Friday, August 31, 2012

The Changing Landscape

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Riding a tiger’s back

“Not too long ago, reporters were the guardians of scarce facts delivered at an appointed time to a passive audience. Today we are the managers of an overabundance of information and content, discovered, verified and delivered in partnership with active communities.”
Mark Little, Storyful founder, 
in Nieman Reports, 2012  


 • Editorial Comment: Hang on tight! Yeeeeehaaaa!


• Yesterday’s WORD: Did you miss yesterday’s WORDs from author, essayist and spider ghostwriter E.B. White, on how mass media looked from a 1938 perspective? Click here.

News from our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café
 
Logan, Utah, makes top-10 (we’re #3!) list of best college towns in U.S., by Ted Pease
‘Meet the weirdos,’ dean urges students at USU opening event, by D. Whitney Smith
Aggie journalism prof’s Washington Post article foreshadows Ethiopian leader’s death , by Matthew D. LaPlante
Aggie Reports from Ethiopia: Olympic Dreams, Empty Pockets , by Danielle Manley
Joe’s boat bursts into flames—in his driveway!, video by Ted Pease





PeezPIX by Ted Pease

Old Main, Utah State University





Thursday, August 30, 2012

Oh, Man

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I heard the news today, oh, man

“When I was a child, people simply looked about them and were moderately happy; today they peer beyond the seven seas, bury themselves waist-deep in tidings, and by and large what they see and hear makes them unutterably sad.”
—E.B. White (1899-1985),
author and wise man, 1938


• Editorial Comment: This man got his news from a spider.



 

• Related: Pease 1985 column on E.B. White—Some Pig!
 

• Yesterday’s WORD: Did you miss yesterday’s WORDs on the presidential campaign from Romney pollster Neil Newhouse? Click here.

News from our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café
 
Logan, Utah, makes top-10 (we’re #3!) list of best college towns in U.S., by Ted Pease
‘Meet the weirdos,’ dean urges students at USU opening event, by D. Whitney Smith
Aggie journalism prof’s Washington Post article foreshadows Ethiopian leader’s death
, by Matthew D. LaPlante
Aggie Reports from Ethiopia: Olympic Dreams, Empty Pockets
, by Danielle Manley
Joe’s boat bursts into flames—in his driveway!, video by Ted Pease




PeezPIX by Ted Pease

Old Main, Utah State Univrsity



Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Pesky Facts

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Um, what?

Critics say the Romney campaign has been misrepresenting welfare issues, and The Washington Post's "Fact Checker" awarded a Romney ad “four Pinocchios.” The Romney campaign dismisses the criticism.

“Fact checkers come to this with their own sets of thoughts and beliefs, and we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.”

Neil Newhouse, Romney pollster, Aug. 28, 2012
(Thanks to alert WORDster Brenda Cooper)


• Editorial Comment: Reality check, please.
 

• Yesterday’s WORD: Did you miss yesterday’s WORDs on media literacy, from John McManus? Click here.

News from our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café
 
Logan, Utah, makes top-10 (we’re #3!) list of best college towns in U.S., by Ted Pease
‘Meet the weirdos,’ dean urges students at USU opening event, by D. Whitney Smith
Aggie journalism prof’s Washington Post article foreshadows Ethiopian leader’s death
, by Matthew D. LaPlante
Aggie Reports from Ethiopia: Olympic Dreams, Empty Pockets
, by Danielle Manley
Joe’s boat bursts into flames—in his driveway!, video by Ted Pease

 


PeezPIX by Ted Pease
Trinidad, California



Tuesday, August 28, 2012

You Are What You Eat

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Detecting Bull

“News stories, indeed most media messages, are designed to be as easy to swallow as warm honey. The language is simple. Articles are short. So are sentences. Images are dramatic. Key points are trumpeted in headlines and lead paragraphs. Why would anyone need help to figure out the news? The simple answer is that a great deal of what looks like news and factual information on the Web, cable and broadcast TV, the radio, even in newspapers, really isn’t. Quality journalism is in more trouble than sobriety at a rugby party.”

—John H. McManus, journalist, media critic 
and author of Detecting Bull: How to identify bias and junk journalism in print, broadcast and on the wild Web (2012)

• Editorial Comment: Day 2 of classes, and my brain already hurts.

 






• Yesterday’s WORD Season 17 Opener: Did you miss yesterday’s WORDs to launch another year of WORDish fun & frolic? Click here.

