Novel Spurs Indiana Police Action

Self-published Indiana Author Spurs Police Action With Novel

By Bridget Kinsella -- Publishers Weekly, 9/22/2009 7:55:00 AM

Tomas Ray Crowel has been publishing his own business books and novels under his Success Press banner in Highland, Ind., and one of his most recent books led to the re-opening into the death of a local girl.

The story began a few years ago when Crowel stumbled on the grave of an 11-year-old girl named Brandi Peltz. When Crowel started asking people in the town about Peltz, he was told she drowned while taking a bath. Crowel found out that, in 1986, police investigated the case as a murder, but later dropped it.

Nonetheless, community members in the small Indiana town suspected foul play, and that a person known as “The Passerby” might be involved in the Peltz's death. (The mysterious character was the first to notice the girl’s house was on fire, and claimed to have tried to resuscitate her in the tub.)

Crowel decided to fictionalize the story in his novel The Passerby, using much of what he found investigating the real Peltz case for nearly three years. Even before Success Press published The Passerby, the Indiana State Police were interested in finding out what Crowel uncovered, much to the chagrin of the Sheriff, who wanted to keep the case closed.

When the book published last year and Success distributed the title to chain and independent bookstores in Indiana and nearby Chicagoland, the community responded immediately and the 5,000-copy first printing sold out. (Success is almost sold out of its second 5,000 copies.) Now, with more than 1,300 comments about the book on Amazon, the Peltzer cold murder case was back in the news and The Passerby was the reason.

When a local television news featured the book and questioned why the case had not been solved, the community put more pressure on the Sheriff to re-open the case. In January, the Sheriff invited the State Police into a new investigation of the Peltz murder. For years the fight for jurisdiction prevented the police from opening the case again, but community pressure sparked by The Passerby made it happen.

The Indiana State Police Cold Case Division cannot comment on the status of the case, but Crowel, who has been in contact with the investigators for months said he thinks they are close to solving it.

Crowel is dedicating all of the proceeds from The Passerby to various charities. “I believe in angels and a divine intervention to write this book,” he said. The book is dedicated to “the angels who guide us."

Wooster Church, ICDI Partner on CAR School

In partnership with the Grace Brethren Church of Wooster, Ohio (Robert Fetterhoff, pastor), Integrated Community Development International was able to build a public school building in the village of Pama, about 260 kilometers (about 160 miles) northwest of Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic. It was officially opened this past Saturday, Sept. 19, 2009.

Five Innovations the Web Brings to Journalism

Here's a look at the web's influence on journalism, from a British perspective. To read the original, or to comment, click here.

Five innovations in news journalism, thanks to the web

Posted by Jon Bernstein

What has the web ever done for journalism, except skewer its business model and return freelance rates to levels not seen since the early 90s?

Well, not much, apart from reinvent the form.

Amidst the doom of gloom in our industry it is easy to lose sight of how the web has transformed the way we tell stories, provide context and analysis, and cover live events.

This is arguably the most creative period in news journalism since movable type – new forms, new applications and new execution. Newspapers are embracing video and audio, radio stations do pictures, and TV has gone blogging.

You’re likely to have your own suggestions, and favourites. But here are five of the best:

1. Interactive infographics

Broadcast news was quick to adopt the graphic as a means of explaining complex issues or, more prosaically, make the most of a picture-challenged story. The web has taken the best examples from newspapers, magazines and TV and given them a twist – interactivity. Now you can interrogate the data, slice and dice it at will. Two of the best practitioners of the art can be found in the US – the New York Times and South Florida’s Sun Sentinel.

2. Crowdsourcing

From crime mapping to a pictorial memorial to the victims of post-election Iran to joint investigations, the crowd is proving a potent force in journalism. It took the web to provide the environment for a real-time collaboration and ad hoc groups are brought together by dint of interest, expertise, geography or some combination of all three. Not all crowdsourcing projects run smooth but the power of the crowd will continue to surprise.

3. The podcast


Just as cheap video cameras and YouTube democratised the moving image, so the podcast has made audio publishers of us all. Some podcasts mirror radio almost exactly in format, down to the commercial breaks at the top, middle and end of the show. Others break the rules. As Erik Qualman notes in his new book Socialnomics, today’s podcasters are taking liberties with advertising models (building in sponsorship) and with length of transmission (”If a podcast only has 16 minutes of news-worthy items, then why waste … time trying to fill the slot with sub-par content?”).

4. Over-by-over

A completely original approach to sports reporting, only possible on a real-time platform. Like Sky’s Soccer Saturday – where a bunch of ex-pros watch matches you can’t see and offer semi-coherent banter – over-by-over and ball-by-ball cricket and football commentaries shouldn’t work, but they do. And it’s not just the application, it’s the execution. The commentaries are knowing, not fawning, conversational and participatory. Over-by-over is CoveritLive and Twitter’s (child-like) elder sibling.

5. The blog

The blog and the conventional news article are entirely separate forms, as any publisher who has tried to fob the user off by sticking the word ‘blog’ at the top of a standard story template will tell you. The blog allows you to tell stories in a different way, deconstructing the inverted pyramid and addressing the who, what, why, when, where and how as appropriate. Breaking news has become a narrative – early lines followed by more detail, reaction, photos, analysis, video, comment and fact checking in no defined order. It’s a collaborative work in progress. News is becoming atomised on the web and the blog is the platform on which it is happening.

I’ve named five but there are bound to be others. What have I missed?

Sometimes the News is Incredible

This is an excerpt--to read the entire article click here.

Rex Smith: Sometimes the news is incredible

Meaning literally that it lacks credibility -- and yet it's real. For the mainstream media, a lesson to learn.

By REX SMITH, Albany Times Union

Many of us in the news business get a quick take on a tale by checking its teller. That may explain why the ACORN story was largely overlooked at first and why we may learn from it something about the changing nature of information transmittal.

In case you missed it: A couple of young conservative activists pretending to be a prostitute and her pimp secretly videotaped ACORN workers in several offices coaching the duo on how to evade taxes and avoid scrutiny. It was startling, to say the least.

The tapes prompted both houses of Congress to pass differing bills that bar the group from receiving federal funds. That was a sweet victory for the several conservative groups that have long viewed ACORN, a coalition of neighborhood groups with a national umbrella lobbying arm, as a haven of voter registration fraud and unethical political activity.

Most of us in the so-called legacy media came late to the story.

To suggest, as some have, that our handling of the story stems from a bias against conservative views is to miss a more complex and interesting point.

The ACORN video was first revealed on a blog run by Andrew Breitbart, a former associate of Matt Drudge. You remember Drudge: It was from the Drudge Report, a groundbreaking blog during the Clinton presidency, that we first heard that Monica Lewinsky had a blue dress harboring presidential DNA.

Many people didn't believe that at first, not just because it was mind-boggling; it was also because Drudge had little credibility. Although a lot of his reports on Clinton proved correct, he has been wrong so often since that nobody should take a Drudge claim at face value.

Breitbart's video got picked up by Fox News -- notably, by talk show host Glenn Beck, who urged viewers to call local newspapers and excoriate us for not reporting the story.

Journalists tend to be dispassionate about stories, and we value independence; the involvement of Beck, whose stock in trade is histrionics, lent little credence to the account.

New York Post Not Laughing at Spoof

New York Post not laughing at climate change spoof

By Evan Buxbaum

NEW YORK (CNN) -- A day before the United Nations held a climate change summit, New York City was blanketed with 100,000 fake copies of the New York Post tabloid, filled with content related to climate change.

The Yes Men activist group says everything in the bogus edition of the tabloid is "100 percent" true.

But the Post, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., wasn't impressed, calling the effort by perennial pranksters the Yes Men a "Witless Spoof in Flawless Format" in a statement released Tuesday, a day after the faux Post hit the streets.

The overall endeavor, the Post said, was a "limp effort," and the fraudulent newspaper "has none of the wit and insight New Yorkers expect from their favorite paper. The Post will not be hiring any of their headline writers."

