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By Sheila Lennon
'Bottom-up' journalism from the pros
May 23, 2003 6:30 p.m. - (Last
week's weblog)
I'm on vacation next week, but if it's still raining by Wednesday,
I might show up here.
SuperDMCA bill dies in Tennessee, vetoed in
Colorado: From the Tennessean,
with the oddest headline:
Legislature won't vote on cable theft this year. This is how the Motion
Picture Association of America has framed its argument for legislation
giving the entertainment industry control of how we use digital technology.
These initiatives are referred to as SuperDMCA, suggesting extensions
of the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. (pdf)
And, as reported yesterday, Colorado Gov. Bill Owens vetoed a similar
bill in Colorado. From the Rocky Mountain News, Telecom
bill vetoed: Owens says it would smother industry, not curb tech crimes
Gov. Bill Owens vetoed a bill Wednesday that he warned could have a
stifling effect on new technology rather than root out telecommunications
crimes.
"Although the drafters intended that the bill would only be used
to prosecute the new thieves and pirates of the digital age, HB 1303
could also stifle legal activity by entities all along the high-tech
spectrum," Owens warned.
Interestingly, that paper had opposed the bill in a May 14 editorial:
The Motion Picture Association of America has been energetically promoting
model legislation that grants the entertainment industry sweeping new
powers to control how people use the home entertainment equipment they
own. And by passing House Bill 1303, the Colorado legislature fell for
their phony anti-consumer arguments. We're counting on Gov. Bill Owens'
enthusiasm for technological innovation to lead him to veto this misguided
legislation.
The ostensible reason for the bill is to combat the use of technology
for illegal purposes, which include both the misappropriation of content,
as in pirated CDs and DVDs, and the theft of services, as with cloned
cell phones.
Of course, these things are already illegal. The only thing that is
altered when the technology changes is how the illegal act is carried
out. That seldom requires changes in the law, and surely not changes
of such magnitude.
However, the technology argument is a useful pretext for the motion
picture group, which is primarily concerned that its product will become
vulnerable to the same kind of computer file-sharing that has trimmed
revenues at record companies. Because movie files are too big to share
easily, it's not yet a terribly serious problem, but it will get worse
as the technology improves.
Trouble is, no one knows exactly what technology is going to cause
problems. So the industry's solution is to draft language so broad that
any conceivable technology that is or could be misused is covered. In
effect, it defines as a crime connecting any device to a communications
service without the explicit consent of the communications service provider.
And in the process, it has swept in a lot of behavior and equipment
that has been and should be legal.
Did you get permission from your cable company before you bought your
kids a new VCR? Did your telephone company say you could use a modem
to log on to the Internet? Did your Internet service provider give written
approval for your Webcam?
Do you think you should have to ask them?
Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) President and CEO Gary Shapiro
issued a response:
"In vetoing HB1303, Governor Owens protected the people of Colorado
against those who seek to curtail innovation and consumer rights and
has once again underscored his position as a leading advocate for technological
advancement.
"HB1303 was promoted as addressing only theft of cable service.
In reality, this vague bill would have extended and broadened the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to criminalize honest consumers and
legitimate products, subjecting Colorado citizens to massive civil penalties
for using lawful devices in the privacy of their homes.
Link
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So,
You Want To Be A Music Journalist: A Practical Guide For Beginning
Writers by Andy
Kaufmann at musicjournalist.com
Many aspiring music journalists have contacted me with inquiries as
to how I got into the biz and how they too can enter this exciting world.
To date, I haven't seen any practical, comprehensive guides on how to
become a music journalist or what it really means to be one. Hence,
I have compiled this essay, in the hope that it will save future writers
the trouble of discovering these basic concepts for themselves and set
new writers on a proper path.
