Grace Newswriter's Blog

Should we Label Christian Fiction?

2012-01-30T11:21:00.002-05:00

Thought-provoking comments from the blog of literary agent Rachelle Gardner:
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There has been a controversy brewing underground for awhile now, ever since publishers started promoting books by offering a limited-time free download. Many of the Christian publishers have done these promotions, but whenever Christian novels are promoted on Amazon as free downloads, many people download them without realizing they’re Christian.

They start reading and when they realize it’s “Christian” they become enraged. They feel like they were hoodwinked somehow. And then they leave 1-star, angry reviews on Amazon. Here are some Amazon comments on a recent Christian novel that was free for a limited time:

“When you read the review for this book, no mention is made of the Christian nature of the book. This is misleading.”
“I resent the absence of the Christian fiction label. ”
“This book is not a [genre]. It is a Christian morality tale.”
“Why is it that authors of Christian fiction often hide that fact in the descriptions? I am simply irritated when I buy a book based on a secular description only to find that the predominant thread throughout the book is Christian proselytizing.”
“It is an excuse to promote a Christian agenda. When a book is Christian Fiction it should be promoted as such.”

These responses are leading people to ask whether Christian fiction needs to be clearly labeled as such, maybe in the “Book Description” on the Amazon page.

I know a lot of Christians think it’s a real shame that people are responding this way. But I have to say, I’m not surprised. To understand what I mean, just imagine if the tables were turned. You are a Christian and you download a free book (or worse, pay good money for a book), which you then discover contains a storyline that strongly promotes the Muslim faith, clearly saying Islam is the one true faith and without it, you’re doomed. I imagine you’d be upset. You’d feel disrespected as a reader. You’d feel tricked into buying something that goes against what you believe; you may even worry that simply reading it was dangerous for you.

I think this is a classic “Do unto others…” moment. I see no reason to disrespect people of other faiths (or no faith) by refusing to label Christian fiction as “Christian.”

In fact, I’d go so far as to recommend that if you write Christian fiction and your publisher is about to do an Amazon “free” promotion, you make sure somebody contacts Amazon to edit the book description so that it makes clear it’s Christian. If you do this, you can probably avoid most of those angry 1-star reviews.

What do you think? Should Christian fiction be clearly described as such in the book description? Why or why not?

WJI Features Conference at Bryan

2012-01-30T09:02:00.001-05:00

CALLING ALL COLLEGE STUDENTS WITH A PASSION FOR WRITING!

Dayton, Tenn.--If you are a Christian student journalist in Eastern Tennessee or Northern Georgia with a passion for writing, circle March 27, on your calendar.

World Journalism Institute, in conjunction with WORLD on Campus, will be conducting a series of free journalism seminars at Bryan College in Dayton, Tenn., for Christian college journalists in the area who want to develop their skills as journalists.

The half day conference, entitled "The Skills and Worldview of the Christian Journalist,"is designed to help students improve the skills necessary to integrate a passion for Christ with a passion for great journalism.

The seminar leaders will be Warren Cole Smith, associate publisher of WORLD magazine; Leigh Jones, editor of WORLDonCampus.com; and Rob Patete, WORLD magazine's associate art director.

Seminar sessions will cover topics such as the basics of news writing, including story structure; common mistakes made by beginning journalists, and how to avoid them; basic interviewing skills, including a few tricks of the trade; how to integrate a Christian worldview into the practice of journalism; and how to write for WORLDonCampus.com

Between the seminar sessions there will be a free pizza lunch for all participants.

The World Journalism Institute (www.worldji.com) is a division of the World New Group with the mission to recruit, equip, place and encourage Christian journalists in the newsrooms of America and the world. WORLD on Campus is a news website for college students looking for news from a perspective that will help them develop a Christian worldview. The World News Group also includes WORLD magazine and World Radio.

To register for the Bryan journalism conference, go to worldji.com and select "Programs." Scroll down to "Bryan College Conference."

Building a Body of Work

2012-01-27T11:52:00.001-05:00

Some inspirational words from an old pro in the freelance writing business:
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Build A Body of Work

I want to return to a basic of writing—any type of writing. Whatever you write, are you writing consistently? Are you continuing to work at building relationships with the gatekeepers (magazine editors, online editors, book editors, literary agents and other professional writers). I know it is basic but consistent writing and working at this business is critical. It rarely comes easy or quickly to any of us. In fact, we often fight the discipline and consistency of writing.

Occasionally someone will look at the volume of my own writing and exclaim, “How do you do it?” It’s just like eating an elephant, one bite at a time. As writers, we write one sentence then one page at a time. Over seven years ago, we moved to Arizona and I sorted through a lot of materials in this process and threw away unnecessary papers. I kept my magazine clips—and there are literally boxes of them. Some days I’m amazed that I’ve written over 60 books and the first one. When I Grow Up was published in 1992. In these years, I’ve been able to build a body of work. The concept of consistency and building a body of work may be new to you.

Years ago on the way to a writer’s conference, I chatted with a literary agent. I was just beginning my writing work and he encouraged me to continue building a body of work. It’s not a single book or a single magazine article but the sum of your work in publishing that eventually makes an impact. What are you doing to build a body of work? Are you writing consistently? Are you growing in your understanding of the publishing business? I confess that I learn new terms and new aspects constantly.

Some days I don’t feel like cranking out some words but I do it. As I’ve traveled the country and worked with different writers. I know some writers are inspirational writers. They only write when they feel the story in their fingers and put it on paper. Others are journeymen and professional writers. They pound the keys day in and day out—whether they feel like it or not. I fall into that latter category (most of the time). It’s helped my consistent writing.

As a young journalist training in news editorial, one summer, I interned on the Peru Tribune, a small town newspaper in Peru, Indiana. I’m fairly certain anyone I knew isn’t at the newspaper any longer. We had no computers and the typesetting was done with a Linotype machine in the back of the building. We had our story meetings at 7:30 a.m where the managing editor talked with the reporters about the stories to be written that day. In that short meeting we received our particular assigned stories, then hit it with the full knowledge of our 11 a.m. copy deadline. Our stories went quickly through the editor and appeared in the printed afternoon paper at 3 p.m. We had no time to sharpen our pencils or hem and haw about writer’s block. We had a deadline to meet—which we met day after day.

I’m committed to writing consistently. I want to keep my fingers on the keyboard and keep them moving to write articles, chapters for books and book proposals. I’m committed to building a body of work. It might not pay off immediately but in the long run, I know consistency counts.

Espresso Book Machine Going Into Powell's

2012-01-19T19:23:00.000-05:00

Powell's Books to Install Espresso Book Machine

January 19, 2012

(Press Release) January 18, 2012 (Portland, OR and NEW YORK, NY) – In the early Spring 2012, Powell’s Books, one of the country’s largest and most successful retailers of new and used books, will launch its Espresso Book Machine (EBM) at its legendary City of Books flagship store location.

The EBM brings a revolutionary book-publishing technology to one of the most respected independent booksellers in the world.

The EBM is the only digital-to-print at retail solution on the market. Within minutes, the EBM produces a bookstore quality paperback with color cover, in any standard trim size, at point of sale. The content is fed to the machine via EspressNet, On Demand Books’ growing digital network of over seven million titles.

Much like an iTunes for books, EspressNet retrieves, encrypts, transmits, and catalogues books from a multitude of English and foreign language sources (including public domain sources, traditional publishers, and self-published authors). Through the SelfEspress software, writers can format, design, edit, and upload their book for printing into a physical book and inclusion on the EBM catalog; it also can convert the print file to epub format suitable for e-readers.

The EBM provides a new sales channel for publishers and vastly increases the availability of titles for physical bookstores, thus significantly reducing loss of sales due to books being out-of-stock. Also, the EBM technology offers libraries and bricks-and-mortar retailers the opportunity to become community self-publishing centers, providing a new distribution platform for self-published authors. EBM improves efficiency and sustainability by eliminating shipping, returns, and pulping of unwanted books.

"We are excited to offer this service to our customers, expanding our vast inventory at the City of Books location from one million volumes to nearly limitless volumes," says Miriam Sontz , Chief Operating Officer for Powell's Books. "It is yet another way we can be valuable and relevant to readers and authors as the distribution channels for books continue to evolve. We are thrilled by this opportunity to work with On Demand Books as our business partner in this venture."

“We couldn’t be more pleased to be partnering with one of the truly greatbookstores in the country,” said Dane Neller , CEO of On Demand Books. “To have our Espresso Book Machine in Powell’s is a dream come true. We look forward to working with the folks there to drive actively sales of publisher content.”

Readers, Not Editors, to Help Choose Content

2012-01-09T19:57:00.002-05:00

Here is a fascinating paradigm shift by a major periodical. This is an excerpt--to read the entire article, click here.

Ladies' Home Journal Lets Readers Write the Magazine

Venerable Publication's Bid to Attract Younger Audience May Cause Ripple Effect Among Mass Titles

By: Nat Ives Published: January 09, 2012

Crowdsourcing has been common in advertising for some time, but in a highly unusual move, it's now vaulting the wall at the venerable Ladies' Home Journal, which is planning to turn over many of the pages in its 128-year-old publication to work written by readers.

Starting with the March issue, LHJ editors will cull much of the magazine's material from posts on DivineCaroline.com, a sibling at Meredith Corp. that lets consumers upload their own stories, as well as from the magazine's website, its Facebook page and other digital channels.

The magazine will still use fact-checkers and include experts in fields such as medicine and beauty, but it will start with consumers where it can. "We really flipped this model," said Editor-in-Chief Sally Lee. "Usually content creation begins with an editor. We have content creation that begins with a reader."

While other publishers have dabbled in the practice, its adoption by Ladies' Home Journal, a title that guarantees advertisers an average paid circulation of 3.2 million, is significant since it is the largest traditional media brand to commit to so much user-generated content on an ongoing basis. If it's successful, other mass-circulation titles may follow. "I've been asked a lot about whether we foresee this becoming a model that other magazines will start to implement," said Diane Malloy, publisher of Ladies' Home Journal. "My answer is, 'Gosh, yes, I think everyone is going to sit up and take notice.'"

The magazine says the changes were driven by research revealing that readers wanted a greater role in filling its pages. But the move could also help LHJ, which competes in the very mature category of women's service, improve its traction with advertisers.

An accompanying revamp by design firm Pentagram will signal the shift and include a new Ladies' Home Journal logo that shrinks "Home" to small type and overwhelmingly emphasizes "Journal."

Unlike the Huffington Post, where many bloggers post without pay, Ladies' Home Journal won't tell its amateur writers to settle for the exposure. "We are going to pay them our professional rates," Ms. Lee said.

The magazine wants to build a community of readers engaging with one another and with editors, but the idea predates the current notions of user-generated content and constant conversations with consumers.

If a Taylor Student Can Win . . . !!!

2012-01-06T20:07:00.000-05:00

BP journalism competition winners named
Posted on Jan 6, 2012 | by Staff

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (BP) -- Nick Dean and Daniel Cernero have been named first-place winners in the 2011 Baptist Press Excellence in Journalism Competition for collegiate communications students.

Dean, a senior at Baylor University and last year's editor-in-chief of The Baylor Lariat student newspaper, won the competition's print/web category.

Cernero, a December 2010 Baylor graduate who was photo editor of the university's Round Up yearbook, won the visual/multimedia category.

Second-place winners are Julia Berger, a senior at Taylor University and co-editor of The Echo student newspaper, in print-web and Makenzie Mason, a Baylor senior and photo editor of the Round Up, in visual/multimedia.

Judging for the competition was provided by members of the Baptist Communicators Association (www.baptistcommunicators.org), a professional organization for individuals who serve in editorial, public relations, electronic media, photography, management, marketing and graphic design positions principally within Baptist entities and institutions. Among its ongoing initiatives, BCA awards annual scholarships to graduate, undergraduate and minority/ethnic/international students planning to pursue a career in Baptist communications.

Each entrant in the BP-sponsored journalism competition submitted a 500-word essay about their journalism career goals and how faith plays a role in those goals. Entrants in the print/web side of the competition could submit up to six news or feature stories; photography, up to 24 images; video, up to 20 minutes of video.

Dean and Cernero will receive $1,000 awards for first place in their respective categories; Berger and Mason will receive $500 awards for second place.

Dean, in his 500-word essay, wrote, "My academic career has been an attempt to define journalism and to discover if I could mix my passion for helping people -- a passion developed through my faith in Christ -- with my love of writing. Fortunately, I've found that to be possible and plan to become a political reporter in Austin covering state politics after graduation."

Cernero, in his essay, wrote that his faith should show through "all aspects of my work in journalism. Especially when it comes to photography, I feel that the photographs are a reflection of the photographer -- it's the world as I see it. Also, even when not actively taking photos, I believe my faith is on display to all I come across in the professional field, be it the person of interest for a particular story or my coworkers."

Cernero currently works at the Fort Hood Sentinel as sports editor and a photographer.

Among the judges' comments of Dean's entries, one judge took note of an article Dean had written on an Iraqi student newspaper at the University of Iraq-Sulaimani. "I found it interesting that a Baylor newspaper would do an article on another college newspaper that didn't have a direct connection with Baylor," the judge wrote. "That was unexpected. But, wow! What a good article for people to read. It is good for them to see a side of Iraq/Kurdistan that relates to their peers."

Among comments on Cernero's entries, one judge wrote, "Daniel seems to include a piece of himself in his work and this is a critical ingredient for making good photographers into great ones. His style, while still in the early stages, shows a strength and determination to capture the essence of the moment. His images evoke a reaction."

Baptist Press editor Art Toalston noted, "Baptists have a long heritage of Christian journalism, dating back more than 175 years. We hope that the Excellence in Journalism Competition serves as both a reminder of our heritage and a point of encouragement to Baptist journalism students. They, too, can strive to be first-rate journalists in our 21st-century context, whether in the Southern Baptist Convention or in the nation's news media."

BCA's president, Julie McGowan, news & media relations director at Oklahoma Baptist University, said in a statement to Baptist Press, "Baptist Communicators Association congratulates the winners of the Excellence in Journalism Competition. We were thrilled to participate in judging the best work of the next generation of Baptist communicators. We hope to see the entrants involved for many years in telling the stories -- through all kinds of media -- of how God is at work around the world."

A Great Opportunity . . . .

2012-01-06T20:02:00.001-05:00

Olasky to Head Teaching Staff for New York Journalism Boot Camp

New York, N.Y., January 9, 2012-Marvin Olasky, journalist, author and educator will lead the World Journalism Institute's team of instructors for its 2012 New York City journalism course.

Dr. Olasky has degrees from Yale University and University of Michigan. He is the editor-in-chief of WORLD magazine. In 1992 he wrote The Tragedy of American Compassion which Speaker Newt Gingrich famously gave to every Republican in the House of Representatives. President George W. Bush called Olasky "compassionate conservatism's leading thinker" as a result of The Tragedy.

The eight-week New York course in May and June of 2012, is comprised of a three-week residency in New York City followed by a summer reporting component in students' hometowns. The course will help students gain or hone the skills needed to be reporters with newspapers, websites, radio, or the World News Group.

The course will have a strong emphasis on reporting and writing, along with training in radio, photography, and video. The most promising students will receive an internship stipend for use in the World News Group or with other media organizations.

The instructors for 2012 will include Russell Pulliam (Indianapolis Star), Clayton Sizemore (CNN), Les Sillars (Patrick Henry College), Alicia Hansen (NYC Salt), and Mindy Belz and Lee Pitts from WORLD. The course costs $500, with scholarships available for those with demonstrated needs. The residency component will be on the campus of The King's College, located in the Empire State Building.

The World Journalism Institute is a division of the World New Group with the mission to recruit, equip, place and encourage Christian journalists in the newsrooms of America and the world. The World News Group also includes WORLD magazine, World Radio, five news websites, and six news magazines for children from pre-K to high school.

To apply for the course, go to www.worldji.com, and complete the online application.

Don't Use These Words!

2012-01-06T15:38:00.001-05:00

Read the Lake Superior State University 2012 List of Banished Words here

(CNN) -- If you're thinking of setting up an amazing man cave or showing off a ginormous baby bump next year, think again.

A northern Michigan school on Friday released its 37th annual list of words and phrases that it believes should be "banished" from the English language, and it suggests that some classic -- and perhaps hackneyed -- should get the ax.

Lake Superior State University once again solicited people online to nominate terms they consider tired, overused or simply annoying. Based on those submissions, the arbiters at the school decided to put the following on this year's chopping block: "amazing," "baby bump," "shared sacrifice," "occupy," "blowback," "man cave," "ginormous" and "the new normal."

"Pet parent," "win the future," "trickeration" and "thank you in advance" also have been unofficially sentenced to linguistic exile for the crimes of excessive and inappropriate usage, according to the university in Sault Sainte Marie on the Canadian border.

"Worn-out words and phrases are the new normal this year, but with some shared sacrifice, we can clean up the language and win the future," a school representative said in a written statement. "With the addition of this year's nominations, the list of words and phrases banished over the years has become ginormous."

"Amazing" -- arguably one of the most overused adjectives in the English language -- topped this year's list of submissions, according to the university.

"Banish it for blatant overuse and incorrect use ... to stop my head from exploding," begged Paul Crutchfield from Great Britain, according to the press release.

"Anderson Cooper used it three times recently in the opening 45 seconds of his program," said Sarah Howley, a resident of Kalamazoo, Michigan, referring to the CNN anchor. "My teeth grate, my hackles rise, and even my dog is getting annoyed at this senseless overuse.

"I don't even like 'Amazing Grace' anymore," she complained.

David Hollis from Hubbardsville, New York, insisted that not all men are enamored with the concept of the traditional man cave.

"It is not just overused, it is offensive to we males who do not wish to hunker (another awful word, often misused) down in a room filled with stuffed animal heads, an unnecessarily large flat-screen TV and Hooters memorabilia," he said. "Not every man wants a recliner the size of a 1941 Packard that has a cooler in each arm and a holster for the remote. So please, assign 'man cave' to the lexicographic scrap heap where it so rightly belongs."

Jim Eisenmann from Madison, Wisconsin, had some free advice for politicians hitting the campaign trail in 2012: dump "win the future" or you may not win the race.

"On its very face, it's an empty, meaningless phrase," he explained. "It basically says that anyone who opposes anything meant to 'win the future' must want to 'lose the future,' which is highly unlikely."

"Ginormous" seemed particularly irritating this time around, with contributors complaining that its usage shows a lack of proper education.

"This combination of gigantic and enormous makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck every time I hear it," said Gina Bua of Vancouver, Washington. "Each utterance reminds me of the high school drop-out that first used this offensive word in my presence."

"This word is just a made-up combination of two words," adds an Andover, Maine, resident named Jason, who refused to offer his last name. "Either word is sufficient, but the combination just sounds ridiculous."

As for "baby bump" -- a term used to describe a pregnant woman's rounded belly -- this "is a phrase we finally need to give birth to, then send on its way," declared Mary Sturgeon from Vancouver, British Columbia.

"I'm tired of a pregnancy being reduced to a celebrity accessory. Or worse, when less-than-six-pack abs are suspected of being one," said Afton, a respondent from Portland, Oregon.

Lake Superior State University's annual "word banishment" list was first created at a New Year's Eve party in 1975. The school now claims to receive tens of thousands of nominations every year.

Definition of 'Book' is Changing

2012-01-03T09:58:00.001-05:00

Apps take e-books beyond mere reading

Article by: LAURIE HERTZEL , Star Tribune
Updated: January 2, 2012 - 7:55 PM

For good and for bad, apps and enhanced e-books -- loaded with audio, video and games -- are changing the definition of what a book is.

You can buy the Kevin Kling-Chris Monroe picture book, "Big Little Brother," for $17.95 and read it to your child. Or you can buy the iPad app of "Big Little Brother" for $7.99 and hear Kling read it himself -- and also watch the characters move and hear the toys talk.

Book apps for tablets and smartphones and enhanced e-books for e-readers are going far beyond the transfer of book text to Kindle screen. By bringing audio, video, animation and games to what was once the simple printed page, apps are beginning to fundamentally change our understanding of what makes a book a book.

So far, the trend has been cautious, but publishers predict enhancements will be common within two years. "It's clearly a market waiting to be fed," said Corinne Helman, vice president of digital publishing and business development for Harper Collins children's books. "This is still very, very early days."

"I think this is going to be a huge deal," said Dan Leary, design and production manager for the Minnesota Historical Society Press. "It's really changing what a book is."

Book apps can be as modest as "Big Little Brother," with just a little animation and audio. Or they can be as elaborate as "Fancy Nancy Dress Up," which allows children to design outfits, dress Fancy Nancy and drop her into the story.

Enhanced e-books include all kinds of supplemental material: travel books are embedded with film clips, language books with audio, cookbooks with step-by-step videos.

There are even book apps that have never been printed books, such as David Sedaris' "David's Diary," six animated videos inspired by his diary entries.

Image-heavy books, such as picture books and photo books, lend themselves well to apps. "The iPad does images better than you can print them," Leary said. "The quality is like a transparency in a lightbox."

Made for images

Minnesota photographer Jim Brandenburg turned his award-winning 1998 book, "Chased by the Light," into an app. It contains the original images of northern Minnesota, additional photos from the revised softcover edition, "After the Storm," and 17 video clips from the documentary about the book.

"Each of the video clips are positioned right on that image," said Heidi Brandenburg, the photographer's daughter and manager. "So as you look at it, Jim is talking about why he chose that subject and what he was thinking."

You can also toggle from an original image to a photo of the same place, taken since the BWCA blowdown. "This is our very first app, but it won't be our last," Brandenburg said. "For photography, it's just unbelievable. It gives a whole new life to the images."

Move over, mom and dad

Apps of children's books are particularly attractive to busy parents, Helman said. "How often do you whip out a phone and say, 'I'll buy myself 20 minutes of silence?' I think parents feel good about book apps because it's still a book and the child is still learning."

If parents are too busy to read to the child -- or have already read the book aloud 50 times -- the app can take over. "It means, in some respect, that the kid is now spending more time with books because it doesn't require the parent to be there," Helman said.

This gives Phyllis Root pause. "If it gets children interested in books, it's good," said Root, the Minneapolis author of more than 40 books for children and an instructor in Hamline University's MFA program in writing for children. "But the most important thing about a picture book is that you sit down and read it with a kid."

A parent can point to a picture and say, "What sound does a frog make?" Root said. "And the child might make the sound. But if every time you come to that page you can push the frog and it makes a noise, you've handed over some of the interactiveness of the picture book to this prepackaged shape."

Lori Helman, associate professor of literacy education at the University of Minnesota and co-director of the Minnesota Center for Reading Research (and no relation to Harper Collins' Corinne Helman), said human relations are crucial to child development.

"We need a lot of opportunities for face-to-face interaction so children can learn what it means to be human," she said. "A developing person, whether they're 2 or 7, needs to be able to ask questions and check out their understanding. And no app can be responsive to all the questions and thoughts and wonderings that a young person needs. You need people."

That said, Helman added, apps and e-books can give kids more access to books and put libraries at their fingertips.

"If we're using these things as little babysitters, I think kids will get tired of them," she said. "But if we use them to enhance our interaction, imagine the great conversation that could spark."

Slow growing for now

While technology is fueling this trend, it is also slowng it down.

Apps must be written one way for Apple products, another way for Droids. App stores don't have a separate category for book apps, making them hard to find. And devices are changing so fast that no one dares invest too heavily in any one direction.

"It's been a sort of three steps forward, three steps back," said Terry Adams, who heads e-book and digital publishing for the Hachette Book Group, which includes Little, Brown. "It is the wild, wild West in this marketplace."

All that additional content requires negotiation and money. "If our agreement with an author is a basic book agreement, there are rights related to images and sound and whatever that are not part of that," Adams said. "So that material has to be provided and paid for. It's very expensive."

Still, Harper Collins' Helman said she thinks these are temporary obstacles. "The publishing industry is trying to get together to figure this out," she said. "There's no doubt in my mind that the standard will be achieved. This is just momentary noise."

The biggest concern, Leary says, is permanence.

"The best long-term storage of anything is the book," he said. "It's still the most future-proof thing in this office. The book version of the Kling-Monroe project will still be functional in 50 years. The iPad version of the book -- I will be surprised if anyone has a device that will still be functional in 10 years.

"These things will have a two-year life span, and then you develop for the next piece of technology."

New York Times Has 'Big Oops'

2012-01-03T09:32:00.000-05:00

Does Anyone in the Media Ever Read the Bible?

By Eric Metaxas

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2011/12/23/does-anyone-in-media-ever-read-bible/?cmpid=cmty_email_Gigya_Does_Anyone_in_the_Media_Ever_Read_the_Bible?
Published December 26, 2011

It happened again just the other day. I was reading the New York Times and I came across something so hilarious that for a moment it seemed to be some kind of joke. But this was in an obituary.

The obit was about one George Whitman, the proprietor of the famous Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris, who had just died at the hoary old age of 98. Before I mention the joke, I should say that I first got a mild chuckle when I read how George nurtured aspiring writers:

"For decades Mr. Whitman provided food and makeshift beds to young aspiring novelists or writing nomads, often letting them spend a night, a week, or even months living among the crowded shelves and alcoves." It made me wonder: was George the true founder of OWS?

But this was nothing compared with the hilarity to follow. What hilarity, you ask? It would come in the next two sentences. Here they are:

"[George] welcomed visitors with large-print messages on the walls. 'Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise,' was one, quoting Yeats."

Yeats!? Did you catch that? I choked on my toast. Did the Times actually just say that "Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise" was from Yeats? Unless I had fallen down a rabbit hole, that quote was from the Bible. It's from Hebrews 13:2 and it's quite famous. If you didn't catch it, don't feel too badly, because you are probably not The New York Times. You are probably not America's "paper of record", proud owner of 106 Pulitzer Prizes in Journalism -- more than any other newspaper. You probably don't have squadrons of fact-checkers on your payroll.

I still couldn't believe what I'd just read, so I kept reading, looking for some explanation. There was none. I then shook the paper to make sure I was reading an actual newspaper, and not, say, an email forward from an aged friend. Nope. This really was the New York Times, the Old Grey Lady, whose motto was "All the News that's Fit to Print." And let's face it, if W.B. Yeats was the real author of the Bible's "Book of Hebrews," that really would be big news!

To be absolutely sure I wasn't dreaming, I read the passage to my wife. She screamed. I wasn't dreaming. The New York Times really had said that the poet W.B. Yeats was the author of a very famous Bible passage.

To be fair, the New York Times eventually issued a correction about the Yeats' quote. Here's what they said:

Correction: December 21, 2011

An obituary on Thursday about George Whitman, the longtime owner of the Shakespeare & Company bookstore in Paris, referred incorrectly to a quotation written on a wall of his store. The words "Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise" are a variation on a passage from the Bible; although Mr. Whitman himself attributed them to the poet W.B. Yeats, they were not written by Yeats.

But believe it or not it wasn't just the Times (and the late Mr. Whitman) who got it wrong. It was also the Associated Press. NPR put up the AP version of their obituary right way. The BBC reported erroneously on the quote, too. Which leads me to two observations. First, have you ever heard the old adage, "a lie goes around the world, before the truth can get its boots on." Here's yet another example of the truth in that statement, especially in this hyper-electronic age.

Second, it's no secret that Manhattan and Hollywood cultural elites are deeply secular. There's a reason many of them consider the middle of America "fly-over country". Since at least H.L. Mencken, many secular elites think those who actually read the Bible need to be educated away from such nonsense. So the ignorance they often show about religion can be staggering. I remember two prominent instances.

The first was when I heard that patting-ourselves-on-the-back anthem "We Are the World" on FM radio 25 years ago. In his solo, Willie Nelson warbled: "As God has shown us, by turning stone to bread..." Did Willie really sing that Jesus had turned stone into bread? Yikes. Um, that's not quite what happened, Willie. What actually happened was that Jesus refused to turn stone to bread. And do you remember who tried to get him to turn stone to bread? That's right, Willie: it was um, Satan, as in Lucifer. As in it was a bad idea...

Keep in mind that this wasn't something he blurted out over the reefer-smoke at a concert. That knee-slapping lyric was written down and gone over and over. Who knows how many of those celebrities heard it and never batted an eye. That's how out of touch the vast majority of Hollywood celebrities are with basic Sunday School knowledge.

The second was when a secular Manhattan friend revealed that he didn't know who had come up with the Golden Rule. When told it was Jesus (Matthew 7:12) he didn't believe it. And this is a brilliant man, who knows just about everything there is to know. But in the world of Manhattan cultural elites, the Bible is mostly thought of as a quaint and useless artifact, like that old colonial butterchurn near the fireplace in your country home. Did it really ever make butter?

In part to remedy this inequality, I've started something called Socrates in the City [www.socratesinthecity.com] where the "big questions" are considered from a generally biblical point of view. But that's another story.

To get back to the faux-Yeats quote, remember that we are not talking about Willie Nelson or about a friend of mine. We are talking about the New York Times. Yes, they have a generally secular and liberal bias, but this was a factual error and the Times has fact-checkers. So if by some fluke the writer of the obit had been raised in Soviet Russia where no one was permitted to read or speak about the Bible, then surely one of the Times notoriously fastidious fact-checkers would have caught this tremendous goof. Besides, this obit must have been written years before, as such obits usually are, waiting quietly in the files for their elderly subjects to pass on. It would have been dusted off every few years and updated and -- presumably -- rechecked.

So when I read the Yeats supergoof, I wondered: where were the fact-checkers? Is the secular bias at the Times so pervasive that it has affected not just the writers but the fact-checkers too? Or has being out of touch with middle America so hurt the Times' subscription base that they cannot afford fact-checkers anymore?

When I first wrote about this on my Facebook page I was excoriated by an acquaintance who writes for the Times. He thought I was simply being too harsh. Perhaps I was. After all, as Sammy Davis, Jr. once remarked, "Judge not, lest ye be judged."

But to get serious, if I had one wish for American in 2012, I wish that we would get to know the Bible better. Even if you aren't a believer there are incredible stories in the "good book" that I guarantee you will keep you glued to the page. The Bible is no less a part of our cultural heritage than Shakespeare is -- and by the way, Shakespeare's plays are absolutely loaded with Biblical references.

In the meantime, the biblical author of Hebrews was on to something when he wrote about angels in disguise. So take his advice: be hospitable to all you meet. And keep your eyes open for disguised angels.

Eric Metaxas is the author of "Socrates in the City: Conversations of "Life, God, and Other Small Topics" and a New York Times bestseller, "Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy."

Ten Words Not to Mispronounce

2011-12-28T13:47:00.002-05:00

10 Words You Mispronounce That Make People Think You’re an Idiot

It’s been said, though we’re not sure by whom, that it is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt. But sometimes we’ve got to open our mouths so use this handy guide to make sure, at the very least, you’re saying the words right.

» By Justin Brown

Don’t worry, I won’t waste your time with the elementary school lessons about how to accurately pronounce “library,” “February,” or “arctic”… although I will take this opportunity to note that if you’re discussing a library and still dropping the first ‘R’, there’s a very good chance that your friends and/or colleagues are laughing at you behind your back.

I won’t trouble you with a lecture covering how some of the words you use actually aren’t words at all. If you’re using words like “snuck”, “brang”, or “irregardless” (no, none of those are real words), a magazine article – much less one written by me – is not going to solve your problems.

What I will do is offer up a rudimentary form of help, in terms of how to properly pronounce relatively common words that are bound to show up in your daily life. These tips will not seal the deal in a job interview or on a date (I can especially vouch for the “date” scenario) but if pronunciation continues to be a potential chink in your armor, your problems will soon be solved.

Thus, behold, People of the Internet… the ten most important words you should learn to pronounce, if you would like to appear reasonably knowledgeable about your own language.

ATHLETE

Incorrect pronunciation: ath – a – leet

Correct pronunciation: ath – leet

This may have been more helpful before the media blitz that was the Summer Olympics but it is a very valuable lesson to have for the future. It applies to “athlete” and any derivative (biathlon, triathlon, decathlon, etc.) and, honestly, I’m sad that I even have to point this out: there is no vowel between the ‘H’ and the ‘L’ in any of these words. There never has been. Let the dream die.

ESCAPE / ESPRESSO / ET CETERA

Incorrect pronunciation: ex – cape / ex – presso / ex – set – err – uh

Correct pronunciation: ess – cape / ess – presso / ett – set – err – uh

Yes, a three-for-one deal, but only because this one is dually very common and very simple to fix. For some reason, we of the English tongue have an obsession with changing any ‘S’ to an ‘X’, if it follows an ‘E’ sound; call it the Exxon Indoctrination. These words are spelled phonetically… let’s try to respect that.

