts and professional education distinguished and guided by its Roman Catholic tradition and Benedictine heritage - the University prepares its students for a lifetime as active, informed and responsible citizens and leaders in the world Community.

IV. GOALS, OBJECTIVES, AND STUDENT LEARNING OUTCOMES

Degree Program Goals

The Communication Arts degree program goals are as follows:

1. Prepare graduates for careers in advertising, electronic and print media, journalism, public relations, publishing, writing or other careers requiring sophisticated communications skills;
2. Prepare graduates for continued study in graduate or professional school;
3. Develop the student's critical and imaginative thinking, reading and writing skills;
4. Develop skills to empower the student to communicate ideas effectively, through speaking, writing and the use of technology;
5. Develop skills for critical interpretation of the media;
6. Foster aesthetic understanding in both production and interpretation of media texts;
7. Develop knowledge of the methods to make responsible social and personal decisions;
8. Develop primary and secondary research methodologies;
9. Develop an understanding of the history, structure and operation of the mass media;
10. Provide an understanding of the impact of mass media industries and messages on the individual, society and culture;
11. Develop professional-level skills in written and oral communication for a variety of media and audiences;
12. Develop professional-level production skills for both print and electronic media;
13. Encourage the development of creative expression; and
14. Help the student develop a professional media portfolio.

B. Course Goals

• Students will apply 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
• Students will have their work included in a juried piece suitable for inclusion in their portfolios

B. Course Objectives/Outcomes

As a course requirement within the degree program, COMM 353 was designed with the above goals in mind. Thus, upon successful completion of this course, the student will be able to demonstrate mastery of the following objectives and student learning outcomes:

• Students will apply specific editing, production and critical thinking 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.
• Students will refine their critical thinking and professional standards and sense of craftsmanship by reading about 20th-century editorial principles and processes; applying principles to the present media environment; and editing each other’s work for a group portfolio piece.

V. TEACHING METHODS. COMM 353 is designed as a practicum, i.e. a course in which students apply the principles learned in their prerequisite courses, as well as areadings throughout the semester, to the writing, editing and production of a demonstration literary-type magazine.

There are two major components of the course:

1. [Lab magazine.] Students will contribute between three and five written pieces to the magazine, and between one and three pieces of artwork, i.e. visual or graphic work; edit and critique each other’s copy; and prepare all copy for publication. Contributions to the magazine can be work that was preciously submitted in other classes. The finished demonstration magazine will be submitted to outside jurors for evaluation, and the instructor will supervise, mentor and evaluate students during the editing and production phases, and assign final grades to students.

2. [Reading and reflection.] Students will read an introduction to editorial principles, attitudes and procedures by a line editor at the University of Chicago Press and a biography of the founding editor of The New Yorker. They will write essays and Web log (blog) posts reflecting on the craft agenda, attitudes and procedures of the Chicago press and the New Yorker, and apply these principles to current demands on media professionals both in print and on-line platforms.

Embedded questions in test instruments and essay assignments will be used for assessment of learning outcomes.

Students please note: Participation and class discussion are the keys to your success in this course. Be prepared to discuss the weekly reading assignments and contribute thoughtful, topical questions and comments about the material both in face-to-face class meetings and on your blogs. Please be considerate and respectful of one another. Web logs evaluated for course credit in my classes comprise a virtual community and an electronic extension of my classroom. In asking students to post to blogs, as in all of my classes, I encourage you to think for yourselves and try out new ideas; to do that safely, we have to respect and trust each other. Therefore, I must ask that we refrain from negative personal comments or "flame wars" on line. What sounds like friendly kidding when we're F2F (face-to-face) with each other can look hostile and intimidating in writing. Distractions in class will not be tolerated (e.g. disrespectful interruptions of instructor, guest speakers, fellow students, cell phones, and discussions irrelevant to class topics) and can affect your grade. Comments or concerns about specific material presented by the instructor or fellow students (should a student be dissatisfied or concerned) need to be brought to the instructor’s attention before or after class.

VI. COURSE REQUIREMENTS, READINGS, WRITTEN ASSIGNMENTS AND TESTS

A. Attendance Policy.
Attendance is required during all class sessions. Students may miss no more than 10 percent of classes without penalty. Unexcused absences in excess of 10% will result in a reduction of the final grade in direct ratio accordingly. For example, an absence percentage of 17% will result in a reduction of the final grade by 7%. If you must miss a class for legitimate reason – e.g. illness, a child care emergency, jury duty or military duty – you must notify me ahead of time or, in the case of an emergency situation that arises without forewarning, within a reasonable period of time as soon as you are able to contact me. I will attempt to arrange make-up work in the case of a bona fide emergency, but the editing processes involved in COMM 353 are collaborative, and your absence will hurt not only your own performance in the course but also that of your classmates. If the final exam is missed for any reason, it may not be made up. If the absence occurs on the date an assignment is due, the late penalty for assignments still applies.

B. Reading Assignments, Please see the discussion of textbooks above and the tentative calendar below for reading schedule. You are expected to complete readings by the assigned dates and to turn in reflective essays on or before the dates assigned in the syllabus. You will keep up with The New Yorker’s website on a weekly basis. In addition to the readings outlined below, you may be given additional reading assignments including articles, journals, websites, etc. Quizzes and/or tests may cover any of the assigned readings or discussions.

C. Written Assignments and Tests. In addition to writing and editing the material in the demonstration magazine, students will write: (1) two five- to eight-page essays discussing selected issues raised in the assigned readings, with particular attention to how they can incorporate the attitudes, practices and procedures in their own writing; (2) a weblog in which they post weekly updates reflecting on issues raised in their assigned reading and their experience in editing and producing the magazine; (2) a midterm essay examination over the “Subversive Copy Editor” textbook; and (3) a five- to eight-page self-reflective essay at the end of the semester in which they evaluate their perceptions of the course material and its impact on their writing and editing. All assignments are due on the date indicated in the tentative calendar, and must be emailed to the instructor or posted to your blog by the beginning of class on the Thursday of the week during which they are due.

Benedictine University at Springfield Student Academic Honesty Policy
The search for truth and the dissemination of knowledge are the central missions of a university. Benedictine University at Springfield pursues these missions in an environment guided by our Roman Catholic tradition and our Benedictine heritage. Integrity and honesty are therefore expected of all University students. Actions such as cheating, plagiarism, collusion, fabrication, forgery, falsification, destruction, multiple submission, solicitation, and misrepresentation are violations of these expectations and constitute unacceptable behavior in the University community.

Student’s Responsibility
Though there is no formal honor code at Benedictine University at Springfield, students are expected to exhibit academic honesty at all times. Violations against academic honesty are always serious and may result in sanctions that could have profound long-term effects. The final responsibility for understanding the Academic Honesty Policy of the institution, as well as the specific policies for individual courses normally found in syllabi, rests with students. If any doubt exists about what constitutes academic dishonesty, students have the responsibility to talk to the faculty member. Students should expect the members of their class to be academically honest. If students believe one or more members of the class have been deceitful to gain academic advantage in the class, students should feel comfortable to approach the faculty member of the course without prejudice.

Violations of the Academic Honesty Policy will be reported to the Office of the Dean of Academic Affairs. Along with a verbal warning, the following are consequences a student may face for academic dishonesty:
• a failing grade or “zero” for the assignment;
• dismissal from and a failing grade for the course; or
• dismissal from the Institution.

VII. MEANS OF EVALUATION.

The instructor's grading scale is as follows: A = 100-90. B = 89-80. C = 79-70. D = 69-60. F = 59-0.

Written work will be graded for mastery of student learning objectives as evidenced by an evaluation of content, including clarity of thought and the use of relevant detail to support the student's conclusions. A final examination will be given, consisting of essay and short-answer questions, which will be evaluated for content. Quizzes and in-class journal exercises may be assigned without notice at the discretion of the instructor. Contribution to class discussion and participation in on-line research exercises in class will weigh heavily in each student's grade. Final grade weighting is as follows:

WEIGHTING

Student blogs and class participation – 25 percent
Demonstration magazine – 25 percent. This will be a group grade, based in part on outside jurors’ evaluations.

Essays – 50 percent
a. Midterm -- on “Subversive Copy Editor”
b. Reflective essay on “Years With Ross”
c. Self-reflective essay (in lieu of final exam)

If a student believes that an error has been made in reporting a grade, an appeal must be made in writing to the instructor and must be initiated 90 days prior to the end of one semester after the course in question has been completed. The appeal should contain specific information on why it is believed the grade reported is inaccurate. See the Student Handbook for details.

Add/Drop Dates
Please refer to the current Academic Calendar for add/drop dates.

Incomplete Request
To qualify for an “I” grade, a minimum of 75% of the course work must be completed with a “C” or better, and a student must submit a completed “Request for an Incomplete” form to the Registrar’s Office. The form must be completed by both student and instructor, but it is the student’s responsibility (not the instructor’s) to initiate this process and obtain the necessary signatures.

Student Withdrawal Procedure
It is the student’s responsibility to officially withdraw from a course by completing the appropriate form, with appropriate signatures, and returning the completed form to the Advising Office. Please refer to the Student Handbook for important financial information related to withdrawals.

VIII. COURSE OUTLINE AND/OR CALENDAR.

A. The “how” of editing – principles and procedures

1. Working with writers
2. Collaborative nature of editing
3. The zen of editing

B. The “why” of editing – editorial standards, New Yorker case study

1. Literary role and standards
2. Journalistic role
3. Relevance to 21st century?

C. The day-to-day reality of editing – applying the “how” and “why”

1. Editorial standards
2. Professional standards
3. Personal standards

Please see also the tentative calendar below.

IX. AMERICANS WITH DISABILITIES ACT. Benedictine University at Springfield provides individuals with disabilities reasonable accommodations to participate in educational programs, actives and services. Students with disabilities requiring accommodations to participate in class activities or meet course requirements should contact the Director of the Resource Center as early as possible.

If documentation of the disability (either learning or physical) is not already on file, it may be requested. Once on file, an individual student’s disability documentation is shared only at that individual’s request and solely with the parties whom the student wishes it shared. Requests are kept confidential and may be made by emailing jharris@sci.edu or by calling 217-525-1420, ext. 306.

X. ASSESSMENT. Goals, objectives, and learning outcomes that will be assessed in the class are stated in this syllabus in Sections IV and VI. Instructor will use embedded questions in graded writing, background knowledge probes, one-minute papers, reflective essays and/or other Classroom Assessment Techniques as deemed necessary in order to provide continuous improvement of instruction.

TENTATIVE CALENDAR

Week 1 (Jan. 17-19)
• Reading: Saller, Intro (ix-xvi) and Thurber, Intro by Adam Gopnik (ix-xxix). Survey the New Yorker’s website at http://www.newyorker.com/.
• Writing: On your own blog, answer these questions, among others I will post to The Mackerel Wrapper. What can you learn from the two introductions that you can use in your writing and editing career? Who’s blogging for the New Yorker’s website these days? What is their slant on things? What are their backgrounds? What can you learn from them?
• Editing: We will begin the process of planning a demonstration magazine, as described in the syllabus above.

Week 2 (Jan. 24-26)
• Reading: Saller, Part I “Working with the Writer, for the Reader” (3-53). Keep up with the New Yorker at http://www.newyorker.com/. What’s new this week? Does your perception of it change as you become more familiar with it? If so, how?
• Writing: Keep up your own blog. It should begin to take on a journal-like quality as you read the assigned texts, follow the New Yorker on line, begin to work on pulling together a demonstration magazine and reflect on how you might be able to use what you’re learning in our own career.
• Editing: Choose examples of your own writing you wish to have included in the magazine. We need three to five written pieces and one to three pieces of artwork and/or graphic design from each of you.

Week 3 (Jan.31-Feb. 2)
• Reading: Saller, Part II “Working with your Colleagues, and With Yourself” (55-102). Keep following the New Yorker’s website at http://www.newyorker.com/.
• Writing: Keep blogging.
• Editing: We should be well into the planning stages now, making realistic decisions about copy flow, deadlines and the assignment of duties. While I will have suggestions for you based on my experience as faculty adviser to the old Sleepy Weasel, you will be responsible for making the magazine happen.

Week 4 (Feb. 7-9)
• Reading: Saller, Chapters 10, 11 and Appendix, on free-lancing, the Zen of editing and “breaking in” (103-119). Keep following the New Yorker’s website at http://www.newyorker.com/.
• Writing: Keep blogging. I will assign the midterm over Saller. It will be a take-home essay examination, due in class Thursday, Feb. 16.
• Editing: By now we should have a rough idea of our production schedule and deadlines. We need to “crash” the magazine and take it through final edit by the week of April 17-19 in order to get it in the hands of jurors, i.e. outside readers who will evaluate it and help determine the final grade for the group project. So we will have to work back from there.

Week 5 (Feb. 14-16)
• Reading: Thurber, ix-35 (this includes reading Thurber’s foreword and re-reading Gopnik’s, which may give you some indication of how important I think it is). Keep following the New Yorker’s website at http://www.newyorker.com/.
• Writing: Keep blogging. As you start reading Thurber, ask yourself how this story of a very idiosyncratic guy who founded a magazine nearly 100 years ago can have any relevance to our world of bewildering change in media. Blog about it. Keep it in mind as you read on.
• Editing: Have copies of your contributions to the magazine ready to be reproduced and edited by other members of our editorial group. As we begin the process, we will have to figure out a foolproof system for identifying who has edited a piece of copy and which is the final version that goes in the magazine.

Week 6 (Feb . 21-23)
• Reading: Thurber, 36-99. Keep following the New Yorker’s website at http://www.newyorker.com/. As you read more of Thurber, you’ll notice he isn’t exactly writing a straight biography. He’s tricky. What’s his attitude toward Ross? How does he convey it? What can you learn about editing – and about writing – from reading it? Are there principles and practices, tricks, techniques or odd little bits of information you can apply you own career?
• Writing: Keep blogging about your experience and your reading. My questions under the reading assignments are intended to be blogworthy, and you should address them in the blog.
• Editing: We will schedule “workshop” discussions of your contributions and your edits in class.

Week 7 (Feb. 28-March 1)
• Reading: Thurber, 100-120. Keep following the New Yorker’s website at http://www.newyorker.com/. How were the outsize personalities and towering egos of the people who worked with the New Yorker able to mesh in a collaborative manner? Can you infer any psychological and/or management principles from Thurber’s account? Or are these just long-dead personality issues?
• Writing: Keep blogging. As we compare edits and try to come to a consensus on different pieces of writing, what insights do you get from the process into the collaborative nature of writing and editing? Of preparing work for publication?
• Editing: Workshop discussions begin.

Week 8 (March 6-8)
• Reading: Thurber, 121-154. How did the New Yorker’s editorial product change from the “roaring 20s” to the Great Depression, World War II and beyond? How did Ross change? Or did he?Keep following the New Yorker’s website at http://www.newyorker.com/.
• Writing: Keep blogging. What insights from the long-ago historical periods that Thurber writes about can offer you guidance for the second decade of the 21st century?
• Editing: Workshop discussions continue.

Week 9 (March 13-15)
• Reading: Thurber, 155-211. Keep following the New Yorker’s website at http://www.newyorker.com/.
• Writing: Keep blogging. How, in your opinion, does the New Yorker today compare to the magazine of the early 20th century as James Thurber described it?
• Editing: Workshop discussions.

Spring Break (March 19-25)

Week 10 (March 27-29)
• Reading: Read Thurber, 212-72. As you finish “The Years With Ross,” you’ll notice the tone becomes almost elegiac. What does it tell you about Ross? About Thurber? About the collaborative nature of publishing? Keep following the New Yorker at http://www.newyorker.com/.
• Writing: Keep blogging. I will assign you an essay reflecting on Thurber’s biography of Harold Ross and its applications, if any, to today’s world.
• Editing: Workshop discussions.

Week 11 (April 3-5)
• Reading: Keep following the New Yorker’s website at http://www.newyorker.com/.
• Writing: Five- to eight-page essay on “Years With Ross” due Thursday, April 5 (grace period to Tuesday, April 10).
• Editing: Copyfitting and layout.

Easter Recess (April 6-9)

Week 12 (April 10-12)
• Reading: Keep following the New Yorker’s website at http://www.newyorker.com/.
• Writing: Grace period expires on Thurber essay. Keep blogging as we start crashing the magazine.
• Editing: Copyfitting, layout and last-minute crises.

Week 13 (April 17-19)
• Reading: Keep following the New Yorker’s website at http://www.newyorker.com/.
• Writing: Keep blogging, crashing and more blogging.
• Editing: FINAL EDIT

Week 14 (April 24-26)
• Reading: Keep following the New Yorker’s website at http://www.newyorker.com/.
• Writing: Keep blogging. I will assign final self-reflective essay.
• Editing:

Week 15 (May 1-3)
• Reading: Keep following the New Yorker’s website at http://www.newyorker.com/.
• Writing: Self-reflective essay due.
• Editing:

Last Day of Classes (May 5).
Final Exams (May 7-12). Our exam period TBA.

COMM 150: Last day of classes

2011-12-08T21:24:00.010-06:00

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

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.
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.

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

2011-12-08T20:13:00.006-06:00

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

2011-12-08T19:57:00.004-06:00

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 ...

2011-12-07T22:04:00.023-06:00

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

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).
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.
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.
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

2011-12-07T21:16:00.006-06:00

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

2011-12-07T11:30:00.002-06:00

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

2011-12-07T07:07:00.012-06:00

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)

2011-12-03T16:14:00.012-06:00

** 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 question~~s, 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

2011-12-02T22:34:00.003-06:00

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

2011-12-01T17:37:00.000-06:00

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

2011-11-30T22:14:00.011-06:00

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

2011-11-30T09:30:00.005-06:00

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

2011-11-29T23:21:00.006-06:00

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

2011-11-29T13:31:00.006-06:00

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

2011-11-28T21:42:00.022-06:00

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

2011-11-28T16:27:00.004-06:00

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

2011-11-27T08:17:00.004-06:00

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

2011-11-26T22:42:00.008-06:00

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?

2011-11-26T00:22:00.013-06:00

"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

2011-11-24T08:57:00.013-06:00

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

2011-11-24T00:54:00.023-06:00

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

2011-11-24T00:26:00.007-06:00

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

2011-11-23T15:36:00.006-06:00

"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

2011-11-23T00:05:00.010-06:00

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

2011-11-22T19:12:00.019-06:00

"[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.

COMM 337: Feature story assignment, writer's guidelines

2011-11-22T10:37:00.013-06:00

Your feature story assignment comes from our syllabus, which stipulates:

VI. COURSE REQUIREMENTS ... C. Written Assignments.
(1) Students will write a 1,500- to 2,000-word article on a current political, social, cultural or artistic issue, research potential markets for it and write a one-page query letter tailored to a specific market.

It is designed to accomplish the following:

Course Goals: Students will understand the techniques, attitudes, values and craft agenda of professional writers, and practice their mastery of the craft by preparing a publishable article and by publishing their analysis of current published writing in a Web log of their own creation.

That's all pretty general, though. So here are the specifics of the assignment.

Feature story

Due in class the week of Nov. 28-Dec. 1. Best to give me a hard copy and email me a backup copy.

