Nit-Picking

.
Writing Rules

• “Correct spelling is one of the arts that are far more esteemed by schoolma’ams than by practical men, neck-deep in the heat and agony of the world.”

—H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), writer, journalist, critic

BUT!

• “[T]ypos are a symptom of a larger problem. Taken as a whole, they can point to widespread misunderstanding about spelling and grammar, not to mention lagging education in language.”

—Benjamin D. Herson, typo-hunter and co-author,
The Great Typo Hunt: Changing the World One Correction at a Time, 2010 See story.

• “Typos mess with the most important aspect of written communication: clarity. . . . Language is bound up in every part of our lives. So when it goes awry, that indicates more than just a spelling and grammar problem.

“No typo exists in a vacuum. Behind every misplaced comma or junction error is a story—whether it be about education, carelessness, or socioeconomic and privilege.”

—Jeff Deck, typo-hunter and co-author, The Great Typo Hunt: Changing the World One Correction at a Time, 2010 See story.

• REBUTTAL:
“Correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays.”

—George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans, 1819-1880),
novelist, journalist and poet

• Editorial Comment: Werds meen whut I want them to mene.







Join Today’s WORD on FaceBook and Twitter! And (be)Friend USU JCOM Alumni & Friends on FB.

• PeezPix prints and notecards for sale.




.

Being First, or Right?

.
High Post

“The common complaint is that the [Washington] Post is lowering its standards—‘cheapening its brand’ is the vogue-ish term. But [editor Marcus] Brauchli says a photo gallery on ‘a B-list celebrity’ doesn't compromise the serious and substantial work the Post does, [and] galleries and the like help keep traffic and advertising flowing so that the paper can concentrate its real journalistic firepower on important things.

“Of greater concern, perhaps, is how the Post plays the traffic game with breaking news. The paper’s working assumption is that it cannot be left behind on any story of importance. Readers do want the latest, and they’ll find it somewhere else if the Post doesn’t give it to them.

“But this is where things can get really sticky. ‘Getting something up’ on a breaking story can be risky. It usually means reporting fragments of the story. Worse, it increases the chances that a story will be inaccurate. Brauchli is adamant about this point: ‘We have no tolerance for getting things wrong.... Our market positioning, as it were, is being right. [We’re] the place you can count on for factual reporting.’”

—Paul Farhi, columnist (and Washington Post contributing writer),
“Traffic Problems,” American Journalism Review, September 2010

• Editorial Comment: When you’re right, you’re right.




Join Today’s WORD on FaceBook and Twitter! And (be)Friend USU JCOM Alumni & Friends on FB.

• PeezPix prints and notecards for sale.








.

Thoughtful YELLING

.
Potent Discourse

“[M]uch of the message among Republicans last year, as they sought to exploit the Tea Party phenomenon, centered — like the Tea Party moniker itself — on this imagery of armed revolution. Popular spokespeople … routinely drop words like ‘tyranny’ and ‘socialism’ when describing the president and his allies, as if blind to the idea that Americans legitimately faced with either enemy would almost certainly take up arms. It’s not that such leaders are necessarily trying to incite violence or hysteria; in fact, they’re not. It’s more that they are so caught up in a culture of hyperbole, so amused with their own verbal flourishes and the ensuing applause, that — like the bloggers and TV hosts to which they cater — they seem to lose their hold on the power of words.”

—Matt Bai, reporter, “A Turning Point in the Discourse, but in Which Direction?” The New York Times, Jan. 8, 2011

• Editorial Comment: I say what I mean and I mean what I say.





• PeezPix prints and notecards for sale.








Join Today’s WORD on FaceBook and Twitter! Join up and rant daily! And join also (be)Friend USU JCOM Alumni & Friends on FB.

Investigative Journalism?

.
Gossip

“I have often wondered why we need the phrase investigative journalism. Isn’t all journalism supposed to be investigative? Isn’t journalism without an investigative element little more than gossip? And isn’t there enough gossip around already?”

—Errol Morris, filmmaker (Thin Blue Line, Fog of War…), author and New York Times blogger (“The Opinionator”), from a 2010 commencement address to the Berkeley School of Journalism

• Editorial Comment: But I heard it on TV....









• USU NEWS NOTE: Salt Lake Tribune crime reporter Nate Carlisle comes to USU today to talk about investigative reporting techniques and IRE. Story.


