Written Pyramids

The Joys of Ad Placement

2011-06-06T18:11:00.001-04:00

I am sure that there are insightful things to say about the coverage of Anthony Weiner's sex scandal.

For example, Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart both raised questions in the last couple of days about the role of comedian vs. journalist when they bemoaned the fact that photos of Weiner's weiner makes for comedic gold but that they are friends with Weiner. They make no secret of the fact that they are both liberal comedians, but I found both comedians willingness to talk about their hestinancy to make fun of this prominent democratic congressman (even as they did make fun of him) interesting, particularly for Stewart who sometimes does journalists' jobs when he looks at what (usually Republican) politicians have said in the past compared to what they are saying now.

The Daily Show - Distinguished Member of Congress
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

But that's not what I want to talk about.

What I want to say is this:

The New York Times' liveblog of Weiner's press conference ran with a particularly apropos ad on the top of the page

Do you think it's too late for Weiner to improve his online reputation? I think so.

A Woman At The Top

2011-06-03T03:04:00.000-04:00

I really need to go to sleep, but I just wanted to write something quickly about today's announcement that Jill Abramson will replace Bill Keller as the executive editor of the New York Times.

My heart jumped a little when I read the news this morning. It's a really big deal. Journalism can still feel like an old boys club. I am shocked by the small number of women in the Senate press room every time I walk in there. Journalism will not become gender-balanced over night or even over the next few years, but Abramson's appointment is certainly a step in the right direction, and as a female journalist I can't help but feel elated (even as I wonder about the fallacy that women should automatically root for other women).

Now, the most prominent newspaper in the country will be lead by a woman. Her second in command will be Dean Baquet, the second black man to be managing editor. These are important steps for the slow-moving beast that is the journalism industry.

Abramson, who has served as a D.C. bureau chief for the Times, made clear that she valued contributions to the Times by both men and women, but she also took time to highlight the women.

From the Times:

In her remarks to the staff on Thursday, she took time to acknowledge “my sisters,” naming more than a dozen women at The Times who have helped her along the way, including the company’s chief executive, Janet L. Robinson.

From the Washington Post:

Among the bookcases and posters in Jill Abramson’s office at the New York Times is a blown-up black-and-white photo of the newsroom, circa 1895, in which a group of men huddle around a desk occupied by a woman named Mary Taft.

“She looks like the boss,” said Abramson. Not quite — Taft was the paper’s second female reporter. On Thursday, the 57-year-old Abramson was named the first woman to head the Times’ newsroom in its 160-year history.

A few days ago I was re-reading my post on women in leadership positions in which I wondered if there would ever be a time when successful women did not feel that they had to be judged as female leaders as opposed to leaders, with gender a non-issue.

It's been almost exactly three years since I wrote that post, and I don't think society as a whole is there yet, but a quote in the Washington Post article leaves me hopeful (emphasis mine):

“I wouldn’t say that she was chosen because she’s a woman,” said Baquet, who is the second African American journalist to become managing editor of the Times, “but I still think it’s a big deal. It just so happened that the person best positioned to be executive editor of the New York Times is a woman. . . . I believe other women who aspire to jobs in journalism will see this as a statement about how far this profession has changed.”

Bonus! This is an excerpt from the obituary of Mary Taft Welch published in the New York Times in December 1944:

The obituary informs readers that Taft, who was hired in 1897 or 1898, "covered news of women's activities" wrote "some art criticism" and "reported many of the early developments in the agitation for women's suffrage." She "won the respect and liking of her male colleagues on this and other newspapers" and retired in 1924.

The Strange Tension of Breaking News, Print Deadlines, and Electronic Media

2011-05-05T18:48:00.004-04:00

New Yorker September 24, 2001

New Yorker September 17, 2001

A while back, I wondered about the usefulness of iPad magazines, and noted that they had the potential to update as needed and never (or less frequently) go out of date. In that post, I noted that the first New Yorker edition to come out after September 11 had nothing to do with the attacks (and may have arrived on news stands on September 10). Because of an inevitable printing lag, the magazine with the all black cover and shadows of the twin towers was the September 24 issue, the second issue after the attacks. It ran with no cartoons.

The September 11 attacks were on a Tuesday, which--along with the print to distribution lag--meant that the New Yorker, which dates its weekly issues with the Monday date had to wait a whole 13 days until its print edition could comment on the attacks.

New Yorker May 2, 2011

Osama bin Laden was killed Sunday evening New York time May 1, 2011. His death was confirmed by President Barack Obama late Sunday night. Of course, the New Yorker issue dated May 2 was not going to comment on the bin Laden's death; almost a full week before he died. The May 9 magazine, has nothing on bin Laden either; it appears to have arrived on news stands on May 2.

On September 11, 2001, the New Yorker website was less than a year old. Now, the site serves as a supplement to the magazine. Currently, there are at least 45 online items (blog posts and audio included) about Osama bin Laden that have been posted since Obama's speech.

Newsweek May 6, 2011

In terms of technical feasibility, I understand why all that work is web-only. Unlike the New York Times, it was clearly far too late for the New Yorker to yell "stop the presses". The New Yorker is not a news magazine; Newsweek's Friday cover, for example, will feature bin Laden (left). But changes in how we read magazines makes the New Yorker lag feel particularly strange.

I currently read the New Yorker on a Kindle. Because it arrives instantly and via the Internet, I am more aware of how behind it is. I have already received the issue dated May 9, and I found myself disoriented when I started reading the first article: "Memorials" by Adam Gopnik. When I saw the title, I expected it to be about Ground Zero, the Pentagon, or something about how we memorialize and celebrate. Instead it is about Civil War memorials in New York City. It's interesting and well written, but seems totally disconnected from the world in which I live.

New Yorker May 9, 2011

The experience of momentary confusion, of a tiny clash of new technology and an 85-year-old stodgy, scrutinized magazine, brought up this question: should the electronic editions (iPads and e-readers) of magazines be different from the print edition? Should someone have changed the lead article in the magazine that was sent to my Kindle? I already get a modified version of the magazine: there are no columns, no ads, no illustrations or photographs, and all of the comics are grouped together in one section. Why shouldn't I get a magazine that reflects some of the huge amount of content generated by New Yorker reporters and writers since I received the last issue?

I am not sure when the issue arrived on my Kindle; it could have happened Sunday night (I've been reading a print book and hadn't checked for a bit). If so, there would not have been time to update the Kindle edition. Still even if they chose to release the Kindle edition slightly after the magazine hits the first news stand, I'd still get my issue before print subscribers got theirs.

On the one hand, that's a lot of extra work, considering Kindle, Nook, and iPad users (who I think get a magazine much closer to the print issue than Kindle users) likely spend a lot of time on the Internet anyway. On the other hand, shouldn't changes in technology be embraced for what they do best?

As someone who likely will switch back to the print edition in the near-ish future (it turns out, I feel just as guilty about partially-read issues building up in my digital archives as I do them piling up in my bedroom), I could see print subscribers --who pay more than I do--getting annoyed that they get less content. On the other hand, that extra money allows print subscribers to turn the pages, read in the bath, see color images, share the magazine with friends, tear out comics or covers they love, and--and this is key-- access the digital edition at newyorker.com. What if that edition reflected the extra content? (Or, if that content remained free to access online). Why not acknowledge that a magazine that arrives over a 3G network while I sleep could and should be a dynamic product?

I Sympathize With You, Tiny Bridesmaid

2011-04-29T10:41:00.005-04:00

Photo by Getty Images photographer Peter Macdiarmid, published on The Guardian's website

The kid on the left is clearly as fed up with the wedding as I am.

The bridesmaid, who is Prince William's 3-year-old god daughter, Grace van Custem, looks grumpy or confused in a lot of photos. I would grumpy and confused too if I were a 3-year-old kid in the midst of pomp, circumstance, and an international media circus.

Pink Covers, Pulitzers, and Petty Grievances

2011-04-28T20:13:00.004-04:00

I emerge from my half-a-year silence to talk about women. And writing. Surely, there was no shock in that.

The Pulitzer, by my own count, is one of the more gender-balanced literary prized out there. By my count, 29 out of 86 Pulitzer awarded for fiction or novel (as the award category was once called) were awarded to women. That's 33 percent.Its not great, but its better than the other book awards.

The National Book Award has been awarded 68 times, 15 times to women (22 percent) Twelve out of the 43 books awarded the Man Booker Prize were women (27 percent). Twelve out of 107 Nobel Laureates in literature are women. That's 11 percent.

So, of all the prizes to win as a female fiction writer, the Pulitzer is the one where gender should be the smallest, issue. But, news questions are, to some extent, predictable, so a short Wall Street Journal interview with Jennifer Egan, who won the prize for her book Visit From the Goon Squad ended with this:

Over the past year, there’s been a debate about female and male writers and how they come off in the press. Franzen made clear that “Freedom” was going to be important, while others say that Allegra Goodman was too quiet about “The Cookbook Collector.” Do you think female writers have to start proclaiming, “OK, my book is going to be the book of the century”?

Anyone can say anything, that’s easy. My focus is less on the need for women to trumpet their own achievements than to shoot high and achieve a lot. What I want to see is young, ambitious writers. And there are tons of them. Look at “The Tiger’s Wife.” There was that scandal with the Harvard student who was found to have plagiarized. But she had plagiarized very derivative, banal stuff. This is your big first move? These are your models? I’m not saying you should say you’ve never done anything good, but I don’t go around saying I’ve written the book of the century. My advice for young female writers would be to shoot high and not cower.

The authors Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarized were Megan F. McCafferty, Meg Cabot, Sophie Kinsella, and maybe Salman Rushdie. With the exception of Rushdie, where the plagiarism was also the least clear, Viswanathan plagiarized well known, successful chick-lit / YA authors.

Chick-lit authors and fans took offense at Egan's description of the genre (or, really, the parts plagiarized) as "very derivative, banal stuff" and bloggers suggested that Egan was guilty of "girl-on-girl crime" and called for an apology. ( As for the three women themselves, Cabot, posted on her Facebook wall "I'm certain Jennifer Egan didn't mean to be rude." McCafferty was a lot more angry and also received an apology. I don't see anything from Kinsella, did I miss it? ).

Here's the thing: the genre is derivative and banal. Sometimes an author's work is even derived of her own previous books. I spent sometime in a bookstore looking at the backs of Kinsella's Shopaholic books (which is a different series than the book that was plagiarized from), and each one of them had the same book summary: Becky shops a lot, Becky is in trouble because of shopping (financially and romantically) Becky's troubles are resolved and deferred. Becky lives a glamorous life full of hot men (or man, she's loyal to her husband once they marry), cute shoes, gossip, and occasional career.

I've read books by each of these three authors. When I was in 12th grade, my English teacher asked me if there were any books that I was secretive about reading, ones that I didn't want to tell anyone else I was reading. I don't think she was asking me about books I was embarrassed about, but right now that's what I think of. I am embarrassed to admit that I have read these books because I believe in the power and importance of Literature, and I don't think those books are Literature (the pretentious capitalized L is intentional).

My English teacher's question came in the form of a question written in the margins of my final high school English paper. The paper prompt was "what is literature." My answer was "a work of writing that makes the reader feel something." Now, years later, I would change that to "makes the reader feel something that lasts beyond the time it takes to read the work itself or makes the reader re-appreciate the power of language." The second part allows for some of the post-modernist writers to be included as part of Literature and the addendum to the first part is reflective of my belief that not everything that is written is Literature. I write every day. Nothing I write for work is literature. It's written to inform and nothing else. Writing that entertains--even if it makes the reader laugh or cry--but leaves little emotion once the act of reading is completed falls into the same category.

I recognize that my answer is somewhat subjective; maybe there are people who read the works of McCafferty, Cabot, and Kinsella and find themselves marveling at the books weeks after the reading is complete. But for me--and clearly for Egan as well--these books fall short of being Literature.

They certainly fill a niche; the authors are wildly successful, and deserve to be. But the books are not memorable. They don't linger. There were no sentences that made me marvel at the possibilities embedded in the English language. At best, they are brain candy, light, entertaining fluff that fills the time well enough while being read but leaves nothing lasting.

Click the arrows or here to read the rest of this post.

I have read the books when my concentration was shot and I needed a distraction. McCafferty, Cabot, and Kinsella wonderfully filled that need. At worst, the books perpetuate the idea that women should dream about finding the perfect guy, that balancing a career and romance (and occasionally kids) should be hectic and hilarious, that Princess is a job title to strive for, and that shopping is a hobby worth pursuing in its own right.

Obviously, that idea would be perpetuated with our without this genre, (see: obsessive coverage of the royal wedding, almost every romantic comedy movie ever made), but for the most part the books don't do anything to elevate conversation, expose readers to new ideas or language, or even make them grapple with deep characters. There are other genres that have the same brain-candy role. The romance novel, the thriller, the cop novel, the mystery novel. And, of course, there are some novels in all of these genres-- including the boy-meets-girl-hijinks-ensue and girl-wants-everything-but-most-importantly-a-man genres that most chick-lit falls into-- that turn out to be a whole lot more than brain candy, that linger deliciously once the last page is turned and that give the reader substantive elements to revisit. There are also books that are supposed to be above brain candy but ultimately leave no lasting impression at all.

The same teacher who asked me about secret books, asked me, this week over Facebook, what makes a book chick-lit. After thinking about it here's my answer: a book targeted to girls or women in the boy-meets-girl-hijinks-ensue genre, girl-wants-everything-but-most-importantly-a-man genre, or best-female-friends-help-each-other-through-tear-jerking-troubles-likely-involving-a-man genre and that has nothing--not characters, sentences, or fresh ideas--left to mull over once the book is finished.

A greater cynic would point to the New York Times article about the book "packager" that helped set Viswanathan up with a book deal in the first place. "Chick-lit (and other books for girls and women that are widely popular but would be unlikely choices for literature classes) is manufactured, not written," the cynic would say. "It's a product, not Literature."

I think that that's probably a step too far. It's certainly clear that the Shopaholic and Princess Diaries books hit on a winning formula, but the books' formulaic nature is a choice the author made, not necessary an outside marketing plan.

But here's the thing, the books will never win awards. The books in the chick-lit genre as I defined it will never be contenders for the Great American Novel. And that's OK. It's OK, maybe even important to write things that are fluffy and distracting.

Egan is a female writer. For better or for worse, as indicated by the questions she got after winning the Pulitzer, she is partially defined by her gender.

It seems to me that Egan sees a role for herself in encouraging female writers, in pushing women to write more books that might shift those awards percentages listed at the top of this post. If more women strove to write novels that rise above chick lit (which I think is what she was trying to say in her comments about the plagiarism) then more women would be in the running for these prizes and less need for outrage about byline imbalance.

Maybe Egan should have used her space to promote some of the amazing female writers who are writing today and deserved to be recognized again and again--Aimee Bender, A.S. Byatt, are two I've read recently --but I don't think she had any responsibility to defend all female writers just because they are female.

Back when Jonathan Frazen got glowing reviews from the New York Times for Freedomland, chick-lit author Jennifer Weiner tweeted "In summation: NYT sexist, unfair, loves Gary Shteyngart, hates chick lit, ignores romance. And now, to go weep into my royalty statement." Slate investigated the sexism allegation and found that 38 percent of books reviewed by the Times were written by women (higher than the above awards percentages, but still not 50) but only 29 percent of books that got two Times reviews were written by women.

So yes, by the numbers, the New York Times favors male writers, but I think grouping that in the same Twitter complaint about the Times not liking chick lit and ignoring romance does women a disservice: the times favors literary authors. Women can be literary authors, so people like Weiner and Jody Picoult who I understand are not (Weiner differentiates herself, calling herself a "commercial" writer, I have not read any Picoult, but I understand that her writing is mainly widely popular tear-jerkers) perhaps can and should complain about the gender imbalance, but not about the absence of their own names in the Times.

A female writer, just like a male writer, has the right to make known which books she thinks are worth reading and which ones she thinks are not. Egan did that. It's not a cat fight or girl-on-girl crime. It's saying that women, like men, can and should write both the fluff and the serious literature, and that women, like men, should feel that they can and should strive to write prize-winning literature.

I don't see any betrayal of the sisterhood in saying that.

Did The Internet Change The Ethics Of Printing Manifestos? UPDATED

2010-09-02T12:43:00.003-04:00

The Washington Post, which prides itself on being a local paper,

lead with the hostage story and teased the Middle East talks.

The Washington Times--which is a conservative paper which describes

itself as "America's Paper" (which I take to mean it has a national focus)

--lead with the Middle East talks and teased the hostage story.

Today, a man took hostages at the Discovery Channel after entering the building armed with guns, explosives, and a manifesto.

He was demanding that the channel promote radical solutions to environmental problems including, but not limited to, forced sterilization.

But you don't have to take my word for it, you can read the two-page manifesto at the Washington Post's website.

Almost exactly 15 years ago, the Post published another manifesto: the Unabomber's.

Sharing the costs with the New York Times, the Post printed the 50-page manifesto in a special section, but only after months of deliberating over the decision: it was received by the papers in June and not published until December.

Part of the reason for the papers' reticence was that it was directly giving into the Unabomber's demands for publication; Ted Kaczynski said he would stop the bombings if his manifesto was published. Part of it was surely cost. Part of the decision to publish was that an FBI hope that it would help someone recognize the writing and identify the Unabomber

But I have to wonder if the papers would have waited so long to publish, if they received the manifesto today. For one thing, it could have been printed online for free-- though I imagine that Kaczynski would not have been happy with that option, what with being so anti-technology. Also, and more cynically, it would have driven a lot of web traffic to the site, in fact, even in the 90's, the manifesto was widely disseminated on the Internet, and the case had the web abuzz.

But the Internet is a little different today, the need for getting news and information out first, regardless of its true news value. There is also some ethos of letting readers decide if the information should be read and passed along.

In today's hostage situation, there were ultimately no victims: all the hostages got out safely. There were also no demands to print the manifesto, so publishing it wasn't giving into demands or cooperating with the FBI. By the time it was published, the hostage situation was almost over.

The questions of how the availability of information on the Internet and of whether or not the status of a case should affect the decision to print came up in the aftermath of Virginia Tech. In fact, the New York Times highlighted that issue by comparing the Virginia Tech gunman, Seung-Hui Cho's video manifestos sent to television stations to the Unabomber's manifesto sent to newspapers:

There is nothing new about criminals trying to manipulate the news media for aggrandizement and gratification. The Zodiac and Son of Sam killers, among others, wrote cryptic messages to newspapers. The Unabomber wrote a large manifesto. And the newspapers, including The New York Times, published them.

The visceral impact of Mr. [Seung-Hui] Cho's video represented an evolution of this virulent strain, updated for a time when any act, no matter how odd or personal, seems destined for immortality on the Web and cycled through 24-hour news channels.
Each of the earlier cases had the plausible suggestion that publishing the message would prevent further harm. Now, Mr. Cho was dead before his videos were shown.

The families of the murdered students at Virginia Tech objected to airing the videos; they felt the decision was insensitive and the videos gave an almost unfettered platform for Cho's views.

In the hostage situation today, there were no victims to object to the printing of the manifesto; the only person who was killed was the gunman himself. This time, the gunman also had his own printing press, in a way: he posted his demands on his own website, http://savetheplanetprotest.com/. Does the fact that the manifesto was already available to the public change what the Post needs to think about before it publishes the document on its own site? It's not easy to get an opinion piece published in the Washington Post, which surely gets more page views than http://savetheplanetprotest.com/. But today, the Post offered up an unedited opinion piece from a guy who used violence to get his opinions heard. Without a crime-stopping aspect, or an obvious newsworthiness (were the quotes in the story not enough?) what was the goal of printing the manifesto? Why print it on your own site instead of just linking to another site? Other than page views, what did it achieve?

The overarching question is, just because the Internet allows newspapers to print whatever they want and as much as they want, should they?

On a similar note, Slate's Jack Schaffer wrote an interesting article about how much coverage newspapers should really give this kind of crime, though he might be being a bit harsh on the Post because it was an important local story as it was happening, and I am sure people checked in wanting updates throughout the day. The Times, it should be noted, did not cover it at all (as far as I can tell).

UPDATE Sept. 2: The Washington Post ran the story front page, complete with photos. There were teasers on the front page to online content, but the online content is housed on postlocal.com. So, even though it was A1, the story's online home indicates that the Post covered it because it was a metro crime story.

Still, people are murdered in D.C. all the time, and I don't think those crimes make A1. Here, no one was hurt except the gunman who was slain by the police. I am sure that the death of the gunnman, James J. Lee, was a tragedy for his family and for people who knew him. But I imagine mothers of children who were killed in crossfire on the streets of D.C. (in areas much less wealthy than Silverspring) wonder why their tragedies did not get as much attention as the death of a man who started out his day with the intention of getting the media to pay attention to him and his views.

The New York Times also ran a story, on page A22 of the New York edition. It was not teased off of the front page.

Seriously?

2010-08-11T16:15:00.001-04:00

I'm still not sure what an editor-at-large does, and I am sure that it varies from magazine to magazine, but these lines from W's editor-at-large in a New York Observer item are shocking for any editor of a magazine--especially one that calls itself "a little bit edgier" than other big fashion magazines:

"I'm going to buy an iPad! I'm going to buy an iPad! I don't have a computer, so this is a big moment for me," continued Ms. [Lynn] Hirschberg.

And how does she write her stories now without a computer?

"I don't type them," said Ms. Hirschberg. "I give a handwritten copy to someone who types them, who I pay."

Previous to her new gig, Hirschberg covered Hollywood for the New York Times. Even if glossy magazines are still doing fine in print alone (which I doubt, considering W is looking into iPad apps, and its parent company Conde Nast is not exactly living in the same lap of luxury it used to), any editor should be embarrassed to admit she does not use a computer in this day and age.

A Story Seven Years Too Late?

2010-08-10T18:16:00.001-04:00

I've come here with gripes about the Washington Post's coverage of the internet before, and before I do it again, I just want to say that I absolutely LOVE the articles written by the Post's main "strange stuff on the Internet" beat writer, Monica Hesse. Her writing is engaging, funny, and --most importantly here--relevant.

But Hesse didn't write today's A1 article, and the reporter who did was clearly doing a content-strapped editor a favor.

Here's the headline and lede:

4chan users seize Internet's power for mass disruptions

One morning in June, Google's list of the top global searches began to fill up with random words: "fried chicken," "comic book stores," "gyms." Before anyone could stop it, a racial slur jumped to the No. 1 spot.

And here's graf number five (emphasis mine):

Created seven years ago by a 15-year-old, 4chan is a vast web of anonymous, uncensored message boards. No one's in charge, but the site's users have managed to pull off some of the highest-profile collective actions in the history of the Internet.

As far as I can tell, this is a story about a phenomenon that is seven years old, with a news hook that is two months old.

To make matters worse, Hesse wrote a profile about 4chan and its founder in February 2009 for the same newspaper. Now, there wasn't really a hard news hook then either, but she had a couple of things going for her: she was covering a convention of people who start memes (so at least there was that hook); her writing is light and informative (there's more information in that story than in today's) ;and the story ran in the Style section, which is by definition a place for quirky features.

Today's story, which as far as I can tell adds nothing to the story the Post ran over a year ago, adds nothing new. It's really just a discussion of 4chan gaming Google search trends, which it did months ago.

I get that a lot of Post readers don't know what 4chan is -- I was hanging out with a bunch of 20 somethings the other night and a couple of people in this Internet-savvy bunch didn't know--but running this story on A1, just makes the Post look like a giant luddite.

So why did the story run A1? I have no idea.

But this is the best part. Had the editors and the San Francisco-based technology reporter been a little more in tune with the pulse of the internet, they would have found a news hook.

