The Tabloid

Gloria! Gloria! I think they've got your number, Gloria!

2007-03-21T12:25:00.000-07:00

[From Ed2010]

GLORIA STEINEM VISITS SYRACUSE ED ON CAMPUS

Ed’s reps at Syracuse University flipped out when they met Gloria Steinem yesterday! The legendary feminist, journalist, and Ms. Magazine founder visited the university for a special lecture "An Evening With Gloria Steinem," hosted by the Ed On Campus. Ed was so nervous that he nearly broke a sweat going to meet her. But Steinem welcomed all with an open heart and mind, answering questions about starting a magazine, the publishing industry, and feminism. Seriously.
Here are six kickin' things, as written and reported by Syracuse EOC President Sharon Clott, she shared about the magazine industry that Ed loved the most:
1. She wants more: "The economy of magazines has changed since I started Ms. Women’s magazines can’t get ads unless they write favorably. It’s all for advertisers. I like Bitch and Bust."
2. She doesn’t pick sides in the print vs. online battle"If the Internet came first, people would be welcoming print magazines and newspapers. They'd say, 'Oh, look it’s portable. I can take it places.' Meaning, just because the Internet's such a new medium, doesn't make it better."
3. She prefers reading online and reads all of her news online, except for the Sunday New York Times, as she always gets a paper copy of that. But, she doesn't read blogs (and doesn't plan on writing one of her own any time soon).
4. She's a hope-a-holic for magazines: "Ms. started with a group of women. We were all working as editors at magazines we wouldn't read. And all we wanted to do was make a magazine we would read."
5. She once made buttons that said "The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off." This came up in her discussion about the current administration's policies.
6. She wants you to tell your stories: "Our stories are narratives. Narratives are crucial. Our minds are organized around narratives. They always talk about the 'Oprahfication' of the news and I think if only. The 'serious' journalism lacks narratives."

Click here for the full deets on the Gloria Steinem event with Syracuse University's chapter of Ed2010.

Only Vaguely Journalism Related (The Onion is Involved)...

2007-03-20T08:38:00.000-07:00

[From NYTimes' "Urban Eye" Newsletter]
Big Gulp
Think Sonya "the Black Widow" Thomas or Eric "Badlands"Booker are tough? Brace yourself, and your gag reflex, fora whole new class of competitive eaters. Tonight is theVending Machine Challenge II, in which contenders fromsuch upstanding civic institutions as MoMA, AM New York andThe Onion attempt to consume the contents of a vendingmachine in its entirety. Go to see who's left standing inthe Doritos dust - or to hear what kind of punny cracks thehost, Murray Hill, will make with pork rinds and Lay's. 8p.m. tonight. Register at LVHRD.com for information aboutlocation; $22, or $11 for members.

Info about Sonya "the Black Widow" Thomas
Info about Eric "Badlands" Booker

photog in cedar rapids fired for urinating on the job

2007-03-06T11:42:00.000-08:00

At a recent hearing on Edwards' request for unemployment benefits, he testified that he was unable to leave the cemetery to urinate for fear of missing the funeral procession.

This just in from Long Dong Silver

2007-03-05T12:42:00.000-08:00

"The media, unfortunately, have been universally untrustworthy because they have their own notions of what I should think or I should do." - Clarence Thomas

Also on the news biz tip...
The Media Equation: Citizen Bono Brings Africa to Idle Rich
Bono, the rare rock star with an ability to make a dent in something besides the pop charts, has met with everyone from Pope John Paul II to President Bush in an effort to achieve debt relief and address poverty and AIDS in the undeveloped world. He is also pushing his agenda one T-shirt at a time with a product line called Red that includes clothing, iPods and credit cards.

But even those combined efforts have been slow going. So now Bono is opening up another front with an unlikely weapon: as the guest editor of the July issue of Vanity Fair, he will try to rebrand Africa.

“We need to get better at storytelling,” Bono said, sitting in the 22nd floor of the office of Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair. “Bill Gates tells me this all the time. We’ve got to get better at telling the success stories of Africa in addition to the horror stories. And this magazine tells great stories.”

Vanity Fair does tell great stories and serious ones, but it sits atop the American magazine industry, in no small part because it takes as its preoccupations the needs and doings of the idle rich. The current Hollywood issue is its biggest ever, 500 pages jammed with glitz, celebrity and so many ads that the magazine could injure someone if it fell off the coffee table. Just outside Mr. Carter’s office, a framed to-do list with hundreds of items details Vanity Fair’s preparations for one of its past Oscar parties, which is a long way from Mogadishu.

“Bono will make a different issue about Africa than we would,” Mr. Carter said. “I think there isn’t one editor in the world who would not pay attention if Bono pulled up and said he wanted to edit a magazine.”...

Old News...

2007-03-01T21:34:00.000-08:00

...but at least we're not the craziest journalists out there!

A prankster handcuffed herself to HUGH GRANT at the Dutch premiere of his new movie MUSIC + LYRICS on Friday night (23FEB07). The actor was left stunned when CIELKE SIJBEN, a journalist working for Dutch TV network 101 TV, leaped forward as he walked the red carpet at the Amsterdam Pathe and clamped a metal handcuff on his wrist, attaching herself to him. The confused star had to stand for 10 minutes while police detained Sijben and fire fighters were summoned to free him from his captor. After the cuffs were cut off, the calm 46-year-old returned to his red-carpet duties, promoting the film - in which he stars alongside DREW BARRYMORE - while Sijben was arrested by police. An onlooker says, "It was incredible. She appeared from nowhere and Grant couldn't believe it was happening. But he was the ultimate professional. He just stood in silence and waited for the fire fighters to free him. "He did look relieved when he disappeared into the theatre - she could have been a maniac."

For the love...

2007-02-26T20:39:00.000-08:00

[From Gawker, natch]

Mary-Kate Olsen Gets A 'Times' Byline

Hey, j-schooled kiddies scrivening away at the Podunk Times-Picayune in the hopes of one day making it into the Gray Lady's bosom? Check this out!

And there's a snazzy bio, too.

I'd much rather work at the Onion than the Times.

2007-02-25T19:17:00.000-08:00

Former Editor Can't Believe Shit College Newspaper Is Printing

NEW YORK—"It's clear the new people don't give a shit, and believe me, that kind of thing starts at the top," Troy Bartell said of the newspaper's lack of journalistic integrity.

Awesomely bad lede of the Day

2007-02-21T10:19:00.000-08:00

I love the reference to "the internet world." And yes, I realize this is a translation. But still:

Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia - A teen who wanted an apple Macintosh computer (mac) for Christmas after seeing one of the ubiquitous apple ads on the apple website, but instead got to inherit his father’s older Windows PC, finally got mad early Saturday morning and threw out the inherited Dell PC out of the window in a bizarre case of life imitating “the internet world”.

The 16 year old boy, Dam Enkhbayar, threw out the computer after it froze while he was downloading video files online. The boy said, “If this had been a Macintosh, I never would've had this problem."

Read the rest here (if you're masochistic)

Think You're Tired Now?

2007-02-12T04:14:00.000-08:00

Something to think about -- that is, if you have enough brain cells left....

Missing out on sleep may cause the brain to stop producing new cells, a study has suggested.

A team from Princeton University working on rats found that a lack of sleep affected the hippocampus, a brain region involved in forming memories. A stress hormone causes the effect.

The researchers compared animals that were deprived of sleep for 72 hours with others that were not. They found those who missed out on rest had higher levels of the stress hormone corticosterone.

They also produced significantly fewer new brain cells in a particular region of the hippocampus.
When the animals' corticosterone levels were kept at a constant level, the reduction in cell proliferation was stopped. The results suggest that elevated stress hormone levels resulting from sleep deprivation could explain the reduction in cell production in the adult brain.

Sleep patterns were restored to normal within a week. However levels of nerve cell production (neurogenesis) were not restored for two weeks, and the brain appears to boost its efforts in order to counteract the shortage.

Writing in PNAS, the researchers led by Dr Elizabeth Gould, said that although the role of nerve cell production in adults remained unknown, "the suppression of adult neurogenesis may underlie some of the cognitive deficits associated with prolonged sleep deprivation. "

People who experience a lack of sleep experience concentration problems and other difficulties.

Story from BBC NEWS:http://news. bbc.co.uk/ go/pr/fr/ -/2/hi/health/

Free pizza for journalists!

2007-02-06T13:22:00.000-08:00

2007-02-06T09:24:00.000-08:00

Boston Ad Prank Suspects Talk About ... Hair

Is being completely humorless a prerequisite of being a journalist everywhere, or only in Boston? I'm not saying it's the height of wit to talk about 70's haircuts when you've been charged with placing a hoax device - as if those blinking cartoon lights were actually intended to resemble bombs - but listen to the self-importance of the assembled press! They sound genuinely outraged that anyone should choose to ignore their questions, as if anyone accused of any crime, however footling, is obliged to talk about it in public. And it's sort of embarrassing how they keep hammering away even though it's perfectly clear the two men in question are going to stick to their hair guns. My personal favourite is the resentful accusation from one particularly doleful male reporter: "It sounds to Us (the Us clearly capitalised as we, the Incredibly Important Members of the Press) like you aren't taking this seriously, you want to talk about your hair instead." No shit.

Also, mistaking cartoon monsters for bombs makes you an idiot. Sorry.

Sree Entertains Bloggers at Conan

2007-02-01T16:49:00.000-08:00

The Conan O'Brien studio audience seats were filled with about 130 bloggers as local news anchors, correspondents, the news director and other NBC brass stood on the show's set and soaked up the bloggers' wisdom and perspective, acknowledged ignorance about the most basic of Web concepts, and encouraged -- no, entreated -- the bloggers to send every little tip and scooplet and news break they had.

"How many people here have WNBC on your lists" when sending emails about scoops asked Sree Sreenivasan, newly minted tech guru for NBC's local news shows after jumping from ABC. No one raised a hand.

http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlny/tv/wnbc_discovers_blogs_52259.asp#more

NYT gripes

2007-01-30T09:33:00.000-08:00

So I was writing an essay on the State of the Union yesterday, and using the NYTimes's handy little word-finding tool to find the accurate reference for things like "switch grass."

In their transcript of the thing, every single page had a careful correction appended: "Correction: Excerpts yesterday from President Bush’s State of the Union address misstated a word from the speech in some copies. Mr. Bush said, “Some in this chamber are new to the House and the Senate, and I congratulate the Democrat majority” — not Democratic majority."

It was weird and it broke up the flow of the piece to read that at every page. Plus, I foolishly thought, it really wasn't that significant a difference. Why would they take such care to make the correction clear?

Today I discovered why. There is a difference between saying "Democrat" and "Democratic" -- but only to Republican sneaky operatives.