A phony "Early City Special" edition of the popular tabloid greeted millions of New York City commuters early Monday with a blaring "WE'RE SCREWED" headline. The headline and everything else in the 32-page publication, including some bogus advertisements and comics, revolved around climate change.

Even the Post's notorious "Page Six" gossip and "Best Sports in Town" sections were spoofed with various true celebrity and sports articles connected to the green movement and climate change awareness.

A statement released by the Yes Men, an activist group whose members have posed as officials and spokesmen of various organizations, companies and agencies, said that although their version of the New York Post is a fake, "everything in it is 100 percent true, with all facts carefully checked by a team of editors and climate change experts."

The Post parody appeared a day before Tuesday's U.N. climate change summit, "where Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will push 100 world leaders to make serious commitments to reduce carbon emissions in the lead-up to the Copenhagen climate conference in December," the group said.

The United Nations said that 54 presidents, 35 prime ministers and one prince were attending Tuesday's events. Former Vice President Al Gore and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair also were involved.

Yes Men spokeswoman Natalie Johns said the aim of the stunt was to "report really important and relevant issues that have not been in the press a day before a U.N. climate meeting."

Johns said the fake New York Post printing cost between $30,000 and $40,000, and was funded by numerous private donations of various amounts.

On November 12, 2008, New Yorkers awoke to the organization's first prank-in-print, finding strategically located "special editions" of The New York Times around the city. The counterfeit Times, dated July 4, 2009, centered on the fictitious conclusion of the Iraq war, as well as other matters connected with the end of the Bush administration.

The Yes Men also have posed as spokesmen for organizations including the World Trade Organization and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Their activities were documented in the 2003 film "The Yes Men."

Obama Open to Newspaper Bailout Bill

From The Hill. To read the original, click here.

Obama open to newspaper bailout bill

By Michael O'Brien - 09/20/09 04:24 PM ET

The president said he is "happy to look at" bills before Congress that would give struggling news organizations tax breaks if they were to restructure as nonprofit businesses.

"I haven't seen detailed proposals yet, but I'll be happy to look at them," Obama told the editors of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Toledo Blade in an interview.

Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) has introduced S. 673, the so-called "Newspaper Revitalization Act," that would give outlets tax deals if they were to restructure as 501(c)(3) corporations. That bill has so far attracted one cosponsor, Cardin's Maryland colleague Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D).

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs had played down the possibility of government assistance for news organizations, which have been hit by an economic downturn and dwindling ad revenue.

In early May, Gibbs said that while he hadn't asked the president specifically about bailout options for newspapers, "I don't know what, in all honesty, government can do about it."

Obama said that good journalism is "critical to the health of our democracy," but expressed concern toward growing tends in reporting -- especially on political blogs, from which a groundswell of support for his campaign emerged during the presidential election.

"I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding," he said.

'God is Dead' Author John Elson Dies

From the New York Times:

John T. Elson; penned 'Is God Dead?' piece in Time

NEW YORK - All journalists want to write a story that makes a big splash. John T. Elson, the religion editor at Time magazine, was no exception. But in 1966 he got more than he bargained for.

For more than a year, Mr. Elson had labored over an article examining radical new approaches to thinking about God that were gaining currency in seminaries and universities and spilling over to the public at large.

When finally completed, it became the cover story for the issue of April 8, as Easter and Passover approached. The cover was eye-catching, the first one in Time’s 43-year history to appear without a photograph or an illustration. Giant blood-red letters spelled out “Is God Dead?’’

The issue caused an uproar, perhaps equaled only by John Lennon’s offhand remark, published in a magazine for teenagers a few months later, that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. The “Is God Dead?’’ issue gave Time its biggest newsstand sales in more than 20 years and elicited 3,500 letters to the editor. It remains a testimony to the social changes transforming the United States in the 1960s.

The quiet, studious Mr. Elson, who died Sept. 7 at age 78, was an unlikely bomb-thrower, and his article, for those who ventured past the cover, reflected his scholarly bent. Meekly titled on the inside as “Toward a Hidden God,’’ it began: “Is God dead? It is a question that tantalizes both believers, who perhaps secretly fear that he is, and atheists, who possibly suspect that the answer is no.’’

More than 30 Time foreign correspondents were also involved in the project, conducting some 300 interviews to measure contemporary thinking about God around the world.

“Secularization, science, urbanization - all have made it comparatively easy for the modern man to ask where God is and hard for the man of faith to give a convincing answer, even to himself,’’ Mr. Elson wrote.

John Truscott Elson was born in Vancouver, British Columbia. His father, Robert T. Elson, was a newspaper reporter in Canada who later became a high-ranking editor at Time and Life and helped write two volumes of the three-volume “Time, Inc.,’’ the company’s official history. He died in 1987.

John Elson was educated at St. Anselm’s Priory School in Washington, D.C. He received a bachelor’s degree from Notre Dame in 1953 and a master’s degree in English from Columbia in 1954.

That year, he married Rosemary Knorr. She said her husband died at home in Manhattan after being in poor health for the last two years. Mr. Elson also leaves two children, Hilary Elson Alter of Lake Zurich, Ill., and Amanda Elson of Wyomissing, Pa.; two sisters, Elizabeth Elson of Manhattan and Brigid Elson of Toronto; a brother, R. Anthony Elson of Chevy Chase, Md.; and a grandchild.

After serving with the Air Force, Mr. Elson worked for the Canadian Press news agency before being recruited by Time. As an editor, he started on the lowest rung and rose to assistant managing editor. Along the way, he edited every section except business. He retired in 1987 but continued to write for the magazine until 1993.

It was as religion editor that Mr. Elson made his most lasting mark. He wrote numerous cover stories on religious issues - “Is God Dead?’’ was the 10th - and committed the magazine to serious coverage of ideas and arguments normally encountered in more specialized journals.

“He was catholic with a capital C and a small c in his interests, deeply and widely read,’’ Jim Kelly, former managing editor of Time, said in an interview last week. “His ability to absorb an enormous amount of information and turn it into a readable story was remarkable.’’

Unquestionably, Mr. Elson touched a nerve. Clergymen took up the challenge thrown down by the “Is God Dead?’’ cover line in Sunday sermons. Church publications and newspaper editorials chimed in.

“Your ugly cover is a blasphemous outrage and, appearing as it does, during Passover and Easter week, an affront to every believing Jew and Christian,’’ one reader wrote. Others wrote to explain their faith in fervent terms. Atheists gloated or scoffed.

Some expressed their feelings in a single word. Norine McGuire of Chicago, responding to Time’s bombshell of a question, wrote: “Sir: No.’’ Immediately below her letter, Time ran one from Richard L. Storatz of Notre Dame, Ind.: “Sir: Yes.’’

Is God Dead? Now He'll Know!

From the Religion News Service blog:

Now he’ll know

So, the Time magazine journalist who penned the famous "Is God Dead?" article in 1966 has shuffled off this mortal coil. It seems worth asking whether the kind of journalism John Elson practiced is gone with him.

From Time magazine's cover you might have thought the article was a bit of bombastic provocation, the kind of writing you see littered throughout the blogosphere. But the article's actual headline was "Toward a Hidden God," and it was a scholarly, careful look at how secularism, urbanism, and all the other 'isms were changing people's ideas about God.

Here's the New York Times' description, "readers were guided through thickets of theological controversy and a shifting religious landscape. Profound changes taking place in the relationship of believers to their faith were often expressed through the words of people, both eminent and ordinary, grappling with the same fundamental problems. Simone de Beauvoir, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Billy Graham and William Sloane Coffin were quoted. So were a Tel Aviv streetwalker, a Dutch charwoman and a Hollywood screenwriter.

"More than 30 Time foreign correspondents were also involved in the project, conducting some 300 interviews to measure contemporary thinking about God around the world."

Elson, who was "Catholic with a capital C and a small c," according to his editor, labored on the project for more than a year. It's hard to imagine any magazine giving a writer similar resources today.

And the cover query did its job, the Times reports: "The `Is God Dead?' issue gave Time its biggest newsstand sales in more than 20 years and elicited 3,500 letters to the editor, the most in its history to that point."

You can read the original article here.

Newspapers to Open Internet Toll Booths

This is an excerpt. To read the entire article, click here.

Newspapers expected to open Internet toll booths this fall as publishers test online fees

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE , Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO - With their advertising revenue drying up, newspaper publishers spent much of the spring and summer debating whether to cut off free online access to some of the material they run in their shrinking print editions.

It looks like the talk will turn to action this fall, when some large newspapers are expected to put up Internet toll booths.

They'll be testing readers' willingness to pay for information and entertainment that mostly has been given away online for the past 15 years. That happened largely because most publishers could afford to subsidize their Web sites with profits from their print franchises. But now those profits have crumbled, just as the prices for online ads are tumbling, too.

A recent study by the American Press Institute found 58 percent of the responding newspapers are considering online fees. Of that group, 22 percent expect to introduce the fee before the end of the year. The findings drew upon 118 interviews of newspaper executives in the U.S. and Canada.

The free-to-fee transition likely will occur in tentative steps rather than bold leaps that would lock all online content behind a pay gate. Publishers are taking this cautious approach because they are still trying to devise online payment plans that will generate more revenue without alienating too many of their readers.

Religion Reporting Losing Prominence in Newspapers

From the Boston Globe. To read the original, click here.

Religion reporting is losing its prominence in American newspapers

By Michael Paulson, Globe Staff

MINNEAPOLIS - I spent the last few days here at the 60th annual convention of the Religion Newswriters Association, which is the national organization that represents the dwindling band of us who cover religion in the media. Attendance is off this year, in part because newsroom travel budgets are down, but also because the religion beat itself is suffering a serious reversal of fortune.

When I first started covering religion for the Globe nearly a decade ago, the beat was almost trendy; newspapers were beefing up their coverage considerably, religion sections were fat, and a few newspapers, like the Los Angeles Times, had four or more religion writers.

No more. There have been reductions in the number of reporters who write about religion full time at all of the nation’s biggest newspapers, and the religion news beat has disappeared from multiple midsize and smaller papers. The surviving newspaper religion sections are getting smaller.

Debra Mason, executive director of the Religion Newswriters Association, told me she does not believe that the religion beat is being targeted, but that all specialty beats at newspapers, including the environment, health, and education, are suffering as newspapers, with shrinking budgets, allocate an increasing fraction of their diminished newsroom staffs to general assignment jobs.

What exactly this means for the future of religion coverage in the United States is unclear. The beat is not likely to disappear entirely from the mainstream media, and there is still a lot of great work being done.

There is a huge amount of writing about religion in new media - blogs and other online publications - some of which break news, and some of which comment on news broken by others. But much of the online work is focused on individual faith groups and is written from a particular ideological or theological perspective, which differentiates it from traditional religion journalism. At the most recent denominational conventions I have attended, bloggers and reporters for religious publications have easily outnumbered reporters for secular publications.

A final, and related, trend that I see is an increase in religious denominations reporting about themselves. I participated in a conference at Utah State University earlier this year and attended a presentation about how, in light of the decline of the religion beat, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is more aggressively telling its own story, through blogging and Facebook and Twitter. It now seems clear that the Catholic bishops’ conference is doing the same thing, and the Episcopal Church appears to be moving in a similar direction.

Of course, lots of organizations have tried over time to circumvent the media and tell their stories directly to the public - what’s new now is that, in some cases, this is being precipitated not by an overarching critique of the quality of coverage, but by the paucity of coverage. Obviously, this trend raises all kinds of questions for those of us who believe that the critical distance journalists seek to maintain from their subjects makes an important difference in storytelling. Apparently, some religious leaders are worried, too: the Rev. Peg Chemberlin, president-elect of the National Council of Churches, said at the conference, “It’s a concern for many of us in the faith community . . . as religion writers are seeming to slide away from the landscape.’’

At a panel on immigration and faith at the convention Thursday, Luis Lugo, the director of the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, made a few interesting observations:

■ Immigration is leading to an increase in the number of Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims in the United States, but a large majority of new immigrants are Christian. This stands in contrast to the situation in Europe, where a much higher percentage of immigrants are non-Christian.

■ Although Protestants outnumber Catholics in the United States, new immigrants are overwhelmingly Catholic, and as a result, “immigration is tilting the balance within American Christianity in favor of Catholicism.’’ Also, Lugo said, “We’re very close to becoming a minority Protestant country.’’

■ Many of the new immigrants are from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. “What we are seeing is not the de-Christianization of America, but the de-Europeanization of American Christianity,’’ he said. One effect of this, he said, is a rise in Pentecostal and charismatic worship styles in US churches, because those more expressive forms of worship are often preferred by immigrants from the Global South.

■ Nearly a quarter of all Catholics in the United States are foreign born - the highest percentage among any of the nation’s largest faith groups. “To know what the country will be like in three decades, look at the Catholic church,’’ he said.

■ The Muslim population in the United States is more diverse, in terms of national origin, than the Muslim population in any other country. No more than 8 percent of American Muslims are from any one country. This, again, contrasts with the situation in Europe, where, for example, many German Muslims are from Turkey, many Spanish Muslims are from Morocco, and many French Muslims are from Algeria.

2 Million Books Now Available on Espresso Machines

Excerpt from an AP article--to read the entire piece, click here.
Google to reincarnate e-books

John Bivens, head of services and support for On
Demand Books, demonstrates the printing of a book
from an Espresso Book Machine at Google
headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., Wednesday

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE , Associated Press

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - Google Inc. is giving 2
million books in its digital library a chance to be
reincarnated as paperbacks.

As part of a deal announced Thursday, Google is
opening up part of its index to the maker of a
high-speed publishing machine that can
manufacture a paperback-bound book of about
300 pages in under five minutes. The new service
is an acknowledgment by the Internet search
leader that not everyone wants their books
served up on a computer or an electronic reader
like those made by Amazon.com Inc. and Sony
Inc.

The "Espresso Book Machine" has been around
for several years already, but it figures to become
a hotter commodity now that it has access to so
many books scanned from some of the world's
largest libraries. And On Demand Books, the
Espresso's maker, potentially could get access to
even more hard-to-find books if Google wins
court approval of a class-action settlement giving
it the right to sell out-of-print books.

"This is a seminal event for us," said Dane Neller,
On Demand Books' chief executive, as he oversaw
a demonstration of the Espresso Book Machine
Wednesday at Google's Mountain View, Calif.,
headquarters.

In the background, some of the books that
Google spent the past five years scanning into a
digital format were returning to their paper
origins.

"It's like things are coming full circle," Google
spokeswoman Jennie Johnson said. "This will
allow people to pick up the physical copy of a
book even if there may be just one or two other
copies in some library in this country, or maybe
it's not even available in this country at all."

On Demand's printing machines already are in
more than a dozen locations in the United States,
Canada, Australia, England and Egypt, mostly at
campus book stores, libraries and small retailers.
The Harvard Book Store will be among the first
already equipped with an instant-publishing
machine to have access to Google's digital library.

The books published by The Espresso Machine
will have a recommended sales price of $8 per
copy, although the final decision will be left to
each retailer. New York-based On Demand Books
will get a $1 of each sale with another buck going
to Google, which says it will donate its
commission to charities and other nonprofit
causes.

The high-speed publishing machine itself sells for
about $100,000, although On Demand Books is
willing to lease the equipment to retailers instead.

For starters, Google is only allowing The Espresso
Machine to publish from the section of its digital
library that consists of 2 million books no longer
protected by copyright.

First and Last is All that Matters

Olny srmat poelpe can raed this. I cdnuolt blveiee that I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd what I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in what oredr the ltteers in a word are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is that the first and last ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can still raed it wouthit a porbelm. This is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the word as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? Yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! If you can raed this psas it on!!

CT Launches Re-Design

Christianity Today Launches Redesign with October 2009 Issue

CAROL STREAM, Ill., Sept. 16 /Christian Newswire/ -- Christianity Today magazine debuts its redesign in the October issue with new features and a bold, new look. The magazine has a new orientation with well-defined sections and a new color palette.

