Friday, August 29, 2014

Down East Press Review

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Good News, Bad News

“The best part of my life is I’ve been hired to work for the people of the state of Maine and I’m very humble and very proud. The worst part of my life is newspapers are still alive — sorry, I had to say it.”

—Maine Gov. Paul LePage, speaking to GOP activists Wednesday

• Related: GOP commercials celebrate Maine Gov. Paul LePage’s big mouth,” SFGate.com 
 
• Editorial Comment: The people’s choice.


PeezPix by Ted Pease 
 
Avocets Wading





PeezPix. ted.pease@gmail.com
 
TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM is a free “service” sent to the 1,800 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Utah State University, Logan, Utah. ted.pease@gmail.com.
(Be)Friend Dr. Ted, Professor of Interesting Stuff

“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

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Thursday, August 28, 2014

Paradise

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Kicking Back in Heaven

“I have always imagined that paradise will be some kind of library.” 
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), Argentine writer (painting
by Beti Alonso)


 
• Editorial Comment: Which would make librarians angels.






PeezPix by Ted Pease 
 
Abalones






PeezPix. ted.pease@gmail.com

 
TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM is a free “service” sent to the 1,800 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Utah State University, Logan, Utah. ted.pease@gmail.com.
(Be)Friend Dr. Ted, Professor of Interesting Stuff

“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

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Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Chilling Effect

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Protecting Truth

Enough is enough. The relentless and by all appearances vindictive effort by two administrations to force Jim Risen into betraying his sources has already done substantial and lasting damage to journalism in the United States. I've felt the chill first hand. Trusted sources in Washington are scared to talk by telephone, or by email, or even to meet for coffee, regardless of whether the subject touches on national security or not. My fellow investigative reporters commiserate about how we're being forced to act like drug dealers, taking extreme precautions to avoid leaving any digital breadcrumbs about where we've been and who we've met. If you value a vibrant free press, you want the Jim Risens of the world out hunting for the toughest truths about how power is used and abused. You don't want them rotting in jail cells. Do we really want to be that kind of country?” 

David Barstow, three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner, The New York Times, in statement protesting Obama administration measures to force fellow Times reporter James Risen to reveal his sources,Pulitzer Prize Winners’ Statements in Support of James Risen,”
August 2014.
 
• Editorial Comment: The truth hurts.


PeezPix by Ted Pease 
 
Summer’s End





PeezPix. ted.pease@gmail.com

 
TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM is a free “service” sent to the 1,800 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Utah State University, Logan, Utah. ted.pease@gmail.com.
(Be)Friend Dr. Ted, Professor of Interesting Stuff

“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

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Monday, August 25, 2014

Strunk’s Style

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Good Advice

“‘Omit needless words!’ cries the author on page 23, and into that imperative Will Strunk really put his heart and soul. In the days when I was sitting in his class, he omitted so many needless words, and omitted them so forcibly and with such eagerness and obvious relish, that he often seemed in the position of having shortchanged himself—a man left with nothing more to say yet with time to fill, a radio prophet who had outdistanced the clock. Will Strunk got out of this predicament by a simple trick: he uttered every sentence three times.” 
—E.B. White (1899-1985), writer, in introduction to The Elements of Style, 3rd edition, 1979 


• Editorial Comment: Third time’s a charm.


PeezPix by Ted Pease 
 
Fogust in California





PeezPix. ted.pease@gmail.com
 
TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM is a free “service” sent to the 1,800 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Utah State University, Logan, Utah. ted.pease@gmail.com.
(Be)Friend Dr. Ted, Professor of Interesting Stuff

“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

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Season 19! The WORD is baaa-aaack....

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Running Amok—The WORD escapes (again),
Defies (still) all reason in a troubled world

ST. GEORGE’S LIGHTHOUSE, California—It had been a quiet summer on the remote rock that supports the maximum security tower of St. Mumbles Home for the Terminally Verbose.


Too quiet, as it turns out.


The crash of waves and borking of sea lions in the late-August pre-dawn calm at the foot of the formidable St. George’s Reef Light, eight miles off Crescent City, Calif., was suddenly split today by the wail of sirens.


Yup. For the 19th straight time, Today’s WORD on Journalism concluded its summer hammocktime by escaping the unescapable maximum security sanitarium for whackos from the world of words.


“God %^*()(*&^%!!!!!!! No, no no no NO!!” observed St. Mumbles Director of Syntax Dr. Con Jugate, all in a furious lather not unlike the seafoam bubbling around the base of the grim tower where the WORD and some of the worse hard-case cast-offs of America’s newsrooms and journalism departments have been incarcerated.


According to a thin-lipped report from Jugate’s spokesman, delivered after the unhappy lexicographer had flung himself into the surf, the WORD apparently spent the summer on the St. George’s veranda knitting a rubber Zodiac-style raft, and made a 6-horsepower outboard in the arts and crafts therapy program.


“No one noticed,” watch commander Mia Opia said as attendants rescued a burbling sanitarium director from the froth. “He said he was knitting an afghan for his Twitter editor.”


The WORD, whose daily doses of “wisdom” on matters journalistic, political, social and cultural have afflicted decent folk on five continents since 1995, had been a, er, “guest” at St. Mumbles since May, when white-jacketed attendants collected the blathering serial quoter and the contents of his office from Utah State University.



He spent the summer convalescing at the remote coastal rest home, a dark tower where Chas. Addams once vacationed, studying up on the 5,000 new words in the Scrabble dictionary, lounging on the porch and secretly collecting new quotes on the press to torment a troubled media world.


The WORD was first admitted and first escaped from St. Mumbles in 1995 after his opening season quoting wise guys on journalism. Since then, the WORD’s, um, “influence” has spread worldwide, and last year the International Bloviaters League and Tribune of Hairbrained Editors & Reporters (IBLaTHER) honored the serial email pest with its coveted Electronic Junkmail Award.


Anyway, the WORD is out again, gentle and unsuspecting readers. Brace yourselves.


As usual, we launch this season with the ever-useful wisdom of the genial former colonial Royal High Potentate of the Virginia Colony, whose high regard for both education and the press rings with an increasingly popular fervor today. New WORDs begin tomorrow, and will continue through the 2014-2015 season, or until you come to your senses. 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.”

• • • • •
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff. ted.pease@gmail.com. (Be)Friend Dr. Ted, Professor of Interesting Stuff on Facebook

“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