Town Crier

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Community Connections

“While local TV news remains the most popular source for local information in America, adults rely on it primarily for just three subjects — weather, breaking news and to a lesser extent traffic. And for all their problems, newspapers (both print and on the web) are the source Americans turn to most for a wider range of information than any other source. . . .

“Web-only outlets are now primary source of information on key subjects like education, local business and restaurants. And greater disruption seems to lie ahead. For the 79% of Americans who are online, in addition to Americans ages 18-39, the internet ranks as a top source of information for most of the local subjects studied in the survey.”

—Pew Research Center,
“How People Learn About Their Local Community,”
Sept. 26, 2011

• Editorial Comment: 69% also said they wouldn't really miss their local newspaper if it went out of business. P-U

• COMING NEXT WEEK: The Children of Ethiopia: From the Cradle to the Grave
Matthew LaPlante, former national security reporter for The Salt Lake Tribune (now an assistant journalism professor at USU), and Tribune photojournalist Rick Egan went to Ethiopia last summer. What they saw: Tuesday, Oct. 4, 1:30-2:45 p.m., TSC Auditorium, Utah State University.

• Visit our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café.
New from HNC:
• Hyde Park dog runs must be closer to owners’ homes, council says
• Kennel complaint drives Millville council meeting ‘to the dogs’
• Half-naked and proud—The Undie Run Utahns are not uptight

• HELP WANTED:
PR FACULTY: The JCOM Department at Utah State University has opened a national search for a tenure-track professor of public relations and corporate communication. Start date: August 2012. See USU HR link here for full posting and details. Email ted.pease@usu.edu for more information.

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I’d Rather Huff

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Leaving the Times

“For me it’s a chance to write with a point of view. It’s sort of the age of the columnist. With the dysfunctional political system, old conventional notions of fairness make it hard to tell readers directly what’s going on. This is a chance for me to explore solutions in my economic reporting.”

[Peter] Goodman, who spent a decade at The Washington Post before his three years at the Times, says he will still rely on facts and not engage in “ranting.” And while he was happy at the newspaper, he says, he found he was engaged in “almost a process of laundering my own views, through the tried-and-true technique of dinging someone at some think tank to say what you want to tell the reader.”

—Peter Goodman, former national economics reporter,
left The New York Times last year for the Huffington Post
(in Howard Kurtz column, The Washington Post, 2010
(Thanks to alert WORDster Shane Graham)

• Editorial Comment: So this is the new “new journalism”?

• COMING NEXT WEEK: The Children of Ethiopia: From the Cradle to the Grave
Matthew LaPlante, former national security reporter for The Salt Lake Tribune (now an assistant journalism professor at USU), and Tribune photojournalist Rick Egan went to Ethiopia last summer. What they saw: Tuesday, Oct. 4, 1:30-2:45 p.m., TSC Auditorium, Utah State University.

• Visit our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café.
New from HNC:
• Kennel complaint drives Millville council meeting ‘to the dogs’
• Pioneer museum or party space? River Heights must decide • Everyone bumps into hurdles on road to success, former coach says

• HELP WANTED:
PR FACULTY: The JCOM Department at Utah State University has opened a national search for a tenure-track professor of public relations and corporate communication. Start date: August 2012. See USU HR link here for full posting and details. Email ted.pease@usu.edu for more information.

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Overexamination

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Tweet This

“The unexamined life, said Socrates, is not worth living. Today, we seem to be operating under a new and very different dictum: the unrecorded life is not worth living. Thanks to digital technologies, we now have the tools to chronicle our daily actions and thoughts in the minutest detail—and to share the record with the world.

“The desire to bear witness to one's personal experience isn't anything new, of course. Long before words and pictures turned into strings of ones and zeroes, people set down accounts of events in their lives. They painted on cave walls, wrote in diaries, took snapshots and collected keepsakes and souvenirs. What's changed is the scale of the effort. Whereas in the past we tended to record only important events, today we can, and do, record pretty much everything. Nothing we do or think, it seems, is too insignificant to be preserved or broadcast.”

