March 2009 Archive Page

Two police officers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been suspended and are having their employment reviewed following allegations that they dumped copies of The Tech, MIT's student newspaper, that featured an article about the arrest of another police officer, The Boston Globe reported.-- Inside Higher Ed

The University of Virginia has begun a three-year process of shutting down all of its public computer labs as part of an effort to cut costs.

In an explanation published on the university's Web site, information-technology officials say that students' changing habits have rendered the public labs obsolete. A survey conducted last fall revealed that 99 percent of new students brought their own laptops to the campus. And while the labs are still heavily used (students spent 651,900 hours in the labs last year), internal data indicated that 95 percent of the time those students used the lab computers to surf the Web and read and compose text documents--tasks that officials say they could easily do on their own computers. -- Chronicle

Remediation of a classic? A satire on visual cruft? http://www.tomas-nilsson.se/


Slagsmålsklubben - Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

This article describes how the Columbia School of Journalism is redesigning its program in order to integrate new media and business skills into the traditional journalism program.

Currently, most student work in the introductory course is in print -- sometimes published by a professor on a course's Web page. It is Grueskin's hope that, in the future, these students might produce more multimedia-driven pieces at this early stage as well.

"It's important for the school and for our students that Web training not be segregated from the core journalism curriculum," Grueskin said. "I think it's important for us to address digital skills training for everybody, not just those who will be new media majors. Students who are multi-talented will have the intellectual dexterity to adapt to some of the technological change that will come in the next 5 to 10 years. Still, at the core is journalism. All of the [new media] tools in the world don't cover up bad journalism."-- David Moltz, Inside Higher Ed

Seton Hill's new media journalism program includes "Writing for the Internet" and "New Media Projects," along with plenty of blogging in the other journalism classes. Students also learn about being a freelance writer, how to deal with agents and copyright and other nuts and bolts in "Publications Workshop."

Recently I was thinking about what kind of a math course might appeal to English majors, since journalists have to deal with statistics, and reporters who know their way around a balance sheet or a corporate annual report will be well equipped to sniff out information for a story.

Cardin's Newspaper Revitalization Act would allow newspapers to operate as nonprofits for educational purposes under the U.S. tax code, giving them a similar status to public broadcasting companies.

Under this arrangement, newspapers would still be free to report on all issues, including political campaigns. But they would be prohibited from making political endorsements.

Advertising and subscription revenue would be tax exempt, and contributions to support news coverage or operations could be tax deductible. -- Thomas Ferarro, Reuters

Will struggling for-profit papers be able to compete with government-supported papers?  PBS and NPR do top-notch work, though the perceived liberal bias of NPR is one reason why conservative talk radio has flourished in the last decade.

"We love you, but signing this agreement doesn't make us legal partners." -- Aviary EULA

That's from the "summary" column, on the right side of a page that has the equivalent legalese on the other side.  It's an example of a human way to present an end user license agreement (EULA), one of those legal documents that you have to assent to when you sign up for an online service.

This site is a good example of treating a user like a human being, instead of a pawn in a gotcha game. (Thanks for another good suggestion, Josh.)

What would it have been like to be brought up by George Orwell? Pretty grim, you might think. But you would be wrong. In June 1944, Orwell and his wife Eileen adopted a three-week-old boy whom they named Richard Horatio Blair (Eric Blair being Orwell's real name). Now a retired engineer living happily in an immaculate house in a picture-book Warwickshire village, Blair has never publicised the fact that he was related to Orwell, always preferring to remain in the background. But ahead of a talk at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival with Orwell's biographer DJ Taylor (details, below right), Richard agreed to speak to me about his memories of his childhood. -- John Carey,The Times Online

Since this is published in the review section, it looks like the website automatically appends "review | Non-fiction book reviews" to the article title (in the <title></title> tags, visible in the colored stripe at the very top of your browser window), but this isn't a book review, it's a personality profile.

I generally discourage my students from delivering PowerPoint presentations, in part because they typically grab images from everywhere and anywhere, which is a practice I don't want them to retain if they should start working for the student paper.  I prefer instead for students to post a richly linked blog entry (with links pointing directly to online sources, rather than copying chunks of online material into their own presentations). 

My colleague Josh Sasmor just sent me a link for Tin Eye, an interesting image-based reverse search tool.  Start with an image, and Tin Eye will look for copies online.  The Cool Searches page demonstrates how the site can find parts of an image, which might be of use in identifying faked images.

A minor disturbance is a 6, while a major disturbance is a 6X. A major accident is a 7X. An officer wanting to grab something to eat? That's a 50.

Got that? 10-4. (Understood.)

Dallas police acknowledge there could be a slight learning curve for some officers and dispatchers. But they don't anticipate issues, especially because the department already has practice using plain language.

When Dallas housed Hurricane Katrina evacuees, several agencies used the same radio system. So, the departments "had to take care to use terminology that we would understand," Dallas Police Lt. Chris Aulbaugh said. -- Eric Aasen, Dallas Morning News

The article notes that different agencies with different codes had difficulty trying to work together after the 9/11 attacks.  The specialized language becomes a marker for members of the law enforcement community, but in times of crisis, according to the article, experienced officers realize you can get more done when you drop the specialized codes.

Many married women choose to hyphenate their married name and maiden name. But there are times when you just shouldn't!! (Mature Content) CBS 13

I laughed so hard my six-year-old daughter rushed downstairs to ask why I was crying.

The son of the poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath has taken his own life, 46 years after his mother gassed herself while he slept.-- Times Online

I'm teaching Plath in my American Lit class tomorrow.

I don't know any bloggers who don't crave comments, but there are many more places than blogs that you can leave comments these days: on news articles, photos, videos, comment walls, and more. Comment writing is something of a new art form, and as many people who get comments will tell you, some are great and some are horrible.-- Grammar Girl

I'm not sure writing a comment is much different from writing a blog entry or web blurb, but I was still happy to see this. (I didn't watch the video, though... I'm not really a visual learner.)

In an academic context, I liken a comment to saying in public something that you might raise your hand to say in class, but because I give my students their own individual blogs, when a peer leaves a comment for a peer, it's a transaction that they know I might never actually see.  I ask students to post 2-4 comments per assigned reading, which I think is enough to keep the conversation going, but the range means that a peer comment is still participating at least somewhat in the gift economy.

You can't do this on dead trees.  A great example of how a new media widget makes a news article interactive. From the Wall Street Journal.

THERE is nothing particularly unusual about the living room of the two-story town house that Scott Veazie shares with his wife in Washougal, Wash., except for one piece of furniture in a corner: a full-size replica of the captain's chair from the bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise, as seen in the original "Star Trek" television series.

[...]

"It's not the most comfortable of chairs," Mr. Veazie said. "The arms are too low and they're too far apart. Now I know why William Shatner was always leaning forward in it."

There is another possible explanation, suggested Eddie Paskey, who as Mr. Shatner's stand-in on "Star Trek" spent much time in the chair during camera and lighting set-ups. "Early on, Bill sat down, leaned back, and it went over backwards," he said. -- Thomas Vinciguerra, New York Times

When I was first watching Star Trek reruns as a kid in the 70s, Eddie Paskey was a "Guy Who Always Gets Killed."  (He played an extra that was killed off, but got cast again the next week as another extra, and wisely kept his mouth shut.) I was a little miffed later on, when I learned the word "redshirt."

Since the NYT is apparently issuing takedown notices to bloggers who use NYT photos ("Pop quiz: You're a troubled media dinosaur struggling to find your way on the Web. What steps can you take to actively discourage people from linking to you, thus reducing your pageviews and revenue?"-- Cory Doctorow) I will instead post my own 3D depiction of this famous chair.

• Kristen Seas, "Ripple Effect: A New Perspective on Rhetorical Agency"
• Lars Soderlund, "Kairos and Emergence"
• Marc Santos, "Social Bookmarking as Distributed Research"
• Jeremy Tirrell, "Decorum and Emergent Ethics"

I was particularly interested in this panel, in part because I taught the session chair in a few technical writing / new media classes when she was an undergraduate, but also because the Emerging Social Software SIG on the previous night had done a lot of thinking about social bookmarking, so I was also looking forward to the talk by Santos.  I'm not a rhetorician, so I learned quite a bit from these panelists.

What follows are my rough notes, lightly edited.  My own comments are in square brackets.

[I came in about 10 minutes late so I didn't catch the beginning. These are my rough notes, lightly edited.]