Also: the yuppie kids will really respect you, if you master “espresso” and “et cetera” – what more motivation do you need?

NUCLEAR

Incorrect pronunciation: nuke – you – lerr

Correct pronunciation: new – clee – err

I’m going to try to get through this one without a President Bush joke. All right, so, despite the fact that it’s 2008, this is a word with which we’re somehow still struggling. Like most of the words on this list, “nuclear” is spelled EXACTLY AS IT IS SUPPOSED TO BE PRONOUNCED and yet, people continue to screw it up worse than the War in Iraq… oh, dammit.

PRESCRIPTION / PREROGATIVE

Incorrect pronunciation: purr – scrip – shun / purr – ogg – uh – tiv

Correct pronunciation: pre – scrip – shun / pre – rogg – uh – tiv

Overlooking the fact that many people also seem to have precisely no idea as to the latter word’s true definition (I’ve had several conversations where people bizarrely substitute “prerogative” for words like “agenda”), this is another problem that can be attributed to ignorance in the arena of “Sound It Out, You Lummox.” The ‘R’ comes before the ‘E’ in both of these words. Please ercognize this erality. Sorry.

UTMOST

Incorrect pronunciation: up – most

Correct pronunciation: utt – most

In a bizarre twist, people actually became so certain of this word’s meaning that they alter its pronunciation to reflect that definition. Yes, “utmost” is an adjective synonymous with “greatest” (a term that immediately calls to mind some tangible Mount Olympus-type of vertical hierarchy and the word “upper”) but that second letter? It’s still a ‘T’.

CANDIDATE

Incorrect pronunciation: can – uh – dett

Correct pronunciation: can – da – dett

Mastering this word will help you at least sound educated in your excruciating political debates as we approach November 3. I cannot explain it any more simply than my second grade teacher once did: “You always want to have a good candidate for your CANDY DATE.” Candy date. It’s sweet and simple.

SHERBET

Incorrect pronunciation: sherr – berrt

Correct pronunciation: sherr – bet

This is one of those words that ultimately had to abandon its crusade for righteousness and now has been corrupted to the point where dictionaries may list the incorrect pronunciation as acceptable because of just how rampant the ignorance grew to be. But there’s only one ‘R’ in “sherbet,” America… no matter how awesome the rainbow flavor is, there’s still only one ‘R’.

AWRY

Incorrect pronunciation: aww – ree

Correct pronunciation: uh – rye

Up until very recently, I could not even conceive a situation where someone would mispronounce this word; it always seemed very simple, to me. However, I have heard three different people – in the world of talk radio, no less – pronounce it inaccurately in the last few months. It’s like… it’s like the mechanism that allows people to speak in an educated fashion went awry (see what I did there?).

FOR ALL INTENTS AND PURPOSES

Incorrect pronunciation: “for all intensive purposes”

Correct pronunciation: “for all intents and purposes”

All right, yes, I cheated a little bit here (for posterity’s sake, I should note that a phrase and a word are not the same thing) but this is still a very popular pronunciation mistake and one that I really feel must be addressed in a public forum. While “intensive” is absolutely a word, the clichéd saying that most people are trying to channel is all about intent. As for the rumor that I, as a younger man, frequently employed the incorrect pronunciation… no comment.

OFTEN

Incorrect pronunciation: off – ten

Correct pronunciation: off – en

If there is a bigger red flag for “I am misinformed about how to pronounce something” in our language, I have yet to encounter it. This word and its evolutionary course in American vernacular could be a cultural study unto itself.

For a while, nobody was aware that the ‘T’ was silent; this sneaky caveat had to be beaten into our brains for years and years in school. But then – in what can best be described as the greatest grammatical epiphany since someone decided that we needed a contraction to turn “I am” into a single word – people seemed to universally scream out “We get it! A silent ‘T’!”. It was a glorious day.

However, this euphoria was ultimately fleeting. At some point, the rational people of Earth decided to flip over the Buffet Table of Reason at the Banquet for Intellectual Hope and thought it best to, once again, simply start pronouncing the ‘T’ in “often.” I do not know whether this was brought on by an innate human desire to flout the rules of our world or just a collective hatred for all things associated with the establishment but it is now arguably the most frequent linguistic speed bump in the history of hyperbole. And I would like to lead the charge to restore balance.

How do Journalists Cope After Covering Tragedies?

2011-12-27T10:06:00.001-05:00

From the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, 12/26/11:

Community Voice: How do journalists cope after covering frontline tragedies?

By Mark Massé
for The News-Sentinel

With U.S. military involvement in Iraq ending and troops coming home, news coverage rightfully focuses on the lives of these men and women and their adjustment to noncombat roles. Notable stories document the challenges facing veterans who cope with physical and mental health injuries, including depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

However, what is typically missing in the analysis of postwar issues are accounts of the print and broadcast journalists who have spent extended time embedded with troops and borne witness to death and destruction while working in harm's way. Several recent research studies have documented that news media workers may suffer from stress, burnout and mental anguish, in percentages comparable to military personnel and other first responders, as a result of being brutally close to the action.

Steve Bell, former ABC News correspondent/anchor and Vietnam War reporter who recently taught at Ball State, notes: “Imagine, journalists are human, too! But until recent years, few thought about the psychological perils of experiencing and reporting on traumatic events.”

How do journalists cope after covering war, conflict, disaster and other frontline tragedies? Although most reporters are resilient to the stresses and dangers they face, crisis coverage can have significant, enduring effects. As trauma psychiatrist Anthony Feinstein states: “Resilience in the face of adversity is not, however, synonymous with immunity.”

Former Washington Post reporter Jackie Spinner's 2006 memoir, “Tell Them I Didn't Cry: A Young Journalist's Story of Joy, Loss, and Survival in Iraq,” describes her nine months in 2004-05 as a war correspondent, having no prior experience in a combat zone.

Spinner returned to the U.S. with postwar trauma: “I did not want to talk about this with my colleagues who had been in Iraq because I feared their judgment of me as weak.”

Spinner was “angry at everything” and felt guilty about the Iraqi staff she had left behind with no promises for the future. She shunned her friends in favor of family “because they asked no questions and surrounded me in unconditional love.”

In his compelling memoir, “The Cat from Hué,” former CBS TV correspondent John Laurence described the personal cost of covering the Vietnam War. For years, he was embedded with U.S. soldiers and Marines in major battles. He wrote of the “narrow separation between life and death in this place.” As he noted in his book, “Reporters and photographers were killed and wounded in the same proportion as the frontline troops they accompanied.”

According to Laurence, being a war correspondent was a “great adventure: fascinating, frightening, fulfilling — more high drama than I expected for a lifetime.” He wrote that at 28 he thought he was tough-minded enough to handle what he experienced as a journalist. But he was naïve. “I had no idea that my involvement was far from over, that I would be going back again and again, repeatedly, indefinitely.”

Decades after he left Vietnam, Laurence endured nightmares, anxiety and other emotional problems associated with his years of war reporting. He admitted counseling helped him cope. However, in 2003, he returned to Iraq as a freelance correspondent, and the familiar demons of depression scuttled back. “I have never felt cured,” he noted in an interview with journalist Judith Matloff in the November/December 2004 issue of Columbia Journalism Review.

Photojournalist and documentary filmmaker Molly Bingham has covered conflict, violence and tragedy across Africa, Afghanistan, Iraq and the Middle East for nearly two decades. She joined a “rarified group of people” who risk their lives to tell dangerous stories that otherwise wouldn't be told. In the process, she had been detained, imprisoned and threatened (“shot at is more accurate”) by both enemy and “friendly” armed forces. She says a journalist's resilience in covering difficult stories is more about the person's physical and emotional states than about professional craft attitudes or newsroom credos. Bingham also believes it is a positive development that today more journalists are willing to discuss the psychological impact of reporting on tragedy and trauma.

Major news organizations such as CNN, the Associated Press and the BBC are using the knowledge, experience and resources of advocacy groups such as the Committee to Protect Journalists, the International News Safety Institute and the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma in addressing journalist safety/welfare issues, including proactive training and postevent debriefing and counseling programs. An integral part of this international reform effort is an enhanced awareness of the emotional impact of conflict and crisis coverage on the victims, their families and loved ones, their communities, as well as on the journalists whose job it is to tell these stories.

Mark H. Massé, a professor of literary journalism at Ball State University, is the author of the recently published book, “Trauma Journalism: On Deadline in Harm's Way.”

Authorship and Changing Lightbulbs

2011-12-23T20:26:00.001-05:00

AUTHORSHIP AND CHANGING LIGHTBULBS

How many publishers does it take to change a light bulb?
Three. One to change it and two to hold down the author.

How many editors does it take to change a light bulb?
"Do we have to get author's approval for this?"
Two, one to change the bulb and one to issue a rejection slip to the old bulb.

How many proofreaders does it take to change a light bulb?
Proofreaders aren't supposed to change light bulbs. They should just query them.

How many mystery writers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Two. One to screw it in almost all the way in and the other to give it a surprising twist at the end.

How many writers does it take to change a light bulb?
Two. One to change the bulb and one to tell a long story about it.

How many literary critics does it take to change a light bulb?
Literary critics don't know how, but rest assured they'll find something wrong with the way you do it.

Magazine Launches up 24% in 2011

2011-12-19T19:20:00.001-05:00

Good news for those who'd like to freelance for magazines!

Magazine Launches Up 23.8 Percent in 2011

Total number of new titles rose from 193 in 2010 to 239 this year.

By Ioanna Opidee
12/14/2011

The number of magazines launched in 2011 jumped 23.8 percent, from 193 to 239, compared to 2010, according to magazine database Mediafinder.com. Meanwhile, the number of closures fell 13.6 percent, from 176 in 2010 to 152 this year.

Like last year, the food category saw the biggest gains, with 25 new titles joining the 28 from last year. Also like last year, regional magazines followed with the second-highest number of launches, at 20, though the category also saw the largest number of closures, with 21 titles folding. Bridal publications took the second-biggest hit, with 19 titles shuttered, including regional editions of Condé Nast’s Brides as well as Atlanta, Georgia-based Get Married.

The b-to-b sector appears to have seen a much healthier 2011, with 62 new titles expanding the segment, compared to just 34 in 2010. Last year, b-to-b saw more magazines fold than launch, with 47 closures in 2010 compared to 38 this year.

High-profile launches this year include crossover brands such as Hearst’s HGTV Magazine, an offshoot of the television network, and Condé Nast’s Style.com/Print, an extension of a formerly-standalone website.

Crucial Reference Works

2011-12-14T09:37:00.000-05:00

From Jerry Jenkins' blog:

Crucial Reference Works

Almanacs and atlases are wonderful, inexpensive investments. A world almanac is a must for any serious writer, and if you can find one you like on disk, so much the better; you’ll be relieved of the tiny print in the paperback versions, and you’ll decrease look-up time.

World almanacs list about anything you could ever want for basic research. I use them even for character names. When naming a foreign character, I’ll look up his country of origin, scan the current government leaders for a last name, combine that with the first name from the country’s history (say, a war hero), and bingo, I have a legitimate, ethnically accurate name.

I use a world atlas, primarily because my characters travel the globe, and to be believable, I have to know time zones, current country names, monetary units, populations, average temperatures, and the like.

Atlases provide detailed maps, and Internet atlases even offer street maps — crucial to realistic action scenes. But almanacs also give the gross national product, offer tourism tidbits, and list major industries and resources. In the Left Behind series, I set some scenes in Greece, a country I hadn’t visited (until last year). The almanac told me one of Greece’s natural resources is lignite. A couple of more keystrokes in Google, and I discover that lignite is a type of coal used to generate electricity. I needed an occupation for a wealthy Greek. So he became a lignite magnate.

Almanacs also show which countries are on the metric system, so when my character is racing through a metrics-using country in a rental car, he’ll buy fuel in liters. Getting minuscule details right makes for a more entertaining read. And when you get them wrong, suddenly they’re no longer minuscule.

You can find free almanacs, dictionaries, and encyclopedias online. Simply Google almanac or dictionary and investigate your options. Some sites require a subscription, but before you pay, make sure you’ll actually use the product.

I use an electronic thesaurus, which is a good aid but also merits a caution: Never let it be obvious you’ve consulted a thesaurus.

Novice writers tend to seek the most exotic word, when the best use of a thesaurus is to remind yourself of alternative ordinary words. Avoid the obtuse and find the ordinary one that best conveys your meaning.

Believe me, readers can tell when you’ve fallen into a rut and overused a favorite word. They’ll let you know.

Lee Enterprises Files for Bankruptcy

2011-12-13T16:00:00.000-05:00

Newspaper group Lee Enterprises files for bankruptcy

6:03 p.m. EST, December 12, 2011

(Reuters) - Lee Enterprises Inc , which publishes 48 daily newspapers including St. Louis Post-Dispatch, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection to refinance nearly $1 billion in debt, as newspapers struggle with falling advertisement dollars and dwindling readership.

In a filing with Delaware bankruptcy court, Lee Enterprises listed liabilities of $994.5 million and assets of $1.15 billion.

The bankruptcy filing plan comes two months after the company had reached an agreement with most its lenders to refinance $769.5 million of its distressed loans.

Most local newspaper publishers in the United States have been hit by dropping circulation and falling advertising revenue, forcing them to sell off or shut several publications.

Tribune Co, the owner of the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune newspapers, had earlier filed a third reorganization plan with the U.S. bankruptcy court.

Lee was founded in 1890 in Ottumwa, Iowa, by A.W. Lee. Most of the company's newspapers trace their beginnings to the mid-1800s. Among Lee's alumni are Mark Twain, Willa Cather and Thornton Wilder.

The case is: Lee Enterprises, Case No. 11-13918, U.S. bankruptcy court, District of Delaware.

Court: Blogger not Journalist

2011-12-07T09:42:00.001-05:00

Court Says Blogger Isn’t a ‘Journalist’ — Implications for Hyperlocal

1 Comment and 0 Reactions 06 December 2011 by Brian Dengler

A federal judge in Portland, Oregon has declared that a local “investigative blogger,” doesn’t qualify as a journalist — calling into question whether online hyperlocal news publishers should be treated differently than traditional media.

Chrystal Cox calls herself an “investigative blogger” and runs sites “exposing corruption.” Obsidian Finance Group filed a $10 million defamation claim against Cox in Portland, alleging that she made several defamatory postings against Obsidian and its co-founder, Kevin Padrick. Cox defended herself in federal court but lost. According to a report by Seattle Weekly, she faces a $2.5 million judgment.

Cox claimed her information for the Obsidian postings came from a confidential source, and, therefore, Oregon’s Shield Law protected her from disclosing her source at trial. In an opinion filed on November 30, 2011, Federal Judge Marco Hernandez disagreed, ruling that Oregon’s Shield Law was limited to traditional media like newspapers, broadcast stations, magazines, and news services — but not to an “investigative blogger” who was not affiliated with traditional media.

The court further concluded that Cox was not entitled to claim other defenses against damages that could be raised by traditional media because she failed to prove she was a bona fide journalist. “Defendant fails to bring forth any evidence suggestive of her status as a journalist,” Judge Hernandez wrote. Hernandez ruled that Cox failed to show, among other things, that she had any education in journalism or “any credential of proof of any affiliation with an recognized news entity.” Cox told Seattle Weekly that she plans to appeal the ruling.

Last June 2011, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that a journalist’s posting on an online discussion board was not entitled to protection under New Jersey’s Shield law. The court concluded that message boards were not similar to traditional new organizations protected by the law.

Although Cox was not a hyperlocal news publisher, the decisions raise concern on whether online hyperlocal news sites, some of them published in blog format, should be viewed and treated differently than traditional media. That question remains unresolved, but it serves as a reminder that getting the facts right is paramount in avoiding trouble.

This article is provided for information only and does not provide legal advice.

AP Does Xmas

2011-12-05T15:13:00.000-05:00

12/05/2011

AP Advisory

AP compiles Holiday Style Guide

The Associated Press has compiled a Holiday Style Guide of words, phrases and definitions to help its members and subscribers with spelling and usage of traditional terms for religious and cultural holidays in December and January. The guidance, compiled by the AP Stylebook and Lifestyles teams, encompasses Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and New Year’s festivities. Some terms are taken from the AP Stylebook. Others are common usage in holiday stories transmitted by AP. Below, see a list of traditional terms sent in an advisory Dec. 5 to AP members and subscribers.

#

Advent
The four Sundays preceding Christmas.

“Auld Lang Syne”
Sung to greet the New Year, poem by Robert Burns set to Scottish music.

BETHLEHEM, West Bank (AP) --
Dateline for AP stories from the biblical site of Jesus’ birth.

Bible
Capitalize in reference to the Scriptures; lowercase biblical in all uses.

Boxing Day
Post-Christmas holiday Dec. 26 In British Commonwealth countries.

Champagne
Capitalize sparkling wine from the French region uncorked to celebrate New Year’s.

Christmas Eve, Christmas Day
Capitalize Dec. 24 and Dec. 25 Christian feast marking the birth of Jesus.

Christmastime
One word.

Christmas tree
Lowercase tree and other seasonal terms with Christmas: card, wreath, carol, etc. Exception: National Christmas Tree.

dreidel
Toy spinning top for Jewish celebrations.

hallelujah
Lowercase the biblical praise to God, but capitalize in composition titles: Handel's "Hallelujah" chorus.

Hanukkah
Eight-day Jewish Festival of Lights starting Dec. 20 this year.

Jesus, Jesus Christ
Pronouns referring to him are lowercase, as is savior.

happy holidays, merry Christmas, season’s greetings
Such phrases are generally spelled lowercase, though Christmas is always capitalized.

Holy Land
Capitalize the biblical region.

Kriss Kringle
Not Kris. Derived from the German word, Christkindl, or baby Jesus.

Kwanzaa
African-American and Pan-African celebration of family, community and culture, Dec. 26-Jan. 1.

Magi
Three wise men who brought gifts to the infant Jesus at Epiphany, celebrated Jan. 6.

menorah
Candelabrum with nine branches used for Hanukkah.

Messiah
Capitalized in references to Jesus or to the promised deliverer in Judaism.

Nativity scene
Only the first word is capitalized.

New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day
Capitalized for Dec. 31 and Jan. 1.

North Pole
Mythical home of Santa Claus.

poinsettia
Decorative plant for Christmas; note the “ia.”

regifting
Passing along an unwanted present to someone else.

Santa Claus
Brings toys to children in a sleigh pulled by reindeer on Christmas Eve.

“A Visit From St. Nicholas”
Beloved poem by Clement Clarke Moore that begins, “ 'Twas the night before Christmas ...”

"The Twelve Days of Christmas”
Spell the numeral in the Christmas carol.

yule
Old English name for Christmas season; yuletide is also lowercase.

Xmas
Don’t use this abbreviation for Christmas.

Publishing Jobs Available

2011-11-21T19:46:00.001-05:00

Recent Openings at the ECPA Career Center
• Associate Marketing Manager, Abingdon Press/UMPH, Nashville, TN
• Executive Director, Theological Book Network, Grand Rapids, MI
• Vice President of Marketing, Bibles, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, MI
• Editor/Proofreader, Kregel Publications, Grand Rapids, MI
• Typesetter, Kregel Publications, Grand Rapids, MI
• Content Editor, FamilyLife, Little Rock, Arkansas
• Production Coordinator, FamilyLife, Little Rock, Arkansas
• Production Design Coordinator, FamilyLife, Little Rock, Arkansas
• Project Editor, FamilyLife, Little Rock, Arkansas
• Acquisitions Editor - Nonfiction, Bethany House Publishers, Bloomington, MN
• Copy Editor for Publications and Bible Study Magazine, Logos Bible Software, Bellingham, WA
• Original Languages Copy Editor, Logos Bible Software, Bellingham, WA
• Account Executive, FrontGate Media, Rancho Santa Margarita, CA
[View and apply online at the CareerCenterForChristianPublishing.com]

Journalism Scholarships Available

2011-11-16T13:45:00.000-05:00

Journalists, Editors Eligible for $5,000 Scholarships for Religion Courses
Study Islam, Religion and Politics, War, Theology -- on us

COLUMBIA, Mo., Nov. 16, 2011 /Christian Newswire/ -- RELIGION | NEWSWRITERS invites all journalists to apply to its Lilly Scholarships in Religion Program. The scholarships give full-time journalists up to $5,000 to take any college religion courses at any accredited institution at any time.

Religion headlines are dominating news coverage -- sex abuse, religion and politics, Islam in America, Post-9/11 -- now is the perfect time to dig deeper into today's hottest stories. More than 200 people have already taken advantage of RELIGION | NEWSWRITERS' Lilly Scholarships in Religion Program for Journalists.

Topics reporters have studied include: Islamic Movements, God & Politics, Christianity and Culture, Religious Tradition and Scientific Inquiry, Buddhism and Science, Violence and Liberation, Religion and Medicine and many more.

"The courses led to dozens of story ideas and new resources. I came out a sharper researcher and writer, two benefits I was not expecting going in," said Eric Marrapodi of CNN who took four Lilly scholarship courses in the last three years at Georgetown University.

The scholarships can be used at accredited colleges, universities, seminaries or similar institutions. Journalists can choose any religion, spirituality or ethics course. Scholarships cover tuition, books, registration fees, parking and other course-related costs. Online and travel classes are also eligible (as long as travel costs are part of the curriculum).

All full-time journalists working in the general circulation news media -- including reporters, editors, designers, copy editors, editorial writers, news directors, researchers and producers -- are eligible, regardless of their beat.

The next scholarship application deadline is Jan. 1, 2012. Scholarships must be used within three academic quarters of their award date.

RELIGION | NEWSWRITERS is the world's only association for journalists who write about religion in the mainstream news media. The scholarships are offered through its non-profit arm, the Religion Newswriters Foundation, with funding from the Lilly Endowment, Inc.

Complete information about the Lilly Scholarships in Religion program is available at bit.ly/j8MOOg. Direct questions to Amy Schiska at 573-355-5201 ext. 3#, or Schiska@RNA.org.

RELIGION | NEWSWRITERS offers training and tools to help journalists cover religion with balance, accuracy and insight. Visit www.RNA.org to learn more about our RELIGION | LINK story ideas, Religion stylebook and primer, contests for religion reporting, annual conference and more.

I Am A Journalist

2011-11-09T19:58:00.003-05:00

Want a first-hand look at what young journalists are saying about their jobs?

Check this out:

http://wearejournalists.tumblr.com/

Twin Cities TV Station Loses Defamation Suit

2011-11-08T09:43:00.000-05:00

KSTP hit with $1 million defamation verdict

Article by: HERÓN MÁRQUEZ ESTRADA , Star Tribune
Updated: November 8, 2011 - 7:14 AM

A holistic healer said she was defamed by a 2009 news story.

A Dakota County jury has awarded a holistic healer from Hudson, Wis., $1 million in compensatory damages from KSTP-TV for a March 2009 story it aired about her treatment of a patient, attorneys for both sides said Monday night.

The jury's award is believed to be the largest verdict ever in a Minnesota defamation lawsuit.

Jurors made the award Friday after a weeklong trial before District Judge Richard Spicer, and returned Monday to deliberate on punitive damages. They declined to issue a punitive award.

Attorney Paul Hannah, who represented KSTP, said he based his argument against punitive damages on the fact that the $1 million compensatory award was the largest in state history for such a case and therefore sufficient punishment for the broadcaster.

"I believe that to be the case, that this is the largest," said Hannah, a prominent Minneapolis media law attorney who expects that KSTP, Channel 5 in the Twin Cities, will appeal the verdict and file motions to get it reduced or overturned.

The lawsuit also named as defendants Cheryl and Eric Blaha, former patients of the holistic healer, but the jury found that they were not liable for monetary damages.

The gist of KSTP's story was that Susan Anderson, then known as Susan Wahl, a Hudson doctor of naturopathy, had "de-prescribed" anti-anxiety medication to Cheryl Blaha. Cheryl Blaha then claimed to KSTP in interviews that she had tried to commit suicide as a result of being weaned from the medicine by Anderson.

The story was reported by KSTP's Jennifer Griswold, who declined to comment Monday night when reached by phone, saying any reaction would have to come from Hannah. Hannah said he is not sure whether KSTP plans to issue any statement regarding the verdict.

Naturopathy is an alternative medicine based on the belief that vital energy or vital forces help the body regulate such things as metabolism, reproduction and growth.

In her suit, Anderson claimed medical records indicated that Blaha's own medical doctor had reduced the medication and that there was no proof of the alleged suicide attempt, said Patrick Tierney, Anderson's lawyer.

"That was certainly the heart of it," Tierney said Monday night. "KSTP bought [Blaha's story] hook, line and sinker, and that's what this case was about."

Jury found 'actual malice'

Tierney said he has handled other defamation cases that resulted in verdicts in the high six figures, but none as large as the one against KSTP.

"It's significant," he said, noting that the jury found "actual malice" in its verdict against KSTP, which he said would make it almost impossible for the award to be overturned or reduced.

But Hannah said he will file motions in coming weeks attempting to do just that. He would not elaborate, but the possible grounds for making such post-verdict motions are that the instructions to the jury regarding the law were incorrect or that the facts did not merit such a high award.

Anderson, in a memorandum in support of the suit, claimed KSTP "knew that the story ... was false," as evidenced by pages and pages of medical records dating back to 2007.

Tierney stated that a week after the alleged suicide attempt, the woman met with her doctor "and never mentioned any suicide attempt."

He said the same records also indicate that KSTP knew the claim that Blaha's doctor did not know Blaha was weaning herself from the anti-anxiety medication was false.

Tierney said the jury awarded Anderson about $100,000 for lost earnings, past and future, and $900,000 for damage to her reputation as a result of the broadcast story.

KSTP "created a report instead of reporting on something," he said.

Minneapolis media attorney John Borger said that, although he could not say with absolute certainty that the $1 million verdict is the highest in state history, he could not think of a higher one.

Tierney, Hannah and Borger all said they know of awards in the $700,000 range, but nothing to equal this one.

"If this is not the highest, it's certainly right up there," Borger said.

StarTrib Joins Paywall Club

2011-10-31T08:50:00.001-04:00

From Minneapolis StarTribune on 10/31/11

Newspapers ask online readers to pay

Article by: DAVID PHELPS , Star Tribune
Updated: October 31, 2011 - 7:09 AM

This week the Star Tribune joins the wave of media outlets that have adopted a digital subscription model.

Newspapers are beginning to ask online readers to pay for something that for years they have gotten for free -- the news.

Within the past year, newspapers including the New York Times, Boston Globe and Dallas Morning News have adopted various digital subscription plans, or "paywalls," that require customers to be paid subscribers for unlimited access to the newspapers' content.

While there's a risk that consumers will reject paying for news online, it's one that traditional media finally are willing to take.

"It's become OK to pay for [digital] material," said Chris Wexler, group planning director for media buyer Compass Point. "As that becomes the norm, newspapers have an opportunity to do that as well."

This week, the Star Tribune will introduce a metered paywall, similar to the New York Times model, that allows readers 20 free views of articles or blogs per month before requiring a paid subscription to read further. Most Star Tribune print subscribers already get unlimited digital access.

"There was no reason not to do this from the onset [of news websites]," said Star Tribune Publisher Michael Klingensmith. "It was a mistake to go down the path that was taken. I never saw the common sense of it, to turn your back on your subscribers."

Klingensmith estimated that digital subscriptions can add 8 to 10 percent in additional revenue. In the case of the Star Tribune, that would be $3 million to $4 million a year, once the subscription model is fully functional. "It's very meaningful money with a basically marginal contribution," he said.

Growing revenue from digital subscriptions would be a huge boost for the newspaper industry, which has suffered declines in advertising and circulation, particularly in the aftermath of the Great Recession.

Since the mid-1990s, the industry has wrestled with how to build online sales, while technological advances allowed an array of competitors to siphon readers and advertising revenue. As a result, the newspaper industry is now a generation removed from the days when print was the dominant way to distribute news.

The shift by newspapers to charging for digital content has become even more critical in a technological world dominated by smartphones and digital tablets that allow readers to get their news anytime and anyplace. Those devices are compatible with pay-as-you-go subscription models. Today, consumers pay for music from the iTunes store, order electronic books or stream movies from Netflix.

Regional newspapers like the Star Tribune will have to continue providing premium coverage in areas such as local government, business, state politics, the arts community and high school sports, experts said. Investigative reporting and lively feature writing are critical as well to attracting digital subscribers.

"Sports is a big differentiator," Wexler said. "The Vikings, the Twins. Major League Baseball has a paywall that is huge. For power users, you charge for enhanced elements like video or the ability to operate on different platforms."

Dan Sullivan, a professor at the University of Minnesota's School of Journalism and Mass Communication, said smaller community newspapers also could benefit from a paywall because they do something that other major media do not -- news reporting at a grass-roots level.

"Small-town papers can pitch a paywall as a community-building activity that makes people feel more part of the community," Sullivan said.

The St. Paul Pioneer Press did not respond to inquiries about whether it would seek digital subscriptions or continue providing free content.

One advantage of a paywall is the ability of newspapers to do targeted advertising by getting more information from subscribers, similar to Google and Facebook. "Then you can track their behavior -- what stories are they reading, what are they interested in," Sullivan said. "You can marry behavior with identity."

For newspapers, however, a more fundamental question persists: Will online readers pay for the news?

A study released last week by the Pew Research Center concluded that the potential for subscription revenue from tablet users "may be limited." Only 14 percent of tablet readers will pay for news on their device, while just 25 percent said they would be willing to pay $5 a month if that was the only way to access their favorite source, the study said.

"Information is very sketchy so far," said Klingensmith. "But this is part of a transformation that needs to happen to our business model."

Earlier this year, the news website Mashable concluded that traffic on the New York Times website declined 5 to 10 percent after a paywall was implemented. But since then, the Times has seen its Sunday print circulation rise, as it bundled print and digital subscription plans.

Ultimately, part of the impact on readership will depend on how much free access the newspaper allows and how much it charges once the paywall has been reached, said Bill Mitchell of the Poynte Institute.

"If the meter is set up in a way that is annoying, you can diminish the audience," he said. "All of these pitfalls are serious, but news organizations are beginning to figure out how to adjust the meter to avoid those pitfalls."

Klingensmith is optimistic that the subscription model for digital news is here to stay. "No one has done it and canceled it," he said.

What Skills Do Journalists of the Future Need?

2011-10-09T23:10:00.002-04:00

Here is a short excerpt from a post on the skills needed by future journalists. To see the entire article, click here.

For the past two years, OurBlook.com has been conducting interviews with top experts in journalism and media about the future of journalism. In my previous post for MediaShift, I offered a collection of views about where the industry and profession is headed.

We recently began asking interviewees to outline what they see as the role and skillset of the journalist. Overall, experts agreed that the future journalist will be:

A multitasker, juggling various responsibilities and roles, many which may have nothing to do with "traditional" journalism.
Technologically savvy, having at least a basic understanding of programming, web tools, and web culture.
A gatekeeper for a particular beat, directing readers to the most current and trustworthy news, regardless of who wrote it or where it's housed.
A versatile storyteller, who knows how to present a story online in various formats.
A brand and a community manager, who cultivates a constant and interactive conversation with their readership.

Watergate Figure Kenneth Dahlberg Dies

2011-10-06T10:27:00.002-04:00

Kenneth Dahlberg died this week. Because of his role in Watergate, and because you saw the film "All the President's Men," I thought you might be interested in this portion of an article on him from the Mpls StarTribune.

During an eventful life that spanned nearly a century, Kenneth H. Dahlberg went from a one-room schoolhouse to aerial heroism during World War II and then to vast success as a Twin Cities businessman.

But it was his brief cameo role in the Watergate scandal nearly 40 years ago that remained a footnote to his life that never really went away.

Dahlberg, a Deephaven resident who founded what became the Miracle-Ear hearing aid company and bankrolled other companies, died Tuesday. He was 94.

"His attitude was that Watergate made good copy, and that's how journalism works," said Warren Mack, who wrote a biography of Dahlberg. "Ken understood that, and even though it was a source of pain for [his wife], Ken never really saw it that way."

Paul Waldon, who worked for Dahlberg nearly 25 years, remembered him as "a patriot, businessperson and entrepreneur who was always trying to do the right thing. ... He was the real deal."

A daughter, Dede Disbrow, also called Dahlberg "a patriot -- he bled red, white and blue."

Born in St. Paul, Dahlberg grew up on a farm near Wilson, Wis., attending a one-room school before moving back to the city to finish his education at an accredited high school. After working for several years in the hotel industry, he was drafted shortly before the United States entered the war.

Shot down three times

He became a fighter pilot and on June 2, 1944, four days before D-Day, he arrived in England to join the 354th Fighter Group, flying P-51 Mustangs to support the invasion.

