Measured Speech

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Watcheth Your Wordes

“When words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain.”

— William Shakespeare (1564-1616), . . . maybe . . . alleged playwright, Richard II (~1595)

• Editorial Comment: But if they’re not your words, the sky’s the limit!.
See “Was Shakespeare a Fraud?” CBS, Oct. 29, 2011

• Scary: Today’s is Dan Rather’s birthday. He’s 80 years old!









Visit our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café
• Weekly News Roundup
• Teams Frankie, Legit and the Butternut Bouncers? Not rock bands — they’re pumpkin launchers, by D. Whitney Smith
• Police report: Accused LHS thieves ‘did it for the rush’; trio suspended for Grizzlies’ championship game, by Kristi Lambert
• Councilman explains why NR students should care about government, by Heidi Hansen


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Not-So-Free Speech

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Buy a Burglar

Q: “How do you feel about the Citizens United decision, which allows corporations to spend as much as they want on campaign advertising?”

A: “I feel strongly that the court made a serious mistake in finding that money is the equivalent of protected speech. If followed out to its logical conclusion, that would have provided First Amendment protection to the Watergate burglars. They were financed with campaign contributions.”

—John Paul Stevens, former U.S. Supreme Court justice, in Belinda Luscombe, “10 Questions,” Time, Oct. 31, 2011

• Editorial Comment: In 2012: we deserve the best leadership money can buy.

Visit our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café
• Opinion: Degrees to everywhere—USU students refute lawmaker’s gibe, by Ted Pease & Dan Smith
• Shaking up the valley: Cache County signs on for April earthquake drill, by Allee Evensen
• For Army ROTC commander, leadership = service, integrity & humor, by Heidi Hansen


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Potent Stuff

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Magic Concoctions

“Words—so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.”

—Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), Massaschusetts novelist

• Editorial Comment: Remember Luke, use the Force for good.




...and Old Nate sure knew his hats!


Visit our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café
• Opinion: Degrees to everywhere—USU students refute lawmaker’s gibe, by Ted Pease & Dan Smith
• Shaking up the valley: Cache County signs on for April earthquake drill, by Allee Evensen
• For Army ROTC commander, leadership = service, integrity & humor, by Heidi Hansen


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iTV

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Dream Big

“Apple’s stock rose $3 a share on a quote [in Walter Isaacson’s new Steve Jobs biography] that Jobs was on the verge of producing an Apple television set before his death:

“He very much wanted to do for television sets what he had done for computers, music players, and phones: make them simple and elegant. … ‘I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use,’ he told me. ‘It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud.’ No longer would users have to fiddle with complex remotes for DVD players and cable channels. ‘It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.”

“Now, to be fair: Unlike computers, TVs were simple and elegant to begin with. Once. Not unlike an iPad, they had a simple interface that was mostly screen. You turned it on, and TV came out. In the old days you may have had to get up to change a channel or adjust some rabbit ears, but the whole process was pretty intuitive and analog. Even now, the TV part of a TV is pretty straightforward. . . .

“I don’t know if an iTV—if it exists—will do this, but Steve Jobs would want us to dream big, right? Do you want a TV from Apple? And if so, what do you want on yours?”

—James Poniewozik, TV critic, “What would you like Apple to do to your TV?”

Time, Oct. 25, 2010

• Editorial Comment: For one thing, no Dancing With the Stars.

• Op-Ed: First, learn to think! “Degrees to Everywhere,” The Deseret News, by Edward C. Pease & D. Whitney Smith

Visit our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café
• Shaking up the valley: Cache County signs on for April earthquake drill, by Allee Evensen
• Author offers advice to avoid the undead on National Zombie Day, by Cathy Morgan
• For Army ROTC commander, leadership = service, integrity & humor, by Heidi Hansen



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Occupy Newsrooms

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Let ’em eat cake

NOTE: Newspaper ownership rewards its failed corporate overlords with huge bonuses (like Gannett Chairman Craig Dubow, whose golden parachute totaled $37M+), while stripping newsrooms and leaving the communities dark and silent. How about occupying newsrooms, starting with Gannett Inc.?

“Never a standout in journalism performance, the company strip-mined its newspapers in search of earnings, leaving many communities with far less original, serious reporting. . . .

“Forget about occupying Wall Street; maybe it’s time to start occupying Main Street, a place Gannett has bled dry by offering less and less news while dumping and furloughing journalists in seemingly every quarter. . . .

“No one, least of all me, is suggesting that running a newspaper company is a piece of cake. But the people in the industry who are content to slide people out of the back of the truck until it runs out of gas not only don’t deserve tens of millions in bonuses, they don’t deserve jobs.

“The optics of the bonuses are far worse than the practical impact. Newspapers are asking their employees for shared sacrifice and their digital readers to begin paying. So, lucrative packages won’t cut it. As newspapers all over the country struggle to divine the meaning of the Occupy protests, some of the companies that own them might want to listen closely to see if there is a message there meant for them.”

—David Carr, media writer, “Why Not Occupy Newsrooms?”