At about 9 p.m. yesterday, The Smoking Gun, posted a transcript of the 4chan's founder's testimony in the trial of the guy who hacked into Sarah Palin's e-mail during the presidential election. The trial concluded at the end of April, but the testimony had never been seen before.

The Post doesn't mention the transcript at all.

Dr. Seuss Invented The iPod

2010-08-01T23:30:00.002-04:00

The other day, I watched The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, which is Dr. Seuss' first and only feature film. It a strange dream sequence complete with childhood nightmares, Seussian sets, villains, fantasy, and very strange musical numbers. A good portion of the way through, the lead kid steals this from a prison guard:

That thing he's holding is allegedly a hearing aid, but it certainly looks like a first generation, sparkly Apple product. The ear piece even looks like a giant Apple earbud. And this is in 1953 (which is incredibly clear from the endless references to atomic bombs).

"Investigators Said," "Allegedly," and Editor's Notes

2010-07-27T14:53:00.011-04:00

Comic via xkcd. I know that this is a serious topic,
but I couldn't think of a better way to illustrate this post.

Back in March, the CEO of Tribune Company banned the word "allegedly" from on-air broadcasts at the Tribune-owned web station. It was among 119 words banned from the air because they were not conversational enough. The list is head-scratching-inducing, but "allegedly" stands out as problematic because it is shorthand for "this is not a fact". This person is not yet charged with a crime." It's an important word both for legal reasons and for ensuring that journalists don't skimp on the truth.

It's likely that it often becomes a dangerous shortcut as a reporter runs with a sexy story and the details are enough that readers stop seeing the "allegedly" and just assume the person in question actually committed the crime. But it's something.

I don't know what the New York Times' policy is on the word, but it certainly could have been used more liberally in their coverage of a fire on Staten Island. Last Thursday, a fire in Staten Island killed a family--two sons, two daughters, and a mother. Investigators quickly determined that the victims were murdered: some of them had their throats slit, and the fire was set intentionally.

They also said that they thought that one of the sons, a 14 year old, was the murderer. That (likely false) theory emerged only hours after the fire.

But now it seems likely the investigators were wrong. Autopsies show the boy died may have died from his slit throat before the fire was started. Investigators are now focused on the mother, while not ruling out the boy's involvement.

The first story that the New York Times wrote liberally relied on variations of the phrase "investigators said" but the reporters also had already drawn the lines between good and evil.

As a single mother in a terrible job market, Leisa Jones had been doing everything she could to hold things together, working part time as a department store security guard during the holidays and, more recently, attending beauty school. Her neighbors said she had made the second-floor apartment on Staten Island where she lived with her four children — two boys and two girls — a place where good manners and good behavior mattered.

On Thursday, after firefighters had picked through the ruins of what they initially believed had been an early-morning fire that killed Ms. Jones and all four children, they uncovered evidence that was even more troubling: Ms. Jones's oldest child...had apparently started the blaze after slitting his sisters' throats.

Those first two grafs are hard to walk back from (which is why I substituted the boy's name for an ellipses). They paint the story of a mother was just a hard working single mother, the hero of everyday life, and of a son who killed his family. "Apparently" does not begin to convey the shakiness of what may end up being a completely false narrative.

The initial story was followed up with a story based on interviews with people who knew the family: the boy had a psychological assessment that recommended he switch schools (though why is unclear), a history of assault, had been bullied, and had been seen lighting paper on fire. If it seems like a leap to say that these were warning signs of homicide on this magnitude, it's because it is.

But that didn't stop the Times from jumping into full-on speculation on the same day:

In front of his home and at a Staten Island pool, he had apparently been lighting fires, flashes of heat and light that spoke, it turned out, of something more than just a fascination with flames. Inside, he burned.

The heat of that rage consumed the 14-year-old boy and left in its place, it would seem, an all-too-mature murderer.

If there's any place "allegedly" should have appeared so far, it should have been in every sentence of this story. The "it would seem" can refer to "all-too-mature" so there's nothing to say that this boy's guilt is not a given. Never mind that the writer has stated "inside, he burned" as fact. And the boy isn't even alive to contest it.

Two days later, the Times ran this headline: Autopsies Suggest Mother, Not Son, Was Killer in Staten Island Case. The next day the writer of a the speculation column wrote a new one saying reporters were too quick to latch on to the story. But the damage might be already done.

In the age of the Internet the allegations are there for all to see. Forever. A person could follow an outdated link and never see the new stories.

A paper cannot force a reader to read all the follow up stories, but there are ways to ensure that a reader who wanders onto the old and now outdated article knows that the boy was not a frightening murderer, and that the mother allegedly killed her family. I'm not advocating for removing the stories. They absolutely should remain on the site. But the Times has the technology to update the old stories, and they should do so. The first column only links to other stories that implicate the boy; it does not link to the back-tracking column.

As it stands, the original story does not even have a link to the updated stories. The "related" articles on the bottom are all about older fires and murders. There is no "Times Topic" page about the fire. There is no "read complete coverage here."

That's the least that they could do. If I were the editor I would go even further and offer the links to the updated story in an editor's note at the top, which notes that investigators are no longer sure that the 14-year-old boy killed his family.

The Times is not violating any newspaper ethics. The paper ran the story as it believed to be true and then ran follow up stories correcting the record. The Times has run editors notes before when a source lied. But this time, the unnamed firefighters and investigators implicating a dead boy didn't lie, they just made a mistake. So technically, no correction or note is needed.

But the rules of what to correct when might be based on an assumption that a reader will always end up at the most recent story. That's true if a person is picking up a paper every day. It's not true if a reader consumes news by way of social media and following links. It's not even true if you use the Times' own search engine. A search for "Staten Island" brings up the original story implicating the boy before the newer stories (though searching for "Staten Island fire" brings up the headline "Doubts Emerge About Teenager's Role in S.I. Fire" first).

The investigators are still not ruling out the boy's involvement in the crime. But an editor's note could establish that his guilt has been called into question, and things are not as clear as the article made it seem.

A while back, I marveled at an iPad magazine that was constantly updated with the most recent data. I said that I expected the way that news was saved would change and that readers could expect that old coverage would remain up-to-date. I can't think of a better way to use that technology than to clear a person's name of a crime.

Especially a boy who cannot clear his own name.

Even Though I'm Reticent To Give Him More Attention...

2010-06-22T14:44:00.006-04:00

The little bonus text at the bottom of yesterday's post, might deserve a post on its own. Here are a few disjointed thoughts.

Greg Packer is already camping out for the iPhone 4, which does not arrive in stores until June 24. BUT this time, the guy who made himself famous by being first in line for almost everything and for offering man-on-the-street comments for almost everything else, is getting paid to sit in line. Gazelle, a company that buys used electronics has offered him all sorts of support in the form of food, camping gear, and clothes as well as $250 a day, totaling $1000. As far as I can tell this is the first time he's been paid for this kind of thing.

But before he was getting paid an Columbia News Wire included a quote from a pop culture expert trying to explain Packer's desire to be first in line:

When told of the lengths Packer has gone to to be at major events and meet celebrities, Robert Thompson, a Syracuse University professor of pop culture, said Packer has turned a passion into an art form.
"If you're totally obsessed with Shakespeare and James Joyce and go to the ends of the earth researching them, we call you an English professor," Thompson said. "This guy has chosen his body of art to consume, it just so happens he can't make a living off of it. The only fundamental difference is he doesn't have tenure."

I've been curious about how the Internet has changed the way Packer is quoted. On the one hand, it's easier to find out that he's a serial quote-provider. Older articles and memos about Packer cite Nexis searches-- a database only available to institutions willing to pay for the service-- but now anyone can stick Packer's name into Google or Wikipedia, and find out that he's not so average after all. On the other hand, the advent of issue specific websites means that editors might not recognize the Packer waiting in line for a gadget as the same guy who cheers for the winning baseball teams.

That's obviously no excuse for the Times quoting him in 2008, when a search through their own archives would have revealed that the Packer is described as "ubiquitous" and Packer had been the topic of a New York Times profile. But it might be a fair excuse for a niche blog.

Still, in the end, I think that those blogs should take the extra two minutes to google Packer. This is different than googling every name you get for a man on the street comment. This is a guy who is first in line; wouldn't you want to know if his fanboy-ism is real?

(Click here to read the whole post, including choice quotes from Packer).

In the On the Media interview I linked to yesterday, the reporter, Amy O'Leary breaks down what makes Packer quotable:

After Packer explains why he's hanging around the Post Office on April 15, O'Leary says: "Okay. See what he did just there? He slipped in the phrase "right here in New York on tax day." You've got the time, the place, it's a totally usable quote -- Greg's specialty"

And, the guy certainly has a lot of usable quotes.
O'Leary highlights this one:

My favorite Greg Packer quote was something he said to the Daily News in 1998 about a Yankees game on Yom Kippur. Greg told them, "There's no way the Yankees will lose, but if they do, they'll certainly have something to atone for."

The New York Times quoted Packer when he was first in line to get Hillarly Rodham Clinton's autobiography autographed.

"Because, you know, I wanted a chance to see her on a more personal basis than saying `hi' to her at the Puerto Rican Day Parade"

That one is not as great as the other, but still usable.

The Times, which should have known better by 2008, also quoted Packer when the Phillies won the world series.

The parade drew fans from beyond the region, too. Greg Packer, 44, of Huntington, N.Y., drove in for Game 5 of the World Series and stayed for the celebration. He arrived on Broad Street near City Hall at 5 a.m. to secure what he considered the best spot.
"In New York right now, we have no Mets, no Yankees, no stadiums," he said. "I came here to represent and cheer our neighbors."

That's also a pretty good quote. But Packer might be losing his touch.

Here's a quote from a video interview he linked to on his very short-lived blog

"I want to see, you know, how it works, I mean it's supposed to be everything in one an ipod, telephone, internet, everything right at your fingertips...I'm an Apple fan, but I don't have an iPod, and I don't have a Mac."

That's a fine, quote, not as good as some of the other Apple fans who got quoted that day, but it works.

But then, here's what Packer told Endgadget about the iPad:

"It's like a mini laptop! I mean, you just, you know, click it on, just like you click the iPhone on. And you don't have to open it up, and you know, go through, you know, go through everything."

That quote is barely usable. I'd guess that that happened because the iPad is kind of confusing, and Packer doesn't bother to make himself an expert on what he's getting quoted on. That's not the point, not for him or the media outlets who quote him. But, when it came to the iPad, a little bit of research about what it actually does, would have helped. According to Asylum, which is according to Wikipedia, "a men's entertainment site owned by AOL," Packer didn't even know that the iPad 3G was not yet available. That's some pretty basic consumer research,

I'll be interested to see what his quotes sound like for the iPhone 4.

Also, at the release of the first iPhone, one of the people who interviewed Packer and posted a video on YouTube, asked Packer about the future of newspapers. Again, Packer, whose blog has four posts, is not an expert on the topic. The interviewer, Ryan Thompson, markets himself as a "social media strategist, and does not seem to be a professional journalist, so I am cutting him some slack.

Thompson: And, America being the land of the free, with, uh, we've got the flag out there, and the Empire State building, and the First Amendment, do you think blogging is going to replace traditional journalism?

Packer: I think so, I think it's well on its way. It's started.

Sigh.

Image from Packer's blog.

The Men On the Street Are Uninformed

2010-06-21T21:37:00.000-04:00

I'm not really a broadcast news kind of person; I read the newspaper--some on print and some online-- and I listen to NPR. But every once and a while I end up watching the 11 o'clock local news. One of those once-in-a-whiles was the night before the nuclear summit.

I was watching a television show, and the teasers for the news kept repeating "How will road closings for the nuclear summit affect your morning commute? Find out at 11."

"Excellent," I thought, as I listened to a stream of motorcades go past the window, "I would love to know if it will affect my morning commute."

So, I stayed by the television to find out. I didn't even get a map of road closures. I got man on the street interviews with person after person who got to tell the television audience how they thought the road closures would affect their own personal commutes.