Credited with 15 aerial victories, Dahlberg was shot down three times behind enemy lines, escaped twice and sat out the last few months of the war as a POW in Stalag VII-A near Munich. Among other military honors, he received a Distinguished Flying Cross.

After the war, he went to work for a firm called Telex, which made hearing aids and other communications equipment. He started his own company in 1948, which became Miracle-Ear, a firm he later sold to go into the venture capital business. Among the companies he invested in was the Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant chain.

"He comes out of World War II with a thousand dollars of back pay [from] when he was a POW and was willing and able to do anything," Waldon said. "He wanted to do whatever he could to make the republic better."

In his years working for Dahlberg, Waldon recalls what he called "Ken-isms," including: "He always lived life on the edge and said if you're not, you're not using up your allotted space."

He also dabbled in politics. Dahlberg's political activities grew out of a wartime friendship with Barry Goldwater, who had been one of his aviation instructors. Dahlberg was a deputy chairman of fundraising for the Arizona Republican's presidential campaign in 1964.

No Watergate wrongdoing

As the Midwest finance chairman of President Richard Nixon's 1972 re-election campaign, Dahlberg was pulled into the Watergate scandal even though he engaged in no wrongdoing. He became linked to the scandal after a $25,000 check he delivered to the Nixon campaign turned up in a Watergate burglar's bank account, tying Nixon to the break-in.

The contribution, which was legal, had come from Dwayne Andreas, a native of Worthington, Minn., who was former chairman of Archer-Daniels-Midland.

Dahlberg was cleared by a grand jury of any wrongdoing, but his role in Watergate was parlayed into a moment of high drama in the movie that documented the scandal, "All the President's Men."

One scene shows Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward phoning Dahlberg to ask about the check, eliciting a tense standoff, though no allegations are made against Dahlberg.

At one point, as the White House tapes later revealed, Nixon's chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, mentioned Dahlberg's role to Nixon, to which the president responded, "Who the hell is Ken Dahlberg?"

Mack, a longtime friend of Dahlberg who wrote his biography, "One Step Forward: The Life of Ken Dahlberg," said that he didn't mention Watergate in the book "because it's still uncomfortable for Betty Jayne [Dahlberg's wife]. There was always this implication that he did something wrong."

Mack added that Dahlberg himself lamented that Watergate overshadowed his accomplishments in battle and in business. "He was just the victim of circumstance," Mack said.

'Flying right up to the end'

Flying remained a passion throughout Dahlberg's life. He served with the Minnesota Air National Guard until 1951, was inducted into the Minnesota and Arizona Aviation Halls of Fame, and continued flying -- either as pilot or co-pilot -- into his 90s.

"He was flying right up to the end -- he was still so good at it," Disbrow said. "And he was a funny guy -- I'd take him for rides around the lake in a convertible and he'd ask why I couldn't afford a car with a roof."

Along with his wife of 64 years and Disbrow, survivors include another daughter, Nancy Dahlberg; son K. Jeffrey Dahlberg; brother Arnold Dahlberg, and sisters Marcella Savage and Harriet Dolny.

Young White Girls--Sex, Violence, and the Media

2011-10-05T13:48:00.003-04:00

Here's a really interesting analysis of the public's fascination (and the journalists' judgment) about young women and crime stories:

"Foxy Knoxy": Sex, violence and media hysteria

Editor's Note: Sarah Stillman, a visiting scholar at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, is the recipient of their inaugural Reporting Award. She recently published The Invisible Army in The New Yorker. Check out her website here.

By Sarah Stillman – Special to CNN

There is something about pretty white girls, bloody knives and the slightest whiff of sex that gets the international news machine humming like nothing else. All three factors merged explosively Monday in a crowded appeals court in Perugia, Italy. There, before several hundred journalists and other spectators, American college student Amanda Knox, 24, was cleared of murdering her study-abroad roommate, Meredith Kercher, in a sexually-motivated crime four years ago. Already, feature film rights to Knox’s story are flying, and book publishers, too, are salivating.

Until recently, the prevailing explanation for “Foxy Knoxy’s” guilt had been a surreal one. A game of rough sex went terribly wrong that evening in 2007, alleged Italian prosecutors. The young American student, her boyfriend and a local immigrant man were behind the perverse ordeal - or so echoed tabloids and reputable papers on both sides of the Atlantic - ending up in Kercher’s bloody death.

This orgy-centered narrative was bandied about by lawyers in the Italian courtroom, as were terms like “she-devil” and “witch.” But was any of it true? After four years of Knox’s incarceration based on an increasingly shaky set of extracted confessions and problematic forensic evidence, prosecutors’ made-for-late-night version of the crime has finally been snuffed this week. Knox, now officially freed, is heading home to Seattle.

All this has left the press to ask, somewhat sheepishly: were mainstream theories about Knox’s guilt driven primarily, as Slate.com’s Katie Crouch argued last month, by our collective lust for a kinky tale?

This hypothesis, it turns out, does have some historical weight behind it. Since the advent of the penny press nearly two centuries ago, American journalists have done some of their briskest business when selling tales of unlikely female perpetrators - the more frail and photogenic, the better. With each successive decade, the “girl killer” genre of true crime reporting has hewed more and more closely to the fading industry model of d-list porn films: a sloppy mash-up of stock characters (the femme fatale, the lesbian psycho-slasher, etc.) prone either to overly-hasty climaxes, or, inversely, to long, drawn-out sagas that test the stamina of even the most dedicated voyeurs.

Here, briefly, are four women in American history whose sensational murder and assault trials became, much like Knox’s, vehicles for serving our most base collective appetites, sometimes spawning whole industries unto themselves and often reflecting larger cultural battles.

1. Alice Mitchell: “Girl Slays Girl”

On January 25th, 1892, a young Memphis teen named Alice Mitchell allegedly attacked her former “girl lover,” Freda Ward, with a knife, slitting her throat. Her motivation? Perverted love sickness, according to the feverish press coverage that began locally but quickly spread across the state, and then the country. American readers, it turned out, were fascinated by the prospect of female sexual deviance at the turn of the century, at a time when young women were first entering public life en masse as workers, consumers, and sexual agents, increasingly bending the rules of traditional gender roles.

The trial sparked the production of hundreds of lurid articles about the two lovers (“Girl Slays Girl”!), medical studies on the disputed topic of Ward’s insanity, folk ballads and a whole raft of other cultural products detailed in Lisa Duggan’s brilliant Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity. It ultimately culminated in Mitchell’s conviction, followed by her psychiatric hospitalization, with the judge calling the crime “the most atrocious and malignant ever perpetrated by a woman.”

2. Lizzie Borden: The Girl of Forty Whacks

Just one year later, America was gripped by an even more sensationalized trial: that of Lizzie Borden, a young woman from Fall River, Massachusetts, charged with killing her father and stepmother with a hatchet. Borden’s case, too, sparked a veritable cottage industry of commentary, with hundreds of reporters covering each twist in the trial and dozens more writing books about Borden’s surprising acquittal. Again, speculation after the trial was rife about Borden’s sexual identity (was she dating female silent film star Nance O’Neil?!), as well as her sanity.

More than a century later, Borden still features in children’s jump rope rhymes (“Lizzie Borden took an axe/and gave her mother forty whacks…”), academic dissertations, award-winning documentaries, themed bed-and-breakfast retreats and a well-reviewed punk rock musical, “Lizzie Borden: A Musical Tragedy in Two Axe.” Most recently, HBO announced the development of a mini-series based around the lurid murder, starring Hollywood it-girl Chloe Sevigny, who apparently regards Borden as a “countercultural icon.”

3. Patty Hearst: Good Girl Gone Armed

How did Patty Hearst cross the line from being a perfect girl-victim to an unforgivable girl-perpetrator? Around 9 pm on February 4th, 1974, the 19-year-old heiress to the Hearst family publishing fortune was kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley, California, where she sat with her fiancé in her blue bathrobe. After ten weeks of captivity in the hands of the radical Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), Hearst was photographed participating in the armed robbery of a San Francisco bank; in a stunning turnaround, she appeared to have joined her captors as a self-proclaimed “urban guerilla.” Next came a sensational courtroom drama that many deemed “the trial of the century,” in which Hearst was found guilty of bank robbery despite pleas of having been brainwashed and sexually traumatized by the SLA.

Her case helped to popularize the psychological theory of “Stockholm syndrome,” sparking a national debate about its legitimacy as a legal defense. In Patty’s Got a Gun: Patricia Hearst in 1970s America, William Graebner, Hearst’s biographer, contends that the case also caught on because it provided audiences with a convenient symbol of what many Americans, particularly those on the right, feared most about 1970’s counterculture: “[F]eminism run amok, armed and sexualized; the pathology of left-wing politics; the arrogance of the moneyed elite; the coddling of criminals,” and so much more.

4. Casey Anthony: Murderous “Tot Mom”

The most recent contender for the category of femme fatale of the century, Casey Anthony, is still woefully fresh in the American consciousness. This past summer, the pert young single mom from Florida stood accused of killing her two-year-old daughter, Caylee. When Anthony was acquitted in early July, many pundits visibly seethed at their certitude that a villainous “tot mom” had escaped her rightful due, with cable news star Nancy Grace erupting in an impassioned anti-Anthony tantrum that went viral.

But Anthony’s saga, and all the attention it garnered, also sparked a counter-trend: vocal and often eloquent critiques of the 24/7 news cycle that has made a lucrative enterprise of sensationalizing stories of young white female victims and perpetrators, while ignoring countless other cases of equal moral gravity (say, crimes committed against non-white, non-poster-child populations).

So perhaps kink doesn’t get the last word. Knox’s acquittal in Italian appeals court seems, at least for the moment, to mark the defeat of a racy narrative that privileged Hustler-ready “let’s imagine if…’s” over solid facts. It may even portend that accountability in well-publicized cases like hers - and, in a more surprising way, the recent case of Troy Davis - is now, more than ever, susceptible to global intervention, not just by lawyers and mainstream journalists, but also by a growing cadre of bloggers, social media users, and all manner of citizen journalists who’ve come to realize that justice doesn’t always coincide with the juiciest story.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of Sarah Stillman.

Who Has Faster Internet Than the U.S.?

2011-10-01T12:56:00.000-04:00

Guess who has faster Internet than the U.S.

South Korea, Moldova and Congo, just to name a few. There are 25 countries with faster Internet than the US. We’re ranked right behind Hungary.

A new report, from online content delivery service Pando Networks, notes that the U.S. now ranks 26th worldwide for Internet speed, putting it just behind Hungary. That country’s gross domestic product of $129 billion, according to the most recent data from the International Monetary Fund, makes it the 56th-largest economy in the world, sandwiched between Qatar and Bangladesh. (The U.S., the world’s largest economy, has a GDP of $14.6 trillion.)

South Korea, with a GDP of $1 trillion, has the fastest Internet speeds in the world.

What do Facebook Changes Mean for Journalists?

2011-09-27T15:54:00.001-04:00

Here is an interesting article on how the recent changes in Facebook will affect journalists (mostly positive). This is justhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif the first several paragraphs--to read the entire article,

Facebook has released several updates in the last month that will affect how journalists use the platform for reporting and storytelling. Many of these new features will make it easier for journalists to distribute their content and keep up with sources of information.

Some of the relevant changes for journalists include Subscribe, which enables readers to subscribe to journalists’ public updates, and a redesigned News Feed — complete with a newly introduced Ticker for real-time updates that makes it easier to keep up with the news that’s most important to you. The new lists also make it easier for you to target updates to a specific group of people, and to see a customized stream of news from them.

New Pew Study on Where People Get News

2011-09-26T10:31:00.002-04:00

Note the paragraphs on the newspaper:

‘Word of mouth,’ as news source, gains on local TV broadcasts, Pew says

By Paul Farhi, Published: September 25

It’s hardly news that local TV newscasts are the most popular source of community information. Surveys and Nielsen ratings have shown that for years.

But the second most widely followed source of local news isn’t the newspaper, radio or the Internet. It’s the oldest and most basic form of human communication: word of mouth.

The importance of neighbors, friends and co-workers as information transmitters is highlighted in a new study that suggests that the dinner table, the back fence and the water cooler make up the ultimate social network, over which some of the most important and relevant news is transmitted.

Word of mouth outranked every new and traditional form of news media except local TV news as the most frequently consulted news source in the study, released Monday by the Pew Research Center and the Knight Foundation. Their report suggests people get news about their communities through a complex “information ecology” that involves multiple sources and media, some mass and some interpersonal.

The role of human-to-human communication in news is both obvious — people have always told stories to one another — and revelatory, primarily because data and studies have long focused on the news media, not on all of the ways news actually gets around.

Local TV news still sits atop the information pyramid, according to the study, but its role is narrow and even fading. In a nationwide survey of 2,251 people, 74 percent said they turned to local TV news at least once a week to get information about their community, more than any other source.

Word of mouth ranked second (55 percent), followed by radio (51), newspapers (50) and the Internet (47). The latter category includes search engines, social networks such as Facebook, and blogs and Web sites not associated with a traditional media source such as a TV station or newspaper.

Marketers have always known that word-of-mouth advertising, or buzz, is critical to selling a product, but its role in news hasn’t been well studied.

The quality of word-of-mouth information, of course, varies considerably from the kind one gets via professional reporters (as the wildly inaccurate character who reports “Second-Hand News” on “Saturday Night Live” demonstrates).

On the other hand, interpersonal news usually comes from a known and trusted source, and helps people “triangulate” or vet information that may have been reported by the mass media, said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, one of two Pew-funded organizations behind the research. It also may be far more specific and personal than anything the media can provide, he said, such as who’s the best fourth-grade teacher at the local school.

Local TV news ranked as the leading information source in the study primarily because it’s the go-to medium for the handful of subjects people said they followed most: weather, breaking news, politics and crime. Weather was, by far, the most widely followed among the 16 topics researchers asked about, with 89 percent of adults saying they keep up with weather news.

But TV ranks low as a source on many other topics, such as news about businesses, schools, government and cultural events. And its appeal is primarily to people over 40; younger people say they are increasingly getting their news from other sources, such as the Internet and mobile phones.

Newspapers, meanwhile, were the most widely cited source for a wide variety of topics, though the topics were generally of lesser interest. Newspapers (print and online) ranked first or tied for first in 11 of the 16 news categories that researchers asked about, such as government, cultural events, schools and housing (sports was not on the list because researchers determined the term implied too many variables, including professional, college, high school, youth and participant sports).

Despite this, the news for newspapers seems ominous. Some 69 percent of the people surveyed said that if their local paper no longer existed, it wouldn’t have a major impact on their ability to learn about news in their community.

Word-of-mouth information tends to fill in gaps in the media infrastructure. Its importance rises the less a subject is covered. A Brookings Institution study this year, for example, found that “family and friends” were the most popular and highly regarded providers of education news.

“People rely on people they know because there’s no other source for a lot of this information,” said Russ Whitehurst, a co-author of the Brookings report. The track record of a local school or teacher “isn’t in the newspaper or online.”

The poll in Pew’s study, “How People Learn About Their Local Community,” has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.

Working Hard and Owning the Business

2011-09-26T08:44:00.004-04:00

Here's a very interesting post from a seasoned journalist who has some very accurate observations about the issue of startupshttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif, working for a hyperlocal news site, and having your own business. See the original by clicking here.

You should only work this hard if you own the business

Posted on September 24, 2011 by Howard Owens

The list of duties for Patch editors in this Romenesko post is pretty much the job description for every local news site owner I know, at least the ones making a living at it.

When I’ve written about the number of hours I put into my business critics have said I don’t have a business model, my business isn’t “sustainable,” and so on.

Of course, this is coming from people who probably don’t want to work that hard, preferring the good old corporatism days of journalism with secure 9-5 jobs, two weeks paid vacation and dental coverage. Those days are disappearing, but the knock against hyperlocal start ups is that they’re not staffed as bodaciously as the newsrooms they may or may not replace.

To the second point, my response remains: Newspapers started small, cheap and with different standards. No newspaper started with staffs of dozens and a raft of Pulitzers. To hold an online-only start up to those standards is just plain daft.

To the issue of hard work, yes it’s hard work to start your own business, and I figure the critics of the online start ups have never dealt much with small business owners.

I deal with them every day, and for any of them that started their own businesses, they will readily tell you of the 100-hour work weeks, the weeks of just barely getting by and the impossibly long to-do lists. The hardships and sacrifices just go with the territory of starting your own business.

But here’s the thing about the work load for Patch editors: They’re not owners. They are expected to do all of the things they would have to do if they owned their own web sites, but merely in service of building wealth for AOL shareholders. Sure, work hard and keep your job is a nice benefit, and as a former corporate employee I think employees have an ethical obligation to help build shareholder value. That’s what they’re paid to do.

I’ve also been critical of corporate employees who aren’t willing to put in a little extra effort to help a project succeed.

However, if what we’re hearing is true about the Patch workload, I can only ask: Why are you doing it?

Patch editors should know that what they’re being asked to do on salary they could do for themselves far more successfully and with some chance of building a valuable business for themselves and their families.

I’m not writing this to wish Patch ill. I am not one to hope for anyone’s failure. I’m writing this for the sake of the seemingly overburdened Patch editors, and asking, “Why not just start your own local news site?”

Jump on in, the water’s fine.

On This Day . . . 1690 and 1789

2011-09-25T14:26:00.002-04:00

From Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac for Sunday, September 25:

On this day in 1690, the colonies' first multipaged newspaper was printed in Boston, named Publick Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestick.

It was also its last printing; gossip about the immoralities of the King of France and a denouncement of the mistreatment of French captives in the French and Indian War angered the local government. Four days after the paper's distribution, the governor and council issued a statement that the paper be "Suppressed and called in," and decreed that any future publications must be first authorized. America's first paper was also its first to be censored.

On this day in 1789, the First Federal Congress of the United States proposed 12 amendments to the recently ratified Constitution. Ten of them were ultimately adopted to become what's known as the Bill of Rights.

The amendments were the result of a major compromise between opposing factions, the Federalists — who thought the Constitution was a sound and sufficient document — and the Anti-Federalists, who worried that it gave far too much power to the central government and didn't protect individual freedoms. The two sides were at an impasse, and the Constitution was at risk of being rejected, until an agreement was reached that, if the Constitution was ratified, Congress would add on a bill of rights.

The Federalists believed the addition was unnecessary, and the anti-Federalists believed it wasn't enough ... but both sides conceded for the sake of the common good.
The first two amendments, concerning the number of constituents and the payment for Congressmen, were rejected.

The other 10, each a single sentence, provided for such rights as the freedom of speech and religion, the right to bear arms, the right to a speedy trial by jury without cruel or unusual punishment, and the right of states to govern themselves in any way not expressly prohibited by the Constitution.

An additional 17 amendments have been added to the Constitution since then. The most recent one, passed in 1992, was that second article proposed and rejected back in 1789, delaying any change to Congress's pay until the following session. The very first article proposed is still pending before state legislatures.

As the anonymous saying goes, "Democracy is cumbersome, slow and inefficient, but in due time, the voice of the people will be heard and their latent wisdom will prevail."

Could Reporters Be Replaced by Computers?

2011-09-23T09:13:00.002-04:00

Here's a really fascinating new technology which may help you a great deal in future reporting of board and council meetings, etc.

Narrative Science – Closer to a True Robot Reporter?

by Alex Salkever

The New York Times recently published an in-depth article about Narrative Science, a fascinating startup founded by two computer scientists who are also journalism professors at Northwestern University, and a veteran executive from DoubleClick. Their product is a software engine that can, given a box score, a crime log, or a real estate transaction, generate a brief , well-written news article in the classic who-what-when-where-why canon. While not works of art, these articles are credible and often beat what human scribes have to offer.

I wrote about Narrative Science a back in June for Street Fight, contemplating whether its application would fuel a truly 100% automated hyperlocal paper. In the Times piece, we got some more tantalizing detail. A Y Combinator backed startup called Market Brief is now using Narrative Science to turn thousands of daily Securities and Exchange Commission filings into moderately readable, albeit grindingly bland briefs. (In all fairness to Narrative Science, consider the original source of the information.)This is very interesting. but also highlights a major weakness of Narrative Science as a hyperlocal news generator. The SEC articles are primarily about transactions. The Narrative Science news engine cannot make inferences or logical leaps—yet.

The articles don’t note that the executive who sold 100,000 shares of stock in his brother’s company did the same thing two months before the company reported bad earnings last year. Okay, I’m making that part up—but you get the idea. The computer could also write up transcripts of city council meetings, but could it pick out the news nuggets, the bombs hidden in the footnotes of the agenda that a human reporter might know to highlight?

Not yet, but it can allow reporters to focus on those nuggets rather than on the drudgery of turns-of-the-screw reporting that is important to put the public record in a more accessible and searchable formate. And I have confidence that the Narrative Science guys have a tricks up their sleeves still. So stay tuned.

Journalistic 'Oopsies'

2011-09-21T11:46:00.000-04:00

This is great! See the video at http://www.cnn.com/2011/IREPORT/09/21/journalism.fails.irpt/index.html?hpt=hp_c2

(CNN) -- Journalism can be an unforgiving profession. Mistakes are easy to make, and they're usually made publicly, which means red faces and awkward apologies all around. The only comfort is that everybody -- EVERYBODY -- makes them at some point.

We'll prove it to you. Here are nine CNN journalists -- including anchor Brooke Baldwin, in the video above -- sharing their most embarrassing professional moments and what they learned from them.

Actually record

It doesn't matter how awesome your interview is if you don't have a record of it. Steve Goldberg, a CNN senior producer, learned that one the hard way.

"I was covering UGA for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and had a big interview lined up with the university president," he says. "I went in with my tape recorder, took only brief notes, only to get back to the office and discovered that the batteries had died and I didn't have a recording."

So Goldberg had to swallow his pride and go back to the university. "I asked sheepishly if I could redo the interview and, much to my surprise, he said yes. Lesson learned: Make sure I put in fresh batteries before the big interview!"

It's critical to make sure you're intimately familiar with your equipment before you go out in the field to avoid such mistakes.(Mistakes, by the way, that many a CNNer have admitted to making.) And along those lines, make sure you actually, you know, hit record. (Yup, we've done that, too.)

Check your facts -- and your geography

CNN.com designer Ken Uzquiano single-handedly ceded Wales to England. True story.

He created a map of the UK to go along with a crime story on CNN.com. The only problem was, he left off Wales, instead marking the country as part of England.

"Within two minutes, it was all over the blogs," Uzquiano remembers.

And indeed it was. The UK-based tech blog The Register wrote:

"We have some bad news for those of you who woke up this morning thinking you were Welsh: As of right now, you're English, and you'd just better get used to the idea. ... Although the offending map has now been removed, when we rang the Welsh Assembly this morning a very glum spokesperson admitted, 'If CNN says we're English then it must be true.' "

Always have someone -- preferably someone with knowledge of the subject -- look over your stories before you make them public. And double-check your locators, because there's a Decatur in almost every state, and you want to make sure you're talking about the right one.

Name (the right) names

CNN video producer Jo Parker had painstakingly checked her facts. She'd gotten both sides of the story. She'd included fantastic, descriptive quotes. Only one problem: She was writing about the wrong guy.

"As a fairly new reporter, I was covering my first town council meeting. I was really proud of the way I'd balanced the story and included terrific quotes," Parker remembers. "I was trying hard to gain credibility, since the previous reporter had irritated local officials by being careless with balance and fairness issues."

"The next day, the story came out. Before I could finish patting myself on the back, I realized that I'd written about a town council member -- but used the local district attorney's name." Oops.

Parker says the mistake taught her to immediately admit the error, take responsibility and apologize as soon as possible. But, perhaps most importantly, "triple-check the things you 'know,' " she says.

Listen up

If you work in TV, you know that live segments have incredible potential for embarrassing screw-ups. CNN iReport producer Rachel Rodriguez was getting ready to present a somber story when she heard the anchor give her an unexpectedly lighthearted intro.

"It was Memorial Day, and I was doing a piece about soldiers we'd lost, so it was a really sad, serious story," she says. "I don't know how the anchor got the wrong information, but she gave me an intro along the lines of 'It's a beautiful Memorial Day outside, and everyone's picnicking and enjoying the lovely weather! CNN iReport's Rachel Rodriguez has more on how people are taking advantage of this gorgeous day! Rachel!' "

Rodriguez remembers the pit in her stomach growing as she heard the intro on her earpiece.

"There was no graceful way out of it," she says. "I just had to take control and turn the conversation around as best I could without making it sound like we were making light of the deaths of soldiers."

The key to recouping? Listen. Whether you're conducting an interview or narrating a segment, make sure you're paying attention to the other person and not just mindlessly reading your notes (or the teleprompter). Chances are, you'll need to react to something they say.

Put everything in context

CNN iReport producer David Williams found a creative -- if entirely unintentional -- way to combine two hot entertainment topics in 2006: Madonna and "Snakes on a Plane."

He was filling in for the entertainment producer, and it was "at the height of the 'Snakes on a Plane' hysteria," Williams remembers. "We ran a story about snake handlers having to deal with large amounts of snake poop during production. I gave it the brilliant but juvenile headline 'Poop on a Plane' and went on with my day."

His fatal flaw? "I didn't really think about how this would look on the CNN.com homepage," he says.

"The headline above it was about Madonna causing a stir in Germany," says Williams. "It looked sort of like this: German authorities watching Madonna poop on a plane. The fine folks at Gawker had a good time with it."

Amusing, but whether you're writing headlines or choosing quotes to go in a story, the lesson is the same: Take the time to think about the context for your words. Often, that will shape how you use them.

The devil is in the details

"When CNN first started going to a system of running videos off of computer codes, it was easy to get the eight-digit numbers mixed up," says CNN senior producer Tricia Escobedo. I think you can tell where this story is going.

"One day, when I was a TV writer for CNN International, two of the top stories were the annual 'running of the bulls' in Pamplona, Spain, and some sort of violence in the Middle East," Escobedo recalls. "I wrote the story for the anchor to read on CNNI over the video of the deadly violence, but inadvertently put in the number for the running of the bulls. I was horrified when I heard the anchor read about mayhem in the Middle East -- and saw the video of a bunch of crazed bulls chasing after some nutty tourists!"

"So the lesson is: Check those minor details and logistics," she says. "They can lead to major mess-ups."

Relax

Ah, internships. Time and scene of so many mistakes. Well, let's call them "learning experiences."

Toward the beginning of his career, CNN video copy editor James Dinan interned with the news department of a radio station in Newton, New Jersey.

"After a couple of days learning the ropes and staying out of trouble, I was offered the chance to cover one of the World Cup soccer games from Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey," Dinan recalls. "It was a simple task -- do a live spot about the game itself, as well as record one or two features about the sights and sounds surrounding the game."

Remember what we said earlier about live segments having excellent potential for mess-ups? Yeah.

"It was time for my live shot, and I was prepared. Or so I thought," Dinan says. "The first words out of my mouth...

"Italy rebounded from its opening match defeat by upending Norwegia, 1-0.

"Norwegia? Wasn't that a fictitious country featured in 'Duck Soup' or a Three Stooges short?" he jokes. "I was supposed to say Norway, but I had Norwegian on the brain and, somehow, the two managed to fuse together into a made-up word."

Luckily, Dinan's boss let him cover another game, Ireland vs. Norway, and he pronounced the country's name perfectly the second time around. His slip-up is a reminder not to psych yourself out before going on camera -- and not to worry too much about the little things.

Read it out loud

Here at CNN, we get our fair share of prank phone calls with super-fun fake names. But even if it's not a prank name, it helps to stop and think about -- and pronounce out loud -- any name you come across.

"In my first job in journalism, among the many things I had to do at a teeny-tiny paper was edit an advice column written by the newsroom staff," says CNN senior editor Jan Winburn. "People called in questions, and the newsroom secretary transcribed them and handed them around to staffers to track down answers."

One day, someone called in the following question: "I would like to find out why Jack Hammers and his equipment are allowed to work at 4 a.m. on Clinkscales and Worley and disturb people's sleep." See where this is going?

"The reporter who got this question dutifully called the city public works department and wrote an answer something to the effect that no one at the department was aware of anyone working at that intersection," says Winburn. "The joke, of course, is that she transcribed the question off the phone as Jack Hammers instead of jackhammer ... and I didn't catch it!" Winburn has kept the clip for more than 10 years.

Pro tip: It always helps to read your stories out loud, even if you're writing for print. Not only does it help make the writing flow, it makes it easier to catch embarrassing errors. And always have a second person read over your story.

Sports Events This Week

2011-09-19T13:59:00.001-04:00

If you have not yet written your sports-coverage article, here are a listing of Lancer sporting events the remainder of this week:

Tuesday, September 20
4p M Tennis Away vs. Goshen College
4p W Tennis Home vs. Goshen College

Wednesday, September 21
4p W Soccer Home vs. Holy Cross
7p M Soccer Away vs. Indiana Tech
7p W Volleyball Away vs. Marian Univ.

Friday, September 23
7p W Volleyball Home vs. Spring Arbor University

Saturday, September 24
10a JV/V Baseball Away vs. Ancilla
1p M Tennis Home vs. Huntington
1p W Volleyball Home vs. Taylor University
2p W Tennis Away vs. Huntington
3p M Soccer Away vs. Huntington
Softball Grace Tournament Home

Press and the Future of Religion

2011-09-14T09:10:00.002-04:00

How do you respond to this information/analysis by Chuck Colson?

The Press and the Future of Religion

By Chuck Colson | Christian Post Guest Columnist

The United States is often referred to as a “post-Christian” nation. In one sense, that is true: The moral and cultural assumptions shaped by Christianity that used to hold sway in American society, can no longer be taken for granted. They must be defended and contended for in the public square.

But that’s not the same as saying that Americans are becoming more like Europeans when it comes to matters like church attendance or belief in a personal God. In many ways the shift in cultural assumptions I just noted is taking place in spite of what Americans believe and do, not because of them.

You would be hard-pressed to know this judging from media reports. These reports seize on any bit of evidence, however suspect, to promote the thesis that Americans are becoming more “secular.” Every few months we are told about some new study that purports to show how secularism and even atheism is on the march.

We are supposed to conclude that instead of going to church our children will spend Sunday mornings reading the holographic edition of the New York Times on their iPad 15 while sipping a latte made from coffee beans grown hydroponically in zero gravity.

It’s a tidy, convenient story. But unfortunately for its tellers, it just doesn't square with the facts.

That’s what two of my favorite researchers, Rodney Stark and Byron Johnson of Baylor, recently told the Wall Street Journal. The flip side to the media’s pouncing on any finding of our alleged drift away from religion is its “yawning” over findings to the contrary.

One such finding is a Baylor survey showing that the percentage of Americans who are atheist – 4 percent – is the same as it was in 1944. And that same survey showed that “church membership has reached an all-time high.”

Again, if all you had to go on is what you read or heard in the mainstream media, both of these facts would come as a surprise to you. The media, you see, uncritically trumpets reports that “young people under 30 are deserting the church in droves,” but they don’t go on to tell you that, “once they marry . . . and especially once they have children, their attendance rates recover.”

Likewise, reports about the politics of younger evangelicals are, to put it charitably, selective in their reading of the evidence.

Neither Stark, Johnson, nor I are suggesting that some kind of conspiracy is at work. What we see here is the human tendency to view evidence in ways that comport with our worldview.

Secularists, both outside and inside the media, see decreasing religiosity as the wave of the future, an inevitable byproduct of cultural refinement and evolution. So they naturally gravitate towards stories that confirm that hypothesis.

It doesn't help that the press “doesn't get religion.” Newsrooms are filled with people who don’t know believers and, thus, don’t have real-world experience with the phenomenon they assume is on the decline. They are strikingly uninformed. So much so that they’re calling orthodox Christians “theocrats,” as I've discussed in another commentary.

But, as Stark and Johnson remind us, you can’t always believe what you read in the newspapers. The reports from the real America are very encouraging. Millions of us are practicing the faith and passing it on to our children.

That’s a fact that even bad reporting won’t be able to change.

'Holy Trinity' of News Helps Small-Town Papers

2011-09-13T20:16:00.000-04:00

Newspaper Deathwatch, Newspapers
Small-Town Newspapers Thrive as the Big Boys Fade
By Matthew Fleischer on September 13, 2011 12:59 PM

USC Annenberg journalism professor Judy Muller has an op-ed in today’s LA Times lauding America’s small-town newspapers. which she says are “doing just fine, thank you,” despite the collapse of their larger, big-city brethren.