News from our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café 
‘Meet the weirdos,’ dean urges students at USU opening event, by D. Whitney Smith

Aggie journalism prof’s Washington Post article foreshadows Ethiopian leader’s death, by Matthew D. LaPlante
Aggie Reports from Ethiopia: Olympic Dreams, Empty Pockets, by Danielle Manley

Joe’s boat bursts into flames—in his driveway!, video by Ted Pease







 PeezPIX by Ted Pease 

Trinidad, California






Monday, August 27, 2012

OMG! The WORD returns!

Not Again!!? Just when we thought journalism was dead

LOGAN, Utah—In a breath-taking display of annual season incompetence, the boneheaded staff at St. Mumbles Home for the Terminally Verbose have apparently permitted “The WORD,” a recidivist journalistic gadfly, to escape the extremely low-security sanitarium on the northern California coast.

Today’s WORD on Journalism, which afflicts some 2,000 misguided subscribers worldwide, thus is free to launch its 17th season of “wisdom” and—as Virginia colonial Governor Sir William Berkeley would say—disobediences and heresies about the press, journalism, politics and whatever the heck he wants.

A St. Mumbles spokeswoman said the WORD normally is confined in a padded maximum citation cubicle, but had somehow been left in a wheelchair on a rocky crag overlooking the Pacific last night. An attendant was found tongue-tied nearby.

Apparently the attendant had passed out after hours of listening to the WORD’s quotations on free expression.

“When he started on the 19th set of Federalist Papers, alternating with Jerry Seinfeld, I was as dumb as a Wikipedia post,” the rueful staff member confessed, clutching his head.

Contacted in his crypt, former President Thomas Jefferson rescinded his famous edict—“No government ought to be without censors & where the press is free, no one ever will”—saying, “I take it back. If the WORD is this generation’s version of truth and wisdom, then we deserve Rush Limbaugh and ‘Dancing With the Stars.’”

Observers noted that the timing couldn’t be worse. “In the midst of an already ridiculous presidential election campaign,” said one academic scholar who begged to be identified so that she could count this as a “vita hit” in her promotion file, “the last thing we need is more noise in the channel to further obfuscate the social and political discourse.”

No one understood what that meant, and this reporter declined to give her name recognition.

From the White House, Obama spokesman Jay Carney responded this way: “Blah, blah, blah, blah. And blah.” A spokesman for the Romney campaign, taking a page from the lofty GOP primary season, observed, “Ooops.”

So here we go, boys and girls. Brace yourselves. As usual, we launch this season with the ever-useful wisdom of the genial former colonial Royal High Pontentate of the Virginia Colony, whose high regard for both education and the press rings with an increasingly popular fervor today. Enjoy!

TODAY’S WORD ON JOURNALISM—The Perennial Season Opener
“I thank God we have no free schools or printing, and I hope that we shall not have these for a hundred years. For learning has brought disobediences and heresy and sects into the world; and printing has divulged them and libels against the government. God keep us from both.”
—Sir William Berkeley
Governor, Virginia Colony, 1671

• • •

Back-story: The WORD was originally concocted (“conceived” is, I think, altogether too grand) as a way to get journalism students to pay attention to their email. Strange as it may sound, email was a new and unpleasant disturbance of the general peace back in 1995, and many students did not then spend 16 hours a day online. As a professor hoping to get and keep their attention while also instructing them, my object was that the WORD would give them something to think about before class. Hope, like the WORD, springs eternal.

I think it’s fair to say that this strategy was a dismal failure. Most of my students continue to ignore their daily WORDs and gaily accept point reductions on their quizzes for not knowing the day's wordish wisdom from philosophers ranging from Soren Kierkegaard to Brian Williams to Lisa Simpson.

But the WORD has become rather frighteningly popular with non-students—purported grown-ups, mostly, who actually ask to be afflicted or who send email addresses of unsuspecting friends/colleagues/parents/bosses, so that they might be victimized as well.

When the WORD was trundled by those nice white-jacketed men into St. Mumbles last spring, about 1,800 (mostly volunteer) victims subscribed to the direct email WORD list. More got the WORD by checking the website, whence it was linked and Tweeted and forwarded like a pox to many more unsuspecting victims by so-called “friends.”

* * * * *
TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM is a free “service” sent to the 2,000 or so misguided volunteer subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe.” Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: While I just quote ’em, I don't necessarily endorse ’em. All, in theory, contain at least a kernel of insight. But don’t shoot the messenger.)

Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff
Utah State University, Logan, Utah

To receive Today's Word on Journalism, send "subscribe" to ted.pease@usu.edu


“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard