Gobbledygook generator

Somehow I surfed up on this UN Gobbledygook Generator, apparently put up on the web by an English expat who has a blog in Hanoi, in Vietnam.Rather than try to explain it, I'll just quote from this tongue-in-cheek instroduction on the UNFG (United Nations Foundation for Gobbledygook) website:

A staggering 800 million adults possess no writing skills at all, leaving them on the margins of all development opportunities. Evidence-based assessments suggest that this occurs mainly at the provincial and local level, however even at the international level writing skills are being challenged  by a lack of proper training and ICT-enabled drafting and authoring tools.
 
In this context, the UNFG developed the Program for Capacity-Building in the Field of Language Transparency Impact. The program assists in dispensing with harmful idiomatic practices, and promotes the use of a standardized international framework for document authoring. Designed as a Public-Private-Sector Partnership within the Framework of the Global Compact, and supported through supplemental grants from individual donors, the program has made a significant contribution in this field.

This web-based application is useful for people who feel that report drafting skills are important in a UN context, and are in need of occasional assistance in order to carry out their duties.  It may also be of  help for citizens aspiring to become officials, particularly at the international level. The tool can be accessed through this website at no cost, by simply clicking on the button below.

The button says "Generate Some Gobbledygook." And it does. I clicked, and got:

In the context of decentralization, the Chief Technical Adviser will work to unlock clusters, through culturally sensitive outcome-oriented stakeholder awareness and ownership.

Wow! "[O]utcome-oriented stakeholder awareness!" I can't wait to show this to SCI's Assessment Committee. Click again, and I get:

Evidence-based assessments suggest that effective Government interventions include evaluative governance-related socio-economic policy advocacy activities.

This is marvelous! Click again:

In the context of improving the legal and regulatory framework, the Member States will develop cross-sectorial organisational Education for All policies targeted at improving enrolment and retention rates amongst marginalized groups.

Of course, it's designed for multinational non-governmental organizations rather than small liberal arts colleges. Click:

The relevant modules of the project are, at the inter-governmental level, mapped onto sector-wide governance-related feasibility studies of recommendations for change to be implemented.

Click again:

The Honorable Representative concluded that this approach is based on context-specific governance-related poverty reduction and sustainable growth strategies.

So, yeah, it's clearly from the world of NGOs and third-world economic development planning. But this honorable veteran of small-college faculty committees recognizes the language. Worse yet, he wonders if he's beginning to speak it ...

Puns, pundits and Molly the cat

Why is it? There's nothing like a cat story to bring out the puns. Now that Molly has been rescued, the puns and the punditry have gone worldwide. Molly, an 11-month-old cat that was trapped behind a wall in a New York City deli, was rescued last night and made the headlines from My favorite is the tabloid New York Post, which reported in today's online edition:

PURR-FECT END

By BRIGITTE WILLIAMS, BRIAN HAMACHER and HEIDI SINGER

April 15, 2006 -- Meow-alleluia!

Curiosity did not kill the cat after all as Molly was finally rescued last night from inside a brick wall after being stuck in the basement of a Greenwich Village store for two weeks.

The miracle feline - looking slightly dehydrated and dirty - was freed at 10:15 p.m. after a group of volunteer rescue workers dismantled the wall of the landmark building, guided by her meows and an acoustics expert.

"It feels like I won the lottery," her proud owner, Peter Myers declared after giving his prized purrer a big cuddle.

"She needs something to drink. I know I do," he added, before feeding the famished feline a plate of roast pork and sardines marinated in oil and water.

What's not to like in this story? Pungent puns, a lot of alliteration. Even the cutlines began: "FELINE GROOVY ..."

The story was carried by news outlets worldwide, including stories in Mainichi Daily News of Japan, almost all the national British papers, The Independent in South Africa, The Age in Sydney, Australia, The Washington Post and TV networks including CNN, ABC, CBS and BBC News. Even Forbes, the business wire service, carried this bulletin last night: "Update 1: Day 14: NYC Cat Finally Rescued From Wall. ... 04.14.2006, 11:00 PM.:

Not to be outdone by its sister tab (and competitor) for the hearts of New Yorkers if not necessarily their minds, The New York Daily News weighed in with "Ending is Cat's Meow" in the headline and "In a purr-fect ending, a miner with a heart of gold searched until he rescued Molly the cat last night" in the lede. Alliteration, too, as The Daily News went on to report the city's "famous fur ball was safe and sound and eating sardines" after her ordeal. Even The New York Times, ever the gray lady, weighed in with "The Fraidy-Cat of Hudson Street Is Yanked to Safety."

So it went worldwide. The Chicago Tribune, ever on the alert for a good (or not-so-good) pun, headlined, "NYC rescuers' best-laid plans no match so far for trapped cat." And icWales.co.uk, which bills itself as the Welsh national website, had, "Deli-cat mouser safe and sound." Alliteration, too, hit the headlines as The Independent of South Africa proclaimed "Rescuers team up to save plucky pussy," and The Times of London chronicled the weeklong "Bid to save Molly the mouser."

In the end it fell to The New York Times to put it all in historical context. No doubt taking seriously its role as the nation's newspaper of record, The Times searched its morgue, along with clips from its competitors, and reported Sunday:

It is easy to hide in New York City. Sometimes it is even easy to get trapped. Ask the cats.

One October day in 1941, a black Persian named Mickey climbed out of his owner's apartment at 178 Fifth Avenue, went as high as he could and fell five stories down an inaccessible part of the chimney, the start of a 24-hour ordeal that ended when a restaurant owner next door gave rescuers permission to break through his storeroom to pull Mickey out to safety. In 1947, another cat, Suzie, was trapped for five days under a Brooklyn pier until she was rescued. The bait: milk and doughnuts. The reward: She got her picture in the paper.

The saga of Molly — the black cat freed from the wall of a Greenwich Village deli Friday night after a frenzied two-week spectacle — was merely the latest chapter in a rather old New York story, the Story of the Trapped Cat. No one knows how many cats have gotten stuck in the chimneys, walls and crevices of this city, but one thing is certain: Molly was not the first to cause a scene and attract the attention of onlookers, the authorities and reporters.

The story, by staff writer Manny Fernandez, was headlined "Want to Captivate New Yorkers? Try the Story of the (Latest) Trapped Cat." In its thoroughness, if nothing else, it was fully worthy of the Sunday Times.

Bear facts -- add 1

Last month we linked to a feature story about grizzly bear sightings in Anchorage, Alaska. Actually, they weren't sightings (not that this should make you feel any better). They were electronic records of tagged and collared grizzlies wandering through the city, including one that got into a residential neighborhood not far from the motel where Debi and I stayed when we were in Alaska last year.

Well, there's a set of photos going around the internet lately of a bear getting into a bird feeder. I tracked it back to a website called geekbase.org. Love the headline.

More details on federal testing

While it came out just before the President Bush's Commission on the Future of Higher Education's latest position papers changed the terms of debate, The Philadelphia Inquirer had a detailed article on the commission last week. Written by staff writer Patrick Kerkstra, it was published March 28 under the headline "Colleges Pushed to Prove Worth: Standardized Testing at the University Level." It fills in some of the gaps in what we've learned so far, both about the commission and the standardized test its chairman has touted, called the Collegiate Learning Assessment developed by RAND Corp., the military research and development contractor, and a RAND subsidiary known as the Council for Aid to Education.

Among other people on both sides of the issue, Kerkstra interviewed commission chair Charles Miller, its leading advocate of standardized testing. And his report suggests more details of Miller's background and current thinking than we had before:

"The pressures for accountability are everywhere," Miller, a former Bush-appointed leader of the University of Texas System Board of Regents, said in a recent interview. "Evidence of the need to improve student learning is pretty clear."

He offered a litany of examples: "softening curricula," "grade inflation," and insufficient literacy skills in half of all four-year college graduates, as detailed in a study funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts released in January. Meanwhile, annual tuition hikes are outpacing inflation.