Some 8,000 weekly papers still hit the front porches and mailboxes in small towns across America every week and, for some reason, they’ve been left out of the conversation. So a couple of years ago, I decided to head back to my roots, both geographic and professional (my first job was at a weekly), to see how those community papers were faring. And what I found was both surprising and inspiring. …

The “holy trinity” of weekly papers consists of high school sports (where even losing teams benefit from positive spin), obituaries (where there’s no need to speak ill of the dead because everyone in town already knows if the deceased was a jerk) and the police blotter. The latter can be addictive, even to outsiders. These items, often lifted intact from the dispassionate log of the sheriff’s dispatcher, are the haikus of Main Street: “Caller states that there is a 9-year-old boy out mowing the lawn next door and feels that is endangering the child in doing so when the mother is perfectly capable of doing it herself.” Or: “Man calls to report wife went missing 3 months ago.”

She’s right. This Fishie hated his hometown, but still checks the police blotter of the local paper from time to time to see if anyone he knows is in there. Although apparently my local paper is bucking the trend. According to Muller most papers aren’t giving their content away for free online. Which is why they’ve been able to thrive. We’ll see how long that lasts. Probably until Patch gets its act together and figures out a way to gut their advertising base.

Looks like local papers may still have a good amount of time.

Disgraced Journalist Publishes Book on His Experience

2011-09-10T19:26:00.001-04:00

From today's Fort Wayne News-Sentinel:

Ex-Bush aide's book shows power of faith, redemption
Goeglein covers plagiarism scandal and 9/11 in volume to be released this week

By Kevin Leininger
of The News-Sentinel

Tim Goeglein has written a book.

To those who somehow found perverse pleasure in the revelation three years ago that he had plagiarized portions of at least 27 columns published in The News-Sentinel – resulting in his abrupt resignation as a White House aide – those six words are sure to resurrect old snickers and sarcasm.

The 48-year-old Fort Wayne native knows that better than anyone, but is willing to endure it because he believes “Man in the Middle: an Inside Account of Faith and Politics in the George W. Bush Era” (B&H Publishing Group) contains important and timely truths about one man's redemption and an entire nation's soul.

The book's release this coming Thursday – just four days after the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks – is coincidental but perhaps also providential. The events of that day are prominent in the book, just as Goeglein, now a vice president with Focus on the Family, was prominent in shaping the administration's response in a way that foreshadowed the unexpected grace he would experience during his darkest hour seven years later.

As deputy director of the White House Office of Public Liaison, Goeglein was indeed Bush's “man in the middle” – “the reliable, loyal conduit for the president's agenda to the outside groups,” he writes – especially the Republican's conservative, religious base. Goeglein's contacts proved invaluable after 9/11, when he helped plan the prayer service at Washington's National Cathedral.

The resulting interfaith service, which featured not only Bush and Christian clerics but also Muslims, Hindus and members of other faiths, demonstrated national unity but also reaffirmed the intrinsically American notion that liberty is guaranteed not by government, but by God, he said.

In his first newspaper interview about the book, Goeglein said one of his goals was to share insights into how a president he clearly admired was guided by faith when dealing with profound issues such as stem-cell research, the appointment of two Supreme Court justices, and the terrorist attacks that claimed thousands of lives and continue to shape our domestic and foreign policies.

But Goeglein doesn't get around to 9/11 until the eighth chapter. He begins the 227-page book (after a brief prologue and a foreword by Bush political guru Karl Rove) by writing about his childhood and parents Stan and Shirley, who still live in Fort Wayne, and how he betrayed those he loved most by claiming other people's work as his own.

That lie began to unravel in 2008 when he opened an email from a reporter who wanted to know if the plagiarism rumor was true. “I knew instantly this would be the most impossible day of my life ... My only prayer was, ‘God help me,' ” he wrote. "Every one of the values I was raised by ... I had violated completely ... I resigned that afternoon, writing a personal letter of apology to the president ... (and) departed the White House, shattered and fearful.”

That fear only grew when he was unexpectedly called into the Oval Office a few days later – and was astonished to experience, perhaps as never before, the power of faith and forgiveness.

“I had embarrassed the most powerful man in the world, but he showed me remarkable mercy,” Goeglein told me. “He forgave me, and I was speechless.” As he wrote in the book, Bush's faith had helped him overcome his own demons, including alcohol, which caused the president to tell Goeglein: “I have known mercy and grace in my own life, and I am offering it to you now.”

A few days later, an apology session with News-Sentinel Editor Kerry Hubartt, turned into “yet another remarkable session of grace ... I asked for his forgiveness, which he offered unconditionally,” Goeglein wrote.

We all sin, even those who reveled in Goeglein's transgressions. But few of us have had to pay for them so openly, and fewer still have issued such a public confession.

But a power much higher than the president offers forgiveness all the time. As Goeglein writes, the knowledge that God does not give believers what they truly deserve ought to induce a deep sense of humility and gratitude.

And so he was saddened and alarmed by reports that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg will exclude clergy from some high-profile memorial events this weekend – perhaps some of the same religious leaders he and Bush were so eager to include after 9/11, and represent the kind of grace and forgiveness that can comfort, strengthen and transform individuals and nations alike.

“Decline is a choice, but I believe America's best days are still ahead,” Goeglein said. “This is a religious republic, and you can't understand America if you don't understand that.”

The book – "I did write it," Goeglein said – aims to make certain you do.
This column is the commentary of the writer and does not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of The News-Sentinel. Email Kevin Leininger at kleininger@news-sentinel.com, or call him at 461-8355.

Building the Future of News

2011-09-09T22:00:00.001-04:00

From the foreword of a new book entitled "Entrepreneurial Journalism" set to appear in November from CQ Press:

The opportunities are indeed endless. That is why I am a cockeyed optimist about the future of news. There is more demand for and interest in news than ever. We have more ways to gather, analyze, and distribute news than we ever could have imagined before the Internet. We have new ways to listen to the public, so we can serve them better. We have new efficiencies to exploit.

But most important, we have entrepreneurs and journalists who have the courage to try to build the future of news. And now, thanks to this book, they have a plan

Zamperini Story Tops One Million

2011-09-09T11:26:00.002-04:00

It may be the dawn of the age of e-books, but last week Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand struck a blow for print editions by surpassing the one million copies in hardcover sales, USA Today reported.

"In this time of explosive growth in e-book sales, the mega-success of Unbroken in hardcover clearly underscores that the demand for print editions of great reads is still enormous," said Gina Centrello, Random House president and publisher.

Inventor of E-Books Dies

2011-09-09T11:15:00.001-04:00

Here is the first portion of an article from the New York Times. The entire article may be seen by clicking here.

Michael Hart, who was widely credited with creating the first e-book when he typed the Declaration of Independence into a computer on July 4, 1971, and in so doing laid the foundations for Project Gutenberg, the oldest and largest digital library, was found dead on Tuesday at his home in Urbana, Ill. He was 64.

His death was confirmed by Gregory B. Newby, the chief executive and director of Project Gutenberg, who said that the cause had not yet been determined.

Mr. Hart found his life’s mission when the University of Illinois, where he was a student, gave him a user’s account on a Xerox Sigma V mainframe computer at the school’s Materials Research Lab.

Estimating that the computer time in his possession was worth $100 million, Mr. Hart began thinking of a project that might justify that figure. Data processing, the principal application of computers at the time, did not capture his imagination. Information sharing did.

After attending a July 4 fireworks display, he stopped in at a grocery store and received, with his purchase, a copy of the Declaration of Independence printed on parchment. He typed the text, intending to send it as an e-mail to the users of Arpanet, the government-sponsored precursor to today’s Internet, but was dissuaded by a colleague who warned that the message would crash the system. Instead, he posted a notice that the text could be downloaded, and Project Gutenberg was born.

Its goal, formulated by Mr. Hart, was “to encourage the creation and distribution of e-books” and, by making books available to computer users at no cost, “to help break down the bars of ignorance and illiteracy.”

Over the next decade, working alone, Mr. Hart typed the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, the King James Bible and “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” into the project database, the first tentative steps in a revolution that would usher in what he liked to call the fifth information age, a world of e-books, hand-held electronic devices like the Nook and Kindle, and unprecedented individual access to texts on a vast array of Internet archives.

Today, Project Gutenberg lists more than 30,000 books in 60 languages, with the emphasis on titles of interest to the general reader in three categories: “light literature,” “heavy literature” and reference works. In a 2006 e-mail to the technology writer Glyn Moody, he predicted that there would be a billion e-books in 2021, Project Gutenberg’s 50th anniversary, and that, thanks to advances in memory chips, “you will be able to carry all billion e-books in one hand.”

Nearly all the books are in the public domain, although a relatively small number of copyrighted books are reproduced with the permission of the copyright owner. The library includes two books by Mr. Hart: “A Brief History of the Internet” and “Poems and Tales from Romania.”

“It’s a paradigm shift,” he told Searcher magazine in 2002. “It’s the power of one person, alone in their basement, being able to type in their favorite books and give it to millions or billions of people. It just wasn’t even remotely possible before; not even the Gideons can say they have given away a billion Bibles in the past year.”

Michael Stern Hart was born on March 8, 1947, in Tacoma, Wash. His father was an accountant; his mother, a cryptanalyst during World War II, was the business manager for a high-end women’s store. The couple retrained to become university teachers and in 1958 found posts at the University of Illinois, in Urbana, where his father taught Shakespeare and his mother taught mathematics.

Michael began attending lectures at the university before entering high school and, following a course of individual study on human-machine interfaces, earned a bachelor of science degree in 1973.

Work on Project Gutenberg proceeded slowly at first. Adding perhaps a book a month, Mr. Hart had created only 313 e-books by 1997. “I was just waiting for the world to realize I’d knocked it over,” he told Searcher. “You’ve heard of ‘cow-tipping’? The cow had been tipped over, but it took it 17 years for it to wake up and say, ‘Moo.’ ”

65% of Adults Now Use Social Networks

2011-09-07T09:58:00.001-04:00

Damon Poeter (@dpoeter) writes in PCMag.com (@PCMag) that the percentage of adult Internet users using sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn is now 65%, up from 61% a year ago, according to a report released by the Pew Research Center (@pewinternet & @pewresearch).

Accounting for the percentage of adults who don't use the Internet at all, that still means that half of all Americans now use social networking sites, Pew researchers say.

The number of Americans using such sites has exploded since 2005, when Pew found that just 8% of Internet users, or about 5% of all adult Americans, said they did. The percentage of Internet users saying they use social networking sites has more than doubled since 2008, when 29% of respondents said they were using them, according to the Pew survey.

Pew reports that women aged 18 to 29 are the most voracious users of social networking sites, with 89% of Internet users in that group participating in such sites and 69% of them reporting that they do so daily. Accounting for all age groups, 69% of adult women using the Internet say they’re social networkers as compared with 60% of men.

Are We Thankful for Freedom of the Press in America?

2011-09-05T08:48:00.003-04:00

(from Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac)

It was on this day (September 5) in 1958 that the novel Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak, was published in the United States.

Doctor Zhivago is set during the Russian Revolution and World War I, and it tells the story of Yuri Zhivago, a doctor and poet, and his love for a woman named Lara.

Pasternak worked on his novel for decades, and finished it in 1956. He submitted the book for publication, but although Pasternak was a famous writer by then, his manuscript was rejected —the publishers explained that Doctor Zhivago was not in line with the spirit of the revolution, too concerned with individualism.

An Italian journalist visited Pasternak at his country house and convinced the novelist to let him smuggle a copy of Doctor Zhivago out of the country to the leftist Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. Pasternak is said to have declared as he handed over the manuscript: "You are hereby invited to watch me face the firing squad!"

He was not executed, but when the upcoming publication was announced in Italy, Soviet authorities were furious, and forced Pasternak to send Feltrinelli telegrams insisting that he halt publication of the novel. One of them said: "I have come to the profound conviction that what I wrote cannot be regarded as a finished work," and in another Pasternak called his novel "in need of serious improvement."

But Feltrinelli was not fooled, and continued with publication. Soon enough, Feltrinelli received a private, scribbled note from Pasternak begging him to continue. Pasternak wrote: "I wrote the novel to be published and read. That remains my only wish."

Feltrinelli published Doctor Zhivago, and helped get it published all over the world. The Soviet Union's attempts to stop its publication only made it more interesting to readers. When it was first published in Italy in November of 1957, the first printing of 6,000 copies sold out within the first day. Doctor Zhivago was published in the United States on this day in 1958, and even though it wasn't published until September, it was the best-selling book of 1958. It quickly became a bestseller in 24 languages.

Pasternak was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1958, and when he first heard of the award, he sent a telegram to the Swedish Academy that said: "Immensely thankful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed."

Two days later, Soviet authorities forced him to write again, this time to say he would refuse the prize. Pasternak died two years later, in 1960, and Doctor Zhivago was not published in the Soviet Union until 1988.

Doctor Zhivago begins: "On they went, singing 'Rest Eternal,' and whenever they stopped, their feet, the horses, and the gusts of wind seemed to carry on their singing. Passers-by made way for the procession, counted the wreaths, and crossed themselves. Some joined in out of curiosity and asked: 'Who is being buried?'—'Zhivago,' they were told.—'Oh, I see. That's what it is.'—'It isn't him. It's his wife.'—'Well, it comes to the same thing. May her soul rest in peace. It's a fine funeral.'"

Be a Stringer!

2011-09-04T17:27:00.002-04:00

From the blog of a friend, Dave Fessenden. This is an excerpt--to read the entire entry, click here.

What do Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain and Sherwood Eliot Wirt (the founding editor of Decision Magazine) all have in common?

Well, besides being amazingly accomplished writers, they all began their careers working on a newspaper. And therein lies a lesson. Newspaper experience is a valuable education for any writer.

I hated my first job with the editor’s recurring comment, “This stinks; rewrite it” had something to do with it. But I learned a lot. Having to write on a deadline and making sure I got the facts straight were good disciplines.

I know what you’re thinking — hasn’t the Internet put most newspapers out of business?

Well, it hasn’t helped, but there are still a lot of newspapers out there—well over a hundred dailies and weeklies in Pennsylvania, for example. And many of them have both a print and an online edition.

Your chances of landing a full-time job as a reporter may be slim to none, unless you have a journalism degree and experience, or your favorite uncle owns the paper. Far better to try for a position as a part-time reporter, otherwise known as a stringer. (I don’t know what the origin of that word is, but at one newspaper I worked at, it meant they would “string you along” for months and months with a vague promise of full-time employment.)

You may also find it difficult to get an assignment at a daily paper; the competition is surprisingly fierce. So if you’re having no luck with a daily, try a weekly. And if you can’t get hired as a stringer, perhaps you can write individual feature articles.

Hyperlocal News Site Helps Hurricane Relief

2011-09-03T23:30:00.000-04:00

The News Frontier
The News Frontier, The Observatory — August 30, 2011 03:07 PM
After Irene: How a Hyperlocal Is Helping

In the Catskills, the Watershed Post is coordinating relief efforts

By Alysia Santo

In the Catskills region of upstate New York, where flooding from Hurricane Irene wiped out entire towns, a hyperlocal site called the Watershed Post is helping to coordinate relief efforts and trying to connect people who are stranded. This local news web site defines its coverage by the bucolic area surrounding New York City’s watershed. But the area is a “news desert” too, and the damage and destruction people are experiencing has the editors of the site, Julia Reischel and Lissa Harris, scrambling to keep up.

Watershed Post is using a live blog not only to aggregate official updates, but as a forum for witnesses to share information. It’s a service that was desperately needed in the severely damaged, and isolated, area of the Catskills. Residents are using it to find loved ones, or announce people’s location to family members, while also warning readers of bad roads, closed bridges, and other hazards. The blog went live on the site Saturday night and has become a go-to source for many local citizens; multiple posts are coming through every minute.

The blog is being run on an advertiser-supported free live-blogging service called CoverItLive, but the Watershed Post’s version has been so inundated with posts that the ads were interrupting user access. At the request of Reischel and Harris, CoverItLive suspended all advertising for the Watershed Post’s live-blog today.

Meanwhile, Reischel says, they are getting an avalanche of phone calls from area residents who are asking the Watershed Post to help them get a rescue team out to a loved one’s house. “We’re sort of becoming this relief organization,” says Reischel, who, along with Harris, has been constantly working the phone—providing locations to emergency responders, letting them in on reports of people stranded, and updating local residents with real time information on the sort of details that come up when an entire area is flooded. For example, the problem of washed away medications was the subject of a recent post. An area pharmacy offered to deliver prescriptions, and a local physician, Dr. Holly Llobet, offered to write and fill them: “Anyone who needs medication, whet (sic) they’ve lost it in the flood or bec (sic) the CVS is no longer there, I am donating my time to write prescriptions,” said Llobet in a phone conversation with Harris, which was then posted on the blog.

The Watershed Post—covering five counties and fifty towns in the Catskills since last year—is run from Reischel and Harris’s home, and Resichel says they are staying in rather than going out to report, not only because it’s dangerous to drive, but because they “have so much information coming in, and most of it desperately needs organization,” says Harris. “We feel that we are the most useful here.”

Reischel says while the Post is pretty well informed on the communities that are flooded but have power, she is trying to focus on areas that do not yet have electricity. She says the people who have made it out of these no-phone or no-Internet areas are reaching out to the Watershed Post, “frantically requesting information. They feel cut off.”

The biggest need lies in coordinating people who are stranded. “I cannot stress enough, scores of people are stranded,” says Reischel. “They are isolated in their homes and they are terrified.”

Fore more on the Watershed Post, read CJR’s News Frontier profile.

How Smaller Gets Bigger

2011-09-03T23:24:00.001-04:00

Some thoughts on hyperlocal news sites from Columbia Journalism Review. How viable would a hyperlocal site be for the Warsaw/Winona Lake area?

The Business of Digital Journalism — May 10, 2011 12:02 AM

How Smaller Gets Bigger

By Jan Schaffer

“The future of journalism will be a tale of smaller and smaller organizations making a bigger and bigger impact,” asserts Lisa Williams, founder of Placeblogger.com.

I couldn’t agree more. They will rise and fall, collaborate and compete, succeed and fail—and be replaced by new startups.

So what does this mean for the business of digital journalism? For one thing, it means we have to do business in dramatically different ways—not just collecting money differently. So here are three places to start. Many of these things are already happening and could add to “The Story So Far.”

Identify the players and mind the gaps: Traditional news organizations should take more cues from independent news startups. Value sells. And value derives from engagement and from unique kinds of content.

• Identify the gaps in news coverage and find ways to fill them. This may mean you create a niche product but it could also mean you enter a news partnership with another journalistic outlet that is covering something you’re not.

• Instead of trying to cover twenty areas poorly, pick six to eight and own them. Partner with other news creators locally or nationally for the rest.

• Make sure you know who’s doing what in your community. Map the media assets that you have. Know who the emerging power players are. I have found it shocking how some traditional news outlets are not paying attention to their own news ecosystem. As far as they are concerned, they are the only game in town. Yet we are beginning to see hyperlocal sites (not just Patch.com) expanding to start new sites in nearby towns.

• Nurture the nickels, not just the dimes. Multiple revenue streams begin to add up. Some of the independent news startups are looking at more than just grants and/or advertising. They are cultivating consulting income (web and social media development), content syndication, niche products, and event income that can include registrations fees and corporate sponsorships. These events can produce new kinds of knowledge networks in communities and open the doors for different kinds of support.

While there is much fretting about how new online news outlets have not fully taken the place of traditional news organizations, the fact is that many hyperlocal sites are covering communities that never had much, or any, coverage before. And a growing roster of statewide investigative journalism initiatives are doing some remarkable accountability journalism—and sharing it with other news organizations in their states.

Incubate your competitors. A radical thought or a new opportunity? Nurture not just what’s good for your company but also what’s good for the community and give it buzz. Make your competitors your collaborators.

• Pull a J-Lab. It may sound counterintuitive but invest $150,000 in a greenhouse fund to nurture the best of your local news providers with micro grants tied to collaboration opportunities. I guarantee you will raise the bar for everyone and begin to connect the news silos that are cropping up.

• Put out a call for collaborative enterprise stories. Since last fall, J-Lab helped to seed fourteen Philadelphia stories that are running on multiple platforms with only $70,000 in funding from the William Penn Foundation. You can do this, too.

• Take those empty desks in the newsroom and turn them into them into co-working spaces. Invite community site founders to work alongside you and even pay a token rent. See what ideas that proximity fosters. Know and nurture the ideas in your community before they blindside you.

• Develop citywide Networked Journalism initiatives. For instance, J-Lab’s Net-J pilot project, funded by the Knight foundation, helps support a community manager at a mainstream news organization and provides small stipends to at least five local news sites willing to try collaborating for a year. The Seattle Times has grown its network from five hyperlocal sites to thirty-nine sites; The Charlotte Observer from five to sixteen. The Portland Oregonian just launched its network with seven smaller news sites that want to partner.

As we learned in a recent survey to gauge Seattle readers’ perceptions of these networks, eight in ten of the 996 respondents said they valued both the network of partners and The Seattle Times itself for making it easier to connect with community news. Times editors said the partnerships had bolstered their brand, even if its website did not see a direct traffic gain.

Once you start erecting an infrastructure that helps all media, you are in a position to leverage different kinds of support.

Initiate a different “ask.” So far in the digital journalism world, we have asked people to be advertisers or to be subscribers. We have asked them to be donors or funders. We have asked them to be citizen journalists or poorly paid professional journalists. We have asked them to rate and share our stories.

We have not asked them to do something that might have more appeal: to be “media players”—media players who are charged with being good stewards of a robust local news and information landscape. It rang so true to me when Batavian editor Howard Owens explained, in “The Story So Far,” that many of his local advertisers don’t care about click-throughs, they just want to support the community. We’ve heard that from many startups.

What would such civic stewardship begin to look like? It could take the form of participating in a knowledge network—a series of events in which people meet and learn about civic issues, literary news, legislative priorities, and fun folks in town. It helps if your events generate some water-cooler chitchat.

Don’t laugh: The Texas Tribune has brought in more than $500,000 in event revenue in the last two years. Many of its events are now the place to be, and the Tribune is breaking news that others news organizations find they must cover.

Media players could also belong to statewide Journalism Trusts, donating funds, advice, and their non-journalism expertise (event production, anyone?) to foster robust news and information. Check out the early Vermont Journalism Trust.

Asking people to participate in ways that don’t require professional journalism skills helps re-channel energies and dampen concerns about authority or the accuracy of amateur journalists. And it gets a different kind of attention from prospective funders.

To be sure, the business of digital journalism gives us much to wring our hands about, as the Tow Center report attests. But having judged several journalism awards contests this year, I’m seeing some of the strongest entries coming from new journalism sites, not the traditional players. I’ve just finished vetting another 378 proposals from women media entrepreneurs; the ideas are enormously varied and the applicants’ skills run deep.

What I see missing from so many of the conversations about how we garner support for the future of journalism is the recognition of the low-hanging fruit growing in many communities—independent news entities that are going to continue to launch. We need more new thinking that validates and engages them in the overall enterprise.

Reactions to CNN Report?

2011-09-02T08:59:00.001-04:00

Here is the video clip of last evening's CNN Anderson Cooper 360 report on Hephzibah House in Winona Lake. I'd be interested in your comments on the quality and balance of the reporting.

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2011/09/01/ac-tuchman-ungodly-home.cnn?&hpt=hp_c2

WORLD on Campus

2011-08-30T10:08:00.001-04:00

Calling to your attention a special college version of the nation's leading Christian newsweekly magazine, WORLD:http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

http://www.worldoncampus.com/

Freedoms in America and Russia

2011-08-30T09:09:00.002-04:00

We were talking last class period about the First Amendment and how freedom of the press in America differs from some other countries. Read this about a Russian journalist--quite an eye-opener.

Today is the birthday of Russian journalist Anna Stepanova Politkovskaya (books by this author), author of Putin's Russia and A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya.

Anna was born in New York City in 1958 while her parents, who were Ukrainian diplomats, were at the United Nations, but she grew up in Moscow, graduating from the Moscow State University's school of journalism in 1980 with a thesis on the Russian and Soviet poet Marina Ivanova Tsvetaeva.

Anna married and had two children and settled down to the business of becoming a fearless, award-winning reporter who would speak for the victims of conflict even in the face of great personal risk.

Anna began her career as a reporter and editor for the accidents and emergencies section at a long-running Russian newspaper, Izvestia, then moved to another paper where she wrote about social problems, in particular the plight of refugees. But it was at Novaya Gazeta, a strongly investigative Russian newspaper that was critical of the post-Soviet regime, that Anna came into her own.

She was highly critical of Vladimir Putin, the former KGB lieutenant colonel who had become the second president of the Russian Federation. As she wrote of him in a later article, "Poisoned by Putin," it was under him that Russia was "hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance ... if you want to go on working as a journalist, it's total servility to Putin.

Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison, or trial — whatever our special services, Putin's guard dogs, see fit."

During the Second Chechen War, which began in 1999 when Russian forces entered Chechnya to end its de facto independence and reestablish Russian federal control of the territory, Anna distinguished herself reporting on what she called "state versus group terrorism," documenting torture, mass executions, kidnappings, and the sale by Russian soldiers of Chechen corpses to their families so that they might be given proper Islamic burials.

She came to the conclusion that the only response one could possibly expect to such treatment would be more militant resistance, more terrorism, and the recruitment of more resistance fighters.

Anna reported directly from the killing fields, putting herself in harm's way, exposing what she called "medieval barbarity" in all its red and vivid brutality. In 2001, in the course of investigating punitive raids by the Russians on Chechen families, she was detained by Russian military officials who beat her, threatened horrific acts on her children, staged a mock execution of her with a rocket launcher, and forced her to drink poisoned tea to make her sick.

Anna received numerous death threats, at least nine according to a colleague at Novaya Gazeta; she never denied being afraid, but her personal sense of responsibility and concern for her informants and for the people she spoke for would not allow her to give up or run away.

She never spent more than a few weeks of her life outside of Russia, and though she had a passport and a U.S. visa, she apparently never even considered leaving Russia to report from a safer location. She said once, during a 2005 press conference in Vienna, that, "People sometimes pay with their lives for saying aloud what they think ... I am not the only one in danger."

In 2004, Anna was poisoned as part of what has come to be seen as a triple-whammy against free press in Russia. En route to cover the Beslan school hostage crisis, Anna, who had taken nothing that day because in her own words, "war has taught me that it better not to eat" before a conflict, was given a cup of tea and was unconscious within minutes.

She later woke in a regional hospital where her doctors told her she had been poisoned and that the tests that had been performed at the airport were already destroyed. A second journalist who reported on Chechen war atrocities and who had also suffered a kidnapping by Russian forces was detained and jailed en route to Beslan, the third hit coming when the editor of Izvestia was sacked following that paper's graphic accounts of the Beslan massacre.

On the afternoon of October 4th, 2006, Anna returned to her central Moscow flat from a shopping trip with a load of bags and parcels. She dropped the bags in her apartment and then took the lift back down. As the lift doors opened, she was shot four times in the chest and once in the head at point blank range, and was found by a neighbor, lying on the floor with the handgun and empty shell casings beside her. She was 48.

Anna's murder by all accounts appeared to be a contract killing. And in a page straight out of Ian Fleming, two years later Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB and FSB officer turned journalist who spoke against Putin for Beslan and accused him of acts of terrorism and of ordering the death of Anna Politkovskaya, was poisoned and killed by the rare and radioactive isotope polonium-210.

He had apparently been poisoned by a pot of tea.

Journalists Run to the Weather Story

2011-08-27T22:39:00.002-04:00

From "Stuff Journalists Like"

Weather story "How about this weather?"

There are some things in life that can be counted on: people will always complain about gas prices, politicians under investigation will resign late Friday afternoon and if there is an abnormal amount of rain wind, snow or sleet, there will be some poor khaki-clad journalist out there reporting on the weather.

When journalists wakes up to a hurricane or blizzard, they know that before the end of the day they will be drenched, knocked down by wind, and forced to choose between life and story. They usually choose the story.

If this is a journalist's first time reporting on the weather, a vital lesson will be discovered - pens don't work in the cold. Use a pencil!

Truck stops, motels, Red Cross stations, restaurants and bars are all places journalists flock to during weather stories to capture that "human element" of the story. And without a hint of irony, journalists will ask residents what they why they haven't fled the storm.

Weather stories are the reason experienced journalists always carry a change of clothes in the trunk of their car that includes galoshes, boots, gloves, coats, a hard hat and a Nomex suit. Journalists never know when they will go from covering a city council meeting to the front lines of a hurricane in the span of an hour.

Journalists especially like it when their editors, from the comfort of their desks, direct journalists into the heart of a forest fire, hurricane, tornado or flood zone. As the rest of humanity is evacuated from a disaster area, journalists and first responders are the only ones headed into the storm.

Once a journalist has risked life and limb to cover the storm, which seven out of 10 times could have been accomplished by simply looking out the window, he or she will then hunt down a wi-fi connect to crank out a 20-inch story. The story will then inform readers about the weather the next day when it is nice and sunny out.

Happy Birthday, Theodore Dreiser!

2011-08-27T19:58:00.002-04:00

Saturday, August 27 is the birthday of Theodore Dreiser, born in Terre Haute, Indiana (1871). He arrived in Chicago as a youth and became a newspaper reporter. As a reporter, he wrote his first novel, his great masterpiece, in just a year. Sister Carrie was about a chorus girl who becomes a success, and it came out in 1900.

Sister Carrie begins: "When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago, her total outfit consisted of a small trunk, a cheap imitation alligator-skin satchel, a small lunch in a paper box, and yellow leather snap purse, containing her ticket, a scrap of paper with her sister's address in Van Buren Street, and four dollars in money. It was in August, 1889. She was eighteen years of age, bright, timid, and full of the illusions of ignorance and youth. Whatever touch of regret at parting characterised her thoughts, it was certainly not for advantages now being given up. A gush of tears at her mother's farewell kiss, a touch in her throat when the cars clacked by the flour mill where her father worked by the day, a pathetic sigh as the familiar green environs of the village passed in review, and the threads which bound her so lightly to girlhood and home were irretrievably broken."

NOTE: Dreiser lived in Warsaw from 1884-1886. In 1916 he wrote A Hoosier Holiday, which describes his travels back to Warsaw years later. There is a lengthy quote from him about his experiences in Warsaw, including some of the stores and lakes, on pages 93-94 of Michelle Bormet's "A History of the City of Warsaw, Indiana."

Former Warsaw Paper Employee Charged With Theft

2011-08-25T22:05:00.001-04:00

From today's Fort Wayne News-Sentinel:

Ex-circulation manager for Warsaw paper charged with theft

From staff reports

The former circulation manager of the Warsaw Times-Union has been charged with felony theft after an investigation led police officers to allege she did not deposit thousands of dollars in cash receipts for the newspaper.

According to a news release from the Warsaw Police Department, Rebecca Walton, 35, of Warsaw, did not deposit cash receipts from contracted newspaper carriers for five or six years, between 2005 and 2011. The release said a completed audit indicated more than $58,000 was not deposited.

Walton was arrested today, according to the release. She is charged with two counts of Class D felony theft. She was being held in the Kosciusko County Jail on $60,000 bond, the statement said.

The news release also stated there was no evidence to support that Walton had help performing the alleged thefts.

400 Updates to Oxford Dictionary

2011-08-22T16:09:00.000-04:00

Woot! New additions to dictionary reflect today's culture

By Phil Gast, CNN

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Concise Oxford Dictionary announces more than 400 new words, phrases
It's an abridged version of the Oxford English Dictionary
The smaller dictionary is meant to "cover the language of its own time"

(CNN) -- Don't be a denialist. Instead put on your jeggings (breathe in) or mankini (be careful) and retweet this article.

After all, it's hip to be in the know on the 400 new words and phrases in the 12th edition of Concise Oxford English Dictionary, the abridged version of the Oxford English Dictionary. The smaller dictionary is meant to "cover the language of its own time."

Beware: Not all words are built to last, wrote dictionary editor Angus Stevenson in a blog posting last week.

"Sadly, the new edition has no room for tremendous words like brabble 'paltry noisy quarrel' and growlery 'place to growl in, private room, den' -- what we might call a man cave these days," Stevenson wrote on a blog.

Some of the new words:

-- cyberbullying: n. the use of electronic communication to bully a person, typically by sending messages of an intimidating or threatening nature.

-- denialist: n. a person who refuses to admit the truth of a concept or proposition that is supported by the majority of scientific or historical evidence.

-- jeggings: pl. n. tight-fitting stretch trousers for women, styled to resemble a pair of denim jeans.

-- mankini: n. (pl. mankinis) a brief one-piece bathing garment for men, with a T-back.

-- retweet: v. (on the social networking service Twitter) repost or forward (a message posted by another user). n. a reposted or forwarded message on Twitter.

-- sexting: n. informal the sending of sexually explicit photographs or messages via mobile phone.

-- woot: exclam. informal (especially in electronic communication) used to express elation, enthusiasm, or triumph.

The dictionary also adds new definitions of familiar words.

Thought a cougar was just an ornery old cat you might encounter in the American West? By now you know a cougar also is "an older woman seeking a sexual relationship with a younger man."

Is Editorial Outsourcing Unhealthy?

2011-08-20T18:40:00.001-04:00

I love my editor, mainly because he's local
Thursday, August 11, 2011

By Brian O'Neill, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Can we call The Hartford Courant "the nation's oldest newspaper" if it's older than the nation itself?

That's the kind of minutia that copy editors live for -- excuse me, the kind of minutia for which copy editors live. They'd make sure there's an apostrophe in "it's" while they're proofreading, too.

I have my eye on the Courant because, starting this fall, Connecticut's largest newspaper is going to be produced in Chicago. That's right. All the copy editing and design will be done by its sister paper, the Chicago Tribune, to save money.

We all know about outsourcing. Just try to buy a toy, a shirt or flashlight made in America. And when your personal computer's on the fritz and you call technical services for help, there's going to be some guy in Mumbai, India, who has taken the alias "Mike" who's going to walk you through it.

I have difficulty seeing how anything as unique as your local newspaper will benefit by some outlander looking for errors, though.

Oh, sure, they'll be able to find the errant comma. (Our own copy editor John O'Brien once planned an entire book on that exciting subject alone, "The Comma Sutra.") But what is a wordsmith in Illinois going to know about the streets of Hartford, Conn., or the politics of Connecticut?

Only an editor who knows the terrain can save the reporter from truly embarrassing mistakes.

Take Pittsburgh's 90 neighborhoods or Allegheny County's 130 municipalities. Do you think an out-of-town fact-checker would know his Edgewood from his Edgeworth, or Sewickley Heights from Sewickley Hills?

Pittsburgh's neighborhood boundaries are even murkier. Their outlines are among the most democratic and elastic boundaries on Earth, constantly redefined and renamed by either popular will or some power broker's rebranding (e.g., "the North Shore," which will never be anything but the North Side, or simply "The Ward," to old-timers).

Many years ago, I went round and round with a copy editor who insisted that Central Catholic High School was in Squirrel Hill, because an official city map -- but no person in its vicinity -- put everything south of that stretch of Fifth Avenue in Squirrel Hill.

I wasn't able to wrestle the school back into Oakland until I pointed out that if we set it in Squirrel Hill, we'd have to inform students that they'd been taking the wrong bus to school for generations.

Knowledge like that can't come from dictionaries or the Associated Press Stylebook, but many newspaper number-crunchers want to consolidate production to save money. Gannett, Media General and the Tribune Co. are all centralizing their editing operations.

The Daily Press in Newport News, Va., has been produced about 900 miles away, in Chicago, for more than a year now. Its reporters and editors speak the same language, but the Tidewater accents that make the coastal city distinct will inevitably be lost in some Midwestern translations.

Perhaps I can make that point clearer by revealing my own modus operandi: When I have what looks like a final version of a column, I shoot it to a nearby copy machine and walk it over to an editor who is as Pittsburgh as "The Steelers Polka."

Maybe a half-hour later, he'll walk back with a half-dozen or more suggested changes. Sometimes he has corrected spelling or grammar, sometimes he seeks greater clarity and occasionally he asks me to defend an opinion.

You don't need to know your West End from your East End to do that, but just a few weeks ago, I had a brain cramp and inexplicably wrote "Steelers Coach Bill Cowher" when I meant "Mike Tomlin."

There was nothing in the context of the column that would have told you that was wrong, but the editor caught it because he recognized the main character in my column was unlikely to have known Mr. Cowher.

Would a copy editor in Chicago have caught that? Not on your autographed picture of Mike Ditka.

I don't expect the journalistic outsourcing trend to reverse itself, however. Newspaper chains can save millions of dollars by downsizing, and so they do it, and the change is not immediately obvious.

Mindworks Global Media in India has gotten outsourced work from American publications for a few years now. Tonight, when I hit my knees, I may ask God to make sure that nobody in New Delhi ever has to figure out where Bloomfield ends and Garfield begins.

Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11223/1166589-155-0.stm#ixzz1Vbz3bPkp

Orlando Paper Outsources Editing to Chicago

2011-08-20T18:38:00.000-04:00

Orlando Sentinel: 20
Posted 08.16.11 • 2011 layoffs, Paper Cuts
0 3

Orlando, Fla.
Owner: Tribune Co.
Announced: Aug. 8, 2011

Most copy editing and design work is being outsourced to the Chicago Tribune. The Sentinel will design its own A1, sports and living pages; 20 employees will be laid off.
Source: Orlando Business Journal

CNN: Digging Up the Best Sources

2011-08-20T15:23:00.000-04:00

How to dig up the best sources

Editor's note: This piece is part of a CNN.com series about storytelling and reporting skills called iReport Boot Camp. In this edition, CNN.com technology writer John D. Sutter shares his advice on finding great sources. Read up, then give Sutter's advice a try in this week's iReport Boot Camp challenge.

(CNN) -- Characters make or break stories.

If you're writing about -- or photographing -- a unique, knowledgeable or quirky person, then readers are sure to remember your work.

If the people you interview are boring and uninformed, you run the risk of telling a story that is, at best, forgettable and, at worst, wrongheaded.

But don't fret, boot campers. Finding fascinating sources isn't as hard as it sounds. (Choosing a story topic, which was your assignment last week, is actually the hardest part, I think. So congrats on making it to week two.)

Here are a few tips on how to approach the source selection process. If you have any questions, feel free to holler in the comments section, or join us for a roundtable discussion of this iReport Bootcamp topic on August 25.

Read about the topic

It's not an awesome idea to go hunting for sources until you understand generally what kind of people are out there and what issues are at stake. Read other news coverage, government reports, books and scholarly articles to figure out who the experts are in this field. Who do other reporters quote? What kinds of people are missing from these stories? Then reach out to them directly. It can be scary to cold-call a professor or a corporation, but don't let that stop you. The hardest part is usually picking up the phone.

If calling the person directly doesn't work, you can ask for the public relations office. It may be able to help.

'Normal' people are the most important

When many young reporters get an assignment, they make the mistake of only interviewing people with five-word titles from big and official-seeming organizations. Those people are important, but don't forget the little guy (or gal).

To find him or her, think about your topic and imagine the type of person who is most affected by the issue -- who has the most intimate knowledge of it, or who has the most at stake. If it's about the economy and foreclosures, find a person whose house has been foreclosed upon. If it's about homelessness in your town, talk to homeless people. When I got assigned a story about the mysteries of the deep ocean after the 2010 BP oil spill, I found the guy who manufacturers robots that work at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

Date around, but don't fear commitment

It's often a good idea to find one super-interesting person who most represents the topic you're researching and then center the story on him or her.

Picking that person, however, can be pretty stressful. I remember an early assignment when I was writing about a softball team in Florida for people over the age of 75. I wanted to do a profile of a player, but couldn't decide which one to pick. Eventually, an editor told me sometimes you just have to take a leap of faith: Use your gut to determine who is most interesting and then talk to that person at length. In this case, I found Kenny Marsh, who was the basis for my story about the softball team, by attending the games and talking to players.

Crowdsource with social media

Don't be afraid of the Internets. Use Facebook, Twitter and Google+ to find friends of friends or other random online types who can be your sources. Sometimes the best way to do this is to put out a solicitation.

Something such as: "Hi, I'm working on a story for CNN iReport about people who get married after they meet on 'World of Warcraft.' Know anyone like that? If so, please send me a note at (your e-mail address here)."

Be sure not to use contact information you don't want to be public.

And vet these sources when you do talk to them to make sure they are who they say they are. In the "World of Warcraft" example, you could double-check the story by asking who else was around when the couple met. Or ask to talk to their friends and family members about the situation.

I found the main guy featured in this story about "smartphone obsession" using the @cnntech Twitter feed. I talked to his friends and family members -- even a guy at his church -- to make sure his story lined up.

Troll the message boards and blogs

Some subcultures and professions have lively message boards and blogs online. Read through some of these and contact people if they have something interesting to say, or if they fit with your story.

Play off of people's connections

When you find one source, they can lead you to several others. Always end your first interview with these two questions: "Is there anything else you'd like to tell me that I didn't ask about?" and "Do you know anyone else whom I should speak with about this topic?" If you reach out to a couple of people with inside knowledge of your subject, they can connect you with other sources of interest.

This is particularly useful if you're working on an emotionally sensitive story. It's easier to get an interview with crime victims, for example, if someone they know and trust can vouch for you and your reasons for wanting to talk with them.

Wandering isn't a waste of time

If your story is rooted in a place, spend some time wandering around there, talking to people and "taking the pulse" of the situation.

Say you're doing a video about cuts to your local parks department's budget. Go to a few of the parks and talk to people about their thoughts. You may have to explain the situation to them before they'll offer an opinion, so go prepared.

If you're writing about life in a particular community, go to the places where people naturally hang out -- coffee shops or popular restaurants are a good place to start since people are already killing time there -- and talk your way around. Tell them who you are and why you want to chat.

These so-called "man-on-the-street" interviews can result in great sources; they also give you more authority on your topic since you can survey a range of opinions and get a sense of what's really going on in a place.

Tell the sources what to expect

A lot of journalists talk about access -- and when they do, they mean, to what degree can you actually talk to and/or hang out with this person. If someone is too busy for you, or doesn't seem interested in your story, they may not be the absolute best person to hang your whole project on. Tell your sources what you expect of them upfront and then see if they agree to the terms. Usually, I say that I'd like to use the person's real name; that I want to hang out with them while they're going about their normal routine; and I give a time range. If it's a phone interview, about 20 to 40 minutes is reasonable. In-person interviews tend to last longer and are always preferable when it's possible.

Think through all of the angles

Finally, a note on fairness: It's smart to think through all of the potential angles of your story and make sure that you understand them all.

One way to do this is to make a "stakeholder wheel." Think of all of the types of people who have stake in your topic. If you're writing about a new power plant in your town, a short list of stakeholders might include people who live nearby, power company officials, workers at the plant, environmental regulators, competing businesses and local government officials. Your topic is the hub of the wheel, and all these people branch off from it as spokes.

You don't have time to talk to every potential stakeholder, of course, but charting this out helps you see what your options are and ensures you're talking to people on all sides of an issue.

Christian Weatherman Fired for Opposing Story

2011-05-11T15:58:00.000-04:00

Christian Weatherman Fired After Opposing Strip Club Story

By Katherine T. Phan|Christian Post Reporter

A Christian weatherman in Bakersfield, Calif., says he was recently fired from his job days after he objected to an ABC-affiliate airing a story on successful local strip clubs.

KERO-TV's chief meteorologist, Jack Church, who delivers the weeknight weather forecast at 5, 6, and 11 p.m. for the station, told The Christian Post he was standing up for his Christian values when he asked executives at the station not to air a story about strip clubs doing well amid an economic recession.

"I said, 'I am a Christian,' and told them I just led a class at my church on faith sharing. I said this is totally inappropriate material for the 5 o'clock newscast and I asked them not to air the story," said Church.

When he learned that the story was going to be broadcast at the start of sweeps, Church asked for the day off. But when his request for leave was denied, the veteran meteorologist said he would not show up for work the day the story was set to air because he felt his presence was an implied endorsement of the racy material.

"I said I don't want to be on that newscast. I don't want to be associated to that material. They said, if you do indeed take off on Thursday, you may not come back on Friday," recalled Church.

Church then got a call from Steven McEvoy, vice president and general manager of KERO-ABC23, who told him he would no longer be employed by the station because he violated his contract.

Order Online: Outlive Your Life: You Were Made to Make a Difference

McEvoy denied that Church's position on the story or his faith played any role in the TV station's decision to end his job.

"Meteorologist Jack Church was not terminated by KERO-TV because he objected to a story the station was running or because of his religious beliefs. Mr. Church was terminated because he breached his contract," McEvoy told The Christian Post in a written statement.

"Beyond this, the station is not at liberty to discuss Mr. Church’s termination," he added.

Church said that McEvoy's statement is technically true because the contract prohibits him from skipping a day of work during any of the four sweeps period throughout the year, February, May, July, and November. During sweeps, the station publishes special reports in an attempt to attract more viewers, according to Church.

For the current sweeps, KERO-TV aired a TV news segment entitled, "Dancing Around the Economy,", which included interviews with a strip club manager who comments on how well business has been and a strip club dancer who confirms to the reporter that "sex sells."

“At the end of the day, and everybody knows this, sex sells. The whole fantasy, you know, just coming in here and being whoever you want to be," exotic dancer Bailey Michaels said in the segment.

The clip, filed by ABC23 South County reporter Cris Ornelas, also shows a full-body shot of a scantily-clad stripper walking up to a pole on a stage, several shots of her spinning around the pole, and multiple shots of strip club signs.

Church said he felt the piece was almost like a promotion for strip clubs.

"I didn't want a teenage girl seeing this newscast and thinking that's a good job," he said.

Church joined KERO-TV in January 2010 to replace a retiring meteorologist at the station. KERO-TV broadcasts under ABC Channel 23 in the Bakersfield, Calif., area. The station is owned by McGraw-Hill Broadcasting Company.

With 30 years of experience in the television business, Church said he finally reached the "tipping point" of the content he would withstand. He hopes his story will prompt people to think twice about what is put on television.

"Some Christians might think, 'I'm not sure it's that bad.' That's the problem in society, we continue to push the envelope."

Despite being fired, Church said he has no regrets and does not harbor any anger toward KERO-TV or McEvoy, whom he said remains a friend.

"The station did what it needed to do. I did what I needed to do. And I feel good about it," Church remarked. "I think we're (Christians) directed by God to follow God first. At this time, I think it's time to put God first."

News of Church's firing was first reported by TV Spy after the meteorologist posted a Facebook message, which read: "Lost my job w/KERO-TV. We were set to air story @ start of sweeps in 5pm news featuring strip clubs & how they’re doing well in down economy. I protested saying it was inappropriate material for local newscast. Based on my Chrisitan (sic) values I could not be to part of this newscast. I asked to have day off when it would air. They denied request, I did’nt (sic) appear they fired me 5 days later for breach of contract."

Although he suspects his career as a meteorologist is over now following the news of his firing, Church said he would not seek a lawsuit over the issue but instead keep standing up for his faith and move on with his life.

"Well, l just depend on God and I'll do something else with my life," he said.

TIME Selling Off 18 Smaller Magazines

2011-05-10T10:20:00.000-04:00

From Dan Poynter's newsletter:

TIME INC. IS SELLING 18 OF ITS SMALLER MAGAZINES

They include Popular Science, Field & Stream
and Parenting, to Swedish publisher Bonnier
Magazine Group. The sale marks the latest
effort by the magazine company to
restructure its business and adapt as readers
and advertisers increasingly look to the
Internet for news, entertainment and
information.

Publisher Introduces New 'Eco-Font' to Use Less Ink

2011-05-09T12:54:00.003-04:00

Intriguing new idea from the UK:

New ‘eco-font’ developed by publisher

by Helen Lambourne

A regional publisher has developed a new ‘eco-font’ which will be introduced at all titles published at its print centre and is thought to be the first of its kind in the country.

A specialist team at Archant has created the new type of font,which reduces the amount of ink used by 10pc but which the company says does not affect the quality of printing.

The initial idea for it was suggested by Paul Wheeler, a business analyst who works for the Archant Life section, and has now been developed by a team at its Thorpe Print Centre, near Norwich, using technology supplied by Kodak.

Archant now plans to introduce the new font at the print centre, which publishes titles including the Eastern Daily Press and Norwich Evening News.

Clive Want, senior production manager, said: “We have always printed black solid text using 100pc black ink but we have developed Paul’s idea and we intend to reduce all text to a 90pc screen. This does not affect quality in any way but it does save on ink.

“Archant is the only newspaper company in this country capable of undertaking this because of its FM screen technology. Traditional newspaper AM screen technology would have resulted in fine text becoming grainy.

“We plan to introduce this process across all our publications printed at Thorpe. Photographs will be unaffected and it will also have the added benefit of less black ink rub off.”

The process involves punching tiny holes, which are invisible without a magnifying glass, into the font and has gone thought test stages using different variations of screen – with 90pc chosen as the most suitable option.

Paul said: “I’m delighted that the eco-font idea has been taken forward. When I first read about them I thought it sounded like a great idea for saving ink and I am pleased Archant has taken the idea forward and been able to use it across the titles printed at Thorpe.”

Facebook Sending Readers to Big News Sites

2011-05-09T10:17:00.000-04:00

Facebook sharing sending readers to big news sites

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Facebook is playing a role in what news gets read online as people use the Internet's most popular hangout to share and recommend content.

That's according to a study released Monday by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Facebook funneled an average of 3 percent of traffic to 21 major news sites that allowed the data to be tracked. The report is based on an analysis of Internet traffic data compiled by the research firm Nielsen Co. during the first nine months of last year.

That's still small compared with Google Inc.'s media clout. Pew says Google's dominant search engine supplies about 30 percent of traffic to the top news site.

Copeland Wins EPA Award

2011-05-05T23:37:00.002-04:00

In the HIgher Goals contest at the Evangelical Press Association this week in Chicago Steve Copeland won a fourth-place award for his work in Sports Spectrum. Congratulations, Steve!

Student Writer of the Year

First Place: Sojourners, “Destroying West Virginia, One Mountain at a Time” by ONLEILOVE ALSTON, Author; JIM RICE, Editor.

Second Place: Priscilla Papers, “Will Boys Be Boys and Girls Be Girls?” by DAVID M. CSINOS, Author; WILLIAM DAVID SPENCER, Editor.

Third Place: Mutuality, “From Hatchet-Man to Women’s Advocate” by NICHOLAS COLBY WATSON WOLFE, Author; MEGAN GREULICH, Editor.

Fourth Place: Sports Spectrum, “A Fighting Chance” by STEPHEN COPELAND, Author; BRETT HONEYCUTT, Editor.

Nellie Bly's Birthday Today

2011-05-05T09:34:00.001-04:00

It’s the birthday of journalist Nellie Bly, born Elizabeth Jane Cochran in Armstrong County, Pennsylvania, in 1864.

When she was 16, her family moved to Pittsburgh, where she read an editorial in The Pittsburgh Dispatch titled “What Girls are Good For.” (The answer was “not much,” at least, not outside the home.) She wrote a furious reply and signed it “Little Orphan Girl.” The editor was so impressed that he invited her in an offered her a job. She took it, and borrowed the name “Nellie Bly” from a Stephen Foster song to use as her pen name.

Unlike most female journalists of the time, she didn’t write about fashion or gardening, though. She wrote about the poor, and the way women were exploited in factories, sometimes posing as a sweatshop worker to report from the inside, which made companies nervous. They threatened to pull their advertising, and she was busted down to a more lady-like beat. She turned in her letter of resignation along with her story.

She went to New York in 1887, and after several months with no job prospects, she talked her way into an opportunity with Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. Her assignment was to cover the notorious Blackwell’s Island Women’s Lunatic Asylum, and she went undercover, convincing doctors and judges that she was mentally ill. She was committed to the asylum and lived there in appalling conditions for 10 days. She wrote: “I have watched patients stand and gaze longingly toward the city they in all likelihood will never enter again. It means liberty and life; it seems so near, and yet heaven is not further from hell.”

In 1889, she proposed a new story: She would beat the fictional Phileas Fogg’s record for a trip around the globe, from Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in Eighty Days. Traveling east, she made the journey in 72 days, six hours, 11 minutes, and 14 seconds. She was, by now, an international sensation, but The World refused to pay her any kind of bonus in gratitude for their increased circulation, and she resigned.

In 1895, she left her career to marry 70-year-old industrialist Robert Seaman. When her husband died in 1904, she took over the business, the Iron Clad Manufacturing Company, and became one of the leading female industrialists in the country. Employee fraud, her lack of experience, and a series of legal troubles forced the company into bankruptcy and Nellie Bly went back to journalism.

In 1914, she went to work for the New York Evening Journal as America’s first female war correspondent. She wrote from the front lines of World War I for almost five years. She returned Stateside in 1919 and died of pneumonia in 1922.

Look What This Journalism Major Did!

2011-05-04T17:34:00.001-04:00

The Man Who Got bin Laden: The Most Deadly Would-be Journalist in the World

Posted by Mark Thompson Wednesday, May 4, 2011 at 3:09 pm

The man who commanded the SEAL team that hunted down and killed Osama bin Laden studied to be a reporter. If the Pulitzer Prize board establishes a new category -- for killing the world's most wanted terrorist -- it's a safe bet Bill McRaven will win it next spring.

Vice Adm. William McRaven, himself a SEAL, was on the ground in Afghanistan as bin Laden met his end, linked electronically to CIA chief Leon Panetta at agency headquarters in Langley, Va. "I have to tell you that the real commander was Admiral McRaven," Panetta told PBS Tuesday night. "He was on site, and he was actually in charge of the military operation that went in and got bin Laden."

So just who is this reporter-turned-frogman-turned-giant-killer? He currently heads the military's 4,000-strong and secretive Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg and Pope Air Force Base in North Carolina. Assuming Senate confirmation, he'll soon pick up his fourth star as head head to Florida to run U.S. Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. That will make him the Pentagon's top commando among the 57,000 people working for SOCOM. He's married, with several kids.

McRaven hedged his bets while studying journalism at the University of Texas in Austin before graduating in 1977: he also was a member of the Navy ROTC program. "You wouldn't expect a journalism major," former deputy CIA chief and ex-Navy admiral Bobby Inman told the San Antonio Express-News, "to end up running special forces."

But it looks like McRaven picked the right career path: in his 35-year career, McRaven went from being a SEAL platoon commander, to heading a SEAL team, to running U.S. special operations in Europe. But he didn't give up everything he learned in journalism school: in 1996 he published Spec Ops, a book on the art of special operations based on eight case studies. He concluded the keys to successful missions are Simplicity, Security, Repetition, Surprise, Speed and Purpose.

McRaven is highly-regarded in the dark world of special operations for improving the JSOC targeting center created by Stanley McChrystal, the Army general who retired last year after Rolling Stone quoted his staff making disparaging comments about top members of the Obama Administration. The unit has gotten high marks for compressing the nation's flow of military and civilian intelligence into targets, times and places for action. In other words, he has spent years "shortening the kill chain," linking curiosity, detection, tracking and destruction.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in announcing McRaven's promotion in March, said McRaven "has led a JSOC team that has been ruthlessly and effectively taking the fight to America's most dangerous and vicious enemies." As JSOC chief, he commands what the public knows as SEAL Team 6 -- the toughest, most skilled SEALs -- but officially known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or simply DevGru.

McRaven deployed SEAL Team 6 to great effect early Monday in Pakistan. Back at CIA headquarters, Panetta and his team monitored McRaven's men from a windowless seventh-floor conference room. As he and his team waited for McRaven to report on whether bin Laden was indeed at the compound, Panetta says the room was tense. “I kept asking Bill McRaven, ‘O.K., what the hell's this mean?,' ” Panetta told Time's Massimo Calabresi. When McRaven finally said they had gotten “Geronimo,” their code name for bin Laden, “all the air we were holding came out,” Panetta says. Not a bad day's work for a would-be journalist. Sure as heck beats writing about it.

Read more: http://battleland.blogs.time.com/2011/05/04/the-man-who-got-bin-laden-the-most-deadly-journalist-in-the-world/#ixzz1LQDOLkVk

Interesting Position Available

2011-05-04T09:43:00.001-04:00

Position Available
Web-Editor

WORLD on Campus

WORLD Magazine, the largest Christian news magazine in the country, is looking for an experienced journalism professional to edit a new web-site currently under development. The new site, tentatively called WORLD on Campus, will provide original Christian worldview journalism to college-aged men and women (ages 18-25). The ideal candidate will have 3 to 5 years of journalism experience (reporting, writing, and editing experience required) and a mature Christian worldview. The editor must also have a deep familiarity with this age group. Experience writing for this age group is a plus. The site will specialize in "convergence journalism" -- the integration of words, graphics and photography, audio, and video. Therefore, experience with all of these media will also be an advantage.

This is a full-time position. Salary will be based on experience. WORLD Magazine is based in Asheville, N.C., but relocation is not required, though a professional home-office work environment is.

To be considered for this position, please email the following to wsmith@worldmag.com :

• Resume
• At least 3 writing samples (links to on-line articles preferred)
• A brief letter/email (no more than 350 words) that highlights how your qualifications match the description above

Investigative Reporting Sampler

2011-05-04T06:53:00.002-04:00

Here is a great compendium of some of the best recent investigative reporting from the StarTribune in the Twin Cities:

http://www.startribune.com/investigators/

Forum shines light on candidates and their positions

2011-05-02T23:57:00.006-04:00

By: Sarah Kraus

WINONA LAKE, Ind.--Monday night, a candidates forum was held for those running in the May 3 election for city office. Over 67 people, in addition to the candidates, were in attendance. The candidates were given a chance to speak about why he or she would be best for the position. While the candidates agreed on many topics, there were several differences on how they would be viewed or how the issues would be dealt with.

The candidates views and positions on Winona Lake receiving a three-way liquor license, Winona Lake Town Council's role in attracting businesses, and the role of not-for-profit organizations in the community were discussed, among other issues.

Retha Hicks, Winona Lake's current clerk-treasurer, is returning to run for office again. She said that her greatest strength is the level of commitment she puts into her job. When she gets involved, she doesn't give up and completes the job in a timely manner.

Her opponent, Kent Adams, believes that he has a lot of experience that will help him succeed. He has been a member of the Indiana General Assembly, has been the Kosciusko County treasurer for four years, and served as a member of the Warsaw Community School Board of Trustees. He has also had experience in handling large budgets and enjoys listening to the concerns of all involved parties.

Dan Daggett and Philip Hood, both running for ward 1, have different ideas of why each of them would be good for the job. Daggett, who has never run for a political office in the past, hopes to bring “new insight, different ideas, and a different point of view” to the position. He also believes his life experience—handling cash flow, a multimillion budget, and being a team leader—will help greatly.

Hood believes that he has the ability to adapt easily and be a team player. He is passionate about making Winona Lake a good, safe place for his four children and others to grow up in.

Terry Howie and John Boal are the opposing candidates for ward 2. Howie, the incumbent for ward 2, would like to get to know the community well, as its representative, and isn't afraid to “get down and dirty” whenever needed. Boal stressed the importance of envisioning the future and working to make that vision become a reality by making decisions in a timely manner.

The opposing candidates for ward 3, Bruce Shaffner and Jerry Nelson, differ in their ideals as well. Shaffner has had previous work experience in business, as the president of the Ramada Wagon Wheel Theater. He would like to nurture relationships with the people and businesses in the community. He believes firmly that “spending cannot exceed income.”

Nelson has been involved with the Town Council for many years, although only as a spectator. He has been to more than six years of meetings as an interested citizen. Consequently, he believes that although partnering with organizations such as Grace Village and Grace College is important, listening to the taxpayers—the citizens themselves—is what is most important.

Sue Gooding, the current council president, and Greg Winn, opposing candidates for ward 4, discussed their positions while joking about the differences in their ages and experience. Gooding has 28 years in business experience, which exceeds Winn's by decades. Nevertheless, Winn is passionate about improvement, time management, fixing problems, and enabling others.

Randy Swanson is running for ward 5 unopposed. He has served previously on the Town Council, and has seen the monthly costs of waste water treatment lowered by 20 percent. He believes in low tax rates.

When asked about their positions on a impending, possible three-way liquor license for the restaurants in Winona Lake—an issue that has brought much controversy—Nelson, Shaffner, Winn, Gooding, and Howie agreed that they would want the community's input.

Nelson suggested public meetings should be held about the subject. Shaffner mentioned the difference between liquor in restaurants and in bars—he leaned toward allowing the license, but still wanted community involvement in the decision. Winn talked about how Winona Lake already has a two-way liquor license, so it wouldn't be much different to have a three-way license. He said he would most likely vote yes, but would still want input from the community. Gooding and Howie both agreed that they would vote whichever way the community wished, and Howie suggested taking a poll of the citizens on the issue.

Swanson, Hood, and Daggett agreed that because of the good standing of the restaurants in question, and because of the extra business it could bring, they would vote yes for the license.
Boal said that he would need to “take things in balance” and think through everything before making a decision.

When discussing the Town Council's role in attracting other businesses, Winn, Daggett, Hood, Howie, Boal, Shaffner, and Nelson all agreed that it would be more important to foster and work with existing businesses before trying to attract new ones.

Gooding mentioned that Winona Lake would need a place to put new businesses. Swanson said that Winona Lake should be “business friendly, but not to the point [of having] a carry out or bar” in town.

All of the candidates believe that the not-for-profit businesses in Winona Lake should not be required to contribute financially to the community, because they have already helped the community in many ways by enhancing the culture of the area and bringing many visitors to town who spend money elsewhere. Even so, Winn commented that it would be helpful for the not-for-profit businesses to educate the public about what benefits they are bringing to the town, in order to avoid confusion.

During the closing remarks, many of the candidates stressed that the community is responsible for electing its officials—and it is its job to go vote on May 3.

Role of the Editor is Changing

2011-05-02T09:34:00.002-04:00

Here is a very stimulating and thoughtful piece from an accomplished blogger. Access her work at http://emediavitals.com/content/4-business-trends-shaping-role-editor

The role of the editor has become as diverse as the revenue streams in the industry in which we work. Today journalists are marketing gurus, audience development specialists and innovators. Smart editors are adapting by learning new skills and taking initiative — and smart publishers are encouraging them to do so.

In my brief career thus far, I've taken on many roles I didn't learn in journalism school (when Facebook was still only a portal for party photos), which is both challenging and exciting. I recently had a Skype chat with a journalism class at my alma mater, Ohio University's E.W. Scripps School of Journalism, during which we discussed innovative online revenue models and what they mean for editors. That's the first sign about how journalism is changing: In a magazine production class, future magazine editors and creative directors are also learning about business models.

Here are four ways new digital revenue models are changing the role of the editor.

The importance of content marketing

Editors and reporters are far beyond just content artists. We also have to understand how to market our content and brand beyond a newsstand, to an audience observable on a granular level. At the most basic level this means having Web analytics, SEO and social media skills. It also means having an eye to package content most appropriate for the medium and the metrics we want to achieve. (For instance, as I write this post, I'm not aiming just for pageviews — but I hope I can engage you with all of these informative links and maybe even get you to subscribe to our newsletter.)

Some journalists will also need to understand how to market products and services, beyond a newsletter or event. It's becoming particularly important at enthusiast publications where commerce is a big part of their business (like F+W Publications and Interweave). Though the blurring line of content and commerce is uncomfortable for traditional journalists, some editors will need to understand how to bridge this divide.

New jobs in brand journalism

It probably comes as no surprise that many of the friends I met in journalism school are not working as editors or writers at media organizations (though many of them are). There are still “traditional,” editorial-focused jobs at news wires and newspapers — though journalists need new skills in those positions, too. There are also non-traditional editorial jobs quickly becoming traditional (such as my position here at a digital-only publication).

But there's also more and more marketing jobs requiring editorial skills. It's nothing new that many journalists will move into PR or marketing — but now journalists have an even wider range of choices between news stories and press releases. As brands create more content operations, they need people trained in creating good content. Furthermore, as publishers beef up custom publishing operations, they need content producers with an understanding of marketing.

This isn't a sign of the detriment of journalism as a public service; it's a sign of new opportunities for content. It would only be scary for the public good if the police were funding police reporting. A magazine with fashion tips sponsored by a designer isn't scary for the public good. It just is what it is — which is more jobs for content people.

Diverse business models

In the old days the revenue model could operate outside of the newsroom, but as revenue models get more diverse, it's not as easy to say “advertising is over there and editorial is over here.” The barrier between church and state is still relevant and taken seriously, but church doesn't need to live in a bubble.

That bubble has popped for some, thanks to digital innovations and revenue challenges to the media industry in the last few years. Amid the recession, every area of a media organization — including editorial — has been thrust into figuring out how to plug leaks in the media business model. It's kind of like how we didn't want the mortgage crisis to happen, but on the upside, we understand the housing market a lot better now.

Jim Brady, who has worked at both traditional news organizations (most recently at the Journal Register Company) and the start-up TBD, told an Online News Association audience that this new understanding of the business model is a good thing for journalists. “Nobody is suggesting that journalists should go write a story and then sell an ad, but I think they should understand — like every other employee in every other company in the world — how the company they works for makes money,” he said. “I think good journalism and good business can easily coexist.”

