Short Subjects

. 
TV Time

“A marketplace approach simply doesn’t work for children. Children’s television can never be profitable because most of the people who watch it are very short, very young and have very small allowances.”

—Peggy Charren (1928-2015), children’s activist and founder of Action for Children’s Television, 1983

• Editorial Comment: Well, how much does decent kids’ TV cost, anyway?


PeezPix by Ted Pease 

Red Sun at Night











Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
.

TV: Good for What Ailes You

. 
Screen Test

“Television is no gimmick, and nobody will ever be elected to major office again without presenting themselves well on it.”
 

—Roger Ailes, TV producer and Nixon campaign consultant, 1968

• Editorial Comment: Just ask Nixon.


PeezPix by Ted Pease 

Rosy











Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
.

The Self-Deluded Writer

. 
Screw It

“The truth is, writing is this: hard and boring and occasionally great but usually not.  

“I have told people that writing this book has been like brushing dirt away from a fossil. What a load of shit. It has been like hacking away at a freezer with a screwdriver.”

—Amy Poehler, actress, director and author, in Rachel Toor’s “Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Writers,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Feb. 2, 2015 

• Editorial Comment: In the fourth year of my doctoral program, I realized that I was no scholar. I don’t think I was alone in that. Most of us learned to use a single research tool, and then applied it like a ball peen hammer to every research problem. The True Value School of Social Science Research. Screwdrivers are good tools, too.

PeezPix by Ted Pease 

Hands Up








Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
.

OMG! Someone’s watching?!?

. 

One of the joys of the WORD (and there really aren’t many, as victims like you know all too well...) is reconnecting with its victims every fall. The thing about cyberspace is that we forget who’s out there, listening as the tree falls in the forest. 

Hearing from longtime WORD afflictees reminds me that there actually *are* human friends out there in cyberspace.

[Pause for ProfessorTedtalk. Feel free to snooze. My students do.] 

Audience awareness is something any mass communicator takes for granted, so when any WORD recipient actually responds, it’s a bit of a shock. The reminder that hitting can hit a sentient being is important for any blogger. 

For the pajama-clad blogger back in his laptop cave (Students in Dr. Pease’s online courses: Don’t even go there.), a personal email response to a mass post can prompt both astonishment and spasms of concern over how long I’ve been wearing this t-shirt.

But, like any undisciplined blogger, I digress.

The point was to express my astonishment and thanks to those who responded to the annual reemergence of the WORD from its hole. It’s really good to hear from you. When the WORD escapes St. Mumbles every August, I am reminded of all my friends out there. Some of whom I’ve even met in person. Hope I was in a (semi) clean t-shirt at the time.

Ted

Precious Days

. 
I Heard the News Today. Oh, Boy

“I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news.” 

―John Muir (1838-1914), naturalist

• Editorial Comment: Today’s lesson: The sound of a 20-knot northwest wind in the redwoods. And then getting all the pineneedles out of your beard. I don’t have that money problem. Or the beard, come to think about it. But thinking is overrated. Ask The Donald.

PeezPix by Ted Pease 

Redwoods and their duff. Which is a good name for a band.











Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
.

CarrTalk

. 
What Are You Waiting For?

“Journalism clearly beats working, that doesn’t need much explaining. How to make sure you have enough to eat and live while you do? Perpetuate journalism often, on as many platforms, for as many people as you can. Don’t wait for permission — find your story and prosecute it to the fullest.”

—David Carr (1956-2015), journalist, author and media critic, mentoring a young journalist, 2015

• Editorial Comment: Doesn’t that start your engines?


PeezPix by Ted Pease 

Rompus











Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
.

Commatose

. 
Serial or Cereal?

“Many newspapers, both American and British, do not use the serial comma, which underscores the idea that the news is meant to be read fast, in the dead-tree version or on the screen, because it’s not news for long. It’s ephemeral. Print — or, rather, text — should be streamlined and unencumbered. Maybe the day is coming when the newsfeed-style three dots (ellipsis) between items, like the eternal ribbon of news circling the building at One Times Square, will dominate.”