Link
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 |
Mascot:
Photoblogger Rion Nakaya (cited yesterday for his NYC gargoyle shots)
also offers this gem:
The
huge inflatable strike rat is one of the city's most recognizable
characters. the rat shows up in front of buildings all over town
when unions are protesting non-union labor and other labor issues.
for more on the rat's many adventures, google:
"inflatable rat" "new york city"
Link
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|
Transparent
TVs from invisible circuits: UPI reports from Yokohama, Japan,
Scientists said Thursday that invisible, high-speed circuitry from
Japan someday soon could form the innards of devices now seen only in
science fiction, such as televisions made of nothing but hunks of transparent
crystal.
"Transparent transistors are the first step towards the realization
of transparent displays, such as seen in Tom Cruise's last summer movie,
'Minority Report,'" electrical engineer John Wager of Oregon State
University in Corvallis told United Press International. "I was
astonished when I first heard about this result."
Link
to this item | Comment
Keep your feet dry: Memorial Day Weekend
may best be spent on Noah's ark this year. If you're a woman camping in
the woods, you might want to explore a
little gizmo that lets you do your business standing up.
Link
to this item | Comment
May 22, 2003 7:05 p.m. - (Last
week's weblog)
Newport's
Redwood Review seeks an audience: The Third Thursday Writers'
Group meets in Newport 's Redwood
Library & Atheneum and publishes an annual literary review. They're
looking for donations to help with printing costs of their 2003 edition
-- a PayPal button makes it easy to give. Hard copies will be available
for free at various spots around Newport, or you could order them on the
donation page. The work will be online as well. (You can see last year's
edition at the headline link there.)
I have a soft spot for all such shoestring efforts. The little magazines
of the '20s such as Criterion, Hound and Horn, and Dial (edited by Marianne
Moore) were the birthplace of modernism. Maybe you'll have a collector's
item someday if one of these authors changes the literary stream in ways
that resonate forever.
If not, you've supported a labor of love. Not bad.
Link
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 Escher
for Real: Yesterday, this blog pointed to inventor James Dyson's
exhibit at the Chelsea Flower show that has water flowing uphill. Dyson
credits M.C. Escher's fanciful constructions for the inspiration.
Today, I went looking for the original Escher and came up with more than
I bargained for. At Escher for Real, Gershon Elber of the Technion (Israel
Institute of Technology) writes,
 ...it
may come as a surprise for some, but many of the so-called 'impossible'
drawings of M. C. Escher can be realized as actual physical objects.
These objects will resemble the Escher's drawing, of the same name,
from a certain viewing direction. This work below presents some of these
three-dimensional models that were designed and built using geometric
modeling and computer graphics tools.
He also offers little avi movies that show the objects rotating in space.
Amazing.
Link
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The
Great Media Gulp: William Safire, writing in the N.Y. Times today
(reg.req), finds himself a member of an unlikely coalition opposing
the FCC's likely decision to " end the ban in most cities of cross-ownership
of television stations and newspapers":
The overwhelming amount of news and entertainment comes via broadcast
and print. Putting those outlets in fewer and bigger hands profits the
few at the cost of the many.
Does that sound un-conservative? Not to me. The concentration of power
— political, corporate, media, cultural — should be anathema
to conservatives. The diffusion of power through local control, thereby
encouraging individual participation, is the essence of federalism and
the greatest expression of democracy.
Why do we have more channels but fewer real choices today? Because
the ownership of our means of communication is shrinking. Moguls glory
in amalgamation, but more individuals than they realize resent the loss
of local control and community identity.
We opponents of megamergers and cross-ownership are afflicted with
what sociologists call "pluralistic ignorance." Libertarians
pop off from what we assume to be the fringes of the left and right
wings, but do not yet realize that we outnumber the exponents of the
new collectivist efficiency.
That's why I march uncomfortably alongside
CodePink Women for Peace and the National
Rifle Association, between liberal Olympia Snowe and conservative
Ted Stevens under the banner of "localism, competition and diversity
of views." That's why, too, we resent the conflicted refusal of
most networks, stations and their putative purchasers to report fully
and in prime time on their owners' power grab scheduled for June 2.
Must broadcasters of news act only on behalf of the powerful broadcast
lobby? Are they not obligated, in the long-forgotten "public interest,"
to call to the attention of viewers and readers the arrogance of a regulatory
commission that will not hold extended public hearings on the most controversial
decision in its history?
So much of our lives should not be in the hands of one swing-vote commissioner.
Let's debate this out in the open, take polls, get the president on
the record and turn up the heat.
Link
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Truthout
interviews the Democratic candidates: First up, Howard Dean.
Link
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 Gargoyles
of New York City: Photoblogger Rion Nakaya posts images of the
creatures "holding up the skyscrapers" and offers a link to
another gargoyle collection titled Where
Am I? Click on my picture to see where I live.
Link
to this item | Comment
Strange
Banana "is a program that creates a random webpage design.
The page design you are looking at has never been seen before - it was
created programmatically just now. If you want, you can use this design
for your own website (in that case you should save it immediately, because
when you leave the page, you will never be able to get the same design
again)."
It's certainly a place to start. It's always easier to modify a page
than start a design from scratch.
If you've been holding back from making your own site because you don't
really know how to start, you might want to play with this.
Link
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Online
book reviewers such as Francis McInerney have caught publishers' eyes:
From the Boston Globe, here's an example of the sort of reputation-management
system suggested for open-source news organizations:
Amazon.com recently posted a list of the top 10 ''most helpful'' reviewers
(Amazon customers can click an icon if a review is deemed helpful).
The No. 7 reviewer is Francis J. McInerney of South Hadley, who has
written 879 reviews, including some video reviews, since he started
in 1997. (The No. 1 reviewer, a Pennsylvania librarian named Harriet
Klausner, has contributed 4,811 reviews.)
Who is Francis J. McInerney, and why would he take the time and effort
to write 879 reviews for free? ''For fun,'' he says, in a telephone
interview. ''Because it's not something I have to do.''
McInerney is 41, married, and the father of an 11-year-old boy and
a 14-year-old girl. He went to college at the University of Massachusetts
at Amherst and has long worked in commercial real estate. Recently,
he returned to his hometown of South Hadley after years in upstate New
York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. At the moment, he says, ''I'm part
of the mass of people looking for a position.'' While job-hunting, he
has time to read lots of books and likes to write down his thoughts
about them.
''I started doing it on a whim,'' he says, ''and what kept me in it
was that I started to hear from writers and publishers.'' Until recently,
he says, ''90 percent of the books I read I would see in a store and
buy. At the time, I knew nothing about galleys or advance review copies.
Now I'm getting notes and books from publishers and authors.''
Link
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Stress
Relief Paintball: Mindless fun. Notice the "Reload"
button at lower right. Click it when it flashes. Otherwise, you'll get
stressed by having no paint to toss.
Link
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May 21, 2003
Award-winning news: Yesterday, we went to
a lunch during the spring meeting of the New England Associated Press
News Executives Association (NEAPNEA) here at which we accepted an award
for Best Overall Site with over 40K readers.
But of far more interest were presentations by the reporters and photographers
who won the public service awards. The links below are to their series:
Sevellon Brown Award: "Heroin
Town" by Tracy Gordon Fox and Bill Leukhardt of The Hartford
(Conn.) Courant. The tiny rural town of Willimantic, Conn., has had
a big heroin problem for 30 years. Fox, Leukhardt and photographer Brad
Clift hung around the town from May to October, and earned the trust
of their major sources, all of whom agreed to be photographed and identified
by their real names.
Thomas K. Brindley Award: The
Somali Experience by the Sun Journal, Lewiston, Maine, for a body
of reporting on the Somali community that moved to Maine. Put more simply,
what happened when about 1,200 African immigrants moved into one neighborhood
in a small Maine city.
Great stuff. If we hadn't been there to pick up our slab of lucite, we
wouldn't have run into these folks or their fine work.
Link
to this item | Comment
Email from Baghdad: "Salam Pax,"
the Iraqi blogger, is still publishing his blog, but Electronic
Iraq is also now publishing it in a clean format with photos. (Photo
hosting was too expensive on his "Dear Raed" blog, "Pax"
writes.) Because of the photos, I do think he's in Iraq.
I got another email from "Salam" this week. Another odd one.
I had questioned him about his story about meeting N.Y. Times reporter
John F. Burns after answering a call for translators. In it, "Salam"
wrote, "The result is that I now have a paper with NY Times heading
and signed, telling the people at the barbed wire fences near the Hotel
entrance that we are 'good'."
This all disappeared from "Pax's'" blog shortly after I informed
Burns about it, asking if he recalled the man. (He said he didn't, and
didn't want anything to do with it.) The section
may still be read on the Guardian (U.K.) site.
"Pax" replied, "Was Burns really upset? I think I have
killed my career as a journalist right there and then. He didn't give
me the piece of paper, another reporter on the staff did."
"Salam" ignored my question about whether he felt safe enough
to reveal himself now. I've asked again. I'll keep you posted.
Link
to this item | Comment
Inside Journalism, Part 2: Doc
Searls' solution to what he calls "Sheila's challenge" yesterday
("... if there's a way to make it profitable to open the archives,
it could happen. Any ideas?"):
Approach Google and Overture (whose advertising business is running
in the $billion/year range, all on the Web) with exactly the problem
we've been describing through this whole Printwash thread. (The junk
that Google returns because it cannot cache major new stories which
have sliped into paid archives) Tell them you're willing to consider
opening the archives if it makes economic sense, and want to explore
advertising deals involving shared revenues. See what happens.
I think if Google and Overture were to make a very lucrative offer to
lease major news stories, a deal might be made.
As it turns out, what Google wants is not what sells best in archives
-- the big stories of wide interest. Leave the obits, traffic accidents,
cop logs, advances on entertainment events, etc., where they are. There's
so much junk it would clog searching forever. Let Google figure out how
to do the sort.
It's worth a shot.
Related: Tom Matrullo,
onetime managing editor of Comcast Cable's Florida sites, offers, in an
email, more to chew on:
Until organs of news reconceive their justification for existing as
revenue streams in light of new possibilities and new configurations
of facts/interpretations/
readers/rumors/communities/networks/et al, they're just flapping their
gums. They have been handed a whole new set of powers and possibilities,
and all they can see to do with them is to suppress most of them, and
to try to find suckers to pay them to supply the rest.
It seems a little like giving someone who has only ever known a 12-note
toy a real, 88-key piano, and watching them break off all the "extra"
keys so they can play the same old tunes without getting confused.
Link
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How
does Dyson make water go uphill? James Dyson's uphill water feature
has been the striking image of this year's Chelsea Flower Show. But how
did he do it? From BBC News,
 It
certainly beats your common or garden water feature.
Inventor James Dyson, he of the bagless vacuum cleaner, has stolen
the headlines from the gardeners at this year's Chelsea Flower Show
with his "Wrong Garden".
A set of four glass ramps positioned in a square clearly show water
travelling up each of them before it pours off the top, only to start
again at the bottom of the next ramp.
It is a sight which defies logic, and has become probably the most
memorable image of this year's show.
Mr Dyson says his inspiration was a drawing by the Dutch artist MC
Escher (he of Gothic palaces where soldiers are eternally walking upstairs,
and of patterns where birds turn into fish).
"One of these is an optical illusion that shows water going uphill
and round and round the four sides of a square perpetually," he
says [see Internet Links]. "I wanted to create a series of cascades
that are all on the same level - an everlasting waterfall."
Link
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Memphis
Paper Finds Inner Blog: I found Bill
Hobbs' blog when I was exploring RIAA's
attempt to get laws passed in Tennessee and other states that could
outlaw TiVo and ReplayTV recorders. I found that he
had linked back, and when I went to look I found this gem that had
me laughing into my keyboard. That's Bill's original headline over there.
The Memphis Commercial-Appeal has launched a blog.
A blog about the Memphis Commercial-Appeal. And the mainstream media
often accuses the blogosphere of navelgazing...
The paper also wrote an article
about the blog - which it doesn't link to from the blog. The story
says our blog is "gomemphis.com Web tips and features" It's
where you'll find out what's new on gomemphis.com, how to find things,
and in general, tips on how to make your visit with us more rewarding.
A blog to help readers navigate the website. Provided they can find
the blog.
Also found on Hobbs' site, via Instapundit:
Super DMCA Vetoed in Colorado
Linda Seebach of the Rocky Mountain News emails: "I thought you
would like to know that Gov. Owens' press secretary just called me to
tell me that the governor has vetoed our super-DMCA bill, H.B. 1303.
In his veto message he said the bill 'could also stifle legal activity
by entities all along the high tech spectrum, from manufacturers of
communication parts to sellers of communication services.' He urges
the legislature, if it returns to this topic in the next session, "to
be more careful in drafting a bill that adds protections that are rightfully
needed, but does not paint a broad brush stroke where only a tight line
is needed."
Link
to this item | Comment
Move
Over, Right Wing Radio - the Liberals Are Coming: At Common
Dreams,
NEW YORK - A political explosion happened this weekend in New York,
and it may be the big one that gives Karl Rove nightmares. It could
mean the end of George W. Bush's seemingly unending ability to tell
overt lies to the American people and not get called on them by the
American media.
At a Saturday talk radio industry event put on by Talkers Magazine,
Gabe Hobbs, Clear Channel Radio's vice president of News/Talk/Sports,
announced that in the near future this corporate owner of over 1200
radio stations is considering programming some of their talk stations
"in markets where there are already one or two stations doing conservative
talk" with all-day back-to-back all-liberal talk show hosts.
Link
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Top
100 books: "In April the BBC's Big Read began the search
for the nation's best-loved novel, and we asked you to nominate your favourite
books. The votes poured in from all around the UK and here are the results!"
Here are A to C:
The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
Animal Farm, George Orwell
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer,
The BFG, Roald Dahl
Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
Bleak House, Charles Dickens
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
Catch 22, Joseph Heller
The Catcher In The Rye, JD Salinger
Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Link
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A
Spy Machine of DARPA's Dreams: Think of it as your brain made
public. It is. Every email, every movement. Gordon
Bell has already done it. At Wired.
Related: Pentagon
Defends Data Search Plan:
The Pentagon submitted a report to Congress on Tuesday that said the
Total Information Awareness program is not the centralized spying database
its critics say it is.
Link
to this item | Comment
Dividend
Voodoo: Warren Buffett writes in the Washington Post as a member
of that non-endangered species (the rich) about what the tax cut will
do for him versus what it will do for his receptionist.
Link
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May 20, 2003 5:55 p.m.
Off yesterday -- playing catchup now.
Inside journalism: Doc
Searls called for it. Dave
Winer seconded: "The print journalists should walk down the hall
to their publishers' office and request that they make their archive publicly
available so it can be indexed by the search engines."
Here's Doc:
The blog train has been delivering clues to the newspaper publishing
business for several days now, but we don't have a sign that the biz
is taking delivery. Not that I'm aware of anyway.
Do any of you see any cracks appearing in the paywalls — not
just at the New York Times, but at Gannett, Tribune, Knight Ridder,
McClatchy, Washington Post? (Links from that last one all go nowhere,
curiously.)
Better yet, can we name any papers (other than the Guardian) with
CMS (content management systems) that publish stories with their final
URLs and expose them to search engine crawlers? Let's give those papers
their props. And do the same for any others who come forward and say
"Hey, it's a purely economic choice, and we are fully aware that
walling off our old stories washes them out of search engine results."
Yes.
It is an economic choice.
Always has been.
This website would be gone without archive sales. Obituaries are the
biggest seller. Law firms buy subscriptions that allow full access. It's
repurposing with no overhead.
What can replace that?
If we can come up with a good answer to that, we might have an argument.
We all want all the information searchable and available to all. But
it won't happen without a strong replacement "product" -- something
heftier than the Google text ads that have been proposed.
As it stands, "open your archives" is the equivalent of telling
Dave to make his Radio
Userland software free so everyone can benefit from free blogging;
or telling Doc to stop charging fees for speaking at conferences so more
people can afford to attend them.
This industry, by giving the news away free online, is already competing
with its primary product, the print edition, which is a lousy business
model to begin with. Newspapers didn't willingly do this -- they came
online to protect their classified franchises.
But if there's a way to make it profitable to open the archives, it could
happen. Any ideas?
Link
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Citizen publishing: Dan Gillmor's Sunday column
in the San Jose Mercury News (A
new brand of journalism is taking root in South Korea) reports on
a truly "bottom up journalism" that's taken Korea by storm:
OhmyNews is transforming the 20th century's journalism-as-lecture model,
where organizations tell the audience what the news is and the audience
either buys it or doesn't, into something vastly more bottom-up, interactive
and democratic.
The influence of OhmyNews is substantial, and expanding. It's credited
with having helped elect the nation's current president, Roh Moo Hyun,
who ran as a reformer. Roh granted his first post-election interview
to the publication, snubbing the three major conservative newspapers
that have dominated the print-journalism scene for years.
Even taxi drivers who don't have time for newspapers have heard of
OhmyNews. The site draws millions of visitors daily. Advertisers are
supporting both the Korean-language Web site (www.ohmy news.com) and
a weekly print edition, and the operation has been profitable in recent
months, according to its chief executive and founder, Oh Yeon-Ho.
Oh is a 38-year-old former writer for progressive magazines. With a
staff of about 50 and legions of ``citizen-reporter'' contributors --
more than 26,000 have signed up, and more than 15,000 have published
stories under their bylines -- Oh and his colleagues are creating something
entirely new.
``The main concept is that every citizen can be a reporter,'' he says.
``We changed the concept of the reporter.''
What's missing here, of course, is how you know that what's published
is true. Not only the Jayson Blair factor, but also the assorted grudges
that can be easily turned into "news."
Over at collision detection,
Clive Thompson has
raised the question, and comments by his readers expand the field.
(Thompson, is a Canadian journalist who's currently a a Knight Science-Journalism
Fellow at MIT studying artificial intelligence and the changing nature
of property in the digital age.) Here's his solution:
A reputation-management system at an open-source news organization
could work like this: You have three columns on the front page. One
is news that is "pretty much rock-solid true"; it's been either
independently verified by a paid editor, or it's gotten hundreds of
independent thumbs-ups. The next column is stuff that is "disputed"
-- and the third column is stuff that is like "yeah, this stuff
is almost certainly false, but what the hell, you can read it for fun."
Obviously, it's possible to fake out a reputation-management system
-- by having people vote down stuff that's true, or vote up stuff that's
wrong. But with such a large audience -- 1.2 million people -- Ohmynews.com
would probably find that this would be minimized.
The entire discussion is worth a look.
Link
to this item | Comment
Leopard
befriends cow in Gujarat village: Gotta love this story -- sort
of like the lion who lies down with the lamb... From Express India,
 According
to honorary wildlife warden Rohit Vyas, who has visited the village
several times with other enthusiasts, "the leopard has been visiting
the cow from October last year at regular intervals".
"After the villagers informed us about frequent visits of the
leopard to the sugarcane field for its close encounter with the cow
in the field, our team comprising conservator of forest H S Singh and
others including wildlifer Manoj Thakkar and Kartik Upadhyay, visited
the village for verification", Vyas told PTI here on Monday.
"It was unbelievable", he said adding, "they approached
each other at very close proximity and the fearless cow would lick the
leopard on its head and neck".
Giving further details about the animals-bond, Vyas said "the
dogs would start barking when the leopard came to meet the waiting cow
every night between 9.30 PM to 10.30 PM".
The Forest Department, which was trying to capture the beast, gave
up its efforts after learning about the friendship. Moreover, the leopard
did not harm other animals in the village and its visits have benefited
villagers as other animals kept away from damaging crops in the fields
and crops yields went up by 30 per cent, Vyas added.
Link
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Embed
Catches Heat: Ron Martz, a former Marine, is military-affairs
reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was embedded with Task
Force 1-64 of the 3rd Division's 2nd Brigade Combat Team that led the
division in to Baghdad. At Editor & Publisher, he writes about the
email he got from readers:
There must have been two wars in Iraq. There was the war I saw and
wrote about as a print journalist embedded with a tank company of the
Army's 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized). Then there was the war that
many Americans saw, or wanted to see, on TV.
That is the only conclusion I can draw while going through the e-mail
messages I have received from irate readers whose view of the televised
war from the warm comfort of their living rooms did not match the war
I reported on. "Do us a favor, stay in Iraq. We don't need reporters
who are un-American," urged one man.
I saw and wrote about a war that was confusing and chaotic, as are
all wars. It was a war in which plans and missions changed almost daily
- and on one occasion changed three times in an hour. It was a war in
which civilians died and were horribly wounded. It was a war in which
soldiers questioned the intelligence they received, the logistics lines
that had trouble supplying them with water and spare parts, and the
reasons they were fighting the war.
Apparently that is not the war the TV-viewing and occasional newspaper-reading
public wanted to see or thought it saw. But, according to a recent study
by the Readership Institute, a large percentage of Americans preferred
to get their war news from TV and not from newspapers. The war they
saw, or thought they saw, on TV was meticulously planned, flawlessly
executed - and not a single member of the armed forces had a complaint
or problem. Few civilians died in that war.
Link
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Gonzo
II: Interesting interview at journalismjobs.com (!) with Matt
Labash of The Weekly Standard, whom some have called the new Hunter S.
Thompson. Excerpts:
• While all these hand-wringing Freedom Forum types talk about
objectivity, the conservative media likes to rap the liberal media on
the knuckles for not being objective. We've created this cottage industry
in which it pays to be un-objective. It pays to be subjective as much
as possible. It's a great way to have your cake and eat it too. Criticize
other people for not being objective. Be as subjective as you want.
It's a great little racket. I'm glad we found it actually.
• The great thing about ideological journalism a couple years
ago was that you could go out on a story with 20 other guys and there
would still be stuff left on the table by the time you took off. You
go off for three days on some kind of campaign trip and nobody would
write the story behind the story. Nobody would write the micro stuff.
Nobody would write how we get to the story. Instead they covered the
dog and pony show. Now, everybody writes the micro story, and there's
the bloggers chewing over all the ideological angles. These things happen
on a Monday. By Wednesday, they're chewed to death.
• I think our capacity for shock has diminished. It's pretty
hard to do it anymore, you know? I don't really know exactly what shock
value means. Everybody's so politically incorrect these days, which
kind of erodes the franchise. We used to have that field to ourselves
in the early to mid-90s. Now, who's not irreverent? Everybody is. You
really want to be politically incorrect? Be politically correct.
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A
success story fit to print: The author, Tanya Barrientos
of the Philadelphia Inquirer, was the mentor of Macarena Hernandez during
her internship at that paper. Jayson Blair lifted quotes from Hernandez's
story about a missing soldier -- and it proved the final straw in Blair's
trail of lies. Barrientos has woven a column into facts that are in themselves
extraordinary. I've extracted just the essence below:
Much has been written about Jayson Blair, the young, talented, African
American journalist who brought shame to the New York Times by fabricating
facts and stealing the work of others.
But I've seen hardly anything written about Macarena Hernandez, the
young, talented, Latina journalist who first brought suspicion of Blair's
plagiarism to light. ... (He lifted her words about Juanita Anguiano,
the mother of a missing soldier, and Macarena's editor at the San Antonio
Express-News asked for an apology.)