Ezra of Tapped has a post today explaining it all:

"DEMOCRAT." The right's grasping, stubborn use of "Democrat" rather than "Democratic" is, without doubt, childish, stupid and demeaning to our civic discourse. But does it matter? I realize that everyone knows that "Democrat Party" is a vicious slur, but is there any polling on the term, or focus groups quantifying its lethality? I'm genuinely curious about this. After all, Americans hear the term "Democrats" constantly, and the party seems to be doing fine. And given the absurd doggedness with which the Republican Party seeks to publicize the label, it'd be rather rich if the slur had no actual effect, but was merely a way for conservats to tweak their opponents.

Update: Ankush answers my question:

this is from a comment written last summer in The New Yorker by Hendrik Hertzberg:

[Frank] Luntz, who road-tested the adjectival use of “Democrat” with a focus group in 2001, has concluded that the only people who really dislike it are highly partisan adherents of the—how you say?—Democratic Party. “Those two letters actually do matter,” Luntz said the other day.
So the results from one focus group by Frank Luntz (I know, I know) from six years ago suggest that the label "Democrat Party" doesn't do anything but annoy Democrats. I highly doubt things are much different today.

--Ezra Klein

So there you have it. Bush said "Democrat" for "Democratic" because that's been focus-group proved to annoy Democrats. And there goes the NYTimes, making extra-sure none of us missed that he said it, but failing completely to mention just why it's important to make that correction.

This is why I hate daily journalism: they'll give you lots and lots of information, but no context or explanation for why they're telling us. Silly me. I thought that was what journalists did -- explain the news, too, not just say what happened.

Re-examining "The Power Broker"

2007-01-29T10:54:00.000-08:00

FOR three decades his image has been frozen in time. The bulldozing bully who callously displaced thousands of New Yorkers in the name of urban renewal. The public-works kingpin who championed highways as he starved mass transit. And yes, the visionary idealist who gave New York Lincoln Center and Jones Beach, along with parks, roads, playgrounds and public pools.

This is the Robert Moses most of us know today, courtesy of Robert A. Caro’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography from 1974, “The Power Broker,” which charts Moses’ long reign as city parks commissioner (1934-60) and chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority (1946-68). A 1,286-page book that reads like a novel, it won a Pulitzer Prize and virtually redefined the biographical genre by raising the bar for contemporary research. Today it remains the premier text on the evolution of 20th-century New York, a portrait of a man who used his power without regard for the human toll.

But according to the Columbia University architectural historian Hilary Ballon and assorted colleagues, Moses deserves better — or at least a fresh look. In three exhibitions opening in the next few days — at the Museum of the City of New York, the Queens Museum of Art and Columbia University — Ms. Ballon argues that too little attention has been focused on what Moses achieved, versus what he destroyed, and on the enormous bureaucratic hurdles he surmounted to get things done.

With the city on the brink of a building boom unparalleled since Moses’ heyday — the reconstruction of Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, an overhaul of the Far West Side, sweeping redevelopment downtown — Ms. Ballon and other scholars argue that his legacy is more relevant than ever.

“Living in New York, one is aware there has been no evident successor or successors to Moses,” she said. “There aren’t master builders. Who is looking after the city? How do we build for the future?” All around New York State, she suggests, people tend to take for granted the parks, playgrounds and housing Moses built, now generally binding forces in those areas, even if the old-style New York neighborhood was of no interest to Moses himself. And were it not for Moses’ public infrastructure and his resolve to carve out more space, she argues, New York might not have been able to recover from the blight and flight of the 1970s and ’80s and become the economic magnet it is today. ...

Read on...

Tighter Budgets Slashing Internships

2007-01-25T21:29:00.000-08:00

Faced with tighter budgets, many newspapers are offering fewer internships this year than last. Interviews with 23 people including editors, recruiters, executives, news directors, career service directors and students indicate this year's applicants have entered one of the most challenging intern markets in recent memory.

Read full Poynter Online article here
http://poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=116948

Mysteries of the J-School

2007-01-25T10:22:00.000-08:00

Why do we all use the lift on the right? What's so good about it? I've also noticed that because everyone uses it instead of the other one, it's always at the top when you want it, so you usually have to wait much longer than you'd have to on the other side.

For TOO LONG we've bowed to the tyranny of the elevator. I, for one, am turning left instead of right next time I enter the J-School. Join me, comrades, in the brave new world of alternative vertical transportation! We'll never look back!

Is Journalism Ready for a Black President?

2007-01-22T16:42:00.000-08:00

I thought this was a good CJR Daily article about how the press tends to cover black candidates. It's true that the emphasis tends to be on the candidate's race much more than issues in some cases. Already we're seeing a trend of that with Barack Obama.

Forget America, is Journalism Ready for a Black President?

Tony Dokoupil

"Is America Ready for a Black President?" It's a question that many media outlets have posed recently ahead of a possible presidential run by Senator Barack Obama. But instead of asking if the country is prepared, the press would do well to ask itself, "Is Journalism Ready?" Not necessarily, say political scientists studying media coverage of minority candidates. Their research on black politicians running in majority-white districts turns up some touchy historical patterns that are germane to both Obama-mania and also the national media's readiness to cover a highly competitive white-black contest.

Three main batches of research -- the most recent published this winter in the Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics builds on two others published in the summer 1999 Journal of Politics and as the book Voting Hopes or Fears? -- focus on mayoral races in New York and Seattle in 1989, and national congressional contests in 1992, 1994, and 2004. It's a small sample by social scientific standards, and shouldn't be considered conclusive. But the primary limit on its size is also a commentary: blacks are still largely absent in the pool of candidates seeking state and national office, let alone the pool of winners. In the 130 years since Reconstruction, only two African Americans have been elected governor, and only three have been elected senator. None have come from a state more southern than Virginia.

Check out the rest of the article here.

Somewhere, somehow Judith Regan's ears are perking up

2007-01-21T12:18:00.000-08:00

Another good reason for being a journalist. We get paid (or can at least craft a killer book pitch) doing the inane things that most people get fired for... at least in a loose sense. This lady should team up with the gramatically ignorant, stick figure model who drafted her entire autiobiography on test computers at the Apple Store in Soho. They could teach at class at the Learning Annex.

Perhaps Clark Kauffman could pitch in as an "expert" and give them some ghostwriting hours. He does seem to have a flair for the kicker.

A Des Moines woman details her idling on the job on her employer's computer.

By CLARK KAUFFMAN
REGISTER STAFF MEMBER

January 19, 2007

A Des Moines hotel worker has been fired for using her employer's computer to keep a massive, detailed journal cataloging her efforts to avoid work.

State records indicate that Emmalee Bauer, 25, of Elkhart was hired by the Sheraton hotel company in February 2005. During most of 2006, she worked at the company's Army Post Road location as a sales coordinator.

At one point during her employment, Bauer was allegedly instructed to refrain from using company time to work on her personal, handwritten journal. Rather than stop writing at all, Bauer allegedly began using her work computer to keep the journal up to date.

"I am going to be typing all my thoughts instead of writing all day," wrote Bauer, according to portions of the journal that were entered into evidence at a recent state hearing dealing with Bauer's request for unemployment benefits. "That way, there isn't any way to tell for sure if I am working really hard or I am just goofing off."

Over the next several months, Bauer composed a book-length journal of 300 single-spaced pages, describing in excruciating detail her dogged efforts to avoid any sort of work.

"This typing thing seems to be doing the trick," she wrote. "It just looks like I am hard at work on something very important."

A supervisor discovered the journal late last year and fired Bauer for misuse of company time.

Other journal entries, according to evidence presented at the hearing:

- "I am going to sit right here and play Elf Bowling or some other nonsense. Once lunch is over, I will come right back to writing to piddle away the rest of the afternoon. ... I have almost 100 pages here! I wonder how long that's going to take to print?"

- "I don't feel like doing a single worthwhile thing today. It's 11:00 and so far I have stuck to that. ... I have managed to waste half of the day doing nothing constructive. That isn't exactly an easy task, either."

- "It's noon already and I don't feel like I have accomplished a damn thing. Accomplishment is overrated, anyway."

- "I just have to get through the next seven hours and forty-six minutes and then I will be free."

- "(I have) an hour of time that needs to be wasted - I mean 'spent wisely.' I know, that's a crock. I am only here for the money and, lately, for the printer access. I haven't really accomplished anything in a long while ... and I am still getting paid more than I ever have at a job before, with less to do than I have ever had before. It's actually quite nice when I think of it that way. I can shop online, play games and read message boards and still get paid for it."

At the state hearing, Bauer testified the journal was intended to help her deal with anxiety and frustration. She said she didn't believe her firing was warranted because other employees violated company policy without being penalized.

Administrative Law Judge Susan Ackerman denied Bauer's request for unemployment benefits last week, saying the journal demonstrated a refusal to work, as well as Bauer's "amusement at getting away with it."

In the journal, Bauer speculated that her writings might someday be published even though they dealt largely with the minutiae of her daily life such as rearranging the furniture at home, doing the dishes and planning for a tattoo on her lower back.

"I don't really think about much of anything as I type or write," she wrote. "I simply put on paper what I am feeling in that exact moment. ... It could be a side note to my biography someday that no one supported my writing and I was forced to do it secretly at the risk of persecution."

Post-Master's Hangover

2007-01-16T15:18:00.000-08:00

Like a real journalist, I know just the cure: Actual hangover. Who's down after all-day orientation tomorrow?

Breaking News: Conservatives Hate the Times

2006-12-31T13:56:00.000-08:00

Narrowing down the 2006 edition of the Top Ten Lowlights of The New York Times to a mere ten entries was a tough task –the paper provided such a wealth of biased behavior throughout the year, from reporters throwing national security secrets onto the front page to publishers going on liberal rants at graduation ceremonies. But we’ve managed to whittle down the worst from another liberally slanted year from the New York Times, and here is the rundown, in ascending order of gruesomeness.
Continue reading "Top Ten Lowlights of the New York Times..."

Scripps Chief Urges Grads to be “Risk Takers”

2006-12-21T11:35:00.000-08:00

When your family asks how long they'll have to support you after you graduate, you might hit them with this. Kenneth W. Lowe, president and chief executive officer drops some optimism on the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication:
The demand for good writers, reporters, editors, videographers, producers, communications managers – you name it – isn’t diminishing in this age of information ubiquity. Far from it: It’s growing and it’s growing fast.
We’ll be looking to you – the next generation of media professionals and managers -- to set high standards for yourselves by following in the tradition of your school’s great name sake.
Well, he means the Cronkites there, but what the hey...