Length: At least 1,500 words
Format: Microsoft Word, double-spaced, 12pt Times New Roman type
Language: English

Other than that, I don't much care about format. It's a publishable article, so you want to edit it for spelling and grammar. (An error in either one is a guaranteed way to get your article deposited in the floor-level circular file and used to line cat litter boxes or paper-train puppies. Right?) Email it to me, and save a copy to your hard drive.

But I do care about how you report it. Good writing is based on good reporting, and that's why I've been stressing interviews when I talk about the feature story. There's no magic number, but professional like to see at least three separate people interviewed. So if you want a magic number, three's a good one.

Query letter

Email it to me at the same time as your story.

Length: 1 page, including your return address, editor's inside address and signature line
Format: Standard business letter, single-spaced, block paragraphs. Use a conservative typeface like Times New Roman, Arial or Verdana.
Language: Seriously, here's where you do your best writing. It's a sales pitch, and you're showing what you can do.

Address it to somebody specific. By name. You can find a market by searching the All Freelance Writing.com directory at http://allfreelancewriting.com/writers-markets/, or you can address the query to me. I used to be the faculty adviser to a campus magazine called The Sleepy Weasel, and in the spring I'll be working with students in COMM 353 (advanced seminar) on a magazine editing project. Tentative plans are to work with stories written by students; if so, we'll be looking for stories.

If you take that option, there are some things in the 2009 issue of the Sleepy Weasel that will help you know what I'm looking for in student writing.

The first is the editor's note headlined "Weasel words: Hickory dickory … mission in action." (I wasn't the editor, I was the faculty adviser. But that made me a de facto procudtion manager.) Among other things, it has the 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 [...]. The Weasel seeks to highlight written and artistic work by SC/BU 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.

As you probably know, I am not cynical about mission statements.

The ~~editor's~~ de facto production manager's note is near the top of the magazine - which is all in one long HTML document. If you scroll down to the end, you'll find a an article "Information, Links, and Personal Thoughts on Freelance Writing" by Lauren Burke.

Among other things, she says:

Don’t underestimate the willingness of people to share information.

From the forensic artist I met when I accidentally interrupted a law-enforcement convention to the Klezmer music-playing entomologist I bumped into in a junk shop while on vacation, I’m learning that people will really open themselves up when you’re interested.

I have found the same to be true when it comes to contacting authors. If you have a favorite author or writer, send fan mail. Seriously. I can’t believe these people even open their mail, let alone write back to lowly peons like myself. BUT THEY DO.

One guy was totally pumped about giving me advice on how to land a book contract. My favorite author/illustrator of all time (Lauren Child, UK), just wrote me back a year and a half after I had sent her a letter. My letter got lost; she recently found it, and sent back a nice little reply with doodles and an offer to write again. That is commitment.

Seriously, people, it doesn’t hurt to try!

Good advice. Here's some more:

Rejections.

Are like poop. They happen. It’s a normal part of life, not anything to dwell on. Don’t let the thought of rejections keep you from making submissions.

Besides, there is always that editor who balances out others’ rejections by sending Christmas cards.

All of this is worth reading even if you're not querying me.

A shameless sales pitch: If you're interested in COMM 353, here's the course 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.

Plans are still tentative, but I envision it as a hands-on course for students in Writing and Publishing, and Communication Arts students as well, with an emphasis on how to edit something to bring out the writer's voice. Texts are: Carol Fisher Saller, The Subversive Copy Editor: Advice from Chicago (U. of Chicago, 2009); and (2) James Thurber, The Years with Ross (ed. Adam Gopnik, HarperCollins Perennial Classics edition, 2001).

COMM 150: "Pepper spray cop," social media, memes and the interactivity of the Internet

2011-11-21T21:06:00.017-06:00

'Pepper Spray Cop' celebrates July 4, 1776
Lt. John Pike of the University of California Davis campus police can thank the Internet for his 15 minutes of fame. But he may not be feeling too grateful. Now immortalized as the "Pepper Spray Cop," Lt. Pike is the latest poster child for unthinking police brutality. And he and his can of pepper spray have been Photoshopped into art works from Michelangeo to an old Peanuts comic strip and the cover of the Beatles album Abbey Road.

And a page that sells pepper spray on Amazon.com has picked up some sarcastic user reviews. C/NET quotes one: "When I reach for my can of Defense Technology 56895 MK-9 Stream, 1.3% Red Band/1.3% Blue Band Pepper Spray, I know that even the mighty First Amendment doesn't stand a chance against its many scovil [sp.] units of civil rights suppression."

Some of the reaction sounds ominous. The hackers' group Anonymous has published Pike's home phone numbers and hinted at retaliation.

But mostly, the Internet action is funny. Tumblr user porcupineschool insists the meme doesn't trivialize the incident:

Internet memes as a form are built on the idea that the audience and the author are the same group of people. Looking, creating, and sharing all blend together into one activity. This isn’t Jonathan Swift writing clever satire for you to read. It’s us creating a satirical and cathartic experience for ourselves.

The old adage, “the pen is mightier than the sword,” is another way of saying that ideas will always spread and mutate and multiply, and they can never be killed. This is what internet meme culture is all about. The echo chamber of online visual culture is gaining the ability to both provide a cathartic experience to those dismayed by abuse of power, and catalyze people to confront those abuses faster than ever before. I think that’s thrilling.

A lot of the Photoshopped images are on Tumblr at http://peppersprayingcop.tumblr.com/, but they've been popping up everywhere.

According to National Public Radio, the Pepper Spray Cop meme apparently started with visual artist James Alex, who blogs on Tumblr as Jockohomo, who has a fine collection at http://jockohomo.tumblr.com/ of his own mashups and a couple of others he particularly admires (including the Trumbill painting of the Declaration of Independence at the top of this page). Maura Judkis of The Washington Post has several of the best in a lifestyle blog post headlined "Pepper-spray cop works his way through art history."

In a thoughtful analysis, Philip Kennicott, culture critic for the Washington Post, suaggests the original photo "probably will be the defining imagery of the Occupy movement, rivaling in symbolic power, if not in actual violence, images from the Kent State shootings more than 40 years ago." He adds:

It looks as though he’s spraying weeds in the garden or coating the oven with caustic cleanser. It’s not just the casual, dispassionate manner in which the University of California at Davis police officer pepper-sprays a line of passive students sitting on the ground. It’s the way the can becomes merely a tool, an implement that diminishes the humanity of the students and widens a terrifying gulf between the police and the people whom they are entrusted to protect.

Kennicott also suggests:

The UC-Davis video might open up a broader conversation about the proper role of the police, especially during an era in which it appears that protest against the established order may be more frequent and widespread. This new era of protest, if it continues to develop, will play out on the Internet, with rapidly uploaded videos providing not just evidence of what happens, but evidence from numerous perspectives, as each encounter is recorded by dozens of onlookers and participants.

COMM 337: A new Michael Lewis review, another not-very-cheery economic forecast ... and a "cute" antidote for reading too much political news

2011-11-21T09:43:00.013-06:00

There's a new review of Michael Lewis' book "Boomerang" in the New York Review of Books. It's by John Lanchester, an Englishman who has also written a book about the current economic crisis, and I think it's important.

First, a word or two about Lanchester. He's a novelist-turned-journalist who wrote a 2010 book titled "I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay." (The title was even better in the U.K. It was: "Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay.") In a style the New York Times describes as "literate" and "wickedly funny," he covers much the same ground as Lewis.

Lanchester liked Lewis' style of writing, which can also be wickedly funny, although he questioned his "society-wide generalizations" about Germany. And he came to remarkably similar conclusions:

One of the lasting feelings I took away from my own experiences of “financial disaster tourism,” as Lewis calls it, was one of sadness. I went to the same countries and met different people who told very similar stories. It is easy to diagnose a basic failure of responsibility as one of the causes of the debt crisis; and there’s no denying that such failures took place on the widest imaginable scale, from individuals up to governments.

But then he goes on to make a point that Lewis hinted at but didn't develop very far:

I think, though, that the failure of responsibility was linked to a failure of agency—the individual’s ability to affect the course of events. An enormous number of people today feel as if they have very little economic agency in their own lives: often, they are right to feel that. The decisions that affect their fates are taken far above their heads, and often aren’t conscious decisions at all, so much as they are the operation of large economic forces over which they have no control—impersonal forces whose effects are felt in directly personal ways.

It is difficult to feel responsible when you have no agency. Many of the people who did stupid things ... did so because everyone around them was doing them too, and because loud voices were telling them to carry on. The Icelanders who bought cars with foreign currency loans were sold them by financiers who promised that it was a good idea; the Irish who bought now-unsellable houses on empty estates were told, by builders and bankers and the state, that this was a once-in-a-generation opportunity; the Greeks who are, at the time of writing, furiously rebelling against austerity measures were falsely told that the state could afford to look after them, and arranged their lives accordingly.

The collective momentum of a culture is, for more or less everybody more or less all of the time, overwhelming. This is especially true for anything to do with economics. The evidence is clear: it is easy to mislead people about money, and easy to lead members of the public astray both individually and en masse, because when it comes to money, most of us, most of the time, don’t know what we’re doing. The corollary is also clear: the whole Western world misled itself over debt, and the road back from where we are goes only uphill.

As Lanchester says, Lewis' is "a sad book, as well as a vivid and funny and enlightening one." And Lanchester's review is sad and vivid, funny and enlightening at the same time.

In Sept. 8 issue of the London Review of Books, Lanchester wrote an article on the global economy titled "The Non-Scenic Route to the Place We're Going Anway." It was just after the U.S. House Republican caucus rejected a deficit reduction compromise and the U.S. debt rating was downgraded, and Lanchester thought government inaction it would further weaken the economic conditions in the European Union as well:

It is this failure of political will both in the EU and US which is starting to make the contemporary economic scene resemble that of the 1930s. The discipline of macro-economics was born out of the study of the Great Depression, in an attempt to understand what had happened and avoid a repetition. That’s why it’s so depressing to see the developed world not just sleepwalking towards another recession, but actively embracing policies which make it more likely. Governments can’t all simultaneously cut spending while also continuing to grow their economies: it just defies common sense to think they can. The problem is in large part to do with the application of an incorrect metaphor, the easy-to-understand idea that a household has to live within its income. But governments are not households, and the idea of cutting your way to prosperity cannot be read across from an individual’s finances to those of the state. It’s a manifest fact that these policies, and the refusal to embrace stimulus spending, are causing economic slowdowns all over the world that are triggering the current anxiety in the markets, which is in turn causing the predicament of governments to intensify, as confidence sinks and the self-fulfilling expectations of a second downturn take hold. This in turn puts pressure on expectations about governments’ abilities to repay their debts, which further lowers confidence, and so on.

Fair enough. But, remember: Lanchester is writing an opinion piece, and his opinion is grounded in a particular economic theory that says government spending jump-started the economy out of the Great Depression. Other financial journalists think cuts in government spending are the best way to create jobs and get the economy booming in the 21st century. Fox News, for example, gives air time to literally dozens of them.

At any rate, Lanchester's prediction for the future in Europe and the U.S. alike is pretty much the same as Lewis' - a decade of hard times while "debts are paid down, the economy is slowly and miserably rebalanced, and eventually things grow back to where they were when the bubble burst." As he said not once but a couple of times in his review of Lewis' book, it's a sad story.

So here's what I do when I've overdosed on sad stories. In my line of work, which involves reading a lot of political - and economic - journalism, it's an occupational hazard. So if I get too much of them, I go to a website called Cute Overload that features adorable kittens, puppies, bunny rabbits, any little critters that leave you barfing rainbows and otherwise forgetting about the problems of the world for a moment. You may already know about it. If you don't, it can be a great mood lifter.

The following Public Service Anouncement for Cats, narrated in the first person by on-air talent with the best radio voice I've ever heard from a cat, is on YouTube. It's put up on the Shelter Pet Project channel. Their blurb:

The Shelter Pet Project is a public service ad campaign focused on
spreading the word that pets in shelters are wonderful and lovable,
and encouraging potential adopters to consider the shelter as the
first place to find a new best friend.

Visit http://theshelterpetproject.org/ to search for available shelter pets in your area and learn more about shelter pet adoption.

COMM 150: Jon Stewart pummels pundits, polls, presidential primaries - IN-CLASS BLOG EXERCISE AND DISCUSSION

2011-11-18T09:29:00.031-06:00

Dogging the watchdogs ...

Before watching the embedded video, please read through this blog item to the end, making note of the questions I want you to post answers to in order to kick off our class discussion.

John Vivian, in "The Media of Mass Communication," says the press is traditionally known as the "fourth branch of government," after the legislative, executive and judicial branches. "Its job," he explains, "is to monitor the other branches as an external check on behalf of the people. This is the watchdog role of the press" (379-81. Boldface type in the original.) As Vivian suggests, this concept goes all the way back to Sir Edmund Burke and the English Parliament in the 1780s, and it has a long history in both English and American political thought. (A good starting point for tracing it is the article on the "Fourth Estate" in Wikipedia.) But who watches the watchdogs?

Well, academics like John Vivian, for starters.

"Although critics argue that the media are politically biased, studies don't support this," Vivian says. "Reporters perceive themselves as middle-of-the-road politically, and by and large they work to suppress personal biases. Even so, reporters gravitate toward certain kinds of stories to the neglect of others, and this influences coverage."

Vivian lists several "media obsessions" (384-85). They are:

Presidential coverage. Instead of issues, the media like to report on personalities. So they personalize issues by focusing on the president.
Conflict. Harking back to an earlier discussion, Vivian suggests "Part of journalists' predilection for conflict is that conflict involves change."
Scandals. Readers like them, but emphasizing them "trivializes political coverage."
Horse Races. Vivian defines them as "election campaign[s] treated by reporters like a game - who's ahead, who's falling back, who's coming up the rail."
Sound bites. A sound bite, or actuality, is the term for a recorded direct quotation in broadcast journalism. It has also come to stand for a short, snappy quote that doesn't go into depth.

In addition to academics, the media monitor each other. For example, Jon Stewart's "fake news" segments on the Daily Show.

(Content advisory: A lot of people think Stewart has a liberal political agenda, and he does seem to spend an awful lot of time making fun of Republicans. But he says he likes to throw spitballs at politicians of either party, and he consistently takes out after the media. Also: As we watch his show, we also ought to keep in mind he's a comedian. He's not even trying to be fair and balanced to anybody - politicians, press or anybody else.)

The segement aired last week, after a presidential preference poll showed Repubican candidate Newt Gingrich in the lead ... how many of Vivian's media obsessions can you spot? You'll have a chance to express yourself in writing (see below for details) on this point.

Jon Stewart: Newt Gingrich Latest 'Zombie' GOP Frontrunner Who Doesn't Know He's Dead (VIDEO) (5:32)

In an interview on National Public Radio in September 2010, Stewart told NPR's Terry Gross he's especially disappointed in the media:

The [more] you spend time with the political [world] and media, the less political you become and the more viscerally upset you become at corruption. I don't consider it political, because 'political' I always sort of note as a partisan endeavor. But I have become increasingly unnerved by the depth of corruption that exists at many different levels. I'm less upset with politicians than [with] the media. I feel like politicians — the way I explain it, is when you go to a zoo and a monkey throws feces, it's a monkey. But when the zookeeper is standing right there and he doesn't say, 'Bad monkey' — somebody's gotta be the zookeeper. I feel much more strongly about the abdication of responsibility by the media than by political advocates.

So instead of watchdogs, we have zookeepers.

In a very good profile of Stewart in the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times reported:a

MR. STEWART describes his job as “throwing spitballs” from the back of the room and points out that “The Daily Show” mandate is to entertain, not inform. Still, he and his writers have energetically tackled the big issues of the day — “the stuff we find most interesting,” as he said in an interview at the show’s Midtown Manhattan offices, the stuff that gives them the most “agita,” the sometimes somber stories he refers to as his “morning cup of sadness.” And they’ve done so in ways that straight news programs cannot: speaking truth to power in blunt, sometimes profane language, while using satire and playful looniness to ensure that their political analysis never becomes solemn or pretentious.

“Hopefully the process is to spot things that would be grist for the funny mill,” Mr. Stewart, 45, said. “In some respects, the heavier subjects are the ones that are most loaded with opportunity because they have the most — you know, the difference between potential and kinetic energy? — they have the most potential energy, so to delve into that gives you the largest combustion, the most interest. I don’t mean for the audience. I mean for us. Everyone here is working too hard to do stuff we don’t care about.”

Tangent: "Agita" is a cool word. I wasn't familiar with it, so I looked it up. (I Google everything.) According to Urban Dictionary, it's an Italian-American word for heartburn that's taken on a secondary meaning, "Giving you more aggrevation than you can stand."

Here are your questions. Make notes on a sheet of scrap paper as you watch, and post your answers as comments to this blog item.

In this recent segment, how much of Jon Stewart's satire is directed at the politicians and how much at the media that cover them? Is he "speaking truth to power?"

How many of Vivian's list of media obsessions do you see reflected in Stewart's monolog and the clips - sound bites or actualities - he shows in the course of the monolog?

Finally: Is Stewart a "good zookeeper?" Or is he just throwing something at the monkeys? Post your thoughts below.

Later [Tuesday, Nov. 22]: According to a story in today's Los Angeles Times, "A new survey of New Jersey voters comes to a provocative conclusion: Fox News viewers tend to be less informed about current events than those who don't watch any news at all." Washington correspondent Mike Memoli adds, "And it seems Jon Stewart may be more reliable than cable news anchors. On Occupy Wall Street, the survey found viewers of "The Daily Show" were 12 percentage points more likely to say protesters were predominantly Democratic. MSNBC viewers were the most likely to say the protesters were mainly Republicans." I'm not sure about the question: Seems to me like the protesters aren't very happy with either party. But if the question's any good, the distribution of answers is well beyond the margin of error.

COMM 337: In class today (Nov. 17) - the "McMurtry test" and querying for different markets

2011-11-17T11:37:00.006-06:00

In-class discussion. In small groups, with the two or three people sitting next to you (or all the way across the room if that's what you want to do), brainstorm and post as comments to this blogpost.

Take a story idea. It can be one you've been working on, or it can be one of the demonstration topics we've been kicking around in class - the Maine coon cat epic, the legacy of the Scottsdale (Ariz.) Fighting Artichokes, whatever. Write the first sentence of a query letter to at least three hypothetical markets that publish one of the common article genres mentioned in the Writer's Digest Handbook. Make sure it passes what I call the "McMurtry test" (see below faor explanation and inspiration). Post your best effort to the blog, and make sure you include all your names so everyone gets credit.

The "McMurtry Test"

This is something I named after Larry McMurtry, a very successful author of midlist novels that get turned into screenplays. The movie "The Last Picture Show" and the TV series "Lonesome Dove" are probably his best-known works. He wrote the novels both are based on, and he worked with the screenplays. In a word, he knows what sells.

And first sentences sell books.