• PeezPix: PeezPix prints and notecards for sale.





NOTE: Join Today’s WORD on FaceBook and Twitter! Join up and rant daily! And join also (be)Friend USU JCOM Alumni & Friends on FB.

Nuggets

.
Grab Bag

On Writing:
“Why don’t you write books people can read?” —Nora Joyce to her husband, James (1882-1941), writer of dense works

“Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.” —T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), poet

On Commentary: “Criticism is prejudice made plausible.”—Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956), journalist

“It is better to be quotable than to be honest.” —Tom Stoppard, playwright

“Dogma is the sacrifice of wisdom to consistency.” —Lewis Perelman, education critic

“I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.” —Gore Vidal, writer and TV guest

On Innovation:
“Men have become the tools of their tools.” —Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), writer

“Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” —H.M. Warner (1881-1958), movie mogul, in 1927

On Education:
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” —Mark Twain (1835-1910), curmudgeon

“Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st century.”—Lewis Perelman, education critic

• Editorial Comment: When you’re right, you’re right.

• PeezPix: PeezPix prints and notecards for sale.




.

New Watchdog Needed

.
Too Little, Too Late

“In this brave new electronic world, you learn about a crisis when it has reached unmanageable proportions, such as happened in the subprime housing debacle at the roots of a recession that has slashed budgets at colleges and universities. And that is why educators everywhere should be concerned about the demise of global journalism, networks of trained reporters and editors generating content on the scene in national and international bureaus. We no longer live nor educate in that world. By elevating access over truth, ours has become a world that reacts via commentary rather than prevents in advance of calamity.”

—Michael Bugeja, director, Greenlee School of Journalism, Iowa State University,
“Stewart, Assange and Journalism Education,” Inside Higher Education, Jan. 18, 2011

Image: Yesterday in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Why is this huge upheaval such a surprise? Where were the journalists? Or do Americans just not care about any culture or people but their own (if that)? Photo by Suhaib Salem / Reuters

• Editorial Comment: Where IS that damn watchdog? Or Chicken Little, even?

• PeezPix: PeezPix prints and notecards for sale.




NOTE: Today’s WORD on FaceBook and Twitter! Join up and rant daily! And join also (be)Friend USU JCOM Alumni & Friends on FB.
.

InFoxifying

.
Happy Groundhog Day!

The Fox Effect?

“I think the effect of Fox News on American public life has been to create a level of cynicism about the news in general. It has contributed to the sense that they are all just out there with a political agenda, but Fox is just more overt about it. And I think that’s unhealthy.

“We have had a lot of talk since the Gabby Giffords attempted murder about civility in our national discourse, and I make no connection between the guy who shot those people in Tucson and the national discourse. But it is true that the national discourse is more polarized and strident than it has been in the past, and to some extent, I would lay that at the feet of Rupert Murdoch.”

—Bill Keller, editor, The New York Times, Jan. 31, 2011 URL

See The Kalb Report, Jan. 31, 2011

Play Whack-A-Murdoch!

• Editorial Comment: Right! Rupert’s turned the Wall Street Journal into a screaming rag!


• PeezPix: PeezPix prints and notecards for sale.








.

Egypt

.
Uncontainable

“What we’ve seen over the last five days is that change of this magnitude—revolution perhaps—is a function of people and passion, not of any particular technology.

Late last week the Egyptian government took the virtually unprecedented step of cutting off the country from the Internet, and yet protests continue unabated. This is not to say that social networks did not play a key, catalytic role—they did. They are part of a vast web of instantaneous information lines into and out of Egypt that connected the protesters to each other and to the outside world in the run-up to the street protests we’re seeing.

When you ask many of these activists about the role of these networks they will often describe them as a kind of lifeline. And if these networks, communicating via the Internet and mobile phones, weren’t so critical, you can be sure that the government would not have hit the “kill switch” the way it did. This was really unprecedented.

In virtually every other case of new media-connected movements—Tunisia, Iran, for example—the governments were much more moderated in cutting off access, slowing things down, opening them back up, slowing them down.

Egypt really was the first of its kind, in terms of near total blackout for a couple of days—raising all sorts of worrying questions. But the fact remains—the protesting never stopped nor did the media coverage of events.”

--Sheldon Himelfarb, U.S. Institute of Peace, Jan. 31, 2011 URL

Related:
• Image: Note that in the Aljazeera photo above that some protesters are using cellphones.
• Photo Gallery from Aljazeera
• Coverage of today’s (2/1) protest from Aljazeera

• Editorial Comment: It’s the message, not the medium.

• PeezPix: PeezPix prints and notecards for sale.

Neeeyeaauh

.
Speak With Conviction
Def Jam Poem by Taylor Mali

“In case you hadn’t realized, it has somehow become uncool to sound like you know what you’re talking about . . . or believe strongly in what you’re, like, saying. Invisible question marks and parenthetical ya-knows and you-know-what-I’m-sayings have been attaching themselves to the ends of our sentences, even when those sentences aren’t, like, questions?

“Declarative sentences, so-called because they used to, like, ya know, declare things to be true? OK? as opposed to other things that are totally, like, ya know, not? They’ve been infected by this tragically cool and totally hip interrogative tone? As if I’m saying, don’t think I’m a nerd just cuz I’ve, like, noticed this OK? I have nothing personal invested in my own opinions . . . I’m just like inviting you to join me on the bandwagon of my own uncertainty?

“What has happened to our conviction? Where are the limbs out on which we once walked? Have they been chopped down with the rest of the rain forest? Ya know? Or do we have like nuthin’ to say? Has society just become so filled with these conflicting feelings of neeeyeaauh, that we’ve just gotten to the point where we’re the most aggressively inarticulate generation to come along since, ya know, a long time ago?

“So I implore you, I entreat you, and I challenge you to speak with conviction, to say what you believe in a manner that bespeaks the determination with which you believe it. Because contrary to the wisdom of the bumper sticker, it is not enough these days to simply ‘Question Authority.’ You’ve got to speak with it, too.”

—Taylor Mali, poet, “Speak With Conviction,” Def Jam Season 2, 2007
• Typographic adaptation by Ronnie Bruce

• Editorial Comment: Neeeyeaauh. ya know?


• PeezPix: PeezPix prints and notecards for sale.




.

Moments Trapped in Amber

Trapped .
Picture This

“As a group, news photographers are not the gentlest of people. The work is hard and physically demanding, and the opportunities for pictures is fleeting. A picture exists in only a cat-wink of time and is lost forever to the photographer who is distracted for just that instant. Or is blocked by a pompous politician or by an aggressive colleague. Expletives can follow these incidents.

“Photographers who document newsworthy events are also a remarkable group of people. They stop history for a microsecond of time and hold it up for us to see and to remember and learn from. They do this work despite threat to life and limb, and they enjoy doing it. Most would do nothing else.”

“Words are the tools of someone who sees something and then describes it. Pictures ... describe something that actually happened.”

—Hal Buell, photographer and former chief of photographers for The Associated Press. From his book, MOMENTS The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Photographs—A Visual Chronicle of Our Time (2010)

• Slideshow of 2008 Winner, Todd Heisler, The Rocky Mountain News, “Final Salute.”
• Collection of Pulitzer Photo Winners, The Newseum.
• 2010 Pulitzer winner in Feature Photography, Craig F. Walker, The Denver Post.
• The Pulitzer Prizes, by category.

Image: A wounded Japanese photographer, Kenji Nagai, lay before a Burmese soldier yesterday in Yangon, Myanmar, as troops attacked protesters. Mr. Nagai later died. 2008 Breaking News Photo Pulitzer Winner by Adrees Latif, Reuters, September 28, 2007

• Editorial Comment: They’re worth more than 1,000 words, I’d say.



• PeezPix: PeezPix prints and notecards for sale.





.

Lessons from Pulitzer

.
Storytelling

“The heart of journalism is storytelling—we are storytellers and story-listeners, and that was the magic of [Pultizer’s newspaper] The World.

“[Today], the media are increasingly becoming a purveyor of [only] information, but information without knowledge and context is of little use to us. The cacophony going on—you turn on the average television station and you have a crawler about news, you have weather, you have stocks and you have someone talking in the middle, and there’s no narrative thread to link us.

“If you ask people to reflect on a disaster … when they read about the Haitian earthquake, they are not as moved as when they read about the one girl who is trapped for two days under the rubble. That intimate narrative story is what connects them. That’s why we read novels: those stories connect us with the experiences of others. The power of journalism to change the world is when we make those intimate connections.”

—James McGrath Morris, biographer and author, Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power (2010), discussing the impact of the giant newspaper baron on American journalism
at Utah State University, Jan. 25, 2010.

