Current_Events: August 2008 Archive Page

High-profile ports columnist Jay Mariotti, who dramatically quit the Sun-Times, saying newspapers are a dying industry, seems to have fallen in love with the Web. His former old media comrades aren't buying it.

Roger Ebert:

You signed a new contract, waited until days after the newspaper had paid for your trip to Beijing at great cost, and then resigned with a two-word e-mail: "I quit.".... The fact that you saved your attack for TV only completes our portrait of you as a rat.

[...]

Newspapers are not dead, Jay, because there are still readers who want the whole story, not a sound bite. If you go to work for television, viewers may get a little weary of you shouting at them. You were a great shouter in print, that's for sure, stomping your feet when owners, coaches and players didn't agree with you. It was an entertaining show. Good luck getting one of your 1,000-word rants on the air.

Chris Deluca:

And now Mariotti says the printed page is a dinosaur. He has embraced the Internet as his new forum.

We're talking about a columnist who detested bloggers -- mainly because he was easy fodder for their biting humor. He acted as if he stood on a level above bloggers. Most of the better bloggers have the kind of wit he couldn't touch.

Are bloggers bad? Absolutely not.

But those of us who work at newspapers have one edge over the blogging world. We have access to the players, coaches, managers and front-office executives. We can talk to key figures on and off the record to get insight unavailable to others. It's a privilege most of us don't take lightly. To not use it to our advantage is a waste -- of our energy and the readers' time.

My colleague Lee McClain passed this article on to me -- via a post-it note attached to the dead-tree edition of the story.

"Move over, mainstream media, it's the voter's turn," says the blurb for an event called: "Tapping the Creative Community: The Power of Voter Generated Media."

To be sure, there are television satellite trucks parked in the parking lots around the Pepsi Center, blow-dried anchormen speaking earnestly into cameras and dignified, old hands like Bob Schieffer of CBS roaming about the hall.

But in the media security lines snaking outside the convention venue, the faces are mostly young, the equipment mostly laptops, and the credentials for Web sites you may have never heard of. --Mackenzie Carpenter, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

I remember the Biden law school incident. Not long after that, during the Clarence Thomas hearings, I remember reading that law school students were secretly photocopying homework assignments submitted by their arch enemies, in the hopes of one day using that information to torpedo a big political appointment.

By choosing Joe Biden as his running mate, Barack Obama has insulted academics -- students and teachers alike -- a constituency that was significant in bringing him the nomination of his party. Especially in a year that has seen two prominent political careers hamstrung by sex scandals, and in an era where choosing vice presidential candidates seems to be foremost an exercise in avoiding skeletons in the closet, it's surprising that Biden's record of plagiarism did not disqualify him from Obama's consideration.

Joe Biden, you will remember, ran for president in 1988. He delivered a speech that presented the thoughts of British Labour Party Leader Neil Kinnock is if they were his own, and was slow to explain or apologize for this transgression. The ensuing scrutiny of Biden's record revealed that he had also plagiarized in law school, failing a course for doing so. Shortly after these revelations, he dropped out of the race. -- Jonathan Beecher Field

Boston.com:

A man from Somerville, Mass., and his friend who went around the country this year removing typographical errors from public signs have been banned from national parks after vandalizing a historic marker at the Grand Canyon.

A good lesson in journalistic humility. FoxNews.

One morning, there was a fatal accident. One person died. One lived. As always, I dutifully jotted down the information from the report. And a few hours later, I announced to all of Ohio who died and who survived this crash.

But I was wrong. See, the police transposed the names of the victim and the survivor on the report. So you can only imagine the feeling in my stomach when the survivor's family called to tell me I had it wrong.

But I'd done due journalistic diligence. My saving grace? I attributed the report of the death to someone. An all important line that said, "Police say so-and-so died last night in a wreck..." And that's all journalism is: not reporting your own conclusions, but what others are saying.

The latest Pew report:

Since 2006, the proportion of Americans who say they get news online at least three days a week has increased from 31% to 37%. About as many people now say they go online for news regularly (at least three days a week) as say they regularly watch cable news (39%); substantially more people regularly get news online than regularly watch one of the nightly network news broadcasts (37% vs. 29%).

Since 2006, daily online news use has increased by about a third, from 18% to 25%. However, as the online news audience grows, the educational divide in online news use - evident since the internet's early days in the mid-1990s - also is increasing. Currently, 44% of college graduates say they get news online every day, compared with just 11% of those with a high school education or less.