To his critic's ears, Miller's case for collegiate testing has a familiar ring. They say similar arguments were used to turn the No Child Left Behind program into a federal fiat, mandating extensive testing in secondary and elementary grades. Miller, in fact, helped design a K-12 testing system in Texas for then-Gov. Bush that became the model for the federal program.

Miller dismissed the comparison. The states, not Washington, should take the lead on collegiate testing by requiring it at public universities, he said. Once the big state systems prove its value, he predicted, testing will be swept by market demand into private schools.

Also, unlike No Child Left Behind, federal funding would not be tied to test results, he said.

Miller has been saying this consistently. But both he and U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings also say financial aid can be used to leverage accountablity. Adds the Inquirer's Kerkstra:

Money, however, is undeniably part of the issue. When the commission was formed, Spellings noted that the federal government provides a third of all higher-education funding and has a right to "maximize" its investment.

"We're missing valuable information on how the system works today," she said, "and what can be improved."

That baffles some ivory tower habitues who see higher education as too preoccupied with self-examination and ranking.

One is Pennsylvania State University president Graham Spanier. Kerkstra quoted him:

"There is no enterprise in America that I know of that assesses itself so carefully and so frequently," said Penn State's Spanier, calling it "both a science and an obsession."

He cited the arduous reviews that faculty members endure to make tenure, the accreditation process, the student-satisfaction surveys, and the monitoring of graduates' efforts to get jobs.

Better known to the public are the college comparisons made by popular publications such as U.S. News & World Report. Those rankings are based on such factors as faculty-to-student ratios, SAT scores, and alumni giving. But they say little, if anything, about how well students are learning in the classroom.

Kerkstra's citation of U.S. News & World Report rankings hardly inspires confidence in his knowledge of assessment issues, but he talked to at least some of the right people. He says:

The solution is not standardized testing, many academics say, but assessments that gauge each student's mastery of a discipline. For instance, a "capstone" course, or a senior-year research paper, or a portfolio of work covering a college career.

Trudy Banta, a professor of higher education at Indiana University and an assessment expert, said that such assignments - combined with satisfaction surveys and scores on graduate and professional school exams - are better indicators of student achievement.

"We all love simple, easy answers," she said. "But this isn't a simple, easy issue."

Kerkstra devoted the most space to a description of Lehigh University's experiment with the Collegiate Learning Assessment, the RAND Corp. standardized test that Miller favors. His discussion is of interest because it gives more details of the preferred test. He says:

Can standardized testing fill in the blanks?

That's what Lehigh University wanted to find out when it administered a standardized exam known as the Collegiate Learning Assessment for the first time last fall to about 100 randomly selected freshmen, according to Carl Moses, deputy provost for academic affairs.

Lehigh is the only Pennsylvania school to acknowledge experimenting with the assessment; none in New Jersey is known to be trying it. Most of the pilot schools are in states where college testing has become a prominent policy debate, such as Texas, New York and California.

The exam is made up of two 90-minute writing exercises. In one, students are given an opinionated statement and asked to compose an essay supporting or disputing it. The second is a real-life "performance task," such as producing a memo from newspaper clips and documents.

The test was developed by two think tanks, the Rand Corporation and the Council for Aid to Education. They employ graduate students to grade the task portion, but a software program called "e-rater" scores the essays. The same program is used to assess writing samples in the entrance exams for both business and graduate schools.

At Lehigh, it's too early to know whether the test has value, Moses said.

Kerkstra doesn't mention the connection, but the Council for Aid to Education is a RAND Corp. subsidiary set up to "enhance the effectiveness of corporate and other private sector support in improving education at all levels and to help education institutions more effectively acquire private support for their programs." All of this bears watching.

Kerkstra's story in The Inquirer also includes a brief description of the CLA and sample test questions, provided by the Council for Aid to Education:

The Collegiate Learning Assessment, a new standardized exam, is supposed to measure college students' communication and reasoning skills. It consists of two 90-minute writing tests. On one, students are presented with an opinionated statement, or "prompt," and asked to respond in an essay. On the other, they are given a real-life task, such as writing a memo based on documentation provided.

Sample Writing Prompt

Public figures such as actors, politicians and athletes should expect people to be interested in their private lives. When they seek a public role, they should expect that they will lose at least some of their privacy.

Sample Performance Task

You are the assistant to Pat Williams, the president of DynaTech, a company that makes precision electronic instruments and navigational equipment. Sally Evans, a member of DynaTech's sales force, recommended that DynaTech buy a small private plane (a SwiftAir 235) that she and other members of the sales force could use to visit customers. Pat was about to approve the purchase when there was an accident involving a SwiftAir 235.

You are provided with the following documentation:

1. Newspaper articles about the accident

2. Federal accident report on in-flight breakups in single-engine planes

3. Pat's e-mail to you and Sally's e-mail to Pat

4. Charts on SwiftAir's performance characteristics

5. Amateur Pilot article comparing SwiftAir 235 to similar planes

6. Pictures and description of SwiftAir Models 180 and 235

Please prepare a memo that addresses several questions, including what data support or refute the claim that the type of wing on the SwiftAir 235 leads to more in-flight breakups, what other factors might have contributed to the accident and should be taken into account, and your overall recommendation about whether DynaTech should purchase the plane.

Miller says the test measures college-level "critical thinking, analytic reasoning, problem solving, and written communications." But if the sample questions in the Inquirer are representative, I don't see how it can.

I guess a computerized "e-rater" might be programmed to score the essay, but the whole test strikes me as breathtakingly superficial. The first question obviously calls for a high school-level five-paragraph essay format (a paragraph each for actors, politicians and athletes, an introduction and a conclusion). And the second "Performance Task" question looks equally superficial, although it would make a dandy prompt for a high school essay with a paragraph each for technicial features of the airplane, liability issues and purchasing procedures.

I'll bet this won't be on the test ...

A wonderful quote from Arnold Joseph Toynbee, longtime professor of Greek language and history at the University of London and author of a 12-volume Study of History that detailed the rise and fall of some 20-odd civilizations, cited in the March issue of BBC History magazine. And one the U.S. Commission on the Future of Higher Education well might pay heed to:

"Civilisations in decline are consistently characterised by a tendency towards standardisation and uniformity."

What more can I say?

No limit Texas hold'em testing?

President Bush's blue-ribbon Commission on the Future of Higher Education has posted a half dozen position papers on financial, accountability and accreditation issues to its website. And The Chronicle of Higher Education says, I think quite correctly, the papers "may have just given colleges more reason to be worried."

In post to its News Blog dated Thursday, the Chronicle notes:

In an e-mail message announcing the release of the papers, the Education Department said the reports “are not formal recommendations by the commission, nor are they intended to reflect the views of the U.S. Department of Education.” Rather, it said, “their purpose is to inform and energize the public about key postsecondary issues and inspire continued national dialogue around the future of higher education in America.” The papers “may assist the commission in forming consensus around these issues,” the department said.

For all of the department’s protestations, however, people in higher education are likely to regard the papers as the first draft of the commission’s final report. And what they read may worry them.

Here's why. The papers look like opinion pieces. They have titles like "Assuring Quality in Higher Education: Key Issues and Questions for Changing Accreditation in the United States," "The Need for Accreditation Reform" and "A Transparent Approach to Higher Education Accountability: Developed and Implemented by The University of Texas System." The commission is holding hearings around the country, but this sounds like the work of people who have already made up their minds.

In fact, it sounds like the work of people who want to extend No Child Left Behind to higher education. It may sound like that because it is the work of people who want to extend NCLB to higher ed. Margaret Spellings, Bush's Secretary of Education, had a key role drafting the NCLB bill when she was a White House aide. And Charles Miller, who chairs the blue-ribbon commission, has a big stake in NCLB-style testing. When the commission was empaneled, The Chronicle reported in its Oct. 14 issue:

... if the chairman's past work is any indication, a major focus of the panel will be accountability. Mr. Miller has been promoting that concept since the late 1980s, when he chaired a Texas task force that developed a state accountability program that became a model for the No Child Left Behind Act.

