InkTank

InkLink! "Weapons of Grass Destruction" found in New York City. Read more here.

Greatest Quotes from "The Office"

The new season of The Office is set to run on Sept. 25th. That seems to me far too distant. In order to hold myself over, here are some Office Quotes:

InkLink! Finally, someone realized Joel Osteen is not preaching a Christian message! Read more here.

Glamourizing Bad Behavior, Criticizing Bad Behavior

In the L.A. Times last week, Enid Portuguez presented an interesting piece about the hit show Gossip Girl, in which the show's producer insisted that the show does not "glamorize" teen drinking or sex:

  “When people say the show glamorizes teen drinking and sex, they aren’t really watching the episodes,” said Savage. “Not all the characters drink or have sex, and when they do, it’s always put in a context. Behaviors are rooted in character. There’s decision-making, regret and consequences involved.”

For years, I've heard similar arguments about all kinds of different media and always heard similar language: "there's sex but it's not glamorized "there's drugs but it's not glamorized." I have not seen Gossip Girl nearly enough to judge one way or the other. But I think the phrase "it's not glamorized" can cover a multitude of sins. The larger question this article raises is, what do you specifically have to do to keep bad behavior from being glamourized?

What kind of faith do people like?

Being religious on the campaign trail is a dangerous thing. It seems to be a balance of having just the right kind. What is the right kind? Well, let me give you a hint:  President George W. Bush, who boasts the lowest approval rating in recent history, is considered an evangelical ("No one comes to the father except through...an evangelical church.")

In the meantime, Sen. Barack Obama is garnering a great deal of excitement about  his own faith. In Newsweek cover story last week, reporters delve into Obama's beliefs. Their finding? Well he believes what most Americans believe, that many faiths lead to heaven.

So what's the right kind of faith? Faith that doesn't leave anybody out.

InkLink! Tennessee man opens fire on progressive church, blames their values. Read more here.

InkLink! Are industry changes taking too long for young journalists? Read more here.

Incoming WJCer covers Da Bears

Incoming WJC Student Kendall Cramer has been covering the Chicago Bears training camp for a local radio station. Here is the day two training broadcast:

Download 07.24.08_Bears_News2.wav

End of an Era: No More Ebert and Roeper

I grew up hearing their names with a sort of awe: Siskel and Ebert. They were the two biggest names in movie critiques. Whenever there was mention of a movie, you were likely to hear "Siskel and Ebert give the movie..." Then you could count on them to either love the movie or pan it on PBS's "Siskel and Ebert and the movies." Their movie critiques, while not always universally agreed upon, were nonetheless appreciated.

Gene Siskel passed away in 1999 and the show became "Ebert and Roper and the movies" in 2001. But news yesterday suggests the end of an era. Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper have stepped down from the show and expressed that they will not return.

But to a certain extent, their influence was gone long before they left.

"Bad Samaritans" a rising trend?

If you haven't read DeNeen L. Brown's Washington Post feature on "The Impassive Bystander," make it a priority for some interesting reading. The article uses three case studies to showcase how people in need were ignored by the "Bad Samaritans" in Brooklyn, NY, Hartford, Conn. and New York City. By weaving the stories together, the author implies that people on the whole are indifferent and perhaps not the Good Samaritans they think they are.

Now, you look on with all the brilliance of hindsight and say you would have done it differently. You would have called for help the moment the woman collapsed on the hospital floor. You would have pulled the man out of the street after the car hit him and other cars just passed him by.

Or would you?

Are you really as good as you think you are? Deep down inside, is there a hero waiting there or an apathetic little soul soaked in indifference?

While the story does bring up some good points on some of the causes of apathy, the article itself attempts to be far-reaching without giving any indication to the substantiated depth of the problem.

Who Are TV Strategists?

On television news programs, they're called "strategists" or occasionally "analysts" but how much they can fulfill that role is up for debate. In a recent A1 article by the Politico, Daniel Libit did a lengthy feature on television strategists, concluding that what it takes to be a strategist is essentially to be able to appear to be making a good argument on television.

This leads to a key question: Do we want the truth or do we want to be entertained?

Five Things I've Learned About DC

This week I celebrate one month in Washington DC as a resident. During my time, I've learned some of the lessons of the city, which I'd like to share with you:

Why Journalists Deserve the Newseum

Leave it to a journalist to see both sides of a story even on a monument to journalists.  In the May 5th  Weekly Standard, Andrew Ferguson takes some easy shots at Washington's newest museum, the Newseum while admitting it's nice to get some positive press on, well, the press. The enormous $500 million structure holds it all:

The actual mouse pad used by Peter Jennings is down the case from a red sweater that Helen Thomas wore to a presidential press conference, across from a notebook jotted in by the Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff during the Lewinsky scandal.

I haven't been to the Newseum, but I think we deserve a little credit. Perhaps even more credit than Ferguson gave us in his recent story.

What Tim Russert Stood For

Brian Williams, the managing editor of MSNBC and anchor of the NBC Nightly News, was in Afghanistan when he received a call that Tim Russert had died. When he asked his wife later how folks back home were reacting, she responded, "It's like a president died."

Speaking at the Catholic Common Ground Initiative Murnion Lecture on Russert's behalf last friday, Williams spoke extensively on what Russert stood for in the news industry. And what Russert stood for, had a lot to do with his Catholic faith.

Media Influence: Glorious and Fallen

In the June 2 issue of Newsweek, Sharon Begley and Jeneen Interlandi present an interesting piece that focuses on the increasing media influence in the lives of teens and twentysomethings. Not news?  Oh, but they admitted we might not destroy America.

I share Begley and Interlandi's concern that our generation doesn't understand the liberal arts, specifically writing. I spent more than a year editing news copy. Trust me: it's a real concern. The article points out that study habits have suffered from the our multi-tasking (ie. Studying with Facebook on your desktop, and iPod earbuds in your ears) and it's resulted in less information retention. In other words, you can learn the information for the next test, regurgitate it, and then it's gone. Never digested. I share that concern.

[Full disclosure: I read the article with earbuds in my ears. ]

Why 'The Happening' Is Happening

I've been told by numerous friends that "The Happening," was, in a word, awful. I'm going to tell you why I disagree.

The Youngest Editor in the Room

       I walked into the North Ballroom at the Walt Disney Hilton in Orlando for my first session at the Florida Press Association conference and was stunned.

I was, by far, the youngest person there. As a 21 year old, I felt as though I was playing dress up in my suit worn for the first time since leaving D.C. in December. There wasn’t even anyone in their late twenties or early thirties. I tried desperately to not feel out of place and chose to sit towards the back, furiously taking notes.

How exactly have I landed a job as an editor of a weekly newspaper in a bedroom community of Tampa Bay, the fastest growing urban area in Florida? Well, I like to call it divine appointment; others would point to the industry’s struggles: shrinking newsholes, shrinking staffs and the ensuing desperation.

I was hired as a reporter less than a month after graduating from college.

I showed up for my first day. I was nervous. After all, my limited reporting experience had left the idea of community journalism a bit vague. What exactly was I supposed to do?

Within ten minutes on that first day, I was informed that the managing editor had turned in their two weeks notice. As I was the only full time reporter, I would assume the position. I’m pretty certain that I had one of those Victorian style episodes. “Vapors,” I think they’re called. I spent those two weeks asking every question I could think of, memorizing the AP Stylebook, relying on sleeping pills to rest at night and praying. I did lots of praying.

 

Florida Press: specialization is the way to go

[This post was submitted by Erica Simons, WJC fall 2007 alumnus.  She is now an editor at her hometown paper in Florida.]

It’s no secret that the newspaper industry is in a major crisis. It’s not just the sluggish economy, either. The cultural shift that has changed the way Americans get their information has profoundly impacted the role of newspapers in American life.

Circulation in newspapers is declining rapidly, and its not because editors and publishers haven’t put effort into improving the newspapers. Huge corporations like the New York Times and Gannett are struggling to find out exactly what readers want while maintaining the huge profit margins that their stockholders have gotten used to. 

A City of Complexity

My service project serves food to staff and volunteers after offering meals to the homeless and poor of Washington.

At breakfast last Wednesday, Greg Wiese was eating pancakes when he mentioned that his family was in town. The head cook for So Others Might Eat piped up and said that Greg should have brought his family to volunteer at SOME to see “the other side of the coin.”

On Monday, I saw both sides of that coin in three experiences that typify the diversity and complexity of the city.

I let go...

The day I made the worst mistake of my life began like any other day.

I was on the National Mall, walking toward the Washington Monument with the latest issue of the Politico in my hand. In fact, it was the first issue of the Politico I had ever picked up. Needless to say I would be excited to get to a place where I could sit down and sift through the newspaper’s contents to satisfy my thirst for ink and paper.

It was a cloudy, gray day, but that in itself was not as ominous a warning as I would have hoped. In seconds the rolling puffs above began to let loose, ever so slowly, and drizzle first one, then another drop onto my skin.

Mapping the U.S. by breaking news

These maps, which we discovered on this blog, should make it very clear why we aren't running the Fargo Journalism Center (no offense, North Dakotans). 

The maps on the left stretch or shrink each state by the number of stories it generated, as reported in a study of 72,000 wire-service stories from 1994-1998.   

And when you do that, parts of the country get gigantism and other parts just disappear. (Don't worry, North Dakota, my home state of Indiana didn't fare any better). 