Here's what I learned in fiction writing workshops when I was learning how terribly difficult it is to write fiction - your very first sentence has to be good enough to draw in a reader who's flipping through books on a shelf at the bookstore. If it isn't, he'll put it down and go on to the next book. Here's the hard part: It has to be about what the book's going to be about, it has to introduce a main character, the theme, the setting, that kind of thing. Sort of like what a lede does in our type of writing, but punchier. A couple of days later, I was in a bookstore and tried it on one of McMurtry's novels. Sure enough, it drew me in. I bought the book, took it home and read it. So a few days after that, Debi and looked at a bunch of McMurty's novels. They all started out that way. We took to calling it the "McMurtry test" in our own writing: Does the first sentence grab a reader and suggest what the article's going to be about. If it does, it passes the test.

It didn't take me long to realize I'd better stick to non-fiction, but the McMurtry test stayed witha me.

Let's go to Amazon.com, and I'll demonstrate with two of McMurtry's novels:

"Lonesome Dove" - click where it says "Click to LOOK INSIDE" and click on "First Pages." The first sentence is, "When Augustus came out on the porch, the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake - not a very big one."
"Texasville" - click to look inside, and click on "First Pages." The opening sentence is, "Duane was in the hot tub, shooting at his new doghouse with a .44 Magnum."

Doesn't that make you want to read on?

Now it's your turn. Do the query exercise, and post your efforts in the comments field below.

COMM 337: Objectivity, fairness and professional ethics

2011-11-15T21:26:00.011-06:00

After we talked about objectivity in class Tuesday, I decided I'd better look it up instead of winging like I did in class. Here's what I found. Objective is defined in Dictionary.com as "not influenced by personal feelings, interpretations, or prejudice; based on facts; unbiased: an objective opinion. So objectivity is the noun form. I think it's one of those goals that's impossible for a writer to attain.

I think it's also very important for us to keep trying.

If you've seen the reruns of "Dragnet," the old 1950s TV cop show, you remember Sergeant Friday saying, "Just the facts, ma'am." That's what I think of when I'm thinking about objectivity.

A closely related concept is fairness. Dictionary.com says it is "the state, condition, or quality of being fair, or free from bias or injustice; evenhandedness." And fair is defined as "free from bias, dishonesty, or injustice>"

The Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics doesn't specifically address the issue of objectivity, although it comes close when it says professional writers shoud: "Distinguish between advocacy and news reporting. Analysis and commentary should be labeled and not misrepresent fact or context." It's not limited to politics, either. The next canon of ethics adds, "Distinguish news from advertising and shun hybrids that blur the lines between the two." Note that the SPJ doesn't forbid advocacy. It just says it has to be clearly labeled as such.

The Public Relations Society of America's Code of Ethics is all about advocacy, of course, but it says, "We serve the public interest by acting as responsible advocates for those we represent. We provide a voice in the marketplace of ideas, facts, and viewpoints to aid informed public debate." Accuracy, truth and fairness are part of responsible advocacy. "We deal fairly with clients, employers, competitors, peers, vendors, the media, and the general public. We respect all opinions and support the right of free expression."

I think it keeps getting back to that marketplace of ideas, and treating people fairly is just good business.

So even-handedness and fairness are important things for us to aspire to in the communications industry. Free-lance writers may or may not belong to SPJ or PRSA, but we'll follow the canons if we're professionals.

The best guidelines I could find on line are by Tony Rogers, a working journalist and community college instructor who wrote several About.com guides to newswriting. One is a Code of Conduct for Reporters that says:

Never state your opinions or inject yourself into any event you cover, such as protests, rallies or public comment forums. As a reporter you're there as a professional observer, not a participant.

Again, he's talking about reporters covering an event. Advocates, writing for example on the editorial page or the op-ed columns, state their opinions. But they label them as opinions. They play fair.

A related point. Play fair with your sources, too. Says Rogers, "Always make it clear to people you're interviewing that you're writing an article that could be published." When I'm free-lancing and writing on spec, I tell them it may or may not be published and the decision isn't up to me. That way I'm not promising them any publicity I may not be able to deliver.

Rogers started on the Capital Times in Madison, Wis., one of the better small dailies in the Midwest. And he was a reporter for the New York Daily News, which is in my opinion one of the best of the big-city tabloids. Now he teaches at Bucks County Community College in the suburbs of Philadelphia. He knows what he's talking about. Here are his definitions of objectivty and fairness, in an About.com piece on objectivity:

Objectivity means that when covering hard news, reporters don’t convey their own feelings, biases or prejudices in their stories. They accomplish this by writing stories using a language that is neutral and avoids characterizing people or institutions in ways good or bad.
Fairness means that reporters covering a story must remember there are usually two sides – and often more – to most issues, and that those differing viewpoints should be given roughly equal space in any news story.

Demonstrating the fairness he's writing about, Rogers adds a couple of caveats [warnings]:

There are a few caveats to remember when considering objectivity and fairness. First, such rules apply to reporters covering so-called hard news, or straight news stories, for the main news section of the newspaper or website. Obviously they don’t apply to the political columnist writing for the op-ed page, or to the movie critic working for the arts section, both of whom make a living giving their opinions on a daily basis.

Second, remember that ultimately, reporters are in search of the truth. And while objectivity and fairness are important, a reporter shouldn’t let them get in the way of finding the truth.

Copied below is some more wisdom. The first two are from one of those webpages that collect lots of quotes The first is from Dave Berry, who wrote a very popular humor column for the Miami Herald:

We journalists make it a point to know very little about an extremely wide variety of topics; this is how we stay objective. ~ Dave Barry.

And the second is from P.J. O'Rourke, who writes very opinionated - and very funny - commentary with a conservative slant:

I am a journalist and, under the modern journalist's code of Olympian objectivity (and total purity of motive), I am absolved of responsibility. We journalists don't have to step on roaches. All we have to do is turn on the kitchen light and watch the critters scurry. ~ P.J. O'Rourke.

My all-time favorite is from Stanley Walker, longtime city editor of the New York Herald Tribune. (He was from Texas, and there's a good bio called "What Stanley Walker Saw" in TexasEscapes.com magazine.) In 1924 Walker said

What makes a good newspaperman? The answer is easy. He knows everything. He is aware not only of what goes on in the world today, but his brain is a repository of the wisdom of the ages. He is not only handsome, but he has the physical strength which enables him to perform great feats of energy. He can go for nights on end without sleep. He dresses well and talks with charm. Men admire him; women adore him; tycoons and statesmen are willing to share their secrets with him. He hates lies and meanness and sham, but he keeps his temper. He is loyal to his paper and to what he looks upon as the profession; whether it is a profession, or merely a craft, he resents attempts to debase it. When he dies, a lot of people are sorry, and some of them remember him for several days.

I want that quote on my tombstone.

COMM 150: REVISED ASSIGNMENTS FOR FRIDAY AND NEXT WEEK - 'Boomtown Singles' in 'Mayberry-ville'? Demographic typologies and Springfield

2011-11-15T20:24:00.019-06:00

FOR FRIDAY: Read this post and the pages I have linked below: (1) the Marketing Research Association webpage; and (2) the USA Today story on market segmentation research; and (3) the Claritas page on market segmentation profiles. FOR NEXT WEEK: Read Chapter ___ on media and government and Chapter ___ on globalization in Vivian. Be ready to take a pop quiz on either or both.

Extra credit "Quiz" in class Friday because attendance was so low: For extra credit (115,000 points), answer the following question:
What demographic would you reach by advertising in Teen Vogue magazine?

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half. - Attributed to John Wanamaker

Wanamaker (1838 - 1922) founded the big downtown department store (named Wanamaker's, what else?) in Philadelphia. He is considered one of the fathers of retail advertising. Market research can be considered as a grab bag of techniques that advertisers use to try to answer Wanamaker's question.

But there's more to it than that. The Marketing Research Association defines it like this:

Marketing research functions in two ways. It identifies key characteristics and attributes of a product or service through individual interviews or group discussions (qualitative research) and it analyzes these attributes by statistical analysis of answers given in a structured set of questions such as a survey or questionnaire (quantitative research). The specific research problem determines whether to employ one or both modes.

Adds the MRA:

WHY do research?
Research has always played a crucial role in the products, programs, social service programs, and laws that affect our daily lives that we all use. Companies are very responsive to what they learn from research and products are changed to meet the needs of the American public.

HOW is research executed?
Marketing researchers adhere to a systematic and objective process to identify problems, collect and analyze appropriate data and present conclusions. Researchers belonging to professional organizations adhere to guidelines such as MRA's Code of Marketing Research Standards and Bylaws, which governs acceptable interview practices and all members must abide by the Code. MRA members will never ask leading questions or try to sell products or services to respondents.

So the telephone surveys that politicians rely on are one of the techniques used in market research, but not the only one.

A key component of market research is demographics - the statistical profile of a population by age, gender, income, ethnicity and other criteria. We looked at demographics earlier, in connection with radio formats. Now we're going to put the pieces together and see why advertisers - not just on radio - use demographics.

A 2003 story headlined "Old labels just don't stick in 21st century" in USA Today clearly explains the background:

For businesses of all kinds, detailed information about potential customers is pure gold. Why send direct mail to households not likely to buy certain products or services? Why advertise in newspapers that go to thousands of households when the goal is to reach only families that have kids under 12? Why should a Lexus dealership blanket thousands of households in a ZIP code with fliers if only a hundred are likely to buy luxury cars?

"What retailers are doing now is microretailing their stores specifically to the demographics," says Patrick Dunne, marketing and retailing professor at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. Retailers use the information to determine what merchandise to put in their stores — a rural Wal-Mart, for example, may have more shovels in its aisles than a suburban Wal-Mart.

What would you expect to see in the aisles in Springfield's Wal-Marts?

One company that has a way of finding out is Claritas Corp. of San Diego. A subsidiary of the Nielsen firm that measures TV audiences, Claritas builds its business model on the idea that "birds of a feather flock together" ... by zip code. It segments the general public into 67 demographic categories and cross-tabs them by where they live, using U.S. Census data. From this statistical analysis it creates model personality types - or typologies - with clever names that reflect consumer behavior. For example, here's the "Mayberry-ville" typology:

Like the old Andy Griffith Show set in a quaint picturesque berg, Mayberry-ville harks back to an old-fashioned way of life. In these small towns, upper-middle-class couples like to fish and hunt during the day, and stay home and watch TV at night. With lucrative blue-collar jobs and moderately priced housing, residents use their discretionary cash to purchase boats, campers, motorcycles, and pickup trucks.

Anybody like that in central Illinois? (At least before the current recession.)

Let's see how it works by visiting Claritas' website and seeing what its typologies can tell us about Springfield.

(And what Springfield can tell us about Claritas' methodology.)

Claritas has a PRIZM zip code lookup page – named for one of its models for comparing demographic data. Be ready to ccmpare the Zip codes in Springfield in terms of income, diversity, age, and other demographics:

• 62701
• 62702
• 62703
• 62704
• 62707
• 62711
• 62712

And any other Zip code you want to look up. What are the advantages of slicing and dicing people into categories like "Middleburg Managers" and "Suburban Pioneers?" Any disadvantages?

After you've looked around a little, we'll start with the north end, since we're in that part of town right now. Let's go back to "ZIP Code Look-Up" and enter 62702 (plus the security code below). You'll get five "PRIZM-NE" categories, starting with "American Classics," i.e. older, downscale adults. When you finish, return to the look-up page by clicking on the "Back" arrow (unless you enjoy reading "Warning: Page has Expired" error messages). Ask yourself: Does this sound like north-enders? Read the other categories. Same question. Look at the map on the lookup page. How much of the 62702 zip code area would north enders consider to be in the north end? What other neighborhoods can you identify? What are their demographics like?

Here are a couple of other questions. Compare notes in small groups (you can group up informally with the people sitting nearest you - or across the room if that's how you want to do it). Compare notes. Discuss. Post your answers as comments to this blog post, and be sure to include all of your names on the post so all of you get credit.

Look up some of Springfield's other zip codes -- 62701, 62703, 62704 and 62707. What neighborhoods are included in each? Do any of the zip codes include neighborhoods of different income levels and/or ethnicity? How do their demographics vary (for example in 62703 and 62707)? Would you want to break down that zip code by smaller divisions like census block or street?
How well do Claritas' categories fit people in the neighborhoods you're familiar with? What, if anything, are the marketers leaving out? What do they emphasize?
How useful, in general, do you think demographic segmentation is in analyzing a smaller metro area like Springfield? How much of it can you trust? What would you want to be suspicious of? What else would you want to know? What other kinds of information could you gather?

COMM 150, 337: Writing Tip of the Week

2011-11-15T15:57:00.004-06:00

Copied from my BenU email. Most of the time, these writing tips are geared more to freshman English essays than journalistic writing. But today's has a lot of wisdom behind it. - pe

From: Kauth, Jean-Marie
To: #All Faculty and All Adjunct Faculty; #All Academic Staff; #All Main Campus Student; #All Moser College; #All Springfield Campus Faculty; #All Springfield Campus Adjunct Faculty; #All Springfield Campus Student
Cc:

Check out these 25 tips from professional writers: http://the99percent.com/tips/7082/25-Insights-on-Becoming-a-Better-Writer

Number 10 is my personal favorite:

10. Jennifer Egan: On being willing to write badly...[Be] willing to write really badly. It won't hurt you to do that. I think there is this fear of writing badly, something primal about it, like: "This bad stuff is coming out of me…" Forget it! Let it float away and the good stuff follows. For me, the bad beginning is just something to build on. It's no big deal. You have to give yourself permission to do that because you can't expect to write regularly and always write well. That's when people get into the habit of waiting for the good moments, and that is where I think writer's block comes from. Like: It's not happening. Well, maybe good writing isn't happening, but let some bad writing happen... When I was writing "The Keep," my writing was so terrible. It was God-awful. My working title for that first draft was, A Short Bad Novel. I thought: "How can I disappoint?"

COMM 337: In-class exercises ... writing style ... writing common articles (Chapters 8 and 9)

2011-11-15T11:34:00.007-06:00

QUIZ: On a clean sheet of paper, or in Microsoft Word, please answer the following question in two or three sentences. What do the editors of the Writer's Digest Handbook say about supermarket tabloids? Are the tabs a good model for your writing? Why (or why not)? Briefly explain. When you're finished, print it out and/or hand it in.

Discussion: Tabloids and broadsheet papers

In groups, compare the writing style in three writeups of the Occupy Wall Street protests in the financial district of New York City. Two are from today's New York papers, and the third is from The National Enquirer. Compare things like sentence length, word choice, use of colorful words and plain language in all three. Also look at the reporting: How many people did the Times have on the story? The Daily News? (The Enquirer is in Florida. Did they have anyone at the scene? How do you know?) Which stories are more readable? What makes them that way?

As you survey the stories, make a note of things you can use in your own writing. Be specific. For example, a nice combination of words. A descriptive passage, a good quote. Short paragraphs. Whatever. Discuss with the people on your row and post your observations as comments to this blog post. Be sure to put all your names on the post so everyone gets credit. We'll go through them in class and compare notes.

Link here:

New York Times. Everybody knows about the Times, a national paper of record, sometimes known as the "gray lady" because its style is as weighty as the great issues of the day.
New York Daily News. It's in tabloid format so people who ride the subway can fold back the pages and read it while they're hanging from straps in the subway cars.
National Enquirer. . Not the worst of the supermarket tabs, but clearly not concerned with the weighty issues of the day. Their story on Occupy Wall Street came out at the end of September.

Keep the window open to the National Enquirer. We'll look at several more stories.

COMM 150: Polls ... exercise ... and revised assignments for the rest of the week [reposting with course number corrected]

2011-11-14T15:38:00.005-06:00

This week we'll take up Chapters 12 and 13 in John Vivian's "Media of Mass Communication," on research and "mass media effects" respectively. Research, to communications professionals, means public opinion polling and market research; Monday we'll look at public opinion polls. Wednesday we'll see how polling applies to advertising, and we'll study demographics, which is the basis of most market research. Friday, we'll whiz through Vivian's discussion of media "effects" in Chapter 13, i.e. several theories of the effect the media have on society. Please complete assignment for Wednesday, by analyzing the two political polls linked below and posting your analysis as a comment to this blog item.

While public opinion polls are used to gauge public attitudes toward everything from religious preference to bath salts and after-shave lotion, they come for the most scrutiny in public affairs. Like practically everything else in American politics, a lot of the scrutiny is negative.

Especially negative is the attitude toward political polling, and news reporting that emphasizes poll results - who's ahead, who's behind, who's winning, who's losing - instead of explaining public policy issues.

"The news media are more obsessed than ever with the horse-race aspects of the presidential campaign, according to a new study," reported the New York Times, for example, on Oct. 29, 2007, when the 2008 campaigns were about at the same stage as today's race. "Despite the campaign’s early start, the media have not been more reflective on the issues, the study said, but have focused on tactics and strategy."

Summarizing a poll by the Pew Research Center, and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, Catharine Seelye of the Times noted that:

Nearly two-thirds of all stories (print, television, radio and online) focused on "political aspects of the campaign, while only 1 percent focused on the candidates’ public records."
She added, "Only 12 percent of stories seemed relevant to voters’ decision making; the rest were more about tactics and strategy.

Seelye concluded, "The campaign coverage has been sharply at odds with what the public says it wants, the study found, with voters eager to know more about the candidates’ positions on issues and their personal backgrounds, more about lesser-known candidates and more about debates. But the media is even more obsessed this time around with questions of tactics and strategy, despite what the study described as a 'generational struggle' in both parties. Horse-race stories accounted for 63 percent of reports this year compared with what the study said was about 55 percent in 2000 and 2004."

Two years later, on Aug. 30, 2009, New York Times blogger Paul Krugman complained about "reporting that focuses on how policy proposals are supposedly playing, rather than what’s actually in them."

At the time, Congress was debating President Obama's health care legislation. But Krugman noted that during the 2004 presidential campaign he "looked at TV reports on health care plans, and found not a single segment actually explaining the candidates’ plans." He said, "It’s easier to research horse-race stuff. To report on policy, a reporter has to master the policy issues fairly well. That’s not easy, especially for journalists who have specialized in up close and personal rather than wonkery — and policy issues change from year to year. To do a horse-race piece, you just call up the usual suspects on your Rolodex, and have a bunch of 'one Democratic insider said' quotes." Krugman added, "The upshot, of course, is that we’re having a crucial national policy debate in which the great bulk of the news coverage tells people nothing at all about the policy issues."

Is it any wonder that in August 2011 the online magazine GOOD could run an article on the health care law headlined "Most Americans Still Have No Idea What the Health Care Law Does?"

And horse-race journalism is still all around us.

Just Saturday, respected political reporter Carla Marinucci of the San Francisco Chronicle quoted Republican political strategist Patrick Dorinson, who writes TheCowboyLibertarian.com political website, saying Republican presidential candiate Rick Perry "is not a guy I'd bet on" after a gaffe in which he couldn't remember the third of three agencies he proposes to eliminate.

"He came out to the horse track and he was a beautiful colt, but no one had ever seen him run," Dorinson told Marinucci. "Now, we're seeing the mules running faster than he is."

So horse-race reporting is alive and well.

And stories based on public opinion polling, for better or worse, are with us to stay.

