RNA Meets in Denver: Hears From Book Authors

From Publisher's Weekly:

Religion Newswriters Meet in Denver; Books a Major Focus

By Marcia Nelson and Lynn Garrett

Publishers were prominent among the sponsors who courted the nation’s religion journalists, gathered in Denver September 23–25 to learn, network, and congratulate one another on still being employed.

Offering more proof that niche-focused shows and conferences make sense, attendance numbers were up at this year’s RNA conference; attendance of 190 (members, exhibitors, speakers, and spouses), including seven journalists from abroad, surpassed last year’s figure of 175.The association now has 573 members, down from a peak of 584 in 2008.

Many of the conference sessions were book based. Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam and his coauthor, University of Notre Dame political science professor David Campbell, introduced findings from their hefty American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (Simon & Schuster, Oct.; see PW’s review) characterizing America as religiously devout, diverse, and tolerant.

At a luncheon sponsored by Jossey-Bass, Donald Kraybill (Amish Grace), the country’s go-to expert on the Amish, spoke about his new book, The Amish Way: Patient Faith in a Perilous World, coauthored by Steven Nolt and David Weaver-Zercher (Jossey-Bass, Oct.; see PW’s review). Kraybill called the book the first ever focused on Amish religion and practice rather than their unique lifestyle. The book has been featured on CNN.com, and the authors will post a guest commentary on the Washington Post “On Faith” blog next month.

FaithWords hosted the Saturday night awards banquet, featuring Philip Yancey’s latest book, What Good Is God? Yancey spoke, centering his remarks on his own experience as a journalist. Other publishers bringing authors were Doubleday Religion, HarperOne, and Baylor University Press, who all also exhibited, as did Westminster John Knox and Jewish Lights/SkyLight Paths. B&H Publishing sponsored a session on Christian book sales phenoms, including its own 4.5-million seller, The Love Dare (2008).

Preceding the main conference was a full day of sessions on Bible translation to familiarize journalists with the process and history of translation, information that will be useful for reporting on the 400th anniversary of the King James translation and the update of the NIV translation that is due in 2011.

At a panel on how to drive online traffic, Alana B. Elias Kornfeld, senior editor at the Huffington Post, who recently launched the site’s religion area, said Google analytics demonstrated that people used Google to search for religion books.

Johanna Inwood, marketing manager and publicist for Random House’s WaterBrook Multnomah division based in Colorado Springs, Colo., told RBL that Doubleday Religion would “return to its Catholic roots,” and that body-mind-spirit and Buddhist titles that do not fit that emphasis—such as books by the Dalai Lama and Deepak Chopra—will be moved over to the Harmony imprint. Doubleday Religion editor-in-chief Trace Murphy will acquire for both imprints.

RNA meets next year in Durham, N.C., with pre-conference sessions at Duke University.

Encouraging News from Religion Editor of Publisher's Weekly

Editor's Note

Our readers know that book publishing has been among the businesses hit hard by the recession and by the uncertainty caused by technological changes. Things have been even tougher for journalists, as staff and pages shrink at magazines and, especially, newspapers.

Just a few years ago the religion sections of dailies were thriving, but recently many of the editors and reporters who worked on them have seen their sections and jobs go away, though many now cover the beat as freelancers.

This year’s Religion Newswriters conference, covered in this issue, brought some hopeful signs. Aside from the veterans who were there, I saw many young faces, attendance was up, and the conversations were more upbeat.

The country struggles these days with the need for better understanding of Islam and for fresh insights across the faith spectrum, as the practice of religions in America changes rapidly. Journalists with deep and broad knowledge of this complex subject will be needed more than ever. Online or in print, religion will be a hot topic. —Lynn Garrett

MomSense Magazine Continues in Print

MomSense Magazine Continues in Print as MOPS International and Christianity Today International Complete Publishing Agreement

DENVER, Sept. 28 /Christian Newswire/ -- MomSense magazine continues to reach over 90,000 mothers of preschoolers as MOPS International resumes full responsibility for advertising sales, editorial and publishing following the completion of a five-year agreement with Christianity Today International (CTI). The last issue published and distributed by CTI will be the November/December 2010 issue.