Here at the small headquarters of eMedia Vitals, our cubicles are clearly marked as church and state. While the divide is clear, I strive to understand how the business works on the other side of my cubicle wall and the role I play in keeping the wheels running.

A focus on entrepreneurship

The really good news about all of the above trends is that editors can be purveyors of new ideas and produce better content than ever before. Instead of just naively proposing an expensive project and getting turned down, editors have the knowledge and tools to launch a feature that fits their audience and the business objectives of their companies.

I remember only a few years ago sitting in budget meetings for the student newspaper, arguing about what should go on the front page. We were operating in a vacuum, only able to use our conflicting judgment about what was important to our audience.

Now journalists have so much more than gray space to work with, including an ever-expanding number of tools and platforms to inform and produce journalism. We can suggest new media and methods to produce content (multimedia, curation), we can interact with our readers on Twitter, and we can even suggest new content products like gamification, personalization and geolocation.

Yes, it's easy to feel wary about how complicated this makes life as a journalist. But I would argue there's never been a better time for creative minds in this field.

Hearst Birthday Today

2011-04-29T11:23:00.002-04:00

from Garrison Keillor's daily almanac:

Today is the birthday of publishing colossus William Randolph Hearst, who was born in San Francisco in 1863.

He demanded the helm of his first paper, the San Francisco Examiner, when he was 23 and his father acquired the paper as payment for a gambling debt. It wasn't long before his papers had a reputation for sensationalism, or as it came to be called, "yellow journalism" — one of his writers said "A Hearst newspaper is like a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut."

On the other hand, Hearst newspapers also employed some of the best writers in the business, like Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, and Jack London.

He and Joseph Pulitzer had an open rivalry in the New York market. Reporters from Hearst's Morning Journal and Pulitzer's World went beyond scooping each other to stealing stories outright from the competition.

Hearst had the last laugh when he ran a story about the death of Colonel Reflipe W. Thenuz — an anagram of "we pilfer the news" — and Pulitzer's paper took the bait, even adding made-up dateline information.

This prank was harmless enough, but when the U.S. battleship Maine exploded in Havana harbor in 1898, the two papers both published a supposedly suppressed cablegram saying the explosion was not an accident. There was no such cable, but it boosted sales of both papers to record levels, and the public demanded that President McKinley declare war on Spain.

As the famous story goes, artist Frederick Remington was sent to Cuba by Hearst to cover the war. He wrote home, "There is no war. Request to be recalled," only to be told, "You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war." And so he did.

In Half or In Two

2011-04-27T08:58:00.001-04:00

Just curious -- this is a headline from WNDU this morning.

Does something "crack in half" or does it "crack in two?"

Semi cracks in half on Toll Road
Elkhart County
A semi-truck snapped in half on the Toll Road during Wednesday morning rush hour.
Posted: 6:57 AM Apr 27, 2011
Reporter: Joel Schipper
Email Address: Joel.Schipper@wndu.com

In Praise of Editors

2011-04-26T14:08:00.000-04:00

Here's a great post by master agent/publisher Steve Laube:

In Defense of Traditional Publishing: Part Three

CONTENT DEVELOPMENT

I need to clarify what I’m attempting to do with this series of posts. I am not digging deeper trenches and pouring the dirt over a head that is already buried in the sand. Some think I’m defending a dying industry and failing to see the changes around it. This series is merely an attempt to remind us what traditional publishers do well. Their critics are jettisoning all of traditional publishing as antiquated. But I posit that there is good to be found in the things that brought publishing to this place.

Today’s topic is Content Development – or more simply, “Editorial.”

Many critics say that the day of great editors are past. The legends are gone and instead we now have overworked editors who don’t have time to spend crafting and developing an author’s content into a masterpiece. They have become paper-pushers.

While editors are generally overworked…that is not anything new. It has been that way for a long time. While at Bethany House Publishers I managed the acquisition and editorial development of nearly fifty titles per year. But I did not work alone.

Editing is a multi-person process in the traditional publishing companies. First is the acquisitions editor who finds, defends, acquires, and negotiates the acquisition of a project (i.e. The Curator). Many times the actual content edit (also call the “line” or “substantive” edit) is done by a different person. The content editor look for accuracy, balance and fairness, cogency of argument, adequate treatment of the defined subject matters and issues, and also includes conformity to all aspects of the description of the work contained in the original book proposal. (That sentence is an adaptation from actual contract language defining an “Acceptable” manuscript.)

Next comes the copy editor who scours the manuscript looking for accuracy in grammar, citations, and factual content. Then it is sent to a proof reader who scours the work for fine-tuned details in punctuation and other tiny details.

These editors are amazing people. And despite the cutbacks in many major publishing houses there are still a number of truly incredible men and women who stay behind the scenes and pour their minds and hearts into the books they work on.

In the Christian industry I’ll highlight one man as an example (and he will likely be embarrassed by this!). David Kopp is an exceptional editor with Waterbrook Multnomah. He was the one who created the eight million copy bestseller The Prayer of Jabez out of a nearly unpublishable massive manuscript. He worked on the bestseller Do Hard Things by the Harris brothers. And recently he helped transform a book about missions into what is now called Radical (by David Platt) that has been on the NY Times bestseller list for 43 weeks (as of this writing).

This is the type of talented person that sits unknown in an office in a traditional publishing house… helping to create magic. I could rattle off a dozen or more names off the top of my head of similar people who make this happen every day. And that does not include the number of freelancers who are hired by publishers to take up the slack when they cannot meet the demands of the editing process in-house.

A critic might say, “But I can just hire these freelance people myself. Why do I need a traditional publisher?” That is a good point. But it misses a critical part of the process. It is illustrated by the question, “Who pays the invoice?”

Think about it for a moment. In a traditional publishing house the publisher is basically in charge. If there is a major dispute over editorial changes or input, the publisher has final say and contractual clout. Rarely is this used as a hammer, but the writer always knows it is there. In almost every case there are long discussions and a compromise is achieved.

But when the author hires the editor, who is the boss? The writer is the boss. The writer will usually defer to an editor’s comments. But what if your novel is going down a terrible path, a path to commercial destruction? I know of a case where an author was bent on writing a particular storyline and would not take anyone’s advice. His agent was unsuccessful. His writing friends and critique partners could not sway him from the path. If he were self-publishing he would have failed miserably. Instead an editor at a traditional publishing house recognized the talent and came alongside with valuable suggestions. The author, realizing that the editor had the goal of creating a great book, acceded to the advice. The book was saved, is now in print, and being sold in stores everywhere.

I also know of another case where a freelance editor took an author’s manuscript (to be self-published) and rearranged the non-fiction content from a topical presentation to a chronological presentation. (The book was the history of a specialized type of job in our court system.) The editor felt that a history should be told chronologically instead of topically. The author disagreed and made the editor put it all back the way it was in the first draft. Because the author was “paying the invoice” the author’s wishes prevailed. The book did not sell and was not adopted as a textbook, which was the goal of the author.

James Michener once said, “I’m not a good writer; I’ve been a masterful re-writer.” He has a fascinating book called James A. Michener’s Writer’s Handbook (1992). In this work are reproductions of the interaction between Michener and his editor. You can see the original text, the editorial suggestions, and the rewrite. A interesting exchange that is rarely seen.

As with the idea of “curation” I believe the editorial or content development process is a vital part of what a traditional publisher does for an author’s work.

Part One: Introduction

Part Two: Curation

What He Thinks He Knows About Journalism

2011-04-26T13:31:00.003-04:00

Here are some thought-provoking observations from a great observer/participator in the journalistic process. You can read the entire post and also see reader comments at http://pressthink.org/2011/04/what-i-think-i-know-about-journalism/

What I Think I Know About Journalism

April 26th, 2011 by Jay Rosen

Next month I will have taught journalism at New York University for 25 years, an occasion that has led me to reflect on what I have tried to profess in that time.
Or, to put it another way, what I think I know about journalism. #

It comes down to these four ideas. #

1. The more people who participate in the press the stronger it will be. #

2. The profession of journalism went awry when it began to adopt the View from Nowhere. #

3. The news system will improve when it is made more useful to people. #

4. Making facts public does not a public make; information alone will not inform us. #

Shall we take them in order? #

The more people who participate in it the stronger the press will be. #

The more people involved in flying the airplane, or moving the surgeon’s scalpel during a brain operation, the worse off we are. But this is not true in journalism. It benefits from participation, as with Investigate your MP’s expenses, also called crowd sourcing, or this invitation from the Los Angeles Times: share public documents. A far simpler example is sources. If sources won’t participate, there often is no story. Witnesses contribute when they pull out their cameras and record what is happening in front of them. The news system is stronger for it. #

In 1999, I wrote a whole book on this idea: What Are Journalists For? It’s about what today we would call “engagement.” But that was pre-Web. Today we can do a lot more. According to the internet’s one percent rule, a very small portion of the users will become serious contributors, which is still a lot of people. Let’s say you’re a beat reporter who has a niche blog on the local public schools (like this one) with a loyal user base of 10,000. If the one percent rule is accurate, 100 of those loyal users are likely to become heavy contributors if given the chance. They should be given that chance. It will strengthen the site. #

That’s what I believe. But we still don’t know very much about how to make these pro-am combinations work, because for a very long time the news system was optimized for low participation. Switching it over is extremely difficult work. Even CNN’s i-Report, which claims 750,000 contributors worldwide, is poorly integrated into the main CNN newsroom. In what Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, calls the “mutualization” of journalism, most of the big discoveries lie ahead of us. We ought to get cracking. #

The profession of journalism went awry when it began to adopt the View from Nowhere. #

It’s Bill Keller insisting that “torture” is the wrong word for the New York Times to use in describing torture because it involves taking sides in a dispute between the United States Government and its critics. It’s Howard Kurtz suggesting that Anderson Cooper was “taking sides” when he called the lies of the Libyan government lies. But it’s also the reporter who has to master the routine of “laundering my own views [by] dinging someone at some think tank to say what you want to tell the reader.” And it’s that lame formula known as he said, she said journalism. It’s the way CNN “leaves it there” when two guests give utterly conflicting accounts. #

Long ago, something went awry in professional journalism the way the Americans do it, and it caused these visible deformations. In my own criticism I have given various names to this pattern: agendalessness, the quest for innocence— most often, the View From Nowhere. The problem is not what it is usually said to be: that the press is supposed to remain “objective” but no one can be totally unbiased. The problem is equating trustworthiness with the prohibition on taking sides, when the actual result may be exasperation with he said, she said, rage at the helplessness that “leaving it there” creates, and mistrust of the formulaic ways in which journalists try to advertise their even-handedness. #

“Harsh interrogation” isn’t a more objective term than torture. Rather, it appears to offer more protection against charges of bias. But these stratagems haven’t worked. The View from Nowhere is increasingly mistrusted. Journalists have to go back and fix the wrong turn they took. #

The news system will improve when it is made more useful to people. #

In the 1970s and ’80s, a number of classics in press scholarship were written by social scientists (like Herbert Gans and Gaye Tuchman) who went into newsrooms to study how decisions were made there. They all observed that routines drive what happens in journalism, and that these routines ultimately served the demands of a particular production cycle: the daily newspaper, the 6 p.m. broadcast, the monthly magazine. Ideas about what journalism is–and even what it can be–get frozen within these routines as they become second nature to the people who have mastered them. #

Look at how J-schools organized the curriculum and you can see what I mean: there’s newspaper journalism, magazine journalism, broadcast journalism. Why do we teach it that way? Because the production routine is god. Master that and you’ve learned the business. #

But that was during the era of heavy industry. The lighter, cheaper, and less restrictive publishing tools that we have today can free the news system from the production gods. The new gods are the users themselves, and what they find useful for staying informed and participating in public life— you know, getting things done. Which is why I’ve said that the simplest way to add value in journalism is to save the user time. #

Making facts public does not a public make; information alone will not inform us. #

There’s a reason why the word narrative has been on the rise in journalism, almost to the point of cliche. It’s become obvious to people that good information alone cannot inform us. News stories pushed at us can be defeated by narratives with greater pull. Under conditions of abundance, the arc of attention matters more than the availability of information. #

To feel informed, we also need background knowledge, a framework into which the relevant facts can be put. Or, as I put it in 2008, “There are some stories—and the mortgage crisis is a great example—where until I grasp the whole I am unable to make sense of any part. Not only am I not a customer for news reports prior to that moment, but the very frequency of the updates alienates me from the providers of those updates because the news stream is adding daily to my feeling of being ill-informed, overwhelmed, out of the loop.” #

In The Lost Art of Argument, Christopher Lasch said we should invert the usual order of information and debate. “We do not know what we need to know until we ask the right questions, and we can identify the right questions only by subjecting our own ideas about the world to the test of public controversy. Information, usually understood as the precondition of debate, is better understood as its by-product. When we get into arguments that focus and fully engage our attention, we become avid seekers of information. Otherwise, we take in information passively– if we take it in at all.” #

So that’s what I think I know about journalism, after 25 years of teaching it, studying it, and writing about it. #

Of course, I’m still learning. #

Prepping for Tonight's Candidate Forum

2011-04-25T15:25:00.000-04:00

Sarah e-mailed me earlier today, asking about how much biography, etc. to include in the article for this evening's forum. Here is my answer--hope it is of help to you, also. We'll have a little time at 6 p.m. to discuss before we go to the forum.

It should be written for the local audience—Times-Union audience—who could not attend but wants to know what each candidate stands for. The biographical information is not as important as what they will be saying when given a chance to speak and answer questions. Presumably readers will want to know “what do they stand for….for whom should I vote?” Your job is not to be partisan, but to accurately and succinctly report what the candidates present as their main issues or solutions for the town’s problems. Biographic information should only be presented as it explains or gives context to their positions.

One of your tasks will be to decide what the main news element is—how you will lead, and what the headline should be. We can’t know that until experiencing the presentations tonight.

Good question—good luck!

Town Elections Blogsite Mounted

2011-04-16T22:09:00.001-04:00

We were trying to figure out how to get candidate information available to people who visit the Town of Winona Lake Facebook page.

Brilliant idea--we opened up a new blog and then can just link to it from many sources.

Check it out here

http://winonalaketownelections.blogspot.com/2011/04/winona-lake-elections-candidate.html

Facebook Trying to 'Friend' Journalists

2011-04-14T22:30:00.001-04:00

New York (CNN) -- Facebook is taking major steps to ensure that its News Feeds contain more actual news.

The social media giant is hiring someone to build relationships with reporters and news organizations. The new hire also will help organize journalism-focused events, the first of which will take place this month at Facebook's headquarters in Palo Alto, California.

Vadim Lavrusik will start as journalist program manager for Facebook, based in New York, April 25. He leaves Mashable, the tech-news site where he was a community manager. (Mashable is a CNN.com content partner.)

In his new job, Lavrusik will be responsible for advocating for the use of Facebook as a reporting and promotional tool. He will also maintain the recently launched Journalists on Facebook page.

With more than half a billion users, Facebook is nearly ubiquitous as a way for keeping in touch with friends and family. However, the site has lagged behind competitors like Twitter and Tumblr in widespread adoption by reporters as a productivity or newsgathering tool.

"A lot of journalists don't have a professional presence on Facebook yet," Lavrusik said. "They think it's another thing they have to add to their workloads. ... It can actually make your job easier."

Lavrusik, a Belarus native, caught the eye of Facebook executives with his blog posts about the practical applications for using the giant social network in reporting. For example, he urges the use of Facebook as a sort of new-age White Pages, helping reporters get in contact with sources.

Before Mashable, Lavrusik interned at the New York Times as a social media producer. He also teaches a graduate-school journalism class about social media at Columbia University.

"The goal is to build programs that bridge the gap between journalists and Facebook," Lavrusik said. "Twitter is very public. It's an informational platform. It's easy to see the application for news."

Lavrusik will help educate about and carry out Facebook's new newsy mission, which some people close to the company say is a case of Twitter envy. (Last fall, Facebook's offer of $2 billion to acquire Twitter was spurned, according to a Fortune report.) Journalists very quickly took to Twitter and, in doing so, helped promote it to their readers and viewers.

"I feel lucky that we just have such a lead and such an advantage of being part of newsrooms already," said Robin Sloan, a member of Twitter's three-person media-partnerships team. "It's a luxury. We get to go into newsrooms, and, literally, on every other monitor, people are running TweetDeck or logged into Twitter.com."

Facebook also has a group specializing in media partnerships, which Lavrusik will be working closely with, a company spokeswoman said. But that group mainly focuses on business-development initiatives, Lavrusik said. Those programs help news organizations implement tools such as the Like button and the new Facebook-powered commenting system, which are designed to help create more links between news sites and Facebook's network.

Twitter's media-partnership team helps teach and field questions from reporters about how to use its service in their work, said Sloan, who joined Twitter from Current TV last year. That's on top of all the partnerships that the group cultivates with news-agency marketers, award-show promoters, sports and entertainment networks and others that fall under the all-encompassing "media" umbrella.

"Even before there was anybody working on media partnerships at Twitter, journalists were just using it like crazy," Sloan said. "The kind of work that journalists and news organizations do on Twitter is really the work that they've always done and are good at."

Sloan doesn't believe that Facebook's growing focus on the news industry is at odds with his team's efforts. Reporters, he said, "need all the tools that they can get. So we're just trying to make Twitter as useful and powerful as we can and fill in that part of the puzzle."

Mark Coatney, Tumblr's media evangelist and a former journalist, concurs, saying that each is used differently. Neither Facebook nor Twitter "is really designed to be a content delivery platform" but is instead used to link to or find articles, he said. "From a branding perspective, a page on Facebook will always look like Facebook."

Tumblr, a smaller but growing social network with 16.8 million blogs, hired Coatney as a media evangelist last year. The former Newsweek editor's job offer came the same day the Washington Post Co. put his magazine company up for sale, he said.

During Coatney's short tenure, Tumblr has achieved a sort of Facebook or Twitter status with reporters; his job mostly entails brainstorming ideas for how Tumblr can be employed uniquely. His journalism outreach may have even spurred reporters to write about Tumblr more often.

"The story ideas have moved from, 'Hey, what is this thing?' to, 'Here's some cool things that are being done on Tumblr,' " Coatney said.

Encouraging cultural influencers such as journalists to use social networks provides value to these companies and also to the reporters who get a new arsenal of tools, said Dan Gillmor, a digital-media professor and director for the Knight Center at Arizona State University.

"I don't know if it will cause people to write about them more, but it's obviously a smart thing for these companies to be evangelizing journalists," Gillmor said. "The more people who use these platforms for their work, the better it is for the platforms."

An Investigative Reporter Speaks

2011-04-08T19:25:00.001-04:00

Today (April 8) is the birthday of the investigative journalist who broke the story of the My Lai Massacre to the American public: Seymour Hersh (books by this author), born in Chicago (1937).

He worked as a reporter for various wire services, including the Associated Press, and eventually as a Pentagon correspondent. When he wrote an extensive piece on chemical and biological warfare that the AP cut to just a fraction of its original size, he quit to go freelance.

He got a tip that a lieutenant, William Calley, was being court-martialed for killing innocent civilians in Vietnam. Hersh drove from base to base, waking people up to ask them where Calley was, pulling all his Pentagon strings, until he found Calley and Calley told him what happened.

Life and Look magazines refused the story, but he did finally sell it. When the story hit, it made a huge impact on the public perception of the Vietnam War, and Hersh won the Pulitzer Prize.

Since 1993, he has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker, where in 2004 he exposed the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

A friend of his said, "There's only a handful of reporters like Hersh who are still doing investigative reporting. There's a new crop of journalists who are what I call 'scandal reporters,' or 'scandal beat reporters.' They only pretend to do investigative reporting."

When asked what the secret is to being an investigative reporter, Seymour Hersh said: "I don't make deals, I don't party and drink with sources, and I don't play a game of leaks. I read, I listen, I squirrel information. It's fun."

Video to Supplement Newspaper Article

2011-04-07T09:44:00.001-04:00

How Twitter Affects One Court Reporter

2011-04-05T11:04:00.001-04:00

From Poynter:

In Kansas, Twitter puts court reporter in touch with the community

by Damon Kiesow

In an elevator in a Wichita, Kan., district court in 2008, Ron Sylvester realized Twitter was changing how he practiced journalism.

Sylvester, a longtime court reporter for The Wichita Eagle and Kansas.com, had just finished covering a murder trial. It was the second time Sylvester had covered a trial live, and the first time he had used Twitter to do so.

As they rode down in the elevator, the mother of victim Chelsea Brooks turned to him and asked, “How is your knee?”

It was not a random question, and it showed Sylvester how he had changed the way readers viewed him in the community.

Sylvester posts professional and personal updates on Twitter. One of those personal tweets mentioned his need for a post-trial knee surgery.

The mother had been following his coverage. On the elevator ride, she opened up the conversation based on the human, not journalistic, information Sylvester had shared online.

Creating a personal connection

“The worst part of the job,” Sylvester told me, “is having to talk to victims’ families.” He now thinks an active presence on Twitter and other social media networks can help in such encounters.

Readers “like to know I am a dad … not just someone who covers grisly murder trials.” The more readers “know about me, the more they can decide if I am trustworthy or not.”

That echoes research I wrote about earlier this month. Engaging on social networks, and even posting reporters’ photos with stories, increases media credibility and trust, according to research by Doreen Marchionni at the University of Missouri.

Sylvester’s courtroom tweeting boosted his credibility in the courthouse, too. Early on in his coverage of that trial, he was interviewed by the ABA Journal, a publication he figures every lawyer and judge in town must read.

The next day in court, everyone wanted to know, “What is this Twitter?”

Fast, frequent updates key to trial tweeting

Sylvester had live-blogged a trial a few months earlier. He emailed updates to the office, where they were edited and posted by an editor. That process was too cumbersome, he said.

The feedback boiled down to readers wanting faster, more frequent updates. For the next trial, of accused murderer Ted Burnett, Sylvester and his editors decided to try Twitter.

He began by tweeting jury selection. By testing out the process during an early phase of the proceedings, they figured it was a good opportunity to “fail quietly” if it didn’t work.

At the time Sylvester had a few dozen followers, but readers quickly took notice. He started seeing replies on Twitter in which people told friends that the Eagle was covering the trial live.

“They know me”

The feedback from regular readers has been the most fulfilling, he said. As a reporter, “usually you only hear from people when you make them mad,” he said. “I have really started hearing the good stuff” since he’s been tweeting trials.

That goes back to the nature of the relationships on Twitter and Facebook. He notes that on social networks, people aren’t called “readers” — they’re “friends” on Facebook and “followers” on Twitter.

That’s a significant change for journalists. Rather than writing for an audience, he said, “I am sharing information with the community.”

Many people, he said, “never pick up a paper or go to a news website.” But they are on Twitter, or more likely Facebook. They learn about riots in Egypt or happenings at school board meetings through those social channels.

Sylvester advocates being where your community is, and Twitter is one of those places. In the past he might have been an anonymous byline in the newspaper. “Now,” he said, “they know me.”

CBS Launches Tweet Week

2011-04-05T11:01:00.001-04:00

From Media Daily News:

CBS Launches Tweet Week

by David Goetzl

CBS is finding a new way to capitalize on Twitter's ability to spark interactivity and engagement. The network will hold "Tweet Week" starting April 3, where stars such as Jeff Probst and Donnie Wahlberg will tweet and take questions during the live broadcasts of their respective shows.

The stunt will last eight nights, and users can join via their Twitter accounts or CBS.com. Networks have been experimenting with avenues to use Twitter -- not just to get people to watch their shows, but to create a sense of ownership among them as they engage in discussion.

"Tweet Week" begins Sunday with performer Dierks Bentley and presenter Julianne Hough offering commentary during the Academy of Country Music Awards.

The following night, two CBS Sports analysts, Greg Anthony and Seth Davis, will weigh in during the NCAA championship game. "NCIS" star Pauley Perrette, who plays forensic specialist Abby Sciuto, will interact Tuesday during the drama smash.

Probst, the longtime "Survivor" host, comes Wednesday during the popular reality show. Later on April 10, fellow reality-series host Phil Keoghan will tweet during "The Amazing Race."

Stars Simon Helberg of the "Big Bang Theory" and Donnie Wahlberg of "Blue Bloods" will dial in next Thursday and Friday, respectively.

Headliner Daniel Dae Kim finishes the live tweeting April 11 during "Hawaii Five-O."

Class Schedule Update

2011-04-04T14:48:00.001-04:00

4 April, 2011
To: Advanced Newspaper Journalism Students
Re: Revised schedule for the remainder of the semester

We’ve had to do quite a bit of schedule-juggling, but here is how the rest of the semester looks at this point:

Tonight – April 4. Wes Pippert will be with us by Skype (I just talked with him) His chapter is on p. 79 of the Kennedy & Moen book. Please have your questions ready for him. Since he directs the U of Missouri master’s program in journalism in Washington, DC, he may also have some good insights on changes in the newspaper industry, how journalists should be preparing for the future, etc. I hope this will be a stimulating and helpful conversation. In addition to Wes, we’ll try to look at IRE chapters 15 & 16, Stephen will lead us through the investigative reporting chapter (p. 113) in Kennedy & Moen (have your questions), Ethan will review his book “All the President’s Men” and we will try to save at least 45 minutes for critiquing your first drafts of a new story. I think this works best if you bring three copies – one for you and two critiquers, read your story out loud, everyone marks up the copies as you go, and then you discuss.

Next week, April 11 – Zach will lead discussion on “Computer-Assisted Journalism Creates New Knowledge” (p. 127). We’ll discuss IRE chapters 17 & 18, and we’ll discuss how you’re coming on your investigative projects.

April 18 – I’ll lead discussion on “How to Get the Journalism You Deserve” (p. 148) of Kennedy & Moen, and your final copies will be due for the stories you read tonight. We’ll do IRE chapters 19, 20, & 21.

April 25 is Winona Lake Town Council Candidate’s night at the senior center. Class meets at regular time. Candidate meeting starts at 7 p.m., so I’ll take one carload down at 6:30 (save us all seats) and will return for the remainder. By this night you should have done background research (from Times-Union or other sources) on who each candidate is, and should be prepared to ask some questions of them. Your story will be due 24 hours later (9 p.m. Tuesday, April 26) and it should be written for local media (Times-Union, StaceyPageNews). This will replace the “board story” requirement in the syllabus.

May 2 – Deb Sprong has re-scheduled to this night for “Literary Journalism.” Be sure to read “Rosa Lee’s Story” and the discussion guide which are posted on the portal. Assuming we have enough time that night, we’ll also have the “shadow-a-reporter” reports (verbal and a written one to hand to me) from Stephen and Zach.

May 9 (final class) – we’ll have the remaining “shadow-a-reporter” reports (Sarah, Josh & Ethan) and your investigative project stories will be due, along with the 10-15 minute verbal reports on your positive experiences, difficulties encountered, and assessment of the worth of this investigative project. We can also discuss Freedom of Information Act material this night.

Times-Union Editor Invites Commentary

2011-04-01T14:40:00.001-04:00

From Gary Gerard, editor of the Times-Union:

Hi Terry,

The picture of the Grace debt clock in today's edition prompted me to drop you a line.

I have a website, dumbhoosier.com. It started out as a place to put my column and links to political websites, but it's grown. Now it has links to the top news stories of the day, a Daily Thought, a national debt ticker, a cost of war ticker, a Google search window, a comment box and an interactive poll question.

Plus -- and here's where your students might be interested -- it has a place where writers can submit opinion columns.

Just e-mail the column and a short bio and I will publish it on the website along with a comment box so others can chime in. All the info needed is on the website. Perhaps some of your students might be interested in having their opinions published online. Any issue is fair game, Grace, local, state, national, world, entertainment, whatever is on their minds. Just thought I'd let you know.

Thanks,
Gary

Venerable DC Bookstore to Continue

2011-03-28T21:55:00.000-04:00

Politics and Prose has found a buyer

Melina Mara / THE WASHINGTON POST -

Politics and Prose, D.C.’s iconic independent bookstore, has found a buyer.

For nearly 30 years, Carla Cohen and Barbara Meade were the Cal Ripkens of bookselling, seemingly never leaving their perch at Politics and Prose. They were so in sync in their stewardship that they often showed up for work wearing the same color.

Eras end. Cohen is gone now, succumbing to cancer last year, and on Tuesday, Meade and Cohen’s husband revealed that they had found new owners for the 27-year-old store. They are former Washington Post journalists Bradley Graham and his wife, Lissa Muscatine.

“The hardest part of all this was losing Carla,” Meade said in an interview. “I told Carla it would be too lonely to run a business by myself.”

Meade and David Cohen settled on the couple’s offer after narrowing a flurry of propositions down to five or six serious offers. One of the final bidders was a group including ex-New Republic editor Franklin Foer, Atlantic magazine writer Jeffrey Goldberg, literary agent Rafe Sagalyn and a real estate company.

Terms of the deal were not released, but a person with knowledge of the negotiations said that the purchase price was about $2 million.

Meade and Cohen said price was not the sole factor in determining the buyer of the store, which has remained profitable despite catastrophic changes in the industry for bricks-and-mortar stores. Rather, they picked Graham and Muscatine because they think the couple is uniquely qualified to extend the store’s reputation as a gathering place for ideas and civic discourse.

Graham began working at The Post in 1978, serving as a business reporter, foreign correspondent, editor and Pentagon correspondent. He is the author of two books, including “By His Own Rules,” a biography of Donald Rumsfeld. He is a graduate of Yale and Stanford Business School and comes from a family that made its money in the ice cream cone and plastics industries.

Muscatine, a Rhodes scholar, worked at the Post for 12 years as a reporter and editor before becoming an aide and confidante to President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Most recently, she was the State Department’s director of speechwriting. Meade liked the idea of a female owner considering the store had always been run by women.

“We understand that Politics and Prose is much more than a bookstore,” Graham told the store’s staff in a gathering held where novelists, presidents and eggheads alike have signed books. “It is an integral part of the Washington community, a community that Lissa and I have served for much of our careers already as journalists, authors and, in Lissa’s case, a senior government staff member. It is a very special culture here, a culture we want to see survive.”

A longtime shopper listening nearby liked what she heard. “They sound like people of the book, which is what the store needs,” said Lenore Weinberg of Northwest Washington, who shops at Politics and Prose often for her grandchildren. “This store is in a class by itself, and I hope it stays that way.”

The deal is expected to close in about 45 days. Graham and Muscatine plan to work full time in the store, taking control, with some guidance from Meade, as the bookstore industry has been battered by e-books and the digitization of information. Borders recently filed for bankruptcy, shutting down hundreds of stores, including several in the Washington region. Barnes & Noble, for sale for months, has struggled to find a buyer.

But many observers think there is still a role for independent bookstores in hand-to-hand bookselling, with smaller overheads, strong customer relationships and the ability to create a tightknit community around words with author events and classes — areas in which Politics and Prose already excels. Using new print-on-demand technology, some independent bookstores are publishing original books or printing not-in-stock items.

Graham, who is not related to Post Co. Chairman Donald Graham, said he approached the idea of buying the store as a reporter, travelling across the country to talk to other successful independent bookstore owners. One stop was at Village Books, in Bellingham, Wash.

“Brad’s eyes were wide open,” said Chuck Robinson, longtime owner of Village Books. “I don’t think he has any great illusions of making a lot money, but if there’s any bookstore in this country that has the potential of continuing to do well, it’s Politics and Prose.”

Graham and Muscatine said they weren’t ready to discuss details. Instead, they want to gather the perspective of the store’s fiercely loyal staff, which Graham called its “greatest asset.” They did say that they plan to put their own money into expanding the store.

And they acknowledge, like other bookstore owners, that the path ahead is somewhat uncertain.

“We are all a little crazy,” Robinson said. “It’s almost as bad as being in the newspaper industry, which Brad of course knows.”

Magazine for Gay Military Launches

2011-03-28T15:17:00.000-04:00

Magazine launch for gay military members announced

Washington (CNN) -- A magazine designed for and by gay military members may soon be displayed at military installations worldwide, an advocacy group announced Monday.

"Our first objective with the magazine is to let all the gay, lesbian, bi, and trans members currently serving know that they are not alone," an active-duty officer who goes by the pseudonym JD Smith said in a statement.

Smith, along with co-director Ty Walrod lead the organization known as OutServe, the group describes themselves as an underground network of actively serving military members of the United States Armed Services who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.

"Visibility is key," Smith said, who added that OutServe hopes to have its next version available in print at "some larger military bases."

The magazine can currently be downloaded from the internet, the statement said.

"We are not about highlighting our differences." Smith said the goal of the publication is to demonstrate "how LGBT troops are proud soldiers, sailors, airmen, Coasties, and Marines just like everyone else."