Vivian has a fairly good explanation of how polls are conducted in your weekend reading assignment, and Gary N. Curtis, author of the Fallacy Files weblog has an explanation of how to interpret a pollthat fills in some important gaps. Curtis taught philosophy at UIPUI (the University of Indiana-Purdue University at Indianapolis, also known as "ooey pooey") who has worked in artificial intelligence for Cycorp Inc. in Austin, Texas. Curtis says:

Every other year, during election campaigns, the American public is polled, surveyed, and canvassed for their opinions, and the news media continuously inform us of the results. The media report polls in the same breathless way that race track announcers describe horse races: "As they round the corner of the convention, the Republican is pulling ahead on the right! Now, they're entering the home stretch and the Democrat is pulling up on the left!" Et cetera.

There is little drama in simply waiting until after the election to report the results. Instead, reporters use polls to add suspense to their coverage, with a leader and an underdog to root for. Moreover, every news outlet is trying to scoop the others by being the first to correctly predict the winner. Unfortunately, much of this coverage sacrifices accuracy for artificial excitement.

This article explains how a layman can read a news report of a poll without being duped by the hype. You don't need to be a statistician to understand enough about polls to not be taken in, because the problems are often not with the polls themselves but with the way that they're reported. ...

Very true. If you know how to read them, polls can tell you a lot.

And Curtis is all about showing us how to read them. Curtis even has a little poll of his own for us. Let's put it up on the screen in class, take the poll and read the rest of his explanation. At the end, he'll tell us how we did.

I'll disqualify myself because I took it Sunday afternoon. (No, I didn't answer all the questions correctly!) But I'll record the answers as you come to consensus on the questions.

Then, after we read the rest of Curtis' post on how to evaluate a poll, I have linked below two stories based on polls in the Republican presidential primary campaign. Please evaluate the stories, using the criteria on Curtis' blog and in Vivian, and post your comparisons as comments to this item. Which is better? Why do you say so? How does each stack up? The polls are:

Miami Herald Friday Nov. 11, which reports, "The Republican presidential race is being shaken up again, with Mitt Romney retaking the lead, Newt Gingrich surging into second place, and Herman Cain dropping to third place, according to a new McClatchy-Marist nationwide poll released Friday." McClatchy is the newspaper chain that owns the Herald, and Marist College is in New York state.
New York Daily News Sunday Nov. 13, reported:
Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich were the big winners after a week of self-inflicted wounds among GOP contenders, a new poll found.

Romney and Gingrich each gained five points in a NBC/Wall Street Journal poll of Republican primary voters released Sunday. ... The support for former Massachusetts Gov. Romney among re-interviewed voters rose from 27% to 32%, and Gingrich's rose from 17% to 22%. Gingrich's resurrection was attributed to consistently good debate performances.

COMM 150, 337: Cat videos

2011-11-14T09:24:00.007-06:00

Background on Huffington Post John St. is "an advertising agency located in Toronto, Ontario. We use creative, design, digital, strategy, social media and research to make our clients' brands unignoreable."

---

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_testing

http://theblogofjohn.com/75:is-market-research-artificial-intelligence/

COMM 337: Steps in writing ... from class discussion

2011-11-10T15:39:00.002-06:00

What are the steps in writing a free-lance magazine article?

1. get an idea what to write about
2. look for markets / audience / buyers
3. query --
4. research – talk w/ experts – interview questions -
5. write the article – edit the article

Compare to chapter headings in "Writer's Digest Handbook" and/or any how-to article on free-lance writing on the World Wide Web.

COMM 337: In-class assignment on queries [plus an important reminder on class attendance]

2011-11-09T20:34:00.016-06:00

Please note my comment on your comments in the comments below. - pe

Intro. As I've written more free-lance articles, I've discovered a good query letter does the same thing an outline used to do for me in academic writing - it helps me plan the article as I start researching and writing it. In some ways, the query is just as important as the finished article. Usually, it's the first thing a prospective editor will see of my work. And it has to answer the question - why should he, or she, buy my story on kumquats, Maine coon cats or Zen meditation and not somebody else's.

In advertising and sales they call the answer to that question a unique selling proposition, and when I write a query I'm in advertising and sales. The query is a sales document. Plain and simple.

So let's cut to the chase ...

Your assignment: Write a query letter. In order to get a feel for the process, let's do a dry run in class first after we've looked at the sample queries in the Writer's Digest Handbook and my blog post immediately below.

Choose one of the topics we discussed Tuesday - Zen meditation, Maine coon cats, the Japaneese tea ceremony, artichokes, whatever - and help me write a query. I can put it on the projector in Microsoft Word.
In groups of two or three, write the first two paragraphs of another query and post your draft as a comment to this post. Then we'll look at your drafts.

For next week: read the Writer's Digest Handbook, Chapter 7 ("Avoiding Problems"), and 8 ("Writing Techniques and Revision"). Also Iris Lamott, "Shitty First Drafts" (PDF file at http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/english/wwwroot2/TA/hyperteach/PDFs/shitty.pdf).

IMPORTANT TANGENT ON CLASS ATTENDANCE: Beginning this week, we're shifting gears in COMM 337 and doing more in-class exercises that involve brainstorming and small-group discussion. By its nature, writing for publication is usually a collaborative process; that means it's nearly impossible to make up the dynamic of our class discussions and exercises regarding the process of writing. Your grades so far have depended heavily on your written analyses. Now they will depend on: (1) your 1,500-word story; and (2) your participation in the exercises designed to get you up to speed on writing the story. So it pays to come to class. Capice?

COMM 337: A couple of examples of query letters ...

2011-11-09T17:35:00.008-06:00

Do you believe in recycling? I do.

So here are some thoughts about writing query letters recycled from an email message I sent to my students in COMM 337 a year ago this semester.

There aren't many hard-and-fast rules about query letters, but there is a definite psychology. Remember: It's a sales document, one you're using to sell your article. Keep it short. Showcase your writing skills. Demonstrate your professional skills. Remember the old advice to writers? SHOW, NOT TELL. It works. *Show* the editor what you can do for him. Or her.

Here's a common format that I like to use in my own free-lance writing. I'll outline it paragraph by paragraph, and copy below the query I used to sell my most recent magazine story to Dulcimer Players News:

FIRST GRAF: Get the editor's attention, and show why your article will appeal to the magazine's readers. Often this graf will sound like the lede of your story. Make it specific to the magazine. Show you've done your homework. (In the sample below, I said I'd been reading it. But I also referred to specific stories in back issues. It *showed* I'd been reading it.) I like to say very specifically something like, "I am offering (the story) for your consideration for publication." Again, it's a sales document and that's what salespeople sometimes call a close -- when you ask your prospect to buy what you're selling.

SECOND GRAF: Give your credentials. If you enclose your resume, mention it. In my letter, I also mention a conversation I had with one of the magazine's editors. There's more in the Writer's Digest Handbook. You can mention the research you did, any personal experience you have. Anything that demonstrates you know what you're talking about.

THIRD GRAF: This can vary. The Writer's Digest Handbook suggests you "showcase your skills and demonstrate some solutions. ... Explain what you can do to meet the magazine's editorial needs." I used mine to talk about artwork, file formats, etc. [the things that pros talk about], to demonstrate I'm a pro.

Plus an example of a successful query I sent out by email last year. It was a little different from an "over the transom" query [*see below for explanation], because I'd talked with the guy's co-editor and they were expecting something from me. But it uses the same psychology:

Subject line: psalmodikon article submission / attn dan landrum
Date: Sunday, July 11, 2010 7:58 PM

To: Dan Landrum, editor
Dulcimer Players News

From: Pete Ellertsen

Ralph Lee Smith says he got so excited when he heard from the folks who play a Nordic-American box zither called the psalmodikon, he nearly lost control of his car. (He was answering his cell phone at the time.) And he's had a couple of fascinating "Tales and Traditions" columns in DPN about them. I've been in touch with the psalmodikon folks, too, partly because the instrument comes out of my own ethnic heritage and partly because it's so much like the mountain dulcimer. So I visited their annual meeting in Wisconsin and started learning to play a psalmodikon. I've written an article and two sidebars from the perspective of a dulcimer player about the revival of interest in the psalmodikon, its historical background and the tablature used to play it. I've been studying back issues of DPN, and I believe the stories will be of interest to your readers. They are attached, and I am offering them for your consideration for publication in the magazine.

You may remember my work, because I had a historical overview of the Appalachian dulcimer and its European antecedents, called "Drones, Picks and Popsicle Sticks," published last year on the EverythingDulcimer.com website. I'm an old newspaper guy, recently retired from a full-time position teaching college journalism, and I'm looking for free-lance assignments. (My resume is linked below.) Stephen Siefert and I spoke briefly at the Dulcimerville workshop last month, and he suggested I contact you. When I got home, I started drafting a letter; the letter turned into an article, and the result is attached to this email message.

Attached as Microsoft Word files are: (1) a 1,950-word article on the revival of interest in the psalmodikon; (2) a 400-word sidebar on the tablature used to play the instrument; and (3) a 400-word sidebar on further reading. While pictures are embedded in the file I'm sending you, I can send you separate JPEG files in order to facilitate the editing process. The photos are mine, and the photocopies are from books in the public domain. ...

I look forward to hearing from you.

When I already have a working relationship with an editor, I don't always bother with a query. But I use the same general psychology - I send a cover letter, again an email message, beginning with a "hook" to get his interest. Since I already know the guy, I don't have to repeat the part about my qualifications. Here's another example:

William Furry
Illinois State Historical Society
Springfield, Illinois

Dear Bill --

Attached are a 6,000-word article and a 1,500-word sidebar for your consideration for publication in Illinois Heritage. They're about the voyage of the steamboat Talisman to Springfield in 1832 and one of the locally written poems that appeared in The Sangamo Journal to commemorate the occasion. The poem was a parody of a popular minstrel show tune of the day, and its appearance in the Springfield paper tells us something about the complexity of popular culture on the Illinois frontier at the time. The Talisman turned out to be the only steamboat ever to reach Springfield, but a rhymed satire in the local paper based on a song currently popular on the East Coast was a sign of an up-and-coming frontier town, riverboat or no riverboat. It also gives us a glimpse of the lives of young men in a frontier community; some of them had a surprisingly literary bent.

Some thoughts on artwork follow. ...

It worked, too. The article was in the summer issue of Illinois Heritage. In writing both of these queries, the process helped me think through what I wanted to say in the article. But here's what I gained from doing it in the context of a sales pitch: It forced me to look at my story idea through an editor's eyes. What would he want to see in the story? What would interest his readers? It wasn't just about me and what I wanted to say anymore.

__________

* "Over the Transom" - I define it as an unsolicited article or query that you're writing "on spec" (which means you're doing it on speculation, ie writing it without an advance agreement that somebody will buy it). The website About Freelance Writing (which by the way is a good one) explains:

... A transom is a small, hinged window above a door. ... In the days before air conditioning, publishers would often leave these windows open, even over night, for circulation.

Writers were said to hurl their unsolicited pieces through that window.

My faculty office in Beata Hall used to have one of those transom windows over the door. But my students would usually slip their papers under the door.

COMM 150: USP, IMC, brand positioning and other stuff that may be on the final exam (capice?)

2011-11-09T12:06:00.008-06:00

On pages 311 and 312 of "Media of Mass Communication" (our edition), John Vivian discusses the Unique Selling Proposition - USP for short - in terms of "lowest common denominator" advertising. I wish he wouldn't do that. Not that it isn't all too often true ... but it's not the way professionals ought to do business.) Vivian suggests it's about "Creat[ing] a benefit of the product, even if from thin air, and then tout[ing] the benefit authoritatively and repeatedly as if the competition doesn't have it." Well, OK, yeah. But you're maybe not going to stay in business long if you rely on that. But Vivian does acknowledge, "A unique selling proposition need be neither hollow nor insulting, however." And that's where I want us to start.

Integrated Marketing Communications, or IMC, is when you mix public relations, advertising and management decision-making processes to maximize the impact on consumers, according to Wikipedia.

Vivian also discusses something call "positioning," which he sees as a way of getting your message through all the "clutter" of competing products. The terms are technical; we'll look them up. Adds Vivian, "Ad clutter, as it is called, drowns out individual advertisements. With positioning, the appeal is focused and caters to audience segments, and it need not be done in such broad strokes." The discussion in Wikipedia adds:

Although there are different definitions of Brand Positioning, probably the most common is: identifying a market niche for a brand, product or service utilizing traditional marketing placement strategies (i.e. price, promotion, distribution, packaging,and competition).

Also positioning is defined as the way by which the marketer create an impression in the customer's mind.

How does this relate to USP? Here are notes from the discussion on unique selling propositions in Wikipedia:

Rosser Reeves of Ted Bates & Co.:
Each advertisement must make a proposition to the consumer. Not just words, not just product puffery, not just show-window advertising. Each advertisement must say to each reader: "Buy this product, and you will get this specific benefit."
The proposition must be one that the competition either cannot, or does not, offer. It must be unique—either a uniqueness of the brand or a claim not otherwise made in that particular field of advertising.
The proposition must be so strong that it can move the mass millions, i.e., pull over new customers to your product.

An example of how it works in the real world:

Notes from Interactive Marketing, Inc., a website optimization and Internet marketing company of Bend, Ore. at http://www.interactivemarketinginc.com/unique-selling-proposition.html:

Your USP is the force that drives your business and success. It can also be used as a "branding" tool that deploys strategy with every tactical marketing effort you use such as an ad, a postcard, or web site. This allows you to build a lasting reputation while you're making sales. The ultimate goal of your USP and marketing is to have people say to you... "Oh, yes I've heard of you. You're the company who..." - And then respond by requesting more information or purchasing [boldface, italics and blue type in the original].

Vivian makes it sound like the USP is basically a gimmick, but it isn't. Notice what the advertising pros say: It has to be real, "Not just words, not just product puffery, not just show-window advertising." Adds Interactive Marketing, "Think in terms of what your business does for your customer and the end-result they desire from a product or service like yours. So, what are the 3 biggest benefits you offer?" And this, "Consumers are skeptical of advertising claims companies make. So alleviate their skepticism by being specific and offering proof when possible."

In-class discussion, Friday. An organization's webpage often serves some of the same functions as an advertisement. Look at BP's at http://www.bp.com/ and Benedictine-Springfield's at http://www1.ben.edu/springfield/. How does each position itself in the marketplace? Does it use the homepage to state something like a unique selling proposition? If so, what would it be it for each?

COMM 150: For Friday - mission, public relations, advertising, USP and IMC

2011-11-09T11:52:00.004-06:00

Alphabet soup? Not quite -

Here's what I put up on the projector this morning

USP –
IMC –

How do the concepts of IMC and USP help an organization define and operationalize its mission? Where do branding and positioning fit into the picture?

Here's another way of wording the question (which I got, by the way, form the final exam in COMM 150 in 2007:

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

COMM 337: Maine coon cat helps grade papers

2011-11-08T23:00:00.006-06:00

Maine coon cat (at left) evaluating COMM 337 papers

COMM 150: Alaska newspaper live-blogging winter storm ...

2011-11-08T21:45:00.010-06:00

Draft question for documented essay due after Thanksgiving: How are social media (sometimes hyped as Internet 2.0) changing the face of American culture? Consider entertainment, politics and government. What are the ethical implications, and how can media professionals overcome them? - The Mackerel Wrapper Friday Nov. 4 2011

Here's how it worked this time ... call it a case study if you want to.

So I'm on Facebook, and I notice my wife's boss in Alaska posted a weather map about 2 hours ago. It shows a huge storm, and she just said "OhOh ..." Below the map is a message the US National Weather Service Alaska posted 10 hours ago: "Here's the latest look at the storm heading into the Bering Sea this morning. It's a monster of a storm! Blizzard conditions will come on the front end of the storm for many locations. The extreme low pressure (less than 950mb) with hurricane force winds will create an 7 to 9 foot storm surge as this heads north. The irregular shape of the West Coast of Alaska will cause different timing of coastal flooding impacts. Please see the latest forecast for your location. http://www.arh.noaa.gov/ We can't stress enough the severity of hazards this storm brings."

In fact, NWS Alaska has a Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/#!/US.NationalWeatherService.Alaska.gov. As I'm writing at 10:20 p.m. CST (7:20 Alaska Standard Time), they've just posted a map dated 6 p.m. showing 40- to 50-knot winds with gusts up to 70 knots and this advisory: "Winds have picked up along the west coast of Alaska and over Saint Lawrence Island. Snow has spread inland causing near ZERO visibility. Hooper Bay to Emmonak and into western Norton Sound, along with Saint Lawrence Island, are already seeing sea level rises associated with the storm surge. Nome is currently about 4 feet above the normal tide. Unfortunately, it will only be getting worse. Stay safe everyone."

What gets me the most is some of the messages on the wall:

Thank You for these updates!! 59 minutes ago.
I'm praying for my son and all the other people on the water right now. 50 minutes ago.
Praying for everyone in the area... 40 minutes ago.
Thanks for posting....It's just starting in Bethel. Ours won't be anything near what the coastal villages are going through! 29 minutes ago.

By morning, all of these posts will be way out of date. I've tracked hurricanes, and this thing is acting like a hurricane.

All of whicy is the first I've heard of the storm. Here in the "Lower 48" [states], our news media are much too busy with Justin Bieber's trials and tribulations to worry about a little old storm.

So next I look at the Anchorage Daily News, and the main stories on their website tonight are a search for a missing student athlete at the University of Alaska Anchorage and the coming storm. It's off the coast of Western Alaska, 1,330 miles northwest of Anchorage, but the ADN is treating it as a big story. The headline: "Evacuations begin ahead of Bering Sea storm." Click on the headline, and it takes me to a live blog. The most recent post is from the city of Kotzebue on the Bering Sea coast:

6: 10 p.m. update: Message for Kotzebue: Stay indoors for the next two days

In Kotzebue, the hub city for a collection of largely Inupiat villages in northwest Alaska, the city and borough planned to urge residents tonight to stay inside, acting city manager Keith Greene said. "One of our concerns up here is people walking through the snow and getting lost."

Even during garden-variety storms, winds and blowing snow can blind travelers on the outskirts of the city. The mega storm is expected to whip gusts as fast as 90 to 100 mph, Greene said. The message for Kotzebue residents will be "stay indoors, don't leave home for the next couple days," he said.

All of which leads me back to the question on your assignment sheet for the COMM 150 paper due after Thanksgiving: How are social media changing the face of America?

COMM 337: Class notes on research (who you gonna talk to?) about cats, tea, artichokes and Zen?

2011-11-08T15:20:00.001-06:00

1 Japanese tea ceremony
2 Maine coon cats
3 Artichokes
4. Zen meditation

write a proposal – outline – you’re pitching an article in other words
 who are you going to talk to?
 what’s your angle going to be?
 what are you going to say about it that’s fresh and interesting to your readers (which means your editor)?

post it as a comment to this blog item on TMW

COMM 337: Who are you going to talk with? Reporting exercise for class today ...

2011-11-08T10:17:00.005-06:00

Write what you know? While it seems perfectly sound on one level, living by this mantra can limit and even deter your career. In order to grow as professionals, writers need to be taught: Write what you don't know.