Unused newspaper racks clutter a storage yard in San Francisco, California on Friday, March 13, 2009. (AP Photo/Noah Berger) (Boston.com)

I'm not so sure this image really depicts the recession. Rather, it's a sign that the business model of print journalism has changed irrevocably, due to the internet. The younger generation has not continued the older generation's habit of picking up a physical copy of the paper. Journalism of the future is a new media enterprise. I expect my journalism students to be good writers with critical interpretive skills, but they also need new media experience in order to reach the 21st C audience.

Applause for Eric Glicker, who got the ball rolling on an annotated bibliography of social software. Many plans, some commiseration, a few very pleasant surprises. Matthew S. S. Johnson reported that his mid-tenure review committee agreed to accept my blog entry on one of his previous CCCC presentation as a citation. I asked him if his committee could send me a letter for my own tenure review, since I'd like my tenure committee to know that my blog is being used as part of someone else's tenure package.

At the meeting, Charlie Lowe presented Bradley Dilger's suggstion that we disband the SIG, since we can do more good splitting up and talking about open source issues in different groups, rather than getting together and preaching to the choir. Bradley was taking notes (on his cell phone no less... boy do I feel inadequate, with my PDA fold-out keyboard attachment). I'll post a link to his notes when I get them.

3500 attendees, successful innovations in on-site childcare and poster-paper sessions. Finances are good, considering the recession. There will be a slow increase in internet technology; 2 years ago there were 3 dedicated "internet rooms," this year there were 6, and next year there will be 9. I should check the WPA-L archives for explanation of internet issues.... I understand there was a lively discussion there regarding the lack of internet access rooms. Not everyone who asked for an internet room got one; not everyone who asked for a digital projector got one; it was a common occurrence for presenters this year to apologize for not being able to show the YouTube links they wanted to show. Michael Day says NCTE has WiFi equipment that the Hilton forbids them from bringing; we need to join with other professional organizations to negotiate as a block. Several resolutions passed without any real comment, though there was some dissent when a CCCC member proposed expanding the minorities scholarship to include LBGTQ minorities.

Short animated video

Four brief case studies, representing new and changing populations on campus. The group has left lots of time at the end for discussion. "We don't have any easy answers."

• Kari Warren, " 'Did My Mom call you yet?" Teaching Millenial Students (And Their Helicopter Parents)"
• Heidi Hanrahan, "'I've got to pay the rent': Teaching the Working Class Student"
• Elizabeth Vogel, "'What does analysis mean?': Teaching the mainstreamed ESL student."
• Bethany Perkins, "'You just don't understand': Teaching the Asperger's Student"

Overall, but not universally or uniformly, a theme of working against the institutional expectations for the benefit of the students.  I was a little surprised at this, I suppose because I feel great confidence in my own institution's ability to support the students it admits; I've served on the admissions committee, and our discussions often hinged on whether we have the resources to provide the level of support that a student needs.

As it happens, each of the four female speakers chose a male student for the case study. (I asked them whether that was intentional, and the panelists looked fairly shocked and told me they hadn't even noticed.)

These are my rough notes, lightly edited, with my own comments inserted in square brackets.

• Nate Krueter, "High Stakes Style"
• Star Medzerian, "Rereading the Past: Style's Place in Our Disciplinary Memory"
• Mike Duncan, "Destroying the Topic Sentence"
• William Fitzgerald, "Dressing Up in Style: The Return of the Figurative in Composition Pedagogy"

This was one of the most enjoyable 4Cs panels I've attended, mostly because it reminded me that I got into this major because I love words.

What follows are my rough notes, lightly edited, with my own comments in square brackets.

• Katie Retzinger, "Immediacy, Desire, and the Other: MMORPGS and Constructions of Identity"
• Mathew S.S. Johnson "The World is Subject: Gamers as Potential for Change"
• Phill Alexander: "Running with the Bulls: The Race Rhetoric of the Tauren in World of Warcraft"

The study of games and composition have long overlapped in the areas of popular culture and identity studies have long been areas of overlap.  I didn't detect a shred of defensiveness in the approach these scholars took, which has not always been the case at games-related CCCC events.  The idea of presenting games as an avenue for social change sounds like another potential growth area, in which the study of composition can turn games into a tool of inquiry and challenge, in much the same way that composition teachers often posit their role as preparing future citizens of a literate society.  I wanted just a bit more of the "How my thesis applies to college composition and communication" bullet point, simply because one expects that in a talk at this venue, but all three held up as explorations of issues relevant to both games studies and identity politics.