As a member and later chairman of the University of Texas System Board of Regents from 1994 to 2004, he proposed new reporting requirements for the nine undergraduate colleges in the system and endorsed testing for all freshmen and seniors. The reporting system went statewide last year, and a test of students' analytical and verbal skills is now in the pilot stage.

And when he testified before Congress in 2003, Mr. Miller suggested that colleges test students in their first two years "to measure student learning at the undergraduate level across institutions."

"I don't have a middle name, but if I did, it would probably be accountability," Mr. Miller says.

The chairman insists he is not out to regulate colleges, but only to hold them accountable to taxpayers. He says policy makers and parents alike need better information about how colleges are performing. "I believe in giving institutions the maximum freedom to operate themselves," he says, "but we do want to see what the results are."

Whatever he means by that.

The position papers suggest it may mean replacing the regional accrediting bodies we have now with a single federal agency "governed by representatives of the public, institutions of postsecondary education, business and industry, and state and federal governments." It would be called the National Accreditation Foundation, and it would oversee a thorough revamp of accreditation procedures.

In October, The Chronicle listed the commission's 19 members and noted, " in addition to four [academic presidents emeritus, three professors, and an association president, includes five executives from such corporate giants as Microsoft, the Boeing Company, and IBM." Among the members are the CEO of Kaplan Inc., the standardized test prep company, and the president of Western Governors University, which describes itself as an "online, competency-based university." But the main tilt seems to be to think tanks and large corporations.

This kind of lineup led Ruth Flower, director of the office of public policy and communications at the American Association of University Professors, to tell The Chronicle she suspected, ""This panel looks like it's poised to move us away from a concentration on comprehensive education and toward a concentration on training for big business."

Well, we'll have to see how that shakes out. In the meantime, there are just enough Texans behind the panel's work, and they have just enough of a stake in the type of test-driven school reform that led to NCLB, it look's like we're in for a round of no limit Texas hold'em standardized testing in higher ed.

COM 209: Good writing = reporting

Here's another example of writing that puts you at the scene and does it by incorporating a lot of descriptive quotes. It's a profile of George Mason University as the school's basketball team made the Final Four. It's by sports columnist Tim Sullivan of The San Diego Union-Tribune, flagship paper of the Copley group that also owns Springfield's State Journal-Register.

Here's the lede. Notice how it's almost pure description, leading to a quote that's also, well, almost pure description:

FAIRFAX, Va. – The line was two hours long. It started at the entrance to the George Mason University bookstore, snaked around the corner, spilled out of the building and scaled a flight of steps.

A lot of students went to a lot of trouble yesterday in pursuit of a simple commemorative T-shirt. When a school qualifies for its first Final Four, March Madness inevitably manifests itself as local lunacy, yet everyone involved swears he or she is perfectly sane.

“Because this is the best thing that ever happened to Mason,” explained senior theater major Jenny Girardi, an aspiring actress. “This is the only day that I'll personally be able to stand in line. And it's part of the experience. I mean, I'm going out. It's my last year. And this is the first time I've seen this much school spirit on campus.”

What senses are involved as we read this? Well, sight, I guess. We see the line at the bookstore. (If you go to the story on the paper's website, SignOnSanDiego, you'll also see a picture of the T-shirts.) Sound, too. We can hear aspiring actress Jenny Girardi, because Sullivan catches the rhythm of her speech in the quote.

Here's another quote, farther down in the story. Sullivan obviously did some good reporting while he interviewed students in line at the bookstore. Again, you can hear the student he talked with:

“I've been here five years, and it's finally time Mason was recognized for something,” psychology major Jessica Clinger said at the back of the T-shirt line. “It's changed the whole morale of the campus.

“Our English teacher goes on and on about how he thinks we're going to have a riot. Last week, we were writing a memo and he's like, 'I think this is what's going to happen: 27 cars are going to get overturned. I think cars are going to be on fire.' We're like, 'Buddy, calm down. This is not Maryland.' ”

But Sullivan also gets in a good profile of what George Mason is like.

George Mason has a "reputation as an impersonal commuter school with shallow, suburban roots," he tells us. It's in Northern Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. It's never had a sports reputation. But that may be changing. Adds Sullivan:

With an enrollment exceeding 29,000 students and 148 degree programs, George Mason is broadly diversified both academically and culturally. Patriots guard Tony Skinn's French/Arabic literature class is taught by an Iraqi and is comprised primarily of foreign exchange students.

“If you walk into that class and you look at the people in that class, you probably think they have no clue about basketball,” Skinn said yesterday. “Three weeks ago, they had no clue about basketball. They probably didn't know George Mason had a basketball team.”

Yesterday, Skinn's appearance in class prompted applause from his fellow students. His teacher had promised to throw him a party yesterday, but postponed it until after the Final Four.

Sullivan even found a faculty member to talk about how basketball fame helps the school's academic side:

... Camera crews prowled the campus, staging “spontaneous” celebrations, capturing the colorful scene at Mason's statue. All of this because of basketball.

“I think it's going to help us intellectually,” said economics professor Vernon Smith, one of two Nobel laureates on the Mason faculty. “I think it brings a prominence to the university. We're going to get more applications and some of them are going to be real good students.”

Soon, students might have to stand in line to get in.

He even ties it back to his lede at the end. It's a well written story, and every word is based on good reporting.

ENG 111: Paper topics on Iraq

Here are some ideas for paper topics based on the brownbag lunch talk that Sr. Rihab Mousa, O.P., gave Wednesday of last week in the SCI Resource Center, along with some links. One is to an article Sr. Rihab wrote for the Dominican Life | USA website about her visit to her Dominican community in Mosul and her home town of Qaraqush in the summer of 2005. (It not only goes over some of the same things she told us last week. It also gives correct spellings of names, places, etc.) You can find other information on Sr. Rihab by googling her name, and the Dominican community in Springfield has a wealth of information on Iraq available on its website. All of this can be good background for your paper.

Your assignment will be to write a 500- to 750-word expository (or explanatory) paper in which you state a thesis related to what you learned from Sr. Rihab's talk and support (or explain) that thesis with factual evidence drawn from your notes on the talk, information you find on the web and your own knowledge. Here are some ideas to get you started choosing a topic and narrowing it down to a thesis statement:

• Christians in Iraq. Several people said in class discussion after Wednesday's talk we were surprised to hear how many Christians there were in Iraq. There is a lot of information on the web about the Christian communities in Iraq, and you could take what you learned from Sr. Rihab as a starting point. Go to profiles published by the BBC (British Broadcasting Corp. and the Arab TV station al Jazeera. You will find several good articles by googling on keywords "Iraq" and "Christian," too. If you are interested in what the Dominicans are doing in Iraq, you could narrow your topic to their activities. Lots of different ways to narrow it.
  
• Do the media get it right? One point several of us brought up in class was the picture we get of Iraq from the media is quite different from the way people from Iraq perceive the reality of living there. Part of that is because it is hard for Americans to report on Iraq (scroll down to the next most recent post to this blog, "COM 209: Reporting from Baghdad") for more information. And part of it is in the nature of news, which emphasizes the unusual just by definition. You might start by listing the things Sr. Rihab said that surprised you, and compare them to the stereotypes Americans have of Iraq or the Middle East in general. What kinds of stories do you find on the Google news page? Try actually counting them. (There might be some surprises there, too. What are the stories about? How many try to explain what conditions are like there?) Lots of possibilities there, and lots of ways to narrow the topic.
  
• Life in another culture. Sr. Rihab said a very basic problem is that Americans just don't understand Iraqi culture. Have you spent time in a different culture? If you have visited Europe or Mexico, how did you cope with the language? What did people do that you didn't expect? How did you get used to it? Or your experience might be as simple as spending a week visiting relatives on a farm if you grew up in town (or in the city if you grew up in the country or a small town). Going away to school, or even the transition from junior high to high school ... or high school to college ... might give you experiences that help you understand some of the challenges Sr. Rihab spoke of. How can we use our experiences to overcome cultural barriers? How can we as Americans overcome the difficulty of learning other languages and other cultures? Again, lots of different ways to find a topic and narrow it.
  

All of these ideas I'm throwing out just to get you started thinking about a topic you'd like to write on. The next step is to choose one, narrow it down and check it out with me before you start writing. The theme will be due at the end of next week, so you have a couple of days to think about what topic you'd like to write about. See me -- or email me -- if you have questions.

COM 209: Reporting in Bagdhad

Here's a link to an important story in The New York Review of Books titled "Baghdad: The Besieged Press." I'm assigning it for class discussion.

Link to: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18844 ... read it by Tuesday, March 28, and we'll discuss it in class.

The story is by Orville Schell, Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, who recently visited Bagdhad. I'll add to this post later, but here's a sound bite. Well, OK, OK, it's a print bite:

In recent history, there have been few wars more difficult to report on than the wa in Iraq today. When I was covering the war in Indochina, journalists went out into th field, even into combat, knowing that we would ultimately be able to return to Saigon Phnom Penh, or Vientiane where we could meet with local friends or go out to restaurant for dinner with colleagues. Although occasionally a Viet Cong might thro a hand grenade into a bar, the war essentially was happening outside the city

I had arrived here in Baghdad naively expecting that as an antidote to their isolation from Iraqi society, journalists might have kept up something of a fraternity among themselves. What I discovered was that even the most basic social interactions have become difficult. It is true that some of the larger and better-appointed news bureaus (with kitchens and cooks) have tried to organize informal evening dinners with colleagues. But while guests were able to get to an early dinner, there was the problem of getting back again to their compounds or hotels by dark, when the odds of being attacked vastly increase. The only alternative was to stay the night, which posed many difficulties for everyone, especially Iraqi drivers and guards.

The result is that reporters find themselves living in a strangely retro mode where their days end before sunset, and they are pulled back to their bureaus for dinner like an American family of the 1950s.

And here's his description of a party at the Fox news bureau:

In our search for the alleged Fox News party, we ask the attendant in the lobby fo directions. He tells me and my guards to go to the fifth floor, but adds that in order t get upstairs, we must first go downstairs, evidently a strategy to prevent suicid bombers from going directly to their targets. In the basement, amid a stack o discarded cardboard boxes and heaps of broken plate-glass windows, an Iraqi man is kneeling on a rug in front of a cement block wall, presumably facing toward Mecca in prayer

When we finally arrive on the fifth floor, we have to leave our guards at a checkpoint fortified with a steel door. Inside, we are greeted by the stink of disinfectant and stale air filled with the smell of curry and cigarette smoke. Down a hallway with a greasy carpet I find a small sitting room with shabby furniture and a soccer game playing on a TV. The Fox News staffers who are smoking and drinking seem glad to see almost anyone. The scene makes me think of a group of elderly retired people clinging to a residential hotel slated for demolition.

"Where are all the other guests?" I ask, as one of them thrusts a bottle of beer into my hand. Zoran Kusovac, Fox's bulky, unshaven bureau chief, takes a long drag on his cigarette and explains in his Croatian accent, "Everybody's gone home." He laughs. "It's Saturday. We wanted to have some fun. We used to be able to have parties until late at night. But now our security people told us that if we wanted to have a party, it would have to end no later than 6:00 PM, so that everyone could get home before dark. We started at 3:00!"

"It's a little like being in third grade, where everybody has to be home before dark," someone else says. Everyone laughs.

Party hearty, huh? The whole story is like that. It gives you a sense of what it must be like to be there.

Reporter flees in URL

If you've wondered, in between the excitement of tornadoes and blizzards, if there's life after Springfield ...

The other day there was a reference in Slate.com's daily roundup of today's blogs: The latest chatter in cyberspace" to a blog by a reporter with The Boston Herald named Jay Fitzgerald. Back in newspapering days, I worked with a guy by that name who hailed from Boston, so I got curious. I couldn't find his bio or CV on line, so I went to the blog, called Hub Blog, and googled around. Eventually I found this:

For my money, the most hilareous novel about journalism is 'Dwarf Rapes Nun; Flees in UFO.' The novel's uncanny, if only because it's about a Statehouse reporter toiling for a medium-size paper in a sleepy Midwest capital in the 1980s and, as it was, I was a Statehouse reporter toiling for a medium-size paper in a sleepy Midwest capital in the 1980s when I first read it -- and I thought for sure the author must have been slyly chronicling the antics of my life and profession. ...

Bingo! I remember the book, by Arnold Sawislak, from my own Statehouse bureau days in in a sleepy Midwest capital. I don't remember whether I borrowed Jay's copy or he borrowed mine, but it went around the Capitol press room when we worked there. He's right, too. The book's hilarious.

I remember Fitzgerald as an ambitious guy who wasn't afraid of hyping a story to get it above the fold on the front page. I figured he was writing his way up and out of Springfield, and I'm glad to see he wound up where he wanted to. He also writes for The Herald's EconoBlog. So yes, Virginia, there is life after Springfield.

Colleges blast federal testing

In a public hearing Monday at Boston, university presidents from New England testified before President Bush's blue-ribbon Commission on the Future of Higher Education about such concerns as curriculum innovation, the complexity of financial aid, and the role of universities in student life, according to The Boston Globe. Standardized testing also came up (although as a secondary concern), and the academics were roundly opposed to it. Reported Sarah Schweitzer of The Globe:

The presidents largely steered clear of the most controversial issue before the commission: standardized testing for college and university undergraduates. The chairman of the commission, Charles Miller, former head of the regents of the University of Texas, has suggested that a nationwide performance-comparison system would foster greater accountability in higher education.

Susan Hockfield, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said testing would harm universities.

''Standardized curricula or testing would limit our ability to educate, to develop new curricula, and to train the innovators we need," she said.

[Tufts University President Lawrence] Bacow said, ''I would ask the commission ... that you not recommend changes to the system that would ... impose uniform or common standards such as exist in many other nations."

In an online column,Globe op-ed writer Derrick Z. Jackson, who also covered the hearing, concentrated on issues of finance and access to higher education:

President Susan Hockfield of Massachusetts Institute of Technology led off the proceedings at the Fairmont Copley Plaza hotel by saying that in order to maintain democracy and compete in a global economy, the nation needs to expand scholarship aid to expand access to college. But she noted how Congress is cutting more than $12 billion from the federal budget for student loans over the next five years and has frozen the maximum for a Pell grant for the last four years. On top of that, she expressed her fear that without proper support of math and science in the nation's public schools, "we will be racing to make up in higher ed what is not being done" in K-12.

Also staffing the hearing was The Harvard Crimson, which devoted more attention to the testing issue. Here's how staff writers Lois Beckett and Stephanie Garlow led the story:

The presidents of MIT, Tufts, and Boston University attacked a suggestion by a federal higher education commission chair to implement standardized testing of college students at a public meeting of the commission yesterday.

If this suggestion were implemented, Harvard students might once again face the kind of mandatory testing many of them experienced through state-wide exams in grade school. But Harvard “would be reluctant to accept any form of standardized testing,” Senior Director of Federal and State Relations Kevin Casey said in an interview yesterday.

“Standardized curricula or testing would limit our ability to educate,” MIT President Susan Hockfield said at a meeting of the U. S. Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education in downtown Boston.

Noting that outgoing Harvard president Lawrence Summers was out of the country and not present at Monday's hearing, The Crimson said "three other presidents of Boston area universities said in their speeches to the commission that standardized testing would hinder educational innovation." Beckett and Garlow added:

Boston University President Robert A. Brown told the commission that a school’s own regulation of faculty expectations and grading policies, not a nationally administered test, is the appropriate way to assess educational quality.

Tufts President Lawrence S. Bacow said in his speech that standardized testing would not address the differences between institutions. “What works at Harvard or Tufts would not work at MIT, would not work at UMass,” he said in an interview yesterday.

The Crimson said a few students also spoke at the hearing:

Harvard Graduate School of Education student Jessica M. Bibeau, who spoke for three minutes during a public comment period, supported an alternative to the proposed testing.