MomSense magazine is the premier benefit of the MOPS International Membership. Interested advertisers can contact Sponsor Relations at Advertising@MOPS.org for more information and assistance. The current MOPS Media Kit with MomSense advertising rates and specifications, and all our media opportunities, can be viewed online at MOPS.org/sponsors, click Advertise in MomSense. Ad reservations can be made quickly and easily using our automated online system at MOPS.org/sponsorlogin if you have an established advertising relationship through MOPS International.

Christianity Today International offers a broad array of integrated advertising opportunities through their publications, websites, blogs, and newsletters, connecting you with key Christian audiences -- pastors, church leaders, influential decision makers, and active and involved men, women, parents and teens.

A Billboard-Sized Oops!

South Bend ad for Walorski has grammatical error

Election season is in full swing around the country, but some are so excited about the all-important election that they're forgetting the small things.

A billboard on the south side of South Bend shows support for Republican Jackie Walorski's race for the second congressional district.

But there's a grammatical error. The sign reads “Joe your fired.” That’s the wrong use of the word "your."

It's unclear whether the billboard was put up by Walorski's campaign.

Friday is National Punctuation Day

Friday is National Punctuation Day
The apostrophe is the most misused.

By COLETTE BANCROFT, St. Petersburg Times

Many of us are worried already. As a former English teacher and copy editor, I despair for humanity when I open an e-mail that bristles with so many exclamation points I can hardly make out the words between them. And those are just the news releases about library events.

Just last week, Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten declared the English language dead, the coup de grace delivered by an unnecessary apostrophe.

But don't bury English yet. People are fighting to revive its proper use. National Punctuation Day was the brainchild of Jeff Rubin, a California newsletter writer who founded it in 2004 as "a celebration of the lowly comma, correctly used quotation marks, and other proper uses of periods, semicolons, and the ever-mysterious ellipsis."

Rubin and his wife, Norma, maintain a website, nationalpunctuationday.com.

Then there is Jeff Deck's mission to bring America back to perfect punctuation, at least in public. "It's a question of people building their apostrophic confidence," says Deck, co-author of "The Great Typo Hunt: Two Friends Changing the World One Correction at a Time."

Deck, 30, an editor who lives in New Hampshire, has a hands-on approach to raising awareness of poor punctuation. A couple of years ago, he and his friend Benjamin Herson, a bookseller, set off on a 2 ½-month road trip in search of errors in spelling, punctuation and grammar in public signs.

The most common punctuation error? "The poor apostrophe is the most misused and put-upon. People are always throwing it into words where it's not needed, especially plurals," Deck says, citing signs directing people to "Restroom's" and offering "Apple's for sale."

"Almost as common is the apostrophe being left out where it's needed.

Deck doesn't blame vanishing punctuation skills on e-mail and texting, saying those modes of communication "get a bad rap. It's very easy to blame them."

Roy Peter Clark loves punctuation so much that the cover of his new book, "The Glamour of Grammar: A Guide to the Magic and Mystery of Practical English," features a giant golden semicolon. The senior scholar at the Poynter Institute devotes several chapters to punctuation, emphasizing what a valuable tool it can be.

In "Reclaim the exclamation point," he lays out the parameters of opinion on that exuberant but controversial mark. On the one hand, master thriller author Elmore Leonard tells him, "You are allowed only three in every one hundred thousand words of prose." On the other, a friend sends Clark an e-mail with a six-word sentence followed by 11 exclamation points.

I'm on Team Leonard, but Clark is somewhere between the two extremes, calling the exclamation point "the thinking writer's emoticon." Clearly it's a mark of punctuation he favors: "My next book is called 'Help! for Writers.' "

Interesting New Degree!

From New York Times:

New Journalism Degree to Emphasize Start-Ups

By TANZINA VEGA

The Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York wants to capitalize on some of the shifts that have rocked traditional journalism — and traditional journalists — with the creation of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism and a new master of arts degree in entrepreneurial journalism, which the school will announce on Monday.

Entrepreneurial journalism, broadly speaking, simply refers to pulling journalism, business and technology closer together. CUNY already offers a course in entrepreneurial journalism, and this new master’s program will extend the traditional degree program to two years from 18 months. The courses in the program will focus on the business of managing media, and the study and creation of new media business models, and it will offer students apprenticeships at New York City start-ups.

