Media: February 2005 Archive Page

Long gone are the days of fast-talking, whiskey-swilling Murray Kempton peers eloquently filling columns with daily dish on government scandals, mobsters and police corruption. The sort of in-your-face challenge that the Fourth Estate once posed for politicians has been replaced by mud-slinging, lies and, where it ought not be, timidity. When I started out in journalism the newsrooms were still full of old guys with blue collar backgrounds who got genuinely indignant when the Governor lied or somebody turned off the heat on a poor person's apartment in mid-January. They cussed and yelled their ways through the day, took an occasional sly snort from a bottle in the bottom drawer of their desk and bit into news stories like packs of wild dogs, never letting go until they'd found and told the truth. If they hadn't been reporters most of those guys would have been cops or firefighters. It was just that way.

Now the blue collar has been fully replaced by white ones in America's newsrooms, everybody has college degrees. The "His Girl Friday" romance of the newshound is gone. All too many journalists seem to mistake scandal mongering for tenacious investigation, and far too many aspire to make themselves the story. --Laurie Garrett --Laurie Garrett's memo to Newsday colleagues (PoynterOnline)

I don't think this site offers a permalink to the individual memos, but this one was dated 28 Feb, 2005.

Yvonne poured herself a drink and melted into the chair across from Callie. She brushed a strand of moltenly hair from her eyes and proceeded to carve the ham. Callie watched intently. Juice streamed from the ham in rivulets like saliva drooling from the fierce jaws of a wild dingo poised over the dead carcass of its prey in the dingo-eat-dingo world. --Travis Tea --Atlanta Nights [Will PublishAmerica Publish Any Old Thing?] (Digital Medievalist)

The above is an excerpt from a novel that was given a contract with print-on-demand publisher PublishAmerica, which claims to be a selective, legitimate publishing source. Once the authors of the novel announced it was a hoax (get it--- "Travis Tea"?) designed to test the selectively of PublishAmerica, the publisher revoked the contract. Digital Medievalist links to the relevant documents and other coverage of the story.

What is "a strand of moltenly hair"? That's brilliantly bad.

--Drive-by Blogging (Google)

Weblog portfolios are due soon, so there's more activity than usual on my students' weblogs. Moira mentioned that fellow student Evan Reynolds had used the term "drive-by blogging" to describe the sudden rush of blog entries that fill in the gaps and fulfill the requrements of the weblog portfolio assignment. That was a new one to me.

For the uninitiated, FUD stands for ?Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.? It is a term popular within the free software community, used to describe the use of lies and deceptive rhetoric, aimed chiefly at free software projects. It is an accurate term. In brief, the goal of FUD is to make money when the free software competition cannot be defeated fairly in the marketplace. This can be done by scaring consumers through wild propaganda, or more recently, confusing courts through more subtle arguments. --Aaron Krowne --The FUD-based Encyclopedia: Dismantling fear, uncertainty, and doubt, aimed at Wikipedia and other free knowledge resources (Free Software Magazine)

Krowne is responding to Robert McHenry's critique of Wikipedia: The Faith-Based Enclyopedia. While Krowne's open-source lenses are rose-colored, he makes the very good point that Wikipedia's editing process is transparent, while the process of deciding what gets into a traditional print encyclopedia and what is left out is completely inaccessible to the end user. Via KairosNews (which features a responsible rebuttal by John Walter).

If they can do a Brady Bunch movie, you can be sure that sooner or later, somebody's going to do a B5 movie. The only thing I can say without equivocation is that when that day comes, as the rights-holder, I will make darned sure that it's done right, because I'd rather have no B5 movie than one that doesn't live up to what fans and I myself would want to see. --J. Michael Straczynski --[Babylon 5 Movie Project Tanks] (JMSNews)

I've been following hints about this project for a while...

While I was thrilled by the DVDs of Farscape that Charlie Lowe loaned me last year, Babylon 5 was the last TV show that I actually made the time to watch on a regular basis, so this is sad news for me.