“The purpose of this accountability system should not be to penalize a one-size-fits-all definition of poor performance, but rather to allow institutions to focus their efforts toward meeting their stated goals,” she said.

But most students who spoke sought to communicate to the commission the need for larger grants and cheaper loans, citing their own educational debt.

What education student Bibeau proposed sounds an awful lot like what colleges and universities do now as part of the accreditation process.

Tornado hits (on) J-R website

Here's an example of why I'm not too worried about the ability of newspapers to compete with the internet. More and more, they're using the internet to get their product to their readers. The way Springfield's State Journal-Register used its website in the wake of last week's tornado is a good example.

For several days, the J-R fronted its website with a frequently updated, blog-like start page carrying announcements of street closures, food distribution sites and other vital information, as well as reader pictures of storm damage. In today's paper, online editor Jason Piscia recalled:

The Web site's coverage of the storm began about three hours after the first tornado hit Sunday night, when an early version of the storm news story planned for the Monday morning newspaper was posted. The site then kept readers updated throughout the night with information that came in too late to meet the Monday morning newspaper's final deadline, including alerts about additional storms passing through the area and information from city officials about the morning commute and early damage estimates.

As the week wore on, the J-R was able to take advantage of the interactivity of the internet to collect and publish storm damage pictures in JPEG format. Piscia said they turned out to be a popular feature:

Web surfers overwhelmingly came to the newspaper's Internet site last week to view photographs of storm damage. Galleries featuring photos taken by State Journal-Register staff members were added to the site all week. The Web site also invited readers to e-mail in their own digital photos. By the end of the week, more than 150 reader photos had been posted.

(I can attest to that. My wife and I, out in Arizona, were among those surfers.) Piscia added:

The Web site recorded more than 600,000 page views Wednesday, the busiest day in sj-r.com's nine-year history. The lowest page-view total of the work week - just under 500,000 - occurred March 13, when most of Springfield was still without electricity.

The daily page views last week were more than three times higher than an average weekday.

The heavy demand maxed out the newspaper's computer system's ability to serve all Web surfers at once, which is why virtually all users experienced some delays when attempting to load pages on sj-r.com early last week.

So the paper went to a stripped-down, blog-like start page that summarized the news and announcements within the website. Said Piscia:

In an attempt to lessen the delays, sj-r.com's staff on Tuesday switched the site's home page to a basic, graphics-free presentation that contained only text links to storm coverage. Pages that contained high-demand items, such as photographs, also were stripped of non-storm-related items so they could load as quickly as possible.

The Web site's regular home page returned Friday afternoon, as Web traffic began to subside.

In short, the Journal-Register was able to offer good service. I don't always act on my good intentions of keeping up with the local news, in fact, and I probably read the J-R more last week than I do when I'm in town.

College-level NCLB pot simmers

While the mainstream media have largely ignored the Bush administration's proposal for nationwide standardized testing of college students along lines of the K-12 No Child Left Behind tests, it continues to get notice in college and university newspapers. Friday's edition (March 17) of DiamondbackOnline.com, the University of Maryland's independent student newspaper, carried a story headed "Faculty criticize standardized test plan." Citing a New York Times report on the Education Department's Commission on the Future of Higher Education, which is conducting hearings on the proposal, Diamondback reporter Theodore J. Sawchuck said:

[Maryland] Office of Institutional Research and Planning Associate Director Sharon Anne La Voy said while the panel’s aims are admirable, the tests would cost too much and measure too little.

“Accountability isn’t in and of itself a bad thing,” she said. However, La Voy doubted the faculty would give up their freedom to teach what they want, or that the test would accurately measure what they teach.

“I have a hard time thinking they’d abandon that and teach to the test,” she said. “Can you measure what you’re getting out of college on a multiple-choice test?”

Sawchuck's story cites statistics suggesting a large number of colleges and universities already use standardized tests. (One of them, although it escaped the Diamondback's notice for obvious reasons, is SCI.) Sawchuck says:

Though this university does not, many colleges nationwide use some form of standardized testing. David Chadima, a consultant with ACT Educational Services, said some 340 schools use ACT’s Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency. According to the Educational Testing Service’s website, about 700 schools use its Major Field Test. The CAAP costs between $11.55 and $17.85 per student while the MFT is $24.

The University of Texas System is among many colleges nationwide who use some form of standardized testing. Pedro Reyes, UTS associate vice chancellor of academic affairs, said students can fail the Collegiate Learning Assessment and still graduate. He said the system bears the cost of the test — $6,000 for 200 tests — to assess the effectiveness of its teaching methods.

Reyes' observation is noteworthy because blue-ribbon commission chairman Miller is a former UT trustee who favors the CLA test. In any event, the story said the University of Maryland doesn't hope to be emulating the schools that already do standardized testing anytime soon:

Standardized testing requires a tradeoff between the cost of the test and quality of the information gained, said Robert Mislevy, a professor in the College of Education.

“It’s almost inevitable that the better you want to do it, the more it’s going to cost,” he said. “Information costs money.”

Until the government mandates standardized testing, the university has no plans to implement it on their own, which pleases assistant professor of Afro-American studies Jessica Gordon Nembhard.

“Standardized tests are just too narrow because they have to be standardized,” she said. “They usually end up missing the nuance that tells us if students are actually learning anything.”

Storm chasing on the Internet

MESA, Ariz. -- This was as close to storm chasing as I ever hope to get.

Tonight we're watching television in the middle of a desert 1,500 miles away from home, we're watching the Weather Channel and we get a report of heavy thunderstorms and a tornado sighting in "the south end of Springfield, Illinois." The announcers move on to a live report from Fayetteville, Ark., and a tornado expert in a TV studio somewhere. Back to scheduled programming, and no more word on Springfield.

So we get on the internet, follow the links off the Yahoo! weather page for Springfield and we get the storm warnings posted by the National Weather Service as they appeared.

And we breathe a little easier. Here's the sequence, earliest reports on top, as the storm tracked through central Illinois:

/O.CON.KILX.TO.W.0011.000000T0000Z-060313T0315Z/
SANGAMON-LOGAN-
850 PM CST SUN MAR 12 2006

...A TORNADO WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 915 PM CST FOR
NORTHERN SANGAMON AND SOUTHERN LOGAN COUNTIES...

AT 848 PM CST...TRAINED WEATHER SPOTTERS REPORTED A TORNADO. THIS
TORNADO WAS LOCATED 2 MILES NORTH OF BUFFALO ON CORNLAND ROAD...
OR ABOUT 15 MILES EAST OF SPRINGFIELD...MOVING NORTHEAST AT 45 MPH.

PEOPLE NEAR THESE LOCATIONS ARE STILL THREATENED...
ILLIOPOLIS.
MOUNT PULASKI.
CHESTNUT.
LATHAM.

TORNADOES ARE ESPECIALLY DANGEROUS AT NIGHT...BECAUSE THEY ARE HARD
TO SEE. DO NOT REMAIN IN YOUR CAR OR MOBILE HOME. INSTEAD...TAKE
COVER IN A REINFORCED BUILDING. GO TO A BASEMENT OR INTERIOR ROOM ON
THE LOWEST FLOOR.

REPORT ANY SEVERE WEATHER OR DAMAGE TO YOUR LOCAL EMERGENCY
MANAGER...OR THE NEAREST LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCY...FOR RELAY TO THE
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE.

LAT...LON 3994 8974 3970 8968 3974 8939 3985 8922
4014 8916

----------------------------------------


/O.CAN.KILX.TO.A.0073.000000T0000Z-060313T0400Z/
/O.NEW.KILX.TO.A.0077.060313T0242Z-060313T1000Z/

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE HAS ISSUED TORNADO WATCH 77 UNTIL
4 AM CST MONDAY WHICH REPLACES A PORTION OF TORNADO WATCH 73. THE
NEW WATCH IS VALID FOR THE FOLLOWING AREAS

IN ILLINOIS THE NEW WATCH INCLUDES 17 COUNTIES

IN CENTRAL ILLINOIS

CHRISTIAN DE WITT LOGAN
MACON MASON MCLEAN
MENARD PEORIA SANGAMON
SHELBY TAZEWELL WOODFORD

IN WEST CENTRAL ILLINOIS

CASS FULTON MORGAN
SCHUYLER SCOTT

THIS INCLUDES THE CITIES OF...BLOOMINGTON...DECATUR...HAVANA...
JACKSONVILLE...LINCOLN...NORMAL...PEORIA...SHELBYVILLE...
SPRINGFIELD AND TAYLORVILLE.

----------------------------------------


TORNADO WARNING
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE LINCOLN IL
825 PM CST SUN MAR 12 2006

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN LINCOLN HAS ISSUED A

* TORNADO WARNING FOR...
SOUTHERN LOGAN COUNTY IN CENTRAL ILLINOIS
NORTHERN SANGAMON COUNTY IN CENTRAL ILLINOIS

* UNTIL 915 PM CST

* AT 825 PM CST...NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE DOPPLER RADAR AND SPOTTERS
WERE TRACKING A TORNADO IN SOUTHWEST SPRINGFIELD NEAR THE I-72 AND
I-55 AREA...MOVING NORTHEAST AT 40 MPH.

* LOCATIONS IMPACTED INCLUDE...
SPRINGFIELD...
SHERMAN...
ROCHESTER...
CANTRALL...
RIVERTON...
DAWSON...
WILLIAMSVILLE...
BUFFALO...

OTHER LOCATIONS IN THE WARNING INCLUDE...MECHANICSBURG...ELKHART...
CORNLAND...ILLIOPOLIS...MOUNT PULASKI AND CHESTNUT.

IN ADDITION TO THE TORNADO...THIS STORM IS CAPABLE OF PRODUCING
GOLFBALL SIZE HAIL AND DESTRUCTIVE STRAIGHT LINE WINDS.

TORNADOES ARE ESPECIALLY DANGEROUS AT NIGHT...BECAUSE THEY ARE HARD
TO SEE. DO NOT REMAIN IN YOUR CAR OR MOBILE HOME. INSTEAD...TAKE
COVER IN A REINFORCED BUILDING. GO TO A BASEMENT OR INTERIOR ROOM ON
THE LOWEST FLOOR.

REPORT ANY SEVERE WEATHER OR DAMAGE TO YOUR LOCAL EMERGENCY
MANAGER...OR THE NEAREST LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCY...FOR RELAY TO THE
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE.

LAT...LON 3987 8989 3968 8976 3974 8939 3985 8922
4014 8916

At 8:20 p.m. (MST), the Weather Channel is reporting "numerous reports of damage across the Springfield area." And we'll have to wait till morning to get details on that, but for now it looks like the worst of the storm tracked south and east of town, and no fatalities are being reported. I still wouldn't want to chase storms for the Weather Service. Too much high-speed driving along two-lane blacktops for that. But my hat's off to the storm spotters who made visual sightings of the storm south of town on I-72 and north of Buffalo. And to all the geeks and techies who made it possible for me to chase the storm through cyberspace from half a continent away.

A WEEK LATER: Turned out the damage was more extensive than I was able to ascertain Sunday night. Local media did a commendable job during the emergency, too, as I learned when we returned to Springfield. WMAY news director and talk show host Jim Leach stayed on the air 13 hours in the aftermath of the storm, turning in a "bravura performance" and "providing for most residents the only constant source of information about the bad weather," according to the alternative weekly Illinois Times. The State Journal-Register also distinguished itself, replacing the front page on its website at www.sj-r.com with a blog-like set of news summaries, links, accouncements and photos.

A model hard news story

Hard news, which I'll oversimplify a little and define as stories that run the next day (or the same day on the internet) about fires, wrecks, crimes, etc., doesn't have to be badly written. Here's a fire story in today's Atlanta Journal-Constitution that can serve as a model for how to write a well crafted police beat story and how quotes gathered at the scene to bring it to life.

So there are two principles here: (1) Write well. (2) Go to the scene. If the fire is already out, visit the family. Talk with them face to face. You just don't get the human side of the story over the phone.

Here's how the AJC's Tessie Borden put together the story of a fatal fire in suburban Clarkston, headed "4 killed in DeKalb apartment fire." Notice how the lede unfolds over three grafs:

A 14-year-old boy jumped out a window of his burning apartment to get help while his grandmother tried to make sure the other seven children in the two-bedroom, first-floor unit got out safely.

Christian Jackson got the help, from neighbors and later firefighters, but not all the children got out safely.

Four died in the 8 p.m. Tuesday fire at 942 North Indian Creek Drive in Clarkston, across from the Clarkston library branch. The victims ranged in age from 3 to 11, according to family members.

I would have led with something like "Four children died in a fire ..." But The Journal-Constitition is major metro. I won't argue. It just goes to show newswriting is about people, and it's an art not a science.

Borden continues by telling how the children died, as best she can reconstruct the confusion of the fire:

Most of the children were asleep in a bedroom when one of Christian's sisters smelled smoke and came runninig for Christian, who was in his bedroom watching television with his grandmother, 68-year-old Lucy Pyne, the children's babysitter.

Christian said he went for help while Payne awoke the other children and tried to get them out. She had to be pulled from the apartment by neighbors.

Christian's sister, Decontee Pyne, 12, said she heard her little sister call Christian. She went out of the bedroom and found smoke in the living room.

"I ran through the fire," she said. She said that once outside, "We started screaming and we tell the people to please come help."

That takes us into the body of the story.

After doing her best to piece together who died in the fire, a difficult job because not all the victims had yet been officially identified and not all the survivors speak English, Borden sets the scene by saying, "Family members said Felecia Jackson -- an immigrant from Liberia -- lived in the apartment with her seven children and Lucy Pyne, their grandmother." Then Borden tells of an interview with the family:

Felecia Jackson was at a relative's apartment on Wednesday morning at the Kensington Station apartments, a few miles from the fire scene.

Jackson, in a gray sweatshirt, sat in the middle of the living room. She was so stricken she could barely speak.

On a sofa next to her was her sister, Deborah Welah, whose only child, 3-year-old Hawa, also died in the fire.

Whenever Jackson would get a phone call or someone would talk to her, she would sob.

Welah, who is pregnant, stared blankly, trying to understand how she could lose Hawa. "She's my world," she said.

The grandmother, Lucy Pyne, was in a bedroom, and could be heard crying periodically. She came out of the bedroom at one point and need assistance walking.

A reporter also went to the scene of the fire in suburban DeKalb County and interviewed eyewitnesses. Here's how Borden tells that part of the story:

Several of the children attended Indian Creek Elementary school, said 9-year-old DeRon Williams. DeRon, a third-grader at Indian Creek, lives in an adjacent apartment building; the front door of his apartment is about 40 feet from the charred building.

He said his neighbors were "really nice kids. They liked to roughhouse and jump on things."

He said that when the fire stated Tuesday night, "I looked outside and there were flames everywhere -- just blazing flames."

Tesfay Kassa, 30, who lived in the unit above Jackson's, said he was writing a letter to his brother in Ethiopia when suddenly the apartment was engulfed in thick, black smoke that seemed to come from the unit below him.

"I was telling him things I was thankful for, like school and about my mother, and then I couldn't see anything," Kassa said.

He felt his way through the apartment, shook his sleeping roommate awake and ran downstairs in time to pull the children's grandmother through a ground-floor window.

They then tried to get to the others who were trapped. "We kicked in the door and the flame came jumping out," Kassa said.

Borden's story was obviously written on deadline. I see things like incorrect verb tenses that would have been cleaned up if her editors had more time to process the story. But it's a good piece of hard news writing, based on good reporting. It's worth studying in detail.

Notice, too, how it follows the inverted pyramid style. That's especially clear toward the end, when the story gets off into related material that has less and less direct connection with the fire as it goes along:

The apartment complex houses mostly immigrants from Mexico and several African countries, many of whom live two to a room in two-bedroom units that rent for about $415 a month.

