Job 1

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Raising Consciousness

“We question the powerful. We hold decision-makers accountable. The chain we help forge links the people we encounter in the field to millions of other individual minds and sensibilities. And once mass consciousness evolves into a shared sense of conscience, change becomes not only possible; it becomes inevitable.”

—James Nachtwey, photojournalist, on accepting the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Magazine Editors, “James Nachtwey: How Photography Can Change the World,” Time, February 2015 

• Editorial Comment: See 5-minute video of Nachtwey’s work. Worth 100,000 words.


PeezPix by Ted Pease

Good Evening












Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 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, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“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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Election Season

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The American Dream

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

—H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), journalist, author and curmudgeon, “Bayard vs. Lionheart,” Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920 (Thanks to alert WORDster Karl Petruso)

• Editorial Comment: This year, an embarrassment of riches.


PeezPix by Ted Pease

Totems













Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 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, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“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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Old Man

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‘I Don’t Want All This Extra Stuff’

“Travis Morgan says he still likes reading a printed newspaper and watching news on television — and using a search engine to dig more deeply if he wants to know more. ‘This may make me sound like an old man,’ Morgan, a 33-year-old pilot from Grants Pass, Oregon, says, laughing. ‘I just want the story. I don’t want opinion. I don’t want all this extra stuff.’”

—Martha Irvine, “Survey: Young adults do consume news — in their own way,” The Associated Press, March 16, 2015

• Editorial Comment: A little young for a dinosaur, no?


PeezPix by Ted Pease

Dog Cave









Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 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, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“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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The Art of Psychic Journalism

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Happy 100th, Mr. Miller

“A playwright . . . is . . . the litmus paper of the arts. He’s got to be, because if he isn't working on the same wave length as the audience, no one would know what in hell he was talking about. He is a kind of psychic journalist.”

—Arthur Miller (1915-2005), playwright, Paris Review (Summer 1966)

• Editorial Comment: What wave length would that be?


PeezPix by Ted Pease

Dog Cave












Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 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, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“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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New Manure

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Old MacStewart

“I’m surrounded by manure, man. What could be better than that?” 

—Jon Stewart, ex-TV host on his NJ farm, “Why Jon Stewart Doesn’t Miss the Daily Show,” CBS News, Oct. 22, 2015 

• Editorial Comment: New day, same old, er, stuff.




PeezPix by Ted Pease

Summer Reflections








Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 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, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“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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The Incoherent Press Conference

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Gaffes & Whimpers

“Do you really remember any recent interview with a major politician? Usually, the only thing that stands out in the mind is some stupid gaffe or piece of rambling incoherence. And if you go and check the original, it generally turns out that this was prompted by a dull or rambling question.

“Try reading the next transcript of a presidential ‘news conference,’ and see which makes you whimper more: the chief executive’s train-wreck syntax or the lame and contrived promptings from the press.”

—Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011), author, critic and journalist, “Oriana Fallaci and the Art of the Interview,” Vanity Fair, 2006

• Editorial Comment: He was stupid first.

PeezPix by Ted Pease

Ppppllllbbbbbbbtttttttt!








Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 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, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“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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Dan Rather’s ‘Darkest Moment’

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Past Imperfect

“It was darkest moment of my career. We didn’t do the story perfectly. I didn’t do it perfectly. But it got the facts. Everybody is entitled to their own opinion but not their own facts. In an imperfect way, we got to the truth.”

—Dan Rather, veteran TV newsman, on events portrayed in the new film “Truth,” which cost him his career, in James Warren, “Dan Rather on movie about his darkest hour: ‘Paid the price,’ but had the facts right,” Poynter.com, Oct. 16, 2015 

• Editorial Comment: My facts are factier than your facts.

• Related: “George W. Bush’s military lies,” Salon.com

PeezPix by Ted Pease

Godwits Struttin’






Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 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, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“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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The Brothel Press

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Life in the Newsroom

“A newspaper is not the place to go to see people actually earning a living, though journalists like to pretend they never stop sweating over a hot typewriter. It is much more like a brothel — short, rushed bouts of really enjoyable activity interspersed with long lazy stretches of gossip, boasting, flirtation, drinking, telephoning, strolling about the corridors sitting on the corner of desks, planning to start everything tomorrow. Each of the inmates has a little specialty to please the customers. The highest paid ones perform only by appointment; the poorest take on anybody. The editors are like madams — soothing, flattering, disciplining their naughty, temperamental staff, but rarely obliged to satisfy the clients personally between the printed sheets.”

—Alan Brien, British journalist, Newsweek, March 1967

• Editorial Comment: I can’t work under these conditions.


PeezPix by Ted Pease

Love Letter





Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 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, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“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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Who Knows?

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Wise Guy 

“I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy what I do not know.” 

—Socrates (469-399), founder of Western philosophy, as quoted in Plato’s Apology (399 BC) (Thanks to alert WORDster Barry Kort)

• Editorial Comment: I’d better cogitate on that. Smart me.


PeezPix by Ted Pease

Where’s Brenda?












Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 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, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“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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There’s a Word for That

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Obsessive

“I collect comments about writing the way other people curate home exhibits of cat figurines or have closets full of black chunky-soled shoes. When I find one of these bits from fellow sufferers I think: Thank you! It’s not just me! Friends, do you see what excellent company I keep?”

—Rachel Toor, writer, “Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Writers,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Feb. 2, 2015

• Editorial Comment: Have you seen my hairball collection?


PeezPix by Ted Pease

See Spot See the Kitties











Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 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, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“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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Teaching

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School Marm

 

“The best teacher is not the one who knows most but the one who is most capable of reducing knowledge to that simple compound of the obvious and wonderful.” 

—H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), journalist, author and curmudgeon, A Mencken Chrestomathy, 1949

• Editorial Comment: See? Simple as A-B-C.


• Yeats said it better: In re. yesterday’s WORD from Bertrand Russell, on adamant fools and the waffling righteous: A number of alert WORDsters remind me that Wm. Butler Yeats said it best: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.”  (Yeats, “The Second Coming,” 1919. See The Paris Review, April 2015)

PeezPix by Ted Pease

Dog Dreams










Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 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, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“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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Painful Times

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We’re Doomed

“One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.” 

—Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), philosopher and writer, “The Triumph of Stupidity,” in Mortals and Others, 1933

• Editorial Comment: Oh, I don’t know . . .





PeezPix by Ted Pease

Pelican Feet








Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 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, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“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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The Megyn & The Donald

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The Trump Wars

“‘We weren't in a war with Donald Trump. He was upset with us, we weren't upset with him. We just wanted to forge forward, and there was no reason to have a dust-up with a presidential candidate who we needed to cover, he's a subject of our news coverage. Understanding those dynamics, there was no upside to saying anything more than I did.’ . . .


“Trump will likely return to her show though, Kelly said. ‘Well, it has to be just right. I think that will be a big moment. Don't you think that'll be a big television moment?’” 

—Megyn Kelly, Fox newscaster and questioner in first GOP presidential debate, in Hadas Gold, “Megyn Kelly: We never wanted a war with Donald Trump,” Politico.com, Oct. 8, 2015

• Editorial Comment: The biggest, Megyn.

PeezPix by Ted Pease
 

Doggie Debates








Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 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, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“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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Business Decisions

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News from Away

News: “McClatchy to shutter foreign bureaus.” —Poynter (10/12/2015)

“I fear it is just a matter of time before newspapers will be considered the same as any business, a fit prize for investment by interests that do not care about the principles of good journalism.”

—C.K. McClatchy, newspaper editor/CEO, in a Hays Press-Enterprise Lecture at the University of California-Riverside, 2006 (Thanks to alert WORDster Bruce Adomeit)

• Editorial Comment: Ka-ching.




PeezPix by Ted Pease
 

Floral Arrangement









Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 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, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“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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