Finding Subscribers

“Both the Paradise Post and the Enterprise-Record had a good number of subscribers in Paradise, and now we don’t have a town to deliver it to.”

—David Little, editor of the Chico (CA) Enterprise-Record, on continuing to publish after fire has wiped out the town of Paradise, “A California town is scorched and empty, but local journalists still deliver,” CNN, Nov. 24, 2018.

• Editorial Note: A very sad paper route.





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Buddy

FREE! Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email This free “service” is sent to 2,000,000 or so subscribers around the planet more or less every weekday morning during WORD season. If you have recovered from whatever illness 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. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard

From the Historical Foresight Department

“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.” 

–Western Union internal memo, 1876. Image: Early “selfie.”

• Editorial Note: That’s what the European Scribes  & Ink-Stained Wretches Union said about Johann Gutenberg’s crazy “printing press” idea in 1439.



• Another Fun TechnoFact: On Nov. 28, 1814, the Times of London was first printed by automatic steam-powered presses built by German inventors Friedrich Koenig and Andreas Friedrich Bauer, making newspapers available to a mass audience. The rest, I guess, is history. (Thanks to alert WORDster Kathleen Franklin)



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Good Heart, Needs a Little Work

FREE! Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email This free “service” is sent to 2,000,000 or so subscribers around the planet more or less every weekday morning during WORD season. If you have recovered from whatever illness 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. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard

Go Forth

“If you can just capture the humanity of the people of the stories you’re telling, you then get that much closer to your own humanity. And you can confront your bias and you can build your credibility and hone your instincts and compound your compassion. You can use your gifts, that’s what you’re really here to do, to illuminate the darkness in our world.” 

—Oprah Winfrey, media mogul and commencement speaker, Annenberg School of Journalism, University of Southern California, “Oprah to Graduates: Vote! Vote! Vote!” The Atlantic, May 2018.

• Editorial Note: Now, look under your seats . . .

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Pelican Patch

FREE! Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email This free “service” is sent to 2,000,000 or so subscribers around the planet more or less every weekday morning during WORD season. If you have recovered from whatever illness 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. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard

Stubborn Facts

“The president says, ‘One of the most important things that I’ve done, especially for the public, is explain that a lot of the news is indeed fake.’ That IS an important statement, but only because it shows what a deceiver and charlatan he is. Journalists don’t make up stuff, except in extremely rare circumstances, and in those cases they are shunned by their profession. But Trump wants you to disbelieve them because they are performing their constitutional function of holding him accountable. Facts are stubborn things. They will persist no matter what he does or what his personality cult believes.” 

—Al Cross, veteran Louisville Courier-Journal journalist and director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, University of Kentucky, on Facebook, Nov. 25, 2018.

• Editorial Note: Amen, brother.

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Snow Day

FREE! Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email This free “service” is sent to 2,000,000 or so subscribers around the planet more or less every weekday morning during WORD season. If you have recovered from whatever illness 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. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard

Roll the Presses

“Despite some colleagues losing everything in Northern California’s destructive Camp Fire, journalists at the Chico Enterprise-Record and the Paradise Post are still putting out their newspapers. 

“‘It’s like the one small contribution we can make to make things normal for the community,’ said Enterprise-Record Editor David Little. ‘You know — the paper still lives. It’s kind of a symbolic, important message to send to the community, that not everything’s lost.”

—Ryan Young and Dakin Andone, “A California town is scorched and empty, but local journalists still deliver,” CNN, Nov. 24, 2018.

• Editorial Note: Ten newspaper staffers lost their homes in the fire. 85 people are confirmed dead, and 249 were still missing Sunday. Recommended: Brian Stelter's interview with editor David Little, embedded in CNN article.

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Greenery

FREE! Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email This free “service” is sent to 2,000,000 or so subscribers around the planet more or less every weekday morning during WORD season. If you have recovered from whatever illness 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. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard

Tofu Turkey

• Editorial Comment: May we all be as lively, intelligent and compassionate. Have a good Turkey Day, whatever your feast of choice may be.

FREE! Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email This free “service” is sent to 2,000,000 or so subscribers around the planet more or less every weekday morning during WORD season. If you have recovered from whatever illness 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. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard

Bamboozle

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” 

—Carl Sagan (1934-1996), astronomer and writer. (Thanks to alert WORDster Christine Fairbanks)

• Editorial Comment: Bill-yuns and bill-yuns bamboozled.




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Crab Pile

FREE! Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email This free “service” is sent to 2,000,000 or so subscribers around the planet more or less every weekday morning during WORD season. If you have recovered from whatever illness 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. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard

Press Reforms

“Televised White House briefings and news conferences have become theaters for self-promoting journalists seeking to disrupt rather than describe. Acosta’s antics are a symptom of a problem enabled by a format that encourages personality-driven reporting.”

—James S. Robbins, author and former Bush2 Administration official, “Acosta's legacy: Kill the lights, shut off the cameras, reform White House press corps,” USA Today, Nov. 19, 2018.

• Editorial Comment: Maybe they could just hand out press releases.

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Launch Beach

FREE! Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email This free “service” is sent to 2,000,000 or so subscribers around the planet more or less every weekday morning during WORD season. If you have recovered from whatever illness 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. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard

Get a Life

“Tweeting and trolling are easy. Mastering the arts of conversation and measured debate is hard. Texting is easy. Writing a proper letter is hard. Looking stuff up on Google is easy. Knowing what to search for in the first place is hard. Having a thousand friends on Facebook is easy. Maintaining six or seven close adult friendships over the space of many years is hard. Swiping right on Tinder is easy. Finding love — and staying in it — is hard.”

—Bret Stephens, opinion columnist, “How Plato Foresaw Facebook’s Folly,” The New York Times, Nov. 16, 2018.

• Editorial Comment: “Conversation is hard”? haha LMAO! 😆 

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Written Communication

FREE! Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email This free “service” is sent to 2,000,000 or so subscribers around the planet more or less every weekday morning during WORD season. If you have recovered from whatever illness 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. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard

Tyranny

“Tyranny, according to traditional theory, is the form of government in which the ruler rules out of his own will and in pursuit of his own interests, thus offending the private welfare and the personal liberties of his own subjects.”  

—Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), German philosopher and political theorist, “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” 1949.

• Editorial Comment: But how is the election and continued support of such a ruler in the electorate’s self-interest?




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Morning Beach

FREE! Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email This free “service” is sent to 2,000,000 or so subscribers around the planet more or less every weekday morning during WORD season. If you have recovered from whatever illness 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. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard

Questioning Trump

“We can’t have a president acting like dictators do all over the world — to silence reporters that they don’t like or reporters who say things or dig too deeply or expose the president too much. The president wants to silence people like that. He cannot do that under the First Amendment.”

—Ted Olson, former Bush solicitor general now representing CNN, “CNN sues Trump to get Jim Acosta’s press pass restored,” Politico, Nov. 13, 2018.

• Editorial Comment: No tough questions, no unpleasant answers.




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Fogwalk

FREE! Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email This free “service” is sent to 2,000,000 or so subscribers around the planet more or less every weekday morning during WORD season. If you have recovered from whatever illness 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. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard