WHICH NEWSPAPER WILL BE THE FIRST TO DIE? Bob McChesney and I address this question in today’s Los Angeles Times. You’ll never guess which one is my pick . . . .
Considering my last post I had to include this debate about the future of journalism that appears on the LA Times Opinion page. Glenn Reynolds and Bob McChesney share with us their views on the problems facing journalism and traditional media. I recommend you read all three days.
In response to an article written in the Opinion Journal I wrote:
In the 1980’s I stopped subscribing to the local newspaper because I only read the Sunday paper for the comics and the sports page. Many of the articles in the newspaper that I would be interested in came from sources other than the local paper. Television and radio typically recognized the good stories of the day and repeated them on the air. A few of the stories were local news stories but many stories came from sources other than the local journalists(e.g Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal). As a result the “news” in the newspaper was typically old news. There was little value added by reading the local newspaper. My fill of local news was handled adequately by watching television or listening to the radio.
In the 1990’s I replaced my paper subscription to the WSJ with the online edition. WSJ was still a leader in creating good stories about business but the competition was fierce. WSJ was rapidly losing their position as the source of the good business stories. Increasingly I found that other sources were creating the good business stories of the day and I could read them from my Yahoo page for free. As an experiment I dropped my online subscription to see how often I missed the WSJ content. For me at least I found that I did not miss the content often enough to subscribe again.
Now I am confronted with the dilemma. I have enjoyed my free ride reading quality journalism paid by others. At the same time I am disappointed with what appears to be an increasing trend in journalism to print the story and let the bloggers check the facts. As a fan of objective journalism and the good that journalism can provide to the community, there is a price I am willing to pay. As a potential customer I haven’t seen the business model I am willing to accept but I remain hopeful. Your business model is a step in the right direction but I do not think it goes far enough to draw customers like me in. There needs to be something special going on in a local newspaper. In the early 1980’s in a MBA class on competitive strategies our team predicted the demise of the newspapers. The competitive pressures on the newspaper industry were in place well before the rise of the Internet. Somehow newspapers adapted and survived. I think they can do it again but the clock is ticking. The customers for journalism are changing, too.
I took this picture of my son today in a restaurant. He was waiting for us to finish our meal. He wanted to go. I took the picture because of the look on his face and the fact that he did not move when I raised the camera. I was surprised he let me take the shot. The color of the photo was not planned but I like the effect.
Thirty-three people were killed and 15 others were wounded at Virginia Tech university on Monday in the deadliest campus shooting rampage in U.S. history.
Source: 33 killed in Virginia massacre – Yahoo! News
I graduated from Virginia Tech so this story hit me hard. Ambler Johnston was a girl’s dormitory when I went to school. Lots of my female friends lived there but I do not remember getting above the lobby. I studied Engineering at Virginia Tech and several of my classes were in Norris Hall where most of the students and professors died. I think it was in Norris Hall that I took a Statics class many springs ago. It was a ball buster of a course back then and everybody knew it. You either got it or you didn’t but you couldn’t skip it. It was a required course. I can still remember being in that class and wanting to be someplace else on those spring mornings. It seemed like all my friends were out having a good time while I was locked in a mortal combat with a course that was going to determine my future career. Did I have the right stuff to be an engineer or are was I really a business major in training? It was so unfair! For a college sophomore this was hell on earth, that is until yesterday.
To love and to be loved is a great but somewhat mysterious goal in life. We all aspire to love deeply but it is probably never more difficult than when we are college students. I look fondly at my relationships in my college years. I was incredibly inept at relationships though I did not think that at the time. I desperately wanted to know what it was like to be passionately in love. It didn’t happen for me and for most of my fellow students. I learned pretty quickly that failure to love someone is not the end of the world. Love can be foolish but never give up. Love is always around the corner.
For the shooter his story of love had ended. It was the end of his world for reasons we will never understand. The first people he shot that day point to a crime of passion. Maybe the shootings were about a love lost. Maybe it was about an unrequited love. Love and fury are typically lethal. Why he shot the rest of the people we will never know. They are all dead.
For many of the students at Virginia Tech and elsewhere, a piece of their innocence was ripped away from them yesterday. Worries about passing classes while their friends played in the sun are trivialized now. They will grieve for their lost friends and the professors but the pain will linger on. Was this an act of senseless violence or an act of passion? For many students closure will be painfully hard. It will be hard to forget the people who died when you walk into Ambler Johnston or Norris Hall but you must press on. It will be eery sitting in front of a substitute professor in Norris Hall but the degree requirements will not change. Life is unfair! The students have embarked on the hardest course in their life, getting over this tragedy. Unlike their college courses they cannot drop this course if they find it too tough and there is no time limit to this course. There is no way to restore lost innocence and there is no time limit on grieving.
About a week ago my Sony camera went on the blink. Up until that point I was very happy with the camera. When I looked through the view finder I got garish yellowish-green monochrome image. When the image started to smear across the screen I decided that it needed to be fixed or trashed. After searching the net for some ideas on how to fix it, I came across a post that said that Sony had settled a legal case concerning a variety of cameras and they were fixing the cameras as part of the settlement. He said that although his camera’s symptoms were not the same as shown on the Sony support website, when he talked to the folks at Sony they said they were willing to fix it under the settlement. So I gave them a call and they offered to fix my camera, too. Yesterday I got my camera back and it works. I am a happy camper again.
In essence, science is nothing more than a method of inquiry. The method says an assertion is valid-and merits universal acceptance-only if it can be independently verified. The impersonal rigor of the method means it is utterly apolitical. A truth in science is verifiable whether you are black or white, male or female, old or young. It’s verifiable whether you like the results of a study, or you don’t.
Thus, when adhered to, the scientific method can transcend politics. And the converse may also be true: when politics takes precedent over content, it is often because the primacy of independent verification has been overwhelmed by competing interests.
Verification may take several forms. I come from medicine, where the gold standard is the randomized double-blind study, which has been the paradigm of medical research since the 1940s.
Source: Testimony of Michael Crichton before the United States Senate
I found this link recently and eventually found my way over to Steve McIntyre’s blog, Climate Audit. Michael is the well know author of many books including Jurassic Park. In his testimony to the Senate he is critical of the scientific techniques used in putting together the hockey stick graph. The hockey stick graph is the keystone to showing that global warming is caused by human activity. I found his discussion of the data manipulation tricks used by Mann to be both interesting and worrisome. These are old statistical tricks that I have seen engineers try to use occasionally so I was surprised that scientists would even consider using them. Picking which data you want to use, excluding data that is “wrong”, and extrapolating new end points only leads to bad decisions. From my experience with engineers we eventually would agree that the data was not good enough to make a decision with and move on to different ways to solve the problem. To think that these techniques would pass as appropriate scientific techniques under peer review is astonishing. In reading Michael’s testimony before the Senate, I can see why global warming skeptics are so skeptical and the advocates have become even more vocal. The underlying issue driving the volume of global warming debate is professional pride. It is embarrassing to Mann to have your greatest scientific work exposed as “unscientific” by an economist and a mathematician. It is embarrassing and distracting to the climate scientific community that Mann’s work was published with such low scientific standards and now must be defended. It is no wonder that this scientific debate has degraded into a pissing contest. Thank God Mann does not work for the pharmaceutical industry!
The blog mob: “Written by fools to be read by imbeciles.”
This is a piece I decided to read because Chris Muir made fun of it in his cartoon. In this painful discourse on how journalists write better than bloggers, his piece had a grammatical error. A period was missing from the end of a sentence. I found the piece interesting for another reason. His sentence structure and choice of words had me gasping for air. Here is a sample.