... A daughter of Mexican immigrants, Macarena worked with her parents
and seven siblings in the fields of California, hoeing cotton and picking
grapes as a migrant farmworker from childhood until she was 15.
She once told me that her father's only goal for her back then was
that she land a job in a building with air-conditioning.
Luckily, teachers at her hometown high school recognized her potential
and encouraged her to consider college. She had a hard time persuading
her parents that it was a worthy pursuit. But they finally agreed to
let her go.
She worked her way through Baylor University, and then earned a master's
degree at the University of California at Berkeley.
...And just like Blair, she was asked to join the staff of the nation's
most prestigious newspaper after completing the internship there.
...Two days before she was to begin, her father, Gumaro Hernandez,
was killed when a truck hit his car. ... Her mother, Elva, needed her,
and she was the only unmarried daughter without other family responsibilities.
So instead of taking the best job of her life, she moved back to the
tiny town of La Joya, Texas, and accepted a job teaching English to
remedial students at her old high school.
The editors at the Times told her she could always come back, and she
wrestled with the decision daily.
But she decided to stay close to home, even after her mother got back
on her feet, because she'd learned that family was more important to
her than a Manhattan byline.
In April 2001, on her father's birthday, she began working as a reporter
for the San Antonio paper.
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To
Tell You the Truth: Anecdotal, interesting Jayson Blair fragment
that turns into a meditation on truth and lying, by Sarah Hepola at Morning
News:
I met Jayson Blair once last summer. At a Times party where I knew
but a handful of people, Jayson was a blessed ally. He introduced me
to his colleagues, talked me up in front of the important ones, even
bummed a few cigarettes on my behalf. We lost hours at the bar, talking
about the things we had in common. He was a twenty-something reporter,
like me. He was short, like me. He had a loud laugh, like me. He had
given up drinking, fearing it had begun to compromise his work. I’d
done the same thing two years prior, after a string of forgotten nights
left me stuttering excuses and half-truths to everyone I knew –
where I’d been the night before, why I was late with the story,
where I’d spent the money. I was sober for a year and a half,
but lately, I’ve taken to six-beers-in-a-bar kind of nights like
this, dark and loud and lovely.
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White
House Hosts State Dinner for Arroyo: Finally, a food story from
this banquet-loathing White House!
Assistant White House chef Cris Comerford, born in the Philippines
and now a U.S. citizen, said she sought common ground between the two
nations as she prepared the menu. ``It was like a marriage of the two
countries,'' she told reporters before the dinner.
For instance, Maryland and the Philippines are both known for crabs,
featured in the first course, she said. Mango sorbets, filled with coconut
mousse, were draped with brightly colored leis made of sugar and chocolate,
said pastry chef Roland Mesnier.
The main course included lamb, achiote polenta, fava beans and cipollini
onion.
The wines were a 2001 Pride Mountain Viognier and a 2000 DuMol Pinot
Noir ``Finn,'' both from California, said White House usher Daniel Shanks.
Shanks said he goes out of his way to find American wines, and did not
try to keep French wines off the White House tables. ...
This sentence in the AP story is a bit jarring, unless you realize that
Philippine President Arroyo's first name is Gloria:
President Arroyo wore a purple dress with a lime-green sash, Laura
Bush a shimmering golden gown. The men were clad in tuxedos, with Bush
sporting a vest.
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Study:
Chimps Belong In Human Genus: From Discovery news,
Chimpanzees share 99.4 percent of functionally important DNA with humans
and belong in our genus, Homo, according to a recent genetic study.
Previous studies put the genetic similarity between humans and chimps
at 95 to 99 percent, so the new figure suggests chimps and humans are
even more closely related than previously thought.
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Iraqi
Women Out of the Picture: Prominence in Public Life Disappears in
Postwar Fear
Subterranean Homepage News
by Sheila Lennon
features & interactive producer of projo.com |
