Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Thanks, Alaska

Strange occurrences and aberrant behavior are a two-edged sword for journalists.

Swung one way, they make for some pretty interesting reading. Swung the other, they reflect poorly on the place you live.

For quite some time now, Floridians have had to duck as that sword has swung back. From the 2000 presidential election to legislative efforts to revive the brain-dead Terry Schiavo to all manner of stupid acts -- criminal and otherwise -- the Sunshine State has been a gold mine for late-night comedians.

So it is with both relief and amusement that Floridians now look diagonally across the country to their brethren in Alaska and say, "Your turn."

Sarah Palin and Ted Stevens were a good start, but now we have Eileen Goode, who hailed from Massachusetts but who hit the big time in a small town in the Northwest. As Kyle Hopkins reported Monday in the Anchorage Daily News, Goode lost her job as news director at KDLG, a school-district-owned public-radio station in Dillingham.

It wasn't what the 28-year-old said over the airwaves but rather what she wrote in Chilly Hell, her blog about life in her adopted home town, that cooled her employer to her promise as a journalist. Some examples:
  • She wrote, "I love living in a place where I can be treated as a respectable personage simply by dint of being sober, employed and totally uninterested in having sex with relatives or children."
  • She described Dillingham as home to "passing drunk women around like poorly rolled joints."
  • She discussed the death of a woman who was found outside, freezing and wondered, "Is it too much to ask for people to die tragically?"

That may have earned her a cold shoulder from Alaskans, but she took a lot of heat off Floridians.

Monday, July 27, 2009

Is Twitter reviving news?

With Jay Leno's departure from The Tonight Show on NBC, the scramble for his late-night television audience is on -- and, according to Bill Carter of The New York Times, it looks as though some of that may be going to news.

News? What's that?

It's the stuff they have on ABC's Nightline, the news magazine born of the Iran hostage crisis during the Carter Administration and anchored ably for so long by Ted Koppel. As good as he was, Koppel was never quite as funny Leno or David Letterman of CBS's Late Show.

Entertainment seems to trump information nearly every time. When the information concerns entertainment, though, the door opens a crack, and that's what happened with the death of singer Michael Jackson.

Nightline capitalized on the connection of one of its anchors, Martin Bashir, who had conducted a memorable interview with the pop star. It also capitalized on the social network Twitter, where 800,000 people now follow the show.

Won't it be interesting if Michael Jackson ends up moonwalking the public back to being engaged with what's going on in their world.

Saturday, July 25, 2009

First Dance

Weddings can send signals about the happy couples involved.

Formal affairs connote conformist attitudes -- of either the bride and groom or their parents. Unusual venues -- outdoors, on bungee platforms, underwater -- imply various degrees of the opposite.

Jillian Peterson and Kevin Heinz felt the urge to get in step with the times -- and ended up inviting a larger-than-usual number of surprised guests to their St. Paul, Minnesota, wedding. The video of them and their wedding party boogieing down the aisle had been seen more than 1.7 million times on YouTube before it was taken down for copyright reasons.

They then recreated the performance, to Chris Brown's "Forever," Friday on NBC's Today show.

Check it out, and feel free to join in.

Friday, July 24, 2009

Don't Friend Him

Is your BlackBerry going off at all hours of the day and night?

Is your e-mail stuffed with tweets and friend requests?

Jonathan Abrams has had enough of that -- which is ironic, because he started it all.

In an article in The Chicago Tribune, Mark Milian tells us that Abrams, who founded Friendster -- the forerunner of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter -- in 2003, wants no more. Having envisioned Friendster as a means of connecting with close friends, Abrams found that it grew far beyond that.

"I'm a little burned out," he admitted to Milian. He even has banned his girlfriend from checkng her BlackBerry in the bedroom.

Now he uses Facesbook and Twitter for promotion rather than communicating with friends.

Could that happen to us? Once we've moved our social network online, will we grow sick of it, as Abrams has?

Could this be the end of friendship?

Monday, July 20, 2009

Sophomores come out to play

Granted: We don't read the sports pages of newspapers to be informed about consequential happenings; we read them to be entertained. They're part of the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine of "hard news" go down.

