St. Mumbles

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Alert WORDster

. . . Bruce Adomeit of the Minneapolis Star Tribune celebrates the WORD’s latest escape from St. Mumbles Home for the Terminally Verbose by sending this image of the Mumbling Lighthouse, off the coast of Wales, after which the WORD’s institution is modeled....




The Mombles Leuchtthurm an der Kuste von Glamorganshire

Mumbles Lighthouse, built in 1794, sits on the outer of two islands off Mumbles Head in Swansea Bay, Wales. “Mumbles Head,” he mused. “I like it!”
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Overheard in the Newsroom

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Overheard in the Newsroom #1718:

Assignment editor to Producer: “I have to run outside for a second. If anyone asks, I quit and walked out.”

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The Web’s Carbon Half-Life

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New Media’s Golden Age

“This is the beauty of the new media: it isn’t so transitory as newspapers and TV. Good stuff sticks around and people email it to friends and it slowly floods the country. What the new media age also means is that there won’t be newspapers to send reporters to cover the next war, but there will be 6 million teenage girls blogging about their plans for the weekend.”

—Garrison Keillor, radio yarn-teller, wordguy and author, 2009
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Hey! There’s a science to it!

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Overheard in the Newsroom #1713:

New Media editor: “Teaching journalism? That’s like… teaching coal mining.”
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Abrasives

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Fine Editorial Sanding

“[T]here is a terrific disadvantage not having the abrasive quality of the press applied to you daily, to an administration, even though we never like it, and even though we wish they didn’t write it, and even though we disapprove, there isn’t any doubt that we could not do the job at all in a free society without a very, very active press. . . It seems to me their obligation is to be as tough as they can on the administration but do it in a way which is directed towards getting as close to the truth as they can get and not merely because of some political motivation.”

—John F. Kennedy (1917-1963), 35th U.S. president, 1962

• This week from Uncle Jay Explains the News.
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Workplace etiquette . . .

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. . . . take a breath before resorting to strangulation.

Overheard in the Newsroom #1695:

Photo editor #1: “Why are you staring at me?”

Photo editor #2: “Because I can’t strangle you.”

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Verbish Doggerel

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On Verbiage & Punditry

Editor’s Note: In Monday’s season opener, my students were challenged to find definitions of “verbiage” and “punditry,” two terms with which the WORD is overly familiar. A loyal WORDster sends this original illustration in the style of the Mighty Ogden Nash . . .

“The definition of punditry
is a scholarly gift to all and sunditry
The definition of verbiage
is just so much excess wordy baggiage.”
—Javan Kienzle, alert WORDster, author and editor, 2009

Another Note: Yesterday’s query from a WORDster in Vietnam yielded a number of pointers. To see them, or to pitch in, go yesterday’s WORDlink and click on the comments link at the bottom of the day’s quote:

• This from a faithful WORDster, seeking assistance with a Quindlen quote. I have my own ideas, but would be interested if the rest of the Faithful would like to take a whack at it. Reply to me, or post directly to the comments section of yesterday’s Word.

Hi there, I have to do a translation assignment but cannot understand this quote? Could you please help to clarify it? “Being a reporter is as much a diagnosis as a job description.” --Anna Quindlen Thank you for your help and thanks for continuing to send the interesting and useful journalism opinions everyday. Regards, Thu

Precious Pest

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Liberty’s Pesty Shadow

“We are, heart and soul, friends to the freedom of the press. It is, however, the prostituted companion of liberty, and somehow or other, we know not how, its efficient auxiliary. It follows the substance like its shade; but while a man walks erect, he may observe that his shadow is almost always in the dirt. It corrupts, it deceives, it inflames. It strips virtue of her honors, and lends to faction its wildfire and its poisoned arms, and in the end is its own enemy and the usurper’s ally. It would be easy to enlarge on its evils. They are in England, they are here, they are everywhere. It is a precious pest, and a necessary mischief, and there would be no liberty without it.”

—Fisher Ames (1758-1808), Massashusetts statesman, 1807
(Thanks to alert WORDster Joseph Benham)

Query
This from a faithful WORDster, seeking assistance with a Quindlen quote. I have my own ideas, but would be interested if the rest of the Faithful would like to take a whack at it. Reply to me, or post directly to the “comments” at the end of this post.

