COVID Paparazzi

“It’s a cliché that a picture is worth a thousand words. It can be — but when it comes to the flouting, or apparent flouting, of lockdown rules, a thousand words is better than a picture.

“Sometimes, such images do highlight legitimate problems. Often, however, they’re lazy clickbait. At worst, they’re dangerous. It’s one thing to state that social distancing is essential right now, and advise people as to how they can do it effectively. Visual snitching on random people . . . is quite another. We aren’t the lockdown police.” 

—Jon Alsop, “There’s no wisdom in crowd photos,” Columbia Journalism Review, April 29, 2020. Image: Overhead view shows beachgoers weren't as close to each other as they looked on the evening news. “Uproar reaction over social distancing at beaches,” News4Jax, Jacksonville, FL, April 20, 2020.

• Editorial Comment: It all depends on your perspective . . . and the focal length of your lens.

 

PeezPix

Piglet

Check out the May issue of Senior News: “Humboldt Holds Its Breath.” Free everywhere.

  

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

More Than an Obit

“In Chicago, Christy Gutowski, who typically writes about child welfare, criminal and social justice topics for the Tribune, is now the paper’s lead reporter on its ever-expanding obits team.

“‘I don’t view it as a typical obit with a set template,’ she said. ‘I am writing a life story to ensure history properly remembers someone’s loved one. They are not a statistic or data point.’

“Gutowski said the obit effort accomplishes three goals: honor the victim, comfort the victim’s family, and help the public to fully understand the human toll of this health crisis. 

“‘This is an important public service,’ she said. ‘I feel that I, in a small way, am making a positive contribution at such a difficult, important time in the world.’”

—Katie Pellico and Brian Stelter,“Writing about the dead during a pandemic: ‘They are not a statistic or data point,’” CNN, April 25, 2020.

 

• Editorial Comment: This image from the Boston Globe of Sunday, April 19, is of two of the newspaper’s 22 pages of obituaries, including 245 death notices and 179 photos.

 

  

PeezPix

Douglas Iris

Check out the May issue of Senior News: “Humboldt Holds Its Breath.” Free everywhere.

  

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

Reading Assignment

Q: “If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?” 

A: “It would depend on who’s reading it to him.”

—Fran Lebowitz, writer, “Fran Lebowitz: By the Book,” The New York Times, March 21, 2017. Image: A librarian with time on her hands arranged these books. Read the titles in sequence.

• Editorial Comment: “Horton Hears a Who”?

  

PeezPix

Another Reading Assignment: May’s Senior News is out. Click here.

Check out the May issue of Senior News: “Humboldt Holds Its Breath.” Free everywhere.

  

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

Support Local News

“This is a time of particular importance for local news. [National media] can’t tell us here in Brunswick where to go for testing, what the situation at our local hospital or when the grocery store’s going to be open. Local news has a critical information function in this particular situation. . . . that’s really important to people.”

“This is an important part of the national infrastructure. In a pandemic, information is one of the absolute key resources, and we need to make sure it’s still going.”

—U.S. Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), “Senators urge stimulus funding for local newspapers,” CNN Reliable Sources, April 12, 2020. 

• Editorial Comment: I’ll subscribe to that, Senator.

• More: 19 Senators Push for Local Newspaper Aid in Next Stimulus Bill

  

PeezPix

Compelling Stuff from the Local Rag: “Wacky Weed” to “Nibbling Nannies”

Check out the April issue of Senior News — “An Unsettling Spring.” Coming Sunday for May: “Humboldt Holds Its Breath.” Free everywhere.

  

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

‘I was wondering if I was crazy’

“‘My job on the Freedom Ride was to document what happened when blacks and whites together sit on the bus in the front, go to the counters in the bus terminals, drink out of the white or black fountain, go to the ‘colored’ restrooms . . . and see what happens when they used those facilities,’ he said.

“But Gaffney kept his distance from the other riders, for his safety and theirs. He said being a photographer was perhaps even more dangerous than being a Freedom Rider.

“[A]sked if he thought the Freedom Riders were crazy, Gaffney said, ‘Well, I was wondering if I was crazy. They took a nonviolent course . . . before they left. I don’t know how they train you to be nonviolent when you’re getting your head beaten. 

“‘I was afraid I might not come back. The further South I got, and they found out I had the camera? When we hit North Carolina, the headline in the newspaper said, ‘Stormtroopers Coming’ in the largest type they could have. So I said, things are getting rough.’”

—Theodore Gaffney (1927-2020), civil rights photographer, in Ira Shapira, “He risked his life photographing the 1961 Freedom Riders. Theodore Gaffney just died from the coronavirus at 92,” The Washington Post, April 16, 2020.

• Editorial Comment: A long ride. RIP, Mr. Gaffney.

  

PeezPix

Keep Left

Check out the April issue of Senior News — “An Unsettling Spring.” Coming Sunday for May: “Humboldt Holds Its Breath.” Free everywhere.

  

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

The President’s ‘Press Briefings’

“Training a camera on a live event, and just letting it play out, is technology, not journalism; journalism requires editing and context. I recognize that presidential utterances occupy a unique category. Within that category, however, President Trump has created a special compartment all his own.

“The question, clearly, is whether his status as president of the United States obliges us to broadcast his every briefing live. No. No more so than you at The Times should be obliged to provide your readers with a daily, verbatim account.” 

—Ted Koppel, veteran TV newsman, in Michael J. Grynbaum, “Trump’s Briefings Are a Ratings Hit. Should Networks Cover Them Live?” New York Times, March 25, 2020. (Thanks to alert WORDster Tom Ferrell)

• Editorial Comment: Stenography ≠ journalism.

  

PeezPix

Watch Dog

Check out the April issue of Senior News — “An Unsettling Spring.” Coming Sunday for May: “Humboldt Holds Its Breath.” Free everywhere.

  

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

A WORD for Earth Day 2020

“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but nature more. . . ”

—Lord Byron (1788-1824), poet, “The Sea,” in “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” 1812. Image: Seastacks, Trinidad Bay, California/Ted Pease.

• Editorial Comment: Don’t self-distance from your Mother.

  

PeezPix

Postcard from Mother Earth

Check out the April issue of Senior News — “An Unsettling Spring.” Coming Sunday for May: “Humboldt Holds Its Breath.” Free everywhere.

  

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

Social Distancing

“I lie on the beach like a crocodile and let myself be roasted by the sun. I never see a newspaper and don’t give a damn for what is called the world.”

—Albert Einstein (1879-1955), theoretical physicist and world-class sunbather, 1918.

• Editorial Comment: Pretty smart fella.

  

PeezPix

Fiddlehead

Check out the April issue of Senior News — “An Unsettling Spring.”

  

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