Monday, November 30, 2009

Keep It Simple

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Advice from Uncle Joe

“Put it to them briefly, so they will read it; clearly, so they will appreciate it; picturesquely, so they will remember it; and, above all, accurately, so they will be guided by its light.”
—Joseph Pulitzer (1847-1911), newspaper publisher
(Thanks to alert WORDster David Bresnahan)
(Illustration by William A. Rogers, Harper’s Dec. 28, 1901)

Editor’s Note: Sounds easy enough.

• • •

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

On Turkeys

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Turkey Day 2009

On this official start of our annual year-end festival of overindulgence, the WORD offers perspectives on turkeys. As anyone in business, academe or who reads Dilbert knows, that’s an impossibly wide opening. Which I (uncharacteristically) decline to open very wide.

Here in northern Utah, gangs of wild turkeys pillage the neighborhood and tag our yards with, er, “turkey tags.” Turkeys are, apparently, just as dumb as the apocryphal story of turkeys drowning by looking up, open-beaked, at passing thunderstorms would indicate.

Yesterday, Sadie (the ADD brown Lab) sped off after a gang of turkeys, who ran like 3-foot velociraptors, all in single-file. The poor guys at the end of the pecking order wouldn’t pull out to pass even when Sadie caught up to them. Hello!? You’re birds! Eventually they remembered that and flew into trees, but several forgot to hold on and fell off their limbs.

Our neighbor up the hill, Allyson, complained the other day about the turkeys cleaning out her bird feeders. I suggested the time-honored turkey repellent: A few cans of cranberry sauce (whole berry works better than the jelly).

Turkey on, all!

Ted Turkey

A Few WORDs on Turkeys

“I hate turkeys. If you stand in the meat section at the grocery store long enough, you start to get mad at turkeys. There's turkey ham, turkey bologna, turkey pastrami. Some one needs to tell the turkey, ‘Man, just be yourself.’”—Mitch Hedberg

“The best way to thaw a frozen turkey? Blow in its ear.”—Johnny Carson

“No more turkey, but I’d like another helping of that bread he ate.’—Anonymous

“Don’t assume you’re always going to be understood. I wrote in a column that one should put a cup of liquid in the cavity of a turkey when roasting it. Someone wrote me that ‘the turkey tasted great, but the plastic cup melted.’”—Hints from Heloise

“Most turkeys taste better the day after; my mother’s tasted better the day before.”—Rita Rudner

“A two-pound turkey and a fifty-pound cranberry—that’s Thanksgiving dinner at Three Mile Island.”—Johnny Carson

“I love Thanksgiving turkey... It’s the only time in Los Angeles that you see natural breasts.”—Arnold Schwarzenegger

“Dear Lord, I’ve been asked, nay commanded, to thank Thee for the Christmas turkey before us... a turkey which was no doubt a lively, intelligent bird... a social being... capable of actual affection... nuzzling its young with almost human-like compassion. Anyway, it’s dead and we’re gonna eat it.”—Berke Breathed, Bloom County

Editor’s Note: You want a stomach pump with that?

CALLING ALL UTAH STATE U. JCOM ALUMS: Happy Thanksgiving! Where are you? We're updating our alumni list. Please send your current position, title, contact info (including email), graduation year and any news to ted.pease@usu.edu. And check the Hard News Cafe for USU and Cache Valley news.

• • •

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Free Expression & the “Soft War”

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Iran Clamps Down

[From The New York Times]: “In early September, [Iran’s] Brig. Gen. Muhammad Bagher-Zolghadr, the former deputy chief of the Revolutionary Guards, outlined the ‘soft war’ concept in a speech: ‘In a hard war, the line between you and the enemy is clear, but in a soft war there is nothing so solid. The enemy is everywhere.’ General Zolghadr said that a soft war was fought in large part through the media, and that the West was ‘better equipped’ to fight it than Iran.

“Soon after his speech, the authorities unrolled a series of measures seemingly aimed at redressing that imbalance. This month, Brig. Gen. Mohammad Reza Naqdi, the head of the Basij militia, announced a new era of ‘super media power’ cooperation between the media and the Revolutionary Guards, according to the state-owned official press.

“The Revolutionary Guards plan to start a news agency called Atlas in the spring, modeled on services like the BBC and The Associated Press, according to semiofficial Iranian news sites.

“The Revolutionary Guards already largely control the Fars news agency, which reflects views of Iran’s hard-line camp. Two weeks ago Iran formed a 12-person unit to monitor the Internet for ‘insults and the spreading of lies,’ a phrase used to describe opposition activities, the semiofficial media reported.

“‘The enemy no longer invests in the military to advance their goals,’ said the official, Ali Daraei. ‘Their primary investment is in the media war through satellite channels.’”
—Robert F. Worth, New York Times,
reporting from Damascus, Syria. 11/24/09 URL

Editor’s Note: Winning hearts and minds.

CALLING ALL UTAH STATE U. JCOM ALUMS: Where are you? We're updating our alumni list. Please send your current position, title, contact info (including email), graduation year and any news to ted.pease@usu.edu. And check the Hard News Cafe for USU and Cache Valley news.

• • •

Monday, November 23, 2009

Newsroom Tension—Not the Good Kind

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Potential Ruin

“Newsrooms used to be places filled with interesting eccentrics driven by unreasonable passions—a situation thought of as ‘creative tension’ and often encouraged by management in eras when profits were high and arrogance was seen not as a flaw but a perquisite of being smart and right. Sadly, over the years newsrooms have come to resemble insurance offices peopled by the blanched and the pinched and the beetle-browed; lately, with layoffs thought to be on the horizon, everyone also behaves extra nicely to please the boss. In the face of potential ruin, journalists have been forced to reach accommodations with themselves: New strictures, new styles, new protocols, new limitations on what is possible are now meekly swallowed. In the frantic scramble for new ‘revenue streams,’ ethical boundaries are more likely to be pushed than is the proverbial envelope. Some of all this has leached out into the product. We all feel it. You do, too.”
—Gene Weingarten, Washington Post blogger, columnist, author
and 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winner (11/3/09). URL.

Editor’s Note: We feel your pain. Really.
Photo by alert WORDster and JCOM alum Ashley Stolworthy

CALLING ALL UTAH STATE U. JCOM ALUMS: Where are you? We're updating our alumni list. Please send your current position, title, contact info (including email), graduation year and any news to ted.pease@usu.edu.

• • •

Friday, November 20, 2009

More on the “Decline of News”

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Mutual Interests


“Without journalists, how would the public learn what we do? Universities cost more and more, and people understand them less and less. . . . Journalists tell the public about our research and show why it matters. They are the agents of our democracy’s confidence that ordinary people with good information can make rational choices that will benefit themselves and the rest of humankind. Journalists serve the public with their daily reports about our studies of flu vaccines and voting patterns and hominid fossils. But they also serve us. Every news story mentioning a professor's research is a small strut supporting our mission.”
—Harry R. Lewis, author and professor of computer science, Harvard.
Part of The Chronicle of Higher Education’s roundtable discussion
of “Academe and the Decline of News,” Nov. 15, 2009 (recommended!)

Editor’s Note: News we can use.

Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller 11/20/09 URL

WORD CARTOONIST:
Announcing the launch of Nate Pratt, the WORD’s new occasional editorial cartoonist. Click here.

CALLING ALL UTAH STATE U. JCOM ALUMS: Where are you? We're updating our alumni list. Please send your current position, title, contact info (including email), graduation year and any news to ted.pease@usu.edu.


• • •

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Journalism Education Fights Back

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The Next Generation

“As partisan outlets proliferate, students raised on faux news will enter our classrooms cocooned in their own biases and conditioned to mistake ridicule for engaged contention. By creating an appetite for critical engagement, universities will challenge those insular tendencies. Drawing on their experience in our classrooms, labs, and libraries, and mining the rich resources of the Web, our students will become citizen-journalists. In that role they will sort fact from fabulation and unmask abuses of power and the public trust.”
—Kathleen Hall Jamieson, media scholar and director,
Annenberg Public Policy Center, University of Pennsylvania,
Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 15, 2009

Illustration by Dave Plunkett for The Chronicle Review
Editor’s Note: So journalism’s NOT dead?