The New York Times, Oct. 23, 2010

Image: I GOT MINE . . .
The chief executive of Gannett Inc., Craig Dubow, second from left,
received a $37.1 million severance package despite presiding over
the loss of some 30,000 jobs. Richard Drew/Associated Press

• Editorial Comment: I get it: Without reporters, we wouldn’t know about this. We’d be happier, right?

• Op-Ed: Learn how to think! “Degrees to Everywhere,” The Deseret News, by Edward C. Pease & D. Whitney Smith

Visit our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café
• Today is National Zombie Day! Author offers advice to avoid the undead on National Zombie Day, by Cathy Morgan
• For Army ROTC commander, leadership = service, integrity & humor, by Heidi Hansen
• Why live in Hyrum? Country atmosphere with city benefits, people say, by Kristi Ottley


• 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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Sexy

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Oooo, Baby

“A new advertising campaign from the Newspaper Association of America seeks to . . . focus on how reading newspapers — in their digital or print incarnations — actually makes users sexy.

“On Monday, the association will announce a consumer marketing campaign that extols the virtues of newspapers, and by extension the news that they provide, as being something that makes people more informed, aware and savvy.

“‘Smart is the new sexy’ reads the tagline for the campaign . . . . ‘Be able to find Iran on a map,’ says one ad that shows an illustration of a woman reading a print newspaper at a table. ‘Know what the city council is up to behind closed doors.’”

—Tanzina Vega, media writer, “Group Says Newspapers Aren’t Dead, They’re Alluring,”
The New York Times, Oct. 23, 2010
(Thanks to alert WORDster Tony Seton)

• Editorial Comment: Sexy ain’t what it used to be. Bob Pierpoint had an idea...see below.

RIP: ROBERT C. PIERPOINT
LOS ANGELES (AP) — CBS News correspondent Robert C. Pierpoint — who covered six presidents, the Korean War, the Kennedy assassination and the Iranian hostage crisis in a career that spanned more than four decades — died Saturday in California, his daughter said. He was 86. After making his name covering the Korean War — a role he reprised when he provided his radio voice for the widely watched final episode of “MASH” in 1983 — Pierpoint became a White House correspondent during the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration, a position he would hold through the Jimmy Carter administration. “He lived quite an amazing life,” his daughter said. AP URL

Hear CBS’s Bob Scheiffer’s remembrance of Pierpont, and the story behind this photo, here. And see James Fallows in The Atlantic here.






Visit our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café
• Why live in Hyrum? Country atmosphere with city benefits, people say, by Kristi Ottley
• Mendon photographers compare and share tips on their craft, by Mandy Morgan
• City council votes to let North Logan animal control officer kill strays, by Steve Crass


• 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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Esperanto Moderno?

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Tuning in

“For the first time in history, mankind is developing a universal language: video. People now communicate with video on two billion computers and more than one and a half billion television sets, and by 2013 you can add another one billion video-capable people regularly accessing the web from their cell phones. The most popular spoken and written language is English, with 1.8 billion users. Looks like video already wins.”

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

Image: Egyptians gather to watch Hosni Mubarak on TV during Arab Spring. Ahikam Seri photo.

• Editorial Comment: Nothing like TV time with the family.

Visit our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café





• 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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Ow!

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Note: Interesting roundup of media attention to Occupy Wall Street.

Noticing OWS

“Media coverage of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests started out exactly as one might expect. There was little coverage at first, and as it expanded, much of it consisted of snide dismissals of demonstrators’ ignorance, hygiene and so on.

“But then something happened. . . . [O]verall the protests have received significant and sustained media attention. This is surprising, given corporate media's history of marginalizing or belittling progressive protest movements. . . . ”

“As the Occupy Wall Street movement spreads, political elites are trying to find ways to adopt some of its message. A Washington Post front-page story reported that the White House plans to ‘turn public anger at Wall Street into a central tenet of their reelection strategy.’

“The Post article acknowledges the inherent difficulty for a White House that drafted an economic team with deep ties to Wall Street to try and run against Wall Street. But it is nonetheless a sign that political and media elites sense that there is something significant happening in the streets—even if they don’t know what it is.”

—FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting),
“Have Corporate Media Warmed to Occupy Wall Street?”
Oct. 18, 2011

• Editorial Comment: If a reform movement falls on Wall Street, does it make a noise?

Media Perspectives on Occupy Wall Street:
• A New York Times took on the “chattering classes” who complained that Occupy Wall Street lacked a clear message or specific proposals: “The problem is that no one in Washington has been listening.”—New York Times, “The Protesters Against Wall Street,” Oct. 9, 2011
• The protesters as “Milquetoast Radicals.” —David Brooks, columnist, The New York Times, Oct. 11, 2011 URL
• “Starbucks-sipping, Levi’s-clad, iPhone-clutching protesters denounce corporate America even as they weep for Steve Jobs,” . . . “indigent indolents saddled with their $50,000 student loans and English degrees” whose policy proposal boils down to, “Eat the rich.”—Charles Krauthammer, columnist, The Washington Post, Oct. 14, 2011.
• “It’s not just protest Wall Street. It’s protest Wall Street and it’s an embrace of Communism and there is no doubt about it.”—Fox business reporter Charles Gasparino, Oct. 17, 2011

Visit our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café
• Review: ‘Killer Elite’—secret agents, spies and a whole mess of guns, by Cathy Morgan
• Truck stop plaza in Wellsville dominates P&Z commission debate, by Allie Jeppson
• Why sewer bills in Richmond are higher than elsewhere in Cache Valley, by Rouchelle Brockman


• 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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Election 2012

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Nuts

“There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.”

—Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), author, “Cold Turkey,” In These Times, 2004

• Editorial Comment: Sometimes you feel like a nut.












Visit our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café
• Review: ‘Killer Elite’—secret agents, spies and a whole mess of guns, by Cathy Morgan
• Truck stop plaza in Wellsville dominates P&Z commission debate, by Allie Jeppson
• Providence council scorecard: Roosters, 1; sleeping humans, 0, by Kristi Ottley

• 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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Health & Wellness

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Dark Ages?

“We asked [editors] what the impact would be if newspapers closed and were not replaced. And 90 percent of them said it would be devastating and made reference to the role of newspapers as part of democracy—and what would happen if people were not held accountable by newspapers.

“It’s not the public’s responsibility to save news; it’s the newspapers’ responsibility. . . . It’s time for the industry to invest energy in getting the message across about how it contributes to society.

“It’s the best institution we have to reflect back to the community what it is and what it’s doing. It’d be a dark age if it went away. We don’t think it’s going away.”

—Paul Steinle and his wife, Sara Brown, are journalists and educators
whose Who Needs Newspapers? project examines newspapers in all 50 states.
In John Darling, “Who Needs Newspapers?,”
The Mail Tribune, Medford,
Oregon, Oct. 9, 2011

(Thanks to alert WORDster Brad Knickerbocker)

Image: Journalists Sara Brown and Paul Steinle browse their “Who Needs Newspapers?” website. The couple interviewed newspaper editors in all 50 states and assembled the website, which examines the evolution of newspapers in the digital age. Julia Moore photo

• Editorial Comment: Pretty dark already, I’d say.


Visit our award-winning
student news site, The Hard News Café
• Canal company’s storage needs more than a pipe dream in Millville, by Rachel Kenley
• Council candidates tell River Heights voters they’ll keep the status quo, by Lindsay Nemelka
• Providence council scorecard: Roosters, 1; sleeping humans, 0, by Kristi Ottley

• 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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Obsession

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Yeee-ha!

“Day and night I’m obsessed by one recurring thought: I must write, I must write, I must write. … The moment I finish a tale, I must, for some reason, write another one, then a third, and after the third, a fourth one. … I’m writing nonstop, like a traveler switching horses midway, and I can’t do otherwise.”

—Boris Alexeyevich Trigorin, writer,

a character in Anton Chekhov’s (1860-1904)

The Seagull, 1895 (full monologue)

• Editorial Comment: Writing on horseback is tricky.








Visit our award-winning
student news site, The Hard News Café
• In Providence, autumn means it’s time to get your sauerkraut on
• Best-kept secret for fall fun may be American West Heritage Center
• Providence council scorecard: Roosters, 1; sleeping humans, 0

• 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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Channel Surfing?

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Perseverance

“Violence and smut are of course everywhere on the airwaves. You cannot turn on your television without seeing them, although sometimes you have to hunt around.”

—Dave Barry, humor columnist and author

• Editorial Comment: Easier on the Internet.



Visit our award-winning
student news site, The Hard News Café




• 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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Lonely Pamphleteers

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There’s Something Happening Here

“‘Get your newspaper, get your free Occupied Wall Street Journal!’ shouted one barker. Getting something in the hands of your average New Yorker is a pretty tough sell, but The Occupied Wall Street Journal was eagerly received, even by the people who just came to gawk, in part because it answered the question of what all the hubbub was about.

“Forgive an old newspaper hack a moment of sentimentality, but it is somehow reassuring that a newspaper still has traction in an environment preoccupied by social media. It makes sense when you think about it: newspapers convey a sense of place, of actually being there, that digital media can’t. When is the last time somebody handed you a Web site?

—David Carr, media writer, “A Protest’s Ink-Stained Fingers,” The New York Times, on the Wall Street protesters’ own newspaper, The Occupy Wall Street Journal, Oct. 9, 2010

(Thanks to alert WORDsters Sara Hostetler and Alexandra Halsey)

• Editorial Comment: All the News You Won’t Print.



• A Personal Note: 20 Years Ago Today: “Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas Came to Our Wedding”







New from our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café:
• Mendon’s volunteer firefighters: ‘Our pay really is helping people’
• Images of Ethiopia: Rick Egan’s photos from the Horn of Africa
• Review: Dream Theater wows enthusiastic crowd during rare SLC stop
• Paradise Town Council election canceled

• 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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