Hi there,
I have to do a translation assignment but cannot understand this quote? Could you please help to clarify it?
“Being a reporter is as much a diagnosis as a job description.” – Anna Quindlen
Thank you for your help and thanks for continuing to send the interesting and useful journalism opinions everyday.
Regards,
Thu

PS
This from a Facebook Post yesterday:
Overheard in the Newsroom #1686: Home-school kid on tour of newsroom to copy editors/paginators: “So basically... your job is a bunch of clicking.”
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You Want Fries With That?

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The Good Old Days of Newspapering
“On behalf of the newspaper industry (new, cost-cutting motto: ‘All the News That’), I wish to announce some changes we’re making to serve you better. When I say ‘serve you better,’ I mean ‘increase our profits.’ We newspapers are very big on profits these days. We’re a business, just like any other business, except that we employ English majors.”
—Dave Barry, columnist, The Miami Herald, 2001


Ted Kennedy Dead at 77
—The Boston Globe

“Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed.”
—U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass. (1932-2009)






RIP, Teddy.

Ignorance ≠ Bliss?

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A thought as school starts. . .

“If you are not in awe of what you don’t know, you shouldn’t be a journalist.”

—Sandy Close, executive editor and director, New America Media, 1995

(Thanks to alert WORDster Betty Medsger)

And that’s the WORD.

Additional wisdom from Uncle Jay Explains the News.
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SEASON 14! The WORD Is Baaaaa-aaaack!

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Riled by ‘Stephen-Come-Lately Colbert,’ The WORD
Escapes Sanitarium for Season 14 of Pithy Wisdom

LOGAN, Utah—Sure as the swallows return to Capistrano, as students flood back onto campuses, as professors steel themselves for another academic year—well, perhaps more like the buzzards that flock back to Hinckley, Ohio every year—Today’s WORD on Journalism broke out of its padded maximum conjugation cubicle sometime in the pre-dawn Monday.

Doctors and overly thesarused white-coated attendants at St. Mumbles Home for the Terminally Verbose on a rocky crag overlooking the Pacific in Northern California confirmed at 6 a.m. (MDT) today that the WORD is once more free to afflict a news-addled planet with more pithy “wisdom” on journalism, the mass media, and a nearly extinct superannuated institution, the press.

The first panicky whispers came shortly after 2 a.m. as the dreamless sleep of the blissfully ignorant was rent by the first murky soundbites of quotable insight.

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’re better off with Lost.”

Reportedly, one of the things that really ticked off the WORD has been the misappropriation of its moniker not only by organized religion, but apparently especially, by Comedy Central pundit and interloper Stephen Colbert, whose feature “The Word” increasingly impinges on this WORD’s territory.

Over recent weeks, snoozing uneasily beneath stacks of Bartlett’s, Brainy Quotes and Marvel comics, St. Mumbles officials reported, the WORD has been thrashing in his uneasy sleep, muttering, “Truthiness!” and other obscure epithets. Taking a page, literally, from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s prescription, “All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath,” the WORD seems to have escaped St. Mumbles by boat.

“There is some slim hope that he fell overboard and drowned,” one officer at the scene said.

As the mingled joy and horror spread, the news that the WORD had once again shimmied down the drainpipe at St. Mumbles to launch its 14th horrific season of punditry and verbiage prompted the most violent response in the journalism department at Utah State University, which spawned the global online affliction in 1995.

(NOTE: If you are one of Professor Pease’s students—and if you are, everyone pities you—your assignment is to define both “punditry” and “verbiage,” and use each in a sentence that makes their meaning clear. Note: Wikipedia is NOT an accepted source! “Truthiness,” too, for that matter.)

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 in 1995 a new and unpleasant disturbance of the general peace, 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 Sanitarium last spring, nearly 1,800 (mostly volunteer) victims subscribed to the direct email WORD list. More got the WORD by checking the website, whence it was forwarded like a pox to many more unsuspecting victims by so-called “friends.”

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 still rings with an increasingly popular fervor today. Enjoy!

TODAY’S WORD ON JOURNALISM—The 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

And that’s the WORD.

