Here's some good advice from John Shore, who blogs at crosswalk.com. This is a short excerpt from a longer posting:
The Book Doctor Will Needle You Now
My last post, A Would-Be Writers Asks: "MUST I Go to College?" made me think of a job I took earlier this year doctoring a novel. If you don't know, "doctoring" a novel means taking someone's novel and either outright fixing it yourself, or directing its author on what he or she needs to do in order to fix it themselves.
It's the most intrusive and inclusive kind of editing; it covers every aspect of the book at hand: pace, setting, characters, dialogue, wardrobe malfunctions, etc. I sometimes take on this sort of work if I believe in the author, or think the book has potential.
Below are excerpts from the last summary report I wrote for a would-be novelist (a fellow whom I'm proud to say took my advice, returned to college, and is now well on his way to making it as a writer of literary fiction).
Back to basics
Just like a physicist must first master basic math skills, so a writer must first master punctuation, grammar, syntax and usage. You simply have to know this stuff, cold. I don’t know how you’re going to learn it as thoroughly as you need to---if you’re going to take an adult ed class in English composition, or buy some style or usage guides and study them, or what.
I can tell you what I did---though I wouldn’t recommend it. I taught that stuff to myself. I spent about three years with my nose buried in "The Chicago Manual of Style," and Kate Turabian’s classic style manual, and the "Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage," and the AP Style Guide, and about a zillion other such titles. (One of the best, most comprehensive books of this sort available today is "Quick Access" by Lynn Quitman Troyka. It’s awesome. If you’re only gonna have one such book---and don’t, of course---make it this one.)
I wouldn’t recommend teaching yourself this material because the best way to learn anything so vast and complex is systematically, which is pretty much the whole purpose of (shudder!) school. I think you want to take some classes in English composition. You need to know what constitutes a complete sentence; the basic rules of punctuation; the pitfalls and earmarks of sloppy syntax. However you go about it, do not try to short cut around learning this stuff, because without it I guarantee you will never get off the ground as a writer....
Reading is really the best way to learn the basics of writing. If you read enough, for long enough, after awhile you just know what does and doesn’t make for a sound, clean sentence; you understand the functions of punctuation; you come to have a solid feel for syntax and usage.
Read any modern master: Updike, Vonnegut, Hemingway, John Irving, Steinbeck. Read it hard. Study it. Take a class or two (or ten) on English literature. Give it a some time. It’ll be worth it, because once you know grammar and syntax you'll be in possession of all the bricks necessary to build yourself virtually any building you want....
Sunday, November 30, 2008
What Was That You Said?
(These will NOT show up on a quiz)
When pop star Britney Spears was asked what is the best part about being famous, she replied, "I get to go to lots of overseas places, like Canada." When you're a celebrity or politician, everything you say can be used against you later. If you're famous, innocent flubs that would otherwise be forgotten are quoted until your dying day.
Here is an assortment of some of those innocent flubs collected by Rinkworks.com:
"Outside of the killings, [Washington, D.C.] has one of the lowest crime rates in the country."
-- Marion Barry, Mayor of Washington, D.C.
"[I want to] make sure everybody who has a job wants a job."
-- George H. W. Bush, during his first campaign for the presidency
"Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?"
-- George W. Bush
"I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family."
-- George W. Bush
"Well, I think if you say you're going to do something and don't do it, that's trustworthiness."
-- George W. Bush
--"President Carter speaks loudly and carries a fly spotter, a fly swasher -- it's been a long day."
-- Gerald Ford
"If Lincoln was alive today, he'd roll over in his grave."
-- Gerald Ford
"That is what has made America last these past 200 centuries."
-- Gerald Ford
"A zebra does not change its spots."
-- Al Gore
"Smoking kills. If you're killed, you've lost a very important part of your life."
-- Brooke Shields
When pop star Britney Spears was asked what is the best part about being famous, she replied, "I get to go to lots of overseas places, like Canada." When you're a celebrity or politician, everything you say can be used against you later. If you're famous, innocent flubs that would otherwise be forgotten are quoted until your dying day.
Here is an assortment of some of those innocent flubs collected by Rinkworks.com:
"Outside of the killings, [Washington, D.C.] has one of the lowest crime rates in the country."
-- Marion Barry, Mayor of Washington, D.C.
"[I want to] make sure everybody who has a job wants a job."
-- George H. W. Bush, during his first campaign for the presidency
"Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?"
-- George W. Bush
"I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family."
-- George W. Bush
"Well, I think if you say you're going to do something and don't do it, that's trustworthiness."
-- George W. Bush
--"President Carter speaks loudly and carries a fly spotter, a fly swasher -- it's been a long day."
-- Gerald Ford
"If Lincoln was alive today, he'd roll over in his grave."
-- Gerald Ford
"That is what has made America last these past 200 centuries."
-- Gerald Ford
"A zebra does not change its spots."
-- Al Gore
"Smoking kills. If you're killed, you've lost a very important part of your life."
-- Brooke Shields
Friday, November 28, 2008
Rick Warren Releases Christmas Book
From Christianpost.com:
Rick Warren's New Book Hits Bestsellers Lists
By Eric Young
Christian Post Reporter
Rick Warren’s first released book since his highly popular Purpose Driven Life is another best seller and will likely continue its climb as America heads past Thanksgiving and toward Christmas.
After two weeks on the bookshelves, The Purpose of Christmas has been listed among the New York Times’ top 5 bestselling Hardcover Advice books. It is also currently No. 25 on USA Today’s weekly top 150 best sellers overall after debuting at No. 27.
“This book, The Purpose of Christmas, is the most clear definition of Christianity – of what it means to follow Jesus, what it means to be saved – of anything I’ve ever written,” says Warren, who pastors Saddleback Valley Community Church in Lake Forest, Calif.
"The book is cleverly simple and profound," adds Pastor Phil Munsey of the Life Church in Mission Viejo, Calif.
"This book won't answer the questions of the skeptic, but it will answer the sincere quest of those who just want the simple truth of the most celebrated holiday in the world," Munsey told the OC Register of Orange County. "If you want to recapture the innocent childlike faith you embraced … this book will cause you to rejoice."
Based off a Christmas message Warren had delivered two years ago at his Southern California megachurch, The Purpose of Christmas explains why Jesus Christ came to earth – which Warren says can be summed up through the three statements given by the angels that appeared at the first Christmas.
“First, he (the angel) said ‘I bring you good news of great joy.’ It’s a time for celebration,” explains Warren. “And then he says, ‘for on this day is born to you a savior, who is Christ the Lord.’ It’s a time for salvation. And then he says ‘Peace on earth; goodwill toward men.’ It’s a time for reconciliation.
“Jesus Christ came to the earth for celebration, salvation, and reconciliation,” Warren says. “In other words, to make peace with God, to make peace with ourselves, to make peace with other people.”
The 125-page gift book follows Warren's bestselling The Purpose Driven Life, which has sold 52 million copies since its release six years ago. Described as the bestselling nonfiction hardback book in history, the 2002 devotional book rocketed the Baptist pastor into national prominence and was also most identified in a Barna survey of American pastors and ministers as the book that was most influential on their lives and ministries.
Even compared to it, however, Warren says The Purpose of Christmas is “the most evangelistic book I’ve ever written.”
“It’s the clearest presentation of the Gospel,” he says.
In addition to the book, two other “amazing tools” were created by Warren and his team to help people understand the meaning and purpose of Christmas.
The second tool that was created is a three-week small group curriculum based on the three parts of Warren’s Christmas message and intended for Christians and churches to use in the months of November and December. The third is a 16-track CD that intertwines inspirational Christmas songs – sung by such well-known artists as Sarah McLachlan, Martina McBride, ThirdDay and Vince Gill – with inspiring narrative from Warren explaining the three purposes of Christmas as detailed in his book.
"God's message of the purpose of Christmas is clearly written in His Word," says Warren. "I believe that when people experience the Good News … they will begin to understand what Christmas means to them personally, deepening their regard and respect for this season.
“We’re going to be praying that this book is used widely to win many people to Christ,” he adds.
All net proceeds of The Purpose of Christmas book and CD will go to benefit Saddleback Church's PEACE Plan – a global initiative created by Warren to mobilize millions of Christians in the fight against the five global giants of spiritual emptiness, self-centered leadership, extreme poverty, pandemic disease and illiteracy/education.
The CD, which comes with a bonus DVD of Warren's message, is currently available exclusively at Wal-Mart stores through an exclusive arrangement.
The Purpose of Christmas book and the DVD study curriculum materials from Christian publishing giant Zondervan, meanwhile, are available at stores nationwide.
Rick Warren's New Book Hits Bestsellers Lists
By Eric Young
Christian Post Reporter
Rick Warren’s first released book since his highly popular Purpose Driven Life is another best seller and will likely continue its climb as America heads past Thanksgiving and toward Christmas.
After two weeks on the bookshelves, The Purpose of Christmas has been listed among the New York Times’ top 5 bestselling Hardcover Advice books. It is also currently No. 25 on USA Today’s weekly top 150 best sellers overall after debuting at No. 27.
“This book, The Purpose of Christmas, is the most clear definition of Christianity – of what it means to follow Jesus, what it means to be saved – of anything I’ve ever written,” says Warren, who pastors Saddleback Valley Community Church in Lake Forest, Calif.
"The book is cleverly simple and profound," adds Pastor Phil Munsey of the Life Church in Mission Viejo, Calif.
"This book won't answer the questions of the skeptic, but it will answer the sincere quest of those who just want the simple truth of the most celebrated holiday in the world," Munsey told the OC Register of Orange County. "If you want to recapture the innocent childlike faith you embraced … this book will cause you to rejoice."
Based off a Christmas message Warren had delivered two years ago at his Southern California megachurch, The Purpose of Christmas explains why Jesus Christ came to earth – which Warren says can be summed up through the three statements given by the angels that appeared at the first Christmas.
“First, he (the angel) said ‘I bring you good news of great joy.’ It’s a time for celebration,” explains Warren. “And then he says, ‘for on this day is born to you a savior, who is Christ the Lord.’ It’s a time for salvation. And then he says ‘Peace on earth; goodwill toward men.’ It’s a time for reconciliation.
“Jesus Christ came to the earth for celebration, salvation, and reconciliation,” Warren says. “In other words, to make peace with God, to make peace with ourselves, to make peace with other people.”
The 125-page gift book follows Warren's bestselling The Purpose Driven Life, which has sold 52 million copies since its release six years ago. Described as the bestselling nonfiction hardback book in history, the 2002 devotional book rocketed the Baptist pastor into national prominence and was also most identified in a Barna survey of American pastors and ministers as the book that was most influential on their lives and ministries.
Even compared to it, however, Warren says The Purpose of Christmas is “the most evangelistic book I’ve ever written.”
“It’s the clearest presentation of the Gospel,” he says.
In addition to the book, two other “amazing tools” were created by Warren and his team to help people understand the meaning and purpose of Christmas.
The second tool that was created is a three-week small group curriculum based on the three parts of Warren’s Christmas message and intended for Christians and churches to use in the months of November and December. The third is a 16-track CD that intertwines inspirational Christmas songs – sung by such well-known artists as Sarah McLachlan, Martina McBride, ThirdDay and Vince Gill – with inspiring narrative from Warren explaining the three purposes of Christmas as detailed in his book.
"God's message of the purpose of Christmas is clearly written in His Word," says Warren. "I believe that when people experience the Good News … they will begin to understand what Christmas means to them personally, deepening their regard and respect for this season.
“We’re going to be praying that this book is used widely to win many people to Christ,” he adds.
All net proceeds of The Purpose of Christmas book and CD will go to benefit Saddleback Church's PEACE Plan – a global initiative created by Warren to mobilize millions of Christians in the fight against the five global giants of spiritual emptiness, self-centered leadership, extreme poverty, pandemic disease and illiteracy/education.
The CD, which comes with a bonus DVD of Warren's message, is currently available exclusively at Wal-Mart stores through an exclusive arrangement.
The Purpose of Christmas book and the DVD study curriculum materials from Christian publishing giant Zondervan, meanwhile, are available at stores nationwide.
Monday, November 24, 2008
Reader's Digest, Rick Warren to Start Magazine
The Reader's Digest Association, Inc., and Dr. Rick Warren, Pastor of Saddleback Valley Community Church and the author of the worldwide best-seller, "The Purpose Driven Life," today announced a partnership to produce an inspirational multimedia platform called The Purpose Driven Connection.
Together the organizations will pool their international resources to produce and publish this Purpose Driven platform to help people who are seeking their purpose in life and wish to interact with others on their spiritual journeys.
The platform will provide a suite of bundled multimedia tools: "The Purpose Driven Connection," a quarterly magazine; Small Group study materials delivered in DVDs, workbooks and downloadable discussion guides; and a state-of-the-art Christian social networking website.
"We are excited about this new partnership and its unprecedented potential for international impact," said Warren, who will serve as Editor-in-Chief and be heavily involved in the conception of each element. "The Purpose Driven Connection represents more than simply integrated multimedia resources; it will become a platform for a movement of people to change the world."
"We are delighted to be working with Rick Warren and the Saddleback team," said Alyce Alston, President of RDA's Home & Garden and Health & Wellness affinities. "This is one of our company's most important and far-reaching ventures ever. Together we will create a category-busting multimedia suite that will help millions of people in their daily lives, including those who already follow the Purpose Driven principles as well as seekers everywhere looking for greater fulfillment."
The Purpose Driven Connection revolves around the theme, "Your Life Matters," and mirrors Warren's book, which has sold more than 30 million copies since being released in 2002 and has been read by 60 million people and translated into nearly 100 languages.
It also relates to Saddleback Church's PEACE Plan, initiated by Warren, which mobilizes Christians to combat global problems affecting billions of people, including spiritual emptiness, corrupt leadership, extreme poverty, pandemic diseases and illiteracy. To date, the PEACE Coalition has advanced the program among the public, profit and faith sectors in 68 countries.
The magazine, to launch early in 2009, will include stories of everyday people who have found God's purpose for their lives. The framework for the platform will be designed to provide five practical tools to communicate five spiritual purposes -- Knowing, Relating, Growing, Serving and Sharing -- each through a combination of teaching and testimony.
"The magazine will be consistent with our highest editorial standards," said Frank Lalli, RDA's Vice President of International Editions and Magazine Development. "In the best traditions of RDA, we are commissioning extraordinary photographers, illustrators and writers to travel the world and capture real-life stories that will change how readers think and inspire them to take action to improve society."
Together the organizations will pool their international resources to produce and publish this Purpose Driven platform to help people who are seeking their purpose in life and wish to interact with others on their spiritual journeys.
The platform will provide a suite of bundled multimedia tools: "The Purpose Driven Connection," a quarterly magazine; Small Group study materials delivered in DVDs, workbooks and downloadable discussion guides; and a state-of-the-art Christian social networking website.
"We are excited about this new partnership and its unprecedented potential for international impact," said Warren, who will serve as Editor-in-Chief and be heavily involved in the conception of each element. "The Purpose Driven Connection represents more than simply integrated multimedia resources; it will become a platform for a movement of people to change the world."
"We are delighted to be working with Rick Warren and the Saddleback team," said Alyce Alston, President of RDA's Home & Garden and Health & Wellness affinities. "This is one of our company's most important and far-reaching ventures ever. Together we will create a category-busting multimedia suite that will help millions of people in their daily lives, including those who already follow the Purpose Driven principles as well as seekers everywhere looking for greater fulfillment."
The Purpose Driven Connection revolves around the theme, "Your Life Matters," and mirrors Warren's book, which has sold more than 30 million copies since being released in 2002 and has been read by 60 million people and translated into nearly 100 languages.
It also relates to Saddleback Church's PEACE Plan, initiated by Warren, which mobilizes Christians to combat global problems affecting billions of people, including spiritual emptiness, corrupt leadership, extreme poverty, pandemic diseases and illiteracy. To date, the PEACE Coalition has advanced the program among the public, profit and faith sectors in 68 countries.
The magazine, to launch early in 2009, will include stories of everyday people who have found God's purpose for their lives. The framework for the platform will be designed to provide five practical tools to communicate five spiritual purposes -- Knowing, Relating, Growing, Serving and Sharing -- each through a combination of teaching and testimony.
"The magazine will be consistent with our highest editorial standards," said Frank Lalli, RDA's Vice President of International Editions and Magazine Development. "In the best traditions of RDA, we are commissioning extraordinary photographers, illustrators and writers to travel the world and capture real-life stories that will change how readers think and inspire them to take action to improve society."