I'm From Rolling Stone

2006-12-16T12:12:00.000-08:00

Journalism -- as a reality show? Who'd of thunk it?!

http://www.mtv.com/ontv/dyn/rolling_stone/series.jhtml

An Exclusive I Didn't Even Know About

2006-12-14T13:18:00.000-08:00

Is this true? What on earth is wrong with the Gawker tipster? If they don't care about the J-school, one would hope they at least care about other students and themselves. Then again, it could be one of the cheaters. Talk about shooting yourself right in your degree... that is, unless they're about to get expelled.

Columbia J-School Ethics Scandal Gets More Scandalous, McCarthy-esque

Columbia Journalism School was thrown into a tizzy recently with the revelations that there had been improprieties surrounding the school's ethics exam. But now a couple weeks have gone by, and the news reports have slowed to a trickle. Of course, that doesn't mean that all is well in Morningside Heights. A tipster reports from the bowels of the J-school:

"The administration is still conducting a witchhunt behind the scenes. Someone gave up names (I know who the rat is, and I'm pissed off enough that I'd love to see her name published and her humiliated), and they're attempting to establish who passed on the exam questions on down the line. Problem is, some of her accusations are completely false (I know that for a fact.)"

Read the rest of the post.

Gasp! A J-School Student Has Doubts?!

2006-12-11T08:30:00.000-08:00

It's getting around that time of the term where I and pretty much everyone I know is starting to doubt a little their abilities and their reasons for coming to j-school. This person - a j-school career switcher - wrote into Salon.com about his anxieties, and he got a response.

I'm not sure if I totally agree with the writer, but the exchange highlighted a fear that some of us might have about this profession and it reminded me what I like so much about the work we do.

Read the advice column here.

- Liz

In case you had nothing better do on a Saturday night

2006-12-08T20:50:00.000-08:00

New York Society for Ethical Culture
New York, New York (United States)


	Schell, Orville	Dean, University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism
	Thomas, Helen	Columnist, Hearst Newspapers
	Jarvis, Jeff	Columnist, BuzzMachine.com
	Moss, Adam	Editor in Chief, [New York Magazine]
	Stengel, Richard	Managing Editor, [Time] Magazine
	Rapoport, Miles	President, Demos

A panel moderated by Mr. Schell discussed the ethics of journalism in a fragmenting media culture, and the media�s responsibility as �watchdogs� of democracy. Topics included: Why is the public losing trust in the media? What are journalists doing to regain the public�s trust? And are those efforts working?

The program "Ethics and Journalism: Should We Trust the Media?" was held in the concert hall of the New York Society for Ethical Culture. It was co-sponsored by New York Magazine and Demos as part of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism Felker Magazine Program in honor of Clay Felker.

I've been blurbed!

2006-12-07T12:09:00.000-08:00

When I interned at LA Weekly, I reviewed a horrible movie called "Angels With Angles," in which George Burns (played by Frank Gorshin) comes down from heaven to help a hapless man find love and steal Fidel Castro's cigars. Here's the last line of my review:

"Not even Gorshin's marvelously dead-on impression of Burns can save a movie that rewrites screwball comedy in the same way King Henry VIII rewrote Catholicism."

On the movie's website, the following quote now appears:

"Gorshin's marvelously dead-on!"
-Jake Tracer, LA Weekly

Horrible NY Observer article

2006-12-04T20:53:00.000-08:00

Columbia J-School: At Stake, 'The Value of Our $60,000 Degree'

The paranoia was arresting at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism on Friday afternoon, Dec. 1. It wafted out from the Lecture Hall, where about 200 graduate students from a "Critical Issues in Journalism" class faced allegations of cheating on a final essay test.

Two girls scrambled to the door when they spotted reporters lingering in the hallway. One shrieked, "So they can just stand here and listen to everything?" The department intern, guarding the entrance with her trusty V.I.P. student list, shooed reporters away from the door. Word made it to dean of students and moderator Sreenath Sreenivasan within minutes and he (falsely) announced that reporters were "recording" the meeting, according to Barbara Fasciani, director of communications and special events for the J-School.

Read the rest here.

And, perhaps inevitably...

2006-12-01T16:31:00.000-08:00

And see, here Rush pays the school a compliment. He compares us to the Bush administration. Oh, wait...

Can you imagine if the federal government, if the Bush administration worked this way? Things that have been leaked, can you imagine if the administration threatened to put every newspaper out of business because it was publishing documents that were classified? I think Dean Lemann at the graduate school of journalism at Columbia University is missing something right in front of his face. He has just inadvertently presided over one of the finest teaching techniques in journalism today. In fact, it's a technique that I'm sure these students thought that they might be rewarded for watching the way the New York Times and Washington Post deal with this. Leaks are what make news today. Here you have some budding young students, got hold of the school's classified data, leaked it to other students, all for the purposes of passing a test and screwing the institution, i.e., administration. I think all these people that cheated deserve an A, not just a pass, but they need to get A's and they need to get further scholarships, because they're showing the instincts to just rise as high as possible in modern journalism.

Tempest, Meet Teapot

2006-11-30T22:32:00.000-08:00

Here's the latest...

Cheating is not unheard of on university campuses. But cheating on an open-book, take-home exam in a pass-fail course seems odd, and all the more so in a course about ethics.

And...

“We have encountered a serious problem with the final exam, and will not register a passing grade in the course for anyone who does not attend,” David A. Klatell, vice dean at the school, wrote in an e-mail message, which was forwarded to a reporter by a student. Mr. Klatell did not respond to several telephone and e-mail requests for comment.

[Cheating on an Ethics Test? It’s ‘Topic A’ at Columbia via NYT]

Look Ma! We're on the 'net!

2006-11-30T14:29:00.000-08:00

Knew it had to break eventually. And now apparently CNN is casting commentators. Good times... See y'all at 1:45 tomorrow!

Ivy J-Schoolers Fail Ethics, Ace Irony

Cheating on an ethics exam? It sounds like the setup for a joke. But
a group of grad students at Columbia's journalism school are
suspected of having done just that, according to a source at the
institution.

Tomorrow, the entire student body is required to attend a special
session of "Critical Issues in Journalism," an ethics course taught
by New York Times columnist Samuel Freedman. In an e-mail announcing
the meeting last week, vice dean David Klatell stated only that
there had been a "serious problem" with the final exam. Failure to
attend the session, Klatell warned, would result in a failing grade
for the course.

Neither Klatell nor Freedman responded immediately to calls for
comment, but students believe the purpose of the meeting is to
exhort suspected cheaters to step forward. "It's an 'Out yourself
or you'll all have to suffer' situation," says the source.

"Critical Issues," an all-school seminar, focuses on dilemmas facing
journalists in the post-Judith Miller and Jayson Blair era. The
class includes topics such as "Why be Ethical?" and "Tribal Loyalty
vs. Journalistic Obligation." The final exam consists of two essay
questions to be completed in 90 minutes. Since the test can be
taken at any time during a 36-hour period, students are instructed
not to discuss the exam questions with each other.

In this case, it seems a few of the aspiring Woodwards and
Bernsteins were a little too adept at working their sources. No
word on how the school's administration got wind of the cheating.

If the disgruntled posts on RateMyProfessors.com are any indication,
Freedman's students haven't exactly been soaking up his sermons.

"Maybe he could e-mail his 'speeches' to the students instead of
making everyone suffer through the most wasted class in j-school
(collective punishment?). His ethical Fridays were a pompous
exercise in self-adulation. He seldom talks about the readings and
a typical speech always begins, 'In (fill in year here).'"

By Jeff Bercovici 11/30/06 3:07 PM

Gravitas, Mocked

2006-11-27T20:56:00.000-08:00

Ok, I dare you to submit this MP3 for your next Radio Skills assignment.

5F15 - Girly Edition

Lisa becomes anchor for a new news program for kids, with help from Bart, Nelson and Milhouse. Bart's on camera presence gets him upgraded to co-anchor. After he overhears his sister calling him stupid, Bart seeks some advice from Kent Brockman on how to be an anchor. He follows Brockman's advice and begins covering human interest stories that make him popular and Lisa jealous. Bart pretends to be emotional about people's problems.

Meanwhile, Lisa devises a plan to expose Bart for being a phony. Bart ends up at a junkyard, where Willie attempts to kill him for earlier destroying his home. Lisa saves the day by using the same phony rhetoric that makes Bart so popular.

[via lardlad, click here for more audio]

Lede of the Day

2006-11-27T17:28:00.000-08:00

Really, this one is a winner...

this from sheri h. and colleen kelly, both in the twin cities.

quote of the year, so far, actually: "The statute does not prohibit 
one from having sex with a carcass,'' Anderson wrote.

kicker of the year, too. wait for it...

DULUTH -- Prosecution of a case involving alleged sexual contact with 
a dead deer may hinge on the legal definition of the word "animal.''

Bryan James Hathaway, 20, of Superior, Wis., faces a misdemeanor 
charge of sexual gratification with an animal. He is accused of 
having sex with a dead deer he saw beside a road on Oct. 11.

A motion filed last week by his attorney, public defender Fredric 
Anderson, argued that since the deer was dead, it was not considered 
an animal and the charge should be dismissed.

"The statute does not prohibit one from having sex with a carcass,'' 
Anderson wrote.

Judge Michael Lucci heard the motion Tuesday.

"I'm a little surprised this issue hasn't been tackled before in 
another case,'' Lucci said.

The Webster's dictionary defines "animal'' as "any of a kingdom of 
living beings,'' Anderson said.

If you include carcasses in that definition, he said, "you really go 
down a slippery slope with absurd results.''

Anderson argued: When does a turkey cease to be an animal? When it is 
dead?
When it is wrapped in plastic packaging in the freezer? When it is 
served, fully cooked?

A judge should decide what the Legislature intended "animal'' to mean 
in the statute, he said. "And the only clear point to draw the line 
in that definition, I believe, is the point of death.''

Assistant District Attorney James Boughner said the court can use a 
dictionary to determine the meaning of the word, but it doesn't have
to.

"The common and ordinary meaning of a word can be found in how people 
actually use the word,'' Boughner wrote in his response to the motion.

When a person's pet dog dies, he told Lucci, the person still refers 
to the dog as his or her dog, not a carcass.

"It stays a dog for some time,'' Boughner said.

He referred to the criminal complaint, in which Hathaway told police 
he saw the dead deer in the ditch and moved it into the woods. 
Hathaway called it a dead deer, Boughner said, not a carcass.

"It did not lose its essence as a deer, an animal, when it died,'' he 
said.

Anderson argued that the statute, which falls under the heading 
"crimes against sexual morality,'' was meant to protect animals. That 
would be unnecessary in the case of a dead animal.

"If you look at the other crimes that are in this subsection, they 
all protect against something other than simply things we don't like 
or things we find disgusting,'' he said.

Other crimes in that subsection include incest, bigamy, public 
fornication and lewd and lascivious behavior.
Boughner said the focus of the statute was on punishing the human 
behavior, not protecting animals.

"It does not seem to draw a line between the living and the dead,'' 
he said.

Interpreting the statute to exclude dead animals would also exclude 
freshly killed animals, Boughner said. That, he said, could lead to 
people who commit such acts with animals to kill them.

Lucci said he would render a decision by Hathaway's next court 
appearance on Dec. 1.

The misdemeanor charge carries a maximum penalty of nine months in 
jail and a fine of up to $10,000. If convicted, Hathaway could serve 
a prison term of up to two years because of a previous conviction. In 
April 2005, Hathaway pleaded no contest to one felony charge of 
mistreatment of an animal for the shooting death of Bambrick, a 26-
year-old horse, to have sex with the animal.

And in today's totally-unrelated-to-journalism amusements...

2006-11-26T23:30:00.000-08:00

Maybe there's a lesson to be learned about the power of editing to convey many different stories from the same material? Or maybe... just maybe!... we can all enjoy the inherent creepiness of red Swingline staplers.

Office Space: Redux

"...because I told, I told Bill that if they move my desk one more time, then, then I'm, I'm quitting, I'm going to quit. And, and I told Don too, because they've moved my desk four times already this year, and I used to be over by the window, and I could see the squirrels, and they were married, but then, they switched from the Swingline to the Boston stapler, but I kept my Swingline stapler because it didn't bind up as much, and I kept the staples for the Swingline stapler and it's not okay because if they take my stapler then I'll set the building on fire..." - Milton

You know you love it

2006-11-26T21:43:00.000-08:00

Afghan Warlord Takes Anderson Cooper As 43rd Wife

Columbians Gone Wild

2006-11-26T18:36:00.000-08:00

From the NY Daily News:

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/474805p-399293c.html

I'm still not sure they mean the Columbia we go to. But I'm sure all these things are really, really totally different than the high-class Puritan class and modesty that goes on everywhere else. And without the Daily News' hard-hitting undercover work, we'd never know...

AARON

Phyllis Garland, Journalism Prof, Dies at 71

2006-11-21T14:37:00.000-08:00

Phyllis Garland, the first female and first African-American faculty member to receive tenure at the Columbia School of Journalism, died of cancer on Nov. 7. She was 71.

For a laugh -- or tears -- note the spelling of "Winston Marcellus" in the Spectator.

Sounds like a great professor. Check out Vibe and the Post-Gazette, which said:

She loved jazz, ballet and soul music and believed deeply in the power of the arts. She taught her students to cover them as thoroughly as they would city hall.
In the classroom, she was known for her tough, but laid-back style.
Her students called her Phyl. She lived in an Eighth Avenue apartment in Greenwich Village and, every year she invited her class to a listening party, sharing music from her huge jazz collection.

Panda Party

2006-11-21T10:57:00.000-08:00

Here's a hard-hitting streaming video from CNN.com:

Panda Cam

I don't know why I find this so funny.

Newspapers vs. Google

2006-11-20T18:04:00.000-08:00

Let the media deathmatch begin.

176 Newspapers to Form a Partnership With Yahoo

SNL "Media-opoly" Cartoon*

2006-11-20T06:11:00.000-08:00

Here's a little Schoolhouse Rock-style 'toon about media deregulation. It's funny because it's true, um, maybe.

*conspiracy theorists take note: this supposedly aired only once.
**While we're on the subject of SNL, more cowbell.

If Tony Dec and MacGyver had a baby...

2006-11-20T06:01:00.000-08:00

Here's a little something for you broadcast majors out there. It's a Do-It-Yourself mike stand.

Just take a metal hanger, bend it in half a little, then bend the hook down and adjust as necessary.

The Joys of Bladder Control

2006-11-18T16:37:00.000-08:00

Maybe Prof. Freedman was right. Says Barbara Walters in the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly, "The reason that I am so successful is that I do not sweat, and I don't have to go to the bathroom very often. That is the key to my success. Which means that I can be on the air for a very long time...I either have great kidney control or I don't drink enough water."

Larry King Admits He’s Never Used The Internet: ‘Do You Punch Little Buttons and Things?’

2006-11-18T13:45:00.000-08:00

Proof you don't need that new media class if you want to become an obnoxious, bloviating, ignorant media superstar.

Transcript:

LARRY KING: On your blog you write, “Bush is going to declare war on China next, I swear.”

ROSEANNE BARR: I was so scared because I woke up and there was the Drudge, you know. I always read the Drudge Report and it said on there that the Chinese were like, you know, spying on our subs or doing something with our subs and I was like, “Oh no, he’s going to think that’s an act of war and then we’re going to go over there next.” I mean we’re everywhere. We’re everywhere.

KING: The Internet as a political medium viable?

BARR: Yes, it’s like the only one left, absolutely, and that’s not just me saying it. That’s everybody saying it.

KING: But there’s 80 billion things on it.

BARR: Yes, but if you know where to look, you know, it all can come together. When you’re looking for the particular information that you’re looking for after you do the big search, this is what I found out by going on there, it just takes your mind and then you live in there forever. You can never come out.

KING: I’ve never done it, never gone searching.

BARR: Oh, my God! It just opens up the whole universe. It’s so awesome. You would love it.

KING: No, I wouldn’t.

BARR: Anything you want to know.

KING: The wife loves it. I wouldn’t love it. What do you punch little buttons and things?

BARR: You just click on this thing. The thing is you got to be able to read, so you have to have strong glasses when you’ve over 50 and then you just scroll down and click. It’s not that hard. I can show you how to do it.

KING: No, thanks.

Story idea

2006-11-17T13:52:00.000-08:00

Wanted to pass along some info on a cool story to report on this
weekend...
Six recent college graduates created an educational non-profit in
conjunction with the public schools and are launching a 2-year
sailing voyage around the world. They take off from Battery Park on
Sunday on their 43- foot sailboat- its an exciting event and thought
it would make a great print *or* broadcast story (i cant do it
myself so thought i'd share)
More info is below, and if anyone has questions they can give me a
call and i can put them in touch 203 913 3048
Or, to call directly:
Aaron Lasher: 847 567 7245
Brian Sabina: 7818010537
Ryan Whisner: 224 420 0576
------

In 1998 Reach The World (www.reachtheworld.org) launched the voyage
of "Makulu", a 43-foot sailboat, which has been followed by over 80
NYC classrooms. As a result of a successful expansion to Chicago, a
second expedition will be departing on Sunday, Nov. 19 from the
docks of the Manhattan Sailing Club in Battery Park City, NY at
approximately 11:00 AM. The vessel is another 43-foot sailboat
that goes by the name "Aldebaran". Come meet the Chicago team (a
group of recent college graduates who spearheaded the RTW
replication in Chicago over the past 2 years) as they say their
final fairwell to family and friends, and leave the safe harbor on
a 2-year expedition around the globe.

Reach The World is an educational non-profit that uses real-world
expeditions to uplift learning far beyong the classroom walls. By
communicating via the internet, classrooms stay in contact with a
sailing vessel and its crew as it circumnavigates the globe,
sharing their experiences in far off lands.
The students we serve often attend the most underfunded public
schools. By empowering their teachers with interactive material
from the voyage, we show the students a world outside their own,
and inspire them to dream for themselves and for the future.

When in doubt, bake it out!

2006-11-16T20:50:00.000-08:00

A last-day memento of our class with Ms. Judith Crist.

You Wanna Be on Top?

2006-11-16T16:44:00.000-08:00

It's been proven again and again... journalism just doesn't make good reality TV -- or a good reality TV spoof, turns out. Judge for yourself...

America's Next Top Journalist

Judy, Judy, Judy

2006-11-14T22:55:00.000-08:00

As folks were filing out of tonight's lecture, a few students who'd noticed Judith Miller in the audience stopped by to say, 'hello.'

Miller did most of the talking as the six of us were somewhat agog. If I remember correctly, she said that she'd been part of a gender discrimination lawsuit at the Times in the early seventies and that she'd started out like panelist Michelle Leder, sifting through documents -- in Washington, where she insisted the Times send her.

Where should we start out, someone asked. The wires, said Miller. She'd never done it, and consequently she never learned to write quickly -- especially those first three paragraphs. That's why she got into investigative journalism.

Miller wanted to know what we thought of "all this," meaning the web's effect on journalism. (God forgive me, I was thinking, "She's got a great Cheshire smile, and she's kind of a fox" -- maybe in an infamous Mata Hari sort of way these days)

Just then, someone passed by, and I stepped away. Soon, Miller was wrapping up. She shook each student's hand and instead of walking out, she waited until I was done with my friend to shake my hand.

Class.

She was down to earth, gracious and -- I'm speculating -- appreciative that noone brought up her troubles or treated her with awkward neglect.

Anyone else who was there care to add something? About the Binaca?

Gawked, Ahhhh-gain

2006-11-13T10:21:00.000-08:00

Gawker posts yet another exposé about the chilling ability of Columbia students to...

Dum Dum Dummmmm...

Network.

The item titled, "'Village Voice' Hiring Pool Remains Incredibly Diverse Provided You Went To Columbia."

Umm, is this a bad time to mention that the Voice was here interviewing internship candiates last week?

Seriously, does this strike anyone else as a weird thing for Gawker to grouse about?

It did to me, until I remembered Gawker's breathless, extensive bloggerage of Radar. Between the lines, it sighed "hire me."

Former J-schooler Interview

2006-11-11T12:37:00.000-08:00

Here's an interview with C.J. Chivers, renowned war correspondent for the New York Times. He has positive things to say about his experience as a Columbia J-schooler:

Steven Ward (reporter): Do you think an education at Columbia is important if you want to work at a newspaper? I understand that you had a choice of two big newspaper jobs following your time at Columbia—the Providence Journal in Rhode Island and a newspaper in Philadelphia. Why did you choose the Providence Journal?

C.J Chivers: Forget the debate about whether journalism schools are useful or useless. Columbia is useful. And forget the ivy. The place is a trade school, and I mean that as a compliment. Let me say I am speaking of the past—I understand Columbia has changed parts of its program, and I know little about these changes, so am not qualified to talk about the present day. But when I went there I wanted very much to learn a craft, and the Columbia j-school knew how to teach a craft. The Marines had shown me—and I still believe this—that excellence is about fundamentals. Journalism is like that, but by the time I decided to try journalism I was 29, and had little insight into the skills I would need. What records are we entitled to? How do you get them? What lines of questioning can elevate an interview, and yield the details and facts and impressions that can elevate a story? How does the First Amendment work in practice? Even little things, like where can we sit in a courtroom? When we're starting out we don't know these things. And by that time I had been a Marine Corps company commander, and I didn't like not knowing where the switches were. Columbia provided a set of answers to these questions, and many others.