Click here for hour-long interview on Utah Public Radio .

Photo: Morris lectures on Pulitzer at USU on Tuesday.

• Editorial Comment: Tell me a good story.


• PeezPix: PeezPix prints and notecards for sale.

Simplify, Simplify

.
Disconnected

“The hyperbolic Thoreau told us that he never received much worthy news through the mail, never found anything of interest in the papers. For the person striving to understand the right way to live, ‘all news, as it is called, is gossip.’ Nineteenth-century America had its own version of Twitter in the penny papers of the day, whose allegiance to fear and gossip-mongering was every bit as real as our own.

“But most of my students don’t read newspapers. They rarely watch the news. Their connections, such as they are, are not with the latest dust-up in Burma or tuition hikes in England. They are not particularly engaged in Obama’s fight with the Republicans. In fact, many don’t know we recently had an election.”

—William Major, English professor, University of Hartford,

who asked his students to give up their cellphones for five days and listen to their lives. For many, it was a scary, lonely and unhappy withdrawal. “Thoreau’s Cellphone Experiment,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. 16, 2011
(Thanks to alert WORDster Mark Larson)

• Editorial Comment: Attention deficit disor... wha?

• PeezPix: PeezPix prints and notecards for sale.




.

GIGO

.
Democratic Data Dump

“Satirist Jon Stewart and activist Julian Assange are symbols of a world without journalism—a largely online marketing-based, consumer-driven world at odds with principles of democracy and freedom. Stewart is often considered a journalist because he holds people accountable when many metro media outlets no longer do so in their downsized newsrooms. The Daily Show does this often by following up on what newsmakers did or said in the past and then comparing that to current, contradictory actions and statements. Wikileaks purportedly holds people and governments accountable. It does so, however, by ‘WebThink.’ Whereas responsible journalists scrutinize motives of tipsters and fact-check authenticity of cables, WebThink just dumps it all on the Internet and lets computer chips fly where they may.”

—Michael Bugeja, director, Greenlee School of Journalism,
Iowa State University, “Stewart, Assange and Journalism Education,” Inside Higher Education, Jan. 18, 2011

Editorial Comment: Garbage In, Garbage Out?

• NEWSnote: PULITZER: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power—Biographer James McGrath Morris discusses lessons from Pulitzer, Morris Media & Society Lecture, TODAY, Jan. 25, 9-10:15 a.m., ESLC 046, USU Campus.






• PeezPix: PeezPix prints and notecards for sale.

Squeaky Wheel

.
Mad as Hell

“I think the same fantasy popped into the head of everybody in my business who has ever been told what I have been told: this will be the last edition of your show. You go to the scene from the movie ‘Network,’ complete with the pajamas and the rain coat, and go off on a verbal journey of unutterable vision and you insist upon Peter Finch’s guttural resonance and you will the viewer to go to the window, open it, stick out his head and yell. You know the rest. In the mundane world of television goodbyes, reality is laughably uncooperative.”

—Keith Olbermann, out-of-work commentator,
ousted from his MSNBC “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” show,
days after Comcast took over NBC-Universal.
(See John Nichols, “MSNBC drops Keith Olbermann,” The Nation, Jan. 21, 2011)

• Editorial Comment: The squeaky wheel gets the . . . ax?

• NEWSnote: PULITZER: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power—Biographer James McGrath Morris discusses lessons from Pulitzer, Morris Media & Society Lecture, Tuesday, Jan. 25, 9-10:15 a.m., ESLC 046, USU Campus.






• PeezPix: PeezPix prints and notecards for sale.




.

Corporate Media Consolidation

.
Bigger Brother

“A big disappointment today: The FCC and the Department of Justice have signed off on the Comcast/NBC merger, paving the way for a single enormous media conglomerate to obtain unprecedented control over the flow of information in our country. I’ll be candid with you: This is an awful development for those of us who care about media consolidation. It will restrict your freedom of choice and raise your cable and Internet bills. And it could pave the way for even more media mergers and even less room for independent voices in the media.”

—Al Franken, U.S. senator (D-MN), Jan. 18, 2011
Related Story.

• Editorial Comment: Please pick one from Column A and one from Column B:

Column A Column B

Crap Crap

Old Al

• PeezPix: Shameless self-promotion: PeezPix prints and notecards now for sale.
.