—Nicholas Carr, author & tech guru,
“The self-recording craze is nothing new—but now we do it digitally,”
The Guardian, June 7, 2007

• Editorial Comment: I tweet, therefore I am.

• Visit our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café.
New from HNC:
• Everyone bumps into hurdles on road to success, former coach says
• Styx and REO ‘surf the wave of joy’ with Salt Lake City crowd
• Senator-astronaut tells students: Space travel could eliminate war

• HELP WANTED:
PR FACULTY: The JCOM Department at Utah State University has opened a national search for a tenure-track professor of public relations and corporate communication. Start date: August 2012. See USU HR link here for full posting and details. Email ted.pease@usu.edu for more information.

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Perrypalooza

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Texas Toast

“The last time a Texas governor ran for president, out-of-state reporters went looking for scandal and controversy about George W. Bush and found mostly glowing accounts in the Texas media of his rapport with Democrats, passion for education reform and success at coming off like a ‘fairly normal’ guy despite his blue blood pedigree—and that positive judgment was more or less echoed by the national media.

“‘Bush could do no wrong,’ recalled Paul Burka, who covered him for Texas Monthly. ‘He just got a clean bill of health from the media, and that included us.’

“But the reporting on [GOP presidential candidate and Texas Gov. Rick] Perry has been far tougher, and has presented national reporters, publishers, TV bookers—and Perry’s opponents—with a ready supply of story lines that in recent weeks have taken at least some of the bloom off his candidacy.”

“. . . R.G. Ratcliffe, a reporter at the Austin American-Statesman who is working on a book about Perry, . . . says he already sees signs that the national media will follow the Texas media in its aggressiveness toward Perry—continuing the stark contrast to Perry’s predecessor.

“‘I get the sense that the national media would just as soon take Perry out as anything,’ he said. ‘The national media, in 2000, wanted George Bush to be president. The reporters all wanted an inside track to the Bush administration. This time around, it’s like, ‘We want to take the guy’s legs out.’”

—Keach Hagley, reporting for Politico, “Texas tales of Perry go national,” Sept. 18

• Editorial Comment: You want grits with that?

• Visit our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café.
• Fonnesbeck Greenhouse: Hobby is now a 22-year landmark in Mendon
• Styx and REO ‘surf the wave of joy’ with Salt Lake City crowd
• Paradise will install meter to measure water flow from spring


• HELP WANTED:
PR FACULTY: The JCOM Department at Utah State University has opened a national search for a tenure-track professor of public relations and corporate communication. Start date: August 2012. See USU HR link here for full posting and details. Email ted.pease@usu.edu for more information.

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Celebrified?

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Thinking Cap

“I remember telling my reporters, one thing I never want to hear in your reports is, ‘I think.’ We have celebrified the news to the point where we are losing the news, where it is more about what some people think than what they know.”

—Frank Sesno, former CNN White House correspondent and Washington bureau chief, in Dave Marash, Columbia Journalism Review, September/October 2011 URL

• Editorial Comment: I think, therefore I am?


• Visit our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café.
• Fonnesbeck Greenhouse: Hobby is now a 22-year landmark in Mendon
• North Logan Council can’t update city’s wage scale for lack of quorum
• Paradise will install meter to measure water flow from spring


• HELP WANTED:
PR FACULTY: The JCOM Department at Utah State University has opened a national search for a tenure-track professor of public relations and corporate communication. Start date: August 2012. See USU HR link here for full posting and details. Email ted.pease@usu.edu for more information.

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Rocking Chair

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An Argument for Retirement

“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.”

—Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), important writer

• Editorial Comment: Me, I have an important nap coming up....







• Visit our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café.
• Off the bus, onto the sidewalks: River Heights kids all walk to school
• Wellsville City Council tables decision on new irrigation water line
• Retired to the rocking chair? Not Louie Leonhardt, Providence gardener



• HELP WANTED:
PR FACULTY: The JCOM Department at Utah State University has opened a national search for a tenure-track professor of public relations and corporate communication. Start date: August 2012. See USU HR link here for full posting and details. Email ted.pease@usu.edu for more information.