Why take on work in this manner? For one thing, it builds your repertoire. Second, editors want all-around writers that they can send on any assignment. Third, it opens doors to other opportunities. If you can research and write about an unfamiliar subject, you bring to the table a fresh perspective. Editors always need fresh ideas - even new takes on old topics. ("Writer's Digest Handbook of Magazine Article Writing" 87-88.

Of course there's a catch ... there always is, isn't there? The Handbook continues:

You might ask, "Can I understand everything about a subject?" The honest answer is, "No." If you try to know every tiny detail, you'll never stay within your deadline. But you must gain a good working knowledge, concentrate on finding key points, get your facts straight (which you undoubtedly will be extra-inclined to to in foreign territory), and talk to the right people. (88)

Today, using the tips and guidelines in Chapter 5 of the Writer's Digest Handbook, we're going to see how it works.

By the way, did you notice the title? "Research." Did you notice what it's about? Talking with the right people. To a journalist, research isn't something you do in a library, it's something you do on the phone. Or, better, in person. Reading up on a subject is essential, but you do it before you talk to them. That way you don't waste their time. Or yours!

So now, let's find out about kumquats, and start looking for kumquat experts.

Kumquats?

Using the suggestions in the Handbook, where would we go to find out about kumquats. Who would we talk to? I mean specifically who we'd talk to. No doubt you've learned about networking in other communications, business or management classes. That's essentially how you go about finding the right people to talk with for a story.

As we talk our way through the kumquat story, we'll change our perspective as we think of different people we can talk with. Finding sources and narrowing the topic are a chicken-and-egg proposition. What we write depends on what the experts tell us. Right? So the perspective will change. As we find out about kumquats, for example, we may find it makes better sense to write about growing them indoors rather than how to keep alligators out of the drainage ditches around the kumquat trees in Florida. I'm just making this up, but you get the idea. Here's what the Handbook says:

You'll get most of your article ideas by meeting people - not by trying to scramble aeound and finf people who you can interview and thus support your article idea.(92)

Once we've explored some of the possibilities of the fascinating world of kumquat horticulture as a group, here are a couple of other topics you can try:

Maine coon cats
The Japanese tea ceremony

Pick one. I hope they seem obscure to you. The point is to find out where the experts are on something you don't already know. Surf around, brainstorm with other students and post your story ideas/sources as comments to this blog item. I encourage you to do this in informal small groups with one or two other students and post a joint comment (be sure to give all your names so you get credit).

For Thursday: Read Chapters 2 ("Queries") and 7 ("Avoiding Problems"). Note, we're taking these out of order - we're going back and picking up the chapter on queries. Be ready to write the first draft of a query on the article I've assigned for the week after Thanksgiving in class Thursday. Next week we'll take up Chapters 8 ("Writing Techniques and Revision") and 9 ("How to Write Common Articles"), so read them over the weekend.

An alltime great political ad ...

2011-11-07T21:36:00.006-06:00

"Diane Benson has experience. She needs your help to clean up the mess. Get out and vote in the primary. August 26th [2008]. Be there." Blurb on YouTube.

Ad was run by Diane Benson, Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in Alaska. It's funny, and it subtly reinforces things that help Alaskans identify with Benson as she plays with her sled dogs and cleans up a mess. Of Tlingit Indian and Norwegian heritage, Diane Benson has also written poetry and is a Native rights activist.

COMM150: In-class exercise - mission statements

2011-11-07T11:32:00.001-06:00

In class …

1. Write your definition of a mission statement that will fit on a T-shirt
2. Post it to the Mackerel Wrapper
3. We’ll look at your posts and combine them into one T-shirtworthy definition.

Post your definitions as comments to this item.

COMM 150: The Lonely Island, a 'comedy music' band that blends old and new media on SNL and YouTube

2011-11-06T23:22:00.019-06:00

Inverviewed by Steve Heisler on the A.V. Club websites about topics as diverse as "their recording process, the definition of a 'real' band, and their sexual prowess," Andy Samberg of The Lonely Island and Saturday Night Live said something in passing about a "real" band, in quotes.

"Do you not feel like a real band?" asked Heisler.

"No," Samberg replied. "We’re a comedy band, I guess. We’re in the comedy section at record stores and on iTunes. It’s not music, it’s comedy. It’s comedy music. [Laughs.] There’s a reason that the word 'comedy' comes first."

Which is what I'd call a niche market.

But the band is successful, both artistically - they're doing what they want to do and doing well - and commercially - they're selling lots of albums and getting lots of page views on the internet.

Thanks to MHovey for posting a link to our class blog.

"Although they were first discovered on SNL, their name shot through the roof through Youtube," she said. "The Lonely Island has become immensely famous because of the internet. Some of my favorite songs by them are 'Like A Boss,' 'I'm on a Boat' and 'Jack Sparrow'."

The Lonely Island's video "Jah Trent" appealed to this old roots reggae fan, but "Jack Sparrow"on YouTube is a much better introduction to what they do and how they do it. It started out as a prerecorded SNL sketch featuring rocker Michael Bolton. Bolton told Clark Collis of Entertainment Weekly's website EW.com:

I just sang it in a studio in Atlanta on a night off. The guys were on through Skype. They’re serious about their comedy but they’re really serious about the details. They were focused on the minutiae that great record producers focus on, not comedy writers. And I love seeing that work ethic. These guys were inspiring.

It was also a boost to his career, which had peaked in the 1990s. According to Collis, Bolton's digital short with Lonely Island "has also turned him into an unlikely Internet phenomenon."

Heisler's May 24 interview in A.V. Club sums up their appeal:

The Lonely Island, practitioners of musical comedy, practically invented the notion of “viral video” with “Lazy Sunday.” And more than five years later, the group has Internet popularity down to a science: The trio’s “Jizz In My Pants” has topped 100,000,000 YouTube views, while the more recent “I Just Had Sex” is close behind. It certainly doesn’t hurt that The Lonely Island’s comic songs, and the accompanying videos, usually debut on Saturday Night Live and feature guests like Justin Timberlake, Nicki Minaj, and Michael Bolton. The group is comprised of Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer—Samberg is an SNL cast member, and the others write, direct, and occasionally pop up onscreen. What started as three friends fooling around with a camera has turned into a genuine pop-culture phenomenon, and the group’s latest album, Turtleneck & Chain—the follow-up to 2009’s Incredibad—cements The Lonely Island members’ place as humorists who are in the game for the long haul.

Comedy has been around since our ancestors told jokes about hunting wooly mammoth during the Ice Age, and sometimes it seems like SNL has been around for just as long. The same goes for hip hop. But The Lonely Island are using new media to promote their spin on topics as timeless as music, sex and pirate movies. How is technology helping acts like theirs change the face of American culture? [See documented essay assignment at http://mackerelwrapper.blogspot.com/2011/11/comm-150-draft-question-for-documented.html for inspiration].

COMM 150: Public relations, management and mission statements

2011-11-06T22:24:00.007-06:00

Today, experts on public relations agree ... [w]hen ainstitutions are making policy, they need to consider the effects on their many publics. That can be done best when the person in charge of public relations, ideally at the vice presidential level, is intimately involved in decision-making. The public relations executive advises the rest of the institution's leaders on public perceptions and the effects that policy options might have on perceptions. Also, the public relations vice president is in a better position to implement the institution's policy for having been a part of developing it. - John Vivian, "Media of Mass Communication" (277).

One reason John Vivian - along with most people who write about public relations - insists that PR is a management function is that its strategy and tactics should reflect an organization's mission. To understand why, we need to review an important tool in organizational development that Vivian doesn't say much about - the organization's mission statement or "a statement of the purpose of a company or organization." The definition is from Wikipedia, which adds, "The mission statement should guide the actions of the organization, spell out its overall goal, provide a path, and guide decision-making." Wikipedia, as usual, is a pretty good starting place. Done right, a mission statement is at the core of its strategic thinking. It takes someone in top management to make sure the mission is followed through, and it takes a PR person in upper-level management to ensure the organization's public face is consistent with its mission.

Done wrong, a mission statement is a jumble of words and cutsey slogans. A lot of them are done wrong, and a lot of people are properly suspicious of mission statements. Which is one reason why it's important for PR professionals to do it right.

So here's a brief outline, and below that an exercise for you to do and post as a comment to this post.

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

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

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

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

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

A mission statement has to be operational: What does that mean? You've got to be able to translate it into action. In "Managing the Non-Profit Organization," Drucker gives a couple of examples. Here's one:

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

My favorite mission definition, however, is not that of a nonprofit institution, but of a business. It's a definition that changed Sears from a near-bankrupt, struggling mail-order house at the beginning of the [20th] century into the world's leading retailer within less than ten years: It's our mission to be the informed and responsible buyer-first for the American farmer, and later for the American family altogether.

Sears has lost sight of its mission in recent years, according to some business analysts. But for a long time, it was nothing if not a farmers' store. Farmers and their families ordered from the Sears catalog (which they also put to other uses), and they shopped at Sears when they came to town. I remember as a kid walking into the Sears in Knoxville, Tenn., and they were selling everything from baby chicks to metal washtubs to the kind of old-fashioned dark blue overalls that were so stiff you could stand them up in the corner until you'd washed them a dozen times. You'd smell the chicken feed as soon as you walked in the door, and you knew Sears was for farmers. Who are Sears' customers now? Well, there aren't that many them anymore. And I think lack of a clear mission is one reason why.

As usual, Wikipedia was a good starting point. And Drucker's explanation is a classic. But we need to go beyond Wikipedia and update Drucker. So here's the exercise:

Your assignment: Find something on the World Wide Web that clearly explains what a mission statement is and what it does.
* * *
Please post what you find out as a comment to this blog. And be sure to include a Web address. Copy and paste it from the address field in your browser into your comment. Like this:

Business Resource Software of Austin, Texas, says, "A mission statement may look simple but it should communicate the core of your organization with a precise statement of purpose. Words should be chosen for meaning and clarity - not technical jargon." There's more. I like it. It's simple. It's clear. And it tells you what to do and how to do it. What's not to like about that?
http://www.brs-inc.com/news002.html

COMM 337: Remember, remember the 5th of November ... with a Guy Fawkes mask? or a bank protest? the big anniversary that didn't amount to much

2011-11-04T13:13:00.028-05:00

Remember remember the fifth of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder, treason
Should ever be forgot ...
-- English Nursery Rhyme

What's with the creepy masks of the guy with the smile and the goatee we see people wearing in coverage of the Occupy Wall protests?

And why would anybody choose a Saturday, when a lot of banks aren't even open anyway, for a protest against "too-big-to-fail" banks like Wells-Fargo and JPMorgan Chase?

In other words, what was so special about Saturday, Nov. 5, anyway? And did anybody notice it? There were several stories in the "mainstream media," but they never really got into it.

Guy Fawkes was an English Catholic who was caught Nov. 5, 1605, sneaking gunpowder into a basement under the houses of Parliament. He was accused of plotting to assassinate King James II by blowing up the building, and was executed for treason. For many years thereafter, English children celebrated the failure of the plot by building bonfires, setting off fireworks and, at least sometimes, wearing masks on "Guy Fawkes Day," every Nov. 5. More recently, a character in a comic book and a movie who wore a Guy Fawkes mask has entered the popular culture as sort of a symbol of rebellion. [Click here and scroll down to Crispijn van de Passe print to see the contemporary 17th-century engraving that inspired the masks. Guido Fawkes is third from left.] So it has been taken up by some of Occupy ______ protesters.

There are several layers of irony here, and, in my opinion, none of the news media have done a very good job of dealing with them.

In an article in the Los Angeles Times, Michael Muskal gives some of the back story:

Guy Fawkes was an English mercenary and failed plotter whose death was elevated into a national celebration complete with bonfires and the burning of effigies. Four centuries later -- thanks to Hollywood, not to mention a deep undertow of popular discontent -- his grinning, mustachioed face has become the symbol of resistance for almost any political movement.

That, of course, includes the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations across the United States.

From New York to Seattle, protesters have donned the stylized masks of Fawkes -- a person seen by many as a 17th century terrorist.

Muskal might have added London, England, where the popular movie "V for Vendetta" (2006) featured a character wearing a Guy Fawkes mask as a symbol of rebellion.

Friday, the day before Guy Fawkes' rebellion was traditionally celebrated, an Associated Press story by Tamara Lush and Verena Dobnik explained how his image came to be taken up first by a graphic novel, then by "V for Vendetta" and most recent by Occupy Wall Street protesters. They also interview an academic who has studied the movie and several of the protesters.

The story, headlined, "For Occupy protesters, every day is Guy Fawkes Day," is a pretty typical AP story. It's kind of bland, but it's carefully reported. In addition to Lush and Dobnik, two other reporters contributed to it. (It looks like Dobnik put it together in New York.) Let's read it and analyze it.

Consider these questions: How many people were interviewed for the story? Is it hard news or a feature? What kind of lede does it have - hard or soft? What's the news here? Is there an news peg? Is it an anniversary story? Or a combination of the two? Is it readable? Is the historical explanation necessary? How clearly is it presented? What might you have added if you were reporting it? Who else might you have talked to?

* * *

A very different kind of story, again on Friday the day before Guy Fawkes' Day, was published in the financial weblog Motley Fool and posted again on the NASDAQ.com website. It concerned plans by the Anonymous protest group (which is getting to be anything but anonymous in spite of its name). The item begins:

November 5th is Bank Transfer Day , and its timing is no accident. Kristen Christian, the person who thought up the idea, chose the date that was once popular in Britain as Guy Fawkes Day.

But Bank Transfer Day proponents aren't the only ones who might act on Nov. 5. The hacker group Anonymous has adopted the date in recent years as a favored day of action. The group's already made one dramatic proclamation, and there could be other threats lurking. Everyone is hopeful that Bank Transfer Day goes off without a hitch, but a few bad eggs might make this Saturday a day that one company would rather forget.

One company that's been a persistent critic of the movement might see harsher action on Nov. 5. Anonymous has declared war on Fox News, a division of News Corp. (Nasdaq: NWS) (Nasdaq: NWSA) , threatening to make an example of the broadcaster's website.

Remember, remember the fifth of November

Anonymous and Guy Fawkes are an unlikely pairing. Those who've seen V For Vendetta know the background, but for anyone who's never seen the movie, here's the short version of the story behind Guy Fawkes: An affected English anarchist in anonymous attire attempts to adjourn the administration through means most abominable, assembling ample explosives adjacent to Parliament while also assassinating assorted authorities. Also, Natalie Portman shaves her head.

The film's signature prop is a Guy Fawkes mask, and this in combination with the message of rebellion gave the "hacktivists" a stylistic mode of expression. The mask has been showing up occasionally at Occupy rallies, and a version of the mask has also been featured on the Bank Transfer Day's Facebook page.

And so on ... of course, Guy Fawkes Day aka Bank Transfer Day was on a Saturday. An day-after roundup article by Martha White on Time magazine's website noted that, "Local news outlets around the country offer piecemeal reports of irate customers taking their business away from big banks, sometimes in conjunction with the Occupy Wall Street protests that have moved well beyond lower Manhattan and into cities throughout the U.S." But she also quoted a banker who said the cause "might have been hurt by the fact that the day they chose fell on a Saturday, when sporting events and other distractions occupy consumers’ minds." After reviewing coverage nationwide, White concluded it was too soon to tell if the protest was effective.

A footnote - who profits from the masks? "V for Vendetta" was a Warner Brothers movie, and Warner holds the licensing rights to the image on the mask. So every time a protester buys a Guy Fawkes mask, the Time-Warner media conglomerate collects the licensing fee.

===========

A couple stories try to pinpoint exactly who's wearing the masks.

One, by John Blackstone of CBS News in Oakland, Calif., traces them to a shadowy group it calls the "Black Bloc" ... he writes:
"For years, these black-clad demonstrators, known as the Black Bloc, have been showing up at marches in Europe and the U.S. Although often small in numbers, by destroying property and challenging police, they can hijack the message of otherwise peaceful protests." For what it's worth, Blackstone's is the only story I've seen that mentions a "Black Bloc." It makes me wonder if some of the protesters in Oakland were having a little fun with a gullible reporter.

The best article I've seen so far is by Michael Greenberg in the Nov. 10 New York Review of Books. Headlined "In Zuccotti Park," it is based on solid reporting. And it tells how the movement got started, among other things. Greenberg noticed the masks, and here's what he says about them:

In mid-July, a senior editor at Adbusters, Micah White, floated an e-mail to subscribers with the idea that they “flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades, and occupy Wall Street for a few months.” As a result, a group of about one hundred people began meeting regularly in Tompkins Square Park to plan the protest, creating the NYC General Assembly, a bold and difficult experiment in direct democracy that has become the ever-expanding decision-making body of Occupy Wall Street. At some point during the summer, the loose collection of hackers known as Anonymous joined the protest. The members of Anonymous are identifiable by the Guy Fawkes masks they wear, and they are known for, among other things, their “denial of service” attacks that involve saturating target websites such as those of banks and credit card payment centers with so many requests that they overload and crash.

For my money, the New York Review of Books is one of the best magazines in the business for serious long-form journalism. And I trust Greenburg's account more than anything else I've read.

But the AP story by Tamara Lush and Verena Dobnik I asked you to comment on comes in a close second.

Why?

I think it's because they're both reported by people who went to the park and talked to the people there.

COMM 150: Draft question for documented essay due after Thanksgiving

2011-11-04T13:10:00.010-05:00

D R A F T

Documented essay (5 to 8 pages). Due the week of Nov. 29-Dec. 2 (the week after Thanksgiving). It's like a term paper in that it is documented. But it's different in that I will give you a narrow question to focus on - more like what you see on an essay test - instead of choosing your own topic. I will revise the question, but is the gist of it so you can start getting ready for the paper now.

How are social media (sometimes hyped as Internet 2.0) changing the face of American culture? Consider entertainment, politics and government. What are the ethical implications, and how can media professionals overcome them?

Here's a link to last year's essay prompt. Your topic this year is more focused, so it'll be easier to write.

----------

Here's a Nov. 4 story in the Los Angeles Times on "Bank Transfer Day" that illustrates the trend.

By Stuart Pfeifer and E. Scott Reckard of the LA Times, it was headlined "One "Facebook post becomes national movement to abandon big banks." They said:

When Kristen Christian learned that Bank of America Corp. planned to charge her a $5 monthly debit card fee, she did what many people do these days when they get mad: She ranted on Facebook.

What followed was an illustration of the power of social media.

Her Facebook post urging friends to abandon big banks unwittingly blossomed into a national campaign. More than 75,000 people have pledged to participate in "Bank Transfer Day" by moving their money from large U.S. banks to nonprofit credit unions by Saturday, Christian said. ...

Why don't you read the rest of it? It'll give you ideas for the documented essay.

COMM 150: Record labels, then and now - Peggy Lee, Cara Dillon and Pierre Bensusan

2011-11-03T21:30:00.013-05:00

John Vivian says one of the things new media and advanced technology have made possible is to break the dominance of "A&R" people at the major record labels (119). It was very limiting to artists, who often didn't even pick their own songs. He quotes a Capitol Records executive who told sociologist Serge Denisoff, who writes a lot about the music industry:

The company would pick out 12 songs for Peggy Lee and tell her to be at the studio Wednesday at 8, and she'd show up and sing what you told her. And she'd leave three hours later and Capitol'd take her songs and do anything it wanted with them. That was a time when the artist was supposed to shut up and put up with anything the almighty recording company wanted.