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Woodward & Bernstein Visit 'Deep Throat'
This summary is not available. Please
click here to view the post.
Why Do You Want to Be in Journalism?
From Columbia Journalism Review. Notice the note at the end, inviting journalism students to contribute. Take them up on it!
Hope Dies Last
I want newspapers to survive, but will they?
By Mallory Carra
I wasn’t even twenty-five years old and I was working for the New York Daily News. All of my friends and family called me their “big-time reporter.” Except at that moment, I was the big-time New York reporter crying in a bathroom stall, thinking, “I hate this.” If this was what it’s like at the “top,” why had I worked so hard to get here?
It was a weird thought because I was living my dream. I had been living and breathing journalism since high school; I loved writing, telling stories, and talking to different people. I found joy in writing for my high school’s barely-there newspaper. I worked myself ragged as a writer and sports editor of NYU’s student paper, but I loved every minute of it. Sometimes I still can’t believe I did all of that for free, yet when I got the chance to do it for a top paper for a good salary, I didn’t want to do it at all.
Was it because of the newsrooms I had worked in or the people I had worked with? Yes and no. I’ve worked in three newsrooms in different parts of the country. Each had their own personality, but all of them tried to fight the future. It’s enough for me to understand why newspapers are dying.
During my post-grad internship at The News and Observer in North Carolina, I pitched a story about Facebook privacy concerns. I spent an hour explaining Facebook to my assigning editor, who still couldn’t wrap his head around it and treated the story like intern busywork that should never see newsprint. After I left, my final draft was turned into the millionth “Facebook is popular” trend story, six months before the Facebook privacy backlash began in 2005.
After that, I spent two and a half years working for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, a newspaper that was trying to catch up with the Internet. Reporters were required to blog, though some of the reporters had trouble understanding what a blog was in the first place, confusing posts with print articles on the Web site. Colleagues and I tried to rebel against the weekly post requirement. We had the freedom to write how and what we wanted, but they controlled when? Wasn’t that against the point of blogging? At least this newspaper’s editors understood the importance of their Web site and tried the best they could, even if they were a few years behind. Reporters blogged, we recorded audio and video, but, most of all, complained—a lot.
At the Daily News, a photographer made a slideshow to go with one of my stories. My supervisor proudly circulated the link around the section, but his boss had a very simple response to the multimedia effort: “Why?” Yet this same person also suggested I create a Google Alert with my name to see if blogs picked up any of my stories, as if it would be an honor and a reward. I found it odd that one of the largest newspapers in the country needed the reassurance of bloggers. After all, everyone at the paper acted like they were unaffected by falling circulation numbers, saying that this is New York and newspapers can’t possibly be dying here because people always have read papers and thus always will. Reporters and photographers mention the paper’s circulation rank at least three times a day in conversation to each other, sources, recent hires, and anyone who dare cross them.
But that mantra won’t stop the numbers from falling, the layoffs from coming, the readers from preferring the Internet, and the ads from not selling. The people at the paper kept telling me how everyone wanted to be in my position. After six weeks, I didn’t want to be there anymore. Three months later, I’ve been laid off from a temp receptionist job and my job search has stalled as the economy crumbles. All I can do now is read blogs in my pajamas all day, but I’m thankful for the chance to be a reader again and see what all the fuss is about.
It’s different on the other side. The only newspaper I read is the free one handed to me before I get on the subway, because I can’t afford to pay for one. My mind drifts during long, jargon-filled online news articles and I enjoy their succinct and snarky blogs more. I follow CNN, AP, and The Onion’s Twitter feeds. My job hunt is fueled by online job postings on various Web sites and attempts at networking. I check CNBC.com for updates about the falling stock market and which company is laying off how many today, because newspapers frustrate me by providing yesterday’s information.
My main concern is how newsrooms will move forward—if they ever do. A lot of people who love reading the hard copy and want coupons, but what happens when that group dies off or the economy gets worse? Why buy a bulky stack of paper filled with yesterday’s news when you can log on and get today’s for free? I’ve attended too many journalism conferences where the theme has been convergence and editors talk about how “blogs are the future.” They’re not the future anymore; they’re now, and the Internet will rule more of how we get news in the years ahead. Where have these editors been?
Reporters need to stop regarding the Internet as a pest they’re not paid enough to provide for and accept that, in addition to their daily duties, this is the new journalism. Owners need to remember that, along with the flashy appeal of the Internet and big profits, newspapers still require good journalism and even better journalists. Newspapers, even without the “paper,” can still remain a news authority, but they need to start acting like one and stop acting like the great-grandfather trying to impress the cool kids.
My current interest in journalism has shifted to the Internet, blogs and social media. News doesn’t necessarily come from news sources anymore. Everything on the Internet has the potential to become something big, even if just for a day. That works out well for marketing ploys and blog book deals, but it also helps promote stories from all over that might have ordinarily flown under the radar. I’m not sure how things will evolve, but I’m excited to see how it does and that’s what still has me interested in the industry. The Internet facilitates creativity. and I think newspapers have the potential to do so much with it. And I’d love to be a part of it, if they ever do.
I want this to happen, so much that it’s hard for me to stop caring for the profession I loved so much in college, but cried about hating in the bathroom. Maybe things will get better when the economy bounces back. Maybe newspapers will start to have the backing to utilize the Internet the way they want and should. Maybe a new generation of editors and reporters will embrace the Internet and save newspapers from dying. Right now, though, I have as much hope for newspapers as I have of finding a non-journalism job while equipped with a journalism degree in this economy—none.
____
In July, we invited laid-off and bought-out journalists to reflect on their experience in the form of a letter to colleagues. Now we are issuing a similar invitation to the young people who’ve come into the profession in the last five years or so, and the young journalism students who soon will. We invite them to air their concerns and hopes about journalism, too. The central questions: What do you see in this business that makes you still want to pursue it? How do you imagine people will get quality news five years down the road? How will you try to fit in? Send your submissions to editors@cjr.org. We’ll publish these periodically under the headline “Starting Thoughts,” and we’ll archive everything we publish here.
Hope Dies Last
I want newspapers to survive, but will they?
By Mallory Carra
I wasn’t even twenty-five years old and I was working for the New York Daily News. All of my friends and family called me their “big-time reporter.” Except at that moment, I was the big-time New York reporter crying in a bathroom stall, thinking, “I hate this.” If this was what it’s like at the “top,” why had I worked so hard to get here?
It was a weird thought because I was living my dream. I had been living and breathing journalism since high school; I loved writing, telling stories, and talking to different people. I found joy in writing for my high school’s barely-there newspaper. I worked myself ragged as a writer and sports editor of NYU’s student paper, but I loved every minute of it. Sometimes I still can’t believe I did all of that for free, yet when I got the chance to do it for a top paper for a good salary, I didn’t want to do it at all.
Was it because of the newsrooms I had worked in or the people I had worked with? Yes and no. I’ve worked in three newsrooms in different parts of the country. Each had their own personality, but all of them tried to fight the future. It’s enough for me to understand why newspapers are dying.
During my post-grad internship at The News and Observer in North Carolina, I pitched a story about Facebook privacy concerns. I spent an hour explaining Facebook to my assigning editor, who still couldn’t wrap his head around it and treated the story like intern busywork that should never see newsprint. After I left, my final draft was turned into the millionth “Facebook is popular” trend story, six months before the Facebook privacy backlash began in 2005.
After that, I spent two and a half years working for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, a newspaper that was trying to catch up with the Internet. Reporters were required to blog, though some of the reporters had trouble understanding what a blog was in the first place, confusing posts with print articles on the Web site. Colleagues and I tried to rebel against the weekly post requirement. We had the freedom to write how and what we wanted, but they controlled when? Wasn’t that against the point of blogging? At least this newspaper’s editors understood the importance of their Web site and tried the best they could, even if they were a few years behind. Reporters blogged, we recorded audio and video, but, most of all, complained—a lot.
At the Daily News, a photographer made a slideshow to go with one of my stories. My supervisor proudly circulated the link around the section, but his boss had a very simple response to the multimedia effort: “Why?” Yet this same person also suggested I create a Google Alert with my name to see if blogs picked up any of my stories, as if it would be an honor and a reward. I found it odd that one of the largest newspapers in the country needed the reassurance of bloggers. After all, everyone at the paper acted like they were unaffected by falling circulation numbers, saying that this is New York and newspapers can’t possibly be dying here because people always have read papers and thus always will. Reporters and photographers mention the paper’s circulation rank at least three times a day in conversation to each other, sources, recent hires, and anyone who dare cross them.
But that mantra won’t stop the numbers from falling, the layoffs from coming, the readers from preferring the Internet, and the ads from not selling. The people at the paper kept telling me how everyone wanted to be in my position. After six weeks, I didn’t want to be there anymore. Three months later, I’ve been laid off from a temp receptionist job and my job search has stalled as the economy crumbles. All I can do now is read blogs in my pajamas all day, but I’m thankful for the chance to be a reader again and see what all the fuss is about.
It’s different on the other side. The only newspaper I read is the free one handed to me before I get on the subway, because I can’t afford to pay for one. My mind drifts during long, jargon-filled online news articles and I enjoy their succinct and snarky blogs more. I follow CNN, AP, and The Onion’s Twitter feeds. My job hunt is fueled by online job postings on various Web sites and attempts at networking. I check CNBC.com for updates about the falling stock market and which company is laying off how many today, because newspapers frustrate me by providing yesterday’s information.
My main concern is how newsrooms will move forward—if they ever do. A lot of people who love reading the hard copy and want coupons, but what happens when that group dies off or the economy gets worse? Why buy a bulky stack of paper filled with yesterday’s news when you can log on and get today’s for free? I’ve attended too many journalism conferences where the theme has been convergence and editors talk about how “blogs are the future.” They’re not the future anymore; they’re now, and the Internet will rule more of how we get news in the years ahead. Where have these editors been?
Reporters need to stop regarding the Internet as a pest they’re not paid enough to provide for and accept that, in addition to their daily duties, this is the new journalism. Owners need to remember that, along with the flashy appeal of the Internet and big profits, newspapers still require good journalism and even better journalists. Newspapers, even without the “paper,” can still remain a news authority, but they need to start acting like one and stop acting like the great-grandfather trying to impress the cool kids.
My current interest in journalism has shifted to the Internet, blogs and social media. News doesn’t necessarily come from news sources anymore. Everything on the Internet has the potential to become something big, even if just for a day. That works out well for marketing ploys and blog book deals, but it also helps promote stories from all over that might have ordinarily flown under the radar. I’m not sure how things will evolve, but I’m excited to see how it does and that’s what still has me interested in the industry. The Internet facilitates creativity. and I think newspapers have the potential to do so much with it. And I’d love to be a part of it, if they ever do.
I want this to happen, so much that it’s hard for me to stop caring for the profession I loved so much in college, but cried about hating in the bathroom. Maybe things will get better when the economy bounces back. Maybe newspapers will start to have the backing to utilize the Internet the way they want and should. Maybe a new generation of editors and reporters will embrace the Internet and save newspapers from dying. Right now, though, I have as much hope for newspapers as I have of finding a non-journalism job while equipped with a journalism degree in this economy—none.
____
In July, we invited laid-off and bought-out journalists to reflect on their experience in the form of a letter to colleagues. Now we are issuing a similar invitation to the young people who’ve come into the profession in the last five years or so, and the young journalism students who soon will. We invite them to air their concerns and hopes about journalism, too. The central questions: What do you see in this business that makes you still want to pursue it? How do you imagine people will get quality news five years down the road? How will you try to fit in? Send your submissions to editors@cjr.org. We’ll publish these periodically under the headline “Starting Thoughts,” and we’ll archive everything we publish here.
Clever Groaners -- Fun With Words
Many people are interested in the Stock Market these days. Here's a report from October 31st.
"Helium was up, feathers are down. Paper was stationary. Fluorescent tubing was dimmed by light trading. Knives were up sharply. Cows steered into a bull market. Pencils lost a few points. Hiking equipment was trailing. Elevators rose while escalators continued their slow decline.
"Weights were up in heavy trading. Light switches were off. Mining equipment hit rock bottom. Diapers remain unchanged. Shipping lines stayed at an even keel. The market for raisins dried up. Coca Cola fizzled.
"Caterpillar stock inched up a bit. Sun peaked at midday. Balloon prices were inflated. And batteries exploded in an attempt to recharge the market."
"Helium was up, feathers are down. Paper was stationary. Fluorescent tubing was dimmed by light trading. Knives were up sharply. Cows steered into a bull market. Pencils lost a few points. Hiking equipment was trailing. Elevators rose while escalators continued their slow decline.
"Weights were up in heavy trading. Light switches were off. Mining equipment hit rock bottom. Diapers remain unchanged. Shipping lines stayed at an even keel. The market for raisins dried up. Coca Cola fizzled.
"Caterpillar stock inched up a bit. Sun peaked at midday. Balloon prices were inflated. And batteries exploded in an attempt to recharge the market."
Investigation Flat, Police Sharp, Damage Minor
Count the ways in which the writer had fun with this story!
Mystery piano in woods perplexes police
By Josh Levs, CNN
(CNN) -- Was it a theft? A prank? A roundabout effort to bring some holiday cheer to the police? Authorities in Harwich, Massachusetts, are probing the mysterious appearance of a piano, in good working condition, in the middle of the woods.
Discovered by a woman who was walking a trail, the Baldwin Acrosonic piano, model number 987, is intact -- and, apparently, in key.
Sgt. Adam Hutton of the Harwich Police Department said information has been broadcast to all the other police departments in the Cape Cod area in hopes of drumming up a clue, however minor it may be.
But so far, the investigation is flat.
Also of note: Near the mystery piano -- serial number 733746 -- was a bench, positioned as though someone was about to play.
The piano was at the end of a dirt road, near a walking path to a footbridge in the middle of conservation land near the Cape.
It took a handful of police to move the piano into a vehicle to transport it to storage, so it would appear that putting it into the woods took more than one person.
Asked whether Harwich police will be holding a holiday party in the storage bay -- tickling the ivories, pouring eggnog -- while they await word of the piano's origin and fate, Hutton said with a laugh. No such plans.
Harwich police have had some fun, though. Among the photos they sent to the news media is one of Officer Derek Dutra examining the piano in the woods. The police entitled the photo "Liberace."
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Traits of a Good Reporter-- WashPost
Here's a very stimulating piece by the ombudsman of the Washington Post. View the original (many live links) by clicking here.
The Traits of a Good Reporter
By Deborah Howell
Sunday, November 23, 2008; B06
Good reporters are the heart of news gathering. If it's news, they have to know it. Without them, the public wouldn't have the news and information essential to running a democracy -- or our lives. Whether the story is local, national or foreign, it has to be gathered on the ground by a reporter.
What makes a good reporter? Endless curiosity and a deep need to know what is happening. Then, the ability to hear a small clue and follow it. When Post reporter Dana Priest first heard "a tiny, tiny piece" of what turned out to be the Walter Reed Army Medical Center scandal, she couldn't ignore it.
She and colleague Anne Hull methodically followed the story until Army officials were shamed and did something about the poor care of many Iraq war veterans. Hull and Priest also have a quality essential to good reporting: empathy. They cared about those soldiers and had the ability to tell the story in a way that touched readers.
Retired Post executive editor Ben Bradlee thinks a reporter's most important quality is energy: "They've got to love what they're doing; they've got to be serious about turning over rocks, opening doors. The story drives you. It's part of your soul."
Reporters go where the story is -- even if it's over a mountain pass in Afghanistan on horseback in a blinding blizzard. That's what Post reporter Keith B. Richburg and photographer Lucian Perkins did in late 2001 to find the front lines of a war between the Taliban and its enemies.
When dark smoke was billowing out of the telephone company building in downtown Minneapolis -- 10 minutes before deadline -- Minneapolis Star reporter Randy Furst was on the story. He ran to the building and burst into a board of directors' meeting and asked the company president what was going on. The company flack called me the next day to complain about Furst's behavior; I thought it was great.
Good reporters are committed to telling the story. Associated Press reporter Terry Anderson ignored his boss's advice to leave war-torn Lebanon; he felt that he had to stay. He was kidnapped in 1985 and spent 6 1/2 years in brutal captivity.
Post foreign correspondent Anthony Shadid is a veteran of armed conflict in the Middle East; he was wounded by gunfire while working for the Boston Globe. What drives him? During wars, "work is all there is. I struggle with how you get beyond the pain of what you see to say something more. For me, every few months I try to figure how I could leave the profession, if for no other reason than to salvage soul and sanity."