Do we read them, though, to see how adorably headline writers can distort athletes' names to make them appear to have something to do with whatever sport is being covered?

Maybe we do. And then, if we study hard, we move on to our junior year of high school.

When Stewart Cink won the British Open golf tournament Sunday by defeating 59-year-old Tom Watson, though, we knew what was coming. Across the front of the local sports section: "Cink-ing feeling."

Groan.

This is in a state where the chief financial officer's last name is Sink, but you don't see "Sinking feeling" in any headlines on the news pages about the state's fiscal misfortunes. I wonder why.

While we're on golf: How does an activity in which a near-sexagenarian comes in second in a top event (a then-53-year-old, Greg Norman, came in third last year) qualify as a sport?

Doesn't "sport" imply exertion, perspiration, perhaps?

Maybe "game" is the word we're looking for -- like checkers or old maid.

Friday, July 17, 2009

Farewell, Walter

Walter Cronkite, found by public-opinion polls during his 19-year tenure as anchorman of the CBS Evening News to be "the most trusted man in America," has died at age 92.


During an age when people discovered that they didn't necessarily have to wait until the next morning's newspaper to find out what was happening, they came to rely on the grandfatherly Cronkite to bring them the truth.


He was there to tell us about some of the most tumultuous, devastating and uplifting events of the past century -- the Vietnam war, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, man's landing on the moon.


It wasn't the news he reported, though, that distinguished Cronkite but rather his credibility. We believed every word he said -- and with good reason. He was an honorable man and one we shall miss.


And that's the way it is.

Thursday, July 16, 2009

An intriguing proposal

Way back when putting newspaper content on the Internet was a new idea, visionaries decided that they could establish their publications as the go-to sources for all information in their communities by making it available for free.

I wonder if General Motors ever considered giving away the cars it builds -- and how much longer the company could have staved off bankruptcy by following the same shrewd strategy.

Now, with newsrooms across America continuing to shove free news onto a medium they haven't figured out how to make pay, David Simon has an intriguing, albeit risky, proposal in the current Columbia Journalism Review. He calls upon the publishers of The New York Times and The Washington Post to start charging everyone who doesn't subscribe to the print papers to read them online.

There's something about this that feels like the periodic efforts to end the reliance on anonymous sources in the nation's capital. It could work only if everyone involved agrees to do it -- which never happens.

The same is true here. If either paper balks, the other would suffer greatly. On the other hand, if both go along -- and, perhaps, are joined by other large news organizations -- they just might be able to breathe some life back into America's newsrooms.

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

What to say? Who will care?

Relatively new to the world of social networking, I'm finding that there are people who have lives even less interesting than my own. I know that because they tell me -- on their blogs, on Facebook, on Twitter.

It seems not too long ago that people who didn't guard their privacy might even exaggerate their experiences to impress others. That time seems to have passed.

Now an act of personal hygiene, a mundane task, a random thought all are assumed to be of interest to the rest of the world. Take, for instance, Jeni Searcy, a "lifecaster" in Fort Worth, Texas, whose life is an open electronic book. Melody McDonald of the Star-Telegram introduced us to Searcy and others like her, including a bride who considered tweeting while walking down the aisle.

"I -- uh, what? Oh, yeah. I do!"

If I'm going to get with the program, I'm going to have to dial down what I regard as worth sharing.

Saturday, July 11, 2009

Failure to communicate

It’s always shocking – but it shouldn’t be – that organizations that exist to communicate with the public communicate so poorly internally. Shouldn’t be because it happens with such regularity.

The latest example is Salongate at The Washington Post, recounted by Post Ombudsman Andrew Alexander in Sunday’s issue. First exposed by Politico July 3, it involved a plan to bolster a sagging bottom line by, in essence, selling access to the newsroom.

The now-aborted scheme called for companies to pony up as much as $25,000 to have dinner at Publisher Katharine Weymouth’s home with, among others, members of the Obama Administration and newsroom representatives. The “spirited” but not “confrontational” conversation was to be off the record.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that any such invitation would be reviewed but that he thought that it “would likely exceed” what the administration would find acceptable.