Peggy Lee is all but forgotten today, but her songs sold well from the 1950s onward, even after she left Capitol in the 1970s. She is best known, perhaps, for the lyrics to a Disney movie "Lady and the Tramp." (And for suing Disney. According to Wikipedia, "In the early 1990s she retained famed entertainment attorney Neil Papiano to sue Disney for royalties on Lady and the Tramp. Lee's lawsuit claimed that she was due royalties for video tapes, a technology that did not exist when she agreed to write and perform for Disney." She died in 2002.

Compare her career to that of a singer from the North of Ireland named Cara Dillon.

Here's what the official biography on Dillon's website says about her dealings with Warner Music Group (one of the major labels, as I'm sure we all remember from Vivian's discussion of sound recordings) and the indie labels she's recorded with since she left Warner 10 years ago.

Dillon and husband Sam Lakeman, who backs her on acoustic guitar and produces her records, have this to say about the time they spent with Warner during the 1990s:

... although they look back on that period as an essential step towards affirming their strong musical tastes and developing their songwriting craft, it was full of frustration and the constant pressure from the label to have commercial success. ... But by 2000 they had parted company with Warners without releasing a single track and in stark contrast to their recent recordings with the label began working on an album of mostly traditional material which they quietly released on an unsuspecting audience via Rough Trade Records.

Their contract with Rough Trade, an indie label, lasted until 2008 and gave them more creative control. During those years Dillon's career took off. She has won awards including the Irish Meteor Award for Best Female Singer, and her concert tours have taken her to the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, China, South Korea and Singapore.

Would it be going too far to say Cara Dillon's career really took off as she went with smaller labels where she had more artistic control? You don't have to be into Irish music to appreciate Cara Dillon's career (altho' it probably helps)! Where would Dillon's blend of Irish traditional music and acoustic guitar fit on the cute little long tail frequency distribution graph with the dinosaur that we looked at in class? Up toward the head? Out on the tail? How far out? How does she use the Internet to market her music downloads and CDs to a niche market scattered worldwide?

Let's visit Dillon's website at http://www.caradillon.co.uk/ (the UK, as no doubt you already know, stands for United Kingdom). How many ways does she use to promote her brand? How does she use the website to sell her artistic product? Other ways of communicating with her fanbase? How does she use her Myspace page at http://www.myspace.com/caradillon to promote her brand and sell product?

Even more sophisticated is a French singer, songwriter and acoustic guitar player named Pierre Bensusan. He was born in North Africa, he lives in France and his music mixes African, French and Irish influences in what is very much a niche market. He also is recognized as an expert in a D modal guitar tuning (DADGAD) that appeals to Irish musicians. Call it a niche market inside a niche market.

Let's look at Bensusan's official webpage at http://www.pierrebensusan.com/. (Click on the British/American flags for the English version.) How does he use it to promote his brand, nurture his fanbase and sell his product? How many different products is he selling? Surf around his website, and I guarantee you'll learn something about marketing. It's quite sophisticated. You'll learn something about music and the nature of art, too.

Then let's check out the following:

Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/pierrebensusan. How, specifically, does Bensusan use feature of Facebook to nurture his fanbase?
Myspace page at http://www.myspace.com/pierrebensusan. How does Bensusan use specific Myspace features to sell product and nurture fanbase?
YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/bensusanhq. Same question: How does he use it to sell product and communicate with fans? What purpose does it serve to mark fan videos as favorites?

http://www.youtube.com/user/bensusanhq#p/a/u/0/AwDemwF3Mg8 Pierre Bensusan US Tour Diary (Part 2) | Florida, Pennsylvania, Maine

http://www.npr.org/2011/02/19/133875793/pierre-bensusan-creating-vividly

"It was not a project I was aware of beforehand," he tells Weekend Edition Saturday host Scott Simon. "All the tunes were saying, 'Play me! Play me! No, me first! Me first!' And I said, 'Wait a minute. I hear you, but I'm going to take my time.' "

COMM 337: Sidebar on William Cellini, other likenesses in ALPLM paintings

2011-11-02T12:20:00.008-05:00

D R A F T

Since we're reading about the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum this week, I would be remiss if I didn't point out it made the news - in a very small way - in the wake of Springfield businessman William Cellini's conviction on charges growing out of the federal investigation into corruption in the administration of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

It came Tuesday (Nov. 1) wjem Kurt Erickson of the Bloomington Pantagraph wrote a sidebar on what some consider to be Cellini's image in a painting in the ALPLM's Civil War exhibit:

State officials say a likeness of William Cellini standing behind Abraham Lincoln in a painting on display at the 16th president's library and museum here will not be removed, despite Cellini's conviction Tuesday on federal corruption charges.

In a testament to the clout Cellini has wielded in state government for years, the 76-year-old Springfield power broker is shown standing over Lincoln's shoulder as the duo wait for vote totals to come in for Lincoln's successful re-election bid in 1864.
.

Cellini's isn't the only likeness in the paintings. The Pantagraph mentions another" "On a separate mural depicting Washington D.C. when the Civil War ended is a likeness of Cellini's wife, Julie, a key benefactor of the museum and longtime member of the state's historic preservation board." And there's at least one more. Tom Schwartz, Illinois' state historian at the time the museum was built, is also painted into the crowd celebrating the Union victory at the end of the Civil War.

But that's all unofficial.

"The artist and the exhibit designer never divulged the models they used for those paintings," David Blanchette of the Historic Preservation Agency told the Pantagraph. "Some people see a likeness there. Some people don't,"

There's a story on Cellini's verdict in Tuesday's Chicago Tribune by reporters Annie Sweeney, Rick Pearson and John Huston. Their lede gives the gist of it:

William Cellini, Illinois' ultimate political insider who for more than four decades worked quietly behind the scenes to amass wealth and power, was convicted Tuesday for joining an age-old conspiracy scheme that demanded campaign cash for access.

A federal jury convicted the 76-year-old longtime Republican lobbyist and fundraiser of agreeing to use his considerable power at an Illinois teachers pension board to help put the squeeze on a Hollywood producer who wanted to continue to do business with the state.

While such a pay-to-play scheme is sadly all too familiar for Illinois, the conviction of a figure who had built such formidable clout in the background of Illinois politics and government was notable to federal prosecutors who spent the last eight years trying to unravel the criminal actions of the scandal-plagued Blagojevich administration.

It goes on to give one of the more objective accounts I've seen of Cellini's career.

COMM 337: Assignments for this week ... (a) irony and (b) gathering information for an article (and no, I'm not being ironic by doing these together)

2011-10-31T21:57:00.009-05:00

This week we will take up two related subjects, research and interviewing, and one that probably isn't, irony.

For Thursday and over the weekend, read Chapter 5, "Research," and Chapter 6, "Interviewing," in the "Writer's Digest Handbook of Magazine Article Writing." Today we'll discuss irony, which isn't so much a literary technique as it is a tone, along with Michael Lewis' articles on what he calls "economic disaster tourism."

First, a couple of definitions from Dictionary.com. First, the standard meaning:

1. the use of words to convey a meaning that is the opposite of its literal meaning: the irony of her reply, “How nice!” when I said I had to work all weekend.

2. Literature.
a. a technique of indicating, as through character or plot development, an intention or attitude opposite to that whichis actually or ostensibly stated.
b. (especially in contemporary writing) a manner of organizing a work so as to give full expressionto contradictory or complementary impulses, attitudes, etc., especially as a means of indicating detachment from a subject, theme, or emotion.

Then we will read an example of irony, as sort of a warmup, and go on to examine Michael Lewis' articles. For convenient reference, I have linked here:

A gently ironic theater review on the BBC.co.uk website linked to an Oct. 25 post I called "COMM 337: The hills are alive with the sound of ... irony?" Note the writing prompt at the bottom.
The directory of Michael Lewis' articles in Vanity Fair that I posted Oct. 11 as "COMM 337: Watch this space for your 3rd analyical assignment.". Posted here in case we need it.

In groups, discuss and be ready to share your thoughts with the rest of the class ...

What are Lewis' strong points, what are his weak points? Try to come to a consensus, but you shouldn't feel like you have to agree on everything. Each of us will get something at least slightly different out of the assignment. Agree on what you can agree about, and agree to disagree on the rest.

Is Lewis, in your opinion, being ironic? Can you find examples to quote? Irony often backfires on writers. Does that ever happen to Lewis?

What can you learn from Lewis that can help you in your own writing?

If you were writing a social-cultural-economic "travelog" like Lewis' of Springfield, how would you characterize the city? What would you write about? Who would you talk to? What do you think Lewis would find to write about if he were to visit Springfield?

For Thursday: Read Chapters 5 and 6 in the "Writer's Digest Handbook" on researching and interviewing. Notice how long the chapters are. Does this tell you anything about the complexity and relative importance of the two arts? two articles by Andrew Ferguson on the Slate.com website:

"How To Design a Lincoln Museum: Step 1: Ask Disney for advice. Step 2: Build a roller coaster?" - July 4, 2007 - http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2007/07/how_to_design_a_lincoln_museum_2.html
"How to Design a Lincoln Museum: Do you feel what Lincoln felt?" July 5, 2007 - http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2007/07/how_to_design_a_lincoln_museum.html

COMM 150: Vlogbrothers, technology and community and art - from YouTube vlogging to young adult novels and a small record label

2011-10-31T21:42:00.011-05:00

Thanks to MSenger for letting me know about this website ... actually a cluster of related websites. It's a perfect example of how advanced technology and new media allow people to express their own vision and connect with audiences more effectively than the "old" media.

It isn't exactly a mom-and-pop business. I'd call it something more like bro-and-bro ...

They're video bloggers John Green, who also writes young adult novels, and his brother Hank Green. Together they have the Vlogbrothers channel on YouTube, which is how they got started, and several related activities. I could write an introduction for the class, but MSenger's is very complete (and picks up on things I would miss). So here it is. better ...

They began on YouTube with Brotherhood 2.0 in which they went a year without any "textual" communication because they live in different states. They shared a channel and "vlogged" back and forth every day, hence their YouTube title, vlogbrothers. They gained followers (~600,000) and now use tumblr and twitter and have created multiple websites around their followers, called Nerdfighteria (nerds that fight worldsuck, which is what it sounds like). They have a record label, DFTBA (Don't Forget To Be Awesome) Records, multiple websites, and have founded other websites related to their program. John writes books and promotes his books in his videos. His latest book, The Fault in Our Stars, is an Amazon best seller and it won't be sold until January of next year. Hank has invented a few things (2D glasses). They founded and organize VidCon, the YouTube convention. It's kind of hard to list everything they do on the internet because they do a lot.

But the best way to learn about them isn't to read about them - it's to watch their FAQ video on YouTube.

There isn't a whole lot in traditional media about the brothers, perhaps understandably, but they're been written up in a college newspaper in Indianapolis and interviewed for local TV in Los Angeles, where they were putting together the F2F convention for YouTube users.

When John Green gave a reading at Butler University in Indianapolis, he got this writeup from Caitlin O'Rourke, arts and entertainment editor of the Butler Collegian. She described him:

Green has won an array of awards for his young adult novels, along with starting a YouTube channel with his brother Hank. It started the geek version of a cult following—just as Jerry Garcia had his Deadheads, the Green brothers have their nerdfighters. It’s a little much to take in. ...

When O'Rourke asked Green about his vlogs, he told her, "We are tremendously lucky to be part of this growing community of people devoted to finding ways to use the internet to make the world a healthier and more productive place to live."

At VidCon, they were the subject of a news segment by Gigi Graciette of local Fox News affiliate FOX 11. It contained this dialog (which is in all-caps because it's quoted from a TV script). Before she's interrupted by Hank Green, Graciette begins:

FROM YOU TUBE SUPERSTARS....

HANK GREEN/VIDCON
"MY CHANNEL HAS ABOUT FIVE HUNDRED MILLION TOTAL. THAT WOULD BE ABOUT HALF A BILLION WHICH, NO OFFENSE, IS PROBABLY MORE THAN YOU GET."

HMM... MAYBE. ; )

Cue a lesson here about the power of new media?

COMM 150: For week of Oct. 31-Nov. 4 ... artistic vision, niche marketing and the long tail

2011-10-31T09:55:00.001-05:00

The question I want us to take up in class: How can artists (musicians, writers, performers, painters, etc.) use Internet technology to connect with niche audiences without having to create "blockbusters" (as John Vivian defines the term) that appeal to broad-based audiences with bland, predictable product that offends no one but doesn't really appeal to anyone either?

In picture at left, a statue of 13th-century Italian leader Farinata degli Uberti occupies its niche at the Uffizi Palace in Florence. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license.

For extra credit, please suggest an artist or group of artists you know of ... like the ones we mentioned toward the end of class today ... who are successfully using new media technology to communicate with their market niche. Post a comment below in which you: (1) briefly identify the group and how you know about them; (2) indicate how they use the Web; and (3) copy-and-paste the link in your browser to their website. I hope to base our class discussion Friday, Nov. 4, on the artists you tell us about.

Example: Pierre Bensusan, a French acoustic guitar player. I heard him performing years ago at a little theater in Knoxville, Tenn., and reconnected with his music on the Internet a couple of years ago. He uses his webpage to promote concerts and sell downloads, DVDs, sheet music and books. It also has a media kit for reporters to write advance when he's coming to their town for a concert.

http://www.pierrebensusan.com/index.php?newlang=english

Schedule for this week's classes

Monday. In class we will examine how three artists use advanced technology, including marketing on the World Wide Web, to get worldwide audiences for genres of music that are specialized, sophisticated or both. They are:

Classical composer Eric Whitacre, who has created a "virtual choir" through YouTube
English folk singer Kate Rusby, whose record label is not a subsidiary of a global conglomorate but a thriving family business
Boston-based world music/urban fusion band Soulfège fronted by Derrick N. Ashong, who is also a presenter for Al Jazeera.

We'll discuss in class. How does "long-tail" marketing help their careers?

Wednesday. Midterm due. You have the option of writing it in class, although I think it may take you longer than 50 minutes to write an A paper.

Friday. We'll look at the bands, performers, writers or other artists you suggest.

For next week: Read the chapters in Vivian on Public Relations and Advertising.

COMM 150: Long-tail marketing, an English folk singer and an Afropop-hip-hop-funk-soul urban fusion band from Boston with a whiff of '50s R&B harmony

2011-10-28T17:32:00.024-05:00

Here are a couple of examples of artists who keep successful careers going by catering to a niche audience. Where would they fit on the "long tail" frequency distribution graph?

(For an example of a frequency distribution with - literally - a long tail, go to Matt Powell's blog post "Chasing the Long Tail." It also has some tips on how to advertise a niche product in Google. It's worth absorbing the psychology behind them, even if you're not yet selling a product. Someday it'll come in handy.)

Kate Rusby

A 33-year-old folk singer from Yorkshire in the North of Englad, Kate Rusby has a small but dedicated fan base and has been performing at festivals and smaller clubs for 20 years. Her record label is a family enterprise. In the embedded clip (to 6:05) from the British TV show My Music, she explains how it works:

(This clip and the rest of Kate Rusby's show available on YouTube.)

Rusby's definitely a niche artist. A review of her CD Awkward Annie by James Fryer in Gloucestershire Music catches the appeal of music like hers perfectly, if unintentionally. The magazine covers the music scene in Gloucestershire "[f]rom alternative to zydeco," and Fryer sounds like he wasn't too thrilled to be reviewing a folk album:

While Awkward Annie and English folk music in general might not be everyone’s cup of tea, for those not familiar with Kate Rusby this new album would make a welcome addition to almost any collection. It’s perfect for an autumn stroll with nothing more than an iPod to keep you company, and won’t fail to touch your heart on a cold Sunday afternoon in front of the fire. Awkward Annie is well worth giving the time of day and, if you want to catch the songstress live, she’s currently on a jam-packed tour of modest venues across the country.

But doesn't that catch the appeal of a niche artist perfectly? "Not everyone's cup of tea," but playing a "jam-packed tour of modest venues."

Derrick N. Ashong and Soulfège

Born in Africa and educated at Harvard, Derrick N. Ashong (DNA) fronts a Boston urban fusion band called Soulfège. He is also a presenter, or announcer, for The Stream a social media aggregator - a website that links to other media - that also has a daily TV show on the Arab network Al Jazeera.

Ashong's blog at http://www.derrickashong.com/ to promote the band and sell CDs and downloads. In a recent post, he included a clip (5:25) of a local TV news pop in Washington, D.C., publicizing his new album AFropolitan.

Soulfege Visited FOX 5 with New Album 'Afropolitan': MyFoxDC.com

Reviewer Delonte Briggs for the Examiner in Washington, D.C., said, "It took a little replay to get the background and history of the songs but after a little inspection, one can hear the songs are about spiritual warfare, political change, love for three women (mom, daughter & any woman who loves musicians). The artistry, story-telling and world influence makes this a top pick for quality independent international music leaving something for everyone one to grasp onto." Again, like Kate Rusby's, a kind of music that is intended to appeal to a sophisticated audience rather than a mass-market common denominator.

There's nothing particularly fancy about Ashong's website. It has pages on "My Music," Lyrics, The Stream, Videos, Photos, Press information, "About Me" and a store where you can buy CDs or downloads.

"These are songs for ALL the people," he says. "Listen, Download and SHARE the music."

In fact, there's nothing very fancy about either of the two websites. But Internet marketing allows both Derrick Ashong and Kate Rusby to keep a pretty specialized artistic vision intact without starving in an attic like so many artists had to do in years past.

COMM 150: Make a note of this cute kitty picture for when we get to the chapter on media ethics

2011-10-27T21:02:00.006-05:00

What's not to like about a picture of a cute kitty cat?

It depends on who you talk to, I guess.

When Associated Press photographer Ben Margot saw a police officer leaning over to pet a cat Tuesday in Oakland, Calif., he snapped the picture. A confrontation between police and Occupy Oakland protesters was building up, and the picture captured a quiet moment that was part of the larger scene in Oakland that day.

So the Washington Post ran the picture with a story about Occupy Wall Street-inspired protests. Later on, the scene in Oakland got violent. The story got updated, but the picture didn't.

So readers were treated to a picture of a cop petting a kit-cat on a story that began, "Police in riot gear fired tear gas and bean bags ..."

And the kit-, so to speak, hit the fan.

"It's amazing that Oakland PD managed to disperse the Occupy Oakland crowd solely by petting kittens," tweeted on reader.

"Not teargassing a soul!" tweeted another.

Both of them, by the way, write for competing publications in Washington.

You can read about it - and see the cute kitty - by clicking on this link. Was the Post out of line? Should they have paid more attention to the picture that ran with the story? [I can tell you from personal experience, a lot of newspaper editors don't even look at the pictures.] Or do some of the Washington Post's readers need to get a life?