But he hasn't, and he will go back to Iraq soon. "If you don't do it, the story might not be covered. Or it might not be covered the way you think it should be. Maybe it's equal parts responsibility, curiosity and ambition, hopefully more of the former than the latter. It's obligation, too. We're one of the few newspapers with the resources and ambition to still cover the story. And if we don't do it -- as the story recedes from the front page, as staffing dwindles, as money dries up -- no one else will."
Bob Woodward, The Post's most renowned reporter, believes that good reporters do not let speed and impatience hinder them. They have the discipline to go to multiple sources at all levels of a story and get meticulous documentation -- notes, calendars, memos. "You go down lots of holes that don't lead anywhere," but "in the end, what always matters is information that is authentic and can be analyzed and documented."
Most reporters don't go to Afghanistan or get shot at. But it often takes the same mental toughness to cover the police or hold local government officials accountable. District police reporter Theola Labbé-DeBose puts it this way: "I think what makes a good reporter is the dogged, unshaken belief that there is some way to obtain a seemingly impossible piece of information."
Good reporters are savvy enough to find sources they can trust -- think Deep Throat -- and, as Ernest Hemingway said, they have built-in b.s. detectors. Don't lie to a reporter; you'll be caught. Say you can't answer.
Woe to officials who want to make public decisions in private. Jim Shoop, a reporter on the old Minneapolis Star, found out about a secret meeting of Twin Cities mayors who were discussing setting up a metropolitan sales tax; he arrived early and curled up inside a portable bar in a corner of the room. He got the story.
Sometimes it's important just to hang out and build trust. Post Metro reporter Josh White was trying to find a stripper with drug problems befriended by the rogue FBI agent Robert Hanssen before he was caught spying. White visited most of the strip joints in town and got a lead that sent him to Columbus, Ohio, where he knocked, unannounced, and met her mother and toddler. After three days, the stripper came home to find White on her couch with her son in his lap watching TV. She gave him the story.
Good reporters know how to get access to people and documents; in the old days, a fifth of whiskey to the right janitor could get you a report lying on a city hall desk. Now a cadre of Post database and investigative reporters plows through mounds of hard-to-obtain government documents, looking for stories of fraud, patronage, waste and wrongdoing; they create spreadsheets and do the painstaking work of looking for patterns. The ability to sort out conflicting information is one of the hallmarks of good reporting.
Metro reporter Keith Alexander, reporting on the case of two girls who were found murdered and stuffed in a freezer in their home, spent days going over court files to find why their mother, accused of killing them, had been allowed to adopt them. The files told him the sad stories of their biological families; he was able to track them down and tell a deeper story of the tragedy.
A reporter's first commitment is getting the story for readers; it trumps almost everything. That's the reason they sometimes miss their wedding anniversaries or their children's birthday parties and keep on reporting until they are wheeled into surgery (see Shadid) or delivery rooms.
Reporting is a calling. If reporters didn't have it (along with good editors), how would you know what was going on in your communities, the nation and the world?
The Traits of a Good Reporter
By Deborah Howell
Sunday, November 23, 2008; B06
Good reporters are the heart of news gathering. If it's news, they have to know it. Without them, the public wouldn't have the news and information essential to running a democracy -- or our lives. Whether the story is local, national or foreign, it has to be gathered on the ground by a reporter.
What makes a good reporter? Endless curiosity and a deep need to know what is happening. Then, the ability to hear a small clue and follow it. When Post reporter Dana Priest first heard "a tiny, tiny piece" of what turned out to be the Walter Reed Army Medical Center scandal, she couldn't ignore it.
She and colleague Anne Hull methodically followed the story until Army officials were shamed and did something about the poor care of many Iraq war veterans. Hull and Priest also have a quality essential to good reporting: empathy. They cared about those soldiers and had the ability to tell the story in a way that touched readers.
Retired Post executive editor Ben Bradlee thinks a reporter's most important quality is energy: "They've got to love what they're doing; they've got to be serious about turning over rocks, opening doors. The story drives you. It's part of your soul."
Reporters go where the story is -- even if it's over a mountain pass in Afghanistan on horseback in a blinding blizzard. That's what Post reporter Keith B. Richburg and photographer Lucian Perkins did in late 2001 to find the front lines of a war between the Taliban and its enemies.
When dark smoke was billowing out of the telephone company building in downtown Minneapolis -- 10 minutes before deadline -- Minneapolis Star reporter Randy Furst was on the story. He ran to the building and burst into a board of directors' meeting and asked the company president what was going on. The company flack called me the next day to complain about Furst's behavior; I thought it was great.
Good reporters are committed to telling the story. Associated Press reporter Terry Anderson ignored his boss's advice to leave war-torn Lebanon; he felt that he had to stay. He was kidnapped in 1985 and spent 6 1/2 years in brutal captivity.
Post foreign correspondent Anthony Shadid is a veteran of armed conflict in the Middle East; he was wounded by gunfire while working for the Boston Globe. What drives him? During wars, "work is all there is. I struggle with how you get beyond the pain of what you see to say something more. For me, every few months I try to figure how I could leave the profession, if for no other reason than to salvage soul and sanity."
But he hasn't, and he will go back to Iraq soon. "If you don't do it, the story might not be covered. Or it might not be covered the way you think it should be. Maybe it's equal parts responsibility, curiosity and ambition, hopefully more of the former than the latter. It's obligation, too. We're one of the few newspapers with the resources and ambition to still cover the story. And if we don't do it -- as the story recedes from the front page, as staffing dwindles, as money dries up -- no one else will."
Bob Woodward, The Post's most renowned reporter, believes that good reporters do not let speed and impatience hinder them. They have the discipline to go to multiple sources at all levels of a story and get meticulous documentation -- notes, calendars, memos. "You go down lots of holes that don't lead anywhere," but "in the end, what always matters is information that is authentic and can be analyzed and documented."
Most reporters don't go to Afghanistan or get shot at. But it often takes the same mental toughness to cover the police or hold local government officials accountable. District police reporter Theola Labbé-DeBose puts it this way: "I think what makes a good reporter is the dogged, unshaken belief that there is some way to obtain a seemingly impossible piece of information."
Good reporters are savvy enough to find sources they can trust -- think Deep Throat -- and, as Ernest Hemingway said, they have built-in b.s. detectors. Don't lie to a reporter; you'll be caught. Say you can't answer.
Woe to officials who want to make public decisions in private. Jim Shoop, a reporter on the old Minneapolis Star, found out about a secret meeting of Twin Cities mayors who were discussing setting up a metropolitan sales tax; he arrived early and curled up inside a portable bar in a corner of the room. He got the story.
Sometimes it's important just to hang out and build trust. Post Metro reporter Josh White was trying to find a stripper with drug problems befriended by the rogue FBI agent Robert Hanssen before he was caught spying. White visited most of the strip joints in town and got a lead that sent him to Columbus, Ohio, where he knocked, unannounced, and met her mother and toddler. After three days, the stripper came home to find White on her couch with her son in his lap watching TV. She gave him the story.
Good reporters know how to get access to people and documents; in the old days, a fifth of whiskey to the right janitor could get you a report lying on a city hall desk. Now a cadre of Post database and investigative reporters plows through mounds of hard-to-obtain government documents, looking for stories of fraud, patronage, waste and wrongdoing; they create spreadsheets and do the painstaking work of looking for patterns. The ability to sort out conflicting information is one of the hallmarks of good reporting.
Metro reporter Keith Alexander, reporting on the case of two girls who were found murdered and stuffed in a freezer in their home, spent days going over court files to find why their mother, accused of killing them, had been allowed to adopt them. The files told him the sad stories of their biological families; he was able to track them down and tell a deeper story of the tragedy.
A reporter's first commitment is getting the story for readers; it trumps almost everything. That's the reason they sometimes miss their wedding anniversaries or their children's birthday parties and keep on reporting until they are wheeled into surgery (see Shadid) or delivery rooms.
Reporting is a calling. If reporters didn't have it (along with good editors), how would you know what was going on in your communities, the nation and the world?
Friday, November 21, 2008
Young Evangelicals -- Videos Invited
Young Evangelicals: We Want Your Videos
In connection with our recent national survey of young evangelicals, Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly invites evangelicals ages 18-29 to send us 1-2 minute videos http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week1207/evangelicalvideos.html about their attitudes on religion, politics, and America's role in the world.
In connection with our recent national survey of young evangelicals, Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly invites evangelicals ages 18-29 to send us 1-2 minute videos http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week1207/evangelicalvideos.html about their attitudes on religion, politics, and America's role in the world.
Jerry Jenkins Reveals 'Writing Cave'
Are you interested in seeing the "cave" where Jerry Jenkins (pictured) goes to write when he's on deadline for a book or an article?
For an "inside look" at Jerry's working environment, click here.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Focus on the Family Folds Four Print Publications
From CTI:
Focus on the Family Folding Four Print Publications
Brio, Brio and Beyond, Breakaway, and Plugged In will turn into online magazines.
Sarah Pulliam
Focus on the Family will stop publishing four of its eight magazines, the ministry told Religion News Service.
The ministry, founded by James Dobson, announced earlier this week that it will cut around 200 positions on it's staff of about 1,150.
Adelle M. Banks writes:
The print edition of "Plugged In," an entertainment review guide for parents, will continue through its online version, Schneeberger said. Three other publications, Breakaway, Brio, and Brio and Beyond, which were aimed at teenagers, will be revamped into online content.
"The content that was found in those publications will still be available online, but it will be targeted not at teens but at parents," he said.
One of the four remaining magazines, Citizen, will be reduced from 12 issues to 10 issues a year. Earlier this fall, the ministry cut 46 other staff positions by outsourcing the department that filled orders and distributed books.
Focus on the Family Folding Four Print Publications
Brio, Brio and Beyond, Breakaway, and Plugged In will turn into online magazines.
Sarah Pulliam
Focus on the Family will stop publishing four of its eight magazines, the ministry told Religion News Service.
The ministry, founded by James Dobson, announced earlier this week that it will cut around 200 positions on it's staff of about 1,150.
Adelle M. Banks writes:
The print edition of "Plugged In," an entertainment review guide for parents, will continue through its online version, Schneeberger said. Three other publications, Breakaway, Brio, and Brio and Beyond, which were aimed at teenagers, will be revamped into online content.
"The content that was found in those publications will still be available online, but it will be targeted not at teens but at parents," he said.
One of the four remaining magazines, Citizen, will be reduced from 12 issues to 10 issues a year. Earlier this fall, the ministry cut 46 other staff positions by outsourcing the department that filled orders and distributed books.
Flight Attendant Helps Land Plane
Every once in a while, a news story appears with such an eye-popping news value it seems unbelievable. I think this is one of those stories.
Air Canada flight attendant helped land plane
By SHAWN POGATCHNIK
DUBLIN, Ireland (AP) - An Air Canada co-pilot having a mental breakdown had to be forcibly removed from the cockpit, restrained and sedated, and a stewardess with flying skills helped the pilot safely make an emergency landing, an Irish investigation concluded Wednesday.
The report by the Irish Air Accident Investigation Unit into an incident in January applauded the decision-making of the pilot and the cockpit skills of the flight attendant, who stepped into the co-pilot's seat for the emergency diversion to Shannon Airport in western Ireland.
None of the 146 passengers or other nine crew members on board the Boeing 767 bound from Toronto to London was injured after the 58-year-old co-pilot had to be removed by attendants and sedated by two doctors on board.
The report did not identify any of the Air Canada crew by name. Nor did it specify the psychiatric diagnosis for the co-pilot, who was hospitalized for 11 days in Irish mental wards before being flown by air ambulance back to Canada.
It said the co-pilot was a licensed veteran with more than 6,500 hours' flying time, about half on board Boeing 767s, and had recently passed a medical examination.
But it said the pilot noticed immediately that his co-pilot was not in good professional shape on the day of the flight, arriving late to the cockpit after all the safety checks and paperwork had been completed. He reported that the co-pilot's behavior worsened once they were airborne, and the co-pilot advised him to take a lengthy break for naps and a meal.
As the aircraft reached the middle of the Atlantic, the report said, the co-pilot began talking in a ``rambling and disjointed'' manner, took another nap, and then refused to buckle his seat belt or observe other safety procedures when he returned to the cockpit.
The pilot concluded that his colleague was now so ``belligerent and uncooperative'' that he couldn't do his job.
The report said the pilot summoned several flight attendants to remove the co-pilot from the cockpit, and one flight attendant suffered an injured wrist in the struggle. Doctors from Britain and Canada on board determined that the co-pilot was confused and disoriented.
The report did not mention how the co-pilot was restrained. Departing passengers at the time said his arms and legs had been tied up to keep him under control.
The pilot then asked flight attendants to find out if any passenger was a qualified pilot. When none was found, one stewardess admitted she held a current commercial pilot's license but said her license for reading cockpit instruments had expired.
``The flight attendant provided useful assistance to the commander, who remarked in a statement to the investigation that she was `not out of place' while occupying the right-hand seat,'' the report said.
Air Canada flight attendant helped land plane
By SHAWN POGATCHNIK
DUBLIN, Ireland (AP) - An Air Canada co-pilot having a mental breakdown had to be forcibly removed from the cockpit, restrained and sedated, and a stewardess with flying skills helped the pilot safely make an emergency landing, an Irish investigation concluded Wednesday.
The report by the Irish Air Accident Investigation Unit into an incident in January applauded the decision-making of the pilot and the cockpit skills of the flight attendant, who stepped into the co-pilot's seat for the emergency diversion to Shannon Airport in western Ireland.
None of the 146 passengers or other nine crew members on board the Boeing 767 bound from Toronto to London was injured after the 58-year-old co-pilot had to be removed by attendants and sedated by two doctors on board.
The report did not identify any of the Air Canada crew by name. Nor did it specify the psychiatric diagnosis for the co-pilot, who was hospitalized for 11 days in Irish mental wards before being flown by air ambulance back to Canada.
It said the co-pilot was a licensed veteran with more than 6,500 hours' flying time, about half on board Boeing 767s, and had recently passed a medical examination.
But it said the pilot noticed immediately that his co-pilot was not in good professional shape on the day of the flight, arriving late to the cockpit after all the safety checks and paperwork had been completed. He reported that the co-pilot's behavior worsened once they were airborne, and the co-pilot advised him to take a lengthy break for naps and a meal.
As the aircraft reached the middle of the Atlantic, the report said, the co-pilot began talking in a ``rambling and disjointed'' manner, took another nap, and then refused to buckle his seat belt or observe other safety procedures when he returned to the cockpit.
The pilot concluded that his colleague was now so ``belligerent and uncooperative'' that he couldn't do his job.
The report said the pilot summoned several flight attendants to remove the co-pilot from the cockpit, and one flight attendant suffered an injured wrist in the struggle. Doctors from Britain and Canada on board determined that the co-pilot was confused and disoriented.
The report did not mention how the co-pilot was restrained. Departing passengers at the time said his arms and legs had been tied up to keep him under control.
The pilot then asked flight attendants to find out if any passenger was a qualified pilot. When none was found, one stewardess admitted she held a current commercial pilot's license but said her license for reading cockpit instruments had expired.
``The flight attendant provided useful assistance to the commander, who remarked in a statement to the investigation that she was `not out of place' while occupying the right-hand seat,'' the report said.
Web Journalists Emerge, Plan to Organize
Here's something very intriguing to think about. The original is at http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/18/business/18voice.php
A new type of journalism outlet is gaining prominence in some cities. Small, non-profit sites run by professional journalists are breaking big stories.
Web journalists' bark grows louder
By Richard Pérez-Peña
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
SAN DIEGO: Over the last two years, some of this city's darkest secrets have been dragged into the light — city officials with conflicts of interest and hidden pay raises, affordable housing that was not affordable, and misleading crime statistics.
Investigations ensued. The chiefs of two redevelopment agencies were forced out. One of them faces criminal charges. Yet the main revelations came not from any of San Diego's television and radio stations or its dominant newspaper, The San Diego Union-Tribune, but from a handful of young journalists at a nonprofit Web site run out of a converted military base far from downtown's glass towers — a site that did not exist four years ago.
As American newspapers shrink and shed staff, and broadcast news outlets sink in the ratings, a new kind of Web-based news operation has arisen in several cities, forcing the papers to follow the stories they uncover.
Here it is VoiceofSanDiego.org, offering a brand of serious, original reporting by professional journalists — the province of the traditional media, but at a much lower cost of doing business. Since it began in 2005, similar operations have cropped up in New Haven, the Twin Cities, Seattle, St. Louis and Chicago. More are on the way.