A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web. (Though it sounds like something you would find stuck in a drain, the ugly neologism blog is a contraction of "web log.") Until recently, I had not spent much time thinking about blogs or Blog People. --Michael Gorman --Revenge of the Blog People! (Library Journal)

Gorman's op-ed piece isn't easily accessible online, but I've found someone's cached PDF copy.

Gorman writes, "When it comes to recorded knowledge, a snippet from page 142 must be understood in the light of pages 1 through 141 or the text was not worth writing and publishing in the first place." He is talking about Google's plan to digitize the contents of some huge libraries and serve them up to online searchers. The original material that was initially published as books, so from that perspective Gorman is correct. Still, there are queries for information that don't logically have to lead to a patron's request to check out a book. And while I, too, find it distressing when my students habitually click the "full text only" option when they are using the library catalog on campus, literally across the street from the library's stacks of printed journals, today's students have developed the digital literacy that helps them to multitask much more efficiently than their sequentially-working elders. Thus, it's hardly productive to sniff at the information-processing skills that students have developed through their entertainment and social uses of the internet.

I don't think it's a bad thing that Google will let people idly peek at a fact in a book that they would otherwise never see. At the very least, they'll have had that peek. And I bet that some of the dusty books that would otherwise have never been found will get more readers than they have now.

I have some sympathy for Gorman's position... for anyone to claim that Google reveals God's mind is ridiculous. Still, I'm stunned that the president-elect of the American Library Association and Dean of Library Services at a major university would brag in the year 2004 that he knew barely anything about weblogs.

Headline writers have other duties. They tend to be overworked and underpaid, given the power their wield. And while I'm sure the headline writer in this case had no qualms -- thinking he or she was capturing the flavor of the issue -- this is a small but telling example of how a headline can twist readers' views, even before they know what the story is about. --Dan Gillmor --A Biased Headline Twists a Story (Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.)

Blogging this so I can fish it out the next time I teach journalism. A great example.

And so the darkness touches the links, and the darkness tastes their power, and the darkness broods and breeds in its desire. The dragon of the night rises, corporations tangled in its wings. It leaves the links powerless, the search-engines crippled, and the readers lost as the rankings swell like rivers and the paths of cyberspace are flooded.

The name of the darkness is marketing economy, and all it touches turns into tinned, cold meat. --Torill Mortensen --Ragnarok will see no blogs (Thinking with my fingers)

Amusingly oblique but poignant prose.

I shake my angry fist at tinned meat!

Several events have sparked a debate about whether an ethical threshold has been crossed: the decision by Marqui, a company in Vancouver, to pay bloggers to mention the company; Newsweek'srevelation that a group of 100 technologists in Silicon Valley accepts free products and services in return for word-of-mouth endorsements (or not); and the news that BzzAgent, a 3-year-old Boston company, has enlisted thousands of volunteers to generate buzz for clients? products, sometimes in ethically questionable ways.

The ground is shifting so rapidly that the Word of Mouth Marketing Association last week released a draft Code of Ethics to help define the rules of the road. (The group invites the public to participate in the process.) --J.D. Lasica --The cost of ethics: Influence peddling in the blogosphere (Online Journalism Review)

Bowing to faculty demands, Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers on Thursday released a transcript of his controversial remarks on women and science. He did so while releasing yet another apology for those remarks and as the head of the Harvard Corporation released a statement backing Summers. --Scott Jaschik --What Larry Summers Said (Inside Higher Ed)

I'm blogging this not only because it's timely and this blog has hosted discussions on women in science before...but because the article demonstrates the quiet power of links.

The article would make perfect sense if printed out, but the online version offers a newcomer links to click on for background. Someone who's been following along the whole time can find raw data. I had seen a link to the full transcript of the speech online, and I read it quickly to see what the fuss was all about. Jaschik knows what he's doing, when it comes to online journalism.

Regarding the women in science controversy, it amazes me that Harvard took so long to publish this transcript.

It is not true that there are no controls. It is not true that the blogosphere is the Wild West. What governs members of the blogosphere is what governs to some degree members of the MSM, and that is the desire for status and respect. In the blogosphere you lose both if you put forward as fact information that is incorrect, specious or cooked. You lose status and respect if your take on a story that is patently stupid. You lose status and respect if you are unprofessional or deliberately misleading. And once you've lost a sufficient amount of status and respect, none of the other bloggers link to you anymore or raise your name in their arguments. And you're over. The great correcting mechanism for people on the Web is people on the Web. --Peggy Noonan --The Blogs Must Be Crazy  (Opinion Journal)

An excellent assessment of the power of blogs, written by a MSM ("mainstream media") insider.

The New York Times Co. has agreed to buy About.com from Primedia Inc. in an all-cash deal valued at about $410 million. --NY Times agrees to buy About.com (New York Business)

About.com is a collection of free resources compiled by "experts" in a format that resembles a blog. The About.com authors are part-timers, enthusiasts who post brief articles and recommend links, within the structure of a website that serves up a lot of annoying advertisements. The About.com "guides" get a commission on the ads.

A few years ago, before there were blog-indexing sites, the fact that About.com let you search through so many articles and links made the site valuable. Now that there are good, reliable ways of finding the most current information posted by thousands and thousands of webloggers, many of them with credentials that exceed those of the About.com "guides," I'm turning to About.com less and less frequently (especially after they mothballed their interactive fiction category). It is too easy for people with valuable expertise to post their material on their own, rather than depend on About.com to do it for them.

The NY Times has credibility, but its content has little visibility on the internet, since its URLs expire.

Update: A half hour later.

From Peggy Noonan's editorial, "The Blogs Must Be Crazy"

Some publisher is going to decide that if you can't fight blogs, you can join them. He'll think like this: We're already on the Internet. That's how bloggers get and review our reporting. Why don't we get our own bloggers to challenge our work? Why don't we invite bloggers who already exist into the tent? Why not take the best things said on blogs each day and print them on a Daily Blog page? We'd be enhancing our rep as an honest news organization, and it will further our branding!

About.com isn't a collection of bloggers. It probably looks desirable to the NYT because the content is more tightly controlled than an equal number of blogs would be. Everyone who agreed to provide content for About.com is comfortable with the idea of working for The Man.

Playing off the self-esteem theme, digital artist David Sullivan's contribution to the show is the Ego Machine, a project that uses Google to project Sullivan's soul into the future and puts the fun back into funeral. --Michelle Delio --Immortality Through Google  (Wired)

If it has anything vaguely to do with technology, Wired is there.

To prove his point that the commons is under attack, Bollier has filled Bullies with example after example of how corporate lawyers have swooped in on artists and consumers who have tried to use products and logos in ways other than those prescribed by the corporations themselves.

As an example, Bollier presents the case of "AiboPet," an enthusiastic owner of one of Sony's robotic pets. When AiboPet set up a website that showed other Aibo owners how to make their pets dance, Sony quickly notified him that, by manipulating the Aibo software, he was violating provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In other words, even though AiboPet had full ownership of his Aibo, Sony could still control how he modified it and whether he taught others to do the same. Rather than face a lawsuit, AiboPet quickly shut down his website. --Amit Asaravala --Are Bullies After Our Culture? (Wired)

Humans specialize in distraction, especially when the task at hand requires intellectual heavy lifting. All the usual "Is it lunchtime yet?" inner voices, and external interruptions like incoming phone calls, are alive and well.

But in the era of e-mail, instant messaging, Googling, e-commerce and iTunes, potential distractions while seated at a computer are not only ever-present but very enticing. Distracting oneself used to consist of sharpening a half-dozen pencils or lighting a cigarette. Today, there is a universe of diversions to buy, hear, watch and forward, which makes focusing on a task all the more challenging. -- Katie Hafner --You There, at the Computer: Pay Attention (New York Times)

I was going to blog this earlier, but I got distracted.

Actually, I realized that blogging this article was an attempt to distract myself from another, higher-priority task that I was putting off at the time.

Search engines are some of the most commonly accessed Web sites online. Millions of people turn to search engines daily to find information about news, health concerns, products, government services, their new neighbors, natural disasters and a myriad of other topics. At the same time, recent trends suggest that the search engine market is shrinking, with fewer large players guiding users? online behavior than ever before. Despite the crucial role that search engines play in how people access information, little attention has been paid to the social, political, economic, and cultural dimensions of large-scale search engines.

This special issue will explore the social implications of large-scale search engines on the Web. It will bring together experts from the fields of communication, sociology, political science, economics, business, law, and computer and information sciences to consider what we know about people'ssearch engine uses and what recent trends suggest for the types of content that will be most accessible to users in the future.

The following are some questions papers might address: Who uses search engines and for what purposes? What are the effects of search engine use on mass- and interpersonal communication? How do users? communication practices influence search engine functionality? How skilled are various population groups at the use of search engines? How do search engines shape identity management and representation online? Are all search engines created equal? Is all content created equal in the eyes of search engines? Is there a viable public alternative to the search engine market dominated by private actors? These are just some of the possible questions papers in this special issue may address. --The Social, Political, Economic and Cultural Dimensions of Search Engines (Journal of Comptuer-Mediated Communication)

I was talking about Wikipedia, and he launched into a rant about its failings. In particular, he complained about the several inaccuracies in an article about a topic with which he was deeply familiar.

"So," I asked, "did you fix them?"

"No," he responded, "I don't have time for that kind of thing."

Talk about not getting it. --Dan Gillmor --Google, Wikipedia and More (Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.)

In this entry about Google's recent interest in Wikimedia, Gillmor offers this anecdote about a Big University Professor.

NASA -- Last year was the fourth warmest year on average for our planet since the late 1800s, according to NASA scientists.

To determine if the Earth is warming or cooling, scientists look at average temperatures. To get an "average" temperature, scientists take the warmest and the coolest temperatures in a day, and calculate the temperature that is exactly in the middle of those high and low values. This provides an average temperature for a day. These average temperatures are then calculated for spots all over the Earth, over an entire year.

Scientists use temperatures taken on land and on surfaces of the oceans. Weather stations provide land measurements, and satellites provide sea surface temperature measurements over the ocean. These data are computed by NASA. --Earth Gets a Warm Feeling All Over (Red Nova)

OMG! Look, Ethel, at that big red blob over North America! We must be frying in hell!

The article doesn't tell us what we're looking at, but one assumes from context that the hotter colors on the map show areas of increased heat. But another map, the "2004 Annual Mean Surface Temperature Anomalies," shows that the area over North America to be anywhere from .5 to 2.7 degrees cooler in 2004 than it was five years earlier.

The article is fine. The pictures are cool. They don't go together, however.

Imagine how different the visual rhetoric would be if this image of the globe instead showed mostly pale green, with a slightly more yellow green indicating raised temperature. The red creates an emotional reaction.

James Guckert, who reported from the White House for the Talon News Service under the name "Jeff Gannon," announced he was quitting the business "in consideration of the welfare of me and my family." --White House reporter's credentials questioned (CNN)

Hmm... I interned at a radio station where one of the news reporters went by a catchy, alliterative, macho on-air name, but the station owner called him by his real name, which was rather mousy, and less pleasing to the ear name.

Since Talon News Service does not seem to have much of an identity outside of reproducing GOP press releases, Guckert's alternative identity is a more troublesome matter.

What is Tenure? (The Good Morning Show -- KFAB)

This morning at about 8:40, I spent about 12 minutes as a telephone guest on a morning talk show on KFAB in Nebraska, where I was brought in to provide context for the Ward Churchill controversy at the University of Colorado. My role was to explain tenure.