Sundance 2011

.
Powerful Stories

“I believe that independent film can transcend borders. If the stories are on the humane side, what people are experiencing in their own lives, in their own countries, in their own villages, you’re going to find out there’s a common thread about victories and failures and losses and so forth. It becomes an international human-interest story.”

—Robert Redford, actor, director
and founder of the Sundance Film Festival,
which opens today in Park City, Utah.
See “Redford reveals his ‘real Sundance,’”
The Salt Lake Tribune, Jan. 20, 2011

Photo: (Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Robert Redford discusses the Sundance Institute and its relationship to the Sundance Festival with Tribune reporter, Sean Means, during an interview at his Zoom restaurant in Park City, Utah, Wednesday, Jan. 19, 2011

• Editorial Comment: The snowflakes keep falling on his head....







• PeezPix: Shameless self-promotion: PeezPix prints and notecards now for sale.
.



.

Pooh

.
WORD: We missed National Winnie the Pooh Day, which was yesterday, Jan. 18.

Oh, Bear!

“It is more fun to talk with someone who doesn’t use long, difficult words, but rather short, easy words like, ‘What about lunch?’”

—Winnie the Pooh, bear, first appeared in 1926.
Alan Alexander Milne, (1882-1956), English author

(Thanks to alert Poohster Caitlin Owen Hunter)

• Editorial Comment: “I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and long words bother me.”




• PeezPix: Shameless self-promotion: PeezPix prints and notecards now for sale.




.

First Draft

.
History on the Hoof

“We often do not realize that history is perishable. It depends on evidence. There are countless stories where evidence is lost, corrupted or hidden, and hence, our attempts to re-assemble a picture of reality are doomed at best. If we lose all the evidence of the Battle of Hastings, what then can we say about it? Journalism may be the first draft of history, but sometimes it’s the only draft. It is often the journalist who collects evidence before it is lost.”
—Errol Morris, filmmaker (Standard Operating Procedure, The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War…), author and New York Times blogger (The Opinionator), from a 2010 commencement address to the Berkeley School of Journalism

• Editorial Comment: All the crap in the back of my Pinto when I was a cub reporter? Archeological strata.

• PeezPix: Shameless self-promotion: PeezPix prints and notecards now for sale.

Lighthouse Dawn

I Have a Dream

.
Words from MLK

“Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.”

—Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968) (Thanks to alert WORDster Collette Parker)

“Curtailment of free speech is rationalized on grounds that a more compelling American tradition forbids criticism of the government when the nation is at war...Nothing can be more destructive of our fundamental democratic traditions than the vicious effort to silence dissenters.”

—Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968) (Thanks to alert WORDster Barbara Reed)

“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.”

—Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968)
Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech, Dec. 10, 1964

“We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.” —Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968)

“I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.... I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.”

—Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968)

• Editorial Comment: Dream on, kids.




• PeezPix: Shameless self-promotion: PeezPix prints and notecards now for sale.

Wise Eyes

DREAM Denied

.
‘Shamnesty’ Travesty

“Many in the conservative media are trying to block the DREAM Act by driving a wedge between Hispanics and white Americans. That, at least, is how Glenn Beck is doing it. ‘If you are white, or you’re an American citizen, or a white American citizen, you are pretty much toast,’ Beck observed, as he joked with a caller who sarcastically suggested he would need to pretend to be an ‘illegal alien’ in order to qualify for in-state tuition for his MBA program. Rush Limbaugh theorized that the legislation was Sen. Harry Reid’s (D-NV) way of ‘thanking Hispanics for stealing the election for him.’

“Elsewhere in the right-wing press, pundits are asking whether a bill aimed at assisting Hispanics will be a ‘nightmare for hard-working Americans,’ calling the bill ‘shamnesty,’ and raising the specter of criminality, calling it ‘reckless illegal alien amnesty’ and that ‘incentivizes illegality.’ Fox News contributor Mike Gallagher even compared the beneficiaries of the bill to bank robbers.”

–Simon Maloy, “The right-wing backlash against advancing minority rights,”
MediaMatters, Dec. 10, 2010

The bi-partisan DREAM Act (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors),
co-sponsored by U.S. Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Richard Durbin (D-IL), which would have opened paths to citizenship for some undocumented minors, passed the House,
but died in the Senate on Dec. 18. Column.

• Editorial Comment: Dream on, kids.


• PeezPix: Shameless self-promotion: PeezPix prints and notecards now for sale.

Christmas Eve Morn
.