Their news coverage and hard-digging investigative reporting stand out in an Internet landscape long dominated by partisan commentary, gossip, vitriol and citizen journalism posted by unpaid amateurs.
The fledgling movement has reached a sufficient critical mass, its founders think, so they plan to form an association, angling for national advertising and foundation grants that they could not compete for singly. And hardly a week goes by without a call from journalists around the country seeking advice about starting their own online news outlets.
"Voice is doing really significant work, driving the agenda on redevelopment and some other areas, putting local politicians and businesses on the hot seat," said Dean Nelson, director of the journalism program at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. "I have them come into my classes, and I introduce them as, 'This is the future of journalism.' "
That is a subject of hot debate among people who closely follow the newspaper industry. Publishing online means operating at half the cost of a comparable printed paper, but online advertising is not robust enough to sustain a newsroom.
And so financially, VoiceofSan Diego and its peers mimic public broadcasting, not newspapers. They are nonprofit corporations supported by foundations, wealthy donors, audience contributions and a little advertising.
New nonprofits without a specific geographic focus also have sprung up to fill other niches, like ProPublica, devoted to investigative journalism, and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which looks into problems around the world. A similar group, the Center for Investigative Reporting, dates back three decades.
But some experts question whether a large part of the news business can survive on what is essentially charity, and whether it is wise to lean too heavily on the whims of a few moneyed benefactors.
"These are some of the big questions about the future of the business," said Robert Giles, curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. Nonprofit news online "has to be explored and experimented with, but it has to overcome the hurdle of proving it can support a big news staff. Even the most well-funded of these sites are a far cry in resources from a city newspaper."
The people who run the local news sites see themselves as one future among many, and they have a complex relationship with traditional media. The say that the deterioration of those media has created an opening for new sources of news, as well as a surplus of unemployed journalists for them to hire.
"No one here welcomes the decline of newspapers," said Andrew Donohue, one of two executive editors at VoiceofSanDiego. "We can't be the main news source for this city, not for the foreseeable future. We only have 11 people."
Those people are almost all young, some of them refugees from older media. The executive editors, Donohue, 30, and Scott Lewis, 32, each had a few years of experience at small papers before abandoning newsprint. So far, their audience is tiny, about 18,000 monthly unique visitors, according to Quantcast, a media measurement service.
The biggest of the new nonprofit news sites, MinnPost in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Minnesota; and the St. Louis Beacon in Missouri, can top 200,000 visitors in a month, but even that is a fraction of the Internet readership for the local newspapers.
VoiceofSanDiego's site looks much like any newspaper's, frequently updated with breaking news and organized around broad topics: government and politics, housing, economics, the environment, schools and science. It has few graphics, but plenty of photography and, through a partnership with a local TV station, some video.
But it is, of necessity, thin — strictly local, selective in what it covers and with none of the wire service articles that plump up most news sites.
VoiceofSanDiego grew out of a string of spectacular municipal scandals. City councilmen took bribes from a strip club owner, a mishandled pension fund drove the city to the brink of bankruptcy and city officials illegally covered up the crisis, to name a few.
A semiretired local businessman, Buzz Woolley, watched the parade of revelations, fraud charges and criminal convictions, seething with frustration. He was particularly incensed that the pension debacle had developed over several years, more or less in plain sight, but had received little news coverage.
"I kept thinking, 'Who's paying attention?' " Woolley recalled. "Why don't we hear about this stuff before it becomes a disaster?' "
In 2004, his conversations with a veteran columnist, Neil Morgan, who had been fired by The Union-Tribune, led to the creation of VoiceofSanDiego, with Woolley as president, chief executive and, at first, chief financial backer.
Most of this new breed of news sites have a whiff of scruffy insurgency, but MinnPost, based in Minneapolis, resembles the middle-age establishment. Its founder and chief executive, Joel Kramer, has been the editor and publisher of The Star Tribune, of Minneapolis, and its top editors are refugees from that paper or its rival, The Pioneer Press in St. Paul.
MinnPost is rich compared with its peers — with a $1.5 million bankroll from Kramer and several others when it started last year, and a $1.3 million annual budget — and it has been more aggressive about selling ads and getting readers to donate.
The full-time editors and reporters earn $50,000 to $60,000 a year, Kramer said — a living wage, but less than they would make at the competing papers. MinnPost has just five full-time employees, but it uses more than 40 paid freelance contributors, allowing it to do frequent reporting on areas like the arts and sports.
If MinnPost is the establishment, The New Haven Independent is a guerrilla team. It has no office, and holds its meetings in a coffee shop. The founder and editor, Paul Bass, who spent most of his career at an alternative weekly, works from home or, occasionally, borrows a desk at a local Spanish-language newspaper.
In addition to state and city affairs, The Independent covers small-bore local news, lately doing a series of articles on people who face the loss of their homes to foreclosure.
With a budget of just $200,000, it has a small staff — some are paid less than $30,000 — and a small corps of freelancers and volunteer contributors. It does not sell ads, which Bass says would be impractical.
"There's room for a whole range of approaches, and we're living proof that you can do meaningful journalism very cheaply," Bass said.
Crosscut.com, a local news site in Seattle, does reporting and commentary of its own, but also aggregates articles from other news sources. It began last year as a business, but is changing to nonprofit status.
VoiceofSanDiego took yet another approach, hiring a crew of young, hungry, full-time journalists, paying them salaries comparable to what they would make at large newspapers and relying less on freelancers. Donohue and Lewis earned $60,000 to $70,000 last year, according to the VoiceofSan Diego IRS filings.
On a budget under $800,000 this year — almost $200,000 more than last year — everyone does double duty. Lewis writes a political column, and Donohue works on investigative articles. But the operation is growing and Woolley says he has become convinced that the nonprofit model has the best chance of survival.
"Information is now a public service as much as it's a commodity," he said. "It should be thought of the same way as education, health care. It's one of the things you need to operate a civil society, and the market isn't doing it very well."
A new type of journalism outlet is gaining prominence in some cities. Small, non-profit sites run by professional journalists are breaking big stories.
Web journalists' bark grows louder
By Richard Pérez-Peña
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
SAN DIEGO: Over the last two years, some of this city's darkest secrets have been dragged into the light — city officials with conflicts of interest and hidden pay raises, affordable housing that was not affordable, and misleading crime statistics.
Investigations ensued. The chiefs of two redevelopment agencies were forced out. One of them faces criminal charges. Yet the main revelations came not from any of San Diego's television and radio stations or its dominant newspaper, The San Diego Union-Tribune, but from a handful of young journalists at a nonprofit Web site run out of a converted military base far from downtown's glass towers — a site that did not exist four years ago.
As American newspapers shrink and shed staff, and broadcast news outlets sink in the ratings, a new kind of Web-based news operation has arisen in several cities, forcing the papers to follow the stories they uncover.
Here it is VoiceofSanDiego.org, offering a brand of serious, original reporting by professional journalists — the province of the traditional media, but at a much lower cost of doing business. Since it began in 2005, similar operations have cropped up in New Haven, the Twin Cities, Seattle, St. Louis and Chicago. More are on the way.
Their news coverage and hard-digging investigative reporting stand out in an Internet landscape long dominated by partisan commentary, gossip, vitriol and citizen journalism posted by unpaid amateurs.
The fledgling movement has reached a sufficient critical mass, its founders think, so they plan to form an association, angling for national advertising and foundation grants that they could not compete for singly. And hardly a week goes by without a call from journalists around the country seeking advice about starting their own online news outlets.
"Voice is doing really significant work, driving the agenda on redevelopment and some other areas, putting local politicians and businesses on the hot seat," said Dean Nelson, director of the journalism program at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. "I have them come into my classes, and I introduce them as, 'This is the future of journalism.' "
That is a subject of hot debate among people who closely follow the newspaper industry. Publishing online means operating at half the cost of a comparable printed paper, but online advertising is not robust enough to sustain a newsroom.
And so financially, VoiceofSan Diego and its peers mimic public broadcasting, not newspapers. They are nonprofit corporations supported by foundations, wealthy donors, audience contributions and a little advertising.
New nonprofits without a specific geographic focus also have sprung up to fill other niches, like ProPublica, devoted to investigative journalism, and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which looks into problems around the world. A similar group, the Center for Investigative Reporting, dates back three decades.
But some experts question whether a large part of the news business can survive on what is essentially charity, and whether it is wise to lean too heavily on the whims of a few moneyed benefactors.
"These are some of the big questions about the future of the business," said Robert Giles, curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. Nonprofit news online "has to be explored and experimented with, but it has to overcome the hurdle of proving it can support a big news staff. Even the most well-funded of these sites are a far cry in resources from a city newspaper."
The people who run the local news sites see themselves as one future among many, and they have a complex relationship with traditional media. The say that the deterioration of those media has created an opening for new sources of news, as well as a surplus of unemployed journalists for them to hire.
"No one here welcomes the decline of newspapers," said Andrew Donohue, one of two executive editors at VoiceofSanDiego. "We can't be the main news source for this city, not for the foreseeable future. We only have 11 people."
Those people are almost all young, some of them refugees from older media. The executive editors, Donohue, 30, and Scott Lewis, 32, each had a few years of experience at small papers before abandoning newsprint. So far, their audience is tiny, about 18,000 monthly unique visitors, according to Quantcast, a media measurement service.
The biggest of the new nonprofit news sites, MinnPost in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Minnesota; and the St. Louis Beacon in Missouri, can top 200,000 visitors in a month, but even that is a fraction of the Internet readership for the local newspapers.
VoiceofSanDiego's site looks much like any newspaper's, frequently updated with breaking news and organized around broad topics: government and politics, housing, economics, the environment, schools and science. It has few graphics, but plenty of photography and, through a partnership with a local TV station, some video.
But it is, of necessity, thin — strictly local, selective in what it covers and with none of the wire service articles that plump up most news sites.
VoiceofSanDiego grew out of a string of spectacular municipal scandals. City councilmen took bribes from a strip club owner, a mishandled pension fund drove the city to the brink of bankruptcy and city officials illegally covered up the crisis, to name a few.
A semiretired local businessman, Buzz Woolley, watched the parade of revelations, fraud charges and criminal convictions, seething with frustration. He was particularly incensed that the pension debacle had developed over several years, more or less in plain sight, but had received little news coverage.
"I kept thinking, 'Who's paying attention?' " Woolley recalled. "Why don't we hear about this stuff before it becomes a disaster?' "
In 2004, his conversations with a veteran columnist, Neil Morgan, who had been fired by The Union-Tribune, led to the creation of VoiceofSanDiego, with Woolley as president, chief executive and, at first, chief financial backer.
Most of this new breed of news sites have a whiff of scruffy insurgency, but MinnPost, based in Minneapolis, resembles the middle-age establishment. Its founder and chief executive, Joel Kramer, has been the editor and publisher of The Star Tribune, of Minneapolis, and its top editors are refugees from that paper or its rival, The Pioneer Press in St. Paul.
MinnPost is rich compared with its peers — with a $1.5 million bankroll from Kramer and several others when it started last year, and a $1.3 million annual budget — and it has been more aggressive about selling ads and getting readers to donate.
The full-time editors and reporters earn $50,000 to $60,000 a year, Kramer said — a living wage, but less than they would make at the competing papers. MinnPost has just five full-time employees, but it uses more than 40 paid freelance contributors, allowing it to do frequent reporting on areas like the arts and sports.
If MinnPost is the establishment, The New Haven Independent is a guerrilla team. It has no office, and holds its meetings in a coffee shop. The founder and editor, Paul Bass, who spent most of his career at an alternative weekly, works from home or, occasionally, borrows a desk at a local Spanish-language newspaper.
In addition to state and city affairs, The Independent covers small-bore local news, lately doing a series of articles on people who face the loss of their homes to foreclosure.
With a budget of just $200,000, it has a small staff — some are paid less than $30,000 — and a small corps of freelancers and volunteer contributors. It does not sell ads, which Bass says would be impractical.
"There's room for a whole range of approaches, and we're living proof that you can do meaningful journalism very cheaply," Bass said.
Crosscut.com, a local news site in Seattle, does reporting and commentary of its own, but also aggregates articles from other news sources. It began last year as a business, but is changing to nonprofit status.
VoiceofSanDiego took yet another approach, hiring a crew of young, hungry, full-time journalists, paying them salaries comparable to what they would make at large newspapers and relying less on freelancers. Donohue and Lewis earned $60,000 to $70,000 last year, according to the VoiceofSan Diego IRS filings.
On a budget under $800,000 this year — almost $200,000 more than last year — everyone does double duty. Lewis writes a political column, and Donohue works on investigative articles. But the operation is growing and Woolley says he has become convinced that the nonprofit model has the best chance of survival.
"Information is now a public service as much as it's a commodity," he said. "It should be thought of the same way as education, health care. It's one of the things you need to operate a civil society, and the market isn't doing it very well."
No Quiz Monday
Because you have two articles due Monday, November 24, there will be no quiz that night.
One from your beat and one sports story.
One from your beat and one sports story.
For Huckabee, a Big 'Oops'
From WorldMagBlog:
How embarrassing
Written by Kristin Chapman
It seems Mike Huckabee needed a better proofreader for his recently released book, Do the Right Thing: Inside the Movement That’s Bringing Common Sense Back to America.
After TIME published an article earlier this week that included a few excerpts from the book, some observant readers were quick to point out a rather glaring error in one of the passages.
See if you, too, can catch the mistake: “I lamented that so many people of faith had moved from being prophetic voices — like Naaman, confronting King David in his sin and saying, ‘Thou art the man!’ — to being voices of patronage, and saying to those in power, ‘You da’ man!’”
Monday, November 17, 2008
Rupert Murdoch Optimistic on Future of Newspapers
Here is a strong statement on the future of newspapers from one of the publishing world's business geniuses. This is an excerpt. To read the entire article, click here.
Murdoch to 'Cynics': Newspapers Will Survive
SYDNEY Global media magnate Rupert Murdoch (pictured) says doomsayers who are predicting the Internet will kill off newspapers are "misguided cynics" who fail to grasp that the online world is potentially a huge new market of information-hungry consumers.
Newspaper companies in the United States and elsewhere are facing fundamental changes to their businesses as more people get their news from the Internet and other sources, and advertisers follow the market away from the paper-and-ink format.
Murdoch, the Australian-born chairman and chief executive of News Corp., said in a speech broadcast Sunday titled "The Future of Newspapers: Moving Beyond Dead Trees" that the Internet offered opportunities as well as challenges and that newspapers would always be around in some form or other.
"Too many journalists seem to take a perverse pleasure in ruminating on their pending demise," Murdoch said in a speech, recorded in the United States and relayed nationally by the Australian Broadcasting Corp. It was the latest in an annual ABC series of lectures by a prominent Australian.
"Unlike the doom and gloomers, I believe that newspapers will reach new heights" in the 21st century, Murdoch said.
Post-Election Newspaper Sales Boom
Quite a few missed the quiz question for this past week about the election's effect on newspaper circulation. It was mentioned briefly in an earlier blog post--here is a little more.
NEW YORK (AP) -- Newsstands from Seattle to New York quickly sold out of Wednesday's papers declaring Barack Obama the nation's first black president as some jubilant customers picked up two, three or even 30 copies as keepsakes.
Newspapers detailing Barack Obama's historic presidential win are being gobbled up as keepsakes.
The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune in Obama's hometown were among papers that restarted their printing presses to produce hundreds of thousands of additional copies across the country.
Entrepreneurs were seeking as much as $600 for the Times on eBay Wednesday.
"Own a piece of history," Walter Elliott said as he hawked 90 copies of The Sun from a Baltimore street corner.
Some papers devoted their entire front pages to a single photo of Obama -- in the San Francisco Chronicle's case, overlaid with "OBAMA" in enormous type and a snippet from his acceptance speech: "Change has come to America." USA Today declared, "America makes history."
The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Ohio, offered high-quality reprints of the front page for $54.95. Below the headline "Change Has Come," a close-up of Obama covers three-fourths of the page.
John Penley, a white man who recalled drinking out of the "wrong" water fountain as a kid in North Carolina, searched New York's Lower East Side on Wednesday for papers to mark an event he never dreamed possible in his lifetime.
"There was one copy left at the bodega around the corner, and people were actually fighting for it," said Penley, a retired photojournalist. "I can't find a copy of any paper anywhere."
At New York's Port Authority bus terminal, Ralston Montaque grabbed 30 copies of the Times for family and friends.