The magazine will contain features about "Don't Ask Don't Tell" repeal implementation and OutServe chapters, as well as other information of interest to currently-serving LGBT military members, the statement said.

"We also want to communicate to all troops that there are capable gay military members serving honorably, and that accepting that and moving on will make our military stronger," said Smith.

On December 22, President Barack Obama signed the DADT bill repealing the 17-year-old law.

The repeal "will strengthen our national security and uphold (America's) ideals," Obama said. "No longer will tens of thousands of Americans in uniform be asked to live a lie."

"Don't ask-don't tell" became law in 1993, after opposition ballooned to then newly elected President Bill Clinton's plan to lift the military's complete ban on gay service members.

The policy stopped the practice of asking service members if they are gay, but still called for the dismissal of openly gay service members.

NY Times Paywall Goes Active Today

2011-03-28T06:48:00.002-04:00

New York Times paywall goes live today

By Allan Chernoff, CNN senior correspondent

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Beginning at 2 p.m. ET Monday, The New York Times will try to harness the force that has been wrecking the newspaper business: free access on the Internet.

The nation's most prestigious general interest paper will now charge readers for extended access to its web site, NYTimes.com. In erecting a paywall, executives at the Times are trying to walk a fine line: generate subscription revenue from avid readers willing to pay, while still retaining more the casual customers who boost advertising revenue with their clicks.

1Email Print Analyzing online readership habits and polling data led the Times to set that fine line at 20 articles every four weeks. Click on fewer and you'll have free access -- but to get article #21, you'll have to pay up.

Readers will need to shell out $15 every four weeks for unlimited online and smartphone content, $20 for online access and the iPad tablet app, or $35 for the full digital smorgasbord. (Print subscribers get it all at no additional cost.)

That pricing structure is subject to tweaking, according to Martin Nisenholtz, The New York Times' head of digital operations.

"We're as confident as we can possibly be in a research setting. Obviously, whenever research hits the real world, there are changes," he said.

"A bet on the future" is how managing editor Jill Abramson describes the plan -- a gamble to raise revenue so the organization can maintain the breadth and depth of its news coverage. Sitting in her office, lined with books and baseball memorabilia, Abramson says she is confident of winning that bet.

"I believe strongly that the quality of our journalism is at such a level that people should be willing to pay to read it," Abramson said. "I don't know if there are that many other general interest newspapers that are offering that same kind of highest-quality journalism, so I'm not sure that everyone else is going to dive into this pond."

While business papers like the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times have long charged for online content, the New York Times is the largest general interest paper to end free, unlimited access to its website.

WSJ.com costs $155 a year, and the Financial Times charges $260 annually for FT.com.

As newspapers have given away their digital product for free, paper subscriptions have plunged. The prestigious Times is no exception. Circulation is down to 877,000 for the weekday edition and 1.35 million on Sunday. Meanwhile, readership at NYTimes.com is steadily climbing. According to ComScore, NYTimes.com had 48.5 million unique visitors in January.

Web advertising now accounts for one quarter of the ad revenue of the Times and its overseas sister, the International Herald Tribune. But that hasn't made up for the drop in print revenue, which has fallen sharply over the past few years. The Times' News Media Group, which includes both newspapers, reported revenue of $2.3 billion last year, off 3%.

So the NYTimes can't afford to retain the status quo. It needs a second stream of online revenue -- and company executives say now is the right time to start charging.

"A lot of things have changed recently. One is that people are more used to paying for digital content with the advent of apps and the app store," said Paul Smurl, NYTimes.com' vice president for paid products.

Even so, the Times will allow access to its site through links on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, to bring in the large audience that makes NYTimes.com appealing to advertisers. In fact, the Times anticipates the vast majority of online readers will not reach the paywall limit. Its hope is simply that devoted readers will reach into their wallets, just as they used to for their daily newspaper.

If any general interest publication can pull it off, it should be the New York Times. But getting people to pay for something they've been getting for free is not easy in any industry. Competing newspaper publishers will be watching very closely.

Increasing Risk to Journalists

2011-03-26T09:44:00.003-04:00

Rash Report: Press under fire, and not just in war zones

Foreign correspondents and local reporters alike are increasingly targeted for killing, kidnapping or incarceration.

Star Tribune , By John Rash

On Monday, after six days of captivity, four New York Times journalists -- Anthony Shadid, the paper's Pulitzer Prize-winning Beirut bureau chief, Stephen Farrell, a reporter and videographer, and Tyler Hicks and Lynsey Addario, both photographers -- were finally freed from forces loyal to Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.

The reporters recounted their harrowing ordeal in a first-person account in the Times. They were repeatedly beaten, threatened with decapitation, and Addario was particularly singled out because of her gender, just as CBS reporter Lara Logan was when she was assaulted in Cairo.

The four journalists were among the 60 so far who have been targeted in Libya, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), an independent, nonprofit organization dedicated to defending the rights of reporters worldwide.

Seven other journalists are listed as "missing." Two -- Mohammed al-Nabbous, founder of opposition broadcaster Libya Alhurra TV, and Ali Hassan al-Jaber, an Al Jazeera cameraman -- were killed in the conflict, which is only weeks old.

The high number of incidents is indicative of how changes in warfare, war coverage and the perception of the press among some combatants has shifted in the post-9/11 era.

It's a significant shift from World War II, when uniformed armies had uniform rules, approved by the Geneva Convention, that classified journalists the same as soldiers -- with the same rights if captured, according to Joel Simon, executive director of the CPJ.

But post-Vietnam, the Geneva Convention was amended to treat journalists as citizens, reflecting how reporting had changed.

Today, asymmetric warfare has been met with asymmetric treatment of journalists in combat zones. Some recent wars, such as those in the Balkans, still operated with some semblance of understanding of reporters' roles.

More recently, the rise in rogue regimes and militant groups has resulted in increasingly dangerous conditions.

David Rohde, a colleague of the Times reporters liberated from Libya, knows both sides well. The Pulitzer Prize winner was kidnapped by Bosnian Serbs in 1996, but was released due to diplomatic pressure, because Bosnia still cared about its international image.

Conversely, his 2008 kidnapping by the Taliban, chronicled in the Times and in his 2010 book "A Rope and a Prayer: A Kidnapping From Two Sides," ended only after he escaped to a Pakistani military base.

"The nature of war has changed, and there's less of a delineation between combatant and civilian," he said in an interview.

"Journalists, fairly or unfairly, are viewed as extensions of certain political parties or governments, so if they are viewed as a citizen of a country that is viewed as an enemy, then the journalists themselves are enemies."

American journalists in particular are suspected of working for the CIA or the State Department, a charge Rohde called "extraordinarily widespread, very prevalent, and completely unfair and wrong."

The high profile of prominent journalists in harm's way is actually a small slice of the perils reporters face, however.

Since CPJ started keeping track in 1992, of the 852 journalists killed because of their job, defined as "motive confirmed" (an additional 320 deaths are categorized as "motive unconfirmed"), 87 percent were local reporters who didn't have the protection of large news organizations and couldn't flee the fighting.

"People have this notion of war correspondents traveling from one conflict to another, but the reality is most journalists who are killed didn't go looking for the war -- the war came to them," said Simon.

And nowadays, more often than not, it's not crossfire, but crossing local politicians or criminals that costs journalists their freedom or their lives.
Of the 44 "motive confirmed" killings of journalists last year (an additional 31 "motive unconfirmed" murders occurred), only 25 percent were war correspondents.

Conversely, 48 percent covered politics, 30 percent corruption and 20 percent crime (totals exceed 100 percent due to some reporters having multiple beats).

Last year's suspected perpetrators apparently didn't think everything is news that's fit to print: 22 percent were part of a political group, while government officials, criminals and mobs accounted for 19 percent each.

Comparatively, military officials, who are often more professional and disciplined, accounted for only 4 percent of those accused.

And typically those accused are never convicted.

Last year, those responsible for 96 percent of the deaths of journalists received complete impunity. In the rare instance someone is held accountable, the wheels of justice grind slowly.

Such is the case in the Ukraine, where former President Leonid D. Kuchma was officially named a suspect on Wednesday in the 2000 killing of journalist Georgy Gongadze, whose headless corpse was dumped in a forest outside the capital, Kiev.
Ukraine illustrates that the dangers aren't limited to war zones such as Iraq (147 killed since 1992), Algeria (60), Pakistan (35) and Afghanistan (22).

In the same time period, 52 journalists have been murdered in Russia, 27 in India, 24 in Mexico, and an astonishing 71 in the Philippines, including 29 who were slaughtered in one 2009 incident.

The stark statistics of those killed are eclipsed by the number of jailed journalists. Worldwide 145 were incarcerated in 2010, with China and Iran each locking up 34. Nearly half of them write online only, often as opinion journalists.

What's at stake for journalists is clear. What's at stake for society is the fundamental ability of the press to present the world as it is.

And especially now, we're interested: The Pew Research Center reported on Wednesday that since January's Egyptian uprising, foreign news has accounted for 40 percent of overall media coverage, which is twice the normal rate.

But it takes robust reporting on the ground to make an indigenous story international. And that reporting is threatened, along with journalists themselves.

"The irony and tragedy of the situation is that with all of the partisan punditry that's occurring, it's more important than ever that journalists get on the ground in these foreign countries and see what's actually happening," Rohde said.

Simon summed it up this way: "There's kind of an ecology of information, and it starts with local reporters who are doing the kind of nuts and bolts information gathering that feeds the international press corps."

Let's hope that for journalists' sake -- and the public's -- this ecology isn't further endangered. Reporters need, and deserve, protection. And our world in crisis needs their journalism now more than ever.

Oxford Dictionary Adds Internet Terms

2011-03-25T21:54:00.001-04:00

OMG! Abbreviations make the dictionary
LOL, IMHO, and BFF also added

JILL LAWLESS,Associated Press

LONDON (AP) - OMG! LOL! The venerable Oxford English Dictionary approves of the three-letter, Internet-inspired expressions you use for "Oh, my God!" and "Laughing out loud."

It is adding them to the authoritative reference book's latest online update.

You can now text the news to your BFF. That's "best friends forever."

All three expressions — and IMHO, or "in my humble opinion" — are among 900 new words included this week. Cracking the dictionary, however, is no easy task.

"The OED is quite cautious," said Graeme Diamond, OED's principal editor for new words.

Terms made popular online are only included among the dictionary's 300,000 entries when they have crossed over into everyday use, Diamond said.

Although the new abbreviations are associated with modern electronic communications, some are surprisingly old. The first confirmed use of OMG was in a 1917 letter by a British admiral.

"Things people think are new words normally have a longer history," Diamond said.

Editors publish updates to the online Oxford every three months.

The OED's Internet version was launched in 2000 and gets 2 million hits a month from subscribers. It may replace the mammoth 20-volume printed edition, last published in 1989.

The new update also includes:

— "muffin top," ''a protuberance of flesh above the waistband of a tight pair of trousers."

— wag, "wives and girlfriends." It was first used in 2002 to describe the female partners of members of the England soccer team. Now it denotes the glamorous and extravagant female partners of male celebrities.

"By our standards, wag is a real rocket of a word," Diamond said. "To go from being coined in 2002 to being included in 2011 is quite unusual."

— "heart" as a verb, a casual equivalent of "to love" that is represented with a symbol, as seen on millions of souvenirs proclaiming "I (heart) New York."

It may be the first English usage to come from T-shirts and bumper stickers. "At some point, people started to vocalize what the symbol was rather than what the symbol stood for," said Fiona McPherson, another editor. "People now talk about hearting things left, right and center."

Well, the latest update hearts the Road Runner cartoon character. The word "meep" — a short high-pitched sound — made the cut.

There are other new terms from the online world, including ego-surfing (the practice of searching for your own name on the Internet) and dot-bomb (a failed Internet company).

Diamond said the Internet has revolutionized the way lexicographers work, giving them a huge amount of new evidence of word use.

Which brings us to another new online-inspired word: TMI, "too much information."

NY Times and its New Paywall

2011-03-25T10:40:00.000-04:00

(CNN) -- The New York Times plans to add a paywall to its website on Monday in the United States. And the internet isn't too happy.

People who don't want to pay for the Times' content -- or who believe the internet is and forever should be an endless vat of free stuff -- already have created a few work-arounds that let people continue to read nytimes.com stories without paying for them.

The Times has taken note. According to a report in Forbes, the well-respected newspaper company asked Twitter to shut down the @FreeNYTimes Twitter feed, which had planned to post every New York Times story on its page so that people could access stories for free.

Because of an exemption in the Times' payment model, people who find New York Times stories through search engines or social media sites like Twitter don't have to pay to read the full version of the story.

A message on the @FreeNYTimes page now says: "Sorry, the profile you are trying to view has been suspended."

Other work-arounds include a bookmark link called NYTClean that, when clicked, claims to let readers bypass the Times' paywall.

The Times will continue to let anyone read up to 20 articles per month without paying. Beyond that, readers will need a digital subscription to access stories directly from nytimes.com. Subscription prices range from $15 to $35 per month. As noted above, you can get around this just by clicking on NYT links from Google or Facebook (if you find an article you like on the homepage you could just Google that headline and then follow the link).

But there's a limit to how far that back-door approach can take you. The Times is clearly aware of such tricks.

"For some search engines, users will have a daily limit of free links to Times articles," the company says in a letter outlining these payment plans.

This isn't the internet's first paywall show-down. Payment models from The Wall Street Journal and Pandora were met with similar digital groans.

Example: Personality Feature With News Hook

2011-03-22T21:06:00.002-04:00

Here is an excellent example of a personality feature article with a news hook (in this case, "time is running out.") This is an excerpt from the Washington Post. To read the entire article click here.

Evangelist Charles Colson’s final mission: Spiritually cloning himself

Charles Colson assembles the newest members of his Christian army at a Loudoun County convention hall on a winter Saturday.

Former Nixon aide-turned-evangelist embarks on his final mission.

Seated before the aging Watergate-era felon-turned-evangelical leader are dozens of handpicked disciples: a woman who sings at patriotic events, a sports psychology professor, a real estate developer, a pharmaceutical salesman.

They’ve spent the year — and as much as $4,000 — reading the books Colson reads, watching the movies he watches, praying the way he prays. It’s all part of an ambitious effort by Colson to replicate his spiritual DNA and ensure that his vision of Christianity doesn’t die when he does.

“This is the time for us to metastasize and impact society!” the gravelly-voiced former Nixon aide tells his rapt audience. “And this is a really, really urgent hour.”

For decades after emerging from a federal penitentiary, Colson focused on building what has become the world’s biggest prison ministry. Now, at 79, he has shifted his attention to the final mission of his remarkable life: saving what he regards as true Christianity from American extinction.

Time is running out.

Good Example of Investigative Article

2011-03-21T08:10:00.002-04:00

This article is a good example of some nice investigative reporting--note the number of sources and the sidebar article that compares situations in neighboring states.

Allegheny River towns fight to save locks

By Mary Ann Thomas, ASPINWALL HERALD

Barges of scrap metal, coal and petroleum products predictably lumber along the Allegheny River.

Towns, water companies and industries draw 524 million gallons daily from that river.

And in the summer, several thousand pleasure boats and personal watercraft zip through its waters, with some passing through its locks to the more rural and wooded pools in the upper reaches of the Allegheny in Armstrong County.

All benefit from the river, but only the commercial barge traffic has paid directly -- via a marine diesel fuel tax -- for upkeep of the Allegheny's locks and dams, which were installed in the 1920s and 1930s to turn erratic pockets of deep and shallow water into reliable pools of slack water.

Therein lies one of the problems with paying for the $8 million annual price tag just to operate the locks on the Allegheny.

When Congress authorized the Army Corps of Engineers to build those locks and dams, it was to meet the needs of businesses to ship commodities, not to help municipalities or industries draw water or sewage authorities to release wastewater or boaters to enjoy a little water skiing.

President Obama's proposed 2012 fiscal budget slashes the corps' Allegheny budget by 50 percent. At least two locks, No. 8, just north of Kittanning, and No. 9 in Rimer, will likely close to recreational boaters and be put in "caretaker status."

Commercial vessels will be able to pass through all locks by appointment.

The corps will decide which locks will see cuts in operating hours on March 31.

But no matter where the ax falls, it's another lean budget and another lean year. Maintenance will be deferred on the aging locks' structures, which are in poor condition, according to Dave Sneberger, chief of the corps' locks and dams branch, Pittsburgh District.

At two public meetings last month, boaters told the corps they are willing to pay a fee and do whatever it takes to keep the all the locks open.

With five locks in Armstrong County, the county commissioners there are rounding up boaters, businesses and state and federal lawmakers to assemble a public/private partnership to help keep the locks open in the upper pools.

They are looking for any new source of revenue to keep their county's waterways open.

Budgets running dry

The money hasn't run out just because of tight economic times.

The corps has been threatening to close some of the Allegheny's locks for decades. It cut operating hours at Locks 5 through 9 in the 1980s as the volume of commercial boat traffic tumbled.

Federal funding for operating the locks and dams is based on commercial tonnage floated down the river.

The Allegheny ranks low in priority. For example, 10 times more cargo passes through the Emsworth lock on the Ohio River each year than does the entire Allegheny lock system, according to Col. William Graham, the Coprs' Pittsburgh District engineer.

So the question is: Where to get more money, and who else can pay?

"I don't think anybody can be dragged kicking and screaming to make a contribution unless it is in their best interest to do so," said James McCarville, executive director of the Port of Pittsburgh.

"I think people have got to understand what is at risk, and they have to make that calculation of what would be the catastrophic loss if they would lose the pools. And, is it worth contributing to keep them open?"

For example, the water companies and authorities that draw from the river and its aquifers aren't bound to the fate of the locks. And the fixed dams on the Allegheny are for navigation, not to control water flow or flooding. That's controlled by reservoirs upstream.

But they benefit from the pools of water and are in no danger, presently, of losing them. So why would they pay for them?

"Municipal water customers of systems that draw from the Ohio River Basin have the benefit of using a source that the Army Corps of Engineer's calls the 'most reliable water system in the country,'" said Don Amadee of the Municipal Authority of Buffalo Township.

"Floods and droughts and pollution still occur, obviously, but our water quality and availability are rarely a concern," Amadee said. "Not every system has that luxury. I don't want my customers to have to start paying for the privilege of using the river. But, if this comes to pass and they start to define who the river users are, we would certainly qualify."

Businesses continue to use the river for water intakes, water cooling and discharges. But they don't see a danger in the pool of water going away, said Mark Devinney, vice president of Freeport Terminals in Freeport. His company ships commodities down the river such as sand, scrap, fertilizer, grain and petroleum-based products as far as New Orleans and Texas.

"In the present economic climate, nobody would be comfortable with additional taxes and user fees, especially municipalities," Devinney said. "They're hard pressed.

"The pools are there, and they don't have a dog in that particular fight, directly," Devinney added.

McCarville disagrees, at least in terms of the long run.

The Allegheny River has weathered lean budgets for years, accumulating a backlog of almost $49 million in critical maintenance, according to Dan Jones, spokesman of the Army Corps of Engineers, Pittsburgh District.

And the proposed federal budget for the 2012 fiscal year pays nothing into maintenance for the aging navigation system.

Just last year, the corps had to shut down a portion of Lock 2 at Highland Park when a section of one of the concrete lock walls crumbled into the river.

As the navigation system is starved for repairs, McCarville fears that the state of decay will eventually render the structures unreliable for use for generations to come.

"To put something in caretaker status allows for further deterioration," said McCarville.

"We're looking at saving short-term operations and maintenance costs and not preserving the valuable capital asset that might play a much greater role in the future."

And the corps should modernize the locks, he said.

"It's like they have to pay more to fix that '57 Chevy instead of it selling it off and buying something a little more modern."

The dams are in good shape, according to Sneberger. "At this time, maintenance of the pools on the Allegheny is not an immediate concern," he said. "But 10 years from now, it might be."

The immediate concern is the lack of maintenance of the lock structures, Sneberger said.

"If we have a major breakdown," he said, "we won't be able to use the lock until it's fixed."

Something old, something new

Since federal funding is based on commercial traffic, some observers want to increase the commercial traffic.

Armstrong County Commissioner Jim Scahill and state Rep. Jeff Pyle, R-Ford City, said they need to spur more commerce on the river so it gets more federal funding.

They are looking to more dredging operations, which have trickled down to almost nothing because of environmental and other regulations, according to Scahill and Pyle.

"We've got to re-establish commercial traffic," Pyle said. "I'm not willing to go after the municipalities."

Pyle wants to help the dredging industry steer through some of the regulations and dredge the sand and gravel and move it again through Armstrong County's upper pools.

And there could be new river commerce with the Marcellus shale natural gas boom, they say.

Businesses have been inquiring about transporting Marcellus fracking water via local rivers. Devinney already provides water transport of fracking sand for the industry.

"Our area stands poised to explode with Marcellus shale well development," Pyle said. "We need to have the ability to move sand and chemicals along the river."

U.S. Rep. Jason Altmire recognizes not only the dilemma with the current corps budget, but the importance of the Allegheny's navigation system to attract new business.

"Our ability to increase waterways traffic is directly related to the status of the structure of each entity on the river," he said. "If people are unsatisfied with the long-term prognosis, they'll avoid our region all together."

To prevent the Allegheny's locks and dams from going into worse disrepair, Altmire and others say more money has to be added to the Inland Waterways Trust Fund, which is paid in to by a 20-cent-per-gallon diesel fuel tax levied on the commercial towing industry.

The fund pays for 50 percent of the federal capital investment in the nation's inland waterways and is "grossly insufficient to meet all of the demands," said McCarville.

"The Port of Pittsburgh is working with operators to come to an agreement with the trust fund," Altmire said. "There has to be recognition and more funding in the trust fund because state and federal governments are definitely cutting spending."

McCarville reports that the operators agreed to increase their contribution to the trust fund by up to nine cents a gallon for the modernization of lock chambers.

However, it also called on the federal government to pick up 100 percent of the cost of the dam repairs and smaller lock improvements, according to McCarville. That plan is has been rejected by the administration, he said.

"Now, we're going directly to Congress to see if they can establish the new plan for the trust fund," he said.

Proposed user fees

There is one funding source ripe for a toll or user fee: for pleasure boats.

Although recreational boaters pay a boat registration fee to the state Fish and Boat Commission, none of that money goes toward the river's navigation system, which the boaters use for free.

During the corps' public meetings last month, a number of boaters suggested an EZ pass system, the toll collection used by the Pennsylvania Turnpike, or an extra fee for their boat registration.

Pyle is investigating a fee or toll system for the locks.

"I want to get some kind of numbers drummed up including how many recreational boaters could pay in," he said. "There's a lot of calculating."

If lawmakers and boaters are serious about establishing a lock fee, it would require congressional approval to allow the corps to use those funds, according to Lenna Hawkins, deputy district engineer for the corps' Pittsburgh District.

A nonprofit group or a governmental entity such as a county or a state could be set up to collect fees toward lock operations, she said.

"There could be a host of funding streams, and we are going to search what has been done across the country," she said.

Hawkins and Col. Graham have already spoken to local members of Congress about the prospect.

"They all seem supportive of a potential public-private partnership," she said.

In the meantime, the Armstrong County commissioners are trying to gather stakeholders, local businesses, and boaters to form a coalition.

"If there's a partnership," Commissioner Jim Scahill said, "I can't see the state of Pennsylvania not being involved.

"Our struggle is to get everyone in the room together and some common voice out of it."

Scahill concedes that they still need to find a "champion -- someone to go to bat for us nationally."

But it's early in the game, with the Army corps cuts only proposed last month.

"We need to process this properly," Scahill said, "and have to be given the time to do it."

Same scenario plays out in other parts of country

The demise of commercial boat traffic and resulting drop in federal funding for inland lock systems has played out in other parts of the country.

It's the same tale as the Allegheny River.

The typical scenario: Commercial traffic vanishes, federal funding is cut, locks decay and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reduces service. Then it puts the facilities in "caretaker status" and maybe transfers the facilities to state or local government.

In the past 20 years, the corps has divested 24 locks to states and municipalities, according to Jim Walker, navigation manager at the Corps of Engineers headquarters in Washington.

"We're looking at reducing federal expenditures at low, commercial-use locks either by turning them over to a non-federal operator or by reducing operating hours and applying the savings to keep high commercial-use locks operating," Walker said.

In Kentucky, the state has closed most of the locks on the Kentucky River because of disrepair and lack of funding.

Conversely, the Muskingum River in Ohio still has its locks open because the state considers it a prime recreational area.

In both cases, a state agency stepped in to pay for or take over the locks and established fees.

There also are examples of private-public partnership such as the Willamette River in Oregon, where a coalition formed to help bring in more money to the lock system.

Kentucky River, Kentucky

The Kentucky River Authority, a state agency, was established in 1986 to take over 10 locks and dams from the Corps of Engineers.

At that point, there was little commercial boat traffic and the locks and dams were put in caretaker status.

A drought in 1986 caused some restrictions for drinking water from the river, motivating the state to protect and improve the waterway.

The state later closed its locks because of the maintenance issues, according to David Hamilton, an engineer at the river authority in Frankfort, Ky.

Concrete barriers were installed to ensure the pools remained, in case a lock chamber gave way.

"With all our dams we have water supply in each pool," said Hamilton. "The concern is if gates fail that would jeopardize the communities' water supply."

The state funds the operations of the lock-and-dam system with a fee passed on to water users, with a typical household paying 25 to 35 cents a month on their water bills, according to Hamilton.

That is changing.

"We've used water money specifically for maintaining the water supply portion of the river," he said. "Now we're looking to change to have water user fees to pay for recreational boat traffic at locks, 1, 2, 3 and 4.

"There's been a good push for it to encourage recreational boat traffic for economic reasons," Hamilton said.

Muskingum River, Ohio

A system of 11 locks and dams completed by 1841 made the Muskingum River navigable from Marietta to Dresden and connected to the Ohio and Erie Canal.

The locks and dams deteriorated in late 19th century and the Army Corps of Engineers took them over and restored the structures. Then after damages from a flood in 1913, the Army corps spent five years repairing the system, which never again flourished commercially.

In 1948, the corps decided not to provide upkeep for the navigation system. Residents pressured the state to take over the lock system in 1958 and restore the locks for recreational boat traffic.

Currently, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources manages the system.

The state renovated much of the system; only the northern-most lock, no. 11, near Dresden is closed, due to deterioration and lack of traffic, said Mike Jarvis, assistant park manager of the Muskingum River Parkway.

"The locks didn't have near the number of boats that were in the lower part of the river, and we used what money we had at the more heavily used locks," he said.

In 1991, the state introduced lock passage fees to helped supplement funding.

The river averages about 8,000 recreational boats per season, with the locks operating from May through October on Fridays through Mondays.

Jarvis said that a number of factors account for the longevity of the system.

"The recreational boaters have a strong driving interest," he said. "They're the ones that insist to move forward.

"And the state parks department is dedicated to preserving the cultural history of it," Jarvis said. "We have history on our side."

The 160-year-old lock system is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Read more: Allegheny River towns fight to save locks - Pittsburgh Tribune-Review http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/leadertimes/news/s_728310.html#ixzz1HEeWqGFu

HERE's an Interesting Ethical Issue!

2011-03-19T22:10:00.001-04:00

Detroit News publisher pens front-page apology

The editor and publisher of The Detroit News has written a front-page apology over the newspaper's decision to change sections of a scathing review of the Chrysler 200 after an advertiser complained.

Jon Wolman wrote in the Saturday column that he owed readers and the writer "an explanation and an apology for the lapse that raised questions about our credibility."

Wolman says former critic Scott Burgess was asked to change several passages of his review of the car promoted in a popular Super Bowl television ad featuring rapper Eminem. Wolman says that happened after an advertiser complained about "acerbic and disrespectful" material.

Burgess says he resigned Wednesday after meeting with Wolman.

The original review appeared in the newspaper's March 10 print edition and changes were made to the online version.

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Thoughtful Analysis of the Pew Report

2011-03-19T09:21:00.002-04:00

Here's a thoughtful and stimulating analysis of the recent Pew Report which gives us a great deal to think about regarding the future of our various news media.

Rash Report: New news study shows Web's peril, promise
Many may view the shifts in the news industry as inside baseball -- but the very ability to be informed is in play.

By JOHN RASH, Star Tribune

Bit by bit, byte by byte, Americans are increasingly turning to the Internet for information, according to the annual "State of the News Media" report released Monday by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ).

In answer to where they received "most of their news about national and international issues," only online readership rose from the prior year.

It increased 17 percent, while every other platform fell: local TV (-1.5 percent), network TV (-3.4 percent), printed newspapers (-5 percent), radio (-6 percent), magazines (-8.9 percent) and cable TV (-13.7 percent).

The growth in Internet usage is making the future of journalism an increasingly dramatic story line. And it's one with considerable consequences.

For the information industry, to be sure, but also for democracy and the informed electorate it depends on.

But so far this isn't a political story. In fact, despite the drumbeat from critics on the right and left, Americans aren't rejecting the mainstream media news model.

Indeed, PEJ found that the vast majority of what's consumed online is original reporting from professional media organizations, including newspapers and TV stations.

Clearly transformational technologies have changed how news is consumed. In the process, Internet intermediaries -- social networks like Facebook, device makers such as Apple and aggregators like Google -- are complicating efforts to extract revenue from readership, listenership and viewership.

This emerging shift in the media business model means that "the news industry is becoming more of a follower and less of a leader in these new layers of relationships," said Amy Mitchell, deputy director of PEJ and one of the coauthors of the report.

As with any relationship, the one between media content and distribution is two-sided. But that doesn't mean it is equal.

"This behavior pattern, the extent to which people are getting this online content from legacy providers, is a major part of the problem," said Mitchell, speaking of the challenge of longstanding mainstream media models.

"Because as people are moving online at a more rapid pace than ever before, the news industry that they are consuming has yet to find a way to create a significant revenue stream from those consumers."

Not all media suffers similarly. The PEJ reports that in 2010, revenue actually rose 17 percent for local TV, 8.4 percent for cable TV and 6.6 percent for network TV. That's in part because of TV's law of supply and demand.

The supply of commercials is about the same (despite what it seems like from your couch), but viewers are down. So even if advertising demand is static, fewer viewers per program means advertisers have to buy more commercials just to reach the same audience.

And thanks to a surge in spending on campaign ads made possible by the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United case, demand wasn't static. It was high, particularly for local TV.

Newspapers get relatively little campaign spending. And they don't have chronological commercial limitations like TV.

Newspaper revenues slid 6.4 percent in a year and 48 percent in four years. Nationally, circulation eroded 5 percent daily and 4.5 percent on Sundays.

This corrosive combination of lower revenues and circulation led to staffing cuts of another 3 to 4 percent last year, which was actually an improvement over previous years.

But the news isn't all bad for newspapers. Indeed, PEJ reports that when print and online readership is combined, many newspapers have larger audiences than ever before.

That's the case with the Star Tribune, which has also managed to record some recent circulation success. The paper is expected to report a circulation increase in April, according to Michael Klingensmith, publisher and CEO of the Star Tribune.

The Audit Bureau of Circulation reported a 5.7 percent Sunday gain and a 2.3 percent daily decline for the paper in its October release. And online, StarTribune.com had nearly 6.2 million visits and more than 1.5 million unique visitors in February, according to Compete, an online analytics ratings agency.

There's no blueprint yet for making money on digital media. But multiple news organizations are drawing up plans.

Currently there are only about three major media outlets -- the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and Bloomberg -- that ring the register online. On Thursday, the New York Times announced plans it hopes will make it the fourth.

Its metered model for readership, which is similar to but more expensive than a Star Tribune version to be introduced later this year, will offer a number of print and online subscription options, including one that will ask online readers to sign up for a digital subscription plan at $15 a month after they've hit a 20-article monthly limit for free reading.

Ten Newspapers Who Do It Right

2011-03-15T14:26:00.003-04:00

Here is an excerpt from a long article on 10 newspapers who are "doing it right." To read the entire article, click here.

10 Newspapers that Do It Right

By: Kristina Ackermann and Deena Higgs Nenad

Published: March 15, 2011

When we set out to feature 10 newspapers that "do it right," we didn't quite realize the magnitude of the project we were undertaking. That's not to say we thought that selecting 10 newspapers from a sea of thousands would be easy, we just underestimated the number of truly noteworthy ideas we would end up sorting through. Never mind the fact that we neglected to define what "it" was and what our criteria for doing it "right" would be.

We asked you for the best you've got - your brightest "a-ha!" moments and your most successful "we may as well try" endeavors - and you, dear readers, delivered the goods. We were amazed at the creativity and innovation demonstrated by newspapers small and large, daily and weekly, free and subscription-based. It quickly became apparent that we would be doing you a disservice if we only featured 10 newspapers, so we modified our strategy.