Editor-in-Chief David Neff says, "Redesign a magazine and you could disorient some readers. But we hope that the redesigned Christianity Today will quickly give the reader a better sense of orientation. We believe the magazine is easier to use and more thoughtful than ever."

Lead designer, Gary Gnidovic, says, "Although we'd been considering a redesign of Christianity Today for a couple of years, the beginning of 2009 felt like the right time to begin the process. Sometimes a publication's design can evolve slowly, but periodically, because of changing editorial needs, or even cultural shifts, it is good to completely rethink how one is approaching the content structurally and visually. In CT's 50-year history there have been only 5 or 6 complete redesigns. We hope that the reader will find this new CT to feel fresh and vital, and with a greater degree of orientation to the content."

The magazine has been organized into four clearly- defined sections:


Briefing - The news section with robust graphic portrayals of key data about current issues.


The Well - Our in-depth and comprehensive feature articles.


Viewpoints - CT editorials and feedback from readers.


CT Review - Groundbreaking reviews on books, music, movies, and websites.

New features:


The Village Green - Three writers address a question that doesn't lend itself to left-right polarization.


Who's Next - Features the people who will be shaping the evangelical movement in the future.

To preview the redesign, go to www.ChristianityToday.com/ct/preview.

For more than 50 years, Christianity Today has been a source of reliable news and commentary, and the magazine will continue to give the reader thoughtful articles, grounded in biblical perspective, written by the men and women who are changing our world.

Christianity Today, the world's leading religious current-issues publication covering the people, events, and ideas that shape the evangelical movement, was founded by Billy Graham in 1956.

Christianity Today International is a not-for-profit ministry.

Andree Seu's Writing Tips

From Andree Seu at World magazine:

Writing tips

The best writing tip I ever got was not William Zinsser’s “Clutter is the disease of American writing,” or “Simplify, simplify,” or “Strip every sentence to its leanest components,” or “Be grateful for everything you can throw away,” or “Writing improves in direct ratio to the number of things we can keep out of it that shouldn’t be there.”

It isn’t even Ann Lamott’s tip about “short assignments,” or to write only what fits in a “one-inch picture frame,” or that “all writers write [expletive] first drafts,” or that “almost every single thing you hope publication will do for you is a fantasy, a hologram.”

It isn’t E.L Doctorow’s analogy that “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

The best writing tip I ever got was from my old professor John Frame, who told me that when he writes, he always keeps in mind the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

The more time you have to think about these nine, the more they expand and bleed into each other. And somewhere in that stew, I’m sure there is an exhortation for both readers and writers to receive one another’s thoughts with a humble and teachable posture, rather than the posture of the critic.

I’m sure that included in the fruit of love or kindness is the idea of entering into another person’s position as far as you can go. Discernment is a good thing, but we tend to jump so quickly to finding fault or the fly in the ointment that if there were any benefit to be gleaned from the brother’s or sister’s insight, it is lost in the ether.

Poll: News Media Credibility Sagging

This is not good news for journos. What can reverse the trend? This is an excerpt--to read the entire article click here.

Poll: News media's credibility plunges to new low

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE (AP)

SAN FRANCISCO — The news media's credibility is sagging along with its revenue.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans think the news stories they read, hear and watch are frequently inaccurate, according to a poll released Sunday by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. That marks the highest level of skepticism recorded since 1985, when this study of public perceptions of the media was first done.

The poll didn't distinguish between Internet bloggers and reporters employed by newspapers and broadcasters, leaving the definition of "news media" up to each individual who was questioned. The survey polled 1,506 adults on the phone in late July.

The survey found that 63 percent of the respondents thought the information they get from the media was often off base. In Pew Research's previous survey, in 2007, 53 percent of the people expressed that doubt about accuracy.

The findings indicate U.S. newspapers and broadcasters could be alienating the audiences they are struggling to keep as they try to survive financial turmoil. Pew Research didn't attempt to gauge how shrinking newspapers, reduced staffs and other cutbacks at news organizations are affecting people's perceptions, although the reductions probably haven't helped, said Michael Dimock, an associate director for the center.

The financial problems mainly stem from a steep decline in the ad sales that generate most of the media's revenue. Newspapers' print editions have been losing readers to the Internet, and broadcasters' audiences are fragmenting in an age of cable TV and satellite radio.

Refreshing Reversal -- It Takes a Woman

From World Magazine. This is an excerpt--to read the entire article click here.

Refreshing reversal

Zondervan takes a step in what may be a very good direction | Joel Belz

There's wonderful irony in the news that it took a woman to produce a breakthrough in the battle over gender-inclusive Bibles.

Moe Girkins, who early in 2008 became president and CEO of Zondervan Publishing Co., quickly developed a concern about the collapse over the last decade of Zondervan's worldwide dominance in Bible sales. Since the introduction of the New International Version of the Bible in 1978, Zondervan had enjoyed a virtual monopoly on both NIV Bibles and NIV-licensed products. Toward the end of the 1990s, Zondervan could claim that nearly 300 million NIV Bibles were in print around the world—a staggering number that eclipsed all other modern translations and justified the claim that the NIV had become the contemporary replacement for the venerable King James Version of the Bible.

But then, in a series of decisions that puzzled many throughout the evangelical world, Zondervan—in close cooperation with the Committee on Bible Translation (CBT) and the International Bible Society (IBS)—began replacing the traditional NIV with revisions that lit a firestorm of controversy. Specifically, the changes included extensive use of so-called "gender-inclusive language," which many evangelical scholars argued went beyond a faithful rendering of the original texts. Whole denominations protested the changes, and thousands of Bible buyers began looking for a suitable replacement for the NIV.

Zondervan and the NIV never lost their lead position in Bible sales. But as the evangelical family feud continued, they did take a hit. By some accounts, the NIV, which had enjoyed as much as a 50 percent market share, may have slipped to not much more than half that figure.

That's the situation Moe Girkins inherited when she took over the 75-year-old Zondervan early last year. Coming as a seasoned corporate executive but a relatively new evangelical believer, she impressed many with her ability to pick up the nuances necessary to operate in the complex evangelical milieu. Indeed, she had already personally taken on a graduate degree program at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Ill. So it didn't take her long to appreciate that some serious issues needed to be addressed. "It's not just the sales," Girkins told me on the phone late last year. "I'm concerned that we have Christians who are still upset and even angry at each other over 12-year-old issues that ought to have been resolved." I could tell she meant business.

Newspapers Catch Mug-Shot Mania

This is from Time Magazine. How do you feel about this practice?

Newspapers Catch Mug-Shot Mania

By Tim Padgett
Monday, Sep. 21, 2009

When Laurie, a 20-something saleswoman in Tampa, Fla., got pulled over this summer for a minor traffic violation, she (and the police officer) discovered that her driver's license had expired. She was arrested for that misdemeanor, was released and dutifully got her license renewed the next day.

Her case is hardly fodder for the crime pages. But since this is the Internet age, Laurie got her mug shot, name and arrest data splashed on TampaBay.com, the website of the Pulitzer-winning St. Petersburg Times. Mug Shots, a prominent fixture on the site's home page since it debuted earlier this year, posts every arrest photo from the four Tampa Bay-area counties, complete with the dazed scowls, bad hair and, for folks like Laurie, the humiliation of appearing alongside alleged murderers and car thieves. "This is completely horrible," says Laurie, who asked TIME not to print her last name to spare her further public shaming. "What if my boss sees it?"

Chances are, he already has. Mug-shot galleries are increasingly popular features on newspaper websites, which are on a crusade for more page views and the advertising revenue that accompanies additional eyeballs. While big dailies like New York's Newsday and the Chicago Tribune have caught on to the trend, mug-shot mania is especially prevalent in Florida, where liberal public-records laws make it easier to obtain these photos. "It's a huge traffic driver for us," says Roger Simmons, digital-news manager for the Orlando Sentinel, where mug shots garner about 2.5 million page views a month, 6% of the site's total. The Palm Beach Post estimates its online police blotter, which streams its own ads, drew half of the site's 45 million page views in May.