Whether the j-school experience is important if you want to work at a newspaper is another question. It depends. If you've worked hard at a solid local newspaper, or are some kind of genius, then you don't need j-school. You probably already know at least half of what they teach, and you may have been smart enough to have been paid to learn it. But if you don't have journalism experience, signing up for a structured curriculum is a good play. What did it get me, short-term? When I left I had interest from the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Providence Journal. These weren't big jobs. They were internships with a small possibility of a full-time slot. I chose Providence because it was clear from the interviewing process that the editors in Rhode Island were more personally interested in their young reporters. And the fishing was better. That mattered.

Read the rest of the article here.

Best of Ed Bradley

2006-11-10T09:46:00.001-08:00

Link to CBS News video

R.I.P. Ed Bradley

2006-11-09T13:15:00.000-08:00

Bradley joined the staff of the venerable news magazine 26 years ago. His consummate skills as a broadcast journalist and his distinctive body of work were recognized with numerous awards, including 19 Emmys, the latest for a segment that reported the reopening of the 50-year-old racial murder case of Emmett Till.

Bradley grew up in a tough section of Philadelphia, was wounded while covering the Vietnam War and later became the first black White House correspondent for CBS News.

Gannett to Crowdsource News

2006-11-09T08:21:00.000-08:00

Gannett to Crowdsource News

By Jeff Howe| Also by this reporter
12:00 PM Nov, 03, 2006

The publisher of "America's newspaper" is turning to America to get its news.

According to internal documents provided to Wired News and interviews with key executives, Gannett, the publisher of USA Today as well as 90 other American daily newspapers, will begin crowdsourcing many of its newsgathering functions. Starting Friday, Gannett newsrooms were rechristened "information centers," and instead of being organized into separate metro, state or sports departments, staff will now work within one of seven desks with names like "data," "digital" and "community conversation."

The initiative emphasizes four goals: Prioritize local news over national news; publish more user-generated content; become 24-7 news operations, in which the newspapers do less and the websites do much more; and finally, use crowdsourcing methods to put readers to work as watchdogs, whistle-blowers and researchers in large, investigative features.

"This is a huge restructuring for us," said Michael Maness, the VP for strategic planning of news and one of the chief architects of the project. According to an e-mail sent Thursday to Gannett news staff by CEO Craig Dubow, the restructuring has been tested in 11 locations throughout the United States, but will be in place throughout all of Gannett's newspapers by May. "Implementing the (Information) Center quickly is essential. Our industry is changing in ways that create great opportunity for Gannett."

And great challenges: Like other newspaper publishing companies, Gannett has watched its share price slide steadily southward, losing 30 percent of its value since January 2004. Although newspapers still post healthy profits, circulation has declined precipitously as more and more readers migrate to the internet, non-journalistic news sources like The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, and on-the-scene videos posted to Youtube.com. Readership figures in the 18- to 34-year-old demographic have been especially dispiriting, and Wall Street has aggressively demanded that papers cut costs and adapt to rapid changes in technology.

Other large publishers are already experimenting with bringing readers into a more participatory role, and a host of citizen-journalism projects like NowPublic and NewAssignment.Net have sprung up in the last few years. But because of its reach, Gannett's move could bring these issues into the mainstream.

Of all the pilot projects the company has conducted over the last few months, the most promising would seem to be the crowdsourcing of in-depth investigations into government malfeasance. Crowdsourcing involves taking functions traditionally performed by employees and using the internet to outsource them to an undefined, generally large group of people. The compensation is usually far less than what an employee might make for performing the same service. Well-known examples include Wikipedia and iStockphoto.

"We've already had some really amazing results with the crowdsourcing element of this," said Jennifer Carroll, Gannett's VP for new media content. "Most of us got into this business because we were passionate about watchdog journalism and public service, and we've just watched those erode. We've learned that no one wants to read a 400-column-inch investigative feature online. But when you make them a part of the process they get incredibly engaged."

The most prominent example, Carroll said, occurred this summer with The News-Press in Fort Myers, Florida. In May, readers from the nearby community of Cape Coral began calling the paper, complaining about the high prices -- as much as $28,000 in some cases -- being charged to connect newly constructed homes to water and sewer lines.

Maness asked the News-Press to employ a new method of looking into the complaints. "Rather than start a long investigation and come out months later in the paper with our findings we asked our readers to help us find out why the cost was so exorbitant," said Kate Marymont, the News-Press' editor in chief.

The response overwhelmed the paper, which has a circulation of about 100,000. "We weren't prepared for the volume, and we had to throw a lot more firepower just to handle the phone calls and e-mails," Marymont said.

Readers spontaneously organized their own investigations: Retired engineers analyzed blueprints, accountants pored over balance sheets, and an inside whistle-blower leaked documents showing evidence of bid-rigging.

"We had people from all over the world helping us," said Marymont. For six weeks the News-Press generated more traffic to its website than "ever before, excepting hurricanes." In the end, the city cut the utility fees by more than 30 percent, one official resigned, and the fees have become the driving issue in an upcoming city council special election.

Maness said the experience was so encouraging that Gannett will roll out the new approach in all of its newsrooms. "We're going to restructure everything in how we gather news and information. We'll shift our eyes and ears on the ground from reporters to the crowd."

Sources at several papers, from The Indianapolis Star to The Cincinnati Enquirer to the Burlington (Vermont) Free Press, said Gannett corporate headquarters had directed them to adopt the new approach.

Naturally, the newsrooms are wary of the changes, despite the results achieved in Fort Myers. "We've broken into task forces to figure out how to implement this, but some of this stuff, I'll be honest, gives us great pause," said one midlevel editor at a Gannett newspaper, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The editor of the Indianapolis Star sparked a minor controversy when he launched that paper's crowdsourcing efforts in the editor's page a few weeks ago. Several staffers publicly expressed the concern that Gannett was turning to the crowd as a cost-saving measure, and worried that the changes would result in more job cuts.

"Look, we've got some hurdles to get over, as an industry and as a company. Cultural hurdles and technological hurdles," said Gregory Korte, an investigative journalist with the Cincinnati Enquirer who has been working to implement some of these ideas at the paper. At some point, he says, it's going to get painful. "The newspaper of the future is going to need more programmers than copy editors, and we're going to have to figure out how to make that transition."

Carroll and Maness have promised that no layoffs will occur as a result of the reorganization. "We're retraining our people, and many will take on new duties," said Maness, noting that photographers are being trained to take videos, and that library staffers may be called upon to man the "data desk," which manages the influx of information Gannett hopes readers will be submitting. "But no one's going to lose their job because of this."

Above and beyond pink-slip considerations, crowdsourcing journalism raises many other thorny issues, said Korte. The paper recently asked the crowd to weigh in on the grisly murder of a 3-year-old foster child.

"All that water-cooler speculation moved online," said Korte. The readers were convicting the foster parents before charges were even filed. "We wound up having to close down the message boards until an indictment came down. It's very hard to separate fact from fiction online, and some people expect that whatever's on our site undergoes the same degree of scrutiny as what appears in the paper."

Korte said he feels that crowdsourcing holds a great deal of promise for certain "pocketbook" issues, like the sewage scandal in Fort Myers, but that it will take a lot of thought and experimentation before discovering how best to utilize the approach.

"We're serious about this," he said. "Do we have it licked? No. But we're ahead of the curve. By maybe half a step."

For extended interview transcripts and information about Gannett's "information center" initiative, please go to Jeff Howe's blog, crowdsourcing.com.

Hamstrung Ex-Philly Ed Parachutes In

2006-11-08T21:18:00.000-08:00

When Amanda Bennett inherited a Philly Inquirer emaciated by job cuts, she massed the staff, and together they came up with a dynamic plan to re-envision the respected newspaper...

For the next forty-five minutes, Bennett and Gordon outlined a plan that called for, among other changes, cutting the number of zones from five to three, and placing an ever-greater emphasis on disseminating the news online. Those and many smaller changes they detailed were in service of a larger goal: the Inquirer could not and would not continue trying to be Philadelphia’s paper of record. That, in turn, meant that the shrunken staff was now free from the burden of covering everything, and given that freedom, the paper would begin to be filled with the boldly conceived and written pieces that had once been its hallmark. The readers, too, had spoken. The Inquirer had conducted yet another round of focus groups in the fall, and the report back confirmed what people had been hearing for as long as they’d been asking: readers turned to the Inquirer to read national and foreign stories almost as much as they wanted local news.

And then she pulled the rip cord...

Some staffers, meanwhile, said that Bennett may not have improved the paper enough during her time to give a new owner reason to keep her on. "The general sentiment was there was not as much impact on the paper as some people expected given her credentials," Yant Kinney said about Bennett, a former editor at the Lexington Herald Leader whose experience also includes The Wall Street Journal. "It is hard to know if she got swept up in all of the larger problems of the paper, or got swept up in the paper, a place this big and complex."

With plans to land at the J-School.

After she leaves the Inquirer, Bennett will become a visiting fellow at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She said the exact nature of the fellowship is unknown, but will take place next semester.

Oh those poor Republicans

2006-11-08T17:13:00.000-08:00

Republicans Blame Election Losses On Democrats

Election Night Coverage: Boys Club

2006-11-08T14:14:00.000-08:00

History was all over the screen, except on the anchor desks and panels of experts, where every news division, even CNN, seemed to have sent out an inter-office memo that said, “stag."

The gender gap on election nights doesn’t match the rest of television news: be it on cable or the networks, female reporters cover every field, including Afghanistan and Iraq.

Skywriter Trailed by Skyeditor

2006-11-08T13:36:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the Onion.

CTV's The Gates: Everyone's Worst Fears Realized

2006-11-07T16:05:00.000-08:00

New Professional Edge for CTV - Arts & Entertainment

Co-star Toby Mitnick, CC'10 (who plays the international student) worries about how his friends will react to seeing him on TV.

"I don't think I'm going to have any more friends," he said. "I'm scared I'm going to come off as a spectacular douche bag."

I love the smell of twatwaffles in the morning...

2006-11-06T13:33:00.000-08:00

Today's Gawker post about what else? Drama at Columbia -- but this time, it's drama of the soap opera kind... I hope O'Reilly gets a hold of these clips.

Columbia U. Soap Opera: Best Amateur Lesbian Porn On 116th Street

It's shocking how endlessly twatwafflish Columbia students are. Exhibit #517 is this new soap opera from Morningside Heights, creatively titled "The Gates." It's being shown on the Columbia TV station but has also helpfully been posted to YouTube so the plebians can hear such scintillating dialogue as, "This is college. You have to start trying new things," and "A man of the world! Have you thought about rushing?" In Part 2, there's also some girl-on-girl action; as an added bonus, one of the parties involved is a shy Asian engineering student who's just come from Bible study. Score!

Who knew he was such a good singer?

2006-11-05T20:34:00.000-08:00

Watch out U2, you got some competition.

George Bush's Freudian Slip

2006-11-05T20:32:00.000-08:00

He almost got it right.

Criminal afoot in the nabe

2006-11-04T17:00:00.000-08:00

Fortunately, he's "bungling."
-----------------------------------------

Cops are hunting for a bungling teenage mugger preying on women in Morningside Heights and Harlem, police said.

The thug threatens his victims by telling them, "Give me your money!" and gesturing as if he has a gun - although several of his targeted victims have not taken his demands seriously, ignoring him and walking away.

"He's not very good at what he does," said one police official familiar with the spree.

The suspect, who is active in the early evening, first struck at 8 p.m. on Oct. 12 when he approached a 28-year-old woman in front of 415 W. 120th St. and demanded money. She walked away.

He next struck five minutes later in front of 425 W. 121st St., when he approached another 28-year- old, who also ignored him.

On Oct. 18, between 7:15 and 7:30 p.m., he successively approached four separate people in front of 512 W. 11th St.

A 28-year-old woman walked away, but a 43-year-old man felt threatened enough to hand over $5. A 53-year-old woman then gave the suspect $60, but when a fourth unidentified victim also walked away, he felt prompted to yell, "I'm only kidding."

He last struck Oct. 19 at 9 p.m. in front of 110 Morningside Drive, threatening a 21-year-old woman, who forked over $40.

He's described as 14 to 16 years old, with close-cropped hair, weighing about 140 pounds.

Flava Flav Spotting

2006-10-30T19:22:00.000-08:00

I know some ladies out there will enjoy this. While working on my TV story today, we were visiting Virgin Megastore in Union Square. One of the guards asked us if we were with Flava Flav. We thought there would be a crowd with him there. Nope, just his body guard. We watched as Flav waited in line to buy a CD and then set off the alarm. He was decked out with a gold crown and a light blue Viagra leather jacket. We wanted to talk to him, but his guard was big.

Halloween Costumes

2006-10-24T17:30:00.000-07:00

If you're still undecided on what to be for Halloween, check out this Forbes.com article where you can download and print out masks of genuinely scary creatures, including:

Donald Rumsfeld
Kim Jong-Il
Stephen Colbert
Borat
Mark Foley
Jim Kramer ("Mad Money")
Lindsay Lohan
Katie Couric
Hugo Chavez

Protest at Columbia

2006-10-23T16:43:00.000-07:00

The Times just published a fairly fascinating recap of Columbia's recent string of free speech controversies, the peg of course being the protest of the Minutemen's speech. You can read the article here.

But I think it's often overlooked that our University was the scene of one of the city's most violent and effective protests of the Vietnam War (you know, back when kids our age actually had a social conscience.) I've come across a brilliant firsthand account of the uprising, in which students took control of the campus for a number of days. You can check it out here.

Are there any lessons here? I suspect each will draw their own conclusions, but it's immensely valuable to realize that Columbia was once ground zero for the personification of First Amendment exercise.

Columbia J-school gets Gawked

2006-10-22T14:57:00.000-07:00

Pasted from Gawker...

'Village Voice': Happy to Accept Sloppy Seconds

In an earlier entry today, we mentioned that Village Voice staffers were dissatisfied because EIC David Blum "only seems to be interested in hiring well-to-do white girls from Columbia". Well, it might help if you're still at Columbia. A tipster tells us:

This just in from the Columbia J School newsletter:
Courtney Reimer has sold her summer-term Master's project to the Village Voice as its cover on October 25. It's about strip clubs in New York.

Wow. More hard-hitting investigative reporting from the Voice.

Indeed. Though to be fair, the average Columbia J-School student probably writes better than the Voice, so Courtney might be slumming here. Unless of course, she's making shit up for her story.

And by the way, Voice's freelance baseball writer Emma Span (whose most unfortunate headline remains unfixed) is the daughter of writer Jon Katz and -wait for it- Columbia journalism professor Paula Span. Corporate-academic synergy at its best.

Oh, back to the ethnic cleansing thing, "Hip Hop journalist" Jimi Izrael kinda saw it coming, going so far as to say, "any minority writers working for Village Voice Media should brace themselves."

Interesting commentary by Keith Olbermann

2006-10-21T10:31:00.000-07:00

Although it is quite extreme, I think it is a very articulate commentary--so I thought I'd post it on here. (click on the title to watch the video... or click HERE)

The drinkin' life of Journos..

2006-10-19T12:52:00.000-07:00

At work today, I snuck out for "lunch" and was somehow was reminded of this Pete Hammil quote:

After they gave me my first Working Press card, I brought my
familiar sense of entitlement to the bar of the Page One every
morning. Those mornings were free of the limits of time, and I
would drink with McMorrow, Grove, Poirer, and others, while
fishmongers made deliveries and the day-shift guys showed up for a
morning pop before starting at ten. The Page One was the
headquarters of the fraternity, a place completely devoid of
character except for the men at the bar, a way station for all the
whiskey-wounded boomers of the business who passed through on their
way from one town's paper to another

Covering politics -- training tonight

2006-10-19T07:48:00.000-07:00

Media Boot Camp Training:
Jennifer Palmieri, Vice President of Communications, Center for
American Progress, will conduct a media boot camp training,
addressing the importance of spreading the progressive message on
college campuses. She will also discuss her experience working as
the Former Deputy White House Press Secretary and National Press
Secretary for Vice-Presidential Candidate Senator John Edwards.
Co-sponsored by the Columbia College Democrats and the Columbia Political Union

When: October 19th 7:30 - 9:00

Where: Fayerweather 310

What:
Media Training Workshop

Bonus:
Free Food from Saigon Grill

This just in: Ben Adler, one of the editors of Campus Progress, will be at the training. So if you want to write for Campus Progress, this is a good chance to hear what advice he has. I've written for them a lot and recommend it; both because they pay for submissions, and because you get a lot of freedom to write about things you care about, in your own voice.

J-school Halloween Party

2006-10-18T18:17:00.000-07:00

That person in class...

2006-10-11T22:33:00.000-07:00

Here's an old, but good, article from The Onion about that person in class who really loves the sound of their own voice. You know the one. They constantly steer the professor off-topic, go on long, irrelevant tirades and ask questions with obvious answers. And while they irritate most people in their classes, they either don't care or are completely oblivious.

Guy In Philosophy Class Needs To Shut The F--- Up
September 28, 2005 | Issue 41•39

HANOVER, NH—According to students enrolled in professor Michael Rosenthal's Philosophy 101 course at Dartmouth College, that guy, Darrin Floen, the one who sits at the back of the class and acts like he's Aristotle, seriously needs to shut the f--- up.

His fellow students describe Floen's frequent comments as eager, interested, and incredibly annoying.

"He thinks he knows about philosophy," freshman Duane Herring said. "But I hate his voice, and I hate the way he only half raises his hand, like he's so laid back. We're discussing ethics in a couple weeks, but I don't know if I can wait that long before deciding if it's morally wrong to pound his face in."

"Today he was going on and on about how Plato's cave shadows themselves represent the ideal foundation of Western philosophical thought," said freshman Julia Wald moments after class let out Monday. "I have no idea what Plato's ideal reality is, but I bet it doesn't include know-it-all little shits."

Wald added: "If he uses the word 'dialectical' one more time, I'm going to shove my copy of The Republic down his throat."

Although he demonstrated a familiarity with Peter Singer's view on famine relief during a discussion of John Locke's theory of property, Floen is reportedly unfamiliar with the theory of cramming it for a change and giving someone else a chance to speak.

"Just last week Professor Rosenthal was talking about Russell's Paradox, and that jackass starts going off: 'But what about Heraclitus' aphorism: Everything flows, nothing stands still?'" classmate James Luers said. "At first I was like, 'That's totally irrelevant,' but then I was like, 'Well, actually, it does apply to the nonstop flapping of your trap.'"

Among the 40 students who regularly attend Philosophy 101, the one who has endured the most suffering is freshman William Deekes.

"Some people know Darrin as just 'that guy in philosophy class who needs to shut the hell up,'" Deekes said. "I, however, also know him as 'the douche in African history who seriously needs to chill' and 'the a-hole in environmental sciences who could really use a girlfriend.'"

"I enrolled in this course because I was fascinated by the question of God," said sophomore Miriam Blank. "After spending six hours a week in the same room as that unbearable windbag, I think I have my answer. Life is as long as it is cruel."

The outspoken student has not gone unremarked by the course's professor.

"Mr. Floen is a valuable contributor to our in-class discussions," Rosenthal said. "His tendency to question and challenge everything before him captures the very essence of philosophy itself."

Rosenthal added: "Having said that, I do wish he would occasionally do me the valued service of shutting his damn cake hole."

Help! Magazines

2006-10-10T14:47:00.000-07:00

Good idea, lanford - I am in the same class and need to find an old copy of men's health, so if anyone has a copy, you'd be my hero. (Don't want to steal lanford's thunder, so just to reiterate, she's after entertainment mags like entertainment weekly.) I don't know how she did that clever thing with her email address embedded but mine is ab2759. Thankyouthankyouthankyou

Need magazines

2006-10-10T12:05:00.000-07:00

Our latest assignment for Ms. Judith Crist is an assessment of a weekly or monthly periodical with a circulation of more than 300,000. I am looking for any subscriber to a major national magazine who happens to have back copies. Something in the entertainment milieu is preferable for me (think Entertainment Weekly, not People or US Weekly). I had originally found a source and, upon a closer look, realized I mistook the readership numbers for the circulation figures. Drat! Please help! Thanks!

O'Reilly talks about "leftist jihad" at Columbia

2006-10-10T11:45:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty sure most Columbia Journalism students didn't know the Minutemen protest was going on, and certainly didn't participate. But O'Reilly still took this as an opportunity to insult the J-school's liberalism.

Free Speech on campus

2006-10-08T18:16:00.000-07:00

This evening, as J-school Senator, I met with other members of the Student Affairs Committee of the University Senate. In that meeting we agreed upon the following resolution:

RESOLUTION ON FREE SPEECH AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

WHEREAS, Columbia University and its community has the responsibility to do everything possible to ensure that we all have the ability to express our intellectual freedom within our institution, and

WHEREAS, the Student Body of Columbia University has a right to invite speakers with varied points of view to campus, and it is unacceptable within our community, to take away someone else’s right to express their opinions and viewpoints, and

WHEREAS, the Student Affairs Caucus represents the entire student body of Columbia University,

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that the Student Affairs Caucus stands behind the principles of free speech on campus, and demands that the Columbia University Community stand firm in our commitment to allow all views to be heard.

Student Affairs Committee

The immediate catalyst for this resolution was Wednesday's night's presentation by the Minutemen and the demonstrations in Lerner Hall.

President Bollinger has spoken on this issue via email, and our student's committee had a lively debate this evening. For the record, I believe I reflected the majority of us as journalists who endorse a wide interpretation of the first amendment and broad usage of free speech.

This topic along with other incidents of intolerance on campus is beng raised. I can provide details, and I welcome all questions/comments. In addition, we are initiating the process to change univ. policy regarding the licensing of compounds used for generic drugs in developing nations. If anyone is interested in this topic, please let me know.

Russian journalist murdered

2006-10-07T11:42:00.000-07:00

From the BBC:

Chechen war reporter found dead

Anna Politkovskaya, a prominent Russian journalist known as a fierce critic of the Kremlin's actions in Chechnya, has been found dead in Moscow.
The 48-year-old mother of two was found shot dead in a lift at her apartment block in the capital.

A pistol and four bullets were found near her body, the Interfax news agency said, quoting unnamed police sources.

She fell seriously ill with food poisoning in 2004 which some believed to be an attempt on her life.

The award-winning journalist fell sick while on her way to report on the Beslan school siege.

A murder investigation is now underway.

Ms Politkovskaya, who worked for the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, was known for exposing rights abuses by Russian troops in Chechnya.

She also acted as a negotiator with the Chechen rebels who held a siege in a Moscow theatre in 2002.

Ms Politkovskaya was killed at around 1630 local time (1330 GMT), Dmitry Muratov, editor in chief of the Novaya Gazeta said.

'Honest journalism'

Vitaly Yaroshevsky, deputy editor of the newspaper, believes Ms Politkovskaya was killed because of her work.

"The first thing that comes to mind is that Anna was killed for her professional activities. We don't see any other motive for this terrible crime," he told the Reuters news agency.

Moscow deputy prosecutor Vyacheslav Rosinsky has said investigators are considering the link between the journalist's death and her work.

"We think that one of the leads of Politkovskaya's intentional homicide is her public duty," he told Russian agency Itar-Tass.

Oleg Panfilov, director of the Moscow-based Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations, said Ms Politkovskaya had frequently received threats.

"There are journalists who have this fate hanging over them. I always thought something would happen to Anya, first of all because of Chechnya," he told the Associated Press news agency.

"Whenever the question arose whether there is honest journalism in Russia, almost every time the first name that came to mind was Politkovskaya," he added.

In 2001, she fled to Vienna, Austria, after receiving e-mail threats claiming a Russian police officer she had accused of committing atrocities against civilians wanted to take his revenge.

In an interview two years ago with the BBC, Ms Politkovskaya said she believed it was her duty to continue reporting, despite receiving such death threats.

"I am absolutely sure that risk is [a] usual part of my job; job of [a] Russian journalist, and I cannot stop because it's my duty," she said.

"I think the duty of doctors is to give health to their patients, the duty of the singer to sing. The duty of [the] journalist [is] to write what this journalist sees in the reality. It's only one duty."

Friday Happy Hour

2006-10-05T21:20:00.000-07:00

Posted by Aaron Cahall, our new Events Director...

Where: Tap-a-Keg, east side of Broadway between 104th and 105th
When: Noon-10p.m.
The Deal: $1 off everything till 7 p.m.; $1 off everything with student ID till 10 p.m.

Questions to: Aaron, aac2127@columbia.edu, 410-459-9744

Yeah...you read it right, this place starts Happy Hour at noon. Not sure what fraction of the day it has to be before it's not really Happy "Hour" anymore, but whatever.

Calendar for all J-school Events

2006-10-03T22:55:00.000-07:00

If you're feeling completely overwhelmed by all the events going on at the J-school, you're definitely not alone. I put together a calendar of all the film screenings, lectures, Happy Hours and career services events coming up. Check it out anytime using this link. If you find it useful, please bookmark it and check it often -- it's the only place where all the different events will be listed in one place.

--Rubina (your new Publicity Director)

Elections are live...

2006-10-03T20:55:00.000-07:00

I was able to sneak away from class to check out the pitches (don't tell).

About 34 others were there. Two contested races: speakers and el presidente

I got there in time for the those 3 to make their spiels..

off the top of my head...

Aaron emphasized networking, social and service connections, and improving the communication among students and expanding the happy hours--with which he has been helping (no dangling participle there!)

Akisa spoke of service, broadening activities out into the greater gotham and her experiences growing up in the nabe, teaching math and as a union rep.

Ernie hopes to caffeinate us all on friday lectures with java offered in the back of the lecture hall, plus his past leadership roles in will help his goals of service.

a fine slate.

vote early vote often. vote onlineHERE

apparently Diabold is secretly running the whole thing. I expect Lula to run a close fourth.

Sree has the whole she-bang on his website HERE get a chance to read the candidates statements.. even thoose who ran unopposed... and do please ignore the photo of me.

they'll be plenty of opportunities to contribute. e.g. even though a speaker's chair will be elected, committee members can do a lot of the work (last years chair Amanda, now an M.A. was very active, but so too, was I, having been responsible for some of our bigger names..Amanda deserves the credit....for getting the heat...(a story for another time)

Pitch Night tonight , before the all class lecture!

2006-10-03T12:34:00.000-07:00

Just a reminder. Come on out, meet who will be the J-school Mafia. Or at least get a good seat for the lecture.

The big race has three contenders, and the runner-up is Veep.

Some roles remain to be filled--including events chair....that means someone can help plan parties.. and more happy hours, and least better then the ones I have put together.

And all are welcome to be active throughout the year.

New Yorker Festival

2006-10-01T15:30:00.000-07:00

The New Yorker Festival is running this coming weekend. While it looks like most of the high-exposure events are sold out, there are free events (a screening of Barry Lyndon on Sunday afternoon, for one) and book signings that everyone who is interested can go to (early) and hope to see. If anyone's interested in taking a break from the beats and heading over to one, post a comment.

Other screening info:

SUNDAY SNEAK PREVIEW:

“Man of the Year”

The New Yorker presents a special screening of “Man of the Year,” a new comedy from Morgan Creek and Universal Pictures about a talk-show host who runs for President as a joke and, to his surprise, is elected to office. Following the screening, New Yorker staff writer Lillian Ross will interview the film’s writer and director, Barry Levinson, and star, Robin Williams.

Sunday, October 8th at 12 noon
Florence Gould Hall
French Institute Alliance Française
55 East 59th Street ($25)

Tickets will be available exclusively at New Yorker Festival headquarters, located at the Union Square Barnes & Noble Booksellers, 33 East 17th Street, beginning at 5 p.m. on Friday, October 6th.

Cash only. No more than four tickets can be sold per person. The film is rated PG-13.

SECOND SCREENING ADDED [The tix for this are probably sold out, but you'll have to check to know for sure]:

“Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan”

Due to popular demand, The New Yorker will add a second screening of the film at 12:30 a.m. on Saturday night, October 7th.

Sacha Baron Cohen, the star of HBO’s comedy “Da Ali G Show,” brings the journalist Borat Sagdiyev to the big screen. In the new film, Borat travels from his home in Kazakhstan to the United States to make a documentary. On his cross-country road trip, he meets real people in real situations. (The film has an R rating.)

Saturday night, October 7th at 12:30 a.m.
Directors Guild of America
110 West 57th Street ($15)

Tickets will be available online at ticketmaster.com, at tri-state outlets, or by calling 1.877.391.0545, beginning Wednesday, September 27th at 9 a.m

They're Bringing Spanking Back (Yeah)

2006-09-30T04:03:00.000-07:00

Spanking naughty students - or giving "pops" - as one principal calls it - is making a comeback in the Bible belt.

New J school mandate: showing up late for lecture = one "pop" per 30 seconds of lateness.

Read the article here.

TV?

2006-09-29T13:46:00.000-07:00

Yesterday our Broadcast RW1 found out some interesting news. We start TV next weekand our professors said there are some students who are not prepared enough to move on to TV and should will work on print and radio for the rest of the semester. They said we should think seriously about if we were ready to move forward. I'm not sure if the ultimate decision is up to us.

While I understand they've been doing this a long time and know what it takes to handle TV, I wonder if this happens other years or in other sections. I would imagine that had someone known this was a possibility that might change their course of study in the beginning.

SPJ Elections

2006-09-27T20:28:00.001-07:00

I know some people on this blog were thinking about running for positions on the SPJ board. The deadline for nominating yourself online is this Friday at 9 a.m. So if you've been vaguely considering it, now is the time to submit your pitch. There still aren't any up for several key positions, including events director, webmaster, secretary, membership director and movie coordinator.

Remember that if you're running for an uncontested position, you will be appointed to the position on Friday, so you don't have to campaign. To see who is running for what, check out the pitches online. For more details, you can also take a look at Sree's original post on elections.

Possible money-making assignment

2006-09-27T19:18:00.000-07:00

One of my business school-attending roommates has asked if there's anyone interested in earning some cash by conducting some vaguely journalism-related research and reporting.

He's looking at the Newspaper National Network (NNN), which is some kind of marketing company that marries advertisers to newspapers. A consultancy firm in Brazil is looking to replicate many of the NNN's strategies in South America - if only they knew what those strategies were.

The mission, should you choose to accept it, is to talk to someone senior at the NNN, find out a bit about the company and how they operate, then write a quick report on it - in exchange for some greenbacks, of course.

It's not undercover or anything and should be fairly straightforward, especially to anyone who already has a contact at the NNN or is interested in business reporting.

Contact me at has2114 or on 646-245-6046 and I'll put you in touch with my roommate who can fill in all the details.

Thanks

Howard

Think this ever happened to Woodward and Bernstein?

2006-09-27T17:05:00.000-07:00

Add this to the list of stuff they never tell you in J-School:

Your sources will always, always call back while you're using the bathroom.

spj events.happy hours

2006-09-27T13:43:00.000-07:00

What is the best strategy for happy hours?

we have been moving around.

What is most important? Price? location:? drink specials? should we go to the same place every other week (mona lounge, perhaps?) and then alternative around the city?
how many people are comming? do open bars work?--would you pay 35 bucks for 3 hours all you can drink , top shelf?

so far we've been doing this in the dark (big props to Aaron C. and Rubina and Mary Grace), ..just trying to get a feel.

soon we should have formal board (election noms close friday i think), and i think everyone is waiting until the last minute. i'll probably run for something too. any one out there interested in events chair?