Net-Newsers and Integrators take advantage of a range of web features to get the news. Roughly four-in-ten (39%) Net-Newsers - and about a third of Integrators (32%) - have gotten a news story emailed to them in the past week. And while 30% of Net-Newsers regularly watch news online, 19% regularly listen to news on the web.

Net-Newsers and Integrators also rely on news and political blogs as a part of their news diet. Roughly a quarter of Net-Newsers (26%) and somewhat fewer Integrators (19%) say they regularly read blogs on politics or current events. Overall, only 10% of the public regularly reads political and news blogs.

Other tidbits...

• " Integrators, who get the news from both traditional sources and the internet, are a more engaged, sophisticated and demographically sought-after audience segment than those who mostly rely on traditional news sources. Integrators share some characteristics with a smaller, younger, more internet savvy audience segment - Net-Newsers - who principally turn to the web for news, and largely eschew traditional sources. "
• "Most of the loss in [newspaper] readership since 2006 has come among those who read the print newspaper; just 27% say they read only the print version of a daily newspaper yesterday, down from 34% in 2006."
• "About a third of those younger than 25 (34%) say they get no news on a typical day, up from 25% in 1998."

I've gone underground to finish off a few projects related to Colossal Cave Adventure, so the blogging has been light. But I'm surfacing in order to blog about this poll, which shows that a majority of respondents said that the government should not force bloggers to give equal time to opposing views, some 31% disagreed.  I'd really rather see all this information in a table, and of course I'd want to see the actual questions, but it looks like that sort of thing is reserved for paying customers.

Even Democrats say hands-off the Internet though but by a far smaller margin than Republicans and unaffiliated voters. Democrats oppose government-mandated balance on the Internet by a 48% to 37% margin. Sixty-one percent (61%) of Republicans reject government involvement in Internet content along with 67% of unaffiliated voters.

So that means that almost half of the Democrats who resonded are in favor of government regulation of the content of blogs. Did the question differentiate between personal blogs and professional ones?  What about discussion forums or social networking sites?  How net-savvy were the people who were polled? Was it a telephone survey that only called people with land lines? There are too many unanswered questions to make any sort of conclusions (which isn't stopping the folks at slashdot, of course).

From The Washington Post:

It hit Mark Gruntz all at once, while he was sitting flat-broke in an airport in Greece: He had lost credit for three summer courses, wasted $11,474 in student loans and gotten kicked off a boat. All because he hadn't cited Wikipedia enough in a paper about a movie.

Last week, he and another college student, Allison Routman, were expelled from the Semester at Sea program for violating the University of Virginia's honor code. The expulsions raised questions for some students about whether the school's more than 150-year-old tradition is too harsh -- and for others, whether students have a different understanding of plagiarism and research now that online resources make it easy to find information.

The headline is misleading. The problem here isn't that the students didn't cite Wikipedia enough... they included direct quotations from their sources without using quotation marks or paraphrasing. This has little to do with online sources, other than the simple notion that because so many facts are available in a few mouse clicks, a new generation of students devalues the work that goes into attaining (and verifying, and documenting) those facts.

An Associated Press article repeats the three sentence fragments that student Allison Routman says she included in her paper without citation.  They're not deep, meaning-laden passages, but they're all from the same source, and as I see it the paper was intended to be a reflection paper -- students were supposed to watch a movie and then relate the movie to their experience during their travels. Not an intellectually heavy task, but Routman says nobody had ever defined "paraphrasing" for her before (which, even if true, suggests she was too helpless to find the definition on her own), and Gruntz, in an interview from the airport in Greece, told the Washington Post "I got in trouble for not citing it enough, I guess" and "I think I was supposed to put quotations around it" and "I don't really think I did anything wrong" (and this is after the students have spent at least a full year at their home college, before signing up for Semetser at Sea; and after a librarian on the ship gave a presentation on proper academic research methods, and after the guilty students sat through a meeting with a panel of five faculty members that picked his paper apart... somewhere along the line, I'm sure all the students were told exactly what's expected in an academic essay).

Yes, the University of Virginia's single-sanction honor code is strict, but it's supposed to have bite. I remember having to write an essay about the honor code when I applied to U.Va., and I remember every year some students would start a motion to lighten up the honor code by instituting a wrist-slapping punishment, but if it ever made to a student body vote, the students would always vote to keep the honor code as-is.

If U.Va. is sponsoring Semester at Sea, and students from other schools who sign up for the program have to agree to abide by the U.Va. honor code, which is clearly explained in the Semester at Sea handbook (PDF).