* * * * *

BeLeegered Tweeter

The Last WORD, 2008-2009

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The Fat Lady Sings, Off-Key, Drools

At about this time every year, like the swallows to Capistrano or the buzzards to Hinckley, Ohio, the WORD migrates to its summer musing grounds at the sanitarium—St. Mumbles Home for the Terminally Verbose.*

The reason is clear, and never moreso than as this season—the WORD’s 13th—peters out.

It’s been a fraught year of high palaver and eye-popping transition, both good and not-so-much. An interminable presidential campaign saga finally did end, and in extraordinary and historic fashion. Meanwhile, the bottom and everything that’s below the bottom fell out of the economy, with families, homes, entire industries and—of particular interest to WORDsters and the civic-minded—dozens of daily newspapers (“I don't so much mind that newspapers are dying—it’s watching them commit suicide that pisses me off.”—Molly Ivins). . . all evaporating. What replaces them, from the individual to the institutional to the societal? Are we looking at a future of in-depth Tweeting?

As any newsperson or firehorse knows, it’s hard to turn your back on day-to-day catastrophe—we just have to look at the car wreck. But even the most deranged and driven need a rest. As philosopher Lilly Tomlin once observed, “No matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up.”

So this morning, as a near-frost hovered over northern Utah, the unmarked van pulled into the driveway and the gentle, soft-spoken men in the white coats rolled the WORD out of bed and into a straitjacket for the usual summer trip to St. Mumbles, where the blathering one will be assigned a hammock and fed soothing, healthy foods—like tapioca and salmon—while recharging the essential muscles of cynicism, outrage, sarcasm, social engagement and high-mindedness, in preparation for the next edition.

This seasonal navel-gazing is essential to the process, of course. As deep-thinker John Alston once observed, “If you don’t control your mind, someone else will.” And since the WORD’s fondest hope is to control and corrupt the impressionable and fragile minds of its faithful subscribers worldwide, preparation and planning are required. Because as seamless and easy as it seems, “Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for,” as Jacques Barzun said—harassing an unsuspecting planet 170+ mornings a year takes forethought. Well, it takes something....

Because the WORD’s dearest hope is not, in John Kenneth Galbraith’s terms, to offer “[t]he conventional view [that] serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking,” in fact, the WORD was born and designed to cultivate cerebral discomfort. It is too easy and much too tempting to tune out all the noise that assails us these days (what was Hannity blathering about the other day? —“Apples of Liberty” being plucked by Obama into the “Crate of Socialism“?—who wouldn’t need to tune that crap out?). But there’s no easy out for devoted WORDsters: “There are two ways to slide easily through life,” Polish logician Alfred Korzybski wrote, “to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking.”

As the WORD recharges its soapbox for the summer, devoted WORDsters know that it’ll be back in August. To paraphrase the late-lamented Molly Ivins, “There’s nothing you can do about being born a WORDster—fish gotta swim and hearts gotta bleed.”

So as the WORD trundles off to its halcyon summer of reflection and conjugation at St. Mumbles, we wish you all, devoted whacko readers, a safe, warm, pleasant and productive summer—with generous hammock time. “Be who you are and say what you feel,” as Dr. Seuss instructed, “because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don't mind.”

But Season 13, like all good things, must come to a —30—. As Karl Marx, the famous philosopher-comic, said, “Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough.” So this isn't a Last WORD—Lord knows there are always more!—but just the end of this episode. Look for the WORD’s escape from St. Mumbles in August, once again to afflict, merrily, gaily, happily, an unsuspecting world

Summer well, friends.

* (See early column on the Birth of the WORD.)

Editorial Comment: That’s a wrap.
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Press ‘Survivor‘?

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New Reality Shows

“License, or the abuse of liberty, may creep into a press which enjoys liberty. Anti-social practices complained of in England and the United States include sensationalism, coloring or distorting the news, propagandizing in the news columns, ‘trial’ by the newspaper of accused persons, triviality in the news, and ‘lying’ or falsification, especially in politics.”

—George Fox Mott, journalism professor, in An Outline Survey of Journalism, 1940

Editorial Comment: So?

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What's All This Crap?

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Waste of Space, and Trees!

“Every single journalism class at NYU has required me to bring the bulky newspaper. I don’t understand why they don’t let us access the online version, get our current events news from other outlets, or even use our NYTimes app on the iPhone. Bringing the New York Times pains me because I refuse to believe that it’s the only source for credible news or Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism and it’s a big waste of trees.”