The major players at the newspaper – Weymouth, granddaughter of the late Post Publisher Katharine Graham and niece of Post chief executive Donald Graham; Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli; President and General Manager Stephen Hills; Charles Pelton, who initiated the plan; and several top newsroom editors who were briefed – now acknowledge, to one degree or another, that it was flawed. The general theme, though, seems to be that they didn’t fully understand what was being proposed or thought that the alert they were receiving was preliminary and would be revised. Apparently no one objected.

Organizations that regularly expose and comment harshly on others’ shortcomings ought to understand that they live in a glass house and be more sensitive to the consequences of violating the rules by which they expect others to live.

Friday, July 10, 2009

Information overload

Been giving a lot of thought lately to the finite amount of time in a day and the inverse ratio of the volume of information to be consumed to the number of minutes remaining for other activities -- having a life, for instance.

I marvel at others' capacity for digesting an avalanche of messages -- news, communication, entertainment, etc. -- and still accomplishing more than I would attempt. Even adding to the volume of information for others to consume.

Something tells me that I need either a speed-reading course or a method for determining, before I read it, if something is worth the time.

Surely there is software for that.

I'm beginning to suspect that the Internet isn't as much to blame for the decline of newspaper-reading as I imagined. When information overload has been reached, it's only natural to want to shut off the flow.

Thursday, July 9, 2009

Where they read the "paper"

Perusing the Nieman Journalism Lab website for a class assignment, I bumped, belatedly, into an April 13 article by Martin Langeveld in which he found that only a little more than 3 percent of the people who read newspapers do so online. It was based mostly on widely accepted Newspaper Association of America research but also a couple of assumptions by Langeveld, and it immediately became controversial.

Even if Langeveld's findings were off, as critics contended, the evidence seems to suggest that most people who read newspapers do so in print. That doesn't consider, of course, the large number of people who bypass newspapers altogether in seeking information, getting it from television, radio or from non-newspaper websites.

As newspapers struggle to maintain adequate newsgathering forces in the face of declining revenue, and difficulty in generating revenue from their online operations, they might well consider both how quickly they abandon print for the web -- and also what they need to do to make their websites more appealing.

Saturday, July 4, 2009

Communicating loudly


Watching fireworks all around, I wondered how they came to mark the United States' independence from England -- and what it all means.

Wikipedia, source of all things true (after which it then is made more true), tells us that the earliest unequivocal documentation of fireworks dates back to 12th Century China, where they were used to frighten away evil spirits and also to pray for happiness and prosperity. OK, I'm beginning to see a potential connection.

It goes on to explain that fireworks and black ash were used to celebrate important events long before the Revolutionary War -- and that even George Washington's inauguration as president in 1789 was accompanied by a fireworks display.

After more than 200 years, Americans haven't come up with anything to beat fireworks as a means of expressing our happiness at being independent.


Thursday, July 2, 2009

New look -- but for how long?

My brother the PR executive called to ask if I'd seen the local newspaper's latest website design. It didn't please him, and he wanted to vent to me because he had suppressed his first impulse: to tweet about it. Ruffled feathers and all that.

The subject of his displeasure, though, reminded me of an evening newspaper in a city in which I once worked for the morning competition. The PM went from a nearly exclusive emphasis on local news to heavy-duty copshop reports to a series of visual redesigns. The changes, it seemed, weren't doing much to attract readers -- and advertisers.

Then came the day when another, different-looking version of the paper arrived, proclaiming itself, "The newspaper for people who watch television."

Well, people certainly were doing that, and apparently they continued to do so -- instead of reading the newspaper, the new slogan notwithstanding. Shortly thereafter, the paper went out of business.

Since then, whenever I see a newspaper, TV news program or the like start to take on a new look -- or, of greater concern, a series of new looks -- I don't think, "Oh, how clever" or "They're really staying on the cutting edge," which, I suppose, is the reaction they're seeking.

No, I more often wonder just how bad things are down there -- and how much longer the publication or program will be around.