Journalism: March 2005 Archive Page

Imagine someone coping with real discrimination -- a black tanner, say, in 1897 Alabama. To expand his business, he needs capital and access to markets beyond the black business corridors in the south. Every white lender has turned him down, however, and no white merchant will carry his leather goods, even though they are superior to what is currently on the market. Tell that leather maker that an alternative universe exists, where he can obtain credit based solely on his financial history and sell his product based solely on its quality -- a universe where race is so irrelevant that no one will even know his own -- and he would think he had died and gone to heaven.

For allegedly discriminated-against minority and female writers, the web is just that heaven. --Heather Mac Donald --Diversity Mongers Target the Web (National Review)

Well, that assumes that the minority and female writers have equal access to the technology and skills that would prepare them for success on the internet. It also presumes they have equal access to the time it takes to build up a reputation that leads to paid work.

Mac Donald notes that women don't tend to write about politics as often as men, and that some minorities might not have the verbal skills that would enable them to make excellent writers; she also raises the spectre of quotas, which was probably unnecessary.

Columbia is introducing a new journalism curriculum. But it is doing so in a separate program, maintaining its old program, which has many of the characteristics Bollinger criticized. The new program is a one-year M.A. degree that draws more heavily on the liberal arts and broad areas of study, rather than the traditional, one-year M.S. program at Columbia, which focuses on specific skills like news writing. --Scott Jaschik --Columbia Rethinks Journalism Education (Inside Higher Ed)

As a journalism instructor at a liberal arts college, of course I'm biased, but I think this is a good step. Students can already learn the skills in internships and during their cub reporter days. What they don't have when they're on the job is the luxury of time to reflect on their achievements, and to scrutinize and dissect the forces that influence a journalist's ethics.

Readers are using aggregation services like Google News to save time and find news they're interested in from one location. But the digital melting pot of news has raised questions about the need for standards that go beyond technology. --Stefanie Olsen --Tough week prompts closer look at how Google gathers its news  (SFGate.com)

No matter how disgusting, shocking, horrifying or abberant the person, the topic or the interview, your demeanor is ALWAYS one of neutrality. Then, don't betray that trust - ever.

The first glimmer of judgment, shock or negative emotion the person glimpses in you - they'll shut down. They may keep talking, but not about anything worth writing about. I laugh every time I see broadcast media do a confrontational interview. What do they get? Nada. Zip. Zero. There's the emotional soundbite of the subject saying "No comment," or cursing...but gee - that gets old. --Amanda Stossel, in a comment. --Interviewing: The Ignored Skill (PoynterOnline)

To blend in, I sat at the $10 craps table and started to lose the magazine'smoney with dispatch. I mean, I had to sit at a table so a Borgata Babe would give me a drink and I could check her out?er, I mean, interview her about the ethical implications of the new weight policy. It'samazing how quickly a reporter'sexpense budget disappears when he'scovering a vital story about the workplace rules for America'scocktail waitresses (cha-ching!) in a casino (cha-ching, cha-ching!) --Gersh Kuntzman --Babes Up in Arms (MSNBC/Newsweek)

Shouldn't there be a period outside that last closing parenthesis?

The real reason I blogged this, besides the good writing, was on page two of the article:

Employers can hire or fire whomever they want to hire or fire. If I run a company and don’t want an office filled with thin people or people who like papaya, I don’t have to hire such distasteful folk. In fact, I don’t even have to hire blacks, women, Catholics, senior citizens, Native Americans or any member of the established “protected classes” – so long as my reason for not hiring them is not because they are black, female, Catholic, old or Native American.

Of course, this is a column, not a legal document or a peer-reviewed scholarly article. But Kuntzman's realization underscores the point I made about weblogs and the workplace: weblogs are just the latest way that people can get themselves in trouble.

Last week'sblog on the state of videogame writing, and the possible solution offered by New Games Journalism, attracted plenty of debate, but many of you wanted to see a few more examples of the NGJ style. --Keith Stuart --Ten unmissable examples of New Games Journalism (Gamesblog)

I've been kicking around an idea for a games-related writing project that combines my interest in computer gaming history with my role as a journalism teacher.

I'm a great fan of The Soul of a New Machine, as well as Levy's Hackers and Stephenson's In the Beginning Was the Command Line. Those only touch on computer games, but they're all rich explorations of the computer geek culture that was one of the influences on today's gaming culture.

At any rate, I'm blogging this now in order to remind myself of these examples over the next couple weeks, so I have time to reflect on what I'd like to put in a proposal I'll need to write before the end of the month.

This might be just the hook for me to hang the hat that I hardly knew I was holding.

1. The Wall Street Journal is read by people who run the country.

2. The Washington Post is read by people who think they run the country.

3. The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country and who are very good at crossword puzzles.

4. USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don't really understand The New York Times. They do, however, like their statistics shown in pie charts.

5. The Los Angeles Times is read by people who wouldn't mind running the country, if they could find the time -- and if they didn't have to leave Southern California to do it.

6. The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country and did a far superior job of it, thank you very much.

7. The New York Daily News is read by people who aren't too sure who's running the country and don't really care as long as they can get a seat on the train.

8. The New York Post is read by people who don't care who's running the country as long as they do something really scandalous, preferably while intoxicated.

9. The Miami Herald is read by people who are running another country but need the baseball scores.

10. The San Francisco Chronicle is read by people who aren't sure there is a country or that anyone is running it; but if so, they oppose all that they stand for. There are occasional exceptions if the leaders are handicapped minority feminist atheist dwarfs who also happen to be illegal aliens from any other country or galaxy provided, of course, that they are not Republicans.

11. The National Enquirer is read by people trapped in line at the grocery store.

12. None of these is read by the guy who is running the country... into the ground. --Newspaper Humor: A Classic Recycled (Editor & Publisher)

I've seen this before, but I just finished scanning through a workbook I'll probably add to my syllabus when I teach "Newswriting" this fall, so I've got journalism on my mind.

Dozens of parents flooded the Methuen school system with phone calls yesterday after a local newspaper reported that a fourth-grade girl had returned from the February school break requesting to be treated as a boy.

The child's parents told school officials that he had always considered himself a boy, rejecting feminine dress and name, and they were agreeing to raise him as a male. --Tracy Jan --Methuen school faces parents' queries on student's gender issue (Boston.com)

This article raises an interesting question for a journalist.

In order for the article to make sense, the reader has got to know that the student is biologically female, but the reporter's use of the masculine pronoun makes the second paragraph more confusing than it should be.

If the editor chose to use the feminine pronoun for the sake of clarity, that would be akin to making an ideological statement -- rejecting the request that the school superintendent has apparently granted. But doesn't the use of the masculine pronoun also suggest an ideological statement?

If I were writing this article, I would probably find a way to introduce this non-standard pronoun usage via a quotation:

"We only want what's best for him," said so-and-so, referring to the fourth-grader.

In professional medical literature and in academic gender studies, I wouldn't find this kind of grammatical play unusual, but in a newspaper for the general reader, it would probably we worthwhile to include some signal like that.