—Mary Norris, copy editor and author, “Confessions of the Comma Queen,” The New Yorker, February 2015 

• Editorial Comment: My heroes are my parents, Donald Trump and that guy who caught the big ling cod.

PeezPix by Ted Pease 

Will and the Big Lings (which is a good name for a band)











Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
.

Wild Words

. 
The Unthinking

“Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.” 

—John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), economist (Thanks to alert WORDster Ruth Pease)



• Editorial Comment: I hadn’t thought of that.



PeezPix by Ted Pease 

The Landing, Bowdoinham, Maine










Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 1,800 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
.

The Press & the Presidency

. 
Oh, Donald!

“[I]f you are a little different, or a little outrageous, or if you do things that are bold or controversial, the press is going to write about you. . . . Sometimes they write positively, and sometimes they write negatively. But from a pure business point of view, the benefits of being written about have far outweighed the drawbacks.”

—Donald Trump, talking hairpiece and GOP presidential candidate, in his book, “The Art of the Deal,” 1987 URL 

• Editorial Comment: What a deal.


PeezPix by Ted Pease 

Wake me when it’s over












Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 1,800 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
.

20! Yup, two freakin’ decades of this crap!!!

.
SOMEWHERE OFF THE NORTHERN CALIFORNIA COAST — “Are you freakin’ KIDDING ME!!?!?!” The security chief’s scream melted the guard’s iPhone6 and left ear hairs within 15 feet smoking. 

“WHAT THE $%^&*(&^%$!!$$%^&*^£¢∞§¶•ª¶§∞£@!??!?!??”

(Editor’s note: AP style is mixed on how/whether to report this kind of exchange. We err on the side of full disclosure to permit the reader to decide for herself. That’s how the WORD has always worked. Sorry about that.)

Yes, unbe-$%^&*(&^%ing-lievable, but true: For the 20th straight year, despite measures that have made Chief of Verbosity Containment Phil O’Shaddup, the disgraced former Guantanamo interrogation chief, reshuffle his size-14 regulation golf shoes in discomfort, The WORD is out. 

Again.

The WORD — formally “Today’s WORD on Journalism” — a pesky and recidivist quoter (some say misquoter) of pithy phrases on journalism and the “lamestream press,” language, politics, and the role of public engagement in an informed civil society (OK, OK, perfesser, move it along . . . !), today did what Homeland Security Boss Jeh Johnson and thousands of crack TSA staff have said was impossible. 

Since 1995, The WORD has tormented an already uneasy planet with statements on the press. Since first apprehended, edited and sent in to the feared hammock-strewn and Scrabble-laden maximum security facility, St. Mumbles Home for the Terminally Verbose, in 1996, The WORD today celebrated the new school year by slipping away (again. did we mention this is the 20th year?) from the remote sanitarium (or is that sanitorium?) on a remote luxury rock miles out in the Pacific Ocean 350 miles north of San Francisco.

“We really thought we had clamped down on the SOB this time,” observed St. Mumbles High Censor (or Censer?) and Comma Queen Mary Norris. Brought aboard after the embarrassing 2014 escape, apparently involving friendly borking sea lions, that it became Norris’s (or is that Norris’? or Norrises’s?) job to keep The WORD “in his goddam hammock,” as Johnson said in May.

“Apparently, there, were, Oxford, commas, involved” in this year’s escape, Norris said. 

While some in the Obama Administration (or should that be lowercase?) weasled — “Could be bad, but maybe not,” an earnest spokesman intoned — many in the larger WORD community, which has swelled to nearly 2,000 worldwide in recent years, cheered.

“YAY!!!” yelled misguided 13-year WORD subscriber Conn Jugate of Haybale, Iowa. “We’ve lost Colbair and Jon Stewie. How can we have a presidential embarrassment without good old WORDie?”

According to a thin-lipped report from O’Shaddup’s spokesperson, delivered after the failed lexicographer had flung himself into the surf, the WORD apparently spent the summer on the St. Mumbles’ veranda knitting a rubber Zodiac-style raft, and made a 6-horsepower outboard in the arts and crafts program.

“He said he was knitting an afghan for his Twitter editor,” said watch commander Mia Opia as attendants rescued a burbling sanitarium director from the froth. “Like anyone edits Twitter.”

The WORD, whose daily doses of “wisdom” on matters journalistic, political, social and cultural have afflicted decent folk on five continents since 1995, had been a, er, “guest” at St. Mumbles since May, when white-jacketed attendants collected the blathering serial quoter and the contents of his office from Utah State University.

He spent the summer convalescing at the remote coastal rest home, a dark tower where Chas. Addams once vacationed, studying up on the 5,000 new words in the Scrabble dictionary, lounging on the porch and secretly collecting new quotes on the press to torment a troubled media world.

The WORD was first admitted and first escaped from St. Mumbles in 1996 after a ground-breaking opening season quoting wise guys on journalism. Since then, the WORD’s, um, “influence” has spread worldwide, and last year the International Bloviaters League and Tribune of Hairbrained Editors & Reporters (IBLaTHER) honored the serial email pest with its coveted Electronic Junkmail Award.

Anyway, the WORD is out again, gentle and unsuspecting readers. Brace yourselves.

As usual, we launch this season with the ever-useful wisdom of the genial former colonial Royal High Potentate of the Virginia Colony, whose high regard for both education and the press rings with an increasingly popular fervor today. New WORDs begin tomorrow, and will continue through the 2015-2016 season, or until you come to your senses. Enjoy!

• • •

TODAY’S WORD ON JOURNALISM—The Perennial 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

• • •

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 a new and unpleasant disturbance of the general peace back in 1995, 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 last spring, 2,000 (mostly volunteer) victims subscribed to the direct email WORD list. More got the WORD by checking the website, whence it was linked and Tweeted and forwarded like a pox to many more unsuspecting victims by so-called “friends.”

• • • • •

Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff. ted.pease@gmail.com. (Be)Friend Dr. Ted, Professor of Interesting Stuff on Facebook

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard

Pease Out

.
Tempus Fugit

All good things must come to an end, quoth the bards. I don’t know who those bard guys are, but this entirely mediocre thing doth cometh to an end as well.

Thus endeth the 19th season of the WORD season, 162 more or less daily whacks up alongside the head happily delivered from me to you.

Sad, I know. But the Class of 2015 has trooped forth into an unsuspecting land, so it’s time for the jolly men in white coats from St. Mumbles Home for the Terminally Verbose to come and lock up the WORD for another summer of rumination, cogitation and conjugation. He’ll be in the top tower, barking as usual.

It’s been a good hunt; we’ve bagged some good ones. The WORD pauses now to reflect on those that got away and to plan hot pursuit for the 2016—our 20th!—season. A roundup report of the brilliance of the past year would be in order, if I were that well organized. But alas. So, like my students, I’m slipping my last WORD under your door and fleeing.

A WORDster sent me this one, wishing only to shut me the hell up. It has nothing to do with journalism, free expression or anything else we deal with, but it would cheer my students if it were true: 

Under the sod and under the trees 
Lies the body of [WORDster] Pease.
He is not here, there’s only the pod:
Pease shelled out and went to God. 

—An 1880s gravestone on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts (lightly edited) 

No one familiar with the WORD or with God could presume any truth to that. But we are hoping for a good salmon season here, which is almost heaven.

Wishing the best to all of you, loyal, deranged WORDsters. You can anticipate the WORD’s next escape from St. Mumbles in late August. Sorry, but like the swallows to Capistrano and the buzzards to Hinckley, Ohio, you can pretty much count on it.   

—TP, inmate, St. Mumbles, on the porch, in the sunny spot, 2015

PeezPix by Ted Pease 

Roadtrip!








Annoy a friend! Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM stuck in his email every weekday morning during 20th WORD season, starting in late August. This free “service” is sent to 1,700 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
.

Surviving 2016

. 
Oh, Jon!

“If Oprah can leave and the world still spins, I honestly think it will survive me.”

—Jon Stewart, on hand-wringing over his decision to depart The Daily Show after 16 years, “Jon Stewart: Why I quit The Daily Show,” The Guardian, April 18, 2015

• Editorial Comment: Everyone, check under your seats.


PeezPix by Ted Pease 

Weiner Walk












Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 1,800 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
.