Village Voice redux.. courtesy of David Blum

2006-09-27T09:26:00.000-07:00

David Blum, currently an adjunct, has been one of my favorite profs. This summer he taught narrative writing, and I finally got an answer to "what is truth?" but I am not telling. besides He lives in the pantheon for coming up with "Brat Pack"

DB was named new editor to the VV, and he really is mining fromn the J-school world.

I just skimmed this weeks issue and found the two lead pieces from Chris Korman (gay rugby: http://villagevoice.com/news/0639,korman,74561,6.html) and current PT-er Lia Araujo http://villagevoice.com/nyclife/0639,araujo,74562,15.html) plus Angela Ashman continues to write there.

Jon Stewart Kills Crossfire

2006-09-26T20:30:00.000-07:00

Here's some more Jon Stewart love, and it is old, but man is it good.

"Now this is theater and it's obvious. How old are you...? And you still wear a bowtie...? Listen, I'm not suggesting that you're not a smart guy, 'cause those aren't easy to tie, but the thing is: You're doing theater when you should be doing debate, which would be great. What you do is not honest. What you do is partisan hackery."

Bloggers noted that Crossfire was cancelled soon after this aired.

"...the terrorists will build a better mouse."

2006-09-26T20:10:00.000-07:00

Watch Jon Stewart tweak CNN's out of control fear mongering.

Design Don'ts

2006-09-26T19:51:00.000-07:00

Want to avoid an ugly resume? (Imagine there was an accent, people.) Squirrel this link away for late next semester, when you're shopping your clips at the Philly Inquirer or somesuch.

Turns out Times New Roman is bad news. But don't take my word for it, read "The Seven Sins of Resume Design" by the folks lifeclever.com.

As Gilbert and Sullivan roll in their graves

2006-09-26T18:18:00.000-07:00

After "I Am the Very Model of A Modern Major-General" showed up in last night's episode of "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," I couldn't get the song out of my head. Here's the product, for better or worse:

I am the very model of a modern J-School journalist
As I attempt to prove I am hard-working and the ablest.
I know that if I overwrite, as I am always prone to do,
My stories will return to me with markings red and full of rue;

I know as well that if I don’t report on every angle that
I’ll go in circles fast enough to outrun Secretariat.
So I must balance reportage with economic brevity
And fight the urge to write unnecessary lengthy levity.

And fight the urge to write unnecessary lengthy levity,
And fight the urge to write unnecessary lengthy levity,
And fight the urge to write unnecessary lengthy levi-levity.

If I am on my beat and find political tomfoolery,
I’ll write it down with details shining like expensive jewelry,
As I attempt to prove I am hard-working and the ablest—
I’ll be the very model of a modern J-School journalist.

As he attempts to prove he is hard-working and the ablest,
He’ll be the very model of a modern J-School journalist.

I’m very good with tape recorders though I can’t transcribe as fast
As I would like. When people speak, I always focus on the last
Thing said so my attention misses better comments coming next,
Resulting in the worsening of quotes and background in my text.

But to record the every word of every single interview,
I’d need the time to rewind back, which always takes too long to do,
Especially when I must read on topics of the solemnest
For lectures given by a certain education columnist.

For lectures given by a certain education columnist,
For lectures given by a certain education columnist,
For lectures given by a certain education column-columnist.

When graduation comes, I’ll know if expectations have been met,
And if the school was worth what’s now a rapidly expanding debt.
Till then I’ll simply have to be hard-working and the ablest,
And be the very model of a modern J-School journalist.

Till then he’ll simply have to be hard-working and the ablest,
And be the very model of a modern J-School journalist.

I’ve learned the ancient jargon and can tell a “nutgraf” from a “lede,”
I’ve learned inverted pyramids make stories easier to read,
I’ve learned that features need a telling detail as requirement,
And that our readership declines each year a frightening percent.

I’ve learned that ethics individuate by one’s morality,
I’ve learned the First Amendment gives us constitutionality,
I’ve learned the industry has won in cases of prior restraint
But still subpoenas always frighten us to jail without complaint.

But still subpoenas always frighten us to jail without complaint,
But still subpoenas always frighten us to jail without complaint,
But still subpoenas always frighten us to jail without-without complaint.

It seems unwise to learn an industry encountering friction
But stories need the best reporters when the writing’s nonfiction,
So I’ll attempt to prove I am hard-working and the ablest,
And be the very model of a modern J-School journalist.

So he’ll attempt to prove he is hard-working and the ablest,
And be the very model of a modern J-School journalist.

the competition?

2006-09-26T13:17:00.000-07:00

Coughing and sniffling all day. too must be something going around...too soon for flu season..

I have no problem entering the fray at news events with the general working press.. in fact watch out Sewell Chan.. my elbows are sharpened so step aside.
But today, I covered a photo daybook assignment, and then only other ones there were from NYU and CUNY. .. a battle of NY's J-school titans.. although CUNY is the newcomer, i kept thinking how much less that guy was paying to do what I was doing..... although i am sure i got the better stuff.

Cough, sneeze

2006-09-25T08:53:00.000-07:00

I had to go to the doctor this morning and get antibiotics for my sore throat.
"Journalism, eh?" the doctor exclaimed.
"Half my patients this week have been from journalism! What are they doing to you over there?"

What, indeed.

This has very little do with journalism...

2006-09-24T15:47:00.000-07:00

...and that's how I like it. Last night, I went to a double-header roller derby bout in Long Island -- about which my post on Glamourite should appear this week. On the way home, I was riding everyone's favorite, the M60 bus, back from Queens, when my friend gets a look of shock, confusion and dismay on her face -- not unlike the look on Flavor Flav's face when he realized Sumthin' had pooped on the floor. So I look back to what seems to be transfixing her eyes, and there is a man standing in the bus stairwell, with a distinct stream of urine surging from his midsection. About 10 seconds later, the bus door opens, and he casually steps out and begins a boisterous walk westward on 125th Street.

It's my personal belief that you have not lived in a city until you have seen someone either vomit or urinate on public transportation. I've seen both. Can we officially say I'm a New Yorker now?

Critical Questions

2006-09-24T12:22:00.000-07:00

Critical Issues brought up more questions to me than it actually answered on Friday, and I've been thinking about it since. I'm constantly shocked into a stutter when sources turn the tables on me, asking "What do you think? or "Who told you that?" I'm wondering what you guys do in those situations.

On my first RW1 story, I wrote about the first art gallery to open in Sunset Park. I spent two long afternoons at the gallery with its owners and on the second afternoon they had ordered lunch and decided to eat while I was there. They offered me food a few times before I finally accepted. It felt odd to sit with them at the table, but not eat, and also sort of rude to decline their continual offers. Was it wrong to eat a small bowl of Chinese noodle soup? I didn't really think twice about it (I never felt that I owed them anything extra because of the soup) until Critical Issues. Now I'm wondering, was it completely unethical of me to have a bowl of soup? Would the gallery owners have felt betrayed if I wrote an unfavorable piece about them?

I'm anxious to hear about your ethical dilemmas and how you've dealt with them and how you reacted to Critical Issues on Friday. I guess experience is the best way for us to learn, but it's so scary to think we could so easily make the wrong, unethical choice.

Lede of the Day

2006-09-23T08:00:00.000-07:00

Women Arrested After Bizarre Sex Sting

SYRACUSE, N.Y. (AP) -- A police sting took an odd turn when an officer pretending to be a john met a suspected prostitute pretending to be an officer.

Police spokesman Sgt. Tom Connellan said here's what happened Thursday:

A male undercover officer driving in a neighborhood known for prostitution was flagged down by a woman. The woman got in his car and they went to a nearby parking lot to negotiate a price for sex.

She asked the officer if he was a cop and he said no.

"That's OK, because I am," the woman said as she pulled out handcuffs and a two-way radio. She barked into the radio: "Move in!"

The officer, concerned the woman was armed and looking to rob him, forced her from the car. Moments later, officers who had been monitoring the situation arrived and grabbed Greene and her radio.

A male officer pretending to be female used the radio to find out who was on the other end. That person was waiting in a car in a nearby alley.

Police charged Lisa Greene, 31, with first-degree criminal impersonation, prostitution and fifth-degree conspiracy. Elena Irwin, 20, was charged with fifth-degree conspiracy and possession of a hypodermic needle.

"We believe these people were going to rob people or extort money," Connellan said.

He did not know if they had successfully used the scam in the past.

Press Shield Law

2006-09-22T05:42:00.000-07:00

WHITE HOUSE OPPOSES LAW PROTECTING CONFIDENTIAL SOURCES (From CAP Progress Report): In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty said that a bill protecting journalists who refuse to reveal their confidential sources would "significantly weaken" the Justice Department's ability to collect critical national security information. The bill is a response to the recent spate of journalists being threatened or punished with imprisonment for refusing to reveal their anonymous sources. Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-PA) rejected the opposition and said he wants to "push forward" with the bill. His sentiment was echoed by Theodore Olson, a former solicitor general in the Bush Administration, who supported the bill because it would "support investigative journalism." The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press calls the bill "the best effort in more than 30 years for Congress to take steps to recognize the importance of providing protection needed by journalists and their confidential sources to fully inform the public."

Monkey Business

2006-09-21T20:53:00.000-07:00

Just think of this the next time you read or write a bad review...

The First Amendment is kind of, you know, important

2006-09-21T14:35:00.000-07:00

It's drilled into our heads constantly, but a reminder now and then is always helpful.

What happens when the First Amendment no longer applies?

Read on and find out

Thanks to SPJ for the link.

Potential Speaker..Irish Ambassador Burton

2006-09-21T14:34:00.000-07:00

He'd like to come to talk to us. Former Irish Prime minster and current ambassador.

thoughts? Although he is not a journalist, I think it is good choice. thoughts?

Future Happy Hours

2006-09-21T10:56:00.000-07:00

If anyone of you want to suggest places for future Happy Hours, please let us know. Until we have a formal events committee for SPJ, we're just coming up with different bars that are accommodating to Columbia students (and have good drink specials).

This week, Aaron Cahall suggested we try going uptown a few blocks from campus. The place, Soundz Lounge, is located at 3155 Broadway (about 124th-ish). If you live far from there, you can take the 1 to 125th Street and just walk one block south. All these prices are for students, so remember to bring your Columbia ID!

From 5 to 8 on Friday, here are the specials:

$2 domestic beers (including Yuengling)
$3 specialty beers
$4 well drinks
$4 frozen drinks (appletinis, pina coladas and margaritas)
$6 pitchers

After 8 p.m., domestics are $3, imports are $4, and well and frozen drinks continue to cost $4.