Some interesting facts came out of this study. For example, DC created more stories than all of California.  New York (actually NYC itself) generated more stories than any other state (including DC), and Texas is curiously absent.  Apparently, news is the only thing that's not big in Texas.

The post on the blog Strange Maps raises some very interesting questions about why this map looks the way it does.   My question is whether this is perhaps an image of our imagined community.  If imagined communities are made up of shared information, having that big bulge in the northeast has to mean something for how we think about ourselves as a people.  Check out the post, and let me know your thoughts.

A final dispatch from the Pope Team

WJC fall 2007 alumna Kristi Moore had one last byline from her assignment to the Washington Times' Pope Team.  This one's about all the pope memorabilia:

Pope Benedict XVI's visit to the District sent local Catholic stores scrambling to meet the demand for memorabilia, as many of them sold out of "any and everything pope."

Vendors at the Nationals Park were also slammed with lines for an hour and a half before and after the papal Mass on Thursday, and unofficial street vendors popped up Wednesday, hawking buttons, T-shirts and even Vatican flags to thousands of gawkers on Pennsylvania Avenue waiting to see Benedict ride by in his popemobile.

The rest of the story after the jump.

Infotainment trifecta: Dems go on Colbert

You just knew it was coming.  Last night all of the Democratic headliners were on the Colbert Report at once.  The road to the White House might go through every state's primary if things work out just right. But -- no matter what happens -- the road to the White House will definitely go through Colbert.   

And then the mainstream media covered this today as if it were real news -- which then makes it real news.  For Colbert this was a ratings trifecta, but for the future of news, it stinketh.  This is the new, news reality, but that doesn't mean we have to like it.

More clips from Colbert after the jump. 

WJC alumna gets in on the Pope action

WJC Fall 2007 student Kristi Moore, who attends the Franciscan University of Steubenville, is back in DC covering the Pope's visit this week.  She interned at the Washington Times last fall and did a great job covering religion and culture.  As a result, she was invited back to be part of the Washington Times' "Pope Team".   

One perk of being on the Pope Team was that she got to go to the White House meetings yesterday morning, and today she's out at Nationals Park covering the celebration of a stadium-sized mass. 

Sounds like fun.  Here are a few of Kristi's Pope-Team clips we want to highlight:

• Benedict to make students' dreams come true.

• Will visit stir more to serve?

• Red vestments are U.S. design.

• How the Mass is celebrated.

Gorbachev makes bank; the Herald blanks

So, the news in Miami is that Mikhail Gorbachev, the last General Secretary of the Soviet Union, is going to make an appearance at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, FL.   Oh, and he's gonna earn $125,000, at least, for just showing up. 

Being a former communist leader is obviously a great gig, if you can get it. 

The Miami Herald could have had so much fun with this story.  But instead, the reporter covered it in such a straight-faced manner that the story just falls flat. 

The press' black box morphs into the 'press sphere'

I ran across this item by a tip from a friend (thanks, Ryan Moede).  Here is a vision of the future of the press as described by Jeff Jarvis, director of the interactive journalism program at the City University of New York, in his blog BuzzMachine. 

Jarvis definitely sees us moving from the "daily we" to the "daily me" notion of news, where the user/consumer is the center of her own information universe.   The old process of creating news was an impenetrable black box that spat out news for everyone.  The new process (it's really more of an "ecosystem" as he describes it) is a very flexible thing, with information coming and going from a story over time, and created just for me.

Compare these two models Jarvis created.  On the left is Jarvis' conception of the old school and on the right is the new school:

This leads to some very interesting analysis.  The entirety of Jarvis' post is quoted after the jump.

U.S. media still haven't discovered the Americas.

People who care about international news already know that mainstream U.S. media have a globe-sized blind spot. Below is some hard data proving that point from the Miami Herald's Latin America analyst Andres Oppenheimer: 

If you think that Latin America is getting a short shrift in the U.S. media, you are right: a new study shows that the percentage of news from the region in mainstream U.S. media is pathetic.

[Article continues after the jump.]

Meanwhile, back at the ranch

I had to do a follow up story while writing for the school paper once and it was difficult to not feel redundant and not sound like the first article was a mistake or filled with journalistic errors. Gretel Kovach, writer for The New York Times, mastered this art in two follow-up pieces from a story which was not originally hers. 

Balance: It's more than just who you quote

Republican Senate candidate Bob Schaffer was "utterly devastated" in a Denver Post article that connected Schaffer with convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff through a trip taken by Schaffer in 1999.

The Denver Post:

Pit bull attacks

An article about a 6-year-old child attacked by a pit bull ran in the Alabama Press-Register on Thursday (Apr. 10). Joshua Nelson's face was badly swollen and covered with stitches one day after the attack, the article said. It had the typical elements of a pit bull attacks child story: dog owner said pit bull had never bitten anyone and young child suffers permanent damage.