things to read

journalism / links / things to read / Tuesday / Twitter — 2 Comments
19
Mar 13

1,032 words on a slice of the Steubenville story

There was a high profile rape trial in Ohio you might have noticed. You might have watched some media coverage that was sympathetic to the attackers. Perhaps you saw some of the news media shared the victim’s name — likely an honest error which nevertheless breaks an unwritten rule of this type of coverage.

I doubt you read this:

It’s a misplaced anger that will do nothing but further confuse the public about issues of rape and sexual assault, particularly as the crime affects children and teenagers, who make up 44 percent of rape victims.

[…]

Here’s the problem: Rape and other forms of sexual assault are incredibly common. (For more information and statistics go here or here.) Researchers estimate that one in four girls and one in six boys will be sexually assaulted before age 18.

That means there are a lot of rapists out there. Sure, some rapists are responsible for multiple attacks and some are dangerous predators. But that many victims suggests profound confusion about rape on the part of both men and women, boys and girls.

Portraying all rapists as monsters and refusing them any sympathy creates a dynamic in which it’s impossible to acknowledge how many ordinary and common rapists live among us. (According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, “approximately 2/3 of assaults are committed by someone known to the victim,” and “38 percent of rapists are a friend or acquaintance.)

To media ethicist and Poynter Institute faculty member Kelly McBride, it seems we can’t characterize the familiar types as monsters. Just the strangers, one supposes.

When your premise starts out as “Railing against CNN’s Steubenville coverage is a waste of time” and moves to shakier ground from there you should reconsider your point. Otherwise you’ll conclude there are plenty of ordinary rapists right there in your hometown. Maybe on your city council! Or church or street! You know, just folks.

Maybe we should treat that as an extraordinary thing.

McBride sees this as “an opportunity to have an honest conversation about the sexual assault of children and teenagers, and about misguided perceptions of healthy sexuality and the role of sports culture.”

So sports turned the young men into rapists. Or maybe it was just that good old fashioned healthy American sexuality.

Poynter, which is a school “dedicated to teaching and inspiring journalists and media leaders” does fine work. This might be one of the most highly trafficked pieces they’ve published for some time, and you should read the comments. There McBride attempts to answer some of the criticisms:

I wish that some of the news orgs that are spending so much space on the CNN controversy would find some survivors to tell their stories.

This is a huge huge international problem. Yet, I think we will be more successful convincing the men who hold these views to see women as fully embodied humans and endowed with clear rights that should not be violated by approaching them as humans, not monsters. Tell someone he’s a monster and he’s not likely to hear you out.

I don’t believe having sympathy for an offender precludes me from being shocked at their sentences, especially when I compare them to the sentences that some teens receive for drug offenders.

(W)hat I would love to see is more news orgs taking the opportunity to explore how confused people are about consent.

Alternately, “You’re doing the wrong story, media” or “You aren’t seeing the right forest because of the wrong trees, society” or “They shouldn’t go to jail for too long because they aren’t monsters and many former victims are able to lead fruitful lives. Also, look at drug sentences.” or “People don’t understand.”

Gotcha.

If I may: Life is choices and consequences, with each meaning something. One choice can make you a gentleman or a braggart or a person who preys on other human beings.

It is troubling that there are so many in that latter group. Being critical of our media doesn’t diminish that. Praising our media for good coverage doesn’t either. Finding shades of gray within that group — as McBride seems to do — is problematic.

Meanwhile, there is plenty of opportunity to discuss both culture and media because, so often, media effects culture. McBride is missing that.

Her last graph:

Railing against missteps or an imbalance in coverage makes us less likely to take up powerful stories that will change the way we as a society understand the extent of the rape problem and the power we have to change it.

Do not share your indignation about “missteps or an imbalance in coverage.” That will … do something or other and you won’t like it.

It has to mean something when the media talks about cultural issues, preferably the right things, in the modern cultural context — yes, your mileage will occasionally vary. When the media strays they deserve a public course correction.

McBride is a media ethicist, a field where right and wrong would, occasionally, be a good thing. But this isn’t about the media for her, rather about some poor put upon teenagers. Did they get the proper messages? Did they know right from wrong? Who taught them that? Could the jocks with the promising grades and a modicum of athletic potential know any better? Or were they mired in some larger, dumber, ignorant problem? Just how backwards is your typical Steubenville teen scene anyway? Maybe it was their coaches? Teammates? Anything, anything but created, complimented or exacerbated by media, except that the larger problem was nurtured by media, which doesn’t deserve criticism, but should, in fact, change “the way we as a society understand the extent of the rape problem and the power we have to change it.”

The circular distraction is maddening.

Kelly McBride on Twitter:

But it isn’t the parents’ problem, apparently:

One wonders who she’s willing to blame. Maybe that’s the problem.

Friday / journalism / links / things to read — Comments Off on Journalism topics to get us through Friday
15
Mar 13

Journalism topics to get us through Friday

Google Reader is shutting down. Google is killing off a power tool used by their power users, citing low traffic and growth.

So, naturally, in everyone’s attempts to find suitable replacements other reader services are crashing under the strain. This is a low traffic tool to Google now, though they haven’t seemed to entertained the idea of just letting the thing live without their touch — which wouldn’t be much different than the way they’ve treated Reader anyway.

Jeff Jarvis, who literally wrote the book on Google:

This is the problem of handing over one’s digital life to one company, which can fail or unilaterally kill a service users depend on. Google has the right to kill a shrinking service. But it also has a responsibility to those who depended on it and in this case to the principle of RSS and how it has opened up the web and media. I agree with Tim O’Reilly that at the minimum, Google should open-source Reader.

The killing of Reader sends an unfortunate signal about whether we can count on Google to continue other services we come to need.

In the end the old saying is true. You get what you pay for, even if you are the service yourself.

Lifehacker has some alternatives. Digg is counting down, and building their own reader.

And now journalism things from various other places. From PR Daily, 6 ways to run a media room reporters will love:

“Organization is key,” said Eileen Melnick McCarthy, senior communications specialist at the Canadian Foundation for Healthcare Improvement in Ottawa. “Remember the reporter is your client, so do what it takes to ensure they get what they need.”

There are six tips, including pre-plan, notifying the media, being prepared and more.

Poynter has tips on How journalists can become better interviewers:

How do you walk up to strangers and ask them questions? How do you get people — tight-lipped cops, jargon-spouting experts, everyday folks who aren’t accustomed to being interviewed — to give you useful answers? How do you use quotes effectively in your stories?

That one also has several helpful tips including, you guessed it, be prepared.

Salon takes a negative view of the media ecosystem. It defies excerption, but here’s the final ‘graph:

There is probably no better evidence that journalism is a public good than the fact that none of America’s financial geniuses can figure out how to make money off it. The comparison to education is striking. When manag­ers apply market logic to schools, it fails, because education is a cooperative public service, not a business. Corporatized schools throw underachieving, hard-to-teach kids overboard, discontinue expensive programs, bombard stu­dents with endless tests, and then attack teacher salaries and unions as the main impediment to “success.” No one has ever made profits doing qual­ity education—for-profit education companies seize public funds and make their money by not teaching. In digital news, the same dynamic is producing the same results, and leads to the same conclusion.

Meanwhile, Conde Nast is going to video:

The move is part of a broader expansion the company is making into television and digital

[…]

For magazine publishers, many of whom are struggling with shrinking readership, building an online portfolio is seen as crucial as both a promotional platform and a new revenue stream.

And speaking of revenues, Alan Mutter discusses why publishers should be worried about retail apps:

From Best Buy to CVS and from Kroger to Macy’s, the biggest buyers of newspaper advertising have launched sophisticated smartphone apps to establish increasingly direct and profitable relationships with individual customers.

These efforts should give publishers the shivers, because this new channel represents a major threat to the retail lineage that constitutes half of what’s left of the advertising sold by newspapers – an industry, lest we forget, whose collective print and digital ad sales are less than half the record $49.4 billion achieved in 2005.

Smartphone apps appeal to retailers, for starters, because they are far cheaper than buying full-page ads and preprint inserts in newspapers. Perhaps even more compelling to merchants is that apps enable them to precisely target offers to individuals, thus achieving not only happier customers but also fatter tickets at the checkout line.

And a new site called FOIA Shaming.

Lastly, stuff from my campus blog:

New York Times sneak peek

When good journalism and good business intertwine

Don’t mistake comedy for the truth

That’s plenty to read over as you head into the weekend. Hope yours is grand!

Auburn / baseball / cycling / Friday / history / memories / things to read / video — Comments Off on An altogether lovely Friday evening
8
Mar 13

An altogether lovely Friday evening

Shelby County, Ala. made The Daily Show earlier this week:

And then Shelby County made the Colbert Report:

So there’s that.

Here’s some stupid:

A Michigan elementary school is defending its decision to confiscate a third-graders batch of homemade cupcakes because the birthday treats were decorated with plastic green Army soldiers.

Casey Fountain told Fox News that the principal of his son’s elementary school called the cupcakes “insensitive” — in light of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.

“It disgusted me,” he said. “It’s vile they lump true American heroes with psychopathic killers.”

The principal chimes in and, as you might expect, does not acquit herself especially well of the situation.

Here’s another one, some 100 students have been suspended for taking part in Harlem Shake videos:

According to the National Coalition against Censorship, about 100 students across the country have been suspended for making and posting their own version of the viral video on the Web. School districts have offered a variety of reasons for the suspensions, said NCAC Director Joan Bertin, with most saying that the videos, which feature suggestive dancing, are inappropriate. However, Bertin said, she believes that regardless of how the videos could be interpreted, decisions to suspend students and keep them out of class cross the line. The NCAC has compared the schools’ actions to the plot of the 1984 film “Footloose,” in which a town outlaws dancing and rock music.

“It seems a rather disproportionate response by educators to something that, at most, I would characterize as teenage hijinks,” Bertin said.

[…]

“We are very strongly in the camp of telling schools that this is protected speech. Even if it’s unpleasant, we do protect that kind of speech in this country and should, as much for students as adults,” she said.

Disproportionate response seems the right words to use there.

When I was a little tot my mother used to tell me about how dirty Birmingham was. It was an industrial center back then, the Pittsburgh of the South, right up until the 1970s. Bio-tech, medical service, UAB and banking changed much of the economic landscape. Between those shifts and more strict ecological rules it changed things in the air too.

The air, my mother said, used to be brown.

Never sure if I’ve ever seen a picture of that, until today. That was the summer of ’72, when there probably was no such thing as air quality reports and ozone alerts. Your emphysema will kick in just looking at it.

And so it was that I enjoyed a much more clear evening outdoors tonight. There’s a lot to be grateful for, if you like, and being breathless under blooming pear trees because your bicycle has your heart rate up is one of those things. Better than the heavy industrial alternative, at least. I got in 21 quick miles this evening, my first time on the bike in several weeks because of travel and sickness. That’s the way of it: build up a bit of form and a few miles, something else always comes along to distract me.

At the baseball game, Auburn led off with a triple, one of Jackson Burgreen’s two hits of the night. He’d also score later in the inning, before sending in a run in the second:

Burgreen

We moved from behind the plate to over third base, so we could enjoy the heckling. Brown had four errors in the seventh (they’d make another later) when I had what was roundly considered the line of the night. The Brown shortstop was standing on third, and he was just about the only guy in his entire infield that hadn’t erred. So I asked him “J.J., do you know what you can make with four Es?”

The professional hecklers in Section 111 made the sound, so I simply said “A Taylor Swift song.”

Turned around to see them bowing to me. It was a bit awkward.

Brown’s left fielder, Will Marcal, had a nice night. He gathered two hits and demonstrated a cannon in the field. I bet no one runs on him more than once:

Marcal

Auburn won 9-4 and we caught the Brown head coach enjoying all of the playful little jokes the hecklers were sharing with his team. Guess we’ll work on him more tomorrow.

journalism / links / Monday / things to read — Comments Off on You can’t make these up
4
Mar 13

You can’t make these up

A nurse who doesn’t save lives, state land without flags, dangerous breakfast treats and it all starts … now.

Do not get ill, destabilize your vitals or otherwise threaten to die in this place:

The executive director of a senior living facility in Bakersfield defended its policies that apparently prohibited a nurse last week from giving CPR to an elderly woman who was said to be barely breathing and later died.