—Alana Taylor, student journalist, 2008

Click here for story.

Editorial Comment: And this dumb Moby Dick! It's like a whale! Can't I bring my Kindle?

News Note: “The Boston Globe and its largest employees union reached a tentative agreement early Wednesday morning on concessions that will keep the 137-year-old newspaper publishing, the union president said.”--Associated Press 5/6/09

RoxyWatch: Imprisoned U.S. journalist Roxana Saberi halted her hunger strike Monday, her father reports, after she was moved to the prison hospital in Iran. The 32-year-old journalist's appeal of her eight-year prison sentence for espionage is scheduled for next week.
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Times Co. Pimps Out The Boston Globe

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Newspaper News Note: “The Boston Globe will survive for at least another day, but the economic problems dogging New England's storied newspaper are reflective of an entire industry in the midst of a historic, wrenching transformation.”

—Christian Science Monitor 5/5/09 (Story here.)

Good to the Last Drop

“From the moment the Times Co. purchased The Globe in 1993, it has treated New England’s largest newspaper like a cheap whore. It pimped her out for profit during the booming 1990s and then pillaged her when times got tough. It closed her foreign bureaus and cheapened her coverage of everything from the fine arts to the hard sciences.”

—Eileen McNamara, Boston Herald (and former Globe) columnist,
April 7, 2009 (Column here.)

Editorial Comment: As a 10-something newspaperboy, I trudged through snow and biked the Globe to subscribers for years. This is agonizing—like hearing the death rattle of a beloved grandparent.

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Kiss a Pig

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Fox News Has It Wrong!
Mexicans NOT to Blame
for Swine Flu Epidemic

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Where's Hunh?

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Forget Iran—Most Americans
can’t find THEMSELVES on a map

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Not Grampa’s Twitter

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Like ‘Clay Tablets”

“The newspaper industry is hurting. I should explain that term to my younger viewers. A ‘newspaper’ is like a blog that leaves ink on your hands and covers topics other than how much you love Fall Out Boy.”

—Stephen Colbert, host, “The Colbert Report,” advice to John Sturm of the National Newspaper Assn., March 31, 2009

Editorial Comment: What else is there?

World Press Freedom Day 2009

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Global Interdependency

“We must strengthen our efforts to build a media that is critical of inherited assumptions yet tolerant of alternative perspectives; a media that brings competing narratives into a shared story of interdependence; a media that responds to diversity through dialogue. . . . On World Press Freedom Day 2009, let us all commit to furthering press freedom and freedom of expression worldwide. . . . A free press is not a luxury that can wait until more peaceful times. It is, rather, part of the very process through which they may be achieved.”

—Koïchiro Matsuura, UNESCO director-general,

message for World Press Freedom Day 2009

World Press Freedom Day is Sunday, May 3.
Links to 24 international press organizations.

Editorial Comment: Where can a planet get together and talk?

Photos: Vittorio de Filippis (top) at a 2008 Paris protest of his arrest, strip-search and detention in relation to a libel case. His account of the arrest provoked general outcry in the media and political world. AFP PHOTO/PATRICK KOVARIK

Palestinian journalists (at right) light candles after burying Reuters cameraman Fadel Shana, 23, in 2008 in Gaza City. Shana was killed by an Israeli tank shell during a military incursion into Gaza. AFP PHOTO/MAHMUD HAMS

More photos at World Press Freedom Day.

Old Folks

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Hope in a Geriatric America

“For people who still love print, who like to hold it, feel it, rustle it, tear stuff out, do their I. F. Stone thing, it’s important to remember that people are living longer. That’s the most hopeful thing you can say about print journalism, that old people are living longer.”

—Phil Bronstein, editor-at-large, The San Francisco Chronicle, 2009

(Quoted in Maureen Dowd column.)

(Thanks to aging but alert WORDster Andy Merton)

Editorial Comment: Clip those support-hose coupons.
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Fox News Flu?

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Swine Flu & Racism:

“Responsible members of the Republican Party need to speak out IMMEDIATELY against the conservative commentators in their own ranks using swine flu as an excuse to spew out racist hatred. Radio, TV and newspaper personalities have jumped on the illness as a platform to attack ‘illegal aliens’ for being responsible for carrying the disease across the Mexican border and infecting innocent Americans.”

