Just reading and trying to write today. Nothing exciting happening on my end whatsoever. How’s your Monday? Grand I hope. We all hope that for one another’s Monday, right? Do we worry about such a thing by Friday? We all have a Monday, but I bet we tend to hold Friday afternoon as our own. And we’re not too concerned about your Saturday prospects either. Unless we need your help moving or something. Otherwise we’re too busy thinking of our own Saturday at the pool or the beach or park or wherever the weekend is taking place.
But Mondays, oh we find we can all relate to that.
The misery of Mondays is overrated to me, but I don’t doubt others experience the phenomenon. Because, one day, I might need a little sypathy about that. We’re desperate to know you can relate to ours.
Some stuff I’ve read today: Jeff Jarvis on Disrupting journalism education, too:
Yes, there will still be classes in writing, editing, and reporting — boot camp with beats ramping up to specialization and expertise — and yes, as I said above, there should still be classes and seminars in law, ethics, theory, and judgment. I’m not trying to blow everything up, not yet. I’m trying to find more ways to teach more and make it fit students’ outcomes better. If we make the teaching of tools and use practical experience better, I wonder whether we’ll be able to devote more resources to more study.
What I’m also trying to do is imagine scaling journalism education so that much, or most, of it could be taught to some — no, to many more — people online, including not just undergrad and graduate students but also professionals who obviously need to learn new skills as their industry convulses around them. I want to have the means to bring training in journalism, media skills, and business to the entrepreneurs and hyperlocal, hyperinterest journalists — and technologists — I continue to hope will populate a growing news ecosystem.
Howard Finberg on Journalism education cannot teach its way to the future:
The future of journalism education will be a very different and difficult future, a future that is full of innovation and creative disruption. And, I believe, we will see an evolution and uncoupling between the value of a journalism education and a journalism degree.
When we think about the future, there’s not a single future. The future for a 20-year-old is clearly very different than the future of a 60-year-old. Each will bring a very different perspective.
The future of journalism education is linked to the future of journalism itself. Each is caught within the other’s vortex, both spinning within today’s turmoil of change.
I find I’ve been thinking and talking along these lines for a good while now. Fine piece, though.
A Samford colleague wrote an open letter to the TSA, and the people said “Amen”:
The TSA should not be streamlined. Administrators should not “review screening procedures.” Screeners don’t need additional training. The TSA doesn’t need to be tweaked. It didn’t “go too far” in these specific instances. Its very existence goes too far. The TSA never should have been created in the first place, and it should be abolished now. Immediately. Without hesitation.
The TSA’s existence is an assault on American liberty and simple human dignity, as anyone who has had his or her genitals touched during an “enhanced pat-down” can tell you. Some still say we should be willing to trade off a little bit of liberty in order to get security, but this is a false trade-off. The TSA does not provide security. It provides what security expert Bruce Schneier calls “security theater.” The TSA only exists in order to give people the illusion of safety. Someone in an airport somewhere in the U.S. is being subjected to an unreasonable search by a gloved TSA screener right this minute. The cruel irony is that he or she is being stripped of liberty and dignity and is being made no safer for it.
As security experts John Mueller and Mark Stewart have estimated, the entire Homeland Security Department infrastructure fails on cost-benefit grounds. In order to justify the costs, Homeland Security would have to stop about four and a half attacks on the scale of the failed 2010 Times Square bombing every day.
WSB Radio, the famed White Columns of Atlanta, are doing something really cool with their Facebook page. Like radio or history or both? Scroll to the bottom, starting in 1922, and work your way up.
So, really, how is your Monday?