"Everybody has to read (the news), brother," he said.
Say what you want about the Internet replacing printed newspapers, but saving a copy of a Web page on a disk isn't the same.
"What it really shows is there's a unique value to print," said Steve Hills, The Washington Post's president and general manager. "It's the ability to look at the whole thing and have a piece of history in your hands."
A newsstand in Evanston, Illinois, sold 100 copies of the Times in 10 minutes -- even as the major local papers, the Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times, rushed to print hundreds of thousands of extra copies.
NEW YORK (AP) -- Newsstands from Seattle to New York quickly sold out of Wednesday's papers declaring Barack Obama the nation's first black president as some jubilant customers picked up two, three or even 30 copies as keepsakes.
Newspapers detailing Barack Obama's historic presidential win are being gobbled up as keepsakes.
The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune in Obama's hometown were among papers that restarted their printing presses to produce hundreds of thousands of additional copies across the country.
Entrepreneurs were seeking as much as $600 for the Times on eBay Wednesday.
"Own a piece of history," Walter Elliott said as he hawked 90 copies of The Sun from a Baltimore street corner.
Some papers devoted their entire front pages to a single photo of Obama -- in the San Francisco Chronicle's case, overlaid with "OBAMA" in enormous type and a snippet from his acceptance speech: "Change has come to America." USA Today declared, "America makes history."
The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Ohio, offered high-quality reprints of the front page for $54.95. Below the headline "Change Has Come," a close-up of Obama covers three-fourths of the page.
John Penley, a white man who recalled drinking out of the "wrong" water fountain as a kid in North Carolina, searched New York's Lower East Side on Wednesday for papers to mark an event he never dreamed possible in his lifetime.
"There was one copy left at the bodega around the corner, and people were actually fighting for it," said Penley, a retired photojournalist. "I can't find a copy of any paper anywhere."
At New York's Port Authority bus terminal, Ralston Montaque grabbed 30 copies of the Times for family and friends.
"Everybody has to read (the news), brother," he said.
Say what you want about the Internet replacing printed newspapers, but saving a copy of a Web page on a disk isn't the same.
"What it really shows is there's a unique value to print," said Steve Hills, The Washington Post's president and general manager. "It's the ability to look at the whole thing and have a piece of history in your hands."
A newsstand in Evanston, Illinois, sold 100 copies of the Times in 10 minutes -- even as the major local papers, the Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times, rushed to print hundreds of thousands of extra copies.
Lutheran Publisher to Close Stores, Cut Staff
Augsburg Fortress to close stores, cut staff
Augsburg Fortress—the Minneapolis-based publishing arm of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America—is closing stores and shifting its publishing emphasis as part of significant changes to its operations. The move was based on a year of market analysis and business research, the publisher said.
Augsburg Fortress will close nine bookstores by April 30, 2009, company officials said. A store at Luther Seminary, St. Paul, Minn., which is not owned by Augsburg Fortress, will continue to rent space there and Augsburg's Canadian bookstores will remain open.
Additionally, Augsburg Fortress will no longer accept or sell new titles in its consumer-oriented book line, although it will continue to sell stocks on hand. Beth Lewis, president and CEO, said 55 positions will also be eliminated from Augsburg's 242-strong staff.
Unanimously approved by the board of trustees Oct. 24-25, the changes will enable Augsburg Fortress to focus its ministry on its group-use materials for congregations as well as textbooks and monographs for higher education, Lewis said.
"Augsburg Fortress is undergoing important strategic changes to focus our ministry and business—and some are very painful on a personal level as we say goodbye to wonderful colleagues," Lewis said. "We are confident that, while difficult, these changes are necessary and will enable Augsburg Fortress to be a strong and responsive organization for the future."
Augsburg Fortress—the Minneapolis-based publishing arm of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America—is closing stores and shifting its publishing emphasis as part of significant changes to its operations. The move was based on a year of market analysis and business research, the publisher said.
Augsburg Fortress will close nine bookstores by April 30, 2009, company officials said. A store at Luther Seminary, St. Paul, Minn., which is not owned by Augsburg Fortress, will continue to rent space there and Augsburg's Canadian bookstores will remain open.
Additionally, Augsburg Fortress will no longer accept or sell new titles in its consumer-oriented book line, although it will continue to sell stocks on hand. Beth Lewis, president and CEO, said 55 positions will also be eliminated from Augsburg's 242-strong staff.
Unanimously approved by the board of trustees Oct. 24-25, the changes will enable Augsburg Fortress to focus its ministry on its group-use materials for congregations as well as textbooks and monographs for higher education, Lewis said.
"Augsburg Fortress is undergoing important strategic changes to focus our ministry and business—and some are very painful on a personal level as we say goodbye to wonderful colleagues," Lewis said. "We are confident that, while difficult, these changes are necessary and will enable Augsburg Fortress to be a strong and responsive organization for the future."
Publishing Has Consequences
Theology Professor Leaving Traditionalist Seminary Over Bible Claims
GLENSIDE, Pa. (AP) — A theology professor who was suspended for suggesting the Bible was the work of both God and people has agreed to leave the conservative seminary where he taught.
In a joint statement, Westminster Theological Seminary and professor Peter Enns said they "arrived at mutually agreeable terms" that are effective as of Friday. No other details were released.
Westminster trustees voted in March to suspend Enns, a tenured 14-year veteran of the school, because of his 2005 book, "Inspiration and Incarnation."
Enns' book was written to help students grapple with recent scholarship suggesting contradictions in the Bible, especially the Old Testament. In it, Enns urges readers to understand the Bible is both divine and human.
Trustees said it appeared that Enns had defied the school's founding principle, based on the 1646 Westminster Confession of Faith, the core creed of the Presbyterian tradition. It says that Scripture is solely the word of God and proclaims the "infallible truth" and "entire perfection" of the Bible.
Westminster, located near Philadelphia, was founded in 1929 by former Princeton Theological Seminary faculty who believed that school was becoming too liberal.
GLENSIDE, Pa. (AP) — A theology professor who was suspended for suggesting the Bible was the work of both God and people has agreed to leave the conservative seminary where he taught.
In a joint statement, Westminster Theological Seminary and professor Peter Enns said they "arrived at mutually agreeable terms" that are effective as of Friday. No other details were released.
Westminster trustees voted in March to suspend Enns, a tenured 14-year veteran of the school, because of his 2005 book, "Inspiration and Incarnation."
Enns' book was written to help students grapple with recent scholarship suggesting contradictions in the Bible, especially the Old Testament. In it, Enns urges readers to understand the Bible is both divine and human.
Trustees said it appeared that Enns had defied the school's founding principle, based on the 1646 Westminster Confession of Faith, the core creed of the Presbyterian tradition. It says that Scripture is solely the word of God and proclaims the "infallible truth" and "entire perfection" of the Bible.
Westminster, located near Philadelphia, was founded in 1929 by former Princeton Theological Seminary faculty who believed that school was becoming too liberal.
Individual Consultations
I'm making available, on several dates which I've reserved for the purpose, 30-minute slots when you are invited to come to my office for an individual consultation, if you wish, on your writing, what I see as areas where you are strong or need to improve, and to discuss in general the potential of your future in journalism.
This is not a requirement, and it is entirely voluntary. You're under no obligation. But if you wish to chat, please pick a day and time on the signup sheet I'll have in class, and when you come to my office, please bring with you graded stories I've handed back (no need to bring quizzes).
If none of the times on the signup sheet works for you, and you wish to meet, we can arrange to meet at a mutually agreeable time for you.
This is not a requirement, and it is entirely voluntary. You're under no obligation. But if you wish to chat, please pick a day and time on the signup sheet I'll have in class, and when you come to my office, please bring with you graded stories I've handed back (no need to bring quizzes).
If none of the times on the signup sheet works for you, and you wish to meet, we can arrange to meet at a mutually agreeable time for you.
News Story Format Checklist
Here is the checklist for news story format which you requested. It's also posted on the Grace Portal.
Checklist for Newspaper Story Format
1. Times Roman typeface, 12 point
2. All stories double-spaced, with NO extra spaces between paragraphs
3. Indent each paragraph
4. Paragraph should be no more than 4 or 5 sentences. Three is better.
5. Headline should be a sentence, SVO (Subject, Verb and Object)
6. Center headline, Upper/lower case, over article
7. Under headline put the byline – by ….. (your name)
8. At bottom right of first page put (more) if story continues
9. At top right of second and succeeding page, put a slugline that includes (a) your last name, (b) story identifier, (c) page number
10. When story is completed, put an endmark (### or -30-) centered under last graf
11. Use AP style in all instances for dates, state abbreviations, capitalization, use of numerals, etc.
12. News stories should be inverted pyramid format, all in third person. Never use first or second person in news story. Lead graf should include as many of the 5W’s (who, what, where, when, why, and how) as possible.
13. All opinion must be quoted and attributed. Only in opinion or op/ed pieces, reviews, and perhaps sports may the reporter inject any personal opinion.
14. Vary the use of quotes with a judicious mixture of direct quote, partial quote, and indirect (paraphrase) quotation.
15. Be sure the most important news element is in the lead. Don’t “bury the lead” by having the REAL news down in the story somewhere.
Checklist for Newspaper Story Format
1. Times Roman typeface, 12 point
2. All stories double-spaced, with NO extra spaces between paragraphs
3. Indent each paragraph
4. Paragraph should be no more than 4 or 5 sentences. Three is better.
5. Headline should be a sentence, SVO (Subject, Verb and Object)
6. Center headline, Upper/lower case, over article
7. Under headline put the byline – by ….. (your name)
8. At bottom right of first page put (more) if story continues
9. At top right of second and succeeding page, put a slugline that includes (a) your last name, (b) story identifier, (c) page number
10. When story is completed, put an endmark (### or -30-) centered under last graf
11. Use AP style in all instances for dates, state abbreviations, capitalization, use of numerals, etc.
12. News stories should be inverted pyramid format, all in third person. Never use first or second person in news story. Lead graf should include as many of the 5W’s (who, what, where, when, why, and how) as possible.
13. All opinion must be quoted and attributed. Only in opinion or op/ed pieces, reviews, and perhaps sports may the reporter inject any personal opinion.
14. Vary the use of quotes with a judicious mixture of direct quote, partial quote, and indirect (paraphrase) quotation.
15. Be sure the most important news element is in the lead. Don’t “bury the lead” by having the REAL news down in the story somewhere.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
An In-Depth Look at the Reporting Life of Ruth Anne
From the Minnesota newspaper where Ruth Anne Maddox worked. Note the comments on her work, and the comments by Times-Union editor Gary Gerard.
Once you met Ruth Anne, you knew her
By Shawn Hogendorf, Correspondent
On Wednesday morning, Ruth Anne Maddox was supposed to write the news, not make the headlines.
When Ruth Anne got out of bed in the morning, the world became a brighter place. After she was found murdered in her Prior Lake home early Wednesday, a dark cloud was cast over those who knew her both as a friend and respected journalist throughout the community.
Her wit, love of words, grammar and ability to tell a story was unparalleled, colleagues said.
One friend, a former reporter for the Shakopee Valley News, remembers a conversation with Ruth Anne about the crazy hours reporters work.
Mary (Sasa) Hilde remembers Ruth Anne saying: “I often work 10-plus hour days and just keep going; I like to consider it loyalty, but it’s probably just stupidity.”
That’s the type of witty humor and honesty anyone who came in contact with Ruth Anne came to know.
She was also known for her passion for the trade.
Pat Minelli, editor of the Valley News, where Ruth Anne worked for the last year, said before she came to the Valley News, he always admired her writing, in particular her columns while she was writing for the Savage Pacer.
“After she left the Pacer, I was thrilled with the opportunity to entice her to the Shakopee Valley News,” Minelli said.
Ruth Anne had respect for everyone she came in contact with, whether it was while covering school board meetings or interviewing sources for feature stories, Minelli said. Even when she wrote news that wasn’t so pleasant for her sources, people still respected her, he said.
“Whenever I was on the street, people would come up to me, gushing with compliments for her,” Minelli said. “It was unbelievable how well she was liked. I have never had a reporter that so many people would go out of their way to say how much they enjoyed her.”
Sarah Koehn, assistant to the superintendent of Shakopee Schools, generally sat next to Ruth Anne during the Shakopee School Board meetings and said the two got to know each other well, both professionally and personally.
Koehn said Ruth Anne usually mentioned her 19-year-old daughter, and did so while covering the meeting the night before she disappeared. She was looking forward to strengthening their relationship when she moved back to her home state of Indiana at the end of the year, Koehn said. Ruth Anne had recently told the Valley News she would be resigning.
Minelli received an e-mail from a Girl Scout troop leader Ruth Anne recently wrote a story about. The leader noted how thrilled the girls were to meet Ruth Anne, an ex-Girl Scout herself.
“She took an extraordinary time to talk with the girls and look at their badges,” Minelli said. “That is the way she did her job, and that is why everyone liked her.”
There were two things to know about Ruth Anne, co-workers said: 1) If you’re writing a text message or e-mail, make sure your grammar was correct, and 2) never, ever call her Ruth.
“Ruth Anne always wrote very clean copy,” Minelli said. “She is one of the better writers I have ever had in that way. She had an eagle eye. It was very rare that she ever had a typo.”
When Ruth Anne was able to get away from her job, she was sure to be found with two dog leashes for her dogs, Quincy and Roxxi, in her hands and a pocket full of treats for any other dogs she came across at the Cleary Lake Dog Park.
That’s who Ruth Anne was, her friends say: a caring friend, a confidant, a loving mother, a dedicated employee, a beloved sister, an animal lover, a daughter and a person always willing to take responsibility, forgive and move on.
Ruth Anne was born Aug. 20, 1963, in Chicago Heights, Ill., to Paul and Lois (Whitehead) Lipka, who currently live in Lake Placid, Fla. She was previously married to Mark Long. Family members and several close friends were too distraught to comment on Ruth Anne’s death this week, but her mother posted a comment at www.shakopeenews.com describing Ruth Anne as a “daddy’s girl.”
Her mother wrote, “As her mother we had a lot in common and got along very well, but first and foremost she was her Dad's daughter. When her sisters and brother wanted something special, they always said, ‘Ruth Anne, you ask him 'cuz he never says ‘no’ to you.’“And Ruth Anne adored her Dad,” her mother continued. “She was never embarrassed by him like most kids are when they are growing up. She listened to him and observed what he did and said. What she learned from him showed up in her writing. I recently read one of her blogs and it was all about his funny ‘adages.’ I’ve heard them for over 50 years and they drive me crazy, but not her. She could have written an entire book about her Dad and his funny sayings. Ruth Anne always (had) a beautiful smile and (was) an enjoyable clown.”
As a reporter who covered the Savage Police Department and the Burnsville-Eagan-Savage School District for the Pacer from 2004 through 2007, Ruth Anne interviewed many people on a regular basis, said Capt. Dave Muelken.
“She approached her work in a friendly manner – and with dedication to get the story and get it right,” he said. “Her work was a benefit not only to newspaper readers but to the city of Savage in providing fair and accurate coverage of the matters affecting our citizens. We are saddened by her death and extend our deepest condolences to her co-workers, her family and her friends.”
Pacer editor Nancy Huddleston hired Ruth Anne when she first moved to the Twin Cities area from Indiana. She jumped into the job feet first and never looked back, Huddleston remembers.
“Her primary dedication to the newspaper was to its readers, to make sure she got their story,” she said. “So many people were touched by her thoughtfulness not only as a reporter but as a great person. If you met Ruth Anne once, you always remembered her for her laughter, wonderful smile and caring personality. Her contributions to the Pacer cannot be put into words, as there were so many.”
Muelken remembered Ruth Anne as a person who always had a smile on her face, was friendly and giggly. She was also thorough and always did her job well, he said.
Although police and reporters don't always see eye-to-eye on what should be public information, Muelken said Ruth Anne was always diplomatic, had the interest of the citizens in mind; and was responsible, fair and factual in her writing.
“She never wrote a story from one direction,” he said.
Most police officers don’t want to talk to the media because they don’t trust them, Muelken said. That wasn’t the case with Ruth Anne.
“If you looked up the definition of a police reporter in the dictionary, you wouldn’t find her picture,” Muelken said of a relationship that developed over years of sitting across a desk discussing the police calls for the week. “She just wasn’t your typical police reporter.”
As a reader of the paper, Muelken added, her feature stories are what made her unique. “She was kind of a character,” he said.
Besides covering police, Ruth Anne was always willing to share a piece of herself with her readers through blogs, personal columns and quirky details that became part of the story, Muelken said.
“I never saw her down,” he said. “She always found the light in a dark situation.”
That light also showed through in Ruth Anne’s numerous comments across Southwest Newspapers’ Web sites and blogs that were written so well.
Ruth Anne captivated Shakopee readers with her blogs that were constantly among the most read and can be read at www.shakopeevalleynews.com.
In one of Ruth Anne’s blog posts, largely focused on exercise and eating healthy, she highlighted the ups and downs of hard work and dedication to improve her life, along with the strife of dieting in an entertaining way that kept readers on the edge of their seat waiting for her next post.
Ruth Anne also wrote passionately about her two dogs, a pit bull-rottweiler mix, Quincy, and a pit bull named Roxxi. Her blog was titled “A pitty-ful dog,” and she advocated for the breed, posted humorous pictures of her two “babies” and titled entries with comical headlines like “If I had to live in a van down by the river, my dogs would be happy as clams,” where she wrote of her companions’ swimming experience in the dog park.
Lori Carlson, editor of the Prior Lake American, recalls how easily Ruth Anne fit in when she joined the staff of the Pacer, which shares an office with the American.“She instantly became an office favorite,” Carlson said. “Ruth Anne always had a story to tell. I spent a lot of time exchanging pet stories with her, and we would arrange to meet up at the dog park. She was just a bright, smiling person. When I had meetings to attend in our Shakopee office, I’d always make sure to stop and talk to her.”
“Ruth Anne’s blogs on our Web site were amazing,” Minelli said. “It was always a hoot to read. She was tremendously gifted. People would get a kick out of things like what she did last night, and not everyone can do that.”
The entertaining style of writing and her ability to capture readers came naturally to Ruth Anne, because it was a part of her personality, Minelli said. Her life wasn’t totally happy – those close to her knew she was having a tough time in her marriage – but the average person would never know it. She was laughing constantly, whether it was on the phone or just chatting, he said.
“I am amazed she could be so happy, witty and comical, when you know everything wasn’t perfect,” Minelli added. “She would talk about things that weren’t so good in her life, but she always put it away, closed that drawer and then lightened the mood and made everyone else feel good.”
Although blogs are generally about personal experiences, Ruth Anne always had a knack for asking the right questions and picking the interesting detail to tell her stories.
She was always able to bring out the best in her sources. Just when the source thought there was nothing more that could be printed, she found the question that made the story a keepsake. Ruth Anne always found the time to stick around after an event to get to know people on a level deeper than the surface, and this always shined through in her work.
Her ability to organize and keep in constant contact with sources was the reason she never got “scooped” on a story.
On the weekends, Ruth Anne also worked part-time at Kohl’s in St. Louis Park.
Before moving to Prior Lake, Ruth Anne was a general-assignment reporter covering police and courts as well as a lifestyles editor for the Times-Union in Warsaw, Ind., where she worked from 1987 to 2003. During her tenure, she reported under the bylines of Ruth Anne Lipka and Ruth Anne Long.
Times-Union General Manager Gary Gerard, who worked with Ruth Anne for 14 years, said he was “lucky enough to inherit her as a reporter” when he began his career with the newspaper in 1988.
As a reporter, Ruth Anne was hard-working,enterprising and always able to come up with unique and interesting story ideas, Gerard said. “There was never a slow news day with Ruth Anne on our staff,” he said.
Her great sense of humor, wit and ability to make others laugh were all traits Gerard remembers vividly. “She would come through the door and look at us and say something like, ‘I’m just delightful. Everyone just loves me,’ Gerard said. “She was always bubbly. That was the way she was when I met her.”
Ruth Anne’s ability to root out a story was incredible in a coverage area where she was responsible for four judges, four courts and a county of 75,000 people, he said. It was a big job, and she had a system for tracking things through the courts and keeping up with everything.
The Times-Union went online in 1996, and Gerard said to this day when a new police and courts reporter starts with the newspaper, he goes back to when Ruth Anne covered police and courts, pulls up a month’s worth of her work and tells reporters that’s what he expects from them.
“She is still the benchmark, the standard for reporters at this paper,” he said.
Upon hearing the news of Ruth Anne’s murder, Gerard said the initial reaction was shock.
“I was stunned,” he said. “I couldn’t believe someone could do this to her, or want to do such a thing to her. My solemn hope is that justice in this case is swift and severe.”
Colleen Hatami, a friend of Ruth Anne’s since the two were in middle school orchestra together, said she is choosing to focus on the laughter and love her friend offered, not the way she died.
“Today I choose not to be full of hate, anger, guilt, ugliness and resentment towards her death. I woke up and chose to fill my heart full of all the love I have for Ruth Anne,” Hatami said.
A long-time friend and former co-worker with her at the Times-Union, Vicki Taylor, said “Ruth Anne was an instant friend. That is just who she was. You couldn’t help but love her. She was the funniest person I ever met and the one person you would want to cross paths with if you were in a bad mood.
“I always told her she was a younger version of Erma Bombeck.”
Once you met Ruth Anne, you knew her
By Shawn Hogendorf, Correspondent
On Wednesday morning, Ruth Anne Maddox was supposed to write the news, not make the headlines.
When Ruth Anne got out of bed in the morning, the world became a brighter place. After she was found murdered in her Prior Lake home early Wednesday, a dark cloud was cast over those who knew her both as a friend and respected journalist throughout the community.
Her wit, love of words, grammar and ability to tell a story was unparalleled, colleagues said.
One friend, a former reporter for the Shakopee Valley News, remembers a conversation with Ruth Anne about the crazy hours reporters work.
Mary (Sasa) Hilde remembers Ruth Anne saying: “I often work 10-plus hour days and just keep going; I like to consider it loyalty, but it’s probably just stupidity.”
That’s the type of witty humor and honesty anyone who came in contact with Ruth Anne came to know.
She was also known for her passion for the trade.
Pat Minelli, editor of the Valley News, where Ruth Anne worked for the last year, said before she came to the Valley News, he always admired her writing, in particular her columns while she was writing for the Savage Pacer.
“After she left the Pacer, I was thrilled with the opportunity to entice her to the Shakopee Valley News,” Minelli said.
Ruth Anne had respect for everyone she came in contact with, whether it was while covering school board meetings or interviewing sources for feature stories, Minelli said. Even when she wrote news that wasn’t so pleasant for her sources, people still respected her, he said.
“Whenever I was on the street, people would come up to me, gushing with compliments for her,” Minelli said. “It was unbelievable how well she was liked. I have never had a reporter that so many people would go out of their way to say how much they enjoyed her.”
Sarah Koehn, assistant to the superintendent of Shakopee Schools, generally sat next to Ruth Anne during the Shakopee School Board meetings and said the two got to know each other well, both professionally and personally.
Koehn said Ruth Anne usually mentioned her 19-year-old daughter, and did so while covering the meeting the night before she disappeared. She was looking forward to strengthening their relationship when she moved back to her home state of Indiana at the end of the year, Koehn said. Ruth Anne had recently told the Valley News she would be resigning.
Minelli received an e-mail from a Girl Scout troop leader Ruth Anne recently wrote a story about. The leader noted how thrilled the girls were to meet Ruth Anne, an ex-Girl Scout herself.
“She took an extraordinary time to talk with the girls and look at their badges,” Minelli said. “That is the way she did her job, and that is why everyone liked her.”
There were two things to know about Ruth Anne, co-workers said: 1) If you’re writing a text message or e-mail, make sure your grammar was correct, and 2) never, ever call her Ruth.
“Ruth Anne always wrote very clean copy,” Minelli said. “She is one of the better writers I have ever had in that way. She had an eagle eye. It was very rare that she ever had a typo.”
When Ruth Anne was able to get away from her job, she was sure to be found with two dog leashes for her dogs, Quincy and Roxxi, in her hands and a pocket full of treats for any other dogs she came across at the Cleary Lake Dog Park.
That’s who Ruth Anne was, her friends say: a caring friend, a confidant, a loving mother, a dedicated employee, a beloved sister, an animal lover, a daughter and a person always willing to take responsibility, forgive and move on.
Ruth Anne was born Aug. 20, 1963, in Chicago Heights, Ill., to Paul and Lois (Whitehead) Lipka, who currently live in Lake Placid, Fla. She was previously married to Mark Long. Family members and several close friends were too distraught to comment on Ruth Anne’s death this week, but her mother posted a comment at www.shakopeenews.com describing Ruth Anne as a “daddy’s girl.”
Her mother wrote, “As her mother we had a lot in common and got along very well, but first and foremost she was her Dad's daughter. When her sisters and brother wanted something special, they always said, ‘Ruth Anne, you ask him 'cuz he never says ‘no’ to you.’“And Ruth Anne adored her Dad,” her mother continued. “She was never embarrassed by him like most kids are when they are growing up. She listened to him and observed what he did and said. What she learned from him showed up in her writing. I recently read one of her blogs and it was all about his funny ‘adages.’ I’ve heard them for over 50 years and they drive me crazy, but not her. She could have written an entire book about her Dad and his funny sayings. Ruth Anne always (had) a beautiful smile and (was) an enjoyable clown.”
As a reporter who covered the Savage Police Department and the Burnsville-Eagan-Savage School District for the Pacer from 2004 through 2007, Ruth Anne interviewed many people on a regular basis, said Capt. Dave Muelken.
“She approached her work in a friendly manner – and with dedication to get the story and get it right,” he said. “Her work was a benefit not only to newspaper readers but to the city of Savage in providing fair and accurate coverage of the matters affecting our citizens. We are saddened by her death and extend our deepest condolences to her co-workers, her family and her friends.”
Pacer editor Nancy Huddleston hired Ruth Anne when she first moved to the Twin Cities area from Indiana. She jumped into the job feet first and never looked back, Huddleston remembers.
“Her primary dedication to the newspaper was to its readers, to make sure she got their story,” she said. “So many people were touched by her thoughtfulness not only as a reporter but as a great person. If you met Ruth Anne once, you always remembered her for her laughter, wonderful smile and caring personality. Her contributions to the Pacer cannot be put into words, as there were so many.”
Muelken remembered Ruth Anne as a person who always had a smile on her face, was friendly and giggly. She was also thorough and always did her job well, he said.
Although police and reporters don't always see eye-to-eye on what should be public information, Muelken said Ruth Anne was always diplomatic, had the interest of the citizens in mind; and was responsible, fair and factual in her writing.
“She never wrote a story from one direction,” he said.
Most police officers don’t want to talk to the media because they don’t trust them, Muelken said. That wasn’t the case with Ruth Anne.
“If you looked up the definition of a police reporter in the dictionary, you wouldn’t find her picture,” Muelken said of a relationship that developed over years of sitting across a desk discussing the police calls for the week. “She just wasn’t your typical police reporter.”
As a reader of the paper, Muelken added, her feature stories are what made her unique. “She was kind of a character,” he said.
Besides covering police, Ruth Anne was always willing to share a piece of herself with her readers through blogs, personal columns and quirky details that became part of the story, Muelken said.
“I never saw her down,” he said. “She always found the light in a dark situation.”
That light also showed through in Ruth Anne’s numerous comments across Southwest Newspapers’ Web sites and blogs that were written so well.
Ruth Anne captivated Shakopee readers with her blogs that were constantly among the most read and can be read at www.shakopeevalleynews.com.
In one of Ruth Anne’s blog posts, largely focused on exercise and eating healthy, she highlighted the ups and downs of hard work and dedication to improve her life, along with the strife of dieting in an entertaining way that kept readers on the edge of their seat waiting for her next post.
Ruth Anne also wrote passionately about her two dogs, a pit bull-rottweiler mix, Quincy, and a pit bull named Roxxi. Her blog was titled “A pitty-ful dog,” and she advocated for the breed, posted humorous pictures of her two “babies” and titled entries with comical headlines like “If I had to live in a van down by the river, my dogs would be happy as clams,” where she wrote of her companions’ swimming experience in the dog park.
Lori Carlson, editor of the Prior Lake American, recalls how easily Ruth Anne fit in when she joined the staff of the Pacer, which shares an office with the American.“She instantly became an office favorite,” Carlson said. “Ruth Anne always had a story to tell. I spent a lot of time exchanging pet stories with her, and we would arrange to meet up at the dog park. She was just a bright, smiling person. When I had meetings to attend in our Shakopee office, I’d always make sure to stop and talk to her.”
“Ruth Anne’s blogs on our Web site were amazing,” Minelli said. “It was always a hoot to read. She was tremendously gifted. People would get a kick out of things like what she did last night, and not everyone can do that.”
The entertaining style of writing and her ability to capture readers came naturally to Ruth Anne, because it was a part of her personality, Minelli said. Her life wasn’t totally happy – those close to her knew she was having a tough time in her marriage – but the average person would never know it. She was laughing constantly, whether it was on the phone or just chatting, he said.
“I am amazed she could be so happy, witty and comical, when you know everything wasn’t perfect,” Minelli added. “She would talk about things that weren’t so good in her life, but she always put it away, closed that drawer and then lightened the mood and made everyone else feel good.”
Although blogs are generally about personal experiences, Ruth Anne always had a knack for asking the right questions and picking the interesting detail to tell her stories.
She was always able to bring out the best in her sources. Just when the source thought there was nothing more that could be printed, she found the question that made the story a keepsake. Ruth Anne always found the time to stick around after an event to get to know people on a level deeper than the surface, and this always shined through in her work.
Her ability to organize and keep in constant contact with sources was the reason she never got “scooped” on a story.
On the weekends, Ruth Anne also worked part-time at Kohl’s in St. Louis Park.
Before moving to Prior Lake, Ruth Anne was a general-assignment reporter covering police and courts as well as a lifestyles editor for the Times-Union in Warsaw, Ind., where she worked from 1987 to 2003. During her tenure, she reported under the bylines of Ruth Anne Lipka and Ruth Anne Long.
Times-Union General Manager Gary Gerard, who worked with Ruth Anne for 14 years, said he was “lucky enough to inherit her as a reporter” when he began his career with the newspaper in 1988.
As a reporter, Ruth Anne was hard-working,enterprising and always able to come up with unique and interesting story ideas, Gerard said. “There was never a slow news day with Ruth Anne on our staff,” he said.
Her great sense of humor, wit and ability to make others laugh were all traits Gerard remembers vividly. “She would come through the door and look at us and say something like, ‘I’m just delightful. Everyone just loves me,’ Gerard said. “She was always bubbly. That was the way she was when I met her.”
Ruth Anne’s ability to root out a story was incredible in a coverage area where she was responsible for four judges, four courts and a county of 75,000 people, he said. It was a big job, and she had a system for tracking things through the courts and keeping up with everything.
The Times-Union went online in 1996, and Gerard said to this day when a new police and courts reporter starts with the newspaper, he goes back to when Ruth Anne covered police and courts, pulls up a month’s worth of her work and tells reporters that’s what he expects from them.
“She is still the benchmark, the standard for reporters at this paper,” he said.
Upon hearing the news of Ruth Anne’s murder, Gerard said the initial reaction was shock.
“I was stunned,” he said. “I couldn’t believe someone could do this to her, or want to do such a thing to her. My solemn hope is that justice in this case is swift and severe.”
Colleen Hatami, a friend of Ruth Anne’s since the two were in middle school orchestra together, said she is choosing to focus on the laughter and love her friend offered, not the way she died.
“Today I choose not to be full of hate, anger, guilt, ugliness and resentment towards her death. I woke up and chose to fill my heart full of all the love I have for Ruth Anne,” Hatami said.
A long-time friend and former co-worker with her at the Times-Union, Vicki Taylor, said “Ruth Anne was an instant friend. That is just who she was. You couldn’t help but love her. She was the funniest person I ever met and the one person you would want to cross paths with if you were in a bad mood.
“I always told her she was a younger version of Erma Bombeck.”
Retiring Newspaper Man Reflects on 35-Year Career
Here is a very interesting "inside look" at the history, growth, technology change of small-town newspapering over the 35 years of this man's career in some small suburbs of the Twin Cities in Minnesota (including the papers on which Ruth Anne Maddox worked). Note some of the changes that occurred through the years, particularly in the way newspapers do business in a community, reasons for growth, technology changes, his predictions for the future of newspapers, and more.
Reporter, editor, witness to suburbs' growth is retiring
By Mark Weber
The president of Southwest Newspapers has announced his retirement from the company he organized and led for the past 35 years. Stan Rolfsrud, 61, combined the operations of five community newspapers in Chaska, Shakopee, Eden Prairie, Jordan and Prior Lake in the 1970s and operated them as a group. The organization also started the Chanhassen Villager and the Savage Pacer.
Southwest Newspapers, with headquarters in Shakopee, is a division of Red Wing Publishing Inc. and circulates nearly 80,000 papers weekly as well as maintaining eight newspaper Web sites and nearly a dozen specialty Web sites.
Rolfsrud credits an extraordinary population surge in the region and an explosion of information technology as critical to the expansion and success of the company. “These factors allowed me to enjoy an entire career in the same organization,” he said. “I’m grateful. It’s unusual these days to be able to do that.”
During his 35 years, Rolfsrud saw:
* the industry transform from Gutenberg-style letter press printing, using melted lead, to instant publishing world-wide on the Internet.
* the population and housing count of the Southwest Newspapers coverage area expand at a phenomenal rate, with its counties listed among the fastest growing in the country.
* little change in appetites for local news about community events and desires to connect to the neighborhood. Though tools and venues have changed, goals for editors, reporters and sales associates haven’t. Some Southwest employees have spent entire careers with Rolfsrud, and continue to practice basic community journalism.
In 1970, after earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism at the University of Minnesota, Rolfsrud was drafted into the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. He spent his 19-month military career at Fort Hood, Texas, becoming the sergeant in charge of the 13th Support Brigade news office.
Discharged in 1972, he borrowed a car from a brother and took the only work he could find: news editor of the upstart Carver County Sun in Chaska at $115 a week. The city boasted one stop light and an experiment called Jonathan, a “new town” development that threatened to fracture a traditional community built on brick manufacturing and the processing of beet sugar and pickles.
Nine months later a rival publisher, the late Bill McGarry, sat in Pete ‘n Barb’s hamburger joint and offered Rolfsrud a job at his Chaska Weekly Valley Herald, promising to match his Sun salary. Rolfsrud held out for $175, but it was no bargain. When he reported to the 100-year-old office building on Second Street, he had no desk or telephone.
A gleaming new photo-typesetting computer, the size of a refrigerator, stood amidst the chaos of obsolete letterpress hardware, grinding yards of yellow punch tape into columns of justified news type.
It was to be only the first of many radical changes to the newspaper business that he would witness in his 35-year career.
Not only serving as the news editor of the Herald, Rolfsrud was then the only full-time news person, working as reporter, photographer and paste-up artist. He covered city halls and the school board, banging out news stories on a manual typewriter, waxing strips of type onto layout sheets late into the night, and driving the pasteups to the printer in Young America. It was hectic and high-energy.
“Nearby, Chanhassen was busy planning its future and I covered it,” he recalled. “Every Monday night, after five hours of give and take, some of the city council and staff would adjourn to Pauly’s Bar. After last call, we’d all cross the street to the Chalet Pizza and, in the only example of civic corruption I’ve ever personally witnessed, City Engineer Bill Schoell, whose private firm held a city contract, would treat us to the super house special combination pizza with everything, including extra onions and peppers.
“I would cover the Carver County Board the following morning, often with a serious case of indigestion.”
When Shakopee’s Howard Wigfield discovered that vodka cost more after distillers converted traditional fifths to new liter bottles, Rolfsrud dashed off a humorous column. It was picked up nationally and later published in a college textbook for journalists. His shortest column ever, “Stan Rolfsrud has nothing to say,” went world-wide. A year later, Chaska postmaster Lou Grindy was startled to see it reprinted in The Reader’s Digest. “If you Google my name today,” Rolfsrud laughs, “that column shows up.
“We had a lot of fun in the ’70s,” he recalls. “During the streaking craze, we got an ‘exclusive’ shot of the ‘Chaska Streaker’ dashing across Chestnut in long johns; when prostitution was linked to saunas in Twin Cities media, we investigated a Chaska barber who kept a sauna bath. We found scattered hair clippings.”
In 1978, Rolfsrud, McGarry, Bob Suel and two others each put $1,000 in a pot and launched the Glencoe Advertiser. Rolfsrud moved briefly to Glencoe to get it started. But he was single then, and chafed at living so far from the action. He soon sold his share to McGarry, trading for more interest in Southwest. The Glencoe newspaper continues today.
Rolfsrud met his future wife at a Chaska Chamber of Commerce meeting held, ironically, in a restaurant called “First Base.” Kathleen Blethen was co-owner of a paint store, Ann Marne Decorating. A loyal Democrat, she urged him to accept a press party invitation to Hubert H. Humphrey’s home in Waverly, when the vice president was campaigning for a return to the U.S. Senate in 1976. Rolfsrud agreed and soon the couple was in the backyard, eating campaign chicken and talking about needlepoint with Muriel and Hubert.
“Kathleen was extremely impressed and it was a very cheap date,” Rolfsrud recalls. A keepsake photo of the afternoon, with the ladies in full-length bicentennial regalia, was taken with Rolfsrud’s news camera by campaign aide Al Hofstede, former mayor of Minneapolis.
In 1980 the couple married in Chanhassen’s Lake Ann Park, with Kathleen’s three daughters as witnesses.
One day Rolfsrud and the business manager went to see banker Red DuToit and borrow $12,000 from the Carver County Bank to order the next generation of phototypesetters. “It was risky,” Rolfsrud recalls. “I remember Bill looking a little pale when we got back and told him how much we had borrowed. But he wanted to move forward, too.”
Those bulky machines worked hard for years, producing thousands of newspaper pages, outside job work and even the first editions of the alternative Twin Cities weekly, City Pages, founded by a former Southwest employee, Tom Bartel.
When phototypesetting chemistry costs soared in the early ’90s, Rolfsrud’s Jordan Independent became the first PC-based newspaper in the state to compose on plain paper. Others followed. Today all Southwest Newspapers composition is done on wide flat screens, with completed electronic pages transmitted directly to the printer in Red Wing. A high-speed network bonds all voice and data communications between the group’s six community offices. The company wrote its own software to track its advertising materials.
A committee of volunteers started the Eden Prairie Community News in 1974 but, soon tiring, sold it to McGarry in 1976. The News, along with the Herald, formed the nucleus of an emerging southwest suburban newspaper group, using the synergy of combined operations. Rolfsrud orchestrated the addition of the Prior Lake American and the Jordan Independent in 1979.
Then in 1980, Red Wing Publishing purchased McGarry’s interest in the Southwest group and added its own Shakopee Valley News, eventually buying out the remaining partners. In 1985 Rolfsrud became general manager of the growing five-newspaper unit. By 1987 Chanhassen’s population was large enough to support its own newspaper so he launched the Villager; in 1994 the Savage Pacer was founded in that fast-growing suburb.
To jump-start these fledgling publications, Rolfsrud pioneered a voluntary pay system which kept circulation under control while providing needed revenue for news operations. “Readers will pay for quality work,” Rolfsrud says.
“Now people ask me how long newspapers will last,” Rolfsrud adds. “They hope newspapers will survive because they’ve grown attached to the organic nature of the product. I just say that there will be many changes, but newsprint and ink will be in play throughout my lifetime.”
The industry is experiencing a dramatic and healthy shake-out right now, he says. “Organizations unwilling or unable to adapt to new realities will be left behind, those nimble enough to continue serving the interests of their customers will thrive. That’s the way it has always been. Developments like the telegraph, telephone, radio, television and the Internet have always doomed operations unwilling to compete or co-opt. If you know what you do and are flexible enough to keep doing it, you get to survive in the best job there is: telling the stories of interesting people.
“What society has learned from the Internet is that information is worthless unless you know who provided it,” he adds. “Consider the source, we say. Politicians and other powerful people discredit newspapers because doing so makes their lives easier. Consumers use brands they trust. We want to be trusted, not elected. Telling lies is bad for business. When we post something on the Internet and brand it with the name of a 150-year-old newspaper, readers believe it to be reliable, tested information, not smoke. Trust has always been the key to the survival and prosperity of Southwest Newspapers and of this industry.
“The people running Southwest Newspapers have good skills, values and flexibility. They’ll do very well after I’m gone.”
“Stan is truly a wonderful wordsmith, but his greatest gift to Southwest was big-picture thinking,” said Laurie Hartmann, director of the company’s business and classified ad departments and publisher of three of its newspapers. “He always looked for new ways to improve our papers and stayed current with industry innovation. When Stan commits to something, he leads by example, learning everything about the subject, so he can be the go-to guy. Southwest was known for its cutting edge, and many Minnesota publishers sought his advice.”
Rolfsrud still enjoys new technology. He posts movies on YouTube under the screen name “Dursflor.” He maintains two blogs, one for family, friends and anybody interested at www.rolfsruds.blogspot.com and another for his high school alumni at www.65roundup.blogspot.com. He gets about 100 cyber visitors daily.
“It’s a wonderful time,” he says. “In my college film class, you needed a glue bottle, scissors and a lot of patience just to make a splice. Now you can do it in seconds. What a great time to be alive!”
Rolfsrud looks back on his 35-year tenure with satisfaction. “Shareholders received an excellent return on investment, hundreds of employees worked challenging, fulfilling jobs, advertisers got messages reliably delivered and the community benefited from interesting, high-quality newspapers,” he said. “Now it is time for me to go away; I have nails to sort in the garage.”
The Rolfsruds have two grandchildren; the 2-year-old spends Wednesdays with them.
A portrait of Winston Churchill hangs in their Shakopee home. “Most people honor Churchill as a charismatic leader who rallied the Brits and defended the island from invasion. I also like that he was an excellent writer. He once said, ‘History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.’ And he did, and it is.”
Rolfsrud plans a trip with seven golfers to the classic Scottish courses this spring. He considers himself an average golfer and was delighted recently to learn that his handicap just squeaked by the cut-off for a tee time at St. Andrew’s. He winters at a golf villa in Tucson that he and Kathleen share with his two brothers and their wives.
Then what? “There’s much to do. For one thing, I would like to know what all those buttons, dials and menus on my digital camera do.”
Reporter, editor, witness to suburbs' growth is retiring
By Mark Weber
The president of Southwest Newspapers has announced his retirement from the company he organized and led for the past 35 years. Stan Rolfsrud, 61, combined the operations of five community newspapers in Chaska, Shakopee, Eden Prairie, Jordan and Prior Lake in the 1970s and operated them as a group. The organization also started the Chanhassen Villager and the Savage Pacer.
Southwest Newspapers, with headquarters in Shakopee, is a division of Red Wing Publishing Inc. and circulates nearly 80,000 papers weekly as well as maintaining eight newspaper Web sites and nearly a dozen specialty Web sites.
Rolfsrud credits an extraordinary population surge in the region and an explosion of information technology as critical to the expansion and success of the company. “These factors allowed me to enjoy an entire career in the same organization,” he said. “I’m grateful. It’s unusual these days to be able to do that.”
During his 35 years, Rolfsrud saw:
* the industry transform from Gutenberg-style letter press printing, using melted lead, to instant publishing world-wide on the Internet.
* the population and housing count of the Southwest Newspapers coverage area expand at a phenomenal rate, with its counties listed among the fastest growing in the country.
* little change in appetites for local news about community events and desires to connect to the neighborhood. Though tools and venues have changed, goals for editors, reporters and sales associates haven’t. Some Southwest employees have spent entire careers with Rolfsrud, and continue to practice basic community journalism.
In 1970, after earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism at the University of Minnesota, Rolfsrud was drafted into the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. He spent his 19-month military career at Fort Hood, Texas, becoming the sergeant in charge of the 13th Support Brigade news office.
Discharged in 1972, he borrowed a car from a brother and took the only work he could find: news editor of the upstart Carver County Sun in Chaska at $115 a week. The city boasted one stop light and an experiment called Jonathan, a “new town” development that threatened to fracture a traditional community built on brick manufacturing and the processing of beet sugar and pickles.
Nine months later a rival publisher, the late Bill McGarry, sat in Pete ‘n Barb’s hamburger joint and offered Rolfsrud a job at his Chaska Weekly Valley Herald, promising to match his Sun salary. Rolfsrud held out for $175, but it was no bargain. When he reported to the 100-year-old office building on Second Street, he had no desk or telephone.
A gleaming new photo-typesetting computer, the size of a refrigerator, stood amidst the chaos of obsolete letterpress hardware, grinding yards of yellow punch tape into columns of justified news type.
It was to be only the first of many radical changes to the newspaper business that he would witness in his 35-year career.
Not only serving as the news editor of the Herald, Rolfsrud was then the only full-time news person, working as reporter, photographer and paste-up artist. He covered city halls and the school board, banging out news stories on a manual typewriter, waxing strips of type onto layout sheets late into the night, and driving the pasteups to the printer in Young America. It was hectic and high-energy.
“Nearby, Chanhassen was busy planning its future and I covered it,” he recalled. “Every Monday night, after five hours of give and take, some of the city council and staff would adjourn to Pauly’s Bar. After last call, we’d all cross the street to the Chalet Pizza and, in the only example of civic corruption I’ve ever personally witnessed, City Engineer Bill Schoell, whose private firm held a city contract, would treat us to the super house special combination pizza with everything, including extra onions and peppers.
“I would cover the Carver County Board the following morning, often with a serious case of indigestion.”
When Shakopee’s Howard Wigfield discovered that vodka cost more after distillers converted traditional fifths to new liter bottles, Rolfsrud dashed off a humorous column. It was picked up nationally and later published in a college textbook for journalists. His shortest column ever, “Stan Rolfsrud has nothing to say,” went world-wide. A year later, Chaska postmaster Lou Grindy was startled to see it reprinted in The Reader’s Digest. “If you Google my name today,” Rolfsrud laughs, “that column shows up.
“We had a lot of fun in the ’70s,” he recalls. “During the streaking craze, we got an ‘exclusive’ shot of the ‘Chaska Streaker’ dashing across Chestnut in long johns; when prostitution was linked to saunas in Twin Cities media, we investigated a Chaska barber who kept a sauna bath. We found scattered hair clippings.”
In 1978, Rolfsrud, McGarry, Bob Suel and two others each put $1,000 in a pot and launched the Glencoe Advertiser. Rolfsrud moved briefly to Glencoe to get it started. But he was single then, and chafed at living so far from the action. He soon sold his share to McGarry, trading for more interest in Southwest. The Glencoe newspaper continues today.
Rolfsrud met his future wife at a Chaska Chamber of Commerce meeting held, ironically, in a restaurant called “First Base.” Kathleen Blethen was co-owner of a paint store, Ann Marne Decorating. A loyal Democrat, she urged him to accept a press party invitation to Hubert H. Humphrey’s home in Waverly, when the vice president was campaigning for a return to the U.S. Senate in 1976. Rolfsrud agreed and soon the couple was in the backyard, eating campaign chicken and talking about needlepoint with Muriel and Hubert.
“Kathleen was extremely impressed and it was a very cheap date,” Rolfsrud recalls. A keepsake photo of the afternoon, with the ladies in full-length bicentennial regalia, was taken with Rolfsrud’s news camera by campaign aide Al Hofstede, former mayor of Minneapolis.
In 1980 the couple married in Chanhassen’s Lake Ann Park, with Kathleen’s three daughters as witnesses.
One day Rolfsrud and the business manager went to see banker Red DuToit and borrow $12,000 from the Carver County Bank to order the next generation of phototypesetters. “It was risky,” Rolfsrud recalls. “I remember Bill looking a little pale when we got back and told him how much we had borrowed. But he wanted to move forward, too.”
Those bulky machines worked hard for years, producing thousands of newspaper pages, outside job work and even the first editions of the alternative Twin Cities weekly, City Pages, founded by a former Southwest employee, Tom Bartel.
When phototypesetting chemistry costs soared in the early ’90s, Rolfsrud’s Jordan Independent became the first PC-based newspaper in the state to compose on plain paper. Others followed. Today all Southwest Newspapers composition is done on wide flat screens, with completed electronic pages transmitted directly to the printer in Red Wing. A high-speed network bonds all voice and data communications between the group’s six community offices. The company wrote its own software to track its advertising materials.
A committee of volunteers started the Eden Prairie Community News in 1974 but, soon tiring, sold it to McGarry in 1976. The News, along with the Herald, formed the nucleus of an emerging southwest suburban newspaper group, using the synergy of combined operations. Rolfsrud orchestrated the addition of the Prior Lake American and the Jordan Independent in 1979.
Then in 1980, Red Wing Publishing purchased McGarry’s interest in the Southwest group and added its own Shakopee Valley News, eventually buying out the remaining partners. In 1985 Rolfsrud became general manager of the growing five-newspaper unit. By 1987 Chanhassen’s population was large enough to support its own newspaper so he launched the Villager; in 1994 the Savage Pacer was founded in that fast-growing suburb.