—Bonnie Fuller, Huffington Post blogger (Click here.)

Editorial Comment: We got a vaccine for that?
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News Judgment

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Missing News:

“Everyone was crowded in, trying to build up their courage because they knew that the next day they would face down state troopers while trying to register to vote. I listened and watched, thinking to myself that no one will see this scene. It won’t be reported in the newspaper, and it won’t be on television. It made me think about how many similar scenes were ignored because a president, or some other person deemed important, wasn’t there.”

—Howard Zinn, historian and activist, recalling a 1963 African American
church service before a civil right march, 2009

Editorial Comment: Voice for the voiceless...

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New Business Model

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Prurient Interest

“If you’re serious about wanting to compete on the Internet, why don't newspapers have a huge porn section?”

—Stephen Colbert, host, “The Colbert Report,”
advice to John Sturm of the National Newspaper Assn., March 31, 2009
Click here to view 5-minute segment.

Editorial Comment: How about an X-rated crossword?

Newswatch: Updates on imprisoned U.S. journalists Roxana Saberi in Iran (click here for the Tehran Times), and , and Current TV’s Euna Lee and Laura Ling in North Korea.
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Drips

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Advice for Furloughed Newspaper People

“Now that you have your mind off your regular work, you can read the papers and watch the news like a normal person, not like a news person. If the project is painting the bathroom, you have to cover the fixtures with newspapers, patch the cracks, prime the walls and apply two finish coats. To get this done in a day or two means getting up early, working steadily and being physically tired at night. Notice how little time you have to skim the headlines, much less read the jump on sprawling newspaper stories? Now that you have a fresh perspective on the press, you can begin to understand how your audience feels.”

--Alan Mutter, blogger (“Reflections of a Newsosaur”),
former newspaperman, Silicon Valley CEO
and sometime journalism instructor. 2009

Editorial Comment: Newspapers catch drips.

Newswatch: Updates on imprisoned U.S. journalists Roxana Saberi in Iran (homepage), and Current TV’s Euna Lee and Laura Ling in North Korea.
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Noxious Vapors

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A Press PS for Earth Day

“Newspapers ... serve as chimnies to carry off noxious vapors and smoke.”

—President Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), enviro-statesman, 1802

Editorial Comment: Global warming explained.
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Newspapers—Low Gas Emissions

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Earth-Friendly

“Not that print journalism actually emits much in the way of greenhouse gases. We have an itty-bitty carbon footprint. We’re earth-friendly. The current press run of an average big city daily newspaper can be made from one tree. Compare that to the global warming hot air produced by talk radio, cable TV, and Andrew Sullivan.”

—P.J. O’Rourke, columnist, The Weekly Standard, December 2008
(Thanks to alert WORDster Dan Kubiske)

Editorial Comment: Buy a paper. Hug your mother....

Of Interest: Aging dinosaurs bloviate on the future of “The American Newspaper,” on KUED-TV’s “Utah Now.”
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Help Me, Heathcliff!

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Escapism

“A book provides what it always has: a haven. I remember the first year after my second child was born, what I can remember of it at all, as a year of disarray, of overturned glasses of milk, of toys on the floor, of hours from sunrise to sunset that were horribly busy but filled with what, at the end of the day, seemed like absolutely nothing at all. What saved my sanity was books. . . . The romantic ramblings of Heathcliff make a piquant counterpoint to dirty diapers, that’s for sure. As it was for me when I was young and surrounded by siblings, as it is for me today when I am surrounded by children, reading continues to provide an escape from a crowded house into an imaginary room of one’s own.”

—Anna Quindlen, columnist and author of How Reading Changed My Life (1998)

Editorial Comment: Beats a Tweet.

2009 Pulitzers Announced: Click here for list of winners.

Of Interest: Aging dinosaurs bloviate on the future of “The American Newspaper” on KUED-TV’s Utah Now.
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Watchdogs or Yap Dogs?

