COMM 150: Media in Springfield / READ

The articles linked touch on topics we covered earlier in the semester and will get back to after Thanksgiving -- the state of the television and newspaper industries and how that affects us as citizens and consumers -- and they detail the state of the news media in Springfield. They're available in this week's Illinois Times. Find it, in print or on line (the links below will take you there) and be ready to talk about the stories in class next week. -- pe.

This morning's issue of Illinois Times has a cover story and a couple of sidebars on the state of the news media. They fit in with the discussion we're having in a couple of my news-editorial classes, and they're important enough I'm assigning them to all of my mass comm. students. Read them, and be ready to cite them in class discussions, on your blogs and/or your final exam essays. You can pick up a free copy of IT from the newsrack next to the Quiet Lounge in Dawson, or read it on IT's website They tell about the pressure of declining circulation, ownership changes and a gloomy job outlook at The State Journal-Register and WICS Channel 20. All this makes it difficult, according to some of the people quoted, to do a decent, ethical job of covering the news -- writing "the best obtainable version of the truth" in Carl Bernstein's words -- in the dominant media in town. More specialized, or "niche," media in the African-American community and public radio are doing better, according to the sidebars.

There's nothing new in the doom and gloom. Ben Bagdikian, a former Washington Post editor now dean emeritus of the journalism school at the University of California-Berkley, summed it up 40 years ago when he said, "Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach's St. Matthew's Passion on a ukulele: The instrument is too crude for the work, for the audience and for the performer."

True enough. But you've got to try.

This week's stories in Illinois Times tell how things are shaking out here lately, and they're not just for students who want to go into the news business. The trends are national, and they're important for everyone who deals with -- or reads, watches, listens to or surfs -- the media. Which is all of us.

A sidelight. In Amanda Parsons' story on local TV news, there's a little preview of what Benedictine students can expect from Nathan Mihelich, who will teach TV production spring semester. Formerly a Channel 20 reporter, Mihelich is now information director for the Dominican Sisters of Springfield. Says the IT story:

Mihelich will teach a new television-production course at Benedictine University/Springfield College in the spring, and he says he will use his experiences at WICS and other news stations to teach students about the value of investigative reporting, the importance of quality rather than quantity, and how to turn a story into a presentable piece that people care about and may act upon.

Read the IT stories and be ready to discuss them in class next week.

COMM 150: Journalism and capital-T truth

Cross-posted from this semester's class blog in Communications 207 (copy editing). -- pe

Carl Bernstein, one of the reporters who broke the Watergate story during the 1970s, has a definition that I've liked ever since I first came across it in our copyediting textbook, Modern News Editing by Mark Ludwig and Gene Gilmore (5th ed. Ames, Iowa: Blackwell, 2005). Journalism, according to Bernstein, is "the best obtainable version of the truth" (231). Ludwig and Gilmore add it's "an acknowledgement that the full truth is hard to grab hold of and may shift over time as more facts are revealed."

Turns out Bernstein has been saying it for years. Especially after he and fellow Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward were portrayed in the Hollywood movie "All the President's Men" (1976), Bernstein has been a fixture on the rubber-chicken dinner and lecture circuit. And he gives this definition of journalism to audience after audience. Usually he says it's being undermined by celebrity news and cost-cutting in U.S. newsrooms.

It makes sense to me. I think it makes sense to a lot of people who have covered the news, and who know from the experience how elusive the truth can be. I like it because it doesn't promise too much. It doesn't promise The Truth with a capital "T."

"Truth is the word that summarizes many journalistic ideas," say Ludwig and Gilmore. "But what, philosopy has always asked, is Truth? Working newsmen and newswomen know what truth means on the job and don't worry too much about the big picture, so far as they can discover and portray it." The best obtainable version, in other words, of truth.

Ironically, Bernstein credits Woodward with the phrase. When the two were interviewed by Larry King of CNN, they said:

... it -- but it -- it -- you know, and our concern is that -- and Carl makes this point, and it's a critical one, that the business of this kind of journalism, trying to get to the bottom of something complicated, hidden, scandalous, or important decisions by people who have lots of power, involves lots of sources. Not one source, not 10, but dozens or even hundreds.

BERNSTEIN: You know, Bob said right after Watergate, that really, what this story was about, like all reporting, or good reporting, is the best obtainable version of the truth. And that phrase has always stuck with me about what real reporting is. When we did "All the President's Men," it turned out unintentionally it was maybe a primer on the basic kind of police reporting and slogging and knocking on doors.

They went on from there, on Larry King Live. But for me the best obtainable version of truth has something to do with "the basic kind of police reporting and slogging and knocking on doors."

In seeking the best obtainable truth, Ludwig and Gilmore look for several things.

The most important is accuracy. "Newsrooms rightly develop a fixation on accuracy about names and addresses. But reporters must be at least as careful about accurate quotation, or about the accuracy of the impression that results from the way facts are put together."

Almost as important is objectivity. Ludwig and Gilmore cite the conventional wisdom: "Reporters should keep themselves out of the story, and editors should see that they do."

Closely related to accuracy and objectivity is fairness. Ludwig and Gilmore have a simple standard for editors: "They treat everybody alike."

Bernstein's rubber-chicken dinner speech, as he gave it Sept. 26, 1998, at the annual convention of the Radio and Television News Directors Association, is available on line. In it he says:

The truth is often complex, very complex. “The best obtainable version of the truth” is partly about context and this is perhaps the greatest single failing of our journalism in media today. For too much of it is utterly without context. Facts by themselves are not necessarily the truth. Thus the gossip press, the tabloids, too much of what we see on the air, even when the facts are somewhat straight, they are often a form of misinformation, because their aim is to shock, to titillate, to distort, to give grotesque emphasis.

How did journalists in the good old days -- which happen to coincide with Bernstein's reporting days -- find the best obtainable version? Bernstein suggests they looked for "thoroughness, for accuracy, for context." Hard to do, he adds, when an "idiot culture" demands 24/7 coverage of celebrities and political foodfights:

The hunger for gossip and trash and simple answers to tough questions in our culture today is ravenous and the interest in real truth, hard, difficult, complex truth, that requires hard work, digging, reporting, is waning In America our political system, and I think we are seeing it now, has been failing and with its failure we have been witnessing as well a breakdown of the comity and the community and the civility, that has traditionally allowed our political discourse to evolve. The advent of the talk show nation, not just on radio, but on television especially, with its standards of the grotesque and people screaming mindlessly at each other on the air is part of this breakdown.

Does Bernstein overdo his critique? Probably. But does he have a point there? Probably. His speech has been covered by the Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World and the Daily Texan, student paper at the University of Texas in Austin, among others.

COMM 150: Tom Brokaw's advice for J-students

An interesting interview with NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw on the Time.com website. Brokaw's career spanned a period of great change in television. He began as a TV newsman in Sioux City, Iowa, and anchored NBC's nightly newscase from 1981 through 2004. Interviewed for Time's "10 Questions" feature, he spoke of the diversity of sources American TV viewers have for their news. In general, he thinks its a good thing:

Do you think it's a problem that fewer Americans now get their news from traditional sources? —Max Jacobson, New Haven, Conn.

We're better off. We have so many more choices. What happens is, of course, that the squeaky wheel continues to get attention. I have a little tool at my house—you should get one—it's called the remote control. You can go from those channels that are showing too much of Anna Nicole Smith to, say, BBC News.

This puts pressure on TV news people, he said, but it's better for consumers:

How do you think the role of the news anchor has changed over the years? —Kathy Crawford, Ossining, N.Y.

When I first got into the business, Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley were the only three people who were doing the evening news at the time. There were no all-news cable on CNN, MSNBC or FOX. Most of these journalistic enterprises were organized by and run by white middle-aged men from the Eastern seaboard. That was the prism through which the rest of the country saw the world. That's changed considerably now. The evening news anchors are competing with the internet. They're competing with the all-news cable channels all day long. They're also competing for the attention of a younger audience that doesn't go home at night and sit down at the dinner table with their parents and watch the news.

Brokaw, who majored in "beer and co-eds" in his own student days at the University of South Dakota, says a liberal arts education is valuable, too.

What would your advice be to to up and coming broadcast journalists? —Jen Ayres, Columbia, Md.

Get a broad base of education. I'm not a big fan of journalism schools except those that are organized around a liberal arts education. Have an understanding of history, economics and political science—and biology, these days—and then learn to write.

COMM 393: Reminder on Senior Portfolios

A copy of an email message I sent out this morning to students registered for Communications 393. I'm posting it to my blogs for communications students as well. I have great respect for the Benedictine/SCI grapevine, and I'll appreciate your assistance in getting the word out. -- pe.

A reminder: The end of the semester is only a month away, so it's time to pull together the material for your senior portfolios.

I will need to meet with each of you in order to: (1) inspect your professional portfolio; and (2) receive a Senior Portfolio Folder containing your self-reflective paper and copies of four pieces of work (artifacts) you have done for class, for internships and/or off-campus publications. You will keep your professional portfolio for use in job hunting, but Benedictine University will retain a Senior Portfolio Folder from each student for program assessment purposes.

I am developing a more detailed set of instructions, which I hope to email to you over the weekend, but I wanted to send out this reminder so you can get started how.

THERE ARE THREE parts to the Senior Portfolio procedure:

I. SELF-REFLECTIVE ESSAY. To be turned in, as part of the Senior Portfolio Folder, during a conference with me before the end of the semester.

The self-reflective essay will be 10 to 12 pages in length, in which you reflect on your experience as a communications major at Benedictine in terms of: (a) your progress toward developing or furthering your career goals; (b) your understanding of the profession, its ethics and its role in society. In this essay you should address the following program objectives of Benedictine's mass communications department:

1. Prepare graduates for careers in advertising, electronic and print media, journalism, public relations, publishing, writing or other careers requiring sophisticated communications skills;

2. Prepare graduates for continued study in graduate or professional school;

3. Develop the student's critical and imaginative thinking, reading and writing skills;

4. Develop skills to empower the student to communicate ideas effectively, through speaking, writing and the use of technology;

5. Develop skills for critical interpretation of the media;

6. Foster aesthetic understanding in both production and interpretation of media texts;

7. Develop knowledge of the methods to make responsible social and personal decisions;

8. Develop primary and secondary research methodologies;

9. Develop an understanding of the history, structure and operation of the mass media;

10. Provide an understanding of the impact of mass media industries and messages on the individual, society and culture;

11. Develop professional-level skills in written and oral communication for a variety of media and audiences;

12. Develop professional-level production skills for both print and electronic media;

13. Encourage the development of creative expression; and

14. Help the student develop a professional media portfolio.

II. PROFESSIONAL PORTFOLIO. To be inspected by me during our end-of-semester conference and returned to you. This will be a collection of your best work, preferably gathered in a presentation folder, that you can take with you on job interviews.

III. SENIOR PORTFOLIO FOLDER. To be turned in to me during our end-of-semester conference and retained by Benedictine. Since we will keep these folders, I will accept them in an inexpensive pocketed folder; you can find them in an office supply store or the school supplies aisle of most drug stores. In this folder, you will include: (a) the the self-reflective essay; and (b) at least one copy at least one piece of work (artifact) from each of the following categories:

1. A 300-level research paper written for a 300-level theory class (including COMM 317, 385, 386, 387, or 390, and 391 if it is a theory class). It must contain proper annotation, structure, evidence, and methodology. The student must have attained a grade of at least a “B” on the paper in its original form for it to be accepted for this requirement.

2. A print-based publication, defined as an original written or produced work fixed in a printed and published medium (including newspapers, magazines and newsletters). If you do not have print publication credits, class work for COMM 207, 208, 209, 253 (equivalent to SCI's COM 221), 254, 263 (equivalent to SCI's COM 222), 264, 337, 381 or 382 can be accepted.

3. A web-based publication, i.e. creation that has been exhibited on the World Wide Web and is created for a departmental publication, internship, or work-related experience. The Sleepy Weasel counts as a web-based publication. Any other web-based artifact, including blogs or personal Web pages, must be approved by the instructor prior to the submission of the full portfolio.

4. Brochures, fliers, memos or other work product, including advertisements, pamphlets, brochures, letterheads, scripts or other copy prepared for broadcast, memos, creative briefs, campaign plans or other tangible material written in connection with a college course or an internship.

I will send you a formal assignment sheet in a few days, and there is more detail available about the senior portfolios on the COMM 393 syllabus linked to my faculty page at http://www.sci.edu/classes/ellertsen/masscom/comm393syllabus.html

If you have any questions or comments, please don't hesitate to get in touch with me.

-- Pete "Doc" Ellertsen, instructor

COMM 150: Mission statements

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

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

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

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

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

What does that mean: A mission statement has to be operational? It has to be something you can translate into action. In the portion of "Managing the Non-Profit Organization" excerpted on line, Drucker gives a couple of examples. Here's one:

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

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

Sears has lost sight of its mission in recent years, according to many business analysts. But for a long time, it was nothing if not a farmers' store. Farmers and their families ordered from the Sears catalog (which they also put to other uses), and they shopped at Sears when they came to town. I remember as a kid walking into the Sears in Knoxville, Tenn., and they were selling everything from baby chicks to metal washtubs. You knew it was for farmers. Who are Sears' customers now?

COMM 150: Are the national media biased?

Cross-posted to my mass communications blogs. -- pe

There's a story in yesterday's Washington Post that we need to read, even though it relates to material we covered earlier in the semester and/or will come back to at semester's end. It's a column by media critic Howard Kurtz on right- and left-wing perceptions of bias in the news media. To sum it up briefly, maybe a little too briefly, Kurtz thinks the media are taking fire from both sides. And he implies, without coming right out and saying it, that's about where you want to be if you're covering the news.

Kurtz has been on the talk show circuit plugging his book on network news, and he said the talk show hosts "appear to be living in parallel universes." His column is a good overview of the issue, concluding:

Bobbing along on this swirling sea of opinions, I became increasingly convinced there is a place for newscasts that at least attempt to provide viewers with a straight set of facts. To be sure, these programs make subjective judgments, sometimes miss the boat and appeal to a demographic keenly interested in all those segments on back pain and hip replacements. But it would be a shame if, in an age of infotainment, the new generation of anchors can't find ways to keep their broadcasts vital as well as balanced. Without them, after all, there would be fewer targets for "The Daily Show" to mock.

Read it. Might be a good one to print out for later use, in fact. I don't know how long The Post archives its stories on the open website.

COMM 150: Tangent (that may not be a tangent)

Linked to my blue faculty page is a column by Michelle Thaller, a prof at Cal Tech and occasional newspaper columnist, about a dinosaur at Chicago's Field Museum. It appeared in The Christian Science Monitor in 2002, under the headline "A dinosaur named Sue, and the way science really works." Great head! (At least if you like headlines. And you should. They're difficult, but fun, to write. And the good ones are fun to read.) Keep that part about the way science really works in mind as you read the story.

Spoiler alert. Here's the money graf -- the paragraph, or 'graph as journalists call it, that explains the whole thing -- at the very end of the story:

As I walked out of the Field Museum that day, I heard people talking about Sue, wondering about her forearms, laughing as their kids tried to mimic how a Tyrannosaurus Rex might settle down for a nap. And whether they knew it or not, they were taking home a very different impression about science that I had learned as a child. Science doesn't lose any of its drama or wonder when we admit that we aren't sure what the facts really are. Questions are much more important. ...

Now the questions.

Please answer in two or three sentences each, and post your answers as comments to this post:

1. How is the way the Field Museum presents Sue the dinosaur to the public in the 21st century different from the way dinosaurs were presented when Thaller visited the museum as a little girl?

2. What does the new way of presenting dinosaurs to the public have in common with postmodernism?

3. Was this reading really a tangent? What does it tell you about postmodernism? What does it tell you about communicating with the public?

COMM 150: Postmodernism and media

There's a concept borrowed from 20th-century French philosophy that will make some of the implications of mass communications easier to understand. It's called postmodernism, and it's all over American popular culture. Sometimes it's abbreviated "PoMo" (which must irritate the Pomo Indians of northern California because they had the name first). It's hard to pin down a meaning, but in general it refers to a feeling that modern culture is falling apart. That it's gone so far, it's no longer modern anymore. Hence the word "postmodern."

You see the word used a lot in media studies. In fact, you're likely to see it just about anywhere. I just did a keyword search in Google on "postmodernism," and got 5,740,000 hits in 0.07 seconds. Joseph Straubhaar and Robert LaRose, authors of our textbook "Media Now," say the way we understand the world around us has changed:

We have moved from [a modern] era of universal laws and truths based in rational science to one in which local, particularistic, subjective understandings are more important and more valid. The postmodern view is that there is no universal truth, that what you think depends on your own experience, which depends on what groups you belong to, what media you pay attention to, what your family taught you. ... (41)

Straubhaar and LaRose go on to say what each of us thinks "is just as valid as what anyone else thinks." I think that's going too far. And they go on to suggest "instead of fragmenting into minicultures, the world is reorganizing itself for a titanic 'clash of civilizations,' pitting the United States and its allies against Islam." I certainly think that's going too far. But, hey, it's a postmodern world -- you don't have to agree with me. Or with Straubhaar and Rose.

Postmodernist philosophy can be really hard to read. A famous definition of postmodernism is by Jean-François Lyotard (pron. Lee-o-TAR), who said, "Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives."

Got that?

OK. Let's try to translate it, then.

"Increduility" means you don't believe something. And "metanarratives" (which Lyotard also called "grand narratives") are the kind of myths or stories people told to try to explain the world. Lyotard said the world is such a mess, we don't believe those kinds of stories anymore. One of the most important was a belief in progress, that Western civilization was a steady series of improvements from the ancient Greeks and Romans to the present, from Plato and Aristotle to -- what? -- Donald Trump? O.J.? Britney Spears? Another "grand narrative" was the belief that science and technology will always make things better and better. Hard to believe after science brought us World War II, the threat of nuclear warfare, reality TV and really annoying automated telemarketing calls.

Dino Felluga, an English prof at Purdue who has an "General Introduction to Postmodernism" that's actually clearly written, suggests the modern era began with the Renaissance and lasted at least until World War I. In many ways, it lasted until after WWII. The modern era was a age of reason, of science and -- most important for out purposes in COMM 150 -- of printing presses and printed discourse. Some critics, says Felluga, find in the chaos of the postmodern era "a result of new ways of representing the world including television, film (expecially after the introduction of color and sound), and the computer."

One big problem with postmodernism is that it's written by academics. Not only academics but French academics. Most people find their writing difficult. Some of us find it pretentious. Andrew Sullivan, a columnist and blogger for Atlantic magazine, says the postmodernists are "impenetrable bullshit artists." But I think they're b.s. artists who have something important to say, even though I wish they'd say it more clearly.

One of the most important postmodernists for media studies is Jean Baudrillard, a sociologist and philosopher who wrote a kind of travelog called "America." (That's pronounced jahn Bo-dri-AR.) He said Americans -- and everyone else in the 21st century -- is overwhelmed with information. We're so overwhelmed, he says, we've lost sight of what's real and what isn't. I think he's got some very good insights. But I think at best, his stuff reads like a string of one-liners. I got the following from a page of selected quotes:

• Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.
  
  
• We are becoming like cats, slyly parasitic, enjoying an indifferent domesticity. Nice and snug in the social, our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial coziness, and our half-closed eyes now seek little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures.
  
  
• Santa Barbara is a paradise; Disneyland is a paradise; the U.S. is a paradise. Paradise is just paradise. Mournful, monotonous, and superficial though it may be, it is paradise. There is no other.
  
  
• Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema or dispatched as microfilm into the sidereal void [the space between the stars].
  

Doug Mann, who teaches a course in pop culture at the University of Western Ontario, has the best short introduction to Baudrillard that I've found on the Internet. Mann says the Fremchman "concluded that in the postmodern media-laden condition, we experience something called 'the death of the real': we live our lives in the realm of hyperreality, connecting more and more deeply to things like television sitcoms, music videos, virtual reality games, or Disneyland, things that merely simulate reality."

COMM 150: Online books, platforms and the future

A thought-provoking story in The Chicago Tribune this morning on the future for electronic books. Steve Johnson, the Trib's internet reporter, says he tried reading the classic "Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen downloaded to his cell phone, and to his surprise he liked it.

"Against all my own prejudices, all my own pride in the history and tradition of the printed word," said Johnson, playing on the words in the title, "I liked it." He added:

I liked holding it in one hand, having it always with me, and customizing my fonts and screen color. I liked reading it on the train without advertising my tastes; I could have been reading "Tropic of Cancer" or "The Firm."

I really liked reading it in bed without the encumbrance of a book light.

I liked it all so much, I've moved on to Austen's "Persuasion" and am, frankly, halfway annoyed at having to take time away from that to write this. What comeuppance will the vain spendthrift Sir Walter receive, and will his deserving daughter Anne find satisfaction?

There's something important going on here. It's subtle, and it involves a lot more than English major-y talk about a 19th-century English novelist. I think the people who understand it (and I don't claim to understand it all) are going to be the ones who flourish as the communications industry goes through the most radical changes we've seen since Johannes Gutenberg invented moveable type in 1457.

Johnson catches the essence of it when he says:

The experience taught me that a book is not what I had thought it to be. It is not, in any important sense, typeface, paper stock or cover art. A book is, foremost, the arrangement of words in sequence, and they are, to borrow a buzz-phrase from the digital folk, platform agnostic.

In other words, the content of a book doesn't depend on its platform. You could carve "Pride and Prejudice" into the side of a pumpkin, and it would still be "Pride and Prejudice." (You'd have to use a lot of pumpkins, though.) What's tricky is to know what media -- platform -- to use for what message, and how to use it to the best advantage.

Cookies make the World (Wide Web) go round

Please read for COMM 150 --

When you were a little kid, did you leave out milk and cookies for Santa Claus? Well, you still do. Every time you visit a website. But these cookies are electronic, and they make the World Wide Web a powerful medium for advertisers and sales people.

Here's how Wikipedia defines the term:

HTTP cookies, sometimes known as web cookies or just cookies, are parcels of text sent by a server to a web browser and then sent back unchanged by the browser each time it accesses that server. HTTP cookies are used for authenticating, tracking, and maintaining specific information about users, such as site preferences and the contents of their electronic shopping carts.

So they're still sort of like the milk and cookies you left out for Santa Claus. But these cookies, so goes the argument, help Santa Claus know what all the good little boys and girls want for Christmas. At least they help Santa know what the boys and girls ordered on the Internet.

Civil libertarians fear tracking internet purchases can lead to violations of privacy. But David Whalen, an internet pioneer who has written a website called Cookie Central, argues, "The sad truth is that revealing any kind of personal information opens the door for that information to be spread. ... If you're going to single-out cookies as your sole vulnerability to personal privacy, you should re-examine how you live your daily life."

Because the cookies allow websites to track where you've been, their owners can make an educated guess what your tastes are. If you read ESPN every day, for example, they can guess you like sports. Or, more accurately, that someone who uses your computer likes sports. If you buy books from Amazon.com, you'll leave tracks.

For example, when I visit Amazon.com on my home computer, there's a message at the top of the page: "Hello, Peter Ellertsen. We have recommendations for you." If I click on "recommendations" (an active link on my page), I get a list of 15 books on journalism, mass media law, hymns and gospel music, subjects of books I've bought from Amazon. So cookies allow Amazon.com to do a more effective job of marketing when it recognizes my computer.

Similar technology allows website owners to track the effectiveness of ads on the internet, even to get a hard figure on how many people click onto a webpage with their ad. John Wanamaker, a department store magnate of the 1800s and early 1900s in Philadelphia, once famously said, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half." If he were alive today, and using the Internet, he could at least get a handle on it.

Argues the Marketing.fm Blog, a good website to read if you're thinking of a career in communications: "The advent of interactive media and online measurement has allowed marketers to target advertising messages much more precisely. Morover, it is possible to access comprehensive data on the viewers of your campagin: page views, geographic location, clicks, links, etc." Is it time to throw away Wanamaker's quote? Probably not quite yet, according to an unscientific poll of Marketing.fm readers. But the Internet is still a powerful tool for advertisers.

COMM 150: The 'Long Tail' and e-commerce

Friday we started talking about something called the "Long Tail." It's an important concept for understanding the Internet. Basically, as the online encyclopedia Wikipedia explains, it describes online businesses like Amazon.com that "can sell a greater volume of otherwise hard to find items at small volumes than of popular items at large volumes." Wikipedia also has a graph that shows what it looks like -- a mathematical distribution with a steeply descending curve along the Y axis and, well, a long tail along the X axis.

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

Open another window and go to the Wikipedia article (linked above). Look at the graph. The number of sales on a hit go up the Y axis. For example, let's see where Britney Spears' new single would go on the graph. She's moving lots of product (I'm not going to call it music), so her sales go way up on the Y axis. But there are also little niche markets for all kinds of different specialty genres. For example, I'm ordering a CD of medieval ballads that Norwegian pilgrims sang when they made their annual pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Olav. Not many people in the market for that kind of stuff, so we'd better plot it way out along the X axis. But I can get it on the Internet. Direct from Norway. In fact, the Norwegian record company's website is even set up to convert from U.S. dollars to Norwegian kroner.

The same is true for all kinds of music. Bulgarian folk songs? Out on the X axis, but somewhere in the wide world there's a market for them. Vintage CDs of Stevie Ray Vaughan or 80s punk rock? X axis. Sister Rosetta Tharpe? Sound tracks from Bollywood movies shot in India? Very popular in India, but still out the X axis worldwide. Especially for an American distributor.

Here's what makes the Long Tail so powerful for marketing on the World Wide Web. There are more people out there buying niche products on the Long Tail along the X axis than there are buying the hits up the Y axis. Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine, came up with the concept in an article called -- what else? -- "The Long Tail." Anderson says:

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

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

What Anderson calls "misses" in the old economy he calls "sales" on the Internet.

With no shelf space to pay for and, in the case of purely digital services like iTunes, no manufacturing costs and hardly any distribution fees, a miss sold is just another sale, with the same margins as a hit. A hit and a miss are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.

What makes it work, says Anderson, is the fact the World Wide Web is worldwide. It's huge, and you can find willing buyers out there somewhere that you couldn't reach if you had a record store, say, at 6th and Monroe in downtown Springfield. But you can reach them by electronic commerce. Anderson says:

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

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

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

COMM 150: Important article on TV, hypertext ...

Here's an article I want us to read and be familiar with as we move on from studying television to the World Wide Web. It's called "Rhetorics of the Web: Implications for Teachers of Literacy," and it's by Doug Brent of the Faculty (or college) of General Studies at Canada's University of Calgary. It's a little hard to follow: It's about something called hypertext, which is the kind of coding that allows us to surf from one website to the next. And Brent not only talks about hypertext, he uses it.

Hypertext allows us multiple entry points into a document. Typically we get into it through a search engine, and we follow the links around. But we don't have to read through a website page by page. In fact, we seldom do. We follow the links till we find what we're looking for. And that's different for every one of us.

COMM 150: Federal regs, media ownership

Imagine. On Wednesday, I lecture on how the Federal Communications Commission regulates mass communications media. And the next day, the lede story in The New York Times is on an FCC proposal to relax the rules on media ownership. While deregulation became federal law with passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, it is an ongoing trend.

The Times reports:

WASHINGTON, Oct. 17 — The head of the Federal Communications Commission has circulated an ambitious plan to relax the decades-old media ownership rules, including repealing a rule that forbids a company to own both a newspaper and a television or radio station in the same city.

A proposal from Kevin J. Martin could change media ownership rules in two months.

Kevin J. Martin, chairman of the commission, wants to repeal the rule in the next two months — a plan that, if successful, would be a big victory for some executives of media conglomerates.

You can read all about it by following the link to the Times' website (it will be up for several days before it goes into the archive and you have to pay to see it). Here's the nut graf (actually two or three grafs), tho':

Officials said the commission would consider loosening the restrictions on the number of radio and television stations a company could own in the same city.

Currently, a company can own two television stations in the larger markets only if at least one is not among the four largest stations and if there are at least eight local stations. The rules also limit the number of radio stations that a company can own to no more than eight in each of the largest markets.

The deregulatory proposal is likely to put the agency once again at the center of a debate between the media companies, which view the restrictions as anachronistic, and civil rights, labor, religious and other groups that maintain the government has let media conglomerates grow too large.

This story relates directly to what we've been talking about in class. Let's follow it.

COMM 150, 207, 337: Obit for 'reporter's reporter'

This morning's Washington Post carries the obituary of a reporter who was shot to death Sunday in Baghdad, apparently by "soldiers from the Iraqi army, believed to be infiltrated by the militia." A sidebar collects appreciations by his colleagues at the Post. "He was a reporter's reporter," says one. "And we all admired his courage."

John Ward Anderson said the reporter Salih Saif Aldin, 32, was tenacious:

Salih loved a scoop, and he reeled in a whopper in the spring of 2005. Like many Iraqis, Salih was deeply committed to justice and democratic reforms. One afternoon, he collared me in the living room of the bureau and, through an interpreter, told an amazing tale of a 37-year-old man in Tikrit who had been arrested by Iraqi police, was brutally tortured and died in police custody.

I was skeptical and told him so. Most important, we needed evidence. He would have to go to Tikrit, hunt down the relatives, confront the police, find the U.S. military officials and get some documentation. There had to be a paper trail, I said. Find it.

Most reporters would hang their shoulders at such instructions. Not Salih. He smiled, and his eyes sparkled. He left for Tikrit the next day.

A few days later, he came back with the story.

And Ellen Knickmeyer recalled he had a reporter's gift for accuracy:

He could be very sweet, deferential, polite and kindly . . . he always called me "Miss," in English. On a trip out of Baghdad last year, he got me past a lot of checkpoints by telling the insurgents I was his mother.

"You couldn't say sister?" I asked him.

"Sorry, Miss, sorry," he said.

xxx

yyy

COMM 207: New blog; as we learn to use HTML tags

By now you should be receiving email messages from Blogger.com inviting you to join a new blog called "comm207fall07." Catchy, huh? Blogger allows you to use simple HTML tags (short for hypertext markup language), and we'll all be posting to the class blog. It can be a frustrating experience at first, because HTML is full of picky little codes. But it's also a good way to get your feet wet in the computer language that makes the Internet such a powerful communications medium. And as you get used to it, you'll discover there's a very simple, elegant logic to the tags and the way they work.

I'll also keep posting messages and links of interest to The Mackerel Wrapper, but some of our assignments will move to Comm207fall07. The link above will take you there.

COMM 207: Where the jobs are (add 1)

A postscript to last Thursday's discussion of jobs in government affairs, lobbying and legislative liaison ... one of the home industries in Springfield ... and a link to a Web page put up by the American League of Lobbyists on how to break into a career in lobbying. An overview:

Most lobbyists are college graduates, and many have advanced degrees. Of these advanced degrees, the most prevalent is legal training, with other common backgrounds being communications, teaching, public relations and journalism. Lobbyists must be able to understand their clients' interests as well as the laws and policies they hope to influence. They must be able to communicate effectively with their audience, both orally and in writing. It is also necessary for them to understand the legislative and political process.

* * *
... The best suggestion we can make is for individuals [wanting to break into the field] to use the contacts they have through previous work or studies, seeking informational interviews and networking as much as possible. As indicated in the paragraph above, political or government contacts are particularly helpful in entering the field.

In short, it helps to know someone. But the way to get to know someone is to take an interest in the political process, volunteer for campaigns and network with people whose politics and philosophies match your own. We have had several students from Springfield College line up internships with local members of Congress, and that is probably the best way to get a feel for the legislative process. The key: Network, network, network.

In class today I will hand out photocopies of the "Illinois" pages in a Springfield telephone book. Most of the listings there, from the Illinois Conference of Churches and the Illinois Conference of Teamsters at the top of the first page to the Illinois Press Association and Illinois Primary Health Care Association at the bottom of the second, are associations that maintain a legislative liaison office in Springfield. Many of them have a full- or part-time communications director on staff. Those that don't sometimes contract out for help with fliers, brochures or other media. You can get a similar list of associations in Springfield, as government affairs offices are often called, by searching in Yahoo! for "Springfield" and "associations."

COMM 150, 207, 337, 393: News or Fark?

Midterm content advisory. This post contains subject matter that relates to the midterm exam in Communications 150 (see post below dated Oct. 6.

I wish I'd seen this before COMM 150 met today!

Jack Shafer, who writes the Press Box media criticism column for Slate.com, has a review of Drew Curtis' new book, It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries To Pass Off Crap As News. Intriguing title? I picked up a copy a couple of weeks ago at Springfield's friendly local neighborhood big box book store, and the book's worth reading. Or at least knowing about.

But what the f--- is fark?

Shafer says it's "[a]ll the garbage the press publishes and broadcasts when it runs out of genuine news." He provides a link to the first chapter of Curtis' book,where Curtis explains the origin of the term in more detail. Fark is also a website at www.fark.com. It's an aggregator, which means it consists mostly of links to other websites, most of them mass media sites. It's hard to classify. Tonight's for example, links to stories about a British teenager who ran "up £1,175 bill by text-messaging votes for herself in online beauty contest in order to win £100 in makeup"; a governor in Brazil who banned "use of the present participle. Yep, you read that right"; and an Episcopal church that "bestow[ed] blessings on cats and dogs" on Oct. 4, the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi, in Bangor, Maine.

If you're really, really into cat pictures, be sure to check out the blessing of the pets in The Bangor Daily News. Otherwise you can safely ignore all this stuff. That's Curtis' point. And Shafer's.

Says Shafer, in terms that remind me of Neil Postman's take on television news:

... High-octane blends of fark contain celebrity news, press coverage of itself, and news served in the context of no context. When Shepard Smith screens, say, five seconds of a burning skyscraper in Brazil, followed by five seconds of a cat rescue in Montana, followed by five seconds of a flood in Thailand on the Fox News Report, you're sucking his fark.

Curtis is irreverent, and sometimes he isn't above taking cheap shots. But he has some dead-serious points to make:

... Whenever Mass Media is really fulfilling its intended purpose, generally something bad is going on. Wars, blown elections, bad weather, you name it -- when people need to know something, it's probably because it's likely to kill them. We'd be much better off living in non-interesting times.

This presents a problem for Mass Media, however, when we are not living in interesting times. This has been further compounded by the advent of twenty-four hour news channels and the Internet as a news source. Back in the days when TV news concentrated most of its resources on one half-hour blocks of news, finding material to fill the time slot wasn't difficult. Nowadays cable news networks have to scramble to have something to talk about for twenty-four hours a day, even when nothing of important is going on. Sales departments are still selling advertisements, after all. Mass Media can't just run content made entirely of ads (with the possible exception of the Home Shopping Network). Something has to fill the space.

Over the years Mass Media has developed several methods of filling this space. No one teaches this in journalism school; odds are Mass Media itself hasn't given much thought to the process. It's a practice honed over the years by editors and publishers, verbally passed down from one generation to the next. They're not entirely aware they're doing it, although the media folks who read advance copies of this manuscript all had the same reaction: "I've been saying we should stop doing this for YEARS."

Some media people even feed him copy, anonymously, of course, if they want to keep their jobs. Says Curtis:

One interesting thing about Fark is how many Mass Media people comb Fark for story ideas, not just for radio but for television, newspapers, and Internet media outfits. Once we switched to Google Analytics for Web traffic tracking we discovered that the number one highest-traffic corporate Internet hitting our servers was CNN. Number two was Fox News. Mass Media even submits a lot of their own articles to Fark, sometimes with taglines so outrageous it's hard to believe these are the same people who run Mass Media. I can't even give any examples; it would be too easy to track back to the source and get people in trouble. The most I can tell you is that it happens multiple times every day. And we really appreciate it.

But also notice that some of the media people who hit the Fark website seem to be looking for material ... for, yep, fark they can fill their newscasts with too. How does all this relate to the social responsbility theory of the press?

COMM 150: Network TV anchors and Iraq

Important story in The Washington Post today. It's by Howard Kurtz, the paper's media critic, and it tellls how ABC, CBS and NBC news anchors have felt about covering the Iraq war. Kurtz tries hard, and I think successfully, to keep his opinion out of the story. But the headline catches its overall tone: "As War Dragged On, Coverage Tone Weighed Heavily on Anchors."

(I'll try not to think about the cheesy pun there. Remember the old Navy song, "Anchors Aweigh?" I recommend you do too.)

Network TV news has been accused of hyping coverage of the war, both "for" and "against" U.S. policy in Iraq. But the reality is more complex than that. Here's what Kurtz said about it in a live discussion forum at noon (Eastern time) today on the Post's website:

It's crucial, because they are far more than newsreaders. As "Reality Show" demonstrates, Brian, Charlie and Katie -- like Dan, Tom and Peter before them -- play a crucial role in shaping their broadcasts. How do they decide when to lead with Iraq and when the news is too incremental? How do they balance the continuing violence with other kinds of reporting from Baghdad? How do they deal with criticism from the administration? How do they press Bush about the war when they have a chance to interview the president? Plus, both Williams and Couric have reported from Iraq this year. So what they think matters big time.

Note (if you're interested in media convergence, or even if you're not and want to know all about it before it appears, as is likely, on the final exam in COMM 150): Kurtz will be blogging about the book at http://anchorwars.blogspot.com/. So here's a newspaper guy (one medium) using a blog (another medium) to plug a book (a third medium). That's what we call convergence.

COMM 150: Midterm study questions

COMM 150: Introduction to Mass Communications
Springfield College in Illinois/Benedictine University

www.sci.edu/classes/ellertsen/com150syl

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

Midterm · Fall Semester 2007
Below are three essay questions – one worth fifty (50) points out of a hundred, and two shorter essays worth 25 points each. Please write at least two pages (500 words) on the 50-point essay and page (250 words) on each of the 25-point short essays. Use plenty of detail from your reading in the textbook, the internet and handouts I have given you, as well as class discussion, to back up the points you make. Your grade will depend both on your analysis of the broad trends I ask about, and on the specific detail you cite in support of the points you make. I am more interested in the specific factual arguments you make to support your points than in whether you like or dislike a particular piece of music. So be specific. Remember: An unsupported generalization is sudden death in college-level writing.

1. Essay (50 points). Neil Postman, media critic at New York University, once said “Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world.” Postman was talking about television, but his critique can be applied to newspapers as well. How do newspapers attempt to strike a balance between entertainment and their duty to give citizens the information they need to function effectively in a democracy? How successful are they? How could they do better? Or can they? How can a mass market communications medium balance entertainment and information without losing customers.

2A. Self-reflective essay (25 points). What have you learned about mass communications in this class so far that you didn’t know before? Consider what you knew at the beginning of the course and what you know now. What point or points stand out most clearly to you? What points are still confusing? In answering this question, please feel free to look at the “Tip Sheet on Writing a Reflective Essay” linked to my faculty webpage. In grading the essay, I will evaluate the relevance of your discussion to the main goals and objectives of the course; the detail you cite to support or illustrate your points; and the connections you make.

2B. Short essay (25 points). How do independent record labels allow creative artists (like musicians and songwriters) to do an end run around the “suits” who often act as gatekeepers in the music industry. What freedom does an independent record label have that the major labels don’t? What limitations does an “indie” have? What is the relationship, generally speaking, between indies and major labels?

COMM 150: Class discussion question

For Friday's class --

Post as a comment to this message your answer to the following questions: Philo Farnsworth was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century. What was his main claim to fame, and how much TV did he allow his children to watch as they were growing up? Why? What does that say about the quality of TV programming? Publish your responses as comments to this blogpost, and we'll talk about them in class. Here's how:

How to Publish Your Responses
Scroll down to the bottom of this post. On the right side of the last line, there will be a link that says "Posted by Pete # 9:33 AM ___ comments" (with a number filled in where I've left a blank, depending on how many comments have been posted). Click on that " ___ comments" link and fill in the comment field on the right. Sign in. You'll have to do something to register for Blogger. Do it. Make a note of the username and password you choose because we'll keep on posting to the blog, and if you don't make a note you'll forget it. Please believe me. This is something we have learned by experience! When you've reviewed your comment, publish it by clicking on "Publish Your Comment." And that's how you publish your comment. Logical, isn't it?

COMM 150, 207, 337 etc.: Where the jobs are

Cross-posted to my mass comm. blogs. -- pe

In Communications 207 (editing for publication) this afternoon, we got off on a tangent about lobbying ... mostly because of a front-page picture in today's State Journal-Register showing people leaning on the third-floor rail of the state Capitol rotunda where lobbyists often gather.

Most comments from COMM 207 students were neutral and process-oriented. "I don't really know much about lobbying." Or a general sense lobbyists influence the government to take action on things. But some reflected a negative attitude often heard about lobbying, one that's described by the American League of Lobbyists as a "caricature" of "portly, cigar-smoking men who wine and dine lawmakers while slipping money into their pockets."

Even more than most stereotypes, the caricature is unfair. In fact, adds the ALL:

Simply put, lobbying is advocacy of a point of view, either by groups or individuals. A special interest is nothing more than an identified group expressing a point of view — be it colleges and universities, churches, charities, public interest or environmental groups, senior citizens organizations, even state, local or foreign governments. While most people think of lobbyists only as paid professionals, there are also many independent, volunteer lobbyists — all of whom are protected by the same First Amendment.

Lobbying involves much more than persuading legislators. Its principal elements include researching and analyzing legislation or regulatory proposals; monitoring and reporting on developments; attending congressional or regulatory hearings; working with coalitions interested in the same issues; and then educating not only government officials but also employees and corporate officers as to the implications of various changes. What most lay people regard as lobbying — the actual communication with government officials — represents the smallest portion of a lobbyist's time; a far greater proportion is devoted to the other aspects of preparation, information and communication.

What's more, the Lobbyists' league has a code of ethics. Linked at the top of the ribbon at the left of its webpage, no less.

The main thing to know about lobbying, especially for those of us who have or plan careers in Springfield, is the associations that lobby the Illinois Legislature are one of the important employers of communications professionals in town.

COMM 207: Beginning to use HTML tags

If you already know how to use Hypertext Markup Language, here's a review. If you don't yet, you will soon enough. Here's a first exercise. Basically, I want you to find a website and write a link to it. You can start by posting a comment to this blogpost. That's right. Now. Today. Blogger lets you do that.

Next step: We'll create a class blog. We had one last year. Follow this link to last year's COMM 207 blog if you want to see it. Students liked it pretty well, once they got used to HTML. And it's a good skill to have. For a pretty good tutorial or to review what you already know, go to the W3 Schools tutorial.

But for now, let's just get started. I learned it monkey-see, monkey-do, and I think that's the best way. And we can look at the theory later. So here goes ...

To create a link, go to the comments field at the bottom of this post and open it. Decide what you want to link to, and type something like: "Here's a link to ..." that introduces the hypertext. The hypertext is just the part you click on that takes you where you want to go. By typing in an address (URL) and putting a code around the text, using angle brackets and letters, you tell your browser to find the indicated address. Confused yet? Let's just do it.

How to Post a Link
I like to do this with two windows open, one to the page I'm posting the link to and the other to the comment (or create post) field in Blogspot. Here are the steps:

1. In the address field in the header, highlight the address (or URL). Copy it.
   
2. Go to the comment field. Type in Here's a link to <a href="
   
3. Paste in the address with no space between the "less than" and the address.
   
4. Type "> with no space between the address and the quote mark.
   
5. Type in whatever words you want in the link, for example where you want to go
   
6. Immediately after those words, type </a>
   
7. Your link should look this this <a href="address">where you want to do</a>

One last step: Be patient. It takes forever to get all the details right, and even then I get little red-and-yellow error messages all the time in Blogger. If you don't yet know what I mean by that, you will very soon!

COMM 150, 207, 337, 393, etc. --sportswriting

Cross-posted to all my journalism blogs. -- pe

I surfed into this column by ESPN Page 2 sportwriter Scoop Jackson while I was "reading the paper(s)" on the Web this morning. It was linked to Jim Romenesko's blog on newspapering. I don't follow sports very closely (other than Illinois Statehouse politics). So I'm not familiar with Jackson. But this time he was writing about a meeting he had with high school journalism students in Kansas, and he headlined it, "A Fresh Perspective on Sportwriting." I think some of you will enjoy it.

Jackson says the kids had been studying his writing, and they came at him with a depth of knowledge and interest:

They came with it. Straight -- no chaser, no ice, no water back. They didn't ask about how this person was or what type of person that person was. What's Shaq like in person? Have you ever met Tom Brady? Is AI as cool as he seems? Who do you think is going to win the World Series? Is Derek Jeter really that cute in real life? None of that. They didn't come with the standard, star-obsessed questions that sportswriters usually get when we walk into a school full of young girls cute like Kaley Cuoco and young guys smooth like Shia LaBeouf.

Instead, they asked about the writing. The art of storytelling and meeting deadlines. Angles and ideas. They asked about the seriousness of what it is that we sportswriters do and how we approach our craft differently every day, so that we can continue to generate interest. They came authentic.

And Jackson came back at them with candid answers. I liked the way he said, "that sports journalism, just like sports itself, is a business first -- that the writer's goal is to provide meaningful content and the job of the company that employs us is to make money." My sport was politics, and that's how it was back in my newspapering days -- I was working for a business, and my job was to make the politics meaningful for my readers.

And I liked what Jackson said about writing. Like this:

... I told them -- as I had once written -- that nothing I write will ever be considered for "The Best American Sports Writing" because of how I write, but that should never be a writer's goal: "Learn to enjoy the process of writing and the end results will take care of themselves." My mouth to their ears.

I told them that as writers, we should believe in the craft first, self second. In that order. Always.

He recommended the kids read widely, "that expanding their reading base beyond sports will make them better writers because -- as much as we'd like to think it is -- life is not all about sports." He even suggested a reading list, which I'll let you read in his column.

And I especially liked what Jackson said about editing, and being edited. One thing you get used to when you're a professional writer is having editors change your copy. And one thing you have to learn is the humility to realize when they've made it better. So I liked this bit:

Before I left Blue Valley Northwest in Overland Park, Kansas, Matt (one of the two students who sent me the e-mail that initiated this whole thing), still with the smile on his face that appeared the second I walked from backstage to surprise him at 8:30 a.m., said something to me.

"Scoop, you know the [New England Patriots and coach Bill] Belichick piece you just did? The one titled '22 Questions?' Well, I read it a few times and you actually have 25 questions in the story not 22."

"No sirrr," I said back. "I made sure there were 22 questions in that piece. Trust me, there's exactly 22."

"Sorry," he said while handing me a copy of the story he had marked up, as if he were already an ESPN editor. "There's 25, Mr. Jackson. I counted."

Which I knew he did. He was thorough like that. I knew he was right because I now knew that's who he is. That he didn't want to test me or check me, just make sure that in his eyes and in the eyes of every other student in the school I remained the best writer I could possibly be, that I remained his inspiration -- which is why his teacher knew I should meet him in the first place, why she wanted me to meet all of them.

COMM 150: Gatekeepers, cellphones in Mynamar

As demonstrations continue in Mynamar, a former British colony still better known by its colonial name of Burma (and always called that in Britain), new communications media are serving the people who hope to overthrow a repressive military regime. According to The Guardian, a highly respected paper in the U.K., "the protesters challenging the government are ready to risk their lives so the world can hear their story. Armed with mobile phone cameras, they have become the eyes of the "saffron revolution."

Revolution or not, it's called by that name because it's being led by Buddhist monks, who wear saffron robes. Guardian correspondent David Jimenez, reporting from Rangoon, says:

Today, the regime has calculated that it can again win the propaganda battle if it controls the traditional media. It is wrong. The military had forgotten about the internet and the mobile phone, two weapons with which the protesters have managed to grab the world's attention.
Kyaw, 23, a medical student, says he has sent various videos to the BBC and dissident groups based in Thailand, using the camera in his mobile phone and a very slow internet connection.

"It is risk," he says. "The soldiers arrest anyone who takes photos, destroy their phones and beat them up. But we have to show the world what is happening."

Remember gatekeeper theory? In this case the gatekeepers are the regime, and the protesters are using new media to get around them. Another new media weapon is the social networking website Facebook, where 100,000 members have joined a group supporting revolution in Mynamar.

It's not at all certain at this point who will win. Jiminez reports:

Yesterday, the junta finally reacted, closing down the country's principal internet server - one of the many businesses it controls. One official claimed the shutdown was the result of damage suffered by a major supply cable connecting to the internet.

Internet cafes in Rangoon have been closed and their owners threatened with reprisals.

A London-based Burmese blogger, Ko Htike, said the move meant he would not be able to feed in pictures of "the brutality by the brutal Burmese military junta", but vowed to continue pushing information back into the country.

The regime has tried to counter the impact of information smuggled out of the country with monotonous news broadcasts that nobody follows, and surreal official versions that describe the soldiers as victims.

What is happening now in Mynamar is something that has played out time and time again.

When the Soviet Union fell apart and Eastern European nations like Hungary and what is now the Czech Republic overthrew their communist governments, fax machines were new ... and because they were new, the authorities didn't know how to control their use ... so they were an important medium of communication for the revolutionaries. When Serbian militias moved against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo in the late 90s, email and the Internet allowed Kosovars to evade the gatekeepers and tell the world about the repression. Repressive governments always try to control the means of communication ... to act as gatekeepers, in other words ... and those who seek to oppose them always seek new media to get around them.

COMM 207: Assignment for Tuesday (Oct. 2)

This was a spur-of-the-moment assignment, so I'm posting it to the blog. Post your answers in the comments field to this blogpost. -- pe

The assignment has two parts:

• Read back through Chapters 5 and 6 in "Modern News Editing," and find something useful you didn't know before. The key here is that it has to be something useful, something that doesn't make your eyes glaze over ... and/or something you can use in your own writing or editing other people's writing.
  
• Write a paragraph explaining how you will use this pearl of wisdom as you scale the heights of journalistic excellence in your own career.

The purpose of the assignment, frankly, is partly to get you to go back through the chapters. But I also want to get a sense of what's important to you about "Working with Stories" and "Word Watching."

COMM 150: Entertained or informed?

Neil Postman, media critic and author of a book titled "Amusing Ourselves to Death," says "Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world" in part because of television news. (I would add newspapers, magazines and news websites.) "The problem," Postman says, "is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining."

Here's an example the Associated Press posted to the Yahoo! news pages Tuesday. It's about global warming, as complex an issue as the world faces today. The news peg was a United Nations summit on warming. Here's how AP headlined it:

'Arnie,' 'Al' push climate action

And here's the lede, written by AP special correspondent Charles J. Hanley:

UNITED NATIONS - "Arnie" and "Al," Republican and Democrat, shared the world spotlight to press for climate action, adding a touch of star quality to the staid proceedings of a U.N. summit.

The two headliners, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and former Vice President Al Gore, also highlighted by their presence President Bush's absence from the eight hours of high-level speechmaking Monday on what to do about global warming.

Bush, who did take part later in a small, private U.N. dinner with key players on climate, rejects the idea of international treaty obligations to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse gases" blamed for global warming — an idea central to U.N. climate negotiations.

The Republican Schwarzenegger, on the other hand, has taken the lead on emissions caps at the state level, signing legislation mandating such reductions in California.

"One responsibility we all have is action. Action, action, action," the former Hollywood action star said as he helped open the summit, winning warm applause from the assembled presidents and premiers.

The Democrat Gore — a Hollywood figure himself as the lead in the Oscar-winning climate documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" — took his star turn at a summit luncheon, where he cited a lengthening list of global warming's impacts, from the shrinking Arctic ice cap to disappearing lakes in Africa.

"The need to act is now," Gore told delegates to the one-day summit, which drew more than 80 world leaders. "We need a mandate at Bali." ...

Gore was referring the annual U.N. climate treaty conference, scheduled for December in Bali, Indonesia, where the Europeans and others hope to initiate talks for an emissions-reduction agreement to succeed the Kyoto Protocol in 2012.

See what Postman's talking about?

The rest of the story is solid and substantive enough, and the Bali conference will be important. But the AP's treatment of Schwartzenegger and Gore as celebrities -- complete with references to their movies -- is a prime example of packaging news as entertainment.

Here's a question. You don't have to blog it, but do think about it. Would you be surprised to see this story -- or something like it -- mentioned in the 50-point question on the Oct. 10 midterm? Just askin'.

COMM 207 -- copyediting and proof reading symbols

As we were going over our copyediting exercises in class the other day, I realized the list of editing symbols on page 00 doesn't have all the symbols that people commonly use (see below for what those zeroes are about). I also realized something I should explain better -- there are several systems that people use, and they're slightly different.

In the days of hard copy editing (i.e. on paper or in "dead tree" format), copyediting used to be the word used for editing copy before it was set in type and proofreading for editing the "proof sheets" you got back from the printer's. (Basically, copyediting made more use of corrections between the lines while proofreading was mostly in the margins. Why? Because you didn't have room to write between the lines after it was set in type.) Those differences don't matter as much as they used to now, since most editing takes place on computers. But they do explain why we have two different symbols for some things.

Why am I confusing you with another set of symbols? Because our book features mostly proofreading symbols, and some of the copyediting symbols are easier to use. If you go to Rich Cameron's L - Copyediting webpage linked below, it'll show how to delete extra words by crossing them out and drawing a line over them. His way is easier than using the little curlique (actually an old-fashioned "d" for delete) that book editors use. Cameron is also good on showing the difference between opening and closing quotation marks. Here are some links:

• The University of Colorado has a good summary of both editing (on the left) and proofreading (on the right) marks in two columns. Notice when they put marks in the margins, they draw a circle around them? That circle is a signal to the printer not to set what's inside the circle.
  
• Nancy Edmonds Hanson of Minnesota State University at Moorhead has a shorter list of the more common symbols if you need one you can print out in one page and take with you.
  
• Rich Cameron of Cerritos College has a very clear explanation of copyediting symbols, how they differ from proofreading symbols and how to use them in copyediting. Highly recommended.
  
• We won't use it much in class, but University of Chicago style is the standard for proofreaders' marks used in book editing. All of them are written in the margins, often with a guideline drawn to the word, letter or punctuation mark to be corrected.

A footnote: Those symbols (in the first graf where I filled in zeroes instead of looking up the number) are on page 73. I left it like that, because filling in zeroes like that is a very useful professional writers' trick. If you use it, you don't interrupt your train of thought while you track down the right figure. But of course you do have to go back and fill in the numbers later. If you're easily frustrated, this tip may be worth the semester's tuition for you.

COMM 150: Class, 'marketplace of ideas'

Since we are bound to talk about what's going on in the world in Communications 150, we are going to find issues on which we disagree. And we are bound to give voice to our disagreement. That's good. Arguing issues, in the sense of staking out a position and citing evidence to back it up, is what scholarship is all about. And a university can be described as a "Marketplace of Ideas" -- i.e. a place where ideas are exchanged, and buyers have the freedom to choose the best among competing ideas. The concept is usually traced back to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who in 1919 said:

If you have no doubt of your premises or your power and want a certain result with all your heart you naturally express your wishes in law and sweep away all opposition...But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas...that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.

The idea and its application in the classroom are explained further in the Wikipedia article on the "Marketplace of Ideas." (I will hand out hard copies so you can keep them.) It is also associated with Thomas Jefferson, who wanted the University of Virginia which he helped establish to "be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind, to explore and to expose every subject susceptible of its contemplation."

Also a champion of the marketplace of ideas was the French philosopher Voltaire, who added an important wrinkle: You don't have to agree with everybody else in the marketplace. Famously, he wrote another philosopher (an abbot), saying, "Monsieur l'abbé, I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write.'' But I like even better something Voltaire said in his "Essay on Tolerance" published in 1755:

Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so too.

That's what I want us to strive for in our classroom.

COMM 150: TV, print, pictures and 'The War'

Recently we've been reading excerpts from Neil Postman, late media critic at New York University, suggesting television dumbs down the news -- and therefore the quality of public debate in America -- largely because it is a visual medium that doesn't lend itself to sustained, rational discourse. Hence all the stories on things like Britney Spears' and Lindsay Lohan's drug, alcohol and marital problems, the reemergence of O.J. Simpson as a celebrity defendant (on charges that don't sound like they amount to very much) and George Clooney's weekend motorcycle accident.

But that's too easy. It's almost like shooting fish in a barrel.

Postman has a point, and it's important. One of the best discussions I've seen of it is in, of all places, an article in a fanzine dedicated to Pink Floyd songwriter Roger Waters. Written by John Ackermann, it has one of those says-it-all titles, "Now.........This; or (I've got Thirteen channels of shit on the TV to choose from)." Ackermann says we get our information about the world from TV. But we're ill served by it:

The thing is, TV is not really a medium well suited to exposition. TV was conceived of , and is, a medium for the conveyance of amusement, or entertainment. TV is a series of programmed visual images and an endless string of pictures. Hence the subtitle of this book, "Public Discourse In The Age of Show Business." Unlike a book, or the printed page, one does not have to really concentrate too long or hard to get the meaning of a picture. A picture is not so much worth a thousand words, more than it renders a thousand words superfluous and useless, although a thousand words would convey far more information and meaning than a single picture.

Very true. But what Ackerman is saying here cuts both ways.

Pictures don't have to lie, and TV doesn't have to dumb it down. This week we have as good an example as we're likely to see in years of what a powerful medium TV can be, as the Public Broadcasting System airs Ken Burns' series on World War II.

Rick Atkinson, critic for The Washington Post, says in his review of Burns' series "The War," it is a "compelling, flawed gem of a documentary, which enriches our emotional comprehension of an event second only to the Civil War in its enduring resonance in the national character."

Atkinson's onto somthing there. Pictures show emotion, and a 15-hour series like Burns' can connect the pictures in a sustained narrative that I believe matches the level of discourse you find in the print media. "War and Peace," after all, is a novel ... but it's basically a story, a narrative. (It also made not one but two great movies, a Hollywood version starring Audrey Hepburn and a Soviet version starring, literally, the Red Army.) It's also the longest book I've ever sat down and read all the way through.

In class today, we will watch the Public Broadcasting Service's extended preview of "The War," the 15-hour series directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick that is airing on PBS stations nationwide this week. It's available on YouTube if you want to see it again at home. We'll read Atkinson's review in The Post before watching it.

Of the reviews I've read of "The War," Atkinson's impressed me for its awareness of its visual impact:

Watch for the images, not for the history. There is little substantive analysis, about the war or its many subplots. The story of Midway, among the signal battles of modern times, is dispatched in 2 minutes 13 seconds; available footage, or the lack thereof, presumably determines this summary treatment. Scholars will find occasional annoyances ...

Moreover, the largest figures of the war remain rather inconsequential, as though no one above the rank of captain had much to do with events. "Generals make plans, plans go wrong and young men die," the narrator, Keith David, informs us gravely. Just so, but plans also go right and young men still die. And it is the making of those plans that gives war its intellectual coherence, that lifts it above simply chaps biffing about.

These are more than quibbles. But "The War" achieves a cumulative power derived from those thousands of images -- many of them unseen by even the most devoted History Channel viewers -- and by those survivors chosen to bear witness.

Like any good reviewer, Atkinson points out the show's good points and its bad points. Read it and decide for yourself, but I think on balance he finds more good points and the good points are visual. Toward the end he says:

Perhaps "The War" is best viewed as one views an art exhibition, focusing on the pictures and not on the captions or the curator's exegesis. The narrative is just scaffolding for the images, many of which linger long after an episode ends: the vivid color footage of flamethrowers on Saipan; the photo of pedestrians strolling past a smoking body next to a burning city bus; the group portrait of butchered soldiers in the dead of winter, their frozen eyes open and lightly dusted with snow, like macabre Jack Frosts.

Here, too, are enduring brush strokes: women climbing on their knees up the steps of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church in Waterbury, grateful to God for the Japanese surrender; or the Jewish GI who kept his dog tags with the little "H" stamped on them -- for "Hebrew" -- inside his glove so he could quickly toss them away if captured by the Germans; or the Marine on Peleliu using his bayonet to extract gold teeth from a Japanese soldier not yet dead. A woman from Mobile, recalling the sight of caskets lining a train platform in St. Louis, asks, "How could you not cry?" How not, indeed.

If "The War" is occasionally turgid, so is "Beowulf." Such is the risk of epic. ...

As you watch the preview, see if you agree with what Atkinson says in the review, especially about the visuals. See if you think Posttman's comments about TV as a visual medium fit the the handling of pictures and their emotional impact in this show. How is it the same as what you see on the evening news? How is it different? Post a paragraph or two in response as comments to this post.

COMM 150, 337: Writing, print, TV, "hot" and "cool" media

One of media critic Neil Postman's main criticisms of television news is that TV is better adapted to showing visuals than it is to sustained, logical thought. Therefore, he says, we have lost some of the clarity and precision of thought we had before TV replaced print media as our dominant source of information. To the extent Postman's argument is founded in fact (and I believe largely it is), the difference lies in the nature of print media.

When we read words on a page, we don't have emotional cues like body language and facial expression to help us understand their full meaning. All we have is the words, and that forces writers to be careful of how they present facts through the written word. The late Richard Marius, director of the writing program at Harvard, noted that the difference was already apparent to the ancient Greeks. In A Writer's Companion (1991), Marius wrote:

Reading is hard work. The written words lie there, as Socrates told Phaedrus in a famous dialogue, without the help of a living person to explain them. They must speak for themselves. If we misunderstand them, no voice speaks out of the writing to correct our mistakes. (6)

The upshot: Writers have to be clear and logical. "Good writers," adds Marius, "know how easily they may be misunderstood, how quickly they may fatigue readers, and how hard they must work to convey the meaning they intend."

And readers, as Marius suggested, have to make an effort to understand what they're reading. Some 2,500 years after Plato's dialogues, a Canadian scholar named Marshall McLuhan said print is a "hot" medium for that reason. It requires some work, some mental exertion, some interactivity on the part of the reader. But TV, McLuhan added, is a "cool" medium. All we have to do is sit back, watch the pictures and listen to the audio -- we don't have to construct meaning like we do when we read. Cool. We just sit back and soak up the message when we watch TV.

For a Harvard prof, Dick Marius knew a lot about practical writing. He started as a teenage stringer for the twice-weekly paper in Lenoir City, Tenn., where people let him know about it "loudly and vehemently" if they "could not understand what I wrote about the garden club or high school commencement" (3). A Writer's Companion started as a handbook for writing students at Harvard, but some of Marius' advice for student writers can tell us a lot about the difference between print and electronic media:

The movies, radio, and television have inundated us with speaking by all sorts of people who might find it difficult to write an essay. We hear their words, their tones, and on TV talk shows see their carefully informal and humble grins. ... We are also accustomed to seeing speakers wander from one point to another, break off thoughts in midutterance, say confusing things, and contradict themselves. But we put up with such things on late-night talk shows, perhaps because we are looking at celebrities and they are amusing and perhaps because we don't have the energy late at night to do anything but sit there and look passively at the tube. (6-7)

We also put up with it because on TV, we have all the visual cues. As McLuhan would say, it's a "cool" medium. We don't have to work as hard to get meaning out of it, so we hardly work at all.

Print is a different kettle of fish altogether. Says Marius:

Writing and reading are far more demanding. Readers construct meanings from texts. Texts do not have body language and intonations. They stand alone. Writing represents more extended and more complicted thought than the though expressed in most conversations. The writer develops ideas in chains, one thought carefully linked to what has come before it, be aware what is there now, and anticipate what will come in the next paragraph or on the next page. Reading puts a strain on short-term memory ... (7)

One way of putting it is that we shift from print to electronic media, we are getting away from a written, inherently logical way of communicating and becoming more dependent on a more visual, emotional way of communicating. How does this affect society?

Works Cited
Marius, Richard. A Writer's Companion. 3rd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991.

COMM 337, 207: Cat story

An ongoing saga in The Anchorage Daily News as a lawsuit over custody of a cat goes to trial today in Palmer, Alaska. The case falls well within the you-have-to-see-it-to-believe-it range. Says Mat-Su borough reporter Andrew Welner:

Thursday, trial began in civil court to decide who owns Carl [the cat], who survived a February 2006 fire that destroyed Fosselman & Associates, an accounting firm on South Bailey Street. Catherine Fosselman, the firm's owner, according to her employees disregarded her car keys and company files to carry Carl to safety that night. She is suing the woman, Staci Fieser, with whom she placed Carl for safekeeping but who has kept Carl since.

Fosselman said she never meant for Fieser to have Carl permanently. She wants him back. And she wants $100,000 in punitive damages for loss of his companionship, she testified Thursday.

OK. How do you play something like this when you have to write it up? Straight. Absolutely straight.

Some great quotes, though. Here's how Welner handled jury questioning:

Prospective jurors were asked Wednesday whether they had any pets and whether a trial over a cat is a waste of court time and resources.

"If somebody had my dog, I'd probably sue them to get my dog back," said one woman.

"I'd rather see them come to court than go to the extremes of violence," said another.

One man said he could decide who gets the cat, but couldn't envision awarding monetary damages.

All three were eventually picked to serve on the 12-member jury, with two alternates, hearing the case.

There's nothing Welner could have added to that.

COMM 150: Bread, TV and circuses

Complaints about television and the commercialization of the Internet are important as we debate the effects of high technology on mass communication and the ideals of a democratic society. But we also might do well to remember people were lodging similar complaints long before the Internet, TV or the mass media ever came along. Often the complaint is registered in terms of "bread and circuses," a reference to the days when plebs (common people) in Rome were provided with a wheat ration and public entertainment after the Republic was replaced by the Roman Empire. According to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, the phrase comes from the satires of the 1st- and 2nd-century poet Juvenal, who complained the Roman people had given up their rights as free citizens. Here's the passage in English and Latin (if you want to show off):

... Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions - everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.

... iam pridem, ex quo suffragia nulli
uendimus, effudit curas; nam qui dabat olim
imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se
continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat,
panem et circenses. ... (Juvenal, Satire 10.77-81)

How is this different from 21st-century America? How is it the same?

COMM 207: Exciting news! A typeface's birthday

Today's editing exercise will be shortened a little because of a story I saw this morning in The Chicago Tribune. I know you'll be disappointed by that, but this is big! It's huge! Helvetica type, the face you see on everything from airplanes to Beemer ads and your 1040 tax form, is 50 years old this month.

In a syndicated story picked up by The Trib, Vanessa Gezari of the St. Petersburg Times went looking for "signs of age: the slightest sag in a once-pert C, the slope that can creep into the shoulders of an M, the struggle for balance -- almost imperceptible to the untrained eye -- in the limbs of a solidly built K."

But she didn't find any!

"Time has been good to Helvetica," she said. "Very good."

Some people just hate Helvetica (maybe partly because of the tax forms)? But others love it. You should be warned that grown men can get misty-eyed and sentimental about a well-turned typeface. (You also should know your journalism instructor has been a fanatic about typography ever since he worked with master Linotype operators during the 1970s, admired what skilled craftmen they were and learned from them a little bit of the craft of newspaper production.) Gezari's story explains why Helvetica is considered "the typographical signature of the modern era."

Gezari also explains, along the way, what to look for in a typeface and some of the psychology behind typography. There's a lot more to it than you'd think.

One thing the online version of the Trib's article doesn't have is a good picture of Helvetica. But Linotype GmbH, owner of the type house that developed the face in 1957, has type specimens and a brief overview in its online type gallery. Wikipedia has a brief and reliable history of Linotype, indexed under its former (and better-known) name Mergenthaler Linotype Co.