Every conceivable belief is on the scene, but the collective prose, by and large, is homogeneous: A tone of careless informality prevails; posts oscillate between the uselessly brief and the uselessly logorrheic; complexity and complication are eschewed; the humor is cringe-making, with irony present only in its conspicuous absence; arguments are solipsistic; writers traffic more in pronouncement than persuasion . . .
His over the top word selection had me reaching for my dictionary, too. Logorrheic is a great word for the crossword puzzle writers. Maybe the most interesting aspect of this article is that I think he was writing for a specific group, bloggers. Who else would spend the mental effort to find the humor and irony in this piece? His serious sounding rant about bloggers actually pokes fun at the self-importance expressed by both journalist and bloggers.
The demise of newspapers has been foretold for many years. Radio and television won the war for people’s minds a long time ago. Somehow newspapers adapt and survive. Bloggers are just another competitor to arrive on the scene. The publicizing of original news stories has become more democratic because of the internet. The internet has dramatically lowered the barriers and encouraged the amateur journalists. What we are seeing is the gradual dismantling of the information monopolies enjoyed by television, radio, and newspapers. In this environment the mob has a greater voice on what is a good story than they ever had in the traditional media. The craft of writing has always had a supporting role. Photographs, video, and the spoken word share this supporting role. A good story is still the king.
We found this while cruising though Bloglines last night. If you are writing anything at all, odds are you’ll improve your skills by spending some time at the Poynter Institute. So without delay, here is a list of a whopping 50 articles that we should all read (yes, I said we because my writing tends to lack in a few dozen areas!)
Source: 50 Tools that can Increase your Writing Skills – by Dumb Little Man
This is one of the few useful posts I have found on digg. I have a love-hate relationship with writing. I hated English when I was in high school. I was planning to major in engineering at college and was dreading college English. The quicker I got out of the English dungeon, the better it was for me. When I met with my college advisor, he said he would give me two quarters of advance placement in English based on verbal score on my SAT. I was shocked. I thought I had died and gone to Heaven. Then he said I should take Honors English. I was dumbfounded! I still do not know what I was thinking at the time. I took the credits and signed up for Honors English. Even now this moment of foolishness brings a smile to my face. My parents were concerned. They knew English was not one of my strengths and my studying skills left a lot to be desired.
Over that summer I tried to make up for every mistake I had made in English classes. That was a silly plan! For good reasons I was panicky about the impending Honors English class. Gradually my preconceptions about studying English faded away. My curiosity about “good” literature led me to read several classics. Maybe if I read a few of the classics it would help me in the class. These books were so much easier to read when it was I who wanted to read them. However, the biggest impact on my writing style occurred when I bought a copy of “Elements of Style”. I let this small book guide me toward the path of competent writing. I took its preachings about writing to heart. I had this vision that all of my fellow students in the class were already so much better than me. They were “real” Honors students. That Fall I slaved over every word and sentence in my Honors English class. I rewrote some pieces so many times I thought I was going to go crazy. I did not want the professor to figure out that I was a fraud. In my mind I was a mediocre English student who didn’t deserve the advance placement or to be in a Honors English class. I guess I fooled him. He gave me an A- and I never took another English class. Over the years I wondered about where my talents really lie but my appreciation of good writing was forever changed that year. It is with fondness I will read the tips from the Poynter Institute. I will remember the summer I panicked and the gift that I found. My appreciation of good writing has stayed with me.
Over the last two days I have made a few site modifications that may cause people some problems.
The Battles Hymn of the Blogger
If your blogging becomes a chore,
Something you dread to do.
Be slow to blame the blog
Because maybe it’s just you.This doesn’t happen to everyone
But maybe you’re battling Blogger’s Block
Stop trying to strike gold with each post
or you’ll find yourself losing to the clock.Maybe you fear nobody’s reading your stuff,
They’re there – if not today in the morrow
Write as if you’ll always touch someone
Stop wallowing in self-sorrow.The best way to Manage Your Writing
Is pen to paper, finger to keys
Once you get a rhythm
You’ll find yourself posting with ease