Print newspapers have long run police blotters, but they're usually just boring-looking text. Website blotters, on the other hand, can affordably offer every color portrait the local precinct shoots. Like television networks opting for cheaply produced reality shows, the newspaper sites believe they've found their cash cow: readers seem as eager to gawk at the average alleged DUI perp as they are to ogle celebrity mug shots on sites like the Smoking Gun.

That, media watchdogs warn, is a troubling sign that newspapers are using voyeurism to survive. "It feeds societal prurience with no journalistic value," says Robert Steele, a journalism professor at DePauw University and an ethics specialist for the nonprofit Poynter Institute for Media Studies, which owns the St. Petersburg Times. And while most mug-shot galleries advise viewers that the defendants are innocent until proved guilty, Steele says there's a "stench of unfairness to this kind of cyber-billboard." Robert Wesley, the chief public defender in Orlando, calls the mug-shot features "online Salem pillories."

Mug-shot backers argue that the cyber-billboard can help prevent repeat offenses. "If you're screwing up with DUI or domestic violence, it's harder to keep doing it if it's harder to hide it," says Dwayne Mayo, a former St. Petersburg security guard who publishes Cellmates, a weekly print tabloid dedicated solely to mug shots. Stephen Buckley, publisher of TampaBay.com, where mug shots draw about 13% of unique visitors each month, says his site didn't start up its gallery for the shame factor.

"But this is information that's local, useful and interesting," says Buckley, "and if someone types in his zip code to see who's been arrested in his neighborhood, yes, it can have practical benefits."

While editors like Simmons say they do worry when they hear puerile radio jocks making fun of the newest mug-shot faces, they reject the idea that they're cheapening mainstream media "We also list restaurants that don't pass inspection," says Simmons. "We're in the public-information business." True, but minor lawbreakers like Laurie are wondering why their business is now everyone else's too.

Christian Books on the NYT Best Seller List

New York Times Best Sellers for September 13:

The Shack by William P. Young (Windblown Media) is #2 on the paperback trade fiction list.

The Love Dare by Stephen & Alex Kendrick with Lawrence Kimbrough (B&H Publishing Group) is #2 on the paperback advice list.

The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman (Northfield) is #4 on the paperback advice list.

The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey (Thomas Nelson) is #9 on the hardcover advice, how-to, misc. list.

The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren (Zondervan) is #9 on the paperback advice list.

Game Plan for Life by Joe Gibbs with Jerry B. Jenkins (Tyndale House) is #13 on the hardcover advice list.

The Reason for God by Timothy Keller (Riverhead) is #13 on the paperback nonfiction list.

90 Minutes in Heaven by Don Piper w/ Cecil Murphey (Revell) is #16 on paperback nonfiction list.

Same Kind of Different as Me by Ron Hall and Denver Moore (Thomas Nelson) is #17 on the paperback nonfiction list.

Green by Ted Dekker (Thomas Nelson) is #20 on the hardcover fiction list.

Espresso Book Machine

Monday noon I'll be talking with Dr. Prinsen's class about the book publishing business. Some think this Espresso Book Machine is the future of the industry, whereby libraries, bookstores, and other establishments can produce books on-demand for the customer. Pretty amazing, don't you think?

Religion Newswriters Conclude Annual Conference

Today, Saturday, September 12, is the final day of the Religion Newswriters Association convention which is meeting in Minneapolis.

Click on this link to note some of the program personnel, workshop topics, and activities. Members are largely religion writers for large daily papers and magazines--it is not a specifically evangelical organization, though many participants would be.

Click here: http://www.rna.org/?page=conference_schedule

Religion Newswriters Association Names 2009 Contest Winners

MINNEAPOLIS, Minn., Sept. 12 /Christian Newswire/ -- The Religion Newswriters Association today announced the winners of its 2009 contests for excellence in religion reporting in the mainstream media. The organization awarded more than $6,000 in eight award categories at its annual banquet, held Sept. 12 at the Minneapolis Marriott City Center.

Winners were selected from among 201 entries. Judges included current or former reporters, journalists and scholars who praised the entries as "top-notch" and "nuanced."

Religion Reporter of the Year
The Religion Reporter of the Year category recognizes excellence in enterprise reporting and versatility in the field of religion. The first-place winner is Moni Basu, formerly of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, for a series of stories chronicling a military chaplain's service to his country from Baghdad to Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington. Judges said the series "...had credibility and authenticity because the writer, in the best tradition of unblinking reporting, told her readers what she witnessed firsthand." Basu received $1,000.

Religion Writer of the Year
The Supple Religion Writer of the Year Award recognizes a reporter's writing skills. Religion Reporter of the Year first-place winner Moni Basu, took first once again for her series, "Chaplain Turner's War." Judges thought her series was "a vivid, touching entry about the many-faceted role of religion in an ungodly circumstance." Basu received another $1,000 prize.

Religion Reporter of the Year--Mid-sized Newspapers
Publications with weekday circulations between 50,001 and 150,000 compete in the Cornell Award. Jeff Brumley of The Florida Times-Union won first place for an extended look at how faith meets modern life. Judges said his stories "...provide authoritative voices for context but also give readers a glimpse of how regular folks fit in. The writing is smooth and easy to read." Brumley won $1,000.

Religion Reporter of the Year--Small Newspapers
The Cassels Award recognizes the religion reporter of the year at small publications with weekday circulations of 50,000 or below. This year's first-place winner was Melanie Smith of The Decatur Daily. Judges liked Smith's range of stories and said her reporting produced "beautifully written stories with a good grasp of lived faith." Smith won $1,000.

Best Religion Section or Pages
The Schachern Award recognizes excellence in religion pages or sections in the general circulation news media. This year's first-place winner was The Salt Lake Tribune for its "unmatched coverage in 2008 of issues that put The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints in the national spotlight." Judges took particular note of the section's presentation, saying it was "a diverse and well-designed weekly faith section and a lively mix of religion news, multimedia and interactive features online." The Tribune received a citation.

Best Student Religion Reporter
The Chandler Award is given to a student journalist who has a grasp of religion issues and writes in a fair and balanced way. The award was established through the generosity of Russell Chandler, former religion writer for the Los Angeles Times, and his wife, ML. This year's first-place winner was Adeniyi Amadou from Syracuse University. Judges said Amadou takes "the reader on a journey into worlds still seldom penetrated in the daily news--the lives of Muslims in America, their everyday hopes and anxieties." Amadou won $600.

Best Television Religion Reporting
Honoring excellence in religion reporting in general audience news television, this year's award went to Kim Lawton of Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly for a story that asked the question, "What would Martin Luther King, Jr. be like as a minister, if he were alive today?" The judges said, "Good writing and production values made this story the clear winner." Lawton received a citation for her work.

Best Radio Religion Reporting
Awarded for excellence in religion reporting general audience news radio, this year's award went to Stephanie Martin of KQED Radio in Northern California. "Glimpses of faith combined with justice being called into action made the story relevant," judges wrote. "The different people interviewed made the story flow well... It even raised the question: Is religion doctrine or revelation?" Martin received a citation.

Study on Christian College Students and Facebook Released

Addicted to Facebook? New Study Reveals Concerns and Impact of Social Media on Evangelical Christian College Students

WENHAM, MA-- When they're not sending text messages or tweets, today's Christian college students are spending time on Facebook. A lot of it. One in every three says he's spending 1-2 hours a day on the site; twelve percent report using it 2-4 hours each day and 2.8 percent report usage at 4-7 hours a day. That's in addition to other forms of social media and electronic usage such as video games, blogs, e-mail and Internet browsing.

The data comes from a new and unprecedented study by two Gordon College faculty members, Bryan C. Auday, professor of psychology, and Sybil Coleman, professor of social work. Released at the 60th anniversary conference for the Religion Newswriters Association in Minneapolis, Sept. 10, 2009, the study--"Pulling Off the Mask: The Impact of Social Networking Activities on Evangelical Christian College Students . . . A Self-Reported Study"--is the only one of its kind to target and give voice specifically to evangelical Christian college students. It explores the specific trends, behaviors and attitudes Christian students perceive of themselves regarding social media usage.