A Google search for "tenure" brings up an informal "What is Tenure" handout that I created in 2000 and posted to the "Frequently Asked Questions" of my website. When the host first contacted me, he mentioned having found my work online.

I presented myself on-air as a guy who happens to earn a living being a college teacher, and tried to described the process in simple terms. When discussing how tenure might differ at different kinds of institutions, I managed to work in some good references to SHU's faculty-student interaction and small class sizes (I mentioned that I teach one class with 30 students, three with about 13, and one with five). In response to a hypothetical question about how my school would respond to the presence of a holocaust denier on our faculty, I worked in a reference to our National Catholic Center on Holocaust Education.

At one point, I noted that there are some cold and insensitive people who are great teachers; there are some kind and loving people who are not; and there are some people who say offensive and odious things who meet the terms of their employment contract. That was the main thing I tried to emphasize – that tenure is a contract, with terms that both ends have to hold up. I noted that tenure would not protect the employment of a faculty member whose scholarship and teaching did not continue to meet the appropriate criteria.

After one of the hosts offered the hypothetical scenario of a rich donor saying that he would donate $10 million to SHU, but only on the condition that Dr. Jerz be fired for voicing an opinion that he finds offensive, I explained the importance of academic freedom.

When I noted that there's a line in our faculty handbook that specifically states that tenure will not be revoked as a way of clamping down on academic freedom, I heard music start to play in the background, and the host thanked me for my time.

Personal Reflection

During the interview, I was consciously thinking of a Salon article I blogged about years ago, "Ambushed on Donahue," in which MIT scholar Harry Jenkins describes being invited on the show to have an intellectual discussion about videogames in culture, but instead found himself facing angry mothers who had been spooked by Donahue's repeated screening of video clips showing the most violent, out-of-context scenes in Grand Theft Auto 3.

Jenkins kicked himself afterward for not sticking to a simple point and hammering it at every opportunity. So I offered a quick answer to the direct questions posed by the host, and then tried to shift as soon as possible back to the narrative I had prepared in advance. I was delighted to hear that music in the background just when I got to the line about the faculty handbook, because I had aimed for that to be the climax of my prepared remarks.

I had a few things in reserve, in case I needed them. The station has a lot of sports programming, so I was also going to use the analogy of a pro team paying big money in order to recruit and retain superstars, or colleges offering athletic scholarship for a similar reason. Had the environment become a little hostile, I was going to say “Hmm” thoughtfully, and then suggest that someone in Nebraska start a university that doesn't offer tenure, and publish a report on what other benefits they needed to offer in order to recruit and retain qualified faculty members. But the need never arose. In fact, the hosts gave me a few generous softballs to speed things along, and when it became clear that I wasn’t going to speculate about Ward Churchill, they offered some hypothetical questions in order to keep me talking.

I tried to record it via the station's website, but I couldn't get through. Perhaps angry mobs called in to mock me after I went off the air, but I’m satisfied with the experience.

If you're designing a website aimed at teenagers, you'd better not make the text too small. That's not because teens have bad eyes, but because teenagers tend to lean back in their chairs when they're at their computers. That advice and much more about how websites for teens should be different from those for adults can be found in a study recently completed by Jakob Nielsen, a principal at the Nielsen Norman Group. --Daniel Terdiman --What Websites Do to Turn On Teens  (Wired)

Another intersting passage, since students dont' blog anonymously at SHU's site:

Also important, [Susanna Stern] said, is enabling teens to explore their identity by providing them with an environment in which they can experiment with ideas of style, the way they talk, the way they dress and the way they think about the sensitive issues in their lives -- all anonymously.

I just don't know what it is about Jerz and Britney. Maybe he is the president of her fan club and he has to donwplay their connection in class because it just would get weird if we knew he loved her like we all do. I mean come on people the world wants to know. Get out there an investigate this mystery. --Leslie Rodriquez --Jerz & Spears...the hidden hatred (Roamer's Zone)

One of my students launches a grassroots journalism investigation of me.