“We’re all very concerned about sustaining quality journalism, and we think the future of journalism is going to be entrepreneurial,” said Stephen B. Shepard, the founding dean of the school and a former editor in chief of BusinessWeek.

The school will also offer a certificate in entrepreneurial journalism for midcareer journalists “who have worked in traditional mainstream media, who understand they need new skills and will come back to get them,” Mr. Shepard said.

The journalism school offers a converged curriculum in which students are able to study media across all platforms, including digital, broadcast and print. Students also choose a subject of concentration in arts, business, urban or international reporting. The center will be led by Jeff Jarvis, an associate professor and the director of the school’s interactive journalism program, and will reside in the school’s headquarters in Midtown Manhattan.

The $10 million center will receive $3 million in funding from The Tow Foundation, $3 million from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and additional grants and contributions from the journalism school. The first degrees are expected to be awarded in the spring of 2012.

Does the Name of This Author Sound Familiar?

Book depicts intense internal White House dissension, says aides doubt Obama's Afghan strategy

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama's top advisers spent much of the past 20 months arguing about policy and turf, according to a new book, with some top members of his national security team doubting the president's strategy in Afghanistan will work.

The book, "Obama's Wars," by journalist Bob Woodward, says Obama aides were deeply divided over the war in Afghanistan even as the president agreed to triple troop levels there. Obama's top White House adviser on Afghanistan and his special envoy for the region are described as believing the strategy will not work.

According to the book, Obama said, "I have two years with the public on this" and pressed advisers for ways to avoid a big escalation in the Afghanistan war.

"I want an exit strategy," he said at one meeting. Privately, he told Vice President Joe Biden to push his alternative strategy opposing a big troop buildup in meetings.

While Obama ultimately rejected the alternative plan, the book says, he set a withdrawal timetable because, "I can't lose the whole Democratic Party."

Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute, the president's Afghanistan adviser, is described as believing the president's review of the Afghanistan war did not "add up" to the decision he made. Richard Holbrooke, the president's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, is quoted as saying of the strategy, "It can't work," according to The New York Times, which obtained a copy of the book before its scheduled publication date, scheduled for next week.

Obama was among administration officials that Woodward interviewed for the book. The Times, which posted its article on its website Tuesday night, said the White House had no comment on the book. The Washington Post also reported on the book on its website late Tuesday night.

Although the internal divisions described by Woodward have become public, the book suggests that they were even more intense than previously known and offers new details, the Times said.

The National Geographic Story

It was on this day, September 22, in 1888 that the first issue of National Geographic was published. The National Geographic Society had been formed earlier that year by an enthusiastic group of 33 gentlemen who were excited about maps, about traveling, about facts and ideas associated with geography.

The first issue of National Geographic was a scholarly journal, it was very technical, had a plain cover, and it was sent to 200 charter members.

One of the founding members was young Alexander Graham Bell. When the National Geographic Society was losing money and membership hadn't increased, Bell thought that it should reach out to regular people. He didn't really have the time himself, but he hired the man who would eventually be hisson-in-law, Gilbert Grosvenor, to be the editor. Instead of academic writing, he used travel stories and simpler language.

Membership grew exponentially, especially after Grosvenor made the decision in 1905 to include photographs. He was short on material for an issue and needed to fill 11 more pages, so he stuck in photographs of Tibet. He thought everyone would be so angry that he would be fired, but instead everyone loved it.

When Grosvenor had first gotten hired, there were 1,400 members. By the time he took over as president of the society in 1920, the National Geographic Society had more than 700,000 members. These days, the magazine has a circulation of more than 8 million.

Apple to Sell Newspaper/Magazine Subscriptions?

From CNN.com:

(ArsTechnica) -- Buzz has been picking up lately about Apple opening an iBooks-like distribution medium for the iPad, but for magazine and newspaper subscriptions.

Now, the Wall Street Journal claims to have further inside information about Apple's digital newsstand, saying that Apple has stepped up its efforts to court publishers for a launch "as early as the next month or two."

According to "people familiar with the matter," Apple is pressing news and magazine conglomerates to get on board with Apple. Those in the industry believe the iPad could provide some much-needed revenue and distribution growth, but also fear giving Apple the kind of power the company had over the music industry for so long.

So far, Apple has allegedly participated in talks with News Corp., Hearts Corp., Time Inc., and Condé Nast. And, although no one seems to be sure which, if any, companies are already on board, Apple has been telling them that at least one company has already signed on the dotted line.

What are some of the sticking points? The WSJ's sources say that Apple's proposal doesn't include handing over personal information about subscribers, which is exactly what they want in order to be able to sell ads, among other things. Apple is allegedly open to discussing ways to share certain info, though, such as subscriber names, or letting publishers offer incentives to get people to voluntarily hand over that information, "such as free Sunday newspaper delivery."

Publishers are also not so keen on giving Apple its typical 30 percent cut of sales as part of the subscription process. Some companies currently sell magazine issues as apps through the App Store, though, meaning that they already fork over 30 percent of the app purchase price (as well as any in-app purchases) to Apple. Still, this detail lines up with reports from earlier this year, which said that newspaper and magazine companies were less keen on giving such a cut to Apple than book publishers have been through iBooks.

The timing for such an announcement remains up in the air. Even though the WSJ says it could happen in the next month or two, we think it's likely to come alongside the announcement of an updated iPad, which is expected to happen during the first quarter of 2011. The frequency of the rumors is speeding up, though, which is often a sign that something is actually going on behind the scenes. It's likely just a matter of time before Apple launches its newsstand, even if only a couple publishers are on board at launch.

WaPo Conducts Two-Year Investigative Project

Since you are focusing on investigative reporting this week, I wanted to call to your attention a massive two-year investigation currently being aired by the Washington Post newspaper. We'll view a short video in class on Monday, but you may want to explore around the WaPo site (look for "Top Secret America" or "TSA") to learn some of the depth and reasoning behind this project.

A note on this project

"Top Secret America" is a project nearly two years in the making that describes the huge national security buildup in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

When it comes to national security, all too often no expense is spared and few questions are asked - with the result an enterprise so massive that nobody in government has a full understanding of it. It is, as Dana Priest and William M. Arkin have found, ubiquitous, often inefficient and mostly invisible to the people it is meant to protect and who fund it.

The articles in this series and an online database at topsecretamerica.com depict the scope and complexity of the government's national security program through interactive maps and other graphics. Every data point on the Web site is substantiated by at least two public records.

Because of the nature of this project, we allowed government officials to see the Web site several months ago and asked them to tell us of any specific concerns. They offered none at that time. As the project evolved, we shared the Web site's revised capabilities. Again, we asked for specific concerns. One government body objected to certain data points on the site and explained why; we removed those items. Another agency objected that the entire Web site could pose a national security risk but declined to offer specific comments.

We made other public safety judgments about how much information to show on the Web site. For instance, we used the addresses of company headquarters buildings, information which, in most cases, is available on companies' own Web sites, but we limited the degree to which readers can use the zoom function on maps to pinpoint those or other locations.

Our maps show the headquarters buildings of the largest government agencies involved in top-secret work. A user can also see the cities and towns where the government conducts top-secret work in the United States, but not the specific locations, companies or agencies involved.

Within a responsible framework, our objective is to provide as much information as possible, so readers gain a real, granular understanding of the scale and breadth of the top-secret world we are describing.

We look forward to your feedback and can be reached at topsecretamerica@washpost.com.

- The Editors

WHO called it off??

Florida reverend calls off Quran burning

This is a headline from CNN's homepage. What does the AP style manual say about this use of the word "reverend?"

Facebook Equals Lower Grades!

Facebook Use Can Lower Grades by 20 Percent

Does the "F" in Facebook stand for an "F" in school? A new study says that college students who are on Facebook while studying or doing homework wind up getting 20 percent lower grades than students who don't have the social networking site in visual range, or even running in the background on their computers or mobile phones.

The study, reported in the Daily Mail of Britain, was done by Netherlands psychologist Paul A. Kirschnera of the Centre for Learning Sciences and Technologies at the Open University of the Netherlands, and Aryn C. Karpinskib of Ohio State University. It will be published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior.

Kirschnera told the Daily Mail that his team studied 219 U.S. university students between ages 19 and 54, and found that Facebook users had a typical grade point average of 3.06, while "non-users" had an average GPA of 3.82.

The psychologist said the study wasn't about whether Facebook's good or bad, but goes more to the stereotype that younger people are fluid multi-taskers —sending text message, listening to music, reading a book, all at the same time, for example — without any problems. (Driving and texting at the same time is, of course, being the among the most dangerous multi-tasking activities anyone can do.)

"Our study, and other previous work, suggests that while people may think constant task-switching allows them to get more done in less time, the reality is it extends the amount of time needed to carry out tasks and leads to more mistakes," said Kirschnera.

Source: MSNBC
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39038581/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/

Piers Morgan to replace Larry King

(CNN) -- British TV host Piers Morgan will take over Larry King's prime-time hour with "a candid, in-depth newsmaker interview program" starting in January, CNN announced Wednesday.

Morgan, best known to American viewers as a judge on NBC's "America's Got Talent," has most recently hosted "Piers Morgan's Life Stories" on television in the United Kingdom.

"Piers has made his name posing tough questions to public figures, holding them accountable for their words and deeds," said CNN-US President Jon Klein. "He is able to look at all aspects of the news with style and humor with an occasional good laugh in the process."

Morgan's show, which was not named in the CNN news release, will air live on CNN-US at 9 p.m. ET and will air worldwide on CNN-International in more than 200 countries, the network said. Morgan will be based in New York, but also will work from Los Angeles and London, CNN said.

King announced this summer that he was stepping aside from CNN's "Larry King Live," a show he began hosting in 1985.

"I have watched 'Larry King Live' for much of the last 25 years, and dreamed of one day filling the legendary suspenders of the man I consider to be the greatest TV interviewer of them all," Morgan said.

Morgan, 45, began his journalism career as a newspaper reporter in the United Kingdom for The Wimbledon News. In 1994, when he was 28, Morgan became the youngest editor ever at Rupert Murdoch's News of the World. He moved to the Daily Mirror as editor-in-chief in 1995, a post he held for nine years.

Morgan went on to become a television personality, hosting interview programs on the BBC and ITV. Simon Cowell hired Morgan as on a judge on the top-rated "Britain's Got Talent."

His print journalism career continued beyond the Mirror, including a monthly interview column for GQ magazine.

Morgan also writes two regular columns for the Mail on Sunday newspaper, which he will continue. In addition, he will provide regular columns to CNN.com, the network said.

Today is International Literacy Day

Today is International Literacy Day. It's a day designated by the United Nations, and it was first celebrated in 1966. The point is to make sure that literacy remains a high priority on the agendas of each country — and for the whole world at large. UNESCO points out, "Today one in five adults is still not literate and two-thirds of them are women." Literacy campaigns are now often linked to women's rights movements.

There's a multi-million dollar literacy campaign taking place right now in central California, in Monterey County. It's a county that houses fancy beachside communities like Carmel-by-the-Sea, but at the beginning of this decade, one-fourth of adults in Monterey County were below a fourth-grade reading level. And so a big literacy campaign was organized, and in 2006 it was launched, funded by private charitable donors. There are free classes in reading, English, and math for adults all over the county — lots of classes, at lots of times, in lots of locations. The campaign's motto is "Literacy is essential to freedom, and change is essential to literacy." There are a number of similar community literacy campaigns around the United States.

One of the most successful literacy campaigns in the history of the world took place in 1961 in Cuba when 24 percent of the population was illiterate. By December of that same year, only 4 percent was. Today, the U.N. lists Cuba has as having the second-highest literacy rate in the world, after the country of Georgia. The United States ties for 21st place with Canada and several northern European countries.

About one million people were involved in the Cuban literacy campaign: 270,000 as teachers, and the rest as learners. It was a highly organized and regimented effort. There were 100,000 middle schoolers and high schoolers who left school for eight months to live in the countryside as volunteer teachers. In the cities, literate adults taught their illiterate neighbors in classes that took place after business hours. There was a group of 15,000 teachers called the "Fatherland or Death" brigade, who left their salaried professional jobs and went out to the countryside to teach.

The government provided the books, which tended to be about the history of the Revolution and all of its socialist ideals. One of the instructional texts was a pamphlet Fidel Castro had written while imprisoned after his first failed attempt at revolution; it's called History Will Absolve Me (1953).

New PBS Series Focuses on J-Education, Changes

From Journalism 2.0:

Beyond J-School: Helping students build a future for digital news

Discussions on the future of journalism, or the future of the news business, often ignore one very important piece of the puzzle: education. A new series called Beyond J-School on the PBS Media Shift site is taking an in-depth look at the opportunities and the need for change. I’ve only scratched the surface on the series, but on first appearance, it appears to be a valuable contribution to the ongoing discussion.

Unfortunately, evolution in journalism schools has often moved slower than in the professional industry (which can be glacial itself). It is somewhat understandable, since tenured professors who are experts in their fields suddenly found their field to be less desirable and less relevant than it was just a few years ago. As the demand for new media curriculum has risen over the past decade, many of those professors turned up their noses and discounted new methods, new technology as fads not to be taken seriously.

The best professors, meanwhile, rolled up their sleeves and got their hands dirty with new technology in an attempt to find the best ways to use it for journalism. They’re the ones who will be most interested in this new PBS series. Learning new tricks isn’t as easy as relying on past successes, but it’s the only way to help students build the future for news in a digital world.

Indpls Christian Writer's Conference Nov. 5-6

Here is an excellent nearby Christian writer's conference that I can wholeheartedly recommend. If you have the time and $$ to go (Dr. Sauders might have some departmental funding available), this would be a great experience:

Registration is now open for the ninth annual Indianapolis Christian Writers Conference, November 5–6, to be held at The Wesleyan Church World Headquarters in Indianapolis.

Join keynote speaker Jerry B. Jenkins (pictured), author of more than 175 books including the New York Times best-selling series, Left Behind , for insights and inspiration that will advance your writing skills! Also, publishing professionals from Wesleyan Publishing House, Tyndale, DaySpring, and others in Christian publishing will present workshops and one-on-one consultations that will inform and encourage you as a writer.

So, register today at www.IndyChristianWritersConf.com or by calling 800.493.7539.

Dan Poynter's Free Newsletter

Many journalists and writers like to subscribe to Dan Poynter's free newsletter. To take a look (and subscribe if you wish), click on the link:

To get the latest issue of Publishing Poynters click on

http://parapub.com/files/newsletter/PP-ezine%2015%20Sept%2010.pdf

Newspaper People Don't Wear Shorts!

This is from the Sunday, September 5 entry in Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac. I thought you'd enjoy the comment about wearing shorts!

It's the birthday of Ward Just, (books by this author) born in Michigan City, Indiana (1935). He's the author of more than a dozen books of fiction, including The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert (1973), The American Blues, (1984) The American Ambassador (1987),and Jack Gance (1989).

But long before he started writing fiction, he was a journalist. He came from a family of serious journalists — his dad, and his grandfather before him, published the town newspaper. He himself started working as an investigative reporter for the family newspaper when he was just 13 years old. A few years later, when he was about to graduate from high school, his managing editor fired him for wearing shorts to work — which he deemed to be a lack of respect for the newspaper business. But they hired him back after he dropped out of college and returned home to be a full-time journalist.

By the time he was 24, he was writing features for Newsweek magazine, and then he was writing for The Washington Post. He went to Saigon to cover the Vietnam War, where he was seriously wounded by shrapnel from a grenade. He came back to the States to recover, and he wrote a book called To What End: Report from Vietnam (1968), and then he quit journalism and launched into fiction.

His 1997 novel Echo House was a finalist for the National Book Award, and his 2004 novel An Unfinished Season was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His book Exiles in the Garden (2009) came out just last year. It begins:

"Especially when he was alone Alec Malone had the habit of slipping into reverie, a semiconscious state not to be confused with dreams. Dreams were commonplace while his reveries presented a kind of abstract grandeur, expressionist canvases in close focus, untitled. ... The reveries had been with him since childhood and he treated them like old friends paying a visit."

Do Your Homework, or the Press Will Find You Out!

(CNN) – Remember the big makeover the Oval Office got last week while President Obama was on vacation?

Well, there’s a problem with the presidential rug.

The floor piece has quotations from four U.S. presidents and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — or does it?

One quote reads, “The Arc of the Moral Universe Is Long, But It Bends Towards Justice.”

As the Washington Post’s Jamie Stiehm points out, the quote attributed to King is not really King’s quote at all.