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Reading

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Footrest

“Ah, lit’rature! There’s nothing like sitting home nights with a fireplace, a dog and a good book at your feet!”

—Jimmy Durante (1893-1980), singer/literary critic, 1947 URL

• Editorial Comment: My dog can read me like a book.

• Rhyme This: Yesterday’s WORD challenged WORDsters to offer Mark Twain limericks. Here is some of the conversation:

Will Pitkin:
There once was a fellow named Twain
Who had a remarkable brain,
He tried every genre,
But being so ornre
He never would write a refrain.

Jim Sparks:
There once was a man named Twain
Who vowed that never again
Would he write any verse
Because it was worse
To readers than having a pain.

Ted Pease: As a deluded English major freshman at UWash in the 1970s, I had a class on DH Lawrence from a wonderful professor named Roger Sales. Annoyed by the usual stupid questions from students about the final paper, he sprayed coffee everywhere and shouted that he didn't give a good goddam what we did! Write limericks, for all I care!!!!! Well, you know the rest of the story. I did: limericks encapsulating each of the 12 or whatever novels we had read and dissected during the quarter. Wish I still had that paper.

But “gen-ree/orn-ree” would never have flown, Perfesser Pitkin. And Sparks is missing a syllable in the first line. Lessee....

A frowsy old writer called Clemens
Received his ideas from the heavens.
“If I call myself ‘twain,’
I’ll make readers insane,
And reviewers can all go suck lemons.”

But Roger Sales would never have accepted that.

Marc Davidson:
There once was a writer named Clemens
Whose poems, he claimed, were all Lemons.
But with nom de plume Twain
His wit hits the brain
Like the cause of delirium tremens.

I bow to anyone who can use “delirium tremens” in a limerick. But all of us need to keep our day jobs.

• COMICS: You choose, Wise Guy! Bunny Honey or Hemp Horseman Sweat? Ted Pease gets bluffed on NPR’s Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me!” Listen here.

• Visit our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café.
• Jake Garn: Senator-astronaut tells students: Space travel could eliminate war
• Head Case? School board honors Providence teacher, passes concussion policy
• Vege Out: Paradise Market: A profusion of garden veggies, crafts and neighbors


• CLASSIFIED:
PR FACULTY WANTED: The JCOM Department at Utah State University has opened a national search for a tenure-track professor of public relations and corporate communication. Start date: August 2012. See USU HR link here for full posting and details. Email ted.pease@usu.edu for more information.

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De Spite

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Eschew Poetry

“Like Charles Dickens and Tennessee Williams, Twain was a compulsive writer. Throughout his long literary career, he tried his writing hand at almost every style and form possible: novels, travel books, essays, journalism, short stories, humor, criticism, speeches, poetry, plays. He mastered a staggering number of these forms, but not all of them….

“‘I shall not write any poetry,’ he wrote, ‘unless I conceive a spite against the subscribers.’”

—Mark Davidziak,
about Mark Twain (1835-1910), dead poet,
quoted from his Buffalo Express editorial, 1869
(in Mark My Words: Mark Twain on Writing.
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996)

• Editorial Comment: Hmmm. There once was a man named Clemens... But wait! What rhymes with “Twain”?

• COMICS: You choose, Wise Guy! Bunny Honey or Hemp Horseman Sweat? Ted Pease gets bluffed on NPR’s Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me!” Listen here.

• Visit our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café.
• Jake Garn: Senator-astronaut tells students: Space travel could eliminate war
• Head Case? School board honors Providence teacher, passes concussion policy
• Vege Out: Paradise Market: A profusion of garden veggies, crafts and neighbors


• CLASSIFIED:
PR FACULTY WANTED: The JCOM Department at Utah State University has opened a national search for a tenure-track professor of public relations and corporate communication. Start date: August 2012. See USU HR link here for full posting and details. Email ted.pease@usu.edu for more information.

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Yossarian

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Catch 22

“Novelist Joseph Heller in Catch-22 reveals how little bits of language can mean a lot. His famous protagonist Captain Yossarian is assigned the tedious job of censoring letters written home from the war front by enlisted men:

‘To break the monotony he invented games. Death to all modifiers, he declared on day, and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and every adjective. The next day he made war on articles. He reached a much higher plane of creativity the next day when he blacked out everything in the letters but a, an and the. That erected more dynamic intralinear tensions, he felt, and in just about every case left a message far more universal.’

“Yossarian went on, no doubt, to teach postmodern literary theory at Yale.”

—Roy Peter Clark, channeling Joseph Heller,
Poynter Institute word guy, writer and author,
The Glamour of Grammar: A Guide to the Magic and Mystery of Practical English, 2010

• Editorial Comment: As an editor, I have to say that we have too many words anyway.




• You choose, Wise Guy! Bunny Honey or Hemp Horse Sweat? Ted Pease gets bluffed on NPR’s Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me!” Listen here.

• For USU and Cache Valley News, visit our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café.




• CLASSIFIED:
PR FACULTY WANTED: The JCOM Department at Utah State University has opened a national search for a tenure-track professor of public relations and corporate communication. Start date: August 2012. See USU HR link here for full posting and details. Email ted.pease@usu.edu for more information.

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Bias

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Happy Constitution Day

“It is crucial to remember that the American founders, the ones who enshrined the ideas of a free press and free speech in the Constitution, had no concept of an unbiased media. They’d never seen, heard or smelled such a beast. The newspapers that John Adams and James Madison read—or, in the case of Alexander Hamilton and The New York Post, founded—existed to further their own political agendas. The idea is that . . . the people are smart enough and dedicated enough to sort through all the flotsam and jetsam presented to them and make, often enough, the right decisions.”

—George Pyle, editorial writer,
The Salt Lake Tribune, 9/4/2011 URL

• Editorial Comment: Navigating the biased beast.



• For USU and Cache Valley News, visit our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café.




• CLASSIFIED:
PR FACULTY WANTED: The JCOM Department at Utah State University has opened a national search for a tenure-track professor of public relations and corporate communication. Start date: August 2012. See USU HR link here for full posting and details. Email ted.pease@usu.edu for more information.

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Old Main at Evening. PeezPix store at Etsy

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Help Wanted

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Wanted: Better Idiots

“Newspapers are killing newspapers. Generally, they are run by idiots. That worked when the presses printed money. It doesn’t work when new ideas, flexibility and creativity are required.”

—James E. Shelledy, former editor, The Salt Lake Tribune, 2009

• Editorial Comment: Tell it to your congressman.


• For USU and Cache Valley News, visit our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café.




• CLASSIFIED:
PR FACULTY WANTED: The JCOM Department at Utah State University has opened a national search for a tenure-track professor of public relations and corporate communication. Start date: August 2012. See USU HR link here for full posting and details. Email ted.pease@usu.edu for more information.

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Old Main at Evening. PeezPix store at Etsy


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Political Discourse

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Out of Order

“Incivility can be defined not just in terms of politeness, but also in terms of orderly discourse. Today’s ‘political and policymaking processes are not ordered around acknowledged facts or even the search for . . . arguable facts. Nor are public policy decisions in the U.S. driven by the desire to solve problems...’ Our political conversation has become increasingly disorderly. . . . One of our two major political parties today benefits electorally and in policy-making from impolite and disorderly discourse, while the other lacks incentives to fight back with equal fervor.”

—Robert Entman, political scientist,
George Washington University,
“Incivility and Assymetrical Partisan Warfare,”
In the Name of Democracy:
Political Communication Research and Practice in a Polarized Media Environment,
(Baton Rouge, LA: Breaux Symposium, Manship School of Mass Communication,
Louisiana State University, 2011)

• Editorial Comment: Facts? We don’t need no stinkin’ facts!


• For USU and Cache Valley News, visit our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café.