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Yapping Heads

“If newspapers become mostly infotainment websites—if the number of well-trained investigative journalists dwindles still further—and if we’re soon left with nothing but the yapping heads who dominate cable ‘news’ and talk radio, how will we recognize, or hope to forestall, impending national and global crises? How will we know if government officials have made terrible mistakes, as even the best will sometimes do? How will we know if government officials have told us terrible lies, as the worst have sometimes done? A decimated, demoralized and under-resourced press corps hardly questioned the Bush administration's flimsy case for war in Iraq—and the price for that failure will be paid for generations.”

—Rosa Brooks, now former columnist, Los Angeles Times, 2009

Click here for full column.

Editorial Comment: Can’t somebody shut that watchdog up?

Of Interest: Aging dinosaurs bloviate on the future of “The American Newspaper,” on KUED-TV’s “Utah Now.”

News Update: American journalists held in Korea, Iran. Euna Lee and Laura Ling, two journalists for Al Gore's TV network, have been held as spies for eight weeks in North Korea. Meanwhile, Roxana Saberi remains jailed and charged as a spy in Teheran, despite calls for her release from President Obama.

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Discussion of "The American Newspaper" on KUED

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Whither newspapers?

. . . and with them, whither the American conversation? Glenn Warchol, blogger for The Salt Lake Tribune, Joel Campbell of the BYU Department of Communications, and Ted Pease of the WORD and USU's Journalism & Communication Department put their heads together with Doug Fabrizio, host of Utah Now on KUED public TV in Salt Lake City. (4/17/09).

In discussing the future of the dying technology, three old, white, male dinosaurs weigh in. Also appearing, Tribune editor Nancy Conway, and Deseret News editor Joe Cannon.
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Some Pig!

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Bashing Charlotte’s Ghostwriter

“The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students’ grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it. . . .

“It’s sad. Several generations of college students learned their grammar from the uninformed bossiness of Strunk and White, and the result is a nation of educated people who know they feel vaguely anxious and insecure whenever they write ‘however’ or ‘than me’ or ‘was’ or ‘which,’ but can’t tell you why. The land of the free [is?] in the grip of The Elements of Style.”

—Geoffrey K. Pullum, head of linguistics and English language at the University of Edinburgh and co-author (with Rodney Huddleston)
of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Full sanctimonious heresy here.

Editorial Comment: Piffle! Click here for pre-rebuttal.

NewsWatch: NYTimes Editorial on Roxana Saberi.
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Big Dig?

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What Happened to ‘Too Important to Fail’?

“I was definitely shocked to hear about the Globe. I fundamentally misunderstood what was going on. Boston.com has 5.6 million readers a month, and yet this hugely successful news gathering operation is going out of business. . . . Part of the erosion of newspapers is about new media, but part of it is newspapers’ own fault. I think the public has felt let down by The New York Times and others for not asking the tough questions, whether about the Iraq war or the subprime issue. The job of the fourth estate is to stand outside the vested interests and say, ‘Wait a minute, this isn't viable.’”

—Ben Affleck, Boston-bred actor whose new movie, State of Play with Russell Crowe, is about an aggressive news reporter. Click here.

Editorial Comment: Digging themselves a deep hole: Newspapers’ “Big Dig”?

Teawatch: Jon Stewart reports on Fox’s “coverage” of “grassroots” tax protests.

Page One Watch from the Poynter Institute.
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Put Your Tax Dollars to Work

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Earmarks for My Taxes

“It’s time for a government bailout of journalism. If we’re willing to use taxpayer money to build roads, pay teachers and maintain a military; if we’re willing to bail out banks and insurance companies and failing automakers, we should be willing to part with some public funds to keep journalism alive, too.”

—Rosa Brooks, now former columnist, Los Angeles Times, 2009. Click here for column.

Editorial Comment: Paperboy tips tax-deductible

Newswatch: Freelance American journalist Roxanna Saberi remains in custody in Teheran's Evin Prison, now charged with espionage. BBC video clip (4/14/09).
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Equal Opportunity Skewering

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Fairness Doctrine Revisited

“We never waver in our political stance: We are pro-smart and anti-dumb. If you can find us a side of the political aisle with no stupid people on it, we promise not to jab that side.”

—Todd Hanson, story editor, The Onion, 2008

Editorial Comment: EOEditor-approved.