What follows are my own rough notes, lightly edited, with my own comments inserted in square brackets.

• Pamela Gay, "The Blogitorial: An Alternative ? Genre for Writing"
• Derek Boczkowski, "When Writing (and Teaching) Goes Public: Blogging and the Wall-less Classroom"
• Michael J. Faris, "What's in a 'Zine? A Public Ancestry of Blogs"

What follows are my rough notes, lightly edited.  I've inserted my own thoughts in square brackets.

• Michael Williamson, "Validity and Bias in Writing Assessment"
• Les Perelman, "The Five Paragraph Essay Makes People Stupid and Machines Smart"
• Brian Huot: "How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the 5-Paragraph Essay"
• Nancy Glaser, "One of Many Myths: Does the Five-Paragraph Essay Sink or Swim in Large-Scale Writing Assessments."
• Edward White, Respondent. (White recently published an amusing "satire" of a five-paragraph essay, which appeared in College Composition and Communication 59:3 (Feb 2008): 524-526

Another chapter in the love-hate relationship comp teachers have with formulaic assessments. (Mostly hate, with some codependency issues.)

[My own thoughts will appear in brackets. I regularly assign Rose's essay, "I Just Wanna be Average" to my freshman writing students. He considers the editorial a valuable form of public writing, and teaches graduate classes that ask students to use their specialized subject knowledge to produce editorials of value to the broader community.]

Bringing our knowledge into the public sphere. Disciplinary knowledge, teaching and classrooms, and personal knowledge.  As a group we are oriented toward practice. This talk is an opportunity to discuss going public with what we know.

[Rose's talk was very structured... so structured that I fear I may have missed labeling a section or two, either because I was inspired by something he had just said and was writing rather than listening, or because I was listening so closely that I forgot to take notes.]

• Dawn M. Armfield, "On the Go: Mobile Technologies and Literacy"
• Daisy Pignetti-Cochran, "What are you doing? Teaching with Twitter?"
• Kimberly A. Schulz, "Social Presence in the Online Writing Classroom: Community-building through Social Networking Technology" (with comments from Laura Gurak)
  

I do the "suck air in through my teeth" thing whenever I hear statements about how kids today "naturally" take to digital media.  If they hear that, they may get the idea that those of us who have acquired textual literacy just came to it naturally -- as if we didn't work hard to acquire that literacy. And students who are told that they are naturally good at digital literacy might get the idea that they're doing something wrong if it doesn't come to them effortlessly... people who are good at digital literacy have spent countless hours immersing themselves in the digital world -- doing things that mainstream society considers wasting time on Facebook, pouring inane thoughts into a Twitter stream, blogging endlessly about minutiae.  In a similar way, we developed our own textual literacy by spending countless hours staring at black marks on dead trees, looking at boring books without any pictures. Kids today are digitally literate because they see the immediate value of investing time in their product (whether they measure that value in terms of the number of Facebook friends they acquire, number of people following their Twitter streams, ratings and views in YouTube). 

Since I am not a heavy user of my phone (I use a Tracfone, the cheapest and simplest model I could find, I am conscious of conserving my calling time so that I don't have to buy extra minutes, and I wouldn't think it's worth it to get an unlimited calling plan, I found this panel very useful.  There's plenty of room for an analysis of the data -- I'd like to see some over-arching patterns that emerge, not from a single narrative about a single classroom experiment, or even a panel that combines several such narratives, but a survey that examines many such studies and categorizes them.  Such a study would take a lot of time, which is why I want to read someone else's study rather than write my own.

The following notes are a rough transcript, lightly edited. [Bracketed text reflects my own thoughts, responding to the speaker's presentation.]

• Bonnnie Kyburz [I arrived a few minutes late, so if she gave a specific paper title, I missed it.]
• Cheryl Ball, "B-Movie Virgin Sacrifice: Digital Scholarship in a Print-Tenure World"
• Michael Salvo "New Media Is/Are not Island(s) : Emplacing New Media in Communities for Use"

Take-away message for me: When I first began teaching HTML authoring, students were so proud that they got something online -- ANYTHING online -- that they weren't really ready for constructive criticism. I've tried to counter that by building more peer-critiquing into the course, with an early assignment that asks them to critique professional websites, and a cautionary reading that reminds students not to be dismissive or rude when they criticize the professionals, because adopting a sneering superiority is not the same thing as developing critical thinking skills.) So I should embrace the good learning that is taking place when students notice the gap between their tastes and their ability to produce. Can we afford to presume that our tenure and promotion committees will recognize this dynamic?

What follows are my rough notes, lightly edited, with my own comments and reflections set off by square brackets.

Here are my rough notes, taken while the speaker was talking. (Conference on College Composition and Communication, 2009.)

After thanking the audience for the "opportunity to serve in the cause of writing," Bazerman began with Mesopotamian farmer's clay pebbles used to keep track of flocks. What will the world be like 5000 yrs from now, or a century, or a decade? Our life projects develop with literacy; few in the developed world are farmers, but we participate in complex knowledge-based activities.

Farmer GPS Software slide: "Even farmers now grow crops by the book."

Writing has been considered sacred; it creates a space where we can be more thoughtful.

Writing facilitates building a parallel world of knowledge that allows us to monitor and influence the world we live in. As teachers of writing, we are bearers of this transformative technology, leading future generations in to more refined skills, deeper understanding, more complex cooperation, new adventures, greater communion.

The take-away message for me...

"The pen may be mightier than the sword, but the pen, like the sword, takes a deft hand, won through long years of training."

An emotional call for respect for the differences of composition, not by hoping for a world in which all English professors will be judged by their fruits, but rather a separatist rallying cry for the discipline of composition. It was well-received by the audience, though I find I rather like my own identity as an English generalist. (Bazerman invoked journalism several times in his talk. But that's one of the hats I wear, under the broad umbrella of English, that would not fit with the mission of the CCCC.)

More notes...

A brief overview of a handful of tools that help the game-creation process.

if you've got a brilliant idea and don't have the capital to build it yourself - or the inclination to pimp it to your local Big Name Publisher, create a proof of concept with these recommended game engine kits and let us know when you've got something we can play! -- Aleks Krotoski

If I were a children's author, I would write the story of Reba the Rebarbative Rhubarb.  Of course, at the end, she'd be Reba the Redeemed Rhubarb.

Powerful journalistic storytelling. There's no way to tell this story without being disturbing. And then there's the big twist that comes in from left field at the end... stunning.

No significant facts were in dispute. Miles Harrison, 49, was an amiable person, a diligent businessman and a doting, conscientious father until the day last summer -- beset by problems at work, making call after call on his cellphone -- he forgot to drop his son, Chase, at day care. The toddler slowly sweltered to death, strapped into a car seat for nearly nine hours in an office parking lot in Herndon in the blistering heat of July.

It was an inexplicable, inexcusable mistake, but was it a crime? That was the question for a judge to decide.-- Gene Weingarten, The Washington Post

If the newspapers do not survive, then what takes on the crucial social and economic roles they have performed over the past century and more? That is unknowable. Failing some inventive institutional spark, some vital functions might simply go unperformed. The Internet is creating a "tragedy of the commons" situation for news, and no one ever claimed that all problems have solutions. Decay and decline are always options, and--unless some mechanism is found to let producers of information monetize their work--inevitabilities. Absent institutional invention, a government-funded news service seems not just possible but likely, possibly supplemented by privately funded organizations with varying axes to grind.-- James V. DeLong, The American

Because newspapers used to be the main conduit between people and the wider world, they were perfectly situated to leverage that relationship to generate income. Now that there are numerous free ways to get good news, the younger generation has never taken on the newspaper-buying habit. (I'm amazed to think that people will spend 20 cents for a text message.)

Here's a good summary of a key point about why the internet is threatening print journalism. There's still nothing wrong with the journalism, it's just the mechanism that newspaper publishers used for earning money has not kept up with the habits of online news consumers:

The most immediate threat from the Internet is classified ads. Newspapers are not efficient media for classifieds if there is an Internet alternative. Classifieds are concentrated on the three big categories of autos (24.4 percent), employment (33 percent), and real estate (32.3 percent). These are all particularly vulnerable to the current slump, but they are also vulnerable to complete cannibalization by the Internet. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how this would not happen, because these listings attract people who are actively looking, not casual browsers flipping through a paper. So Craig's List or other specialized websites will take over this area. The papers themselves are well positioned to run such sites, of course, but the threat of competition will keep the prices down.