There were a handful of papers that stood out as obvious candidates: They had several areas of innovation that produced measurable results. Some of them were so excited to tell us about their projects that their submissions started to rival War and Peace (I'm looking at you, Times of Northwest Indiana). Other papers took a more focused route and stuck to one or two things they do expertly, such as hyperlocal content or coverage of high school sports. There was a lot of overlap among this second group - believe it or not, there's more than one newspaper that copied Groupon and launched a daily coupon program.

Internet Now News Destination of Choice

2011-03-14T11:08:00.001-04:00

Here's an excerpt from an AP article. To read the entire article, click here.

Report: Online news consumption only area of industry showing growth
Associated Press

NEW YORK - The rapid growth of smart phones and electronic tablets is making the Internet the destination of choice for consumers looking for news, a report released Monday said.

Local, network and cable television news, newspapers, radio and magazines all lost audience last year, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a research organization that evaluates and studies the performance of the press. News consumption online increased 17 percent last year from the year before, the project said in its eighth annual State of the News Media survey.

The percentage of people who say they get news online at least three times a week surpassed newspapers for the first time. It was second only to local TV news as the most popular news platform and seems poised to pass that medium, too, project director Tom Rosenstiel said. Local TV news has been the most popular format since the 1960s, when its growth was largely responsible for the death of afternoon newspapers, he said.

"It was a milestone year," he said.

People are just becoming accustomed to having the Internet available in their pockets on phones or small tablets, he said.

In Social Media, Libel Abounds but Few Sue

2011-03-14T10:58:00.002-04:00

This article is specific to Minnesota (it's from the StarTribune), but it raises a generic issue that we all must think about. I see this as a good trend article.

In social media, why let the facts get in the way?
Libel abounds, but libel lawsuits are rare.

By Kevin Giles, Star Tribune

One Facebook user, angry over a dispute with a neighbor, ridicules her online as a thief and a liar. On Twitter, someone accuses a murder suspect of being a killer. A blogger discloses sensitive details about a political candidate's personal life.
In Minnesota, and everywhere else, a perplexing phenomenon has emerged as millions of people have their say in social media.

In today's world, libelous online comments are rampant -- and yet with the notable exception of the "Johnny Northside" blog case, very few people have filed lawsuits over reckless and untrue statements.

Court actions involving users on youth-dominated social media remain surprisingly low, suggesting a new outspoken culture that's more tolerant of lies, rude behavior and character assassination.

"They've come to accept this kind of hurly-burly Internet conversation as normal," said Mark Anfinson, a Minneapolis media attorney. "There are a lot of folks out there who never had a voice before. They now talk in a context just like in a bar or across the backyard fence."

While loose lips have become common in social media exchanges, consequences loom for people who launch false attacks that threaten to inflict serious harm on someone's reputation. Libel cases, often driven by anger and a quest for vengeance, can cost tens of thousands of dollars in attorney fees and result in unflattering publicity.

Few suits over comments

In Minnesota, only a handful of people have been sued for comments they made online and even fewer cases go to trial. Reasons for this, experts say, include:

•Attorneys can't sue Internet companies -- who have the deep pockets -- for what individual users say because of protection from the federal Communications Decency Act.
•A blurring between fact and fiction continues unabated on Internet sites.
•Many states have no laws to address the endless ways people fabricate information.
•Many online postings are never seen in the first place. Unlike permanent comments in newspapers, postings can slide past without being noticed -- but whether they ever disappear from databases remains in dispute.
•Online postings, depending on how they're delivered, can have narrow audiences.
Ordinary folks are held to the same legal standards as news reporters and anyone else who makes written statements in public, but few seem to know that -- or care.

"People do and say things online that they aren't likely to do in the physical world," said David Ardia, director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard Law School in Boston. Libel suits related to social media are rare nationwide, he said, in part because users can fire off instant replies to nasty comments.

"There's this feeling of engagement that people have available to them, tools they didn't have in the past," Ardia said.

In Minnesota, social media engages millions of residents who post comments on Facebook, My Space, Twitter, personal blogs and elsewhere. Some are citizen journalists, some are back porch commentators, but most are just chatterers who want a say in the world around them.

An estimated 3 million Minnesotans sign onto Facebook alone, although actual use is difficult to verify. Many offending comments relate to politics, religion and interpersonal relationships -- topics sure to inspire arguments in face-to-face conversations.

Social media, Ardia said, has made the world into one big chat with everyone speaking at once. The cacophony of voices seems to race at Mach speed, with new comments continually burying old ones, but experts say it's a mistake to presume libelous comments will disappear entirely.

Writer's responsibility

"The rule is you're responsible for what you say," said Minneapolis attorney Leita Walker. Whether posting on Facebook, writing a letter to the editor of a newspaper, blogging or otherwise expressing an opinion, "you strive to be accurate and fair and make sure what you write is true. You don't want to repeat a rumor to find out the rumor isn't true."

This past week, a challenge over statements that Minneapolis blogger Johnny Northside made in 2009 led to a jury determination Friday that he must pay $60,000 in damages. Northside, whose real name is John Hoff, was sued by Jerry Moore, former director of the Jordan Area Community Council. Northside wrote about Moore's associations with a major mortgage fraud case that sent one man to prison for 16 years. Moore was never charged in the case.

Moore said posts by Hoff or anonymous people caused the University of Minnesota to fire him. In reply, Hoff defended his comments as protected speech, but the jurors disagreed.

Suits against bloggers -- often known as "citizen journalists" -- won't make much money for anyone seeking damages, said Jane Kirtley, a University of Minnesota professor of media law and ethics. "A lot of people recognize that these unaffiliated bloggers don't have a lot of financial resources."

That's another reason many victims don't sue.

Libel also can be hard to prove. Plaintiffs have to show damage to their reputations.
The motivation, then, for filing suit? Anger, outrage, a sense of being violated in a public way among friends and neighbors.

From the opposing point of view, a blogger might embrace free speech protections under the First Amendment. Or, more commonly, a caustic-tongued user on Facebook or My Space doesn't know the law and doesn't care.

Anfinson, who teaches a media law course at the University of St. Thomas, said younger people today worry far less about libeling someone because of a higher tolerance for online name-calling that older readers of newspapers won't accept.

To younger people, Ardia said, suing somebody seems like a heavy-handed, disproportionate way to respond to offending comments. But he also thinks it's hard to track much of the underlying turmoil.

Many people, instead of hiring attorneys, will send threatening letters and e-mails to people they think have done them harm, demanding that the offensive post be removed.

"The surface might seem very calm," Ardia said, "but below it there might be a lot more going on than we're aware of."

Another View of the Abramoff Story

2011-03-14T09:54:00.002-04:00

Please read the following review AFTER you have viewed the Gibney film on Abramoff. The author of the review is also a self-proclaimed liberal, but he has quite a different view of some of the personalities and events Gibney portrays in the film.

A Disappointing, One-Sided, Unobjective Analysis of a Complex Political Scandal, September 3, 2010

By Gary S. Chafetz

I recently watched Alex Gibney's "Casino Jack" in a virtually empty movie theater, the new documentary about Jack Abramoff. (Gibney won an Oscar for Documentary Feature in 2008.) "Casino Jack" simply regurgitated the story the media had already conveyed about "evil" Abramoff, and thematically repeated a Bill Moyers documentary several years ago. Gibney's film would have been far more insightful and compelling had it been even-handed.

Disclaimer: Even though I found his Abramoff documentary tendentious and flawed, I admire and respect Gibney's work very much. Politically, we are hard-core liberals. Because I was writing a book about Abramoff (and secretly interviewing him before and during his imprisonment,) Gibney and I have been occasionally meeting and talking about the Abramoff scandal for the past three years.

There are so many disappointing things with this documentary I don't know where to begin. My overarching problem was that Gibney made no attempt to be objective, and that he omitted a plethora of important information that might have afforded the audience a chance to draw a more balanced, nuanced, and more informed conclusion about this complex scandal.

Gibney knew what his conclusion would be long in advance. Presumably for that reason, he did not interview anybody who defended Abramoff or anyone who argued that this scandal was far more convoluted than the simplistic, black-and-white narrative that has been repetitiously presented to the public and now by Gibney.

The film opens with footage of the 2001 mob murder of Florida businessman Gus Boulis, even though Abramoff had met Boulis only once and had nothing to do with his murder. (Boulis had just sold SunCruz casinos to Abramoff and his partner Adam Kidan.)

Soon, there is footage of the casinos operated by Abramoff's tribal clients. Clearly, these casinos are on par with those in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. And clearly, these thriving casinos, earning hundreds of millions of dollars a year, belong to Indians who are well-to-do, not bumpkins that just fell off a log. They can afford the best consultants, lawyers, accountants, and lobbyists. Hence, these particular Indians-for whom Abramoff was the lobbyist-were hardly unsophisticated, which I doubt anyone in the audience have grasped. Gibney should have made this point clear.

(A large part of the virulent antipathy toward Abramoff was fueled by our collective guilt over the genocide our European ancestors committed against the Native Americans. In 1892, there were wild celebrations across the nation. In New York City, for example, a statue was erected of the Great Navigator in an area re-named Columbus Circle. But in 1992, there were essentially no national or regional celebrations to mark a stellar numerical anniversary: the quincentenary of the European discovery of the New World. The reason? We were too ashamed.)

Yes, the public was infuriated with Abramoff. Here was this white man-(that he was an Orthodox Jew only made matters worse)-stealing candy from these poor, unsophisticated Indians. The Washington Post, which broke this story, exploited this undercurrent of shame brilliantly and cynically. I feel it was disingenuous of Gibney not to make clear that these particular Indians-whom Abramoff was accused of defrauding-were not your stereotypic unemployed Indian, boozing it up on a hard-scrabble reservation. In the end, these Indians proved to be far more sophisticated than Washington uber-lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

The other impression Gibney, The Washington Post, and Sen. John McCain, (former chair of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, which also investigated Abramoff,) wanted to impart was that not only had Abramoff defrauded his clients, but he had been a lousy lobbyist. In other words, they wanted the public to believe that all these gullible, unsophisticated Indians had not only been bamboozled into paying Abramoff gargantuan sums, but had received nothing in return.

This is untrue. Abramoff was perhaps the most effective Indian lobbyist who ever lived. It would have been fair if Gibney had at least made that clear. But he did not. Apparently, Gibney preferred Abramoff's iconic image as the indelibly vile pariah, Indian exploiter, and corrupter of the democratic process.

TAXING TRIBAL CASINOS
The most compelling example of Abramoff's lobbying magic was his successful efforts for three successive years to defeat Republican-controlled congressional legislation that would have taxed tribal casinos. (Federally recognized Indian tribes are "sovereign nations" and are supposedly exempt from federal and state taxes.) Had that legislation passed, tribal casinos would have been required to pay about 33% of their profits to the US Treasury. By killing this legislation, Abramoff has cumulatively saved Indian Country about $30 billion for the past 12 years and counting, exponentially more than the relative pittance he charged them for his services. But once again, Gibney omitted this Abramoff triumph from his film.

THE CHOCTAWS OF MISSISSIPPI
Gibney describes how Abramoff, (remember, a lobbyist advocates for and protects his clients as does a lawyer), protected the interests of his client, the Choctaw Indians of Mississippi, so that its casino could keep making money. If a nearby casino opened up, it would hurt his client's revenue stream. So Abramoff worked hard to kill all competing casinos. (This is precisely what anyone hiring a lawyer/lobbyist wants done-the American Way, for better or worse.)

The Choctaws ran a lucrative casino near the Alabama border. The Jena Tribe, also located nearby in Mississippi, wanted to open its own casino, which would have put a big dent in the Choctaws' profits. But first, the Jena Tribe needed federal approval. With the help of Tom DeLay and other Republican lawmakers in Washington, Abramoff blocked the Jena's casino. But Gibney made it seem that Abramoff's successful efforts were somehow sleazy. Perhaps they were. But that's not the point. Abramoff did his job. He may have charged a lot, but he did save the Choctaws many hundreds of millions of dollars-far in excess of what he charged his client. Gibney should have pointed that out.

Gibney also completely omitted another far more spectacular Choctaw success Abramoff engineered. He somehow stopped a referendum in next-door Alabama that would have led to the opening of Indian casinos in that state. Since most of the Choctaw casino clients came from Alabama, the passage of that referendum would have probably put their casino out of business. Again, Abramoff saved his client hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, something Gibney did not to mention.

THE COUSHATTA TRIBE OF LOUISIANA
Gibney omitted another impressive Abramoff lobbying coup involving the wealthy Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, which also operated a casino and resort.

The Louisiana Coushatta had applied to the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) in 1927 for permission to purchase about 9,000 acres of land "in trust" to add to its reservation. For nearly 75 years, the BIA did nothing but sit on that application. It was Abramoff, with the help of Tom DeLay, who forced the BIA to grant the Coushatta's request. Again, Gibney made no mention of this.

Abramoff's biggest lobbying coup for the Louisiana Coushatta was shutting down a casino east of Houston, Texas, that may have put his client's casino out of business. It may seem hard to believe, but a complicating factor involved his also shutting down the casino of a tribe 1000 miles away in El Paso, Texas.

THE TIGUA TRIBE OF EL PASO, TEXAS
Gibney focused much attention on the Tigua tribe of El Paso. This pivotal and controversial episode in the Abramoff scandal is the one which reporter Susan Schmidt of The Washington Post, (whom Gibney interviewed extensively in the film), manufactured so that Abramoff appeared to be the most deceitful villain to have ever slithered out of the slime.

Schmidt claimed that Abramoff had secretly shut down the Tigua's casino simply so he could appear the next day to persuade the tribe to hire him to get its casino reopened! The ultimate sleazebag, right? Well, not quite. It was Schmidt who was sleazy-some would say dishonest-in how she manipulated the facts. Her little work of fiction created such a firestorm of public fury against Abramoff that it helped her win a 2005 Pulitzer Prize, (which, in my opinion, should be rescinded.) What's more, it was also the final straw that made Abramoff's imprisonment inevitable.

The problem is that Schmidt withheld a crucial bit of information from her story. Here are the facts. (Please bear with me.This is a bit complicated.)

Back in 2001, there was one tribal casino in Texas, and it was being operated illegally (something Gibney neglected to mention) by the Tigua Tribe in El Paso. There was a second tribe preparing to open its own illegal casino 700 miles away, east of Houston. That second tribe is confusingly called the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe of Texas. A pending bill in the Texas state legislature would have legalized both tribal casinos. Abramoff's client-the Louisiana Coushatta, (who had just purchased 9,000 acres of land thanks to Abramoff and DeLay), operated a very lucrative casino near the Texas border-felt threatened. Most of its gamblers drove three hours from the Houston area to play slots and blackjack in its casino. Had the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe of Texas opened its own casino east of Houston, Abramoff's client, the Louisiana Coushatta, might have been forced out of business. (Why drive three hours to gamble when a new casino has just opened minutes away?)

Here's the point of this complex-sounding story. Abramoff needed to stop that Texas bill which would have legalized the two tribal casinos, even though only one of them-the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe of Texas-threatened his Louisiana client. Obviously, Abramoff had absolutely no interest in shutting down the Tigua casino, because it was located in El Paso, 1000 miles from (and therefore no threat to) his client in Louisiana. But, yes, if Abramoff could find a way to kill the bill, the Tigua casino would also be shut down.

In another brilliant lobbying coup, (which Gibney once again failed to point out), Abramoff managed to derail the Texas bill. (The bill had already passed in the Texas House by an 83-vote margin. It would have easily passed in the Texas Senate by an even greater margin, but Abramoff was able to stop the bill from reaching the Senate floor for a vote! Hence, the bill failed to become law; both tribal casinos were shut down.)

But The Washington Post's Susan Schmidt never mentioned the part about the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe of Texas in her story! She claimed that Abramoff's sole purpose was to shut the Tigua's casino so he could persuade them to hire him to get it reopened. She completely omitted the fact that the casino of another tribe-the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe of Texas-was the only one he was interested in shuttering. Did Schmidt know that the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe of Texas even existed and that it was a threat to Abramoff's client in Louisiana? Indeed, her name had appeared on a recent story in which those two facts were identified by her! Hence, it would appear that Schmidt deliberately omitted this key bit of information simply so her story would make Abramoff's behavior seem so reprehensible.

I discussed this complicated story a number of times with Gibney. He didn't seem as outraged as I. But he did end up conceding in his film that Abramoff's shuttering of the Tigua casino was "collateral damage." Schmidt, on the other hand, never used the term collateral damage-or any similar term, because that would have undermined her fairy tale of righteous indignation. She simply omitted the name of the second tribe and, most importantly, that the second tribe was Abramoff's real target. Given Schmidt's previous reporting, she knew that the real reason for Abramoff's actions were not what she reported, but rather to protect his Louisiana-based casino client.

In the film, Gibney did not call Schmidt on the carpet for her journalistic transgression or question her on this matter at all. Why he gave her a free pass I find puzzling.

SEN. JOHN MCCAIN
Let's take a look at the illustrious Sen. John McCain. Although Gibney was well aware that there was bad blood between McCain and Abramoff, he failed to mention this in his film. First of all, Abramoff was an arch conservative, allied with House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, former Christian Coalition chairman Ralph Reed, right-wing ministers James Dobson, Pat Robertson, and others. They all loathed "maverick" John McCain, who then touted himself as a moderate Republican.

Secondly, Abramoff had inadvertently funded the notorious and scurrilous "black baby smear" campaign that had helped to sink McCain's presidential bid in the South Carolina Republican primary of February 2000. So it could be argued that McCain's investigation of Abramoff was in large part motivated by personal vendetta. Gibney omitted this.

Although Gibney did mention that McCain had suppressed many of Abramoff's subpoenaed emails, Gibney did not provide a readily available and widely known specific numerical percentage. Straight-talk McCain suppressed 99% of Abramoff's emails! In other words, he only released 1% to the public. This highly selective release of emails allowed McCain to paint Abramoff in the worst possible light, especially since Abramoff foolishly decided not to defend himself during the hearings. (On advice of counsel, he exercised his Fifth Amendment right, which led many to conclude he was guilty.)

Gibney did point out that McCain suppressed many of Abramoff's emails, but that he did so to avoid injuring his fellow Republicans. That was only partly true. The tiny fraction of emails McCain released had been selected and taken out of context in order to generate the greatest possible damage to Abramoff. Gibney knew this, because we discussed it many times, but did not mention it.

SUNCRUZ CASINO
Regarding the purchase of SunCruz casino, Abramoff had been indicted for wire fraud, involving a forged $23 million wire transfer, supposedly the down payment for the $147.5 million purchase of SunCruz casino. Abramoff, however, knew nothing about this phony wire transfer. I interviewed Adam Kidan, Abramoff's SunCruz partner, for over 100 hours. I asked him if Abramoff knew about this forged wire transfer. Kidan repeatedly told me that Abramoff knew nothing about it. Since I had told Gibney this fact and since Gibney also interviewed Kidan for the film, I was quite surprised that Gibney did not mention it.

So why did Abramoff plead guilty to wire fraud in the SunCruz matter if he knew nothing about the concocted $23 million wire transfer? Here's another key issue that Gibney chose not to address in his film.

WHITE-COLLAR GUILTY PLEAS AND HONEST-SERVICES FRAUD
Like many defendants, especially white-collar defendants, Abramoff pleaded guilty, because he was afraid not to. (The New York Times reported that over 25% of convicted and imprisoned rapists and murderers, later exonerated by DNA evidence, had pleaded guilty!) The truth is that Abramoff was intimidated and pressured into pleading guilty, even though he didn't think he was guilty. First, his legal fees were becoming astronomical. Second, federal prosecutors threatened to sentence him to 30 years in a maximum-security prison with violent offenders. Abramoff was told, however, if he agreed to plead guilty to whatever they told him to plead guilty to, his sentence would be reduced to four years and he would do his time it in a cushy prison camp close to home, conveniently allowing his wife and five children to visit him. Again, Gibney failed to mention this.

What exactly was Abramoff guilty of? Bribing congressmen? He never did that, (although he did plead guilty to it.) Tax evasion? Doubtful, (although he did plead guilty to this. Even some of the federal prosecutors who worked on the case disagree on this tax-evasion charge.) Wire fraud? Definitely not, (though he did plead guilty to this too.) Defrauding his tribal clients? Well, now we've now arrived at the crux of the criminal matter, which centers on the "kickback" scheme involving Abramoff's public-relations colleague, Michael Scanlon.

THE "KICKBACK" SCHEME
Gibney prominently mentions that Abramoff took "kickbacks" from Scanlon. The Post and McCain contend that Abramoff should have informed his tribal clients that he was getting a "kickback" from Scanlon, whom they hired at Abramoff's behest. But there is nothing criminal in not informing his clients. And calling it a "kickback" is a misnomer. It was a perfectly legal referral fee, something that orthopedic surgeons, lawyers, and mortgage brokers engage in everyday without informing their clients. Federal prosecutors knew it wasn't a crime, but had to conjure up something to charge Abramoff with so he could appear to plead guilty to defrauding his tribal clients. The conjured-up was "honest-services fraud," a nebulous felony impossible to define. In fact, the U. S. Supreme Court recently declared this controversial law unconstitutionally vague...and yet Gibney did not choose to mention anything at all about the storm swirling around the honest-services fraud statute and its pivotal effect on the Abramoff scandal.

THE GUILTY PLEA OF REP. ROBERT NEY
Gibney extensively interviewed former Ohio Congressman Robert Ney, who spent nearly a year in prison as a result of the Abramoff scandal. For a long time, Ney had stubbornly refused to plead guilty, claiming he had done nothing wrong. And in my opinion it is unlikely that Ney would have ever been indicted, never mind found guilty of any charge related to the Abramoff scandal. What cooked Ney's goose, however, was not Abramoff. Ney was caught accepting a $50,000 cash bribe from a Syrian businessman who asked Ney's help in obtaining spare parts for Iranian military jets, something Abramoff had nothing to do with. With that little incriminating tidbit, however, federal prosecutors were able to tighten the screws on Ney until he squealed guilty to the Abramoff charges as well, in return for a reduced sentence in a cushy prison camp. Gibney knew all about that fat Syrian businessman, but did not to mention it.

Gibney also mentioned that Ney had placed at Abramoff's behest two statements in the Congressional Record-one that disparaged SunCruz owner Gus Boulis and a subsequent one that praised Adam Kidan. Well, this isn't exactly true. Those statements had not been placed in the Congressional Record, but in the Congressional Records Extensions, an obscure publication that essentially no one reads, in which lawmakers insert statements praising local boy-scout troops; honoring a constituent's birthday, marriage, graduation, or death. Gibney made a big deal out of that frivolous favor. Frivolous comments made in an obscure publication pale in comparison to helping the terrorist state of Iran and sworn enemy of the United States obtain spare parts for its aging American fighter jets. But Gibney said nothing about this.

FORMER HOUSE SPEAKER TOM DELAY
As for Tom DeLay, former Republican House speaker and Abramoff's most valuable asset, Gibney makes it clear how much he loathes his politics and his tactics-and so do I. And I can't stand Abramoff's politics as well, (even though he tried to change my mind during the 100 hours I interviewed Abramoff). Gibney did his best to make DeLay, who was extensively interviewed in the film, look hypocritical and sleazy. Gibney even included clips from DeLay's embarrassing appearance on the TV show "Dancing With The Stars." This was gratuitous and only served to make DeLay look foolish, which I thought was unfair. No matter how unsavory Gibney tried to make DeLay appear in the film, there is one incontrovertible fact that Gibney failed to concede. DeLay would never be indicted for anything related to the Abramoff scandal. Indeed,the Department of Justice (DOJ) recently announced that it had dropped its six-year investigation of DeLay. (And Abramoff, who has been cooperating with federal prosecutors for nearly six years, repeatedly told me how badly the DOJ wanted to indict DeLay.)

ADAM KIDAN
Even minor things were not dealt with even-handedly in Casino Jack. For example, Gibney interviewed Melanie Sloan, executive director of CREW (Citizens For Responsibility and Ethics in Washington), a liberal, non-profit watchdog group. She stated that Adam Kidan, Abramoff's SunCruz partner, had been disbarred for fraud. But Gibney chose not to give Kidan a chance to respond or defend himself. It just so happens that those charges were brought by Kidan's stepfather, the controversial owner of adult video stores. They were embroiled in a business dispute. However, the stepfather later wrote to the authorities withdrawing his complaint. (These letters are archived and readily available in Brooklyn and Long Island courthouses.)

Furthermore, Naomi Seligman, former deputy director of CREW and one of Sloan's dearest friends, used to date Kidan. Perhaps this was not worth mentioning in the film, but Gibney knew this.

THE EELEMOSYNARY ABRAMOFF
In the tradition of Orthodox Judaism, Abramoff had been an extraordinarily generous person. Essentially, he gave away much of his money, often anonymously, mostly to Jewish charities. He never even paid off his own home mortgage. And yet Gibney didn't mention any of this at all. It's as if he went out of his way to avoid saying anything that might cast Abramoff in a positive light.

CONCLUSION
Gibney ends the film decrying lobbying. He cites how banking and financial lobbyists are preventing the government from reigning in and controlling derivatives, such as credit-default swaps, which recently nearly triggered an economic depression. He also cites the recent Supreme Court decision, allowing corporations to spend as much as they want on lobbying. And somehow he compares those cataclysms to the alleged crimes of Jack Abramoff.

What crimes did Abramoff actually commit? He got Rep. Bob Ney to insert frivolous comments in the frivolous Congressional Records Extensions. Abramoff gave lawmakers and their staff free meals, drinks at his restaurant and free seats at sporting events, and subsidized a few golf trips. And what did he get in return? He helped his tribal clients' casinos remain profitable. He wangled an audience with President George W. Bush for the prime minister of Malaysia. So what? This is inconsequential compared to the great evils perpetuated by the financial-industry lobbyists, the health-care lobbyists, the tobacco lobbyists, the National Rifle Association, etc. And for these petty gems of sleaze and corruption, Abramoff is sent to federal prison for four years? Seems to me like much ado about nothing.

What Gibney did not mention in his film is that lobbying-the right to petition Congress-is protected by the very First Amendment to the Constitution. Sure, every liberal wants elections to be publicly financed, but it will never happen because of something called the "incumbency advantage." Incumbents get reelected about 90% of the time, thanks, in part, to the money that lobbyists funnel into their reelection campaigns. (Yes, the "bad" lobbyists include Exxon Mobil, the National Right to Life Committee, and the National Rifle Association, as well as the "good" lobbyists like the American Civil Liberties Union, the NAACP and the AARP.) It's doubtful that current lawmakers are going to pass legislation that would make it easier for their opponents to take away their jobs.

When Abramoff stopped the Republican-controlled Congress from taxing Indian casinos, do you know how he did it? He didn't do it with free drinks and meals at his restaurant, free tickets to sporting events at his skyboxes, or golf trips. What those freebies got him was access to the lawmakers and their staff, so he could present a compelling argument. And what was that compelling argument that killed the bill? He told Republican lawmakers that they should vote against this bill because it was a tax, and Republicans were supposed to be anti-tax fanatics. It worked, but people who see the documentary won't know that, because Gibney didn't mention it.

Oh yes, I almost forgot. Remember those naïve, unsophisticated Indians that Abramoff bamboozled? Well, they all sued the law firms that Abramoff used to work for. And guess what? They all won huge settlements, so that in the end, they got Abramoff's phenomenal lobbying services for a pittance...Gibney forgot to mention that too.

Someone of Gibney's caliber should not have resorted to such transparent tendentiousness.

Gary S. Chafetz is the author of The Perfect Villain: John McCain and the Demonization of Lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Crowley Removed as State Dept. Spokesman

2011-03-13T13:59:00.001-04:00

Crowley out as State Department spokesman

By: CNN Senior White House Correspondent Ed Henry

Washington (CNN) - P.J. Crowley is abruptly stepping down as State Department spokesman under pressure from the White House, according to senior officials familiar with the matter, because of controversial comments he made about the Bradley Manning case.

Crowley will step down as early as Sunday afternoon, the officials said, because White House officials are furious about his suggestion that the Obama administration is mistreating Manning, the Army private who is being held in solitary confinement in Quantico, Virginia, under suspicion that he leaked highly classified State Department cables to the website Wikileaks.

Speaking to a small group at MIT last week, Crowley was asked about allegations that Manning is being tortured and kicked up a firestorm by answering that what is being done to Manning by Defense Department officials "is ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid."

Crowley did add that "nonetheless, Bradley Manning is in the right place" because of his alleged crimes, according to a blog post by BBC reporter Philippa Thomas, who was present at Crowley's talk.

But Crowley has told friends that he is deeply concerned that mistreatment of Manning could undermine the legitimate prosecution of the young private. Crowley has also made clear he has the Obama administration's best interests at heart because he thinks any mistreatment of Manning could be damaging around the world to President Obama, who has tried to end the perception that the U.S. tortures prisoners.

Nevertheless, Crowley's political fate was sealed on Friday when Obama was asked at a White House news conference about his comments regarding Manning.

Obama revealed that he had asked Pentagon officials "whether or not the procedures that have been taken in terms of (Manning's) confinement are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards."

In a comment that drew howls of protest from liberals, Obama added that Pentagon officials "assure me that they are. I can't go into details about some of their concerns, but some of this has to do with Private Manning's safety as well."

Manning's treatment has become a flashpoint for liberals, with Amnesty International noting he has been confined to a windowless cell for 23 hours a day, is stripped down to his boxers at night and is not given pillows or blankets.

Manning's lawyer also says the young private recently had to sleep in the nude because defense officials thought there was a suicide threat and decided to take away his boxer shorts.

Crowley is highly respected on foreign policy matters, dating back to his time as National Security Council spokesman under then-President Bill Clinton. He has been the Obama administration's public face on many international stories as the daily briefer at the State Department for Secretary Hillary Clinton.

But he has not had a completely smooth relationship with officials in the Obama White House, and eyebrows were raised several months ago when White House aide Mike Hammer was sent over to the State Department to serve as Crowley's deputy. Hammer is now expected to replace Crowley as the assistant secretary for public affairs.

A little-known factor in Crowley's comments about Manning was revealed Saturday by April Ryan, a White House correspondent for American Urban Radio who covered Crowley in the Clinton White House.

Ryan wrote on Twitter that Crowley "dislikes treatment of prisoners as his father was a Prisoner of War."

While it's true that Crowley's father was imprisoned during World War II, people close him downplay that as a major factor in his comments about Manning, saying the biggest factor is simply that Crowley believes what he said.

Asked to comment on Crowley stepping down, Tommy Vietor, spokesman for the National Security Council, referred questions to the State Department.

So. Bend Tribune Discusses Media Mix

2011-03-11T09:35:00.000-05:00

It might surprise you, given all the pessimism about newspapers in recent years, to learn that The Tribune has more readers than ever before.

That's because even though there are fewer print subscribers than when the newspaper was essentially the sole source for news, our web audience has grown exponentially.

Digital page views for our sites were up 20 percent year-over-year at the end of 2010.

Those of you who follow SouthBendTribune.com regularly know there are reasons for those numbers. We're the leading news site for north central Indiana and southwestern Michigan; our coverage of high school and college sports, weather, and business and economic development is unmatched. And readers come to us from all over the globe to read about the University of Notre Dame.

Now SouthBendTribune.com is taking another leap forward. We've switched this week to a new content management system that allows us to organize and present material more attractively and effectively.

For example, you'll find that the local news pages offer stories by category -- "government and politics," "crime and courts," "education, " etc.

Because our new system, Tribune Digital, links us up with a number of newspapers and television stations around the country, we'll offer you extra packages of articles, photos, and live streaming video that will help you make sense of the day's major stories. We'll have stories and photos, for instance, from The Los Angeles Times, the nation's leading source for news about entertainment and the TV/movie industry, and we'll have the last word on Chicago sports from The Chicago Tribune. There also will be more news from around the nation and world.

Most significant will be the improvements to our local news presentation. The new system also allows us to link up more effectively with our partners at WSBT-TV and WSBT Radio. All of us are owned by Schurz Communications Inc., which is in the process of converting all of its properties to Tribune Digital.

With all three news operations able to share information seamlessly, we'll bring you even faster breaking news, weather and traffic reporting and more video and audio to complement our writing and photos.

In January, we launched a new Classified website that gives visitors more information and easier ways to search for what you are looking for. New features include an easier way to sort information, maps to locate real estate, garage sales, and auctions, and "Contact the Seller" button where you can ask the seller a question via anonymous email.

We know that more and more of our readers get at least some of their news from our digital products. With our new system in place, your visits to SouthBendTribune.com will bring you deeper, wider choices than ever before.