• CLASSIFIED:
PR FACULTY WANTED: The JCOM Department at Utah State University has opened a national search for a tenure-track professor of public relations and corporate communication. Start date: August 2012. See USU HR link here for full posting and details. Email ted.pease@usu.edu for more information.

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Focus, dammit!

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Spongep ... Wait, hunh?



“Fox News ran a story that even watching just a few minutes of SpongeBob SquarePants can lower a child’s ability to concentrate, delay gratification, and might even cause learning problems.

The problems were seen in a study of 60 children randomly assigned to either watch SpongeBob, or the slower-paced PBS cartoon Caillou or assigned to draw pictures.

Immediately after these nine-minute assignments, the kids took mental function tests; those who had watched SpongeBob did measurably worse than the others.

... “I think the CNN-Tea Party GOP Debate last night might have same effect on us as SpongeBob does on kids. First of all, there is the fact that a respected news organization is pairing up with the Tea Party. As the T-shirts say, ‘Tea Party sounds so much nicer than racist homophobes.’ Already my ability to concentrate and delay gratification is a point or two lower.”

—Laurie Essig, “SpongeBob SquarePants and the Tea Party Debate,”
Chronicle of Higher Education, September 13, 2011 URL
(Thanks to alert WORDster Mark Larson)

• Editorial Comment: Why would anyone want kids to focus on SpongePants?


• For USU and Cache Valley News, visit our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café.





• CLASSIFIED:
PR FACULTY WANTED: The JCOM Department at Utah State University has opened a national search for a tenure-track professor of public relations and corporate communication. Start date: August 2012. See USU HR link here for full posting and details. Email ted.pease@usu.edu for more information.

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PeezPix store at Etsy

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Light & Shadow

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Triumph of the Pictograph?

“Video is the distillation of the four ways people exchange information—speech, print, sound, and pictures. Video can convey more information more powerfully to more people in more places—and more quickly—than TV, radio, print, or the voice of the evangelist.”

—Dave Marash, “Fade to Black:
As a video revolution sweeps the world, US television news caps its lens,”
Columbia Journalism Review, September/October 2011

• Editorial Comment: More good news for the U.S. Postal Service.


• For USU and Cache Valley News, visit our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café.

• Hot News Today: Big Fire in Mendon, Storee Powell reports. And Remembering 9/11, by Heidi Hansen


• CLASSIFIED:
PR FACULTY WANTED: The JCOM Department at Utah State University has opened a national search for a tenure-track professor of public relations and corporate communication. Start date: August 2012. See USU HR link here for full posting and details. Email ted.pease@usu.edu for more information.

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>:-P . . . beuh

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The New English

“Blogging is not writing. It’s graffiti with punctuation.”

—Elliot Gould character in Steven Soderbergh’s film Contagion (2011)

• Editorial Comment: Elitist! LMAO! :-D








• For USU and Cache Valley News, visit our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café.

• Hot News Today: Big Fire in Mendon, Storee Powell reports. And Remembering 9/11, by Heidi Hansen


• CLASSIFIED:
PR FACULTY WANTED: The JCOM Department at Utah State University has opened a national search for a tenure-track professor of public relations and corporate communication. Start date: August 2012. See USU HR link here for full posting and details. Email ted.pease@usu.edu for more information.

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Editorial Comment

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That Warm Feeling

“Editorial writing is like wetting your pants in a blue serge suit. It gives you a nice warm feeling all over, and nobody notices.”

—William Ringle (1923-2011),
the longtime Gannett newsman and foreign correspondent who died this week
(Thanks to alert WORDsters Tom Bower and Phil Meyer)


(Image: Bill Ringle in the reading room at the Library of Congress in May 2002. Heather Martin Morrissey, Gannett News Service)

• Editorial Comment: They don’t make ’em like Ringle anymore.

• For USU and Cache Valley News, visit our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café.




• CLASSIFIED:
PR FACULTY WANTED: The JCOM Department at Utah State University has opened a national search for a tenure-track professor of public relations and corporate communication. Start date: August 2012. See USU HR link here for full posting and details. Email ted.pease@usu.edu for more information.

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