Newswatch: Freelance American journalist Roxanna Saberi remains in custody in Teheran's Evin Prison, now charged with espionage. See Committee to Protect Journalists.
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Hunkering Down

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Ethics Enduring

“As the national media—and the citizenry—hunker down in economic survival mode, individual journalists and news organizations remain willing to take risks to uphold the integrity of the news.”

—Tim Gleason, dean, UOregon School of Journalism and Communication,
announcing the 2009 Payne Awards for Ethics in Journalism

Editorial Comment: Press Ethics—a staple in the social survival kit.

This Week on “Uncle Jay Explains the News”: Socialism

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Why Teach Journalism?

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Fears of a Journalism Professor

Q. “I feel like I’m teaching [my students] something that will be as useful as Sanskrit when they graduate. . . . [E]very morning I read stories about how huge, venerable newspapers will likely be shuttered by the end of the year, and it absolutely freaks me out. . . . I feel horribly guilty, wondering what will become of them.”

A. “It is not your job to guarantee them stable employment. I’m not even sure that stable employment is good for young journalists. Journalists exercise power. Ideally, they exercise that power on behalf of the powerless. If they know nothing about what it is like to be powerless themselves, they may come to exercise their considerable power on behalf of the already powerful. . . . So I do not think it is such a terrible thing that your journalism students are entering an uncertain world. It’s the kind of world that is ripe for enterprising journalists. It is the kind of world that needs to be reported on and explained.”

—Cary Tennis, advice columnist, Slate.com Click here.

Editorial Comment: What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger?

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News of the Intergalactic Age

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To Boldly Go. . .

“I always thought it was odd to hear flat out declarations that there can be no life on other planets in the absence of water. How egocentric! So you’re saying that life can only exist if it’s precisely like us?

“Really?

“That’s the feeling I’m getting right now in the woe-is-us, hand-wringing sob-fest about whether life and our democracy can survive the death of some newspapers.

“With all due respect to some great newspapers where I’ve worked, I don’t give a damn about the paper they’re printed on. What I care about is journalism.”

—Charlotte-Anne Lucas, former newspaperwoman and current online journalist, 2009.
Click here for blog.

Editorial Comment: To joyfully split infinitives in any medium.

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Free Expression Matters

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Power

“It is within the power of writers and artists to do much more: to defeat the lie!”

—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), Nobel Prize-winning writer

(Thanks to alert WORDster Steve Marston)

Editorial Comment: Or, of course, to perpetuate it....

Below, Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag, 1953; and in happier times....

Another News Flash: The American Society of Newspaper Editors decides to eliminate “Newspaper” from the organization’s name. Click here.

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EXTRA! (writ small)

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The Dawn of the In-Depth Tweet?

“[On] the day the last newspaper is published—a day that seems to be rushing at us like a brick wall in an old Warner Bros. cartoon—I will not be surprised if the nation’s various crooks, crumbs and corruptors fail to shed a tear. But the unkindest cut of all, the ‘Et tu, Brute?’ dagger in the back, is the fact that, according to a new survey from the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, most other Americans won’t, either. Pew found 63 percent of respondents saying that if their local paper went down, they would miss it very little or not at all. It is the insult that compounds the injury, by which I mean the growing sense that we are working on the last major story of our lives, and it is an obituary. Ours.”

—Leonard Pitts Jr., Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist,
The Miami Herald (3/19/09) Click here.

Cartoon: Mike Keefe, Denver Post (04/03/09)

Editorial Comment: The 140-character obit?

News from the Copy desk: BYU recalls 18,500 copies of Daily Universe to correct “apostle” misspelled “apostate.” Picky, picky. Click here for story.
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News from the Pond (circa 1854)

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What’s News?

“To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.”

—Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), writer and philosopher, in Walden (1954).

(Thanks to alert WORDster Matthew Flitton)

Editorial Comment: News women?

Saturday Flash: Boston Globe Going Down?

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And Another One Bites,
and Another One Bites
and Another One bites the DUST??!?

Boston Globe on the chopping block?

NoNoNoNoNoNo!

Reporting Good News Is Hard

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Self-Loathing or ‘Objectivity’?

Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies “says the news media, in general, don’t do a good enough job of telling the world its good news,” reports National Public Radio ombudsperson Alicia C. Shepard.