It’s Theodore Parker’s.

King often quoted and paraphrased Parker, an abolitionist and minister from Massachusetts, who in 1853 proclaimed, “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one ... And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice."

While the origins of Parker’s proclamation are rarely cited in today’s public discourse, a search on even the most basic of research tools, Wikipedia, reveals Parker as the voice behind the words.

CNN has been unable to reach the White House for comment.

Oops!

Come prepared Monday night to tell me what she meant by "yellow journalism"

Vanity Fair reporter admits error in Palin article

By HEATHER HOLLINGSWORTH, The Associated Press

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- A writer for Vanity Fair has acknowledged a case of mistaken identity in an unflattering article about Sarah Palin in the magazine's October issue.

Reporter Michael Joseph Gross describes Palin's youngest son, Trig, being pushed in a stroller by his older sister, Piper, before a rally in May in the Kansas City suburb of Independence.

"When the girl, Piper Palin, turns around, she sees her parents thronged by admirers, and the crowd rolling toward her and the baby, her brother Trig, born with Down syndrome in 2008," according to the article. "Sarah Palin and her husband, Todd, bend down and give a moment to the children; a woman, perhaps a nanny, whisks the boy away; and Todd hands Sarah her speech and walks her to the stage."

Later, Gross describes Piper joining her mother on the stage to "allow Palin to make a public display of maternal affection."

The problem, which was first reported by the website Politico, was that the boy the reporter described was another child with Down syndrome.

The mother of that child, conservative activist Gina Loudon, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that she told Gross during the rally that the child in the stroller was her son, not Palin's. She said she tried to make it clear because the two children look a lot alike.

"I told him that. And he ignored it," Loudon said. "It's not even like he didn't fact check - he just ignored facts."

Gross said in a written statement sent to The Associated Press that he was mistaken.
"Trig was with his mother the next day in Wichita (Kan.), but the child in Independence was someone else, and I regret the error," he said.

Palin was quick to call the article "yellow journalism" in a tweet. The article describes everything from stingy tips given to hotel staff to heated fights between Palin and her husband.

Doug McMarlin, a spokesman for Palin's political action committee, said in a written statement Friday that the article was a "collection of lies."

"As the message continues to succeed, the messenger will continue to be attacked by yellow journalists seeking to increase sales," McMarlin said. "Our focus remains on the historic 2010 election and the brave Americans that have courageously entered the public arena to bring commonsense leadership back to our federal, state and local offices."

Be Careful What You Tweet!

This is an excerpt from a WaPo column by Andrew Alexander. To read the entire article, click here.

Post columnist Mike Wise suspended for fake Twitter report

Popular Washington Post sports columnist Mike Wise has been suspended for a month after knowingly sending a false tweet on Monday.

The action stems from a short scoop to his Twitter followers that said Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, who has been suspended for six games by the NFL after allegations of misconduct, will only have to sit out five games. “Roethlisberger will get five games, I’m told,” Wise tweeted.

That was big news for those who follow professional football, and it quickly spread on the Internet. But as Wise soon acknowledged, it was a hoax that was part of a misguided attempt to comment on the lowered standards of accuracy for information shared on social media.

Fabrication is a major journalistic transgression. He's lucky he wasn't fired.

Wise announced his suspension from The Post at the start of his Tuesday morning radio program on WJFK 106.7 FM. “I’m paying the price I should for careless, dumb behavior in the multi-platform media world,” he told listeners in a contrite program intro.

“My bosses at The Post feel I need a month to think about the severity of my actions,” he said. “I agree and will serve a one-month suspension beginning today at The Post.”

Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli declined to comment. “I’m not going to discuss anything personnel related,” he said.

Post Sports Editor Matthew Vita said, “Clearly, we consider what Mike did was poor judgment on his part.” He added: “He knows that what he did violates our core principles.”

Wise could not be reached for comment beyond his statement on WJFK.

After his initial tweet on Monday, Wise issued several others that suggested his Roethlisberger exclusive was spoof, not scoop. In one of his subsequent tweets, he said his source was a “casino employee in Lake Tahoe.”

After the tweets became known to his Post bosses on Monday, they quickly contacted Wise to seek an explanation. Brauchli settled on the 30-day suspension from The Post. It does not affect Wise’s broadcast work.