It costs money to get the physical pages in the hands of potential consumers. It's cheaper to distribute the news online, of course, but it's also easier to make money from online classifieds alone (without bothering to hire journalists to write the content that makes people page through the print edition).

Does Adobe Shockwave fit your definition of malware?

I train my kids not to click on random boxes that pop up, and I don't want any boxes popping up on computers my kids use.  So I was very annoyed the other day when I first saw this box -- intrusive auto-update window that shows only two options, without a "Cancel" button or a "Close dialog box" button.
I've blogged before about the lengths I went to avoid using Adobe's Acrobat PDF reader.  My nerves are a little raw from several late nights at work, but even on a good day, the arrogance of this dialog box would disgust me.

Even more insulting, this window stays in the front of the screen, and there's no way to move it, minimize it, or even kill it from the Windows Task Manager "Applications" screen. Unless I yield to the "choice" Adobe presents here, when I want to search my hard drive for a Shockwave setup program, or search the internet for tips on how to disable the intrusive auto-update, or even use the Windows file removal utility to install the stupid program, I have to do with this digital cataract, this abomination of an eclipse, in my field of view.

After peeking aroud the edges of the box, searching the internet for advice on how to remove this unwanted "feature," I found a page on the Adobe website that purports to include a feature to disable the autoupdate feature, but 1) it's damn anoying that this box doesn't include a link to that page and 2) I don't expect to have go to someone else's website in order to control what happens on my computer.  I also found some advice on how to adjust the Windows registry, but that was far too complex to do with an obstructed screen.

And the final insult -- when finally managed to use the program manager to remove Shockwave, the stupid popup was blocking the confirmation button. 

It ticked me off to no end that I had to click "Remind me later" just to make this box stop blocking the button that I had to click in order to remove Shockwave from my system. 

I suppose I could have tried killing the process in the Windows Task Manager, but by that time I just wanted the stupid box to go away.

So... do the deliberate interface choices implemented by Shockwave's desingers meet your definition of malware?  Are the needs of users in any way served when Adobe deliberately makes it impossible to say "No"?

I smell trouble. Via Trekmovie.com:

Genki's "Red Shirt" cologne (whose tag line "Because Tomorrow May Never Come" is priceless) celebrates the sacrifices of those often nameless crew of the USS Enterprise. Described appropriately as a cologne for those with a "devotion to living each day as it could be your last" the cologne has top notes of green mandarin, bergamot, and lavender, with base notes of leather and grey musk.

Live every day as if it could be your last, with 'Red Shirt' cologne

Also available: Tiberius, and Pon Farr.

On the first day of classes, I make sure that everyone knows that cell phone use during class is NOT going to be allowed.  Not a text, not a tune, nothing.

On day two, I backtrack just a bit and introduce them to the county's disaster alert program that residents and students can sign up for with their cell phones.

On Friday, we were using Re:Writing Plus! and logged in for the first time.  Except that not everyone was successful.  As I walked around helping out the students, one of my students pulled out his cell phone and dialed the 1-800 number for help.  At first I was amazed, but then I shrugged and thought that it was an efficient way to deal with the problem.

Today, two of my deaf students were arranging to have other students take notes for them.  Instead of relying on the interpreter, they (deaf and hearing) decided to text each other later.  During class, one of the students texts the person sitting next to him if he needs something. -- Joanna Howard

I was once teaching a class in a computer lab, and when I heard typing in the middle of my lecture, I politely asked whoever it was to pay attention. A voice from the back of the room, sounding somewhat hurt, said, "I was taking notes."  A few years later, I was attending a faculty workshop, and I was typing while the leader was talking. What she was saying was inspiring -- I wanted to get it all down.  "Could the typing please stop?" she asked.  I knew just how my student felt.

So I'm more likely to give students the benefit of the doubt.

Repeat after me. Newspaper ≠ journalism. Journalism ⊃ newspaper.

Why a once-profitable industry suddenly seems as outmoded as America's automakers is a tale that involves arrogance, mistakes, eroding trust and the rise of a digital world in which newspapers feel compelled to give away their content. "Most of the wounds are self-inflicted," says Phil Bronstein, editor at large of the San Francisco Chronicle, which Hearst Corp. has threatened to close unless major cost savings are achieved or a buyer is found. Rather than engage the audience, he says, "the public was seen as kind of messy and icky and not something you needed to get involved with." -- Howard Kurtz, Washington Post