Expletive Deleted

Or, Allegations of America’s dirty little backwoods secret and Google won’t let their ads be placed on the newsfic coverage…

Since I’ve only got a few articles under my belt thus far, I feel like I can still beat the “new blogger” drum, at least for a while. I’d best enjoy this while the romance is still all hot and sticky. My posts should still throb with their burgeoning tumescence. Why, I’m so hot, my prose is even turgid.

As a new blogger, I face many issues. Finding a name for a blog (and available domain) that pleases more than just me. Finding a host that will serve my needs without breaking the bank. Learning the ins and outs of social media and self-promotion. Maybe even generating a little (likely very little) revenue while I’m at it. That’s where this post comes in. Full story »

What the hell is up with all the Jobsophilia since Steve Jobs died? The Tech Curmudgeon has noticed that there’s a hell of a lot of supposedly smart people reporting and blogging on “technology” claiming that Steve Jobs was the most visionary tech guy in the last 30 or 40 years. Or they’re fellating Jobs’ reputation and going so far as to claim that the man changed the world more than anyone else in the history of technology. The Tech Curmudgeon wants some of what they’re smoking, because it’s clearly better than mescaline and LSD.

So lets look at some of Jobs’ contemporaries who are more important than he was to things that, you know, actually matter to the real world. Full story »

If you’re a working journalist, congratulations. You have survived a horrendous year of newsroom job cuts. The Newsosaur, Alan Mutter, compiles the sad, frustrating, dismaying news:

The number of jobs eliminated in the newspaper industry rose by nearly 30% in 2011 from the prior year, according to the blog that has been tracking the human toll on the industry for the last five years.

Mutter, working with data from Erica Smith, author of the Paper Cuts blog, notes layoffs have been horrific over the past four years.

Since Smith began her running count of publishing layoffs in the middle of 2007, 39,806+ newspaper jobs have been eliminated. This represents 11% of the all the jobs in an industry that, according to the Census Bureau, employed 360,633 individuals in 2007.

Worse, Mutter points out, the number of journalists in America’s print newsroom is at an all-time low. The layoffs, over time, have taken a staggering toll on newsrooms.
Full story »

It’s a funny thing that happens when someone buys a car, especially when they think they’re buying a none-too-common sort. I buy a Mitsuyota RoadWidget, in part because it is distinctive, and next thing I know, they’re everywhere! A similar thing happens when one starts blogging in earnest apparently. Substantive issues that may have long been around may have flown under the personal radar since they weren’t perceived as personally relevant. Write an article or three and next thing ya know, there’s significant current debate surrounding related issues all over the place.

Cases in point. As I’m scanning the headlines today looking for fodder, I find what appear to be three relevant articles. Full story »

Journalism’s aggregator-in-chief, Jim Romenesko, has launched his new site, Jim Romenesko.com. In one of his first postings (it’s Romenesko -he has already been hard at work  reporting and posting other content, so you have to scroll down to find this item) he gave his side of the Poynter saga. Poynter is considered the gold standard for continuing journalists’ education.

Romenesko was publicly corrected by his Poynter editor for not using quotations, just links, in his aggregations, a practice he’d been following for the dozen years he’d written the blog for Poynter.

I used blog posts and stories from Poynter, Columbia Journalism Review and others to launch a discussion on appropriate attribution for aggregators for students in my press law and ethics course at Michigan State University’s School of Journalism.

“He who spareth the rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him correcteth him betimes.” (Proverbs 13:24)

“Withhold not correction from a child: for if thou strike him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and deliver his soul from hell.” (Proverbs 23:13-14)

By now, you’ve probably heard about the video of Texas judge William Adams beating his disabled, then-16 year-old daughter, Hillary, with a belt. You may even have seen the video. If not, a caution: it’s every bit as disturbing as reports would lead you to believe. We’re not used to seeing this kind of domestic brutality on YouTube, especially when it’s punctuated by lines like ”lay down or I’ll spank you in your fucking face.”

I initially ignored this story. I heard the headlines, made the same assumptions as a lot of people probably did and moved along. But today the story hooked me back in when I saw that Adams, in the process of blaming the victim (she only released the tape because he was cutting her off and taking away her Mercedes, he says), suggesting that the footage looked “worse than it was.” Full story »

I never imagined I’d be blogging on Apple issues, but here we go.

In anticipation of getting a new iPad2 I migrated my MobileMe over to iCloud. It’s hard to have a definitive idea of what a new service is going to do until you get your hands on it in earnest, but I had read about iCloud, asked some Apple types who knew more than I did about it, and felt like I had a fair idea that it was going to help me solve some problems I’ve been dealing with in the course of managing the logistics of my business.

I was wrong. Mostly, anyway. I knew I was in trouble when the guy at the Apple Store told me do not migrate, sweet gods, for the sake of all that’s sacred do not migrate!! Okay, that’s not exactly how he put it, and I won’t repeat the words he actually did use (which weren’t much much better), but suffice it to say that staff was finding iCloud to be “suboptimal.” Full story »

I am in the room where I teach. You stop at the door and knock.

“Come in,” I say. You stride in and sit in the chair next to me. The phone in your hand chirps. You glance at it, then at me. I frown. You sigh and put your phone in your pack.

“What can I do for you?” I ask.

“I want to write well,” you say. “How do I do that?”

I nod. “How much do you read?” I ask.

“Not a lot,” you say.

“Why do you not read more?” I say.

“I do not like to read,” you say. “It takes too much time.”

“That is too bad,” I say.

“Why?” you ask.
Full story »

Lord knows what Rupert Murdoch and his son James were thinking a couple of weeks ago when they provided their bullshit testimony to Parliament over the phone hacking scandal at the now defunct News of the World. But if the documents released by Parliament yesterday are any indication of what information still has yet to emerge, either both were lying outright to Parliament, or neither one has a clue regarding what goes on the organizations they each run—News Corporation in the case or Rupert, and its subsidiary News International and its British satellite broadcasting subsidiary BSkyB in the case of James. In either event, the recent expressions of support by the BSkyB board for James are starting to look a bit premature, as does Rupert’s refusal to split his current Chairman/CEO roles at News Corp.
Full story »

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s post about UK Prime Minster David Cameron’s thoughts on shutting down social media in times of unrest, we hear this from Erik Sass at MediaPost:

Colorado’s Department of Public Safety is employing analysts at the Colorado Information Analysis Center to monitor sites like Twitter and Facebook with an eye to gleaning information about potentially disruptive events before they happen. By monitoring social media conversations in real time, the CDPS analysts hope to be able to identify emerging threats within minutes of the first discussion by online plotters — which should hopefully allow law enforcement to preempt, for example, apparently spontaneous outbursts of civil disorder. Full story »

Analystas are rushing in from all sides to examine the causes of the UK riots. Are they about politics and economics? Or is it merely an opportunity for thugs to steal stuff? All we know for sure is that it’s anarchy in the UK and that Saturday’s opening day match between Spurs and Everton has been postponed.

One sobering development, though, should make British citizens sit up and take notice. For that matter, those of us in America and in every other democracy in the world (to the extent that the US can be called a democracy) need to be paying very close attention to the latest move by Brit Prime Minister David Cameron, who is calling on Parliament to consider enacting social media bans. Full story »

If you teach writing for a living, you tread that fine line between prescriptivism and descriptivism. A prescriptivist (which, sadly, I lean toward) is one who harrumphs over a misplaced apostrophe (even when meaning is quite clear) and tells people how language ought to be used according to her strict interpretations of the language’s rules of the road. Think William Safire.

A descriptivist views language as it is written, as it develops, without the harrumph, harrumph. She systematically studies linguistic change and records it without comment.

I raise the issue — to harrumph or not to harrumph — because I recently harrumphed … a lot. One of my graduates, who is distinguishing himself in his first newspaper job, is tweeting his stories at light speed to promote them.

Full story »

In the final moments of Children of Earth, Captain Jack Harkness – sometime immortal, but really a “fixed point in time and space” – must make a terrible decision: sacrifice his grandson, Steven, in order to channel a transmission and destroy alien invaders.

In so doing he will save 10% of the world’s children whom the invaders, the 456, wish to use as living factories to produce recreational drugs.

At its best, science fiction confronts us with human choices against the stark contrast of an alien background.

Children of Earth asks us: would you sacrifice someone you treasure and love in order to save millions of others who you have no connection to and who may never know of your sacrifice?

Full story »

Where in the world is Casey Anthony?

I don’t know, and I don’t care, and I think the media pursuit and frenzy over this question is both bizarre and foolish. Her parents care, and that’s appropriate. Likely the plaintiffs in the various lawsuits care because they have to serve her under the court rules. But the media frenzy, with more than likely a number of blank checks ready to be written, hurts journalism as a profession.

In stark contrast to the Anthony is kidnap victim Jaycee Dugard. What an amazing woman, she’s a true profile in courage and grace. She went through 18 years of hell, captured by a pedophile and his sidekick–his equally sicko wife. Diane Sawyer’s ABC interview was probing and often disturbing as Jaycee calmly related the day to day horrors of her existence during her imprisonment. ABC paid for her story, and likely People did, too. Full story »

Jeff Jarvis, scion of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism, took issue with my Twitter response expressing the belief that newspaper buyers are complicit in the actions of newspaper producers (wrt to News of the World, for our American readers).  He took it further in a blog post, “Readers are our Regulators.”

I disagree. If the public are good regulators then I assume you would accept that the public would have Casey Anthony found guilty even though a court of her peers found differently? The “court of public opinion” isn’t always wise or informed.

Making difficult and appropriate, but socially unpopular, decisions is part of the idea of justice. Full story »

A couple of months ago we noted that things were not going all that well in Murdochland, what with investigations heating up over allegations that phone hacking–that delightful pastime of hacking into someone’s voicemail so you can read and/or hear their messages—was far more pervasive than anyone had guessed. Or, certainly, than Murdoch and his News Corporation team were prepared to admit. Since then, it’s gotten worse, with lots of lawsuits, and allegations, and to-ing and fro-ing all over the place. But it wasn’t until this past week that the whole situation finally exploded, and explode big time it did.

Because it’s one thing to hack the voicemail of movie stars and politicians—the public turns out to be supremely indifferent to that. It’s quite something else to hack into the voicemails of a murdered schoolgirl and delete messages, leading her parents to think she was still alive. Or the families of other murdered schoolgirls. Or the relatives of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the victims of the July 7 bombings. Not only is this beyond the bounds of decency by several orders of magnitude, the public actually recognizes this. And they’re steamed. Full story »

As I predicted four years ago on the Fourth of July, little has changed. This year’s fireworks and barbecues offer only a brief respite from the problems of the nation, how they are worsening, and how those who are supposed to address them remain mere chanters of their respective ideologies.

Four years ago, I predicted that the cost of federal elections would continue to rise, that the role of money would increase dramatically. I did not predict — or even dream it could happen — the outcome of the Supremes’ consideration of Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission that deepened the hole in which corporate money could hide while paying for “electioneering communications.”

Sadly, I did not predict that more than 30,000 journalists would lose their jobs in the past four years, lessening the ability of the press to hold government accountable. To me, corporations are now essentially the American government; more journalists, not fewer, trained in the same accounting chicanery that allowed Enron to flourish, are necessary to hold corporate government accountable, too.
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Heading down to the First Friday event in the Highlands Gallery District here in a bit, and am very much looking forward to seeing mentalswitch’s eyePhone show at Sports Optical. You’ve seen some of his iPhone art here before, in fact, and tonight – lots more. Head this way, Denver folks.

Meanwhile, I’m ramping up for the evening with some new tuneage. Just downloaded last year’s Fitz & the Tantrums CD and I’m rapidly falling in love. Here are a couple of samples.

Y’all have a good one, y’hear? And if I don’t see you, happy 4th. I’ll be doing barbecue, Lexington style, with some good friends. You won’t be eating as well as we are, but have fun the best you can…. Full story »