“In the event of a health emergency at this independent living community our practice is to immediately call emergency medical personnel for assistance and to wait with the individual needing attention until such personnel arrives,” Jeffrey Toomer, director of the facility, said in a statement on behalf of Glenwood Gardens.

“That is the protocol we followed,” he said. “As with any incident involving a resident, we will conduct a thorough internal review of this matter, but we have no further comments at this time.”

Bakersfield fire dispatcher Tracey Halvorson pleaded with the nurse on the phone, begging her to start CPR on the elderly resident, according to the 911 tape released by the Bakersfield Fire Department.

“It’s a human being,” Halvorson said, speaking quickly.

“Is there anybody that’s willing to help this lady and not let her die?”

The woman paused.

“Um, not at this time.”

We’ve maybe, possibly, lost our way.

But the poor nurse, who was then having a really bad, no good unfortunate day, managed to be heard on the 911 recording. “She’s yelling at me,” she said of Halvorson, “and saying we have to have one of our residents perform CPR. I’m feeling stressed, and I’m not going to do that, make that call.”

(Here’s an update where the family speaks and the firm says things and I don’t care.)

That’s some kind of nurse, some kind of medical care mitigated by absolutely nothing.

Also in California: Caltrans policy stymies a proposed veterans monument.

Small-town folks struggling to put up a monument to veterans: It sounds like something straight out of “Mayberry R.F.D.,” but for residents of this Central Coast town, it feels more like “Catch-22.”

After three years, the privately funded $60,000 monument, which is sponsored by the American Legion and would be placed on a sliver of land owned by the California Department of Transportation, is still unbuilt. The sticking point has been opposition from Caltrans to the monument’s use of the American flag and the agency’s apparent reluctance to allow the display of words — such as “United States” — on the monument’s military emblems.

[…]

In an interview, Peter Adam, the supervisor representing Orcutt, was unequivocal about the idea of striking the flag from a veterans monument: “That’s a degree of crazy we shouldn’t allow.”

The policy stems from a First Amendment case where the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said Caltrans should not have allowed removal of activists’ antiwar banners from a highway overpass while U.S. flags were allowed to fly. Caltrans, then, decided to bar all flags from state roads. The plaintiff in that suit, by the way, is quoted in this story. And they are as mystified by it all as you are right now.

Our great-grandparents would be ashamed of all of us. Bureaucracy in general, however, is thrilled.

And we haven’t even discussed pastries yet. But we will.

A seven-year-old Maryland boy has been suspended from school after biting his breakfast pastry into a shape that his teacher thought looked like a gun.

Josh Welch, a second-grader at Park Elementary School in Baltimore, said he was trying to nibble his strawberry Pop Tart into a mountain.

“It was already a rectangle and I just kept on biting it and biting it and tore off the top and it kinda looked like a gun but it wasn’t,” Josh said. “All I was trying to do was turn it into a mountain but it didn’t look like a mountain really and it turned out to be a gun kinda.”

But when his teacher saw what he had done, the boy says she got “pretty mad” and he knew he was “in big trouble.”

Josh is in the second grade. He should know the difference between mountains and firearms, even if his school doesn’t. Here’s the letter home to concerned parents.

Assault pastries! That sucrose-laden confectionary treat is a loaded weapon! Suspended for two days, young Josh and his friends will no doubt realize how silly the authority figures in their school are behaving.

When I was in high school one of our teachers built and demonstrated a potato gun that fired off rubbing alcohol. She would run through the halls, burst open doors and shoot — wait for it — a tiny nerf basketball at people. It was hysterical. It was also the 1990s, so get off my lawn, I guess, with your “nurses” and your flags and your Pop Tarts.

journalism / links / Monday / Samford / things to read / Twitter / video — Comments Off on If I don’t talk, or swallow, I feel fine
25
Feb 13

If I don’t talk, or swallow, I feel fine

Much like Phil Collins, I can feel it coming in the air, particularly through the mouth and down into the throat where it is manifesting itself as a persistent, burning little itch. I’m getting sick.

