The Mackerel Wrapper

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

Friday, October 31, 2008

How Sarah Palin Was Unmasked / CBS News

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/10/31/business/marketwatch/main4559732.shtml

Three observations:

1. Nathan Thornburgh was "working the edges of the story," as I like to call it. Instead of going to the McCain-Palin rally in Ohio, the center of where the action was, he booked a flight to Anchorage.

2. They're measuring readership by clicks or unique page views instead of circulation -- "For instance, a recent story on Palin ... drew 508,980 page views, according to Time spokesman Daniel Kile." Before the Internet, there was no good way to measure how many people read a given story.

3. His resume sort of works the edges of the profession, to coin a phrase. Instead of majoring in print journalism at something like the Medill School, he taught English, played saxaphone and started writing music reviews in an alternative weekly. My kind of guy? Maybe, for someone who got a Ph.D. in Shakespeare and went next to covering the Anderson County (Tenn.) sheriff's police next.
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About Me

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