 There will always be a public appetite for reporting on baseball, movie stars, gardening and cooking, but it’s of no great moment for the country if all of that work were taken over by amateurs or done by machine. What is of great moment is reporting on important and true stories that can change society. The reporting on the Catholic Church’s persistent harboring of child rapists, Enron’s fraudulent accounting and the scandal over the Justice Department’s Operation Fast and Furious are all such stories.
Because telling true stories is vital, the value of journalism can’t be reduced to other, ancillary needs. Journalism performs multiple overlapping functions, and there never used to be much urgency in defining those functions. In the period in which public speech was scarce (which is to say, all of history until now), journalism was simply what journalists did, journalists were just people hired by publishers, and publishers were the relative handful of people who had access to the means of making speech public.
We believe that the role of the journalist–as truth-teller, sense-maker, explainer–cannot be reduced to a replaceable input for other social systems; journalists are not merely purveyors of facts. Now and for the foreseeable future, we need a cadre of full-time workers who report the things someone somewhere doesn’t want reported, and who do it in a way that doesn’t just make information available (a commodity we are currently awash in), but frames that information so that it reaches and affects the public. –Tow Center for Digital Journalism.
In many, many parts of the country right now, if you want to go to see a movie in the theater and see a current movie about a woman — any story about any woman that isn’t a documentary or a cartoon — you can’t. You cannot. There are not any. You cannot take yourself to one, take your friend to one, take your daughter to one.
There are not any. –At The Movies, The Women Are Gone : Monkey See : NPR.
Over 50 percent of humanities Ph.D.s who start out working in non-tenure-track positions make the jump to full-time, tenure-track employment in less than three years. Those who don’t make that jump, again, do what Ph.D.s have always done: Some choose interesting work in the business, governmental, or non-profit sectors, others in university administration. A few obtain tenure-track positions later in their careers. A small minority remain off the tenure track. Virtually none are unemployed.
So it shouldn’t be too surprising to learn that few humanities Ph.D.s regret their decision to go to grad school. Nerad and Cerny found that even among English Ph.D.s employed in business, government, or non-profits—fields for which their Ph.D. was, strictly speaking, completely unnecessary—64 percent said that given the choice to do it over, even knowing how things would turn out for them, they would still pursue the Ph.D over law school, medical school, doctoral study in a different field, or no graduate school at all. Overall, 89 percent of them felt that the Ph.D. was worth it, even though they hadn’t joined the profession many had likely thought they would. –Don’t Be Afraid of Going to Graduate School in the Humanities
Can’t wait until we get this end-of-year state-mandated testing/evaluation over with, so my son can go back to reading stuff like this guy’s book.
“Reality is structured to a series of moments so that anything that is real is real in a moment of time, and if something appears to persist in time, that’s because [...]
Technology’s Impact on Education | Visual.ly.
Wikipedia is testing a visual editor, in the hopes of lowering the barrier for first-time authors. Wikipedia:VisualEditor
Caps off to the Navy’s plan to drop all-caps.
OFFICIAL COMMUNICATIONS AND ORDERS HAVE BEEN IN ALL CAPS SINCE 19TH CENTURY.
YOUNG SAILORS ACCUSTOMED TO TEXTING SEE ALL-CAPS ORDERS AS A FORM OF SHOUTING!
NAVY WANTS ITS ORDERS AND OFFICIAL MESSAGES TO BE MORE READABLE AND LESS RUDE.
“WHILE THIS DECISION WAS MADE TO SAVE [...]
The headline is hype. How about “Lego faces are getting more diverse?” That would be just as true, and less misleading. Many of the recent sets come with heads that you can rotate — a happy face on one side, a scared or angry face on the other side. So it’s also true that Lego [...]
A former student who is now excelling in grad school took a moment to share her thoughts about my blogging portfolio assignment, which is usually 25-40% of a student’s grade.
In April, a different former student who had blogged for me in several classes, whom I invited as a career workshop guest, surprised me [...]
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