In Clarkston, about 11 miles northeast of downtown Atlanta, 1 in 3 people were born in countries such as Bosnia, Ethiopia and Vietnam.

The town has the highest concentration of Africans and Europeans of any city in Georgia and the second highest concentration of Asians, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Members of metro Atlanta's closely knit Liberian community were trying to help the family. The Rev. William B.G.K. Harris, pastor of International Christian Fellowship Ministries, which has a mostly Liberian congregation, said he fielded calls all Wednesday morning about the family.

"People are concerned," he said. "They want to know what they can do to help and we want to see what we can do to support them. Even trying to bury them may be a big challenge."

Harris said refugees have few, if any, resources to fall back on in case of emergencies. Most of the time, he said, they don't have insurance.

Allen Shaklan, executive director of Clarkston-based Refugee Family Services, said the children were involved in an after-school program. He said the agency, which provides services to refugee and immigrant women and children, had worked with the family since the fall.

"We're trying to find out what we can do to help," he said.

Dee Massengale was on her way to the International Rescue Committee when she heard about the fire. She went to the Indian Creek apartments, found out where the family was staying, and brought the items there.

The family began looking through the items for clothing and toys for the children.

"I gave the family my card. I wanted them to know there are strangers out there that care," Massengale said. "It's devastating to go through a war, and then to come here and have this happen," a teary-eyed Massengale said.

While Borden's byline is on the story, it took five reporters to put it together. A credit line at the end says, "Staff writers Saeed Ahmed, Mike Morris, Shelia M. Poole and Mark Bixler contributed to this report." In a case like this, the byline usually goes to the reporter who contacted the fire department and interviewed eyewitnesses.

Bear facts in Alaska feature story

There's a well-written story in The Anchorage Daily News on the grizzly bear population in Alaska's largest city. And what's got to be the first "Interactive Bear Map" I've seen on a daily newspaper website.

The story is by Doug O'Harra of the Daily News. It's a model feature story, a writeup of a scientific study of nine bears that were tranquilized last summer and fitted with global positioning devices. The study -- and the ADN's online bear map -- tracked their movements in and around the city. O'Harra sets it up with a bear's-eye lede that tells a story. Here's how:

The young male grizzly bear weighed maybe 500 pounds. Over the summer, he scarfed down salmon and ate moose. He spent a few breathless nights chasing bliss with a brunette sow deep in the mountains.

A story from deep in the Alaska wilderness? Not quite.

Almost entirely unseen, Bear 208 roamed the streets and parks of Alaska's largest city over much of last summer and early fall, from East Anchorage across the Hillside to Turnagain Arm [the city's waterfront]. He crossed Tudor Road [a major traffic artery] into densely populated neighborhoods at least once, the movement tracked by a global positioning system device on a collar around his neck. But except for snacking on a few domestic sheep in a South Anchorage back yard and raiding a bit of dog food, the bear, 5 or 6 years old, spurned human edibles in favor of silver and king salmon in local streams.

And he had friends.

See how O'Harra cuts back and forth from telling the bear's story to setting up the wildlife study? The "friends" in the fourth graf are the scientists, and the reference leads right into the nut graf. Actually two grafs followed by a two-graf quote:

A military-funded tracking study of Anchorage grizzly bears found that these large, intelligent omnivores don't just make quick trips to the city's edge and then retreat to some remote wilderness up in the Chugach Mountains.

They spend the summer close to people, largely out of sight in parks and on military land. Some of them seem as adept at urban life as any traffic-savvy moose from the neighborhood.

"It's kind of startling to realize these brown bears are in our midst," said state research biologist Sean Farley, who oversaw the research.

"There is not another city like this in the world that has wild brown bears in this close proximity to people like we have here," he said. "To have bears come in so close to people and not cause problems is really remarkable."

A couple of things may need explaining here: (1) Moose are as much of a road hazard in Alaska as deer are in central Illinois; and (2) the "4 Ws" don't all come right at the top of a feature story. Typically, they're strung out over several grafs.

So here we are down to the eighth graf, and we're still working in the who-what-where-when's. Bears not just wandering around but apparently living in Anchorage last summer. Look how deftly O'Harra explains how many bears we're talking about. He transitions with one of his short grafs:

How many bears live in and around Anchorage?

Biologists aren't really sure. About 60 brown, or grizzly, bears are thought to live between the Knik River and Turnagain Arm, with a dozen more foraging in or near town. At least 250 black bears are thought to overlap the area, with a third foraging in or near town.

Those are just estimates, though, based on studies in the Susitna Valley that were extrapolated to the municipality. It's hard to actually count bears.

Leaving the reader, no doubt, to nod his head in agreement.

O'Harra's use of quotes is worth studying, too. Notice how he transitions into a quote with a short graf, then highlights the quote by beginning and ending another graf with the quoted material, tucking the attribution (the so-and-so-said tag that English teachers would call a signal phrase) inside:

The tracking study provides new information about where a group of tagged grizzlies went, and how they behaved.

"They're not visitors, they're not tourists," said Rick Sinnott, area management biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. "They inhabit the (Anchorage) Bowl just like the rest of us."

Nine bears captured last May and fitted with special collars that can log locations every 90 minutes often toured for weeks at a time within shouting distance of homes or five-lane boulevards.

"We already knew there were bears there -- that's not a surprise," said assistant area biologist Jessy Coltrane, who helped Farley with the study. "We thought they were using the creek and moving off, but they're using the creek and staying. They're living in Far North Bicentennial Park."

So once we get into the body of the story, the quotes keep it moving along. Toward the end, O'Harra repeats advice that's often repeated for the benefit of newcomers to Alaska.

The study, which continues next summer, suggests that Anchorage residents should assume brown bears live near city salmon streams and behave accordingly. Manage garbage properly. Don't sneak through the brush. Use common sense and make noise when hiking.

"The take-home message is there are bears in the woods," Coltrane said. "If you live in an area that's adjacent to natural habitat, then you live in bear country."

And O'Harra uses the same writing technique, a transitional graf leading into a quote, to bring up another subject that's been in the pages of the ADN:

The study also showed the importance of salmon to brown bears inside the city. Increase the number of fish by removing dams or opening culverts on urban streams -- projects proposed for Ship and Chester creeks -- and the number of bears will increase too.

"If you enhance it, the bears will come," Farley said. "That doesn't mean that you don't enhance it. ... But you have to do it with open eyes, because if you have urban fisheries, you're going to have brown bears."

And O'Harra's story, like so many of the best feature stories, ends with a quote:

By late fall, most of the collars had stopped working. Farley had tracked three or four bears to den sites in the Chugach Mountains. He hopes to catch up with them next spring.

"That joke about Anchorage being good because it's close to Alaska, well it's not really true if you're talking about brown bears," he said. "They're already here.

"It's Alaska. It's bear country. People should not be afraid. Just be aware of it."

Unlike hard-news writing, which still follows the inverted pyramid style, a feature ends with a kicker. And this one, if you'll forgive the expression, bears up under examination.

COM 209

Cat picture alert! Bird flu story ...

Now that the H5N1 bird flu virus has been confirmed in the death of a house cat in Germany and pet owners have been ordered to keep their cats inside, the newspapers in the land of Goethe, Schiller, Bach and Beethoven have been "going crazy over contagious kitties," as one of them puts it.

In a story headlined "Curfew for Kitty," the English-langauge website of Der Spiegel (which in English means "the Mirror") today reports:

Germany's most read daily, the populist Bild Zeitung [or "Picture Daily" in English], has an article examining where the cat came from. "This is Where the Death-Cat Perished" reads the headline of a story that gives a painstakingly detailed account of the life and death of the unlucky tomcat. ... The newspaper also has an interview with leading veterinarian headlined: "Can We Still Cuddle Our Pets?" But never shy to dabble in a bit of fear-mongering, the paper frames the article with a gigantic photo of a housecat snacking on a little blue and yellow bird. After suggesting Germany's 7.5 million cat owners had "great worries," Bild does go about trying to answer some of the questions posed by its readers. Besides addressing whether fluffy can be given Tamiflu antibiotics, someone also asks: "Is it dangerous to clean the cat box?"

Bild's answer to that question, unfortunately, is not recorded in Der Spiegel's English-language story. And I don't know enough German to do a keyword search for "cat box" in the original.

Der Spiegel has its own cat picture, by the way, courtesy of the Deutsche Presse Agentur (German Press Agency). It shows a tabby cat "nibbling on a titmouse," and it ran today in several German papers.

Bird flu is a very real public health threat, and the appearance of a case in a house animal has understandable impact in Germany. Maybe that's why Der Spiegel was tempted to have a little fun with it.

Even the more staid center-left Berliner Zeitung ("Berlin Daily") had advice for pet owners. Take your cat to the vet, for example, if it has the sniffles. And Der Speigel, if you'll pardon the expression, pounced on it:

Less useful is the advice about the dangers of getting hit by bird droppings: "The droppings should be removed and clothes and hands properly washed." Not that anyone would just leave it on, but better safe than sorry, right?

Good advice.

Stories like this are natural when the news is worrisome. And it gave Der Spiegel an excuse to run a darling cat picture.

A ray of hope in COM 209

Communications 209 is our basic newswriting class at SCI, and I've assigned some of my COM 209 students to write up a class they're attending ... if they can't get out of it to cover a presentation on campus by the Springfield Election Commission at the same time, they can do a story on the class. Think it's impossible? Well, Julia Keller, cultural critic for The Chicago Tribune, is taking a 400-level English lit class at DePaul University and writing it up for Tempo, the newspaper's lifestyle section. Here's how she begins her story about a typical class on the 18th-century writer Jonathan Swift:

The sky was garbage-can gray, a dirty, depressing shade that made the prospect of a three-hour-and-fifteen-minute class on a long-dead but somehow still long-winded author downright grim.

For the first five classes, the commute from downtown Chicago to DePaul's Lincoln Park campus had generally occurred under cheerful skies and mild temperatures. Last Wednesday, however, winter finally cracked the whip. Snow fell with a vengeance. The chilly air had a defiant bite to it. And the steps down into the Red Line tunnel at Grand Avenue were awash in that sloshy-sloppy-soppy-soupy mix of water, salt and the darkly undifferentiated crud that adheres indelibly to trouser cuffs.

You should understand that I've always been unduly susceptible to the portentous implications of weather. I regard it as a personal omen.

Clear skies obviously mean the mission is destined for success. Relentless snow, scimitar winds or excessive rain can only be interpreted as signs that I should give up, turn back, go home.

So Keller dreaded going to class. Sound familiar? You don't have to have sunny skies and a perfect day at the beach to make a story interesting. Ordinary, crummy winter weather will do.

Now, watch how Keller sets up the rest of the column:

So on I trudged, emerging from the Fullerton stop to make my weary way to McGaw Hall. My backpack grew soggier by the second. My mood was disintegrating even more rapidly. Had you leaned close to me, you would have heard a muttered, slightly insane-sounding chant: Jonathan Swift, who needs ya? Jonathan Swift, who needs ya? Jonathan Swift . ...

And yet, at the risk of turning this into a morality tale so neat and prim and predictable that it makes parents swoon and kids grimace, honesty forces me to report: Once I got to class, once Professor Todd Parker started his typically enthralling lecture on the vivid particulars of Swift's world, the old educational magic reasserted itself and even wet socks were forgotten.

The class, she says, "was pure enchantment." Yet it wasn't Parker's lecture that got to her. It was a chance remark that sent her on her way thinking the class was worth fighting the "el" in winter weather. Keller says it was:

... one of those classroom moments -- rare, splendid, unpredictable -- when the professor went off-road, as it were, and leaned back in his chair and gently hitched the 18th Century to the 21st: "As a professor of the humanities, I work in the one college that produces nothing useful." There were a few chuckles. Parker continued: "The humanities don't produce products. They produce individuals. Other colleges -- engineering, computers -- create instrumental knowledge. But the college of arts and sciences creates the context that makes that instrumental knowledge meaningful."

Emerging from McGaw Hall just after 9 p.m., we discovered that the winter weather wasn't quite so menacing anymore. Snow descended in great, wet, fat, fairy-tale flakes, like an earnest benediction, and the world seemed both very, very old and very, very new.

Keller, by the way, has won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. It's with writing like that she did it.

PLEASE NOTE: If you're in COM 209 and don't have a class at 2 p.m. Tuesday, March 7, your assignment is still to cover the presentation on the city's new voting machines in Becker Library.

UPDATE (March 2): The assignment is off ... turns out I have a standing meeting of the faculty Assessment Committee Tuesday afternoon, so I won't be able to attend the Election Commission's presentation. (The theory, of course, is that assessment is part of instruction and doesn't get in its way. But that's a topic for another day.) You're still urged to cover something -- including maybe Tuesday's dog-and-pony show -- before the end of spring break.

UPDATE ADD 1 (March 3): The event is now rescheduled for 12:45 p.m Wednesday, March 8. As far as I'm concerned, the specific assignment is still off. But you still need to write a feature story over spring break.

More Baghdad bloggers

Aljazeera.net, the online service of the Arabic TV station al Jazeera, posted a good article to its website today on bloggers operating in Iraq today. It quotes Salam Pax, the "Bagdhad blogger" who helped bring blogging to worldwide attention during the U.S. invasion of Iraq. But it makes it clear blogging in Iraq didn't end when his first blog went on hiatus during the breakdown of civil order in Iraq a year after the invasion. Even Salam Pax is back, with a blog called "Shut Up, You Fat Whiner" that's been up on Blogspot intermittently since the late summer of 2004.

Bloggers, according to Aljazeera.net, can "give a voice to the community that they say often goes unheard in Western media." The difference is palpable:

Salam Adil, 38, an Iraqi blogger who lives in the United Kingdom, says: "I compared reporting from the BBC and the British newspapers to the [Iraqi] blogs and there is a world of difference.

"It is as if the Western media are on a different planet," he told Aljazeera.net.

The ongoing disturbances since the partial destruction of the al-Askari shrine last week have been particularly hard for Western -- or Iraqi -- news media to cover. And bloggers were able to report from places the journalists couldn't get to. But they reflect the divisions in Iraqi society. Says Aljazeera.net:

Although the blogs have helped Iraqis communicate their hopes for Iraq’s future, they don’t always speak with the same voice, and there is often much debate, with conspiracy theories and humour thrown in.

Blogger Hammorabi wrote that the "barbaric and savage attack on the Shrine of Imam Al-Hassan Al-Askari in Samarra is a continuation of the barbarism of the Saudi Wahhabi terrorism".

But A Free Iraqi blamed the violence on politicians who "keep inflaming those already existing divisions for their own benefit, as they represent nothing but ethnic and sectarian hatred".

At the bottom of the story are links to 10 bloggers (Zeyad, Baghdad Treasure, 24 Steps to Liberty, Fayrouz Hancock, Riverbend, Hammorabi, Salam Pax, Salam Adil, A Free Iraqi and Iraq Blog Count). I've been spending way too much time surfing them, and al Jazeera's right: They give a picture of life in Iraq that not even Juan Cole can get at and the commercial Western media can no longer even try.

Words to live by

An effective quote from The Charlotte Observer's obituary of Don Knotts, who died Friday at the age of 81. (The story was syndicated and picked up by The Miami Herald.) A wonderful comic actor, Knotts played Deputy Barney Fife to Andy Griffith's Sheriff Andy Taylor of the fictional Mayberry, N.C. Look at the way staff writer Mark Washburn of The Observer sets it up:

"Originally, I was supposed to be funny," Griffith recalled in a 2003 interview with the Observer. "I noticed on the second episode that Don was funny and I should be straight. That set it up, and I played straight to the rest."

Griffith added that he never regretted making that adjustment. "The straight man has the best part," he said. "He gets to be in the show and see it, too."

Sheriff Taylor and Barney Fife couldn't have done a better job of setting up the quote.