FROM THE OH, SH*$@#!! DEPARTMENT: Oh, dear. Yesterday, Columbia Journalism Review posted a piece fact-checking La Palin’s roguish new “book.” A few minutes later, this: “Dear reader, In the promo for the piece about, uh, fact checking: Sarah Palin was not a vice president, as you know. She ran for the office. Apologies.” —Columbia Journalism Review

WORD CARTOONIST: Announcing the launch of Nate Pratt, the WORD’s new occasional editorial cartoonist. See URL.

CALLING ALL UTAH STATE U. JCOM ALUMS: Where are you? We're updating our alumni list. Please send your current position, title, contact info (including email), graduation year and any news to ted.pease@usu.edu.


• • •

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Too Much Noise . . .

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. . . Not Enough Listening

“The people formerly known as the audience [are] too busy making content to consume much of it.... The medium is not the message; the messages are the media.”
—David Carr, media critic, New York Times, March 18, 2009
(Thanks to alert WORDster Alexandra Halsey)

Editor’s Note: Sound, fury, signifying...what?

WORD CARTOONIST: Announcing the launch of Nate Pratt, the WORD's new occasional editorial cartoonist. See URL.


CALLING ALL UTAH STATE U. JCOM ALUMS: Where are you? We're updating our alumni list. Please send your current position, title, contact info (including email), graduation year and any news to ted.pease@usu.edu.

• • •

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Wanted: Real Journalism

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Vanishing Species

“I think a certain commitment to the public good vanished in the race for circulation. I think that is accentuated when you get newspapers taken over, as you have across America, by people who either borrow extensively to buy the paper, or never had any interest in what real journalism is about in the first place.

“The kind of investigative journalism, which I think is the absolute essence, is in danger and, in fact, in many places has vanished. We have to have this searchlight to know what the hell is going on. So when newspapers or TV neglect reporting, so you get chunks of opinion without any factual basis whatsoever, we’re all going to suffer for it.”

—Harold Evans, former editor of The Sunday Times of London,
in an interview on NPR Nov. 5, 2009. (Thanks to alert WORDster Thomas E. Winski)

Editor’s Note: Somebody ought to look into this.

And then there’s this . . . When everyone just aggregates and recycles everyone else (like the WORD?), does actual news stop happening? (Thanks to aleert WORDster Marc Davidson)


WORD CARTOONIST: Announcing the launch of Nate Pratt, the WORD’s new occasional editorial cartoonist. See his first offering here.

CALLING ALL UTAH STATE U. JCOM ALUMS: Where are you? We’re updating our alumni list. Please send your current position, title, contact info (including email), graduation year and any news to ted.pease@usu.edu.

• • •

Monday, November 16, 2009

Devolution of Elocution

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W8! Whaa U Say?

“I think what I do is better than inflicting such assaults on the English language as ‘ROFL’ (Rolling On Floor Laughing) or ‘BBFN’ (Bye Bye For Now) or ‘DMFYLOCIAIM’ (Delete Me From Your List Of Contacts, I’m An Illiterate Moron). Still, language is in a constant state of evolution. Perhaps text speak will seem perfectly normal in 50 years’ time. Perhaps there’ll be a 21st-century edition of Shakespeare’s collected works featuring ‘2B/not 2B,’ and the Oxford English Dictionary will define ‘2thless’ and ‘1derment.’

“Perhaps misery memoirs will be written not in prose, but as a series of increasingly downcast emoticons. But let’s look on the bright side. If everyone in the world keeps texting, we’ll all become as mentally stunted as each other, and so nobody will even notice that there’s been a narrowing of the human attention span. Or, as it will surely become known, a10shn spn.”
—Michael Deacon, columnist, The Daily Telegraph, 2009
(Thanks to alert WORDster Javan Kienzle) URL

Editor’s Note: But ideal for Twitter’s in-depth 140-character analysis.

WORD CARTOONIST: Announcing the launch of Nate Pratt, the WORD’s new occasional editorial cartoonist. See Newspaper Wars.”

CALLING ALL UTAH STATE U. JCOM ALUMS: Where are you? We're updating our alumni list. Please send your current position, title, contact info (including email), graduation year and any news to ted.pease@usu.edu.


• • •

Friday, November 13, 2009

Introducing WORD cartoonist Nate Pratt

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Newspaper Wars?

The WORD is pleased to introduce its own occasional editorial cartoonist, Nate Pratt, a Utah State University art major. So, we’re wondering, what do we really get from the press these days, “news you can use,” or news that abuses?

©Nate Pratt, The Word 2009

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Passion

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Bloggers or Beat Reporters
What Makes Journalism Tick

“Incredible journalism is like incredible baby-making—it starts with passion. The guy combing through the city budgets because it’s his job isn’t the same as the guy combing through them because it keeps him up at night, because he thinks about it when he shouldn’t be. Institutions support that passion—but they don’t create it. When my old Howard buddy was killed by the cops, it was all I could think about, and it was all I wanted to write about. And I did it almost for free, because it helped me sleep at night. I was burning to get it down. I deeply suspect that the bloggers you love, and the reporters you love, are similarly on fire inside.”
—Ta-Nehisi Coates, blogger, The Atlantic, 2009 URL

Editor’s Note: Burn, baby, burn.

CALLING ALL UTAH STATE U. JCOM ALUMS: Where are you? We're updating our alumni list. Please send your current position, title, contact info (including email), graduation year and any news to ted.pease@usu.edu.


• • •

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Good Old Days

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The Bush Administration Press Model

Let’s face it: This administration has utter contempt for the press and the public. They lie inveterately. (Consider the EPA lies, the Iraq lies, the Niger lies, the Houston school lies, the ‘death tax’ lies, the tax refund lies.) They deny and censor. (Global warming.) Their idea of truth is faith-based. They live in a bunker. It would be astounding if [Bush Attorney General John] Ashcroft opened himself to serious questioning. Which administration official does that?”
Todd Gitlin, journalism professor and author, 2003

Editor’s Note: Of the People, For the People...

CALLING ALL UTAH STATE U. JCOM ALUMS: Where are you? We're updating our alumni list. Please send your current position, title, contact info (including email), graduation year and any news to ted.pease@usu.edu.

• • •  

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

A Newspaper Career

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WORDsters: My regular computer is at the doctor, and I’m unable to send the usual email spam to everyone today. If you came here in search of today’s “wisdom,” I pity you. But the regular dose should be back in a day or two. TP

Transitions
“I think a certain commitment to the public good has vanished in the race for circulation. I think that is accentuated when you get newspapers taken over, as you have across America, by people who either borrow extensively to buy the paper, or never had any interest in
 what real journalism is about in the first place.

“The kind of investigative journalism, which I think is the absolute essence, is in danger and, in fact, in many places has vanished. We have to have this searchlight to know what the hell is going on. So when newspapers or TV neglect reporting, so you get chunks of opinion without any factual basis whatsoever, we're all going to suffer for it.” 

—Harold Evans, former editor of The Sunday Times of London, 
and author of new autobiography, My Paper Chase
in an interview on NPR Nov. 5, 2009. URL 
(Thanks to alert WORDster Thomas E. Winski)
Editor’s Note: Feeling in the dark?
CALLING ALL UTAH STATE U. JCOM ALUMS: Where are you? We're updating our alumni list. Please send your current position, title, contact info (including email), graduation year and any news to ted.pease@usu.edu.

• • •  

Monday, November 9, 2009

Books

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Freedom to Roam

“With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one—but no one at all—can tell you what to read and when and how.”
—Doris Lessing, writer and winner, 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature
(Thanks to alert WORDster Brenda Cooper)

Editor's Note: I'll be in the stacks. See you Thursday.

CALLING ALL USU JCOM ALUMS: Where are you? We're updating our alumni list. Please send your current position, title, contact info (including email), graduation year and any news to ted.pease@usu.edu.

• • •

Friday, November 6, 2009

Whither Journalism?

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Point-Counterpoint

Cookie Dough:
“I’m an old media guy and I love newspapers, but they were brought down by a long period of gluttonous profits when they were run as monopolies by large, phlegmatic, semi-literate men who endowed schools of journalism that labored mightily to stamp out any style or originality and to create a cadre of reliable transcribers. That was their role, crushing writers and rolling them into cookie dough. Nobody who compares newspaper writing to the swashbuckling world of blogging can have any doubt where the future lies. Bloggers are writers who’ve been liberated from editors, and some of them take you back to the thrilling days of frontier journalism, before the colleges squashed the profession.”
—Garrison Keillor, radio yarn-teller,
wordguy and author, 2009 URL

Invasive Surgery:
“I would trust citizen journalism as much as I would trust citizen surgery.”
—Morley Safer, “60 Minutes” newsman, 2009
(Thanks to alert WORDster Terrie Claflin Martin)


Editor’s Note: Thrilling elective surgery?


CALLING ALL UTAH STATE JCOM ALUMS: Where are you? We're updating our alumni list. Please send your current position, title, contact info (including email), graduation year and any news to ted.pease@usu.edu.

• • •

Thursday, November 5, 2009

Making Sausage in Public

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The Public Jury

“In public affairs ... the jury is everybody who creates public sentiment—chattering gossips, unscrupulous liars, congenital liars, feeble-minded people, prostitute minds, corrupting agents. To this jury any testimony is submitted, is submitted in any form, by any anonymous person, with no test of reliability, no test of credibility, and no test of perjury.”
—Walter Lippmann, (1889-1974), newsman and author,
in Liberty and the News (1920)
(Thanks to alert WORDster Philip Meyer)

Editor’s Note: The Walmart of ideas.

CALLING ALL USU JCOM ALUMS: Where are you? We're updating our alumni list. Please send your current position, title, contact info (including email), graduation year and any news to ted.pease@usu.edu.

• • •

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Fisticuffs

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Namby-Pamby Modern Newsrooms

“Back when I got into journalism, the idea that a fistfight in a newsroom would turn into a news story was unthinkable. The guys in the sports department at the New York Daily News, they had so many, you wouldn’t even look up.”
—Henry Allen, 68, Pulitzer Prize-winning editor, now on leave for his last three weeks before retirement from the Washington Post Style section after punching reporter Manuel Roig-Franzia during a newsroom fracas, 11/3/09. URL

Responding on his blog, Chatological Humor:
“The first thing I want to say is, hooray. Hooray that there is still enough passion left somewhere in a newsroom in America for violence to break out between colorful characters in disagreement over the quality of a story.”
—Gene Weingarten, Washington Post blogger, columnist,
author and Pulitzer Prize-winner (2008) URL


Editor’s Note: Hard-hitting journalism.

CALLING ALL USU JCOM ALUMS: Where are you? We’re updating our alumni list. Please send your current position, title, contact info (including email), graduation year and any news to ted.pease@usu.edu.


• • •

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Newsroom Innumeracy

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Mathphobia

“Go through some of the archives of any newspaper or TV station—even some of the most prestigious—and you can find astounding examples of bad math, inept comparisons, statistical tomfoolery.”
—James Ledbetter, journalist, editor & author,
in 1997 “College Issue,” Rolling Stone

Editor’s Note: That just doesn't add up.


CALLING ALL USU JCOM ALUMS: Where are you?
We're updating our alumni list. Please send your current position, title, contact info (including email), graduation year and any news to ted.pease@usu.edu.

• • •

Monday, November 2, 2009

What’s in a Word?

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The Uphill Battle of Ms.

“America lacks a language dictator like the Académie Française . . . The closest thing here might be the copydesk of the New York Times. . . . As a handy form of address, Ms. found a foothold in the 1952 guidelines of the National Office Management Association; they suggested using it to avoid any confusion over a woman’s marital state. Twenty years later, when Ms. was born, the editors explained, ‘Ms. is being adopted as a standard form of address by women who want to be recognized as individuals, rather than by their relationship with a man.’ . . .

“Such developments left the New York Times—which that year ran a story headlined, IN SMALL TOWN U.S.A., WOMEN’S LIBERATION IS EITHER A JOKE OR A BORE—in the awkward position of identifying Gloria Steinhem as ‘Miss Steinhem, editor of Ms. magazine.’ At that point, even the late language guru William Safire called for surrender. The Times refused on the grounds that the title had not passed into common usage. ‘We reconsider it from time to time,’ the editors mused, ‘but to our ears it still sounds too contrived for news writing.’ Only in 1986 did the Times relent; the editors at Ms. sent flowers.”

—Nancy Gibbs, TIME columnist in the magazine’s “The State of the American Woman” issue, Oct. 26, 2009 URL

Editor’s Note: Excuse me? The Times, “too contrived”?
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