In matters of personal health I blame everyone until I find the right person to blame. This is of course an overreaction, but the pretend-angst is a sort of self-soothing, self-medicating technique I’ve been working on these last several years. Besides, it is more proactive than saying “Sinuses” or “Allergies.” Which is hopefully all this amounts too.

But I’m just saying now that this week is going to be Coughy, Achy, Watery, Fatiguey and a few more of the dwarfs that were never cool enough to hang out with Snow White. Fire Marshall ordinance or not, she could have spent some time with those other characters. There were parks they could have visited together!

Anyway, class today, where we heard fine presentations on public relations and advertising. We’ll go visit our friends over at Intermark Group on Wednesday. The rest of today was spent making recruiting phone calls and doing various other things which will no doubt yield small results in big matters.

So I’ll just pass the time with various links I’ve been hoarding with some of the lesser dwarves and sinus symptoms these last few days.

One of my students shared this one, and it is awesome. 8 New Punctuation Marks We Desperately Need. These include the sinceroid and sarcastises, which I would use every day.

Incidentally, punctuation or grammar humor is always welcome from a student. Makes us think our passion for this stuff is contagious.

Here’s a piece designed to make every journalist with arithmophobia feel better: Danger! Numbers in the newsroom — tips from Sarah Cohen on taming digits in stories. Find an anchor, she says:

A standard or goal – Ask yourself, “What would good look like?” For example, what would good GDP growth look like?

Historical numbers – Is there a golden period to which current numbers can be compared? Perhaps in the economy that might be the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Portion of whole – For example, at the time of the Million Man March in 1995, a turnout of 1 million black men would have represented 1/12th of all the black men in the country at the time.

Other places – How do other similar towns or companies compare?

A lot more at the link.

Here’s a great presentation on the functional art of Infographics:

Just a wealth of knowledge here; and here are the slides:

From Poynter: How reporters can become better self editors, a topic we talk about a lot. No doubt I’ll make some hay out of this post in a class somewhere soon.

Hiding in public: How the National Archives wants to open up its data to Americans is a story from the Nieman Lab that generates a lot of responses. Interest! Intrigue! Fear! A challenge!

The National Archives is sitting on massive amounts of information — from specs for NASA projects to geological surveys to letters from presidents. But there’s a problem: “These records are held hostage,” said Bill Mayer, executive for research services for the National Archives and Records Administration.

“Hostage” might be a strong word for a organization responsible for 4.5 million cubic feet of physical documents and more than 500 terabytes of data, most which can be accessed online or by walking into one of their facilities around the country. But the challenge, Mayer explains, is making NARA’s vast stockpile more open and more discoverable. “They’re held hostage in a number of centers around the country — they’re held hostage by format,” Mayer said.

Fascinating stuff, but I’m glad that’s someone else’s challenge.

The Iwo Jima photo and the man who helped save it:

Soon after the photo’s publication, a story began to percolate that Rosenthal had staged the famous scene, that he had posed the men just so. The story followed Rosenthal to his death in 2006. It is whispered in various forms to this day.

Hatch can set you straight on this, just as he has been setting people straight for nearly 70 years.

Hatch enlisted in the Marines in 1939 and worked his way into its photographic unit. In late 1943, some 15 months before Iwo Jima, Hatch had waded ashore with the American invaders at Tarawa, carrying a hand-cranked 16mm camera.

[…]

Hatch came in with the first wave at Iwo Jima, a battle that killed nearly 6,000 Marines.

From that day to this one, he insists there was nothing posed about the flag photo. Though the events occurred a lifetime ago, Hatch speaks about them as if they were fresh in his memory. Hatch can swear like, well, a Marine, and he brooks no argument about what happened that day and thereafter.

What a man.

Finally, an interactive piece from Smithsonian: The Civil War, now in living color.

The photographs taken by masters such as Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner have done much for the public’s perception of the Civil War. But all of their work is in black and white. The battlefield of Gettysburg is remembered as a shade of grey and the soldiers as ghostly daguerreotype images. Photography was in its infancy during the time and colorizing photographs was rare and often lacked the detail of modern imagery.

John C. Guntzelman is changing that.

Not quite right, but gripping, spooky stuff. There are four pictures there for you to see.

And that’s all for today, but there will be more for you to see here tomorrow. Do come back.

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