This is what I get when I make pop culture references in order to make sure students are awake.

In Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, the eponymous subject keeps his youthful looks while the vagaries of age are visited upon his portrait in the attic. Now a digital version of Wilde's idea is being developed to show you what you will look like in five years' time if you take no exercise, eat too much junk food and drink too much alcohol. --Will Knight --Mirror that reflects your future self (New Scientist)

Of course, in the novel, the picture shows the effects of the evil in Dorian's past. I wonder whether the inventors of this technology applied the Dorian Gray analogy themselves, or Knight did that himself.

There were buttons and switches everywhere - buttons to call for food for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature. and there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.

Vashanti's next move was to turn off the isolation switch, and all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Has she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one's own ideas? --E.M. Forster --The Machine Stops

This short story was written almost 100 years ago, but this passage perfectly captures what I feel like after I've been away from the office for a while, and return in order to find new e-mails stacked up and messages on the answering machine. The story is full of the kind of moralizing one often finds in cheesey 1950s sci-fi movies, but this was ahead of its time. I'm teaching it for the first time today, in "Intro to Literary Studies".

The Literature, Arts and Medicine Database has a brief annotation on this story, and Marvin Thomas has compiled some other interesting links that examine this story. My favorite is the one written in 1998, which presents this story in the context of Y2K readiness.
While driving to work this morning, I had the crazy idea that it would make a good basis for an interactive fiction game. I've already got so much on my plate that I'm sure I'll never get to it, but thinking about it was an interesting mental activity.

It gave me ideas.

The scene: A college classroom at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.

The subject: Writing the newspaper column.

The question: "Can any of you name a columnist you read -- in a newspaper or magazine or online -- on a regular basis?"

In response: Dead silence.

[...]

"My generation is very visually oriented," explains Ryan Schreiber, a U-M Dearborn junior from Dearborn who -- like most in the class -- is majoring in journalism but doesn't read much of it. --Laura Berman --Nonreading generation of writers needs 12-step program (Detroit News)

A response from the student paper doesn't quite get at the core of the problem... but the site requires registration, so I don't think I'll bother responding in my blog.

Via Joanne Jacobs.

Though "1893" is a homage to bygone text adventures, the sophistication of the programming is a step up. In "Zork," commands more complicated than, say, "attack troll with rusty knife" would confuse the game. But "1893" can handle much more.

"The parser is pretty elaborate at this point," Mr. Nepstad said. "You can type 'get ax,' or you can type 'pick up the short-handled ax and put it in the bag.' It'll understand you." --Brendan I. Koerner --A Game With a Low Body Count (NY Times)

I didn't know that Enron's fate had anything to do with the production of this game... A good little article that goes beyond the nostalgic. Here's hoping Nepstad drums up some more sales -- his game really is an impressive accomplishment.

I'm glad I wrote the column, though, even if I'm wrong, because it helped bring into focus something else that I've been wanting to say for a long time, which is that it's a sad state of affairs in our politics when people are so locked into being in one camp or the other that they can't review the evidence as it presents itself and adjust their thinking accordingly.

How else can you explain some local columnist with liberal intentions drawing so much interest just because he wondered aloud that maybe he had been wrong and that the other side had been right?

I don't ever want to be one of those columnists -- or commentators -- who just take all the information they receive and hammer it into their pre-conceived notion of the truth. --Mark Brown --What's so shocking about having second thoughts? (Chicago Sun-Times)

Brown reacts to the buzz that resulted over a column he wrote yesterday, in which he briefly suggested that the sight of so many Iraqis lininig up to vote was enough to make him entertain the notion that perhaps, just maybe, Bush might in some small way not be completely and utterly wrong about everything he has ever done, said, thought, and felt.

I'll save Brown's punchline for those who actually click on the link and read the whole column... (if it doesn't disappear behind a paid-subscription firewall, that is).

Update: Dan Gillmor offers this sobering flashback:

NY Times (1967): U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote. United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting.