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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, that's what I think.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COMM 150: Segue to media law and ethics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COMM 337: Schedule of assignments - with *UPDATES*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fences mended. End of story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chase quoted her messages and said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Among other things, she:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note the role of social media here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How are social media changing our world?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so on ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The paper is documented. In my classes, that means sources of information in all of your writing must be attributed or documented according to the basic guidelines of an academic system like MLA or APA. Key concept: If you write down anything you didn’t know before, say where you found it! Failure to do so, even unintentional, is plagiarism. In our field, it may also be copyright infringement.

Do not write just to fill up space. Create clear, concise, accurate, and relevant thoughts. And convey them to readers in a well-written, grammatical, engaging fashion. If you are majoring in communications, consider yourself a professional writer already. If you're not a major ... consider yourself a professional writer already, too, and consider changing majors to comm arts while you're at it!

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stoneking added:

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

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

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

COMM 337: Feature story assignment, writer's guidelines

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

'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

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

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

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

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.