Novel Spurs Indiana Police Action

Self-published Indiana Author Spurs Police Action With Novel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wooster Church, ICDI Partner on CAR School

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

Five Innovations the Web Brings to Journalism

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

Five innovations in news journalism, thanks to the web

Posted by Jon Bernstein

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

Well, not much, apart from reinvent the form.

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

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

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

1. Interactive infographics

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

2. Crowdsourcing

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

3. The podcast


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

4. Over-by-over

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

5. The blog

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

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

Sometimes the News is Incredible

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

Rex Smith: Sometimes the news is incredible

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

By REX SMITH, Albany Times Union

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New York Post Not Laughing at Spoof

New York Post not laughing at climate change spoof

By Evan Buxbaum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obama Open to Newspaper Bailout Bill

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

Obama open to newspaper bailout bill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'God is Dead' Author John Elson Dies

From the New York Times:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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