"We'd received enough anecdotal evidence from college students to raise some red flags about these issues," said Coleman. "But we felt it was crucial to gather scientific data from students about both the benefits and concerns (of usage) if we were going to get a clearer picture about how we could best respond."

The study was conducted in April 2009 entirely online and surveyed 1,342 students between 18 and 27 years of age on four evangelical Christian college campuses with an equal class representation. Seventy percent of all participants were women.

Questions included the amount of time participants engage in a specific electronic activity during an average day; the primary reason for using a specific site; the impact (both positive and negative) of usage on personal life and relationships; the ability or inability to stop usage, and the possible conflict of usage with personal Christian values.

"It isn't yet clear whether over-zealous use of computer-based activities will be formally accepted in the U.S. as a distinctive, unique form of addiction," said Auday. "What is clear from our study is that a surprisingly high percentage of Christian students who frequently engage in electronic activities report several troubling negative consequences. But ironically they also mention many positive outcomes related to the time that is spent on Facebook or text messaging their friends."

Over half (54 percent) reported that they were "neglecting important areas of their life" due to spending too much time on these sites. And when asked if one were to define addiction as "any behavior you cannot stop, regardless of the consequences," 12.7 percent affirmed that they believe they are addicted to some form of electronic activity. Another 8.7 percent report that they are unsure. For small campuses, that translates into large numbers. And 21 percent felt that their level of engagement with electronic activities at times caused a conflict with their Christian values.

The students' voices--and solutions--themselves add perspective to the study. Some described regular fasts from Facebook, avoiding places with Internet access, deleting their Facebook accounts altogether, or imposing self-limits.

"During the critical years of young adulthood, Christian college students need to be mindful that academic and social development are important, yet incomplete in terms of nurturing the whole person. The spiritual condition also needs attention," said Coleman. "Since the evidence from this study raises several concerns for their time management skills, possible neglect of important areas in their lives and their psychological and spiritual health, the next question needs to be, how can we help?"

For more information or to arrange an interview with the professors, please contact Jo Kadlecek, Office of College Communication, 978.867.4752 or jo.kadlecek@gordon.edu.

###

What Crisis?

From BuzzMachine by Jeff Jarvis:

What crisis?

At the Aspen Institute FOCAS event, where we presented our CUNY New Business Models for News, there came to be an unspoken debate – that is, an idea thrown out but never really engaged – about whether there is a crisis in news and journalism.

I now say that there isn’t a crisis. That’s not what I used to say. Indeed, one of my mistakes in this debate has been accepting the assumption that there was one and allowing the debate to start there: “How are you going to save journalism from the scourge of your damned internet?”

Instead, the discussion should start here: “Look at all the new opportunities there are to gather and share news in new ways, to expand and improve it, to change journalism’s relationship with its public and make it collaborative, to find new efficiencies and lower costs and thus to return to profitability and sustainability.”

One’s view on the question determines one’s response and its level of desperation or optimism.

To generalize unfairly, those who say there is a crisis – most often, those whose legacy institutions are fading – are often known to react by:
* Looking for others to blame for the purported problem – Google, bloggers, aggregators, craigslist, et al (which is to say, not taking responsibility for their own role in it);
* Trying to preserve their past (expecting newsrooms to be supported, unchanged, by some manna from the market – paid content being only the latest prayer);
* Seeking protection from government (antitrust exemptions) or the law (copyright extensions);
* Demanding tribute (saying they are entitled to get paid because what they do is worth so much);
* Giving up (talking about abandoning growth by building walls or shifting to not-for-profit and begging for charitable support).

Those who say there is not a crisis (for- and not-for-profit entrepreneurs, inventors, and investors) instead tend to:
* Look to innovation (collaboration, algorithms, data, streams) to create new ways to make news;
* Look to entrepreneurship to sustain journalism (in blogs and networks);
* Be open to new ways to define journalism;
* Irritate the legacy people by not seeing the crisis they see.

So if we’re looking for an original sin in this saga, I’ll confess that mine has been viewing news from the perspective of the old controllers rather than from that of the community (the people formerly known as the audience), the inventors, and the entrepreneurs. At Aspen, it was Sue Gardner, head of the Wikimedia Foundation, who made me see this as she talked about the wonders that have been done with news on Wikipedia, which no one could have predicted. Being open to such new possibilities is key to building news’ new future.

There are so many reasons to be optimistic about the future of news:
* The audience for news is only growing online.
* The audience isn’t an audience anymore. News is becoming more and more collaborative as witnesses share what they see and communities join together to create news.
* Those who make news are more accountable to their publics.
* News is opening up to more diverse voices and perspectives.
* News is becoming far more specialized and targeted, which is to say that it can give deeper service to more communities.
* New technology – and freedom from the limits of the old means of production and distribution – allow the reinvention of the form of news, organized around streams, topics, ideas, and concepts still being imagined.
* News is more efficient thanks to the link – do what you do best and link to the rest – and specialization. That is what makes it more sustainable.

Some – but not nearly enough – of this optimism is inherent in the future we imagined in the New Business Models for News Project. We used the financial lingua franca and assumptions of the present world – CPM advertising, page views per user, even the concept of a page and a site – because that made it easier to describe what can follow and made our vision of sustainable news more credible. We were criticized for being too optimistic about audience penetration and ad rates.

But I think we were not nearly optimistic enough. We have to leap past the idea that news is a collection of pages worth 12 views per user per month (or, quoting Martin Langeveld, 0.5% of time spent online). News shouldn’t be a site we force people to come to but, as Google’s Marissa Mayer said at Aspen, we have to find ways to insinuate news and its value into anyone’s – her words – hyperpersonal news stream. We shouldn’t create sites but instead create platforms that enable communities to share what they know and need to know, with journalists contributing value – reporting, editing, aggregation, curation – to their ecosystem. We should build and assume much greater engagement and define engagement not as consumption but as creation. We must value that creation (and not consider it merely a reaction to what we do). We should forecast much greater relevance and thus value for both the market and the marketer.

We should set the bar way higher. And that is the real problem with letting the discussion start with the pessimism, depression, and desperation of the perceived crisis among the past’s players, who aren’t inventing the future. It limits the possibilities.

The Old Man and the Sea

Last night we were talking about Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea." This is from Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac for today:

September 8 -- It was on this day in 1952 that Ernest Hemingway (books by this author) came out with his last novel, The Old Man and the Sea. He'd had a hard time getting back to writing since covering World War II as a journalist. He finally published his first novel in 10 years in 1950, Across the River and Into the Trees, about World War II. It got terrible reviews.

Hemingway was working on a long novel that he called The Sea Book, about different aspects of the sea. He got the idea for it while looking for submarines in his fishing boat. The book had three sections, which he called "The Sea When Young," "The Sea When Absent," and "The Sea in Being," and it had an epilogue about an old fisherman. He wrote more than 800 pages of "The Sea Book" and rewrote them more than a hundred times, but the book still didn't seem finished. Finally, he decided to publish just the epilogue about the old fisherman, which he called The Old Man and the Sea.

The novel begins, "He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish." It tells the story of an old man who catches the biggest fish of his life, only to have it eaten by sharks before he can get back to shore.

The Old Man and the Sea won the Pulitzer Prize, and two years later, Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in literature. He didn't publish another novel in his lifetime.

Carole Simpson: 'Not Delighted' With Sawyer Move

Commentary: Why I'm not delighted by Sawyer move

Editor's note: Carole Simpson, who anchored the weekend editions of "ABC World News," is leader in residence and a full-time faculty member in the journalism department of Emerson College. A recipient of three national Emmy awards with 40 years experience as a broadcast journalist, Simpson was the first black woman to anchor a network evening news broadcast.

(CNN) -- Diane Sawyer now joins Katie Couric as anchor of a major network evening newscast, leaving Brian Williams the sole man.

Since I have personally worked for 30 years for the advancement of women in broadcast journalism, I guess I am supposed to be delighted. Why am I not?

Because it took so darned long -- and TV news is on life support.

No disrespect to Diane or Katie. I consider them friends and I take pride in their accomplishments. They have proven their talents and journalistic credentials. But, come on. We had to wait until 2009?

Women began entering television news in significant numbers in the 1970s during the women's liberation movement. In fact, I started my network career in 1974.

The major impact on the hiring of women resulted after 16 women filed a class action sex discrimination suit in federal court against NBC in 1975. Two years later in a $2 million out-of-court settlement, the network promised to act affirmatively and hire, promote and raise the salaries of a large percentage of women over the next five years.

CBS and ABC saw the writing on the wall and suddenly discovered many women -- inside and outside their news divisions -- qualified to be more than researchers and secretaries.

We women in television news thought we had "arrived" when ABC chose Barbara Walters to co-anchor the evening news with Harry Reasoner in 1976. It turned out to be a match made in hell. Harry was so upset about sharing airtime with a woman that he refused to speak to Barbara, except on the news set. The ill-fated experiment ended two years later when Harry left in disgust for CBS and Barbara was ousted as anchor.

While newswomen were continuing to move onward and upward in network television, it took another 16 years -- 1993 -- before we saw another woman in a network anchor chair. At CBS Connie Chung was paired with Dan Rather on the "Evening News."

During her stint as co-anchor, Connie was sent to Oregon to report on figure skater Tonya Harding's activities following an assault on her chief skating rival, Nancy Kerrigan. Dan Rather remained at the anchor desk.

Can you even imagine Dan spending days out of the studio reporting on someone like Harding? No, you can't. Chung was axed from the program after two years amid tension with her co-anchor.

In 2006, 13 years post-Connie, Katie Couric made history when CBS named her the solo anchor of the "Evening News." She had a rough time from the blistering criticism most women "firsts" have to endure. But she has held her own and grown in stature, enough so that ABC has given Diane Sawyer her shot.

It took almost 40 years for this unique state of affairs. So, why are women getting these opportunities now? Well, I'm a cynic. The reason is that broadcast television news is dying.

For more than 20 years, network newscasts have been called "dinosaurs." Media experts say the shows are in their death throes. Network news budgets have been slashed and employees have been fired and laid off.

The audience for network news has been dwindling year after year as viewers turn to cable or the Internet for their news, or avoid the news altogether.

I wish Diane and Katie the best. Millions of Americans still watch network news programs, but they are only a semblance of what they were in terms of quality and content.

With fewer resources and the death knell sounding, why not put women in charge of the network evening news programs? When things couldn't be worse, it's okay for women to be in charge. Sad to say, but I don't believe the evening network newscasts, nor Katie and Diane as the anchors, will be around for very long.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Carole Simpson.

Indpls. Christian Writers Conference Coming

I realize that attending this may not be practical, especially since it's over Grace's Homecoming Weekend, but it is an excellent example of a fine Christian writer's conference that includes a number of well-experienced speakers and workshop leaders and editors.

Serious writers should find at least one such conference to attend, as you can literally soak up years' worth of experience and savvy on the industry in just a few short days.

Please take the time to browse this schedule a bit, to look at the bios of the faculty, and to see the schedule.

http://www.indychristianwritersconf.com/

Is Facebook On the Way Out?

New York Times says Facebook may be losing its grip. Here's a short excerpt--click here to read the entire article.

Facebook Exodus

Kevin Van Aelst

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. Facebook, the online social grid, could not command loyalty forever. If you ask around, as I did, you’ll find quitters. One person shut down her account because she disliked how nosy it made her. Another thought the scene had turned desperate. A third feared stalkers. A fourth believed his privacy was compromised. A fifth disappeared without a word.

The exodus is not evident from the site’s overall numbers. According to comScore, Facebook attracted 87.7 million unique visitors in the United States in July. But while people are still joining Facebook and compulsively visiting the site, a small but noticeable group are fleeing — some of them ostentatiously.

Leif Harmsen, once a Facebook user, now crusades against it. Having dismissed his mother’s snap judgment of the site (“Facebook is the devil”), Harmsen now passionately agrees. He says, not entirely in jest, that he considers it a repressive regime akin to North Korea, and sells T-shirts with the words “Shut Your Facebook.” What especially galls him is the commercialization and corporate regulation of personal and social life. As Facebook endeavors to be the Web’s headquarters — to compete with Google, in other words, and to make money from the information it gathers — it’s inevitable that some people would come to view it as Big Brother.

“The more dependent we allow ourselves to become to something like Facebook — and Facebook does everything in its power to make you more dependent — the more Facebook can and does abuse us,” Harmsen explained by indignant e-mail. “It is not ‘your’ Facebook profile. It is Facebook’s profile about you.”

The disillusionment with Facebook has come in waves. An early faction lost faith in 2008, when Facebook’s beloved Scrabble application, Scrabulous, was pulled amid copyright issues. It was suddenly clear that Facebook was not just a social club but also an expanding force on the Web, beholden to corporate interests. A later group, Harmsen’s crowd, grew frustrated last winter when Facebook seemed to claim perpetual ownership of users’ contributions to the site. (Facebook later adjusted its membership contract, but it continues to integrate advertising, intellectual property and social life.) A third wave of dissenters appears to be bored with it, obscurely sore or just somehow creeped out.

Want to Work as a Professional Tweeter?

Dr. Sauders has called to our attention this article about a communication-related profession that didn't even exist a few years ago. See the original article by clicking here.

More big businesses hire professional tweeters
Multinational corporations turn to social media to extend their brands

CHICAGO - People around the world interact with Alecia Dantico (pictured) all day. Usually, though, they don't know whether she's young or old, male or female.

What her followers on Facebook and Twitter know is that's she's a friendly, sometimes sassy, blue and gold tin of Garrett Popcorn. That's the icon of the popular Chicago-based snack food that has tourists and locals lining up around the block at locations here and in New York City.

And when Dantico sends out a "virtual tin" of popcorn to a fan over Twitter, she's breaking new ground in the way companies market themselves, joining a growing number of social media experts hired to man Twitter, Facebook and similar sites.

"My day starts on Twitter and it doesn't really end," Dantico says. She keeps her BlackBerry on at all hours to respond to followers in different time zones. "It's driving my family crazy, but that's OK."

Best Buy Co. Inc. riled up the social-media world earlier this summer with a job posting for a senior manager of emerging media marketing. One of the job requirements, as originally posted, called for applicants to have more than 250 followers on Twitter. (When that caused an online backlash, the electronics retailer opened the process of crafting a job description to the public.)

Multinational corporations, such as Ford Motor Co. and Coca-Cola Co., are beginning to use social media to increase positive sentiment, build customer rapport and correct misinformation, says Adam Brown, Coca-Cola's Atlanta-based director of social media.

"Having the world's most-recognized brand, we feel like there's an obligation or a responsibility when people are talking about us, we have a duty to respond," Brown says.

Dantico, who is getting a doctorate in communications with an emphasis in building brand identity in online communities, says she has seen an uptick in sales when she's tweeted from events since joining the company in June.

"I really believe in the power of conversation in social media," she says. "Some days we talk about the weather. Some days we talk about the 'Chicken Dance.' Some days we talk about recipes and parties and shipping Garretts to Cabo for a wedding."

She mentions popcorn in her Tweets, and has helped customers secure tins for special events, but never implores followers to go out and buy some. Successful selling through social media is much more subtle.

"Social media is all about being social," says Nora Ganim Barnes, a marketing professor and director for the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. "It's not called selling media. The biggest mistake companies make is using social media to hawk products. It's a turnoff."

Large Fortune 500 companies have been the slowest to adopt social media strategies, Ganim Barnes says. But not-for-profit organizations have been the fastest.

"It's free," she says. "And they've never had such access to media before."

Recent research by Ganim Barnes and colleagues, though, points to a rapidly growing familiarity with social media, even among the world's biggest brands.

"It's bigger than Twitter, MySpace, Facebook or blogs," she says. "It's about engaging people."

The lightning-fast pace of social media, and Twitter in particular, has forced businesses to act in a whole new way, says Brown, of Coca-Cola.

"If you don't respond within three or four hours, you might as well not respond at all," he says.

For example, a man on Twitter recently expressed annoyance at his difficulty in claiming an all-expenses paid trip he'd won through the My Coke Rewards program. He Tweeted, "Coca-Cola, bring down your drawbridge," Brown recalls. Within about a half an hour, Brown had engaged the customer on Twitter, got on the phone with him and resolved the problem.

Not long after, the man changed his Twitter avatar to a can of Coke Zero.

Like Brown, Scott Monty is working to create a social-media strategy for his company, Ford Motors, where he serves as digital and multimedia communications manager in Dearborn, Mich.

"The beautiful thing about sites like Twitter and Facebook is that it's a one-to-one conversation," Monty says. "You're addressing whoever wrote the original comment. But you're doing it in the public square."

Whether your business is large or small, Monty advises those interested in expanding to social media to stand back and listen before diving in.

"It's not the typical one-way push kind of conversation," Monty says. "You wouldn't burst into a cocktail party and just start handing your business card to people and leave. The online space is no different."

Dantico, with Garrett Popcorn, says she responds every time someone mentions her company on Twitter, whether it's positive or negative. And if one of her followers posts about having a bad day, it's not unusual for Garrett Popcorn to send over some treats.

"Popcorn is fun. My brand is fun," she says. "The conversations were already happening. My job was just to join them. This is the best job in the world."

'Checkbook Journalism' Rears Its Head Again

This article, from the LA Times, is about a practice most journalists refer to scornfully as "checkbook journalism" -- paying interview subjects for access to them. Generally it is considered highly unethical, and really a low-life practice on the part of journalists. How do you react? What is the right thing for a reporter or news source to do here, if you have a willing subject who agrees to be paid?

Media offering thousands of dollars for tidbits on 18-year-old kidnapping
By Los Angeles Times

ANTIOCH, CALIF. - At week's end, the street where Jaycee Dugard lived after she was allegedly kidnapped as a child 18 years ago by Phillip and Nancy Garrido was swarming with media. Satellite trucks parked in driveways. Cameramen and photographers tromped on lawns and knocked on doors.

Damon Robinson was in his back yard, talking with reporters across a chain-link fence, while another group lined up in the side yard, waiting to interview him.

Robinson eventually spoke with reporters from CNN, the Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times about the years he'd lived next door to the Garridos.

Suddenly, a British reporter pushed to the front. He told Robinson that his deadline was approaching. He offered $2,000 if Robinson would give him "an exclusive." Robinson complied.

In the days since, locals who knew the Garridos said that they have repeatedly been approached by reporters -- American and foreign, print and television -- who have offered thousands of dollars for information and photographs of the Garridos, Dugard, now 29, and the two daughters she bore Phillip Garrido, ages 15 and 11.

Manuel Garrido, who lives in nearby Brentwood, at first spoke freely with reporters about his son's past. But now he says he wants to be paid. "No more free information," said Garrido, 88. "Other people are getting paid."

The elder Garrido said he had received $2,000 from one news outlet for an interview. "From now on, it's going to be more than $2,000," he said. "You're making big stories, and you are getting paid for it. Here I am suffering, so I should get some money out of it."

Concord resident Mark Lister, who knew Phillip Garrido and had some of his promotional business materials, said he sold one of Garrido's business cards, featuring a photo of Dugard, for $10,000.

VA Candidate for Governor Dogged by Thesis

There is a really interesting story playing out right now in the Virginia gubernatorial race. One of the candidates is having his feet held to the fire based on a paper he wrote while a student at a Christian university. Here is an excerpt--read the entire article by clicking here.

Thesis Issue Builds, McDonnell Tries to Move On
Former Colleagues Say Views Persist

By Amy Gardner and Anita Kumar, Washington Post Staff Writers

Republican Robert F. McDonnell's 20-year-old master's thesis continued to consume the Virginia governor's race Tuesday, with Democrat R. Creigh Deeds presenting the paper as his opponent's true beliefs and McDonnell insisting otherwise.

The Deeds campaign brought out four former Republican lawmakers who said the views expressed in the thesis mirrored the positions they saw McDonnell take again and again in the General Assembly. McDonnell reiterated that some of his views have changed, particularly regarding women in the workforce, and attempted to change the subject to education.

At issue is a 93-page research paper titled "The Republican Party's Vision for the Family: The Compelling Issue of the Decade," in which McDonnell laid out a conservative action plan to promote the traditional family in government. McDonnell wrote against working women, feminists and homosexuals, and he decried the absence of religion in the public schools, the rise of single motherhood and the creation of tax credits for child care to encourage mothers to work.

He submitted the thesis in 1989, two years before he was elected to the House of Delegates, while pursuing public policy and law degrees at Regent University in Virginia Beach.

Deeds has been highlighting McDonnell's conservatism for months, but his campaign pounced on the thesis as further evidence of it after details from the paper were first published Sunday in The Washington Post. On Tuesday, the four former lawmakers, who had previously announced their support for Deeds, used the thesis to talk about McDonnell's record. "It's the Bob I've always known,'' said former senator Martin E. Williams (Newport News). "My biggest shock is that he is running away from it, because I really do think it's who is he is."

Portland Online Startup Challenges the Big Guys

From Journalism 2.0:


Startup news site rocking the boat in Portland

Posted: 01 Sep 2009 10:49 AM PDT

Do a couple of self-proclaimed tech guys/news junkies stand a chance competing in a crowded online news media field? While it doesn’t seem plausible, the digital age has made it possible. And sometimes, that’s enough.

In Portland, Ore., the landscape is already crowded with stalwarts Willamette Week and the Portland Tribune and upstarts Portland Sentinel and Portland Mercury battling against the Oregonian and the local TV stations for the local news audience.

Enter ThePortlander. Somehow, without marketing or promotion, it’s catching on, and catching the attention of the big boys.

Jeremiah Kastner and Jeff Martens have no experience in journalism. While the site has been around for some time, a retooled version has struck a chord recently with a growing local audience.Kastner implemented a clean, modern design in less than a week (try that at a news company) and launched it earlier this summer.

Like any good entrepreneurial endeavor, the motivation stemmed from personal frustration. Rule No. 1, after all, in starting a business is to fix your own problem.

“We were really getting frustrated with the local news options,” said Kastner, whom I first met at Digital Journalism Camp Portland in August. “We are the demo we’re going after. We are tech savvy which means we don’t read printed newspapers - it’s just not gonna happen. But we represent a huge demo rising up. We don’t fall into the typical daily newspaper readership, but we don’t go for the alternative press either.”

Think about it: The average age for a reader of the Oregonian or a viewer of local TV news is probably pushing 60. The average age for alternative weeklies, with their focus on bars and live music, is closer to 20. That’s a pretty wide gap for a new publisher to attack.

“It’s like a newspaper, but it’s not,” Kastner said of ThePortlander. “Nothing locally caters to Generation X or Y. I looked at what the Portland Mercury and Willamette Week were doing and said, ‘they can do it, why can’t I?’”

Kastner, who says he “know just enough about coding to be dangerous,” retooled a Wordpress theme to get the look he wanted a couple months ago. Now he and Martens aggregate links to local news stories and post original content as time allows. They are recruiting local bloggers (10 have signed up so far) and looking for college journalism students as interns to help the operation grow.

They have already struck are negotiating a partnership deal with the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network and are in talks with the Oregonian about a potential collaboration, too. while it takes 12-15 hours a day to keep the site updated (it’s almost 50% original content, 50% cross-posted), the goal is to grow advertising revenues to support 6-8 people.

Technical innovations include an automatic process that posts links to new content on dozens of social networks. And ThePortlander released a functioning Facebook application last week, too.

“Here we are, no experience in journalism and we’re building a news site that is starting to rock the boat in Portland,” Kastner said. “When I look at big newspaper sites, it amazes me they’re having such a big problem.”

Granted, ThePortlander has a way to go catch up to the alternative weeklies, not to mention the big players in town. But there early success suggests there is still room in most cities and towns for new entries in the digital news landscape.

Expect to see similar flowers blossom in the coming months and years.

NOTE: The post was updated to reflect the new ratio of original vs. aggregated content (now 50/50), the number of community bloggers who have signed up (now 10), and the fact that the OEN partnership is still in discussion.