To jump-start these fledgling publications, Rolfsrud pioneered a voluntary pay system which kept circulation under control while providing needed revenue for news operations. “Readers will pay for quality work,” Rolfsrud says.
“Now people ask me how long newspapers will last,” Rolfsrud adds. “They hope newspapers will survive because they’ve grown attached to the organic nature of the product. I just say that there will be many changes, but newsprint and ink will be in play throughout my lifetime.”
The industry is experiencing a dramatic and healthy shake-out right now, he says. “Organizations unwilling or unable to adapt to new realities will be left behind, those nimble enough to continue serving the interests of their customers will thrive. That’s the way it has always been. Developments like the telegraph, telephone, radio, television and the Internet have always doomed operations unwilling to compete or co-opt. If you know what you do and are flexible enough to keep doing it, you get to survive in the best job there is: telling the stories of interesting people.
“What society has learned from the Internet is that information is worthless unless you know who provided it,” he adds. “Consider the source, we say. Politicians and other powerful people discredit newspapers because doing so makes their lives easier. Consumers use brands they trust. We want to be trusted, not elected. Telling lies is bad for business. When we post something on the Internet and brand it with the name of a 150-year-old newspaper, readers believe it to be reliable, tested information, not smoke. Trust has always been the key to the survival and prosperity of Southwest Newspapers and of this industry.
“The people running Southwest Newspapers have good skills, values and flexibility. They’ll do very well after I’m gone.”
“Stan is truly a wonderful wordsmith, but his greatest gift to Southwest was big-picture thinking,” said Laurie Hartmann, director of the company’s business and classified ad departments and publisher of three of its newspapers. “He always looked for new ways to improve our papers and stayed current with industry innovation. When Stan commits to something, he leads by example, learning everything about the subject, so he can be the go-to guy. Southwest was known for its cutting edge, and many Minnesota publishers sought his advice.”
Rolfsrud still enjoys new technology. He posts movies on YouTube under the screen name “Dursflor.” He maintains two blogs, one for family, friends and anybody interested at www.rolfsruds.blogspot.com and another for his high school alumni at www.65roundup.blogspot.com. He gets about 100 cyber visitors daily.
“It’s a wonderful time,” he says. “In my college film class, you needed a glue bottle, scissors and a lot of patience just to make a splice. Now you can do it in seconds. What a great time to be alive!”
Rolfsrud looks back on his 35-year tenure with satisfaction. “Shareholders received an excellent return on investment, hundreds of employees worked challenging, fulfilling jobs, advertisers got messages reliably delivered and the community benefited from interesting, high-quality newspapers,” he said. “Now it is time for me to go away; I have nails to sort in the garage.”
The Rolfsruds have two grandchildren; the 2-year-old spends Wednesdays with them.
A portrait of Winston Churchill hangs in their Shakopee home. “Most people honor Churchill as a charismatic leader who rallied the Brits and defended the island from invasion. I also like that he was an excellent writer. He once said, ‘History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.’ And he did, and it is.”
Rolfsrud plans a trip with seven golfers to the classic Scottish courses this spring. He considers himself an average golfer and was delighted recently to learn that his handicap just squeaked by the cut-off for a tee time at St. Andrew’s. He winters at a golf villa in Tucson that he and Kathleen share with his two brothers and their wives.
Then what? “There’s much to do. For one thing, I would like to know what all those buttons, dials and menus on my digital camera do.”
Nov. 15 is 'I Love to Write Day'
To access the website, click here:
Thank you to all of the schools, libraries, bookstores, community centers and writing groups all across the country that helped to make I Love To Write Day our biggest one yet.
Please join us again on November 15 for the seventh I Love To Write Day. To read about some of the events that took place, please click here.
Children’s Way Foundation (the non-profit developer of the virtual world, Woogi World™, www.woogiworld.com), and author of 30 years, John Riddle, are collaborating to bring to 50,000 elementary schools throughout the country, the opportunity for their to children discover and develop the talent of writing. Read the official press release here.
NEW this Year ... nominate your school, classroom, teacher or a student for an "I Love to Write Day Award of Excellence." Click here for details.
Thank you to all of the schools, libraries, bookstores, community centers and writing groups all across the country that helped to make I Love To Write Day our biggest one yet.
Please join us again on November 15 for the seventh I Love To Write Day. To read about some of the events that took place, please click here.
Children’s Way Foundation (the non-profit developer of the virtual world, Woogi World™, www.woogiworld.com), and author of 30 years, John Riddle, are collaborating to bring to 50,000 elementary schools throughout the country, the opportunity for their to children discover and develop the talent of writing. Read the official press release here.
NEW this Year ... nominate your school, classroom, teacher or a student for an "I Love to Write Day Award of Excellence." Click here for details.
Dan Wooding Reflects on Sherwood Wirt
Christian journalism loses one of its great pioneers
Sherwood Eliot Wirt, founding editor of Decision magazine has passes away at the age of 97
By Dan Wooding
Founder of ASSIST Ministries, writing from Jordan
Photo: Sherwood Wirt with Billy Graham
AMMAN, JORDAN (ANS) -- The world of Christian journalism has lost one of its great pioneers and characters, Dr. Sherwood Eliot Wirt, the founder of Billy Graham’s Decision magazine, also the San Diego Christian Writers Guild.
“Woody”, as he was known to his many friends, passed away at the age of 97 in the early morning of November 8, 2008. His wife Ruth told friends that he had “slipped away in his sleep."
Dr. Wirt, was also the author of 42 books including “Billy: A Personal Look at Billy Graham.”
He was born in 1911 and served as a chaplain in the U.S. Air Force, pastored several churches, and held Ph.D.'s in theology and psychology from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland (Class of '51).
Dr. Wirt was originally a newspaper journalist, but eventually became the founding editor of 'Decision,' a monthly magazine which Billy Graham established in the 1960s and which is still in circulation today. In 1978 he founded the San Diego Christian Writers Guild.
Dr. Wirt is known to have ministered and traveled with Dr. Graham for nearly 40 years. As a friend, Dr. Wirt knew Mr. Graham intimately and not just as a public figure.
A spokesperson for the San Diego Christian Writers Guild (SDCWG) said, “We will always be grateful to Woody for his friendship and the many things he taught us! After 97 years on earth, he is with the Lord!
“Woody had a vision to help Christian writers learn how to effectively communicate through the written word and get published while doing it!” the spokesperson added. “He started the first critique group that year. A small group of writers met monthly to help each other through constructive critiquing of each other’s work. That one group eventually grew into a network of meetings all over San Diego County and eventually into Orange, Los Angeles and Riverside counties.
"Today, in San Diego, ten groups meet regularly. One of the original groups, from East [San Diego] county, has been meeting for over twenty years and every member has been successfully published many times.”
I first met Woody Wirt in 1968 in London at Billy Graham’s UK offices, where I was working for The Christian and he had come over from Minneapolis to work on the UK version of Decision.
Many years later, after I had moved to the United States and he had retired to the sunshine of San Diego, we began running writer’s seminars together, which was a trip for me, as he was so lovingly eccentric in his presentations. I remember he had one talk about the “Seven Essential Tools of a Writer” which he said included owning a typewriter. I had to point out to him that in this computer age, most of his audience wouldn’t know what a typewriter was.
Most of our seminars were under the auspices of Mike MacIntosh of Horizon Christian Fellowship in San Diego who would hold his “Festival of Life” outreaches in different parts of the world and include a writer’s seminar with the two of us.
Woody was a humble person and yet he secured a real scoop that any journalist would have loved to have had. He did the very last interview wit CS Lewis before Lewis died. (See http://www.assistnews.net/STORIES/2006/s06090017.htm). He was also a columnist for ANS for many years.
He eventually left San Diego for Bothell, Washington, where he died. His memorial service will be held on December 5 at 2:00 PM at Westminster Chapel, 13646 NE 24th St., Bellevue, WA 98005.
Struggling Bookstore Makes Film on Plight
Here's an interesting story from the Washington Post on one struggling bookstore's effort to gain public support for struggling stores. To view the entire article, click here.
Dizzying Descent
Owners of Struggling Vertigo Bookstore Take A Page From the Screen
By Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 15, 2008; Page C01
When you're the proud parents of a bookstore at risk of imminent death, you'll try pretty much anything to give your baby a chance -- including asking your customers to watch a documentary about other bookstores at risk of imminent death.
"It's a film about troubled bookstores. We're a troubled bookstore," Bridget Warren said matter-of-factly Thursday night as she introduced a showing of "Paperback Dreams" at Vertigo Books, the College Park store she owns with her husband, Todd Stewart.
Late last month, Warren and Stewart appealed for help in an e-mail to regular customers and a posting on the store's Web site. "Vertigo books is at risk," it began. "Vote with your dollars now if you value our local economy and this store." They didn't want to be seen as whining or asking for handouts. But they'd also watched what had happened, over the past year, to other independent area stores.
Poof! No Karibu.
Poof! No Olsson's.
Poof! No Candida's or Chapters or A Likely Story -- though Chapters remains on life support, its inventory in storage as it struggles to find a new location.
"We thought, we'll give people a heads-up that that's what will happen," Stewart explained, "if you don't come in with more than your good thoughts."
This evening, only a few came at all. Just 15 of the 25 chairs at the back of the store were filled as producer-director Alex Beckstead fired up "Paperback Dreams."
In August 2005, Beckstead went out to grab some lunch near his office in Menlo Park, Calif., and saw a note on the door of Kepler's Books announcing the legendary 50-year-old store's demise. He ran back clutching his sandwich and saying "Kepler's is closed!" as his colleagues "dropped what they were doing and said, 'WHAT?' "
They weren't alone. In one of the most heartening recent developments in the shrinking universe of independent booksellers, Kepler's customers -- among them a number of wealthy Silicon Valley denizens who loved the store -- banded together to try to save it. Around the same time, Cody's Books, an equally legendary Berkeley institution, decided to roll the dice on a big new store in San Francisco.
Beckstead thought the combined ventures had the makings of a film. He was hoping it would be a positive one.
The Vertigo audience, joined by a few latecomers, watched largely in silence as the twin tales unfolded.
Dizzying Descent
Owners of Struggling Vertigo Bookstore Take A Page From the Screen
By Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 15, 2008; Page C01
When you're the proud parents of a bookstore at risk of imminent death, you'll try pretty much anything to give your baby a chance -- including asking your customers to watch a documentary about other bookstores at risk of imminent death.
"It's a film about troubled bookstores. We're a troubled bookstore," Bridget Warren said matter-of-factly Thursday night as she introduced a showing of "Paperback Dreams" at Vertigo Books, the College Park store she owns with her husband, Todd Stewart.
Late last month, Warren and Stewart appealed for help in an e-mail to regular customers and a posting on the store's Web site. "Vertigo books is at risk," it began. "Vote with your dollars now if you value our local economy and this store." They didn't want to be seen as whining or asking for handouts. But they'd also watched what had happened, over the past year, to other independent area stores.
Poof! No Karibu.
Poof! No Olsson's.
Poof! No Candida's or Chapters or A Likely Story -- though Chapters remains on life support, its inventory in storage as it struggles to find a new location.
"We thought, we'll give people a heads-up that that's what will happen," Stewart explained, "if you don't come in with more than your good thoughts."
This evening, only a few came at all. Just 15 of the 25 chairs at the back of the store were filled as producer-director Alex Beckstead fired up "Paperback Dreams."
In August 2005, Beckstead went out to grab some lunch near his office in Menlo Park, Calif., and saw a note on the door of Kepler's Books announcing the legendary 50-year-old store's demise. He ran back clutching his sandwich and saying "Kepler's is closed!" as his colleagues "dropped what they were doing and said, 'WHAT?' "
They weren't alone. In one of the most heartening recent developments in the shrinking universe of independent booksellers, Kepler's customers -- among them a number of wealthy Silicon Valley denizens who loved the store -- banded together to try to save it. Around the same time, Cody's Books, an equally legendary Berkeley institution, decided to roll the dice on a big new store in San Francisco.
Beckstead thought the combined ventures had the makings of a film. He was hoping it would be a positive one.
The Vertigo audience, joined by a few latecomers, watched largely in silence as the twin tales unfolded.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Former Warsaw Times-Union Reporter Murdered
Tim Robertson, reporter for the Warsaw Times-Union, will be with us in class Monday night. Please read this article, and we will ask him what effect this event has had on his staff. Also...I'll share a little more of the backstory with you--I have a very personal connection to this situation.
Former Warsawan Slain In Minnesota
David Slone
Times-Union Staff Writer
PRIOR LAKE, Minn. - A former Warsaw resident and Times-Union reporter was found dead in her home in Prior Lake, Minn., Wednesday morning.
Her husband is in jail on charges related to her death.
Ruth Anne Maddox, 45, worked for the Times-Union from April 1, 1987, to July 8, 2003. During her tenure at the Times-Union, she covered general assignments, as well as police and courts under the bylines of Ruth Anne Lipka and Ruth Anne Long.
According to the Star Tribune newspaper in St. Paul, Minn., police responded to the Maddox home at 16492 Timber Crest Drive SE Tuesday night to check on Ruth Anne after she was reported missing by co-workers.
Her husband, Charles Anthony "Tony" Maddox Jr., allegedly was uncooperative and would not allow police to enter the home. After a second welfare check at the residence, police secured a search warrant.
Ruth Anne's body was discovered at 3:17 a.m. Wednesday. Reports published online indicate her body was found wrapped in a tarp in an attached garage.
Tony, 43, was booked into the Scott County Jail at 4:55 a.m. Wednesday on a preliminary charge of second-degree homicide, according to an officer at the jail. No bond had been set as of Wednesday afternoon.
Lori Lambrecht, office manager for the Scott County attorney's office, said if the charges were not filed today, they would be filed Friday.
Reports indicate Ruth Anne was last seen alive by a neighbor at approximately 11:30 p.m. Monday.
According to twincities.com, Ruth Anne filed for divorce from her husband on Oct. 22.
In a telephone interview this morning, Ruth Anne's attorney for the divorce, Peter Horejsi, said a hearing for the divorce was scheduled for Nov. 6. But prior to that court date, Tony's attorney and Horejsi came to an agreement on the divorce. Horejsi said they expected the divorce to be concluded this week. Tony also agreed to be out of the house by the end of the month.
Horejsi said he learned of Ruth Anne's murder Wednesday.
According to an affidavit filed in the divorce, Ruth Anne was concerned about how her husband would react to the breakup, based on an incident of abuse that occurred a year ago when the possibility of a divorce was brought up. Horejsi said today, Ruth Anne did not expect any extreme violence. He said there was no reason to believe anything to this extent.
In February 2005, according to a police report provided by the Prior Lake Police Dept., Tony was arrested for driving while intoxicated and fleeing police in a motor vehicle. His blood alcohol content was .15.
At the time, he had an outstanding warrant from Hennepin County, Minn., for driving with a suspended license.
Lt. Randy Hofstad, Prior Lake Police Dept. spokesman, said Wednesday afternoon a cause of death had not been determined, but the case was being investigated as a homicide.
Initial reports indicate Ruth Anne was beaten, but it was unknown at press time whether any type of weapon was used.
Ruth Anne's two dogs and cat were taken to Four Paws animal shelter, according to a report in the Savage Pacer newspaper online.
Ruth Anne moved to Prior Lake from Warsaw in 2003 after marrying Tony. Ruth Anne and Tony attended high school together in Hammond and reconnected after attending a class reunion.
In Minnesota, Ruth Anne became a reporter with two newspapers owned by Southwest Newspapers. She first worked at the Savage Pacer and then at the Shakopee Valley News. She also worked part time at a Kohl's store.
Mark Weber, general manager of Southwest Newspapers, said, "We are shocked and saddened by the news.
"She was a great employee. The newspaper is keeping her friends and family in their prayers," Weber added.
Ruth Anne is survived by a daughter, two sisters, a brother and her parents.
Times-Union General Manager Gary Gerard said, "Ruth Anne was here when I was hired in 1988. She was a hard-working, talented reporter and just a really fun person to be around. She had a great sense of humor."
He added, "I can't imagine how anyone could do something like this to Ruth Anne. My solemn hope is that justice in this case is swift and severe.
"I want Ruth Anne's family to know all of us here at the Times-Union grieve with them and are keeping them in our thoughts and prayers," Gerard said.
It was the first homicide in Prior Lake since January 27, 2002. In that case a man killed his wife then took his own life, according to the Star Tribune.
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