COMM 337: Free-lance markets - who's going to buy what we're selling

2011-10-27T11:05:00.016-05:00

Now that we've all got story ideas, let's see who's buying what we're selling. The standard source for many years has been Writers Market, an annual publication that lists thousands of magazines, contests (especially for literary writing) and other outlets. It's expensive, although not as expensive as most college textbooks ... its website has more information, although most of it seems to be behind a subscription paywall. The print edition, which should be available in most libraries, carries very good articles on the basics of the craft - including how much to charge for editorial services and how to write a query letter. I recommend it if you're serious about freelance writing.

There are also free sources of information on the World Wide Web. One that I like is the Directory of Writers' Markets on the All Freelance Writing website.

(One of Doc's tangents: Did you notice that apostrophe? It's in the right place. After the "s" in "Writers'." Wow! That tells me they're pros, because nobody else ever gets apostrophes right. I started noticing apostrophes when the city editor at the newspaper in Oak Ridge, Tenn., told me she always looked for apostrophes. She wasn't a college graduate - a lot of newspaper people weren't in those days - but apostrophes mattered to her. Like when she was looking at letters applying for a job at the paper. They're one sign of a professional writer.)

So here's your assignment. In class today:

Go through the directory and see how many markets you can find for the story you're proposing to write for COMM 337. If there aren't any, you may need to refocus the topic. If there are too many, same thing. How could you change the story to appeal to different markets? Here's my point: You modify your story idea to fit what the markets are buying. It's even possible to interview somebody and develop a story for two different markets - for example, a story about the 100-man who ran a marathon in Toronto could be rewritten for Runner's World and a senior citizens' magazine.
Post a comment reminding us what your story idea is and listing the potential markets you found for them.

COMM 150: The "long tail" - niche marketing in the arts, entertainment and ... just about everything else

2011-10-26T09:53:00.013-05:00

In "Media of Mass Communication," John Vivian raises the issues of "elitist vs. populist values" that are posed when different media - from books to movies and sound recordings - seek "blockbusters" or megahits that make lots of money by appealing to a broad audience. He suggests they appeal to a lowest common denominator:

Masterpieces .. are exceptions in the huge ocean of media content. The economics of modern mass media pressures companies to produce quantities to meet huge demands. It's like zookeepers needing to keep the lions fed. Production lines for television series, romance novels and the latest hot genres are designed to produce quanties to meet low thresholds of audience acceptibility. (263)

Vivian discusses this tendency in terms of "high art" conflicting with "pop art." And he makes a pretty good case for saying the trend to seek blockbusters influences a majority of media content today.

But there's another trend that works in the opposite direction. Because of the proliferation of different media outlets, especially on the internet, artists don't have to appeal to lowest-common-denominator audiences. That's because of a statistical concept called the Long Tail that has been taken up by marketers - especially on the World Wide Web.

Chris Anderson, executive editor of WIRED magazine, started it with an article in 2004 called "The Long Tail" ... He got interested in Amazon.com, when he discovered that the online bookstore sells more of its lowest-ranking titles than its "blockbusters," once all the lower-ranking titles are added together. But the mathematical concept behind it also helps explain why smaller, more specialized distributors and entrepreneurial who do their own fulfillment or distribution can make a go of it in the new media landscape. The long tail, says Anderson, is:

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

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

For too long we've been suffering the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop. Why? Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching - a market response to inefficient distribution.

Anderson's argument is very mathematical, and it isn't easy to follow. But he's onto something. Consider this: Two of the three bricks-and-mortar retailers he cited here have gone out of business since he wrote, and the third, Barnes & Noble, is trying to change its business model.

Basically, as the online encyclopedia Wikipedia explains, the long tail applies to online businesses that "can sell a greater volume of otherwise hard to find items at small volumes than of popular items at large volumes." Wikipedia has a graph that shows what it looks like - well, it's a mathematical frequency distribution with a steeply descending curve along the Y axis and, well, a long tail along the X axis.

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

Open another window and go to the Wikipedia article (linked above). Look at the graph. The number of sales on a "blockbuster" go way up the Y axis (vertical). For example, let's see where a shlocky new single would go on the graph. I'm told Justin Bieber is still moving lots of product (I'm not going to call it music), so his sales would go up on the Y axis. But there are also little niche markets for all kinds of different specialty genres. For example, I like Norwegian jazz saxophonist Jan Gabarek. He's done some interesting things with medieval chant, Indian ragas and other forms that fit loosely in the category of world music. But not many people are in the market for his music, especially in the United States, so we'd better plot him way out along the X (horizontal) axis. But I can order his CDs on the Internet.

The same is true for all kinds of music. Bulgarian folk songs? Out on the X axis, but somewhere in the wide world there's a market for them. Vintage CDs of Stevie Ray Vaughan's blues or half a dozen bands playing 80s punk rock? On the X axis. Sister Rosetta Tharpe? Sound tracks from Bollywood movies shot in India? Very popular in India, but still out the X axis worldwide. Especially for an American distributor. What kinds of music do you enjoy? Where would it fit on the long tail frequency distribution graph?

Here's what makes long tail marketing so powerful. There are more people out there buying niche products out on the long tail of the X axis than there are buying the hits up the Y axis. What makes it all work, says Anderson, is the fact the Web is worldwide. It's huge, and you can find willing buyers out there somewhere that you couldn't reach if you had a record store, say, at 6th and Monroe in downtown Springfield. But you can reach them by electronic commerce. Anderson says:

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

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

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

Questions: How does the concept of long-tail marketing give serious artists - in any genre - a chance to sell product? Would it work differently for entertainers in different media and genres? How about blues, reggae or ska bands? Playwrights? Poets? Symphonies? Choral groups? How does it give you as a consumer more choices?

How does the long tail affect John Vivian's discussion of highbrow, mass market and blockbuster entertainment? How does it help a composer like Eric Whitacre further his career?

COMM 150: Midterm, due Wed., Nov. 2 [REVISED]

2011-10-25T18:46:00.019-05:00

PLEASE NOTE (posted 10 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 26): Since our class discussion today suggested that I hadn't worded Question 2A clearly enough, I have rewritten it below to reflect the main themes in our textbook more closely. If you still aren't sure about it, please don't hesitate to contact me by email at eellertsen@ben.edu. - pe

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

Below are three essay questions – one worth fifty (50) points out of a hundred, and two shorter essays worth 25 points each. Please write at least two pages double-spaced (500 words) on the 50-point essay and at least one page (250 words) on each of the 25-point short essays. Use plenty of detail from your reading in the textbook, the internet and posts to our class blog, as well as class discussion, to back up the points you make. (Indicate your sources and page numbers, where appropriate, in parentheses.) Your grade will depend both on your analysis of the broad trends I ask about, and on the specific detail you cite in support of the points you make. I am primarily interested in the specific factual arguments you make to support your points. So be specific. Remember: An unsupported generalization is sudden death in college-level writing. Due in class Wednesday, Nov. 2.

1. Main essay (50 points). In a discussion of mass media theory in our textbook "The Media of Mass Communication," author John Vivian says, "[online] communication shifts much of the control of the communication through the mass media to the recipient, turning the traditional process of mass communication on its head" (47). Elsewhere, he suggests, "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). How is the World Wide Web transforming the print media, i.e. books, magazines and newspapers? How is it changing the way you learn about the world around us?

2A. Short essay (25 points). John Vivian defines what he calls "demassification" as a "[p]rocess of media narrowing focus to audience niches" (100). How did demassification help the magazine industry better compete with broadcast media for advertising revenue after the 1970s? How has demassification given television advertisers more choices as the industry makes the transition from "terrestial" to cable networks? How do radio advertisers use formats to target audience segments?

2B. Self-reflective essay (25 points). What have you learned about mass communications in this class so far that you didn’t know before? Consider what you knew at the beginning of the course and what you know now. What point or points stand out most clearly to you? What points are still confusing? In grading the essay, I will evaluate the relevance of your discussion to the main goals and objectives of the course; the detail you cite to support or illustrate your points; and the connections you make.

COMM 337: A foreign correspondent's letter to his newborn son

2011-10-25T15:03:00.016-05:00

In class Thursday we will listen to a 1996 broadcast by Irish journalist and historian Fergal Keane. At the time he was a foreign correspondent for the British Broadcasting Corp., and he was in Hong Kong for the ceremonies that marked the former British colony's incorporation into the Republic of China. But Keane's broadcast wasn't about that historic occasion, it was about the recent birth of his son Daniel ... and, as he explained it later, he spoke "not just about becoming a father, but also about my own past, about loss and the failure of dreams, about the pain of different children I had met along the roads of war, about my father and how alcohol had taken him from me." Some of you may remember it from COMM 150 last year, when I played it as we discussed journalistic ethics. This time we'll look at the way it's written; it is considered a masterpiece of on-deadline writing.

So ... read Fergal Keane's Letter to Daniel as a writer, look for his turns of phrase and any literary techniques you find him using ... and ask youself if there's anything in you can use in your own writing. Post your analysis and thoughts as comments to this item below.

To get the full impact of Keane's mastery of the language, open two windows:
Read the letter by opening this window.
Listen to it by opening a second window and click on the link at lower right that says "Audio" Listen to the letter."
That way you can follow along as Keane reads the letter aloud. Listen especially for alliteration and assonance (repeated vowel sounds), word pictures, images and the cadence of his words, in other words for the textures of poetry in his writing. Remember: Poetry is written to be read aloud, and so is broadcast writing. So should all good writing.

Several years later, Keane told how he wrote the piece for an on-air feature called "From Our Own Correspondent," and what it meant to him ... and to his listeners:

There was one draft of the letter. No re-writing. And after the piece was done I went back to my paternity leave.

And then the letters started to arrive. By the sack load. From a mother whose only son had died on a military exercise in Canada; from a man writing by the light of an oil lamp in a tent in Antartica, missing his family back in Britain; and many, many letters from those who had struggled with alcohol or seen loved ones die from it.
***

Some of my friends worried that I would be identified with "Letter To Daniel" for the rest of my life; they felt for me when a critic attacked me for writing so personal a piece.

And I replied that nothing anybody says about it - good, bad or indifferent - matters a damn in the long run.

When I read the Letter now, and I remember that morning with the baby asleep in my lap, I see a young father about to start out on the greatest adventure of his life. He doesn't know that yet, of course.

But that child will be the making of him, the saving of him.

Keane, who is Irish, has had a distinguished journalistic career. It is frequently said of him that he displays a typically Irish awareness of the moral dimensions of social and political upheaval. His first job was on a small newspaper in Limerick, and he moved on to cover trouble spots in Northern Ireland, Africa and Asia. As an occasional contributor to the BBC for the last 10 years, he now is able to pick and choose his assignments, and reported on the aftermath of the government crackdown in Mynamar (a country the Brits still call Burma) in 2007. Most recently, he has turned to writing history.

Keane was one of several BBC reporters in Rwanda in the spring of 1994, when government backed militias murdered hundreds of thousands of people. "For some of us," he said years later, "it has left an enduring mark, a sense that we failed, not so much as journalists, but as human beings, because we saw things we were powerless to stop." In 2004 on the 10th anniversary of the genocide, he was interviewed for an American public television show on what he saw and how it changed him. He has taken an active interest in the Third World since leaving day-to-day news coverage for the BBC, and most recently he has written "Road of Bones: the Siege of Kohima 1944," a history of British and colonial troops in Asia during World War II.

COMM 337: Feature story topics

2011-10-25T14:41:00.002-05:00

COMM 337: The hills are alive with the sound of ... irony?

2011-10-25T11:10:00.022-05:00

I guess irony's the right word. It's a tone that doesn't have enough bite to be sarcastic, but it quietly "give[s] full expression to contradictory or complementary impulses, attitudes, etc., especially as a means of indicating detachment from a subject, theme, or emotion." That's from a definition of "irony" that I don't remember from my days teaching English. But Dictionary.com says it's "especially [used] in contemporary writing," and it's worth mastering in our own writing. In this era of postmodern ambiguity, we do want to be contemporary, don't we?

So here's a cute little story on the British Broadcasting Co. website by Bethany Bell, a foreign correspondent based in Vienna (she's also reported extensively from the Middle East), on a revival of "The Sound of Music" in Austria". The vintage musical comedy doesn't have many fans in Austria because, well, its writers and producers obviously didn't know much about Austria.

Which gives Bethany Bell a field day.

Her headline is straightforward enough - "Taking the Sound of Music home to Salzburg." (Of course, the headline isn't hers. Count on a headline writer to get the tone of your story wrong! Not always, but all too often.) For all of that, her tone is tongue-in-cheek all the way through.

Her lede paragraph, for example. "How do you solve a problem like The Sound of Music in Salzburg?" It's an echo of a song about Julie Andrews' character in the musical, "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria/" Readers of a certain age will get it immediately, at least in English-speaking countries. And it isn't the only song echoed in Bell's article.

On the whole Bell's story is a balanced account. And at the end, she has kind words for the people who are trying to adapt the stage version "The people of Salzburg still have to be convinced about The Sound of Music, but this production might be a very good place to start." After her lede, she gives some background and goes directly to a nut graf:

The Hollywood film starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer has a fanatical following in the English-speaking world.

It tells the true story of Maria the novice nun who sings her way into the hearts of Captain von Trapp and his family - and then flees with them as Austria is annexed to Nazi Germany.

The 1965 film, with its soaring shots of the mountains around Salzburg, attracts thousands of tourists to the city every year.

But many Austrians can't sing a note of it.

It's partly because the piece celebrates a Hollywood fantasy vision of Austria. While it may be one of Fraulein Maria's favourite things, no self-respecting Austrian would ever eat schnitzel with noodles - only with potato salad, or possibly with chips [french fries]. ...

And so on ...

There's one of Bell's sly references to Julie Andrews' songs, by the way, this time to "My Favorite Things."

Later on Bell notes that some errors were corrected when the musical was translated into German. "A couple of plot details have also been changed. The von Trapp family no longer escapes over the mountains into Switzerland, because everyone here knows that if you climb over the mountains near Salzburg, you end up in Germany." Not exactly where you'd want to go when you're escaping the Nazis, as everyone in a Salzburg audience would know.

Bell interviewed a German academic who tried to explain the maovie's lack of authenticity to an English reporter in terms English readers would relate to:

Reinhold Wagnleitner, a professor of history at the University of Salzburg, who specialises in American studies, says the movie is not "the real thing".

"It's too syrupy, it's kitsch," he told me.

"It's as if an Austrian author would make a film in German about the Mersey Sound with an Austrian crew in Liverpool and expect the Liverpudlians to think it is a great music film."

The Mersey Sound was the combination of rock, skiffle, doo wop and soul that the Beatles and other bands in Liverpool popularized in the 1960s. So Wagnleitner's comparison would resonate with people from Liverpool [who are called "Liverpudlians"] and English music fans in general.

Before we move on, try your hand at it: Take Herr Professor Wagnleitner's metaphor and "Americanize" it. For example, I might say "... it's like an Austrian writer shot a movie about the Chicago blues with an Austrian crew on the South Side of Chicago." But you can do better than that. It doesn't have to be about music, or Chicago, as long as you get the idea of outsiders trying to explain the nuances of something they don't understand. Maybe "... like Martha Stewart coming to Springfield and telling us how to make a horseshoe sandwich" or "... like an elderly college professor trying to talk about postmodernist nuance." Give it a try, and post your metaphors as comments below.

COMM 150: Eric Whiteacre's virtual choir - an online community for "choir geeks" ... or a very small, worldwide market niche ... or both?

2011-10-23T16:18:00.035-05:00

Just askin'.

But it'll serve to introduce a concept we'll be learning about in the next few days ... what is sometimes known as the "long tail" model of niche marketing.

In class Monday we agreed that a live performance is more real and raw than a "mediated" performance - one that is broadcast by media technology - and watching a live performance allows us to interact with other audience members. Today we'll look at an extreme form of mediated performance - the "virtual choirs" put together on YouTube by American composer and conductor Eric Whitacre.

First we'll watch a brief intro that Whitacre posted to YouTube. Singing in a group can be a powerful way of connecting with people. That's why our ancestors have been doing it since we lived in caves 15,000 and 20,000 years ago. Now in an increasingly fragmented world, Whitacre tries to bring people together virtually. How well does he succeed?

Whitacre's "virtual choir" went viral, and he's done several pieces. On his blog he explains, in a post titled (logically enough) "The Virtual Choir: How We Did It." He also sells CDs - not to mention T-shirts that say "Choir Geeks Of The World UNITE!" and other knick-knacks on the blog. He seems to be doing a flourishing business.

How does Whitacre use technology to get his artistic vision to a niche audience?

Just this week, Whitacre was an artist in residence for "choir geeks" from four states at a high school in Southern Pines, N.C. (population 10,918). Originally from Nevada, Whitacre is currently based in London. He's on a U.S. tour this month, and Southern Pines' local paper, The Pilot, called him a "classical rock star" and had this to say about him:

Whitacre’s success has prevented him from working with students recently. His debut album, “Light & Gold,” released last October, became the number one classical album on the U.S. and U.K. charts within a week.

He achieved mega-stardom in the choral world with a call to singers to participate in a virtual choir. He invited singers to sing his work “Lux Aurumque” from their homes and upload the performance. The result was a virtual choir of 185 voices from 12 countries. The video received more than a million views on YouTube in just two months.

His residency at Robert E. Lee High School in Southern Pines brought in music students from all over the Southeast:

“It’s really special to be able to come to Southern Pines,” Whitacre says. “I spend most of my year composing, but every now and then I love to work with musicians from all walks of life and ages and stages of musical ability.”

The residency at Pinecrest High School will give young musicians precious time with this music legend. Plisco opened the clinic up to groups from colleges and other high schools. Participating ensembles include the Union Pines Wind Ensemble, the Salem College Choirs from Winston-Salem, the Christopher Newport University Chamber Choir from Newport News, Va., the Palmetto Voices from South Carolina, the Middle Creek High School Choral Program in Apex, the St. Stephens High School Chamber Ensemble from Hickory and singers from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Tenn.

While singers have always communicated with each other, it was through the Internet that these singers descended on a small town in coastal North Carolina. High school chorus director Erin E. Plisco said she "noticed how infatuated [her students] were with his music. He’s like a rock star to them." So she "went to Whitacre’s website last fall and emailed his manager, telling her how Pinecrest students were inspired by Whitacre." They emailed back and forth, and out of it came the residency.

Be ready to discuss the following questions in small groups. I don't think there are any final answers to them, but that's always true of the best questions, isn't it? And it shouldn't stop us from thinking about them. Discuss:

How does the interactivity of the internet break down the boundaries between mass communication and interpersonal communication? Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Why? How? How do Whitacre and members of the virtual choir use technology to communicate?
What is a "virtual community?" (Check it out on Wikipedia if you need to.) How can such a community bring people together over great distances? What are its limits? Can the "choir geeks" of the world really unite via the World Wide Web? What is gained by online communication? What is lost?

Post summaries of your answers as comments below.

Want to see more? In a 15-minute talk at last year's last year's Technology Entertainment and Design conference, Whitacre explained how the virtual choir pieces were recorded and put together, and he expanded on his ideas about building community.

COMM 150: In-class discussion, entertainment media

2011-10-23T15:52:00.007-05:00

On page 245 of "The Media of Mass Communication," John Vivian asks, "What are the advantages of live performances over mediated performances?" Good question, but it raises several other questions. Let's unpack some of them. In small groups, please discuss how the following questions apply to music, storytelling, sports, video games and any other forms of entertainment that Vivian doesn't mention:

For starters, what is a "mediated performance?" How does Vivian define the term? How do you define it? How is it different from live performance?
What are the advantages of live performances over mediated performances? (This is Vivian's original question.)
What are the advantages of mediated over live performances?
What are some of the trade-offs between the two?
How do we experience each? As performers? As audience members?
What benefits do you receive as a performer from a live audience, from a performance carried by the media?
What benefits do you receive as an audience member from a live performance, from a mediated performance?
How are technologies and media platforms like Skype and YouTube changing the boundaries between live and mediated performance?

Break into small groups. (You don't have to count off. Just get with the people sitting at your row, or the people sitting nearest you.) Discuss, and be ready to report to the rest of the class what you learned from talking it over with your classmates.

COMM 150: Getting ready for the midterm, Wednesday, Nov. 2

2011-10-23T14:39:00.024-05:00

Updated Tuesday, 8 a.m. Please see the draft of this year's midterm questions. I have streamlined and focused the 50-point question more closely, and I have added a 25-point question on CPM.

As I announced in class Friday, our midterm will be Wednesday, Nov. 2. I will post a final draft of the questions by Wednesday, Oct. 26 (a week ahead of time), but in the meantime I will post draft copies of the assignment sheet as I go along. That way, you can start working on it ahead of time. It is an open-book essay test, and you can bring a final draft to class on Nov. 2. (Or, better, bring it in on a flash drive, give it one last edit and print it out in class.) Or you can write it in class during the scheduled 50-minute period. I will follow the same procedure for the final exam, and you can consider this as a dry run for the final.

How to study for the midterm

Since it's an open-book test, you are very strongly encouraged to open the book! - i.e. to consult John Vivian's "Media of Mass Communication" and to include a lot of quotes. As you quote from Vivian, it's a good idea to put the page number in parentheses after the quotation. But I don't demand a Works Cited or References page. You can also find material on the Mackerel Wrapper (for an example, see the item from Libya linked below in this post). Use examples from your reading in Vivian and the blog, as well as your own knowledge and class discussion, to support your points. Remember: An unsupported generalization is sudden death in college-level writing. So go back over Vivian and the blog to find examples you can use to support your generalizations.

How to write the essays

A good strategy for essay tests, one I developed in grad school, was to answer the question with facts from the text(s) and lecture notes, i.e. parrot the conventional wisdom, and then to go on and give my own opinion and analysis of the issues raised by the test question. But even when I was stating my opinion, I learned to always back it up with facts, statistics, quotes and examples. Even? Especially when I was stating my opinion! Your teachers are probably looking for two things when they grade a test: (1) your command of the basic facts; and (2) your ability to analyze and evaluate the factual information. So give 'em both.

In a word, be specific. Clobber me with facts. In other words, be specific. At the risk of sounding repetitious, always be specific.

What's going to be on the test?

Last year's midterm in the same course will give you a good idea of the format, and one of the questions will be the same.

I'm still drafting this year's midterm, but it will include the following questions:

A 50-point essay. While I don't have a final draft yet, it will include the following related points: (a) How does the technology of different media platforms (e.g. magazines, TV, sound recording, the internet) influence the content of messages? (b) How do the media influence the way we perceive the world? ~~How~~To what extent do they allow ~~the creators of content to bypass the~~ media consumers to function as their own gatekeepers? How does the technology of communication infaluence the way you perceive the world?
A 25-point "self-reflective" essay. Here's last year's: "What have you learned about mass communications in this class so far that you didn’t know before? Consider what you knew at the beginning of the course and what you know now. What point or points stand out most clearly to you? What points are still confusing? In answering this question, please feel free to look at the “Tip Sheet on Writing a Reflective Essay” linked to my faculty webpage at http://www1.ben.edu/springfield/faculty/ellertsen/reflect.html. In grading the essay, I will evaluate the relevance of your discussion to the main goals and objectives of the course; the detail you cite to support or illustrate your points; and the connections you make." I will copy and paste this into this year's test.
A 25-point short essay on a more focused topic. It ask about something specific (there's that word again) and how it relates to one of the main themes of the course like cross-platform convergence or market segmentationa. I'll probably take it from the section of the book on the history of print, sound and motion media, but I'm still rereading it and haven't decided yet. I'll ask about CPM - how does Vivian define it, and how does it work in the example he gives? How does it influence content in other media? How, specifically, do radio advertisers use formats to lower CPM by reaching targeted market segments?

In the meantime, here's a story that gives an example of how a media technology changed the way we perceive the world. During the weekend, Esther Addley of the Guardian.co.uk website in Great Britain noted that the death of Libya's Colonel Gaddafi was broadcast to the world via a mobile phone picture. She added:

If television has made it difficult for governments and armies to control the news of political deaths, mobile phone cameras and social media have made any such hopes almost impossible. The US government might have refused to release images of Osama bin Laden's body, but al-Jazeera, Twitter and a cheap mobile phone handset made that decision irrelevant in Libya.

Addley's thoughts on the subject, in turn, were picked up by a paper in Australia and relayed to the world under a headline "Click: How mobile phones and social media broke the news." How do aher story and the news of Gaddafi's death relate to Vivian's discussion of the 2009 "Twitter Revolution" in Iran, the Arab Spring or this month's Occupy Wall Street demonstrations?

COMM 337: An old-fashioned war correspondent's dispatch from Libya and the power of direct observation, quotation

2011-10-22T21:19:00.001-05:00

We don't see too much of them anymore, especially in America where news budgets have been repeatedly slashed over the years, but war correspondents like Ernie Pyle and Edward R. Murrow were once the rock stars of journalism. And novelists including Stephen Crane and Ernest Hemingway got their start as war correspondents. Now, even at newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post that still maintain overseas bureaus, they are a dying breed. But British readers still have an interest in international affairs (even if they have no interest whatsoever in swapping the pound for the euro!), and Kim Sengupta of The (London) Independent is one of the best still around.

Here in a dispatch posted today to the Independent.co.uk websit, Sengupta reports from Libya in a dispatch headlined "Gaddafi cannot hurt his people any longer." The headline picks up on a quote, and Sengupta's direct quotations and observation make the story. His lede:

The blood had been washed off and the faces, eyes shut, were in repose. But the terrible wounds of the last violent moments were left uncovered by the shrouds of white cloth that had been hastily thrown over them. The bodies were on stretchers, Muammar Gaddafi in a temporary military barracks, Mutassim Gaddafi in a container.

These were temporary resting places for the former dictator and his son. After being brought back to Misrata from Sirte, the scene of the killings, the corpses had been moved from place to place – at one point to the home of a former rebel official and then to a meat warehouse. ...

Sengupta said the revolutionary government of Libya hadn't yet decided how to dispose of the bodies, and "it was as if no one wanted responsibility for disposing of these grisly symbols of the revolution's triumph after such a bitter civil war," but he isn't interested in sorting out the politics of the occasion. (Better to leave that to the talking heads on TV, one would think.) Instead, he he does what journalists do best - he reports what he saw and heard:

Looking down at the body of Colonel Gaddafi, Firuz al-Maghri, a 55-year-old schoolteacher who had been allowed into the barracks by a friend in the opposition militia, shook his head as he recalled a brother and a cousin who had died in Tripoli's Abu Salim prison, a place of fear and despair. "Twelve hundred prisoners were murdered there," he said. "It is difficult for outsiders to understand, but he was responsible for so many lives lost, families who never found out what happened to those who disappeared. We feared him, I was afraid. But seeing him like this...."

Captain Rahim Abu-Bakr, an engineer who became a fighter, patted Mr Maghri's shoulder. "It does not matter," he said. "He cannot hurt people any longer. What happened at the end to him and his son was bound to happen. But this was a bad death. I do not like being here."

Colonel Gaddafi appeared to have been shot in the head, the bullet wound clearly visible under his previously curly hair for which he was famous– it now lay lank. Mutassim had injuries to his chest and stomach. But exactly what happened when the final reckoning came at Sirte remains unclear.

And so it goes. It is a news story, and it trails off at the end. But that's what the inverted pyramid is supposed to do.

At one time or another Sengupta has reported from most of the world's trouble spots, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Kosovo, the former Soviet state of Georgia, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Northern Ireland and New York City in the aftermath of 9/11. Soon thereafter when Queen Elizabeth II named Rudy Giuliani, New York's mayor at the time, an honorary Knight Commander of the British Empire, Sengupta was on hand in London to cover the ceremony. He quoted the queen - "I hope you have less stress in your life now [than on Sept. 11]" - and he got some great quotes from Giuliani:

How did he cope with the adulation he was receiving [in London]?

"It beats being booed, which sometimes happens when you are Mayor of New York."

The award, he said, was for the people of New York. "I'd better say that - I know what they are like. When I walk around back in Brooklyn they'll say, 'Hey, what is this Sir stuff? You some kinda big shot?"'

Giuliani cannot be called Sir Rudolph because he is not British, but he can add KBE to his surname.

He paraphrased General Norman Schwarzkopf on whether the United States should forgive the September 11 attackers: "It is not the responsibility of the US to forgive them; it is up to God. It is the responsibility of the US to make sure that meeting takes place."

See? It aways gets back to the quotes. Sengupta is one of the best in a very tough business, but he's no better than the best of his quotes.

COMM 337: Another type of op-ed column, a balanced foreign policy appraisal by an overseas academic observer

2011-10-22T20:26:00.017-05:00

In Friday's issue of The Guardian (a broadsheet newspaper in the U.K.), Brian Williams of the universities of London and Oxford offers his appraisal of U.S. foreign policy under the Obama administration. Unlike happy warriors like William Safire and Peggy Noonan, who have clear partisan loyalties, Williams assesses both the pros and cons of President Obama's approach to foreign policy.

Williams' lede notes, accurately enough, that Obama's approach to the revolution in Libya has played out very well so far:

President Obama's latest foreign intervention in Libya reflects an evolution of the American way of war and the crystallisation of the "Obama Doctrine". Gone are the "shock and awe", trillion-dollar campaigns of the Bush era – right on cue, the president has followed Thursday's news of Muammar Gaddafi's death with Friday's announcement of the final pullout of US troops from Iraq by the end of 2011. In this age of austerity and public fatigue with foreign exploits, the Obama White House has diligently combined military force, technology, intelligence assets and patience to rack up an unassailable list of "wins" for the president on foreign affairs.

He compares Obama's foreign policy to former President George W. Bush's, and adds, "The Bush Doctrine played right into Osama bin Laden's hands; the Obama Doctrine killed Bin Laden."

Compare American pundits like the New York Times for example, which headlined a Libya story "Successes Overseas Are Unlikely to Help Obama at Home." Or Ken Walsh's Washington blog U.S. News and World Report, "Success in Libya Unlikely to Aid Obama's Re-election Chances."

Perhaps because he's British and doesn't have to spend all of his waking hours analyzing next year's U.S. election, Williams sees complex issues at play in what he calls the "Obama Doctrine." Even more amazing, he discusses them:

The methods behind the Obama Doctrine are just as important as the thinking. We are witnessing an evolution in the American way of war. The broad-brush "global war on terror" of Rumsfeld and Bush is being replaced by a far more sophisticated mix of ingredients. Unmanned aerial vehicles have replaced boots on the ground. This effort concentrates on gathering intelligence on opponents and then using the American technological advantage to eliminate enemy leadership. Under President Obama, the use of drones has more than tripled. While such a policy raises moral, ethnical and legal issues, the effectiveness in decimating the al-Qaida network and Taliban leaders is hard to dispute.

I think he means it raises "ethical ... issues" (since "ethnical" isn't a word and wouldn't fit the context even if it were), and I'd have to agree.

On a more pragmatic note, Williams questions "new US approach to active intervention where the US seemingly plays a secondary role to allies," but he adds, "not being the obvious lead nation is a vote winner in the US." I'm not so sure about that - the Republican primary candidates certainly don't sound like they think it's a winner! Even in the context of Libya, Williams adds:

The euphoria over Gaddafi's fall, we should remember, may prove shortlived. How secure is the National Transitional Council's authority, and will it prove capable of making the transition to a legitimate, democratic form of government? What if, in fact, Islamic extremists emerge as a major force? Or what if, perhaps, another military junta seizes power? Will we think the mission a success if, over coming months, the country decays into civil war? Can the US and its Nato allies stay out of Libya if the security situation deteriorates? All of these questions remain to be answered. Until we see how Libya pans out, the validity of the Obama Doctrine remains questionable.

And there's always Iran to think about:

The recently revealed Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi Arabian Ambassador to Washington, coupled with continued intransigence on their nuclear weapons programme, and interference in Afghanistan, all mean that the president will be pressured to make a tough call in the near future. If and when he does decide to act, however, it will likely not be the brash, all-guns-blazing policy of the last decade. Such an intervention will be based on covert operations and the use of technology to deliver tightly targeted military action.

But Iran is not Libya, as the US national security team is well aware, and the pragmatism of the Obama Doctrine may very well avoid conflict in favour of strategic patience. After all, given the president's foreign policy scorecard, why give in to Republican bellicosity on Iran in the run-up to the 2012 election?

COMM 337: William Safire, a master wordsmith, speechwriter, op-ed columnist

2011-10-22T13:34:00.044-05:00

Last week in the comments section of this blog, we had a sidebar conversation about a famous political speech. It's worth an item of its own because it calls to mind one of the great 20th-century political wordsmiths.

William Safire, 1929-2009, was speechwriter for President Richard Nixon and Pulitzer Prize-winning op-ed columnist for The New York Times. The conversation in The Mackerel Wrapper got started when I noticed the author of our textbook in COMM 150 got the date wrong on a famous speech by Vice President Spiro Agnew, in which he accused people who disagreed with him of being "nattering nabobs of negativism." A student said the textbook also misquoted him, so I looked it up, and she was right. Anyway, it brought back memories.

William Safire was one of Agnew's chief speechwriters, and "nattering nabobs" was his turn of phrase. It helped make him famous.

The speech came during the 1970 congressional elections, when Agnew was campaigning for Republican candiates. Safire wasn't the only Agnew speechwriter with a flair for invective. Another was Patrick Buchanan, who went on to write for conservative websites and ran for the Republican presidential nomination. As speechwriters, they were properly anonymous at the time. But later on, much later on, the "nattering nabobs" speech turned out to be Safire's. The Sept. 21, 1970, issue of Time magazine quoted it at considerable length:

WE have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism. They have formed their own 4-H Club—the hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history. These men are hard up for hard times. They can only make hay when the sun does not shine. The objective of this campaign is to replace those who moan endlessly about what is wrong with their country with men and women of the wit and will to stand up and speak out for what is right in America. This campaign presents us with a clear choice between the troglodytic [cave-dwelling] leftists who dominate Congress now, and the moderate, centrist and conservative supporters of President Nixon.

Time's editors saw fit to explain "troglodytes" in brackets. At least two other words also deserve a word or two of explanation because they show what a master wordsmith Safire was.

According to the HarperCollins dictionary, "nattering" is "Chiefly Brit," and it means "to talk idly and at length; chatter or gossip." A "nabob" is a "rich, powerful, or important man" or a "European who made a fortune in the Orient, esp in India." Agnew wanted to paint his political enemies as un-American snobs, elitists who were way out of the mainstream, and Safire chose exactly the right words for him.

Even the targets of Agnew's attacks had to enjoy the wordsmithery. When he blasted college students and other critics of the Vietnam War as an "effete corps of impudent snobs," I remember seeing people wearing buttons on the University of Tennessee campus that said, "I am an effete, impudent snob."

After Agnew resigned from office in 1973 (as part of a plea bargain on charges of bribery and tax evasion), Safire was hired by The New York Times to write an op ed column. He also wrote about the English language, and sometimes it was hard to tell whether politics or language was his first love. In 2005 he wrote his last political column, but he kept writing "On Language" for The New York Times Magazine until his death.

Here's what Safire said in 2009 about a topic that's still in the news - "Zombie banks," which he defined suddinctly as "a bank with negative assets that survives thanks to government support."

“The Zombulator will continue to wreak havoc,” opined a worried Web site named the Motley Fool a couple of weeks ago, “as long as we pursue a Zombie Bank policy. ” A few months before, a group of anxious academics wrote in The Irish Times that “Irish banks must be recapitalized if Ireland is to avoid a Japan-style prolonged recession, retarded by zombie banks.” And Mark Gilbert, a Bloomberg News columnist who thinks that “the zombie banks are demanding to be let back into the financial mall so they can pillage the global markets anew,” headlined his somewhat alarmist view: “Fresh Flesh Runs Screaming as Zombie Banks Drool.”

Blanch not, horror fans; the etymology of zombie offers understanding. An 1819 history averred that Zombi is the name for an Angolan diety; in 1872, the early student of Americanisms Maximilian Schele de Vere defined the proper noun as “a phantom or a ghost, not infrequently heard in the Southern States in nurseries and among the servants” and speculated that “the word is a Creole corruption of the Spanish sombra.” A century later, as the word lost its capital and picked up a final e, The Times of London reported that “a zombie, as every schoolboy knows, is a person who has been killed and raised from the dead by sinister voodoo priests called bocors.” The spooky name was then taken up by bartenders to describe a stupefying rum highball ...

And so on ... you don't have to be a wordsmith to see how much he enjoyed the language.

When Safire died, fellow speechwriter-turned-columnist Peggy Noonan duly noted, and quoted, the "nattering nabobs" speech in a tribute in Time magazine. But she added it was in the column that "Safire became Safire." She said:

There he mastered and honed a natural pugnacity--a desire to "mix it up," as he put it. You really cared what he thought and weren't sure what he'd think because he could surprise you. And boy, did he wade in. When everyone was putting down Washington Mayor Marion Barry, he was alone in criticizing violations of Barry's privacy. He voted for Bill Clinton but pulled no punches toward him or Hillary. ...

Noonan started out as a speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan, and she felt an affinity for him. She continued:

He gave me some of the best professional advice I've ever received: Write what you see, because "what history needs more of is first-person testimony." "Never feel guilty about reading; it's what you do to do what you do." "Never join a pile-on, but it's O.K. to start one."

Notice that Noonan said readers like her "really cared what he thought and weren't sure what he'd think because he could surprise you." There's that word again. Surprise your readers, and they'll stay with you. Even in political writing. Maybe especially in political writing.

My free advice (for what it's worth) for readers: Our system of law and government is adversarial, and I think it's important to keep up with all sides of the issues. I say "all sides" because usually there are more than two. In the current Republican primary field, for example, there are at least five credible candidates whose ideas will influence the eventual party platform even if they don't win the nomination. That means we have to read a lot of stuff we don't agree with just to be informed citizens.

So ... after that windup, here comes the pitch ... if I read something I don't like, I try to be open-minded about it. Give it the benefit of the doubt. If it pins an abusive label on me, wear it proudly (like an "effete impudent snob" button). And if the people I agree with are the ones who are acting like jerks, I try not to let that bother me either. Whenever all the political invective leaves a bad taste in my mouth, I'll look at http://cuteoverload.com/ before I turn off my computer and go do something else. That always puts me in a better mood.