“We do a HORRIBLE job covering our successes. Horrible. And there are consequences: 1.) The public thinks all we do is screw up. 2.) Folks under-appreciate the role of good journalism. 3.) No one even recognizes good journalism when they see it. 4.) And we tend to underestimate our own ability to change the world.”

—Kelly McBride, ethics specialist, The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, discussing how NPR and other news media do and don’t report their successes, yesterday.

(Thanks to alert WORDster Colleen Almeida of the Tulsa World)

Editorial Comment: But good news isn’t news, right?

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On Editors

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Quality Control

“What we are losing is editing. When I grew up, nothing could be communicated to the outside world without editing, getting your facts right, your spelling, etc. . . . That’s the worst part of it—the discipline that should go with the ability to communicate is gone.”

—Daniel Schorr, senior correspondent, National Public Radio, 2009

Editorial Comment: Oh, that.

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An April Fool's Day Editorial Judgment

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A Newspaper Recipe

“Here is the recipe for making a ‘great daily’; let them who have stomachs for such work apply themselves: a scandal-in-high-life, first-page, double-leaded, screamer head; two or three columns of rocking chair speculation on matters political, Washington datelines; a few bogus or garbled interviews with prominent politicians; a suicide; a scandal-in-low-life; a thrilling account of an impossible accident in Timbuctoo; report that a million Chinese have been drowned by an overflow of the Hwang-Ho; full and circumstantial report of a sensational divorce trial—not intended for Sunday-school reading; two-column account of a prize fight; a hanging, with all the ghastly details ‘worked up’; two columns of esoteric baseball lingo in which the doughty deeds of ‘Fatty,’ ‘Shorty,’ ‘Squatty,’ ‘Bow-Legged Bill’ and ‘Short-Stop Sam’ are painted in wonderful chiar-oscuro; account of the elopement of a society belle with a negro coachman; heavy editorial on the ‘Power of the Press’; more editorial inanity and offensive self-glorification; a pimping ‘personal’ column’ two columns of murdered men and English language; more toothsome scandal; market reports to mislead the country merchant; budget of foreign news—manufactured in New York; interesting case of ministerial crim. con.; advertisements of quack doctors, lost manhood restorers, syphilitic nostrums, preventative pills, and other things calculated to set the cheek of modesty aflame; local miscellany; police court reports and taffy in solid slugs. Jam to a mux and serve hot. Price, 5 cents. Now is the time to subscribe.”

—William Cowper Brann (1855-1898), the “American Carlyle,” editor of The Iconoclast, briefly the country’s most controversial magazine, with a national circulation
of a quarter-million. An enraged reader shot and, er, “edited” Brann
on the streets of Waco, Texas, on April Fool’s Day, 1898.

Editorial Note: I suppose just a letter to the editor was out of the question?

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Today's WORD: Social Necessity

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Don’t Let Newspapers Die

“[T]oo many of us fail to understand what that death would mean, believing newspapers provide no service they can’t get elsewhere. But there is a reason [Larry] Craig and [Kwame] Kilpatrick were not taken down by CNN or the local TV news. Local TV news specializes in crime, weather and sports. CNN has a national purview. Even the Internet primarily synthesizes reporting done in other media.

“No, only the local paper performs the critical function of holding accountable the mayor, the governor, the local magnates and potentates, for how they spend your money, run your institutions, validate or violate your trust. If newspapers go, no other entity will have the wherewithal to do that.”

—Leonard Pitts Jr., Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist,
The Miami Herald. Click here for this column.

Editorial Comment: Ignorance ain’t bliss.

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Today's WORD: Good Gloat

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Reader Research

“I bought The Salt Lake Tribune this morning for the first time in six months because of the lead front-page article ‘Are Newspapers Sinking?’ The San Francisco Chronicle is finished, and subscriptions are falling from The Los Angeles Times to The New York Times.

“The Tribune can blame the Internet and talk radio, but you won’t face the truth. Your big problem is blatant, one-sided leftist liberalism. Your editorial pages are predictably leftist and full of falsehoods, and it seeps into the rest of the reporting.

“I’ll be delighted when you go bankrupt and [are] forced to close your doors. Utah won’t miss you much.”

—Jay Reid, proud non-subscribing reader,
in letter to the editor, The Salt Lake Tribune (3/24/09)

Editorial Comment: There. Feel better?

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