First of all, viewers were not informed of where these random people lived or worked so there was no way to draw connections from their experiences to my own. Second of all, these interviews were not live; they were filmed before the road closures began, so the men and women being interviewed were guessing. Hello random person I don't know why YES I want to know whether you think it's annoying that the roads are closed. Oh, wait. I don't. I certainly don't want your inexpert opinions on whether the road closures are necessary in place of actual information about what the road closures are and how they will affect my morning.

In the end, I logged onto WPost.com and found a map there.

Anyway, this is all old news. I had actually forgotten about this particular annoyance until I came across this xkcd comic:

The hover text on the comic is equally delightful:

News networks giving a greater voice to viewers because the social web is so popular are like a chef on the Titanic who, seeing the looming iceberg and fleeing customers, figures ice is the future and starts making snow cones.

Comparing any news source to the Titanic makes me gloomy, but I certainly agree with the sentiment.

Bonus: Here is an interview with a guy who basically makes it his job to get quoted as a man-on-the-street as often as possible. Most recently, he was first in line to get the iPad, and all sorts of news outlets and blogs dutifully reported it, though many have caught on to his antics. Back in 2003, the AP warned reporters about quoting him.

Depression Kills

2010-06-17T11:48:00.002-04:00

A friend of mine lost her brother to suicide this week.

If you are feeling suicidal or depressed, please ask for help: e-mail a friend, call a family member, call a crisis hotline.

If you know someone who might be struggling, reach out or pass on this number.

I Know What I'm Talking About But I Sound Like An Idiot

2010-06-11T12:03:00.005-04:00

I don't actually use Twitter. I had an empty account that I set up back in 2007 when I was writing an article about presidential candidates using new-ish technology. (Guess which one was using Twitter? Fred Thompson! He actually has gotten better at it since the campaign, when his account was just a list of events he was attending). My account was never used, used a pseudonymous handle, and had hundreds of spam followers. I closed it years later when I remembered that it existed at all. I now have another one under my real name, which is private and empty while I figure out what actually do it with it.

My confusion about Twitter is, in some ways, like my confusion about the iPad. I understand what to do with it and how to do it, but I don't understand the point. But for Twitter the problem is also related to my work's pretty strict policy about social media that can be traced back to the publication. So, while my Gchat status messages are often witty (or so I'm told), I'm not keen to broadcast them into the ether of the Internet on a site where I would need to follow professional contacts as well as friends. So for now, I'm solely a consumer of tweets.

Which brings me to my real problem with Twitter: I sound like an idiot when I talk about it. The other day, I was complaining to a friend about a tweet that had offered misleading information. I stopped my self half way through the sentence, because using the words "tweeted" "hashtag" and "handle" and "tweet" in one sentence makes me sound like I am using some middle school code, not talking about actual media that is being archived by the Library of Congress.

And by the way, the vocabulary for Facebook is not much better. Come to think of it, the verb "to blog" is stupid-sounding too.

So, yes, I am all for Slate's campaign to develop a new vocabulary even though I suspect it's too late to change very much. (Also, I plan on never using phrases like twitterverse or tweeple. Yeesh).

Image from the Twitter Status Generator.

Maybe Ignorance Is Bliss

2010-06-10T00:57:00.007-04:00

There are a lot of things to complain about with Glee. The music is great, but the plots can be sloppy bordering on offensive.

I seem to be more or less on my own in my level of discomfort in the blackmail plot with Sue and the principal, but catching a Shakespeare reference in the season finale of Glee did not help much:

"One last chit, Figgy, give the glee club another year, and I won't mention us making the beast with two backs again."

I'm willing to bet that the writers did not know that "the beast with two backs" is from Othello. But I did; I am obsessed with Othello. My thesis for my BA was titled "'All That Is Spoke Is Marred' – The Transformation of Othello As Seen Through Speech."

So, I knew that "a beast with two backs" is part of a list of racially-charged animal metaphors that Iago uses to describe Desdemona sleeping with Othello. And when I heard it here, in describing what the creators of Glee clearly see as a race as well as infidelity issue, I cringed a little. (Emphasis mine).

IAGO
'Zounds, sir, you're robb'd; for shame, put on
your gown;
Your heart is burst, you have lost half your soul;
Even now, now, very now, an old black ram
Is topping your white ewe. Arise, arise;
Awake the snorting citizens with the bell,
Or else the devil will make a grandsire of you:
Arise, I say....

BRABANTIO
What tell'st thou me of robbing? this is Venice;
My house is not a grange....

IAGO
'Zounds, sir, you are one of those that will not
serve God, if the devil bid you. Because we come to
do you service and you think we are ruffians, you'll
have your daughter covered with a Barbary horse;
you'll have your nephews neigh to you; you'll have
coursers for cousins and gennets for germans.

BRABANTIO
What profane wretch art thou?

IAGO
I am one, sir, that comes to tell you your daughter
and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs.

It should be noted that this dialogue also produces an exchange that should be printed on DC Shakespeare shirts:

BRABANTIO
Thou art a villain.

IAGO
You are--a senator.

Feminist Kaleidoscope

2010-06-03T04:04:00.008-04:00

This is an essay, apropos of nothing, that I originally wrote for another blog. I'm reprinting it here, because more than a year after writing it I am still proud of it and still grappling with these issues.

"It's really important to make women in our community less invisible," the chief Rabbi of England, Jonathan Sacks, said at a panel discussion in D.C. in advance of the release of a prayer book with his commentary. A murmur of approval rose from the audience.

"You can see it on the first page of my siddur," he said, referring to the version of the prayer book with his commentary. He has written the first prayer in both the feminine and the masculine grammatical forms. He has included a prayer of thanksgiving for the birth of a girl. He has -- as chief rabbi--fought for aggunot [women whose husbands refuse to give them a divorce] and for strong, religiously acceptable prenuptial agreements, and for communal lay-person leadership roles.

His prayer book still has the line "Blessed are you God for you did not make me a woman." In the American version, there is no commentary on that line. The editor took it out; it was too much apologetics, not enough explanation.

The murmurs continued, and I felt deeply sad. This is what constitutes progress in the religion that I am deeply committed to and deeply believe in: ensuring women can get a divorce (and thus avoiding a lifetime barring on re-marriage that does not ever apply to men), can say prayers with the proper grammatical endings, can be born with thanks. Changes dictated by the men.

Blessed Are You God for you did not make me a woman.

I imagined tiny pieces of glass falling on me from above, my hand bleeding and cut when I try to push on that ceiling from below.

The women say, "Blessed Are You God for making me as you willed."

I am intensely jealous of the women engaging in great discussions about what it means to be a feminist in the 21st century. I look at my feminism through a kaleidoscope. My extra lens of religion seems to make articulating my feminism exponentially more difficult.

(click to read full post)

In an interview, Barnard professor and poster child for cool women in science, Janna Levin said:

If I sometimes faced outmoded attitudes, they seemed outright silly. If there were darker times when the obstacles were far more destructive than merely silly, I at least never doubted that they were wrong. So, yes, there are gender issues to deal with whether I want to or not, and there have been very tough times. But mostly I feel fortunate. And at the end of the day, instead of talking about gender, I'd rather talk about science, about writing, about writing about science or even about art. Those are the subjects I've spent my life thinking about.

On first reading this, it seemed easy to say, "yes! I totally agree! On the few occasions when I was told I couldn't do something because I am a woman, I either ignored the person or used it as an educational opportunity."

But on a second reading, I am hit with a yearning, a jealousy. I want to actually feel that way. I want to feel that I am not constantly proving myself, that I do not feel like I need to be armed with twice as much Jewish text information as my male peer if I want to win my argument, that arguing for an expanded role for women in Judaism (I'm talking equal leadership roles, public speaking, and learning opportunities. I'm not even getting into the Rabbinate) gives me the derogatory "feminist" label.

I do not resent my religion. I was lucky to be raised in a family, school, and congregation where women did have leadership roles, where I learned exactly the same thing that the boys did, where women were respected scholars, where our voices were heard. Not counting as part of a prayer quorum also does not bother me. For various reasons that's not a battle I choose to fight; I do believe that sometimes you need to swallow the bitter parts of tradition in order to partake in its strength.

I was lucky that the sheltered life I lived until I got to college taught me that I was strong, smart, and valued independent of my gender. And then I got to college. And then to real life. The biases I met ran deep.

A boy once told me he was scared of me -- that he had rarely debated someone who he thought he might lose to. And I wondered did he mean I was smart for a girl? I cursed myself for second guessing him and therefore for second guessing myself.

I insist on leading the grace after meals when there are three women in the room, and I can hear the mutters about "Barnard" as if I have caught some contagious feminist virus rather than having learned the sources that tell me I -- like the men-- have to engage in communal grace if there are three women present. Every time I do something that I believe in -- learning Talmud, making the communal blessing over bread--every time I make a decision about how I lead my life as a Jewish woman, it becomes a religious, political, and feminist statement. It's pretty exhausting.

As a woman in the secular world my feminism is about choices and about equal opportunities in practice as well as on paper. Those are assumptions that I can carry without a lot of thought. I move through the secular world assuming I can do it. I rarely worry about my gender.

As a Jew, it's much more complicated. I am still sorting out the dangerous biases from the silly. I am decades behind my secular self, and looking at through that kaleidoscope is making me dizzy.

The Things We Do Today Must Be Today's News

2010-06-01T17:11:00.003-04:00

In general, I'd rather curl up with an old school book or newspaper than read long texts on a computer or other gadget. But I'm not a luddite; I know that technology has to be the savior of my beloved newspaper, and to a lesser extent books.

So--even though I still don't really understand the iPad--I read Gizmodo's review of Popular Mechanics' iPad edition with real interest.

Gizmodo was less than impressed with Wired's attempt, basically noting that it just looked like a printed magazine on a screen with some extra special effects. I had a hard time figuring out what exactly one would expect to see in an iPad magazine that brought something totally new to the table.

But when I read these lines in the Popular Mechanics review, I began to understand.

Second, and key to keeping the app feeling alive and relevant, it pulls in new info, so the app doesn't become a fossil once you're done with the issue. The mini-app-within-an-app—a living infographic, if you will—that they demoed for me charted seismological data in the US, not only historically, but also using the most recent 7 days of earthquake data from the USGS. Which is really savvy—the mag retains value after you're done reading the issue.

The iPad version, which Gizmodo is quick to note is still "incrementally reformatting the magazine, instead of reinventing it" does acknowledge the strange thing about print publications: they are out of date before they hit the stands. Electronic versions of magazines never have to be out of date.

Stating it like that seems overly obvious and incredible old news. News online is always more up-to-date than news in print. That's part of the problem, and people have been talking about that for years. But magazines have a particularly hard time of it because they go to print so early.

It was particularly obvious in the wake of the September 11 attacks, when newspapers and magazines apologized for having to distribute content written for a September 10 kind of reality. (Below are the Sept. 17 and Sept 24 issues of the New Yorker as an illustration of that lag).

(click to read full post)

More recently, I noticed it in National Geographic, which presumably closes its issues very very early because they are rarely linked to the events of the day. Still, it was strange to read a photo essay about the White House in the January 2009 issue which referred only to the "next president" presumably because the text was locked in before the results of the 2008 election were known (though that seems like an incredible long lag).

Going back to Gizmodo, the lag is even more noticeable when it's not an issue of a cover or a caption; the actual data can change rendering the premise of a whole article faulty, or in the very least rendering a wonderfully conceived graphic obsolete before anyone sees it.

The Popular Mechanics iPad edition hints at a strange new world in which every time a reader revisits an article, it reflects the most up-to-date information, not only through updates at the top but through fully integrated, constantly changing information.

How that would be sustainable from a staffing perspective, what that means for reinventing journalism ethics, and what that means for publications being records of history are beyond me. I don't think we're enough in that world to grapple with those questions. But they are questions that aren't that futuristic anymore.

There's a line in the musical Newsies where the striking newsboys sing joyfully "that the things we do today will be tomorrow's news." Hearing that line today is a quick reminder of how much news has changed. Today someone saying "the things we do today will be tomorrow's news" would be no cause for celebration; it's basically the same as saying "yesterday's news." If it's not news right away, it will be obsolete before anyone reads it. Electronic editions might be figuring out what a subscription to a newspaper or magazine would mean to someone making today's news today.

I'm Pretty Sure Carrie Never Flies Economy

2010-05-28T16:15:00.002-04:00

Overheard on an airplane in D.C.:

Flight Attendant to boarding passenger: I like your dress.

Boarding Passenger (who appears to be in her 20s and is wearing a knee-legnth, pink, sleeveless dress with detailing around the hem): Thank you.

Flight Attendant: It's very Sex and The City.

Boarding Passenger: It's very TJ Maxx.

Flight Attendant: It's very Carrie Bradshaw.

Passenger continues walking. I wonder if she felt complimented by the somewhat strange exchange and how much she sees herself in Bradshaw (projecting my own life onto this stranger I would guess 'not at all'.)

Walking With Leeks

2010-05-28T01:46:00.001-04:00

They were balanced precariously in too-full bags; their green leaves sticking out of the top. I walk past a construction site and they thwip thwip against a fence.

Crossing the street, I feel something brush my ankle and one of my leeks is on the ground. I double back, and as I turn back around the other one falls. I'm out of time for retrieving it. Standing on the sidewalk, I watch two cars miss the leaves before the third drives over them. The leek still looks intact.

Two days later, I think it's gone. Crossing the street, I notice a web of white crushed into the street. As if the leek had silk hidden inside.

"We're Really Sorry We Didn't Think About Your Reactions. Again."

2010-05-24T23:42:00.004-04:00

Does anyone else get the sense that Mark Zuckerberg fills in Mad Libs to generate his apology letters? (Here, here, and here).

The most recent one doesn't actually apologize, but the game is still there. Here's samples from today, 2007, and 2006 respectively:

The biggest message we have heard recently is that people want easier control over their information. Simply put, many of you thought our controls were too complex.

Beacon would give people an easy and controlled way to share more of that information with their friends. ...But we missed the right balance.

We did this to make sure you could share information with the people you care about. This is the same reason we have built extensive privacy settings — to give you even more control over who you share your information with.Somehow we missed this point with News Feed and Mini-Feed and we didn't build in the proper privacy controls right away.

So when exactly were they hearing something other than people wanting more control over privacy settings?

Remember when Facebook looked like that image above?

Say What?

2010-05-23T03:59:00.000-04:00

Plenty of people have complained about the privacy issues with facebook and its advertisers, I am just going to complain about the advertisers themselves.

Celebrate Moms by "liking" a cleaning supply? Ugh.

And then there's this. I don't understand this at all. If Clorox thinks it's important to help kids, why make people "like" it on Mother's day in order to make the donation? This is a general gripe and confusion about corporate giving; do consumers like it more when they feel involved? Does it sell more products? Does it sell more than just printing "Clorox supports kids" on the package?

How about not only marketing it to women? Does that help?

Here ends today's rant.

Strong, Beautiful, Women's-College-Educated Women

2010-05-21T16:42:00.005-04:00

Inspired by the nostalgia brought on by Barnard's graduation earlier this week and by my declining fear of being identified on this blog, I pulled up an essay I wrote months ago about claims that women's colleges offer a much-needed boost to their students. I originally wrote the essay in response to this post on Slate's XXFactor blog.

It drives me crazy that people look at my educational history and decide that I am a feminist. I am a feminist, in the way that I think most of my friends are – a fiercely held view that there is nothing I should be prevented from doing because I am a woman. But, that world view was not shaped exclusively by four years at Barnard.

I am a feminist, because it never occurred to me not to be. Because there were rarely any times when I thought that being female was a disadvantage, or that it should be. But, because of where I went to school people assume that my decisions—often my religious decisions—are the direct byproduct of some mysterious four years of feminist boot camp. I don’t know what world they grew up in, but one year in a Modern-Orthodox school in Israel and four years in college--during which I would have told you that I associated with the Columbia Daily Spectator as much if not more so than I associated with Barnard--does not a person make.

When I was in eleventh grade, my teacher wrote on my report card, “with a bunch of loud-mouthed boys in her class, she needs to learn to hold her own.” One of those loud mouthed boys is still one of my best friends. I don’t remember being intimidated by the boys in my class in eleventh grade, but apparently, sometimes I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. Still, in a grade of 40 girls and 16 boys, an equal number of boys and girls sports teams, and more leadership positions than there were students, I don’t think the girls ever felt cheated by the co-ed classrooms.

In my first year college, I took eight courses. There were boys in four, maybe five of them (I cannot, for the life of me, remember who was in intro to fiction writing). I don’t remember the boys making it any harder to participate. In one class, my group was made up of three girls and a boy, and I’m pretty sure we ganged up to make him do the work we didn’t want to do, but other than that, gender rarely came up.

With the exception of the classes that were required for my major and the first-year seminars, almost all my classes were co-ed. At the same time, I was spending more than 30 hours a week at the newspaper. At the newspaper, I worked under three female news editors, three female editors-in chief or managing editors, four male news editors, and four male editors in chief or managing editors (technically six, but I don’t think I could have told you who the ME and EIC were my first year). For the most part, gender was irrelevant there too. (For anyone counting, the imbalance is due to sample size more than anything else; some of the later boards were almost entirely female).

The only place gender was obviously an issue was in my Judaism, but that’s a different essay altogether.

In short, I was rarely in the all-female environment that is supposedly empowering or that is supposed to compensate me for those high school history classes with loud-mouthed boys (again, the question of whether or not the high school teacher would have described loud-mouthed girls, is also another essay).

But Barnard College still waves those statistics about women’s colleges producing more CEOs and more doctorates than their co-ed counterparts; even though I never took a class about women, it was clear to me that Barnard was proud of its place as a women’s school, and sees the work the school does as important.

And so it should be. I did graduate Barnard feeling empowered, and, in many ways, feeling more appreciated than my Columbia College peers across the street.

But if few of my classes and none of my extracurricular activities were all female, did it really matter that Barnard only accepts women?

Yes and no.

(click to read more)

Barnard’s class of 2007 had around 500 students. Columbia College’s had around 1,000. I think that it would be naïve not to take the size of the classes into consideration. It was a lot more feasible for the deans to learn my name than it was for the deans across the street to learn the names of the Columbia College students.

But I also think that there is an assumption that being an all women’s school means that there needs to be an active process of empowering the students. It’s too bad, because I don’t see any reason why my male peers wouldn’t have benefited from the same sort of can-do attitude.

The can-do-attitude means that when I walked into a community service event the first Sunday of Barnard, the first-year dean, who I had never met recognized me and called out to me by name. Whether she had memorized all the students’ names or had taken the time to look me up in the facebook (the hard-cover yearbook-like thing, not the website) didn’t matter as much as the fact that she had bothered to learn my name at all.

The can-do attitude means that when I was annoyed by the way the Hillel drama society was running and decided to start one of my own, the College Activities Office gave me 500 dollars, almost no questions asked. I got more funds from the Dean’s office, and more from the Residential Life Office. I was in my second semester of school.

The attitude means that in the age of room phones, we got mass messages directed at “strong beautiful Barnard Women” and while some objected to the adjective beautiful (why was it necessary?) and some objected to the adjective strong (did that need to be mentioned? Why couldn’t it just be assumed?) The message was somehow that we had the world (or, in this particular case, cheap theater tickets) at our disposal. All we had to do was go to the College Activities Office.

The goal of empowering women meant that we had a functioning advisory system, while across the street campaigns for student government focused on reforming the advisory system year after year.

It meant that all my professors knew my name, and that none of my classes were taught by teaching assistants.

But while I certainly benefited from all of those things, it didn’t mean that my male peers wouldn’t have, or shouldn’t have. My peers who were taking core curriculum classes freshman year probably would have benefited from uninterrupted seminars when the TAs went on strike, and it’s clear they wanted better advisers.

And while some wanted the anonymity afforded by a larger school, that’s not gendered; my sister was not at all attracted by my glowing descriptions of Deans knowing her name. Her complaining when 500 names were called at my graduation meant I had the right to complain three times as loud when 1500 were called at her college graduation.

Barnard’s mission statement has a paragraph about the importance about research on women’s issues. But it ends with this paragraph:

“The Barnard community thrives on high expectations. By setting rigorous academic standards and giving students the support they need to meet those standards, Barnard enables them to discover their own capabilities. Living and learning in this unique environment, Barnard students become agile, resilient, responsible, and creative, prepared to lead and serve their society.”

Columbia College’s mission statement is a lot longer, but does not talk about its graduates becoming leaders, serving their society, or being resilient. It talks instead about an “emerging future.” It does not talk about expectations.

“If students have acquired intellectual and social mobility, they will be able to meet the career and lifestyle challenges of a changing world, by adapting acquired modes of expertise and experience to new circumstances, by thinking creatively across differing frames of reference, by making informed value judgments in a heterogeneous social context, and by using the best of the past to guide them toward what is best for the emerging future.”

I think that Barnard empowered me not because it was a women’s school, but because, by virtue of being a women’s college it felt obligated to empower its students.

If co-ed schools had the same focus, they might get the same results.

The Discomfort of Identity Literature

2010-05-21T01:56:00.006-04:00

In Borders in Pentagon City, Virginia, the fiction is at the back of the store. In order to get to the fiction, which is helpfully labeled "Literature/Fiction," you need to walk through a different section. You can walk through the religious books, through psychology, through DVDs and then through comic books and graphic novels.

Or, you can walk through Gender/Women's Studies. Or, you can walk through "African American".

It's that last one that gives me pause. Like the Gender/Women's studies aisle, the African American one could be filled with books about civil rights, and history books about identity and political struggles.

But there's a different equation for African American. All chick lit -- books that are arguably written for women by women--is shelved with Fiction/Literature.

But black romance novels, books by Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, or Ralph Ellison are shelved separately, under African American. (There is something similar going on with the GLBT section, but those books are less prominently displayed, and I don't want this post to be the length of a book, so for now I am just focusing on the African American section).

I actually think they might be double-shelved, with at least some shelved in the designated section as well as in the special, prominently displayed African American section, but my point stands.

This clearly is not limited to Virginia; Borders.com offers the option of browsing in the category "African American" and "GLBT" but as far as I can tell, those are the only minority groups that get their own categories.

In a Washington D.C. Barnes and Noble, the American Girl books in the Josefina series and the Addy series -- the Hispanic and black American Girls-- are always selling out before the other ones.

But the orders about what to stock come from a central office, so the Barnes and Noble orders the whole Kit series for their shelves--the ones about a white girl during the great depression--while regularly putting in special orders for Josefina and Addy books. Which is to say, that there is a market for selling books about a specific ethnicity to people of that ethnicity. But all the American Girl books are shelved together. Why can't the adults' books be the same way.

For a while, I knew that this designation made me uncomfortable, but I couldn't articulate why.

And then I listened to Toni Morrison read her book Beloved, which is one of the award-winning books that is designated as African American. It IS a book about black slaves which is written by a black women. But it should not be only for a black audience.

(click to read more)

One of the characters sees a friend's photo in the newspaper and, though he can't read, he knows instantly that it is very very bad news:

Because there was no way in hell a black face could appear in a newspaper if the story was about something anybody wanted to hear. A whip of fear broke through the heart chambers as soon as you saw a Negro's face in a paper, since the face was not there because the person had a healthy baby, or outran a street mob. Nor was it there because the person had been killed, or maimed or caught or burned or jailed or whipped or evicted or stomped or raped or cheated, since that could hardly qualify as news in a newspaper. It would have to be something out of the ordinary-something white people would find interesting, truly different, worth a few minutes of teeth sucking if not gasps. And it must have been hard to find news about Negroes worth the breath catch of a white citizen of Cincinnati.

I'd like to believe that that is changed; that as citizens of this world we should all be expected to read stories about people who don't look like us and who have had vastly different experiences. Learning about the horrors that were the foundation of this country should be interesting and compelling. It gives us a fuller understanding of the world in which we live.

By separating out the African American literature, bookstores imply that white readers still are not interested in "a Negro's face in the paper" and in the stories those papers could contain. (This headline implies there's still some element of that even when a black president regularly graces the front pages of every newspaper in the country).

By calling it African American literature, there is this strange message that that literature, which includes some of my favorite books, is not for me. That because those books do not contain my history, I'm not supposed to read it. How am I supposed to understand that history if I'm not able to read the stories that come out of it? And, isn't fiction all about discovering worlds that a reader might not otherwise be exposed to?

Relatedly, The Help, which is written by a white woman about black domestic help, is not filed under African American fiction at Borders.com. Slate's sister site, The Root, self described as "a daily online magazine that provides thought-provoking commentary on today's news from a variety of black perspectives," posted a compelling review about the questions raised about having a white woman write that book. (I don't think there is a problem writing magazines or books with a single readership in mind, I just don't think those books and magazines should be separated out in bookstores with such broad strokes that it implies that all readers can only read about people who look like them).

In her article, Natalie Hopkinson writes about the double standard that white and black writers face:

Several reviews noted the hurdle Stockett overcame, being a white woman writing about black characters. White people aren't generally expected to be able to code-switch. For black people, it is a matter of survival. Society requires us to be bicultural, to know what it means to get a perm when a white woman says, compared to when a black woman does. These are the cultural competencies members of minority groups get no extra credit for.

By putting all the literature written by black writers in one place, I think bookstores might be perpetuating this; they might be saying "if you write like a white person, your books will be recognized as mainstream. Otherwise, they should get a special designation."

That's a frustrating and backwards path.

Get Your Photo Taken! Ask Me How!

2010-05-17T13:43:00.003-04:00

A good friend of mine just graduated George Washington University. On the evening before the university-wide commencement, she decided she wanted to write something clever on her hat. She has four years of college-level Arabic, and decided to advertise that by writing "Hire Me!" in English and Arabic.

"If you write that on your hat, you absolutely will get your photo taken," I said.

And lo and behold, the AP published five photos of the commencement. One of them was a photo of her hat (the link to the photo I was using is now broken, so the photo itself is not currently available).

I'd like to think I have a highly attuned news sense, but I'm a little concerned that if the media is that predictable, I'm not the only one who is manipulating it.

I'm A Confused Mac

2010-05-05T20:06:00.003-04:00

I think I should be the target audience for the iPad. Stereotypes aside, I'm a pretty devoted Apple products user, I consume a lot of news and media, and I spend a lot of time on the Internet. But, when Steve Jobs said the iPad would fill the void between the laptop computer and the smart phone, I was confused. I could not figure out what that void was.

A week or so after the iPad was released, I spent the day walking around an unseasonably warm D.C. carrying my laptop in my backpack. The weight of my Macbook combined with my (admittedly irrational) dislike and distrust of all things windows operated made me wish for an iPad and keyboard dock, but i quickly realized that what I was actually wishing for was a Mac netbook or an affordable Macbook Air.

Which brought me back to square one: what exactly is the point of an iPad? I find myself staring at people using them to see if the answer will reveal itself. I'm not the only one; the first time I saw someone on the metro using an iPad (middle-aged man playing sudoku) I was one of three or four people jostling to sit near him so we could see it "in real life."

So after not so subtly spying on people using it and playing with one for a little bit in Best Buy, these are my conclusions.

It would probably be great for old people. I actually am not sure how intuitive it is; though the lack of multitasking and the touch screen makes it more intuitive than an actual computer, a lot of what we do with a touch screen actually mimics how we use a computer mouse. It's not actually intuitive to run your finger down the screen to see more text. We just think it is because we scroll with a mouse. Still it's simpler than a lot of computers, and ebooks could drastically increase the number of large print books available.

If it had a usb port, if the iWork suite is really compatible with Microsoft Office, and if the keyboard dock is super portable, it might make a super pretty netbook. That's a lot of ifs.

It's good for reading books you are embarrassed to read in public. Secretly dying to read the latest Dan Brown? Curious about Twilight? Interested in advice contained in a self help book with a hokey title? Erotica (will Apple's book store sell erotica?) Stick it on the iPad and no one will be the wiser. Of course, this is true of all e-readers, and there is always the significantly cheaper option of making book covers out of newspaper (though this may be the book equivalent of drinking out of a paper bag).

Old people, not-quite-sensible netbook users, snobby readers: somehow, I don't think that was the void between smart phones and laptops Jobs was talking about.

What The Hell is Wrong With Glee?

2010-04-21T23:44:00.005-04:00

O.K. I get that Glee is making fun of stereotypes and the cliques of high school. There is also some making fun of the "let's break out into song" genre, although the Glee numbers all come across as pretty earnest. AND I get that Sue Sylvester is over-the-top evil incarnate.

But, did anyone else squirm when she roofied the principal? No? You thought that it was not condoning it because, well, Sue is evil? OK. I hear that. That's even what I tried to tell myself. And then I watched the recap of the first episode of this second season that studio execs are calling season one part 2. The recap includes this gem:

Awww. A sleepy pill. That sounds so innocent and not criminal. Argh!

And THEN, two seconds later, we have this:

O.K. I watched the episode. I know that the blackmail is adultery not interracial relationships. And, I would say that this is satire, but I don't think "brown male" and "white female" sleeping together is an issue that people get blackmailed over anymore. Am I wrong? Even if I am wrong, why perpetuate the alleged shame, even in jest?

I guess that this means that I have no sense of humor. In this case, I'm OK with that.

Oh, and this week? Check out the comments over at Jezebel about the double standard regarding sex for girls vs. guys in what was allegedly a girl power episode. (Here's a well-articulated comment. SlayBelle has a couple of good ones in this thread, and probably all over).

The people over there say is better than I can, and I know one of my few readers is behind and discussing this would give away real plot points.

Things That Are Strange

2010-04-19T18:57:00.002-04:00

An assortment of things I've noticed recently:

The print version of this article had the following headline: "Michelle Obama, all by herself, for world's children." Does that "all by herself" seem a little patronizing to anyone else. It made me expect the next line to be: "Mexican First lady reminds Obama to hold her glass with "two hands.""

I guess the other way to read it is that she is the only one who cares about the world's children, which is a little less patronizing and a little more false.

The other day, I got to play with the iPad while I was at Best Buy. When I turned it on, the browser was at Hulu.com, which is -- as has been pointed out numerous times-- not supported on the ipdad because it runs on Flash. It seems that someone had to see it to believe it.

Stickers have been popping up around Georgetown and Foggy Bottom that say "Gatsby Ain't Great."

All Politics, All The Time

2010-03-23T13:51:00.003-04:00

This was outside a poster store that sells lots of things I can't afford and a lot of Obama posters. I do have some Obama pins at work, which are hanging next to McCain ones in a display of journalistic objectivity. Maybe I'll bring one home and go poster shopping.

Read This Even If You're A Man

2010-03-17T02:05:00.010-04:00

But the internal culture of "for and about Women" made me feel uncomfortable. Women were treated exclusively as shoppers, party-goers, cooks hostesses, and mothers, and men were ignored. We began thinking of a section that would deal with how men and women lived—together and apart—what they liked and what they were like, what they did when they were not at the office. We wanted profiles, but "new journalism" profiles that went way beyond the bare bones of biography. We wanted to look at the culture of America as it was changing in front of our eyes.

What we have here, folks, is a quote from a book published 1996. The passage is about a decision made in the late 1960's. It is from Ben Bradlee's book A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures. The passage is about how the Style section came to be at the Washington Post. Over 40 years ago.

It also kind of describes what Slate.com does, except Slate is a little wonkier. Slate, not incidentally, is owned by the Washington Post company.

I mention all of this, because after DoubleX folded into Slate, they started adding little pink X's next to the stories that used to be on a separate, segregated site for women, and now are just labeled as women's stories.

That's right. Over 40 years after the Washington Post's "For and About Women" section became "Style," Slate launched what seems to amount to a "For and About Women" section. Argh.

Why is an article about Virginia Thomas, Clarence Thomas' wife, and her Tea Party ties an article specifically for women? I mean, I know what Virginia Thomas is a woman, and I know that Emily Bazelon is also a woman. But why is the writer's gender relevant? Why would Slate want a big fat X next to this story to not so subtly say, "are you a guy? If so, this story is not really of interest to you."

How about this great story about the woman who live-blogged/tweeted her abortion? It's the 21st century people, men get angry about abortion on both sides of the debate. Abortion is a women's issue, but it is also an everyone issue. So is religion. Which is what this story is about.

And, looking at it from the other angle, a disproportionate percentage of stories that get the pink X icon are some kind-of-modern-day variation of "shoppers, party-goers, cooks hostesses, and mothers." Siiigh.

I really like Slate. I really wanted to like DoubleX. I just wish I could have liked it without my feminism kicking into high gear.

Feeling A Little Snarky

2010-03-16T01:38:00.004-04:00

Do you ever wonder what happens in the New York Times editors' meeting? I do. Particularly at times like this.

Here's what I think happened.

"Hey! Did you hear about this newfangled social networking thing that the kids are doing nowadays? No? Anyone? It's called Foursquare."

"Like that game with the ball and the chalk squares on the pavement that my kids used to play when they were little?"

"Kind of like that, but it's an application! For those iphones!"

"Hey! Let's write a feature about that! People eat up those tech stories about social networking."

"OK! Sounds good. We're sure that this is a new thing, right?"

"Yeah! For sure! There's no way it was founded a year ago, and had starts before that, but even if it was, we'll just tell the readers that!"

And somewhere, some promising young reporter in the newsroom is smacking his head in frustration.

And you know what kills me? It's going to be one of the "most-emailed" stories anyway.

Just Because

2010-03-15T13:10:00.003-04:00

There's nothing more to add. I just like this.

Seriously?

2010-03-10T18:32:00.008-05:00

This photo ran A1 in the Washington Post on March 4. It was printed, along with an article, the day after D.C. began issuing marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples.

It's newsworthy. A1 newsworthy. And so the Post went about their business of publishing the news. In response, 27 people canceled their subscriptions.

That is mind blowing.

It's not that I think 27 is a huge number (though it did warrant an AP story) nor am I surprised that there were people who are angry about the photo (and presumably also angry about the passage of the law). But I am surprised that that was reason enough to cancel their subscriptions. There is nothing obscene in the photo; the guys don't even seem to have their hands on one another. Surely the Post prints disturbing photos from time to time, but they do it because it's the news.

In fact, the Post ombudsman wrote that it's common for the Post to get complaints about controversial photos:

Almost immediately, I began hearing from upset readers. That’s normal when controversial photos appear in The Post. The same thing happened recently when The Post published disturbing images of Haiti earthquake victims.

But these complaints lasted longer and ended in canceled subscriptions. According to the ombudsman blog linked above, the message was basically "I don't want to see this with my breakfast" but often in a much more offensive manner. Here's one of the calmer ones, written by a 65 year old woman:

“While I realize that the Post must report on these changes – even the ones with which I do not agree – I feel that the picture on Thursday morning was an affront to the majority of your readership. It is not something that I want coming into my home. I believe that even your editors know that it would have been better placed in the Metro section and that it would have mitigated its impact to do so."

(The editors, clearly, do not believe she is right).

But basically, these people canceled their subscriptions because they disagreed with the news. Way to shoot the messenger.

How A Shakespeare Nerd Reads A Catalog

2010-03-10T12:26:00.006-05:00

This morning I sat eating cereal while flipping through a Bed Bath And Beyond catalog. Other than the guilt brought about by being too lazy to retrieve my newspaper and the fact that catalogs are boring reading, everything was going well. Until I saw this:

That's a bedding set named "Othello."

Do you know what happens in beds in Othello? People are MURDERED! According to many stagings of Othello, Othello murders Desdemona using a pillow. Emilia is laid out next to the dead Desdemona on the bed after she stabbed by Iago, and she dies in the bed. And, Othello stabs himself, kisses Desdemona and then also dies on the bed. In fact, the very last lines of the play, spoken by Lodovico to Iago, start as such:

O Spartan Dog,
More fell than anguish, hunger, or the sea!
Look on the tragic loading of this bed.
This is thy work
Let it be hid. Gratiano, keep the house.
[The bed curtains are drawn]

That's right. The tragic loading of this bed. In fact, the text seems to imply that Othello and Desdemona, who started the play deeply in love with one another, never consummated their marriage. So, that means that the only thing they did together on the bed was die.

Remind me again why you would want a bedding set named for this play?

Wonderfully Meta

2010-02-22T17:17:00.006-05:00

Alexander M. Haig Jr., the four-star general who served as a confrontational secretary of state under President Ronald Reagan and a commanding White House chief of staff as the Nixon administration crumbled, died Saturday at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, according to a hospital spokesman. He was 85.

Mr. Haig was a rare American breed: a political general. His bids for the presidency quickly came undone. But his ambition to be president was thinly veiled, and that was his undoing. He knew, Reagan’s aide Lyn Nofziger once said, that “the third paragraph of his obit” would detail his conduct in the hours after President Reagan was shot, on March 30, 1981.

That day, Secretary of State Haig wrongly declared himself the acting president. “The helm is right here,” he told members of the Reagan cabinet in the White House Situation Room, “and that means right in this chair for now, constitutionally, until the vice president gets here.” His words were taped by Richard V. Allen, then the national security adviser.

Those are the top three grafs of the NYTimes obit of Alexander M. Haig Jr. Graf two has a quote explaining what will be in graf three! I can't decide if this is strange or wonderful.

The A.P. decided to forgo the dead man's wishes (prophecies? manipulations? understanding of the obituary formula?) and put it in graf one.

The Washington Post put it in graf two.

Relatedly, I'm surprised the Post had to run the AP story at all. You'd think they'd of had Haig's obit edited and ready to go, considering he was hospitalized before he died and considering the Post's deep connection with all things Watergate.

Let The Citizen Journalism Debates Begin

2010-02-16T12:58:00.001-05:00

Filmers of Iran protest death win Polk Award in NY

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
NEW YORK -- The unnamed people who captured on video and made public the shooting death of an Iranian protester have been chosen as winners of a George Polk Award, the first time the journalism prize has honored work produced anonymously.

I think this is fascinating. I'll have more to say about it, when I have time but for now, I'm just posting.

Urban Legends Do Not A Trend Story Make

2010-02-09T13:37:00.007-05:00

That most e-mailed Sinatra story listed in the post below was one of the strangest trend stories I have ever read, and had incredibly weak trend back up. Observe:

The authorities do not know exactly how many people have been killed warbling “My Way” in karaoke bars over the years in the Philippines, or how many fatal fights it has fueled. But the news media have recorded at least half a dozen victims in the past decade and includes them in a subcategory of crime dubbed the “My Way Killings.”

Six in 10 years? Really? I mean it seems like a lot seeing as it should be none, but it doesn't really seem trend-ish.

Whatever the reason, many karaoke bars have removed the song from their playbooks.

How many Karaoke bars removed the song? "Many."

Karaoke-related killings are not limited to the Philippines. In the past two years alone, a Malaysian man was fatally stabbed for hogging the microphone at a bar and a Thai man killed eight of his neighbors in a rage after they sang John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” Karaoke-related assaults have also occurred in the United States, including at a Seattle bar where a woman punched a man for singing Coldplay’s “Yellow” after criticizing his version.

Two more examples! Now we're talking. (Also, note to hyperlink editors. I would have preferred a link to the story about the killing instead of a YouTube video of the song). Oh, and we're going to broaden our subject matter to include assaults.

“The Philippines is a very violent society, so karaoke only triggers what already exists here when certain social rules are broken,” said Roland B. Tolentino, a pop culture expert at the University of the Philippines. But even he hedged, noting that the song’s “triumphalist” nature might contribute to the violence.

A ha! The all important expert, who "hedged." Sounds like someone was pushing for proof.

Some karaoke lovers are not taking chances, not even at family gatherings.

In Manila, Alisa Escanlar, 33, and her relatives invariably gather before a karaoke machine, but they banned “My Way” after an uncle, listening to a friend sing the song at a bar, became enraged at the laughter coming from the next table. The uncle, who was a police officer, pulled out his revolver, after which the customers at the next table quietly paid their bill and left.

Eh hem. ONE karaoke lover is not taking chances.

And then, the rest of the article is about how Karaoke bars in the Philippines are dangerous places regardless of what is being sung. Also, they never go back to the idea that Karaoke kills everywhere. It's that one graf and a transition back to the Philippines.

Meta Amusement

2010-02-09T13:35:00.004-05:00

The New York Times' blog post about what makes an article most-emailed, is, in fact, a most e-mailed article. Spoiler alert, it's pretty much what The Onion said quite some time back. Well, close enough.

From my local Barnes and Noble

2010-02-02T14:13:00.003-05:00

Jane Austen was a satirist. Just saying.

Keep Calm And Make Up A Trend Story

2009-11-23T14:25:00.003-05:00

I don't love trend stories. Usually I strongly dislike them. I read a whole article headed "the growing backlash against overparenting" and was not, at any point, informed of how we know said backlash is growing. Nor was I convinced that there is a rash of overparenting in the first place.

The danger of writing things like this without any sources is that you get a reader who is in the demographic you are writing about and then that reader knows you are making things up:

By the time the frenzy had reached its peak, colleges were installing "Hi, Mom!" webcams in common areas, and employers like Ernst & Young were creating "parent packs" for recruits to give Mom and Dad, since they were involved in negotiating salary and benefits.

My guess is that I was in college when the frenzy of overparenting allegedly reached its peak. I have heard of people who got to college and didn't know how to cut a piece of chicken, make ice cubes, or clean up spilled water. I knew one girl whose father moved to New York from Florida so she could go to college and still live "at home" ( The student was actually very self sufficient despite her father's attempt at control and spent a lot of time trying to break free of him). But all of those examples were the exceptions that proved the rule. Almost everyone I met was normally parented. And I have NEVER heard of these alleged "Hi, Mom!" webcams. Nor can I think of any student who would appreciate such an innovation. Really, Time? You're going to just state something like that exisits without even citing the college that installed these things in the common room? We're you just hoping that no recent college graduates would read the article and question the veracity of that?

One of the biggest repeat offender of trend stories is the New York Times. The Times' offenses tend to be particularly egregious because the stories tend to be rich people trends. Tights for men! Plastic surgery at a spa! But today the Times brough new meaning to the idea of repeat offender.

"To propel themselves through this economic downturn, media and advertising executives are turning to a phrase meant to soothe another troubled populace: the British during World War II."

That's the lede of a short story about "Keep Calm and Carry On" posters. It ran in today's New York Times.

"This can't be new, " I thought when I read it. "I've read a trend story about these posters months ago."So I looked in New York magazine. Nope not there. Did I read it in the New Yorker? Unlikely. And then I remembered. I read it in the New York Times Magazine. That's the magaizne that's sold as an insert to the New York Times. That's right. This newspaper already wrote about this.

For example, when red posters bearing the sans-serif slogan "Keep Calm and Carry On" underneath a simple crown icon started catching on in Britain a few years back, Bex Lewis knew their provenance. Now an associate lecturer in history and media studies at the University of Winchester, Lewis wrote her Ph.D. thesis on British propaganda posters devised for the home front during World War II. The "Keep Calm" poster, meant to be distributed in the event of a German invasion, was extremely obscure for many decades. So she was interested, she recalls, to see it turning into "sort of a consumer item."

This story is actually about how the poster's slogan has been changed, which is a more interesting story and somewhat more legit than "it's a recession! It's a trend!" But the point is, the Times already wrote a story about these posters catching on. And the story was published in July. So are the Times editors sure this is a new trend? Are there numbers? Anything other than a few pithy quotes to make sure they should write about this poster again?

Nah. That would require reporting.

Why Don't I Read DoubleX?

2009-11-17T22:46:00.012-05:00

Because it's a Web site about parenting, decorating your house, and chick lit. It's not for me.

When I heard that DoubleX, Slate's women's sister site, is being re-incorporated into Slate I wasn't surprised. Here's why:

I had a lot of things I needed to do tonight, so instead I decided to split the DoubleX archives by topic.

Here are the top ten topics and number of times they appear in DoubleX:

Parenting		160
Home Decorating		41
Literature		30
Sex/Virginity		29
Clothes/Makeup/Hair		26
science		26
Birth/ Pregnancy		25
Recipes/Food		25
Celebrities/Hollywood		24
Motherhood		23

Notice the quantitative difference between the first and second most popular topic? I wonder why I didn't feel like it was directed to me. Which ones of these topics was supposed to break out of the box of traditional women's roles?

I went through everything in their archives except podcasts, some videos, and the XXFactor blog. The reason for the first two is that I'm lazy. The reason for the last one is that I figure the question should be what did DoubleX add to the already existing blog.

I only read the headlines and the teaser of each article and found them simply by clicking on the tabs on the top of DoubleX, so if it was saved incorrectly, I didn't see it. If the headline or teaser was misleading, too bad. I figure people decide whether or not to read it based on the headline and teaser. So, for example, a search on DoubleX for "sexual harassment" comes up with more than one post, but I only saw the term once.

Also, I was not doing this carefully. Mothering, for example, is posts in which daughters write about their mothers. Except sometimes it's really parenting, just with an extra focus on mothers. Health is non-healthcare reform, generally non-children related issues. Literature includes a disproportionate amount of chick lit and some children's literature, and movies includes about five posts on Judd Apatow. Religion is mostly about Islam with some about the Christian right and a few personal essays. Feminism is mainly posts that tackle the question of what is feminism or what its future will be head on.

In general, I inflated the numbers for terms that I didn't think I was that careful in recording. There's one giant exception: Parenting. I wasn't sure if I should count each XXtra Small post as its own entry, and I got bored counting them, so while I counted everything else from today back to May 1, I only counted XXtra Small through August. And then, the parenting numbers are deflated even more because I got tired of counting my tally marks.

As for the blogs, I counted all of The Desire Lab under Sex/Virginity with a few marks for domestic violence and rape.

I went through Your Comeback like the rest of the archives.

I counted all of Nick's Dream House under Decorating

All of The Oyster's Garter went under science.

I didn't count the On-Ramp at all because it seemed to just be an aggregation of recession related news (relatedly, it's interesting how many recurring features or blogs within DoubleX just died or trickled off).

Any post could be given as many tags as I saw fit.

Let's hear what the founders said about it when it launched:

Emily Bazelon: "I grew up feeling mostly baffled by women's magazines. They just didn't really speak to me, they felt ... sometimes they felt like a guilty pleasure but often they just felt kind of irrelevant."

On XXtra Small: "Our effort to fill a hole that Hannah and I and I think others felt in particular."

Meghan O'Rourke "Women's magazines seem to assume you want to inhabit a very particular kind of identity, and one of the things we are trying to do is to explore different senses of identity and to do it with a sense of playful inquiry,"

"We're hoping that the site will speak to women of multiple generations and we're hoping that will be one of it's great strengths."

It "isn't always about I'm a woman and this is what I think. It's I'm a person and this is what I think."

Hanna Rosin: "There's lots of incredibly interesting cultural writing about fashion which we hope to have in the magazine."

"They don't have to be 'women's issues' in the way that people have always defined women's issues. There can be a whole range of issues and you just put them through a slightly different lens."

"If you take something like Slate and have it edited by three women instead of the kind of people it's edited by well that's the kind of magazine we want to turn out."

At the end of the day, for all their hope of talking about women's issues in a new way, DoubleX just shifted the demographic a little bit older, and was not really all that groundbreaking in the way they talked about issues, which, when listed, read just like the table of contents of any other magazine.

I still feel like DoubleX is irrelevant to me, I don't understand why Slate edited by women would hew to such stereotypical discussions, and I don't understand what the definition of women's issues is. And based on my numbers, they did a pretty bad job catering to senior citizens or 20-somethings, which is too bad because advertisers for the mommy bloggers already have platforms.

My whole chart is below.

Parenting	160	International affairs	16	Body image/eating disorders	4
Home decorating	41	Recession	16	Divorce	4
Literature	30	Health	15	Domestic Violence	4
Sex and virginity	29	Relationships	14	economics	4
Clothes/makeup/hair	26	Teens	14	Millenials	4
Science	26	Media/Social networking	13	Obama, Barack	4
Birth/ pregnancy	25	Television	12	Obama, Michelle	4
Food	25	travel	10	Sex scandals	4
Celebrities/Hollywood	24	Health Care	9	Sotomayor	4
Motherhood	23	Men's Rights/Manhood	8	Music	4
Movies	21	Millitary	8	Sisters	4
Q&A with women	21	Marketing	8	Iraq	3
Married life	20	Birth control	7	McCain, Meghan	3
Religion	20	Rape	7	Palin, Sarah	3
Workplace	19	Sports	7	Senior citizens	3
Supreme court	18	Politics (other)	6	Clinton, Hillary	2
Weddings	18	sexism/ gender	6	Judiciary reform	2
Friendship	18	Grief	6	Race	2
Abortion	17	Happiness	5	Yoga	2
Feminism	17	Sexuality	5	Sexual harrasment	1

A Thought

2009-10-21T23:10:00.005-04:00

The words for "I" and "I am not" are the same in Hebrew. Exactly the same letters, just different vowels, and most people don't write the vowels anyway. Both words can be spelled "אני".

A homograph is a word that looks the same as another word but has a different meaning. My favorite is wind and wind or windy and windy. How did those two things come to be spelled the same way? When left to your own devices, with no context, does the word "windy" automatically mean blustery or twisted? How about wind? Left! That's another one!

A capitonym is a word whose meaning changes depending on whether or not it is capitalized. Like Polish or polish or like Pole and pole. What is is with the Polish that their descriptive words are also random other words in English?

There is no point to this other than that sometimes language blows my mind.

Hey! Look! We're Trend-Setters!

2009-08-13T16:32:00.015-04:00

My youngest sister is a cool kid. In the Malcom Gladwell sense. In other words, she's often one step ahead of the curve. Sure, there are a lot of things that she does that are conformist--she's an 18 year-old suburban kid going to NYU; she's bound to be conformist--but she's the kind of person who will get people to do whatever she says. Her friends don't think she's that funny, but just wait, in a few years they'll all be making hyperbolic sarcastic comments, and she'll be on to bigger, better things.

When she was in fifth grade, she decided to teach flying lessons. Knowing that she couldn't actually teach people to fly, she came up with what was basically a form of dance that focused on arm movements. Within weeks, there were 30 kids out of 60 in her grade taking flying lessons. There was a system of tests and levels and teaching certification. There was the Flyers Weekly Flier. Then a few months later, too many people wanted to take the flying teacher certification test, and there were not going to be enough students. So my sister resigned as head of Flying School, and said "if they want to continue, that's fine." And that was the end of that.

Anyway, the point is, that I am not the cool one in my family. Not by any stretch of the imagination. I'm the kid who had two posters in her room in high school: one of Leonardo daVinici and one of fractals.

Case in point I sent this West Wing e-mail to a friend

Subject line: I think the transcript speaks for itself

Body: DANNY So I'm home. By myself. Listening to my police scanner. C.J You have a police scanner? DANNY Yes, I do. C.J. Danny, you were like, President of your high school audio-visual club, weren't you? DANNY: I was, in fact, not President of the AV Club. I was vice-President. Bobby Pfeiffer was President, and that's something I don't like to talk about. C.J. : Why'd you come down? DANNY : Josh said to come by for a drink. C.J. You should have gotten here earlier. DANNY: I would have, except I was home listening to my police scanner.

In his e-mail, my friend replied: “... but did he get laid that night?”

Or, another West Wing quote comes to mind:

JOSH: I wasn’t much into squash. I was more of a Crimson guy. DONNA: Crimson? JOSH: The campus newspaper. RYAN: Yeah, that figures. JOSH: What’s that supposed to mean? RYAN: Nothing. That’s great. JOSH: Are you implying that I didn’t have a social life?

So yeah, my friends and I, were like Danny and Josh, only not in charge of covering or running the White House. We're the kids who quote West Wing.

So, I laughed a lot when I read these sentences in the book I'm currently reading: SuperMedia: Saving Journalism So It Can Save The World.

"Or they [websites] serve an informed, elite group, such as the stylish well-informed US political magazine Slate.com, which targets political obsessives."

And then: "In the US it's now a measure of your "cool" factor as a young urbanite not just to say "Did you see Jon Stewart last night?" but also to say "I was listening to the podcast of Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me from NPR this weekend." This may be small elite in the US, albeit a trend-setting group of opinion-formers."

My mind is blown. How did we become "a trend-setting group of opinion-formers?"

Lest You Think I'm An Obama Adminstration Hack

2009-08-11T22:15:00.002-04:00

This story really made me nervous. You don't want dolls of your kids? OK. That's legit. But what is it about Malia and Sasha Obama that is off limits. J. Crew shamelessly plugs their clothes, and that seems OK. There is a TON of first family paraphernalia including Malia and Sasha paper dolls and coloring books, and President Obama wrote an open letter to his daughters. Open, as in published in Parade Magazine.

Let's compare an excerpt from his letter to the ad that the White House objects to:

In the end, girls, that's why I ran for President: because of what I want for you and for every child in this nation.

I want all our children to go to schools worthy of their potential—schools that challenge them, inspire them, and instill in them a sense of wonder about the world around them. I want them to have the chance to go to college—even if their parents aren't rich. And I want them to get good jobs: jobs that pay well and give them benefits like health care, jobs that let them spend time with their own kids and retire with dignity.

That's the letter. And here's the ad:

With all due respect Mr. President, when you ran for president your kids became public figures. Yes. There is a history of the media leaving first kids alone, yes, there is a history of the White House using the kids when it's prescient (see: Malia and Sasha at assorted White House events, Chelsea Clinton holding her parents' hands at Martha's Vineyard, the Checkers Speech), and yes there are different media ethics for kids and for adults.

I am not sure how I feel about letting the girl in the ad be a literal poster child, but I sure know that whoever is in the White House making an A1 fuss about this ad is making the White House look like a bully, even though the expert in the article is right that it's seriously unlikely the Obamas want to censor anything.

And the ad? It's political speech. The most protected form of speech there is. I really do see where the White House is coming from, it's a slippery slope: having your kids appropriated for political purposes . I understand that. I really do. I'd even understand a zero tolerance for political ads with the first daughters. I'd understand it from Daddy and Mommy Obama. But from the President and the First Lady? Well, I've said it before: the only thing I stand for publicly is the First Amendment. In all its glory.

Does the Secretary Of State "Snap?"

2009-08-11T18:36:00.008-04:00

One of the earliest things I learned in journalism is to use "said" as often as possible, let the quotes -- not your colorful verbs--speak for themselves.

This, of course, goes against all those writing classes in elementary school when you brainstorm more interesting, more descriptive words to replace said: Yelled, whispered, cried, mumbled, shouted, proclaimed, explained.

There are, of course, legit reasons to use words other than said, "asked" and "replied" are obvious ones.

The more descriptive ones have their place too: usually in human interest stories.

""The explosion ripped the Humvee in half," whispered Lance Cpl. Jan Friis, 22, of Bethesda, whose best friend, Lance Cpl. Jeremy S. Lasher, was killed when a bomb blew to pieces the vehicle he was driving."

I believe that the reporter could tell he whispered. No judgment only an expression of disbelief or sadness, an efficient use of words.

Or this, which is recounting what someone else heard:

Helen Ingram, 53, said she was reading her Bible in her apartment when she heard what sounded like 10 or 12 gunshots. She peered into the darkness and saw two women. One yelled, "I got hit!" and the other screamed, "I can't feel my back!" Ingram said.

But here's the thing, in the last two months (which is as far back as the Post Web site lets me search with minimal effort) the word "snapped" was used only once to describe the way someone talked:

Another student asked Clinton what her husband, the former president, thought of growing Chinese investment in Congo.
"My husband is not secretary of state. I am!" Clinton snapped.

That's the Post version. Here's the AP version:

"She abruptly reclaimed the stage for herself.
"My husband is not secretary of state, I am," she snapped. "I am not going to be channeling my husband.""

Ok, so two reporters thought she snapped. The New York Times thought she "bristled".

All of these things seem like unnecessary descriptors. I think readers would get that she was annoyed even if the reporters wrote, "said."

And for good measure, here's what the Associated Press Stylebook has to say about exclamation marks:

EMPHATIC EXPRESSIONS: Use the mark to express a high degree of surprise, incredulity, or other strong emotion.
AVOID OVERUSE: Use a comma after mild interjections. End mildly exclamatory sentences with a period.

Here's the thing, It's kind of hard to exclaim a whole sentence. And since the AP didn't feel the need for the exclamation mark, I'm not sure why the Post did, and I certainly don't know what the Post needed the exclamation mark and the "snapped." Maybe the paper just needs copy editors.

On a related note, the Washington Post's coverage of the rapes in Eastern Congo has been incredible and heartbreaking.

"Other"

2009-07-24T17:07:00.009-04:00

I'm a big fan of the New York Times. (" I confess, I lust after the Sunday Times," I once whispered to a friend, after spending six dollars on a newspaper. "Yeah, so do I," he said.)

I also like NYTimes.com, and since I get the Washington Post in print, I now usually read the Times on line, and buying it is a pleasure reserved for days when I need a boost, or when the front page is irresistible (as it was today, actually.) Anyway, being a fan of NYTimes.com, I agreed to fill out the Nielsen survey when it popped up on my screen, something I would normally just ignore (which leads me to wonder how helpful surveys like that are, if only loyal readers fill them out).

All was going well -- sections? I read a majority of them. Blogs? I read a lot of them How often? Seven days a week-- until I got to the part where they ask you to fill out things about yourself.

Behold:

Which of the following best describes the type of business, industry, or profession in which you work?

Click one.

Accounting

Advertising/Marketing/Public Relations

Agriculture/Farming

Architecture/Interior Design

Arts/Entertainment/Broadcasting/Publishing

Automotive/Aerospace

Computer - Hardware/IT

Computer - Software/Programming

Construction/Labor/Trades Industry

Engineering/R&D

Fashion/Design/Modeling

Finance/Banking/Investment Services

Food Service/Lodging

Healthcare/Medical

Human Resources

Insurance

Law/Legal

Manufacturing/Operations

Non-Profit (not including Religion)

Pharmaceutical/Biotechnology

Raw Materials (Oil, Gas, Mining, Lumber, etc.)

Real Estate Industry

Religion/Ministry

Retail/Wholesale

Social Services

Sports/Recreation

Telecommunications Industry

Transportation/Warehousing

Travel/Tourism

Utilities

Other

That's right: 30 choices, and I had to choose "Other." Am I "Arts/Entertainment/ Broadcasting/Publishing"? I don't think so, and I'm not "Telecommunications Industry" either. This happens a lot on surveys, but it bothered me because I'm reading the NEW YORK TIMES and there is no place for print journalists. Sigh.

Is Everyone In The Hearing Room Using The Wrong Definition of Empathy?

2009-07-16T02:01:00.014-04:00

When Republicans complained about President Obama's "empathy" standard, she [Sotomayor] agreed, and politely suggested that they ask the president what he means by it. "We apply law to facts, we don't apply feelings to facts," she said.

-- Republicans Unable to Pin Her Down: With Democrats' Help, Sotomayor Has Blunted GOP Senators' Best Efforts, Washington Post, July 16.

sym·pa·thy: the act or capacity of entering into or sharing the feelings or interests of another b: the feeling or mental state brought about by such sensitivity <sympathy for the poor>... synonyms see attraction, pity

em·pa·thy : the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner ; also : the capacity for this
--www.merriam-webster.com

When I first learned the word empathy it was about feelings. You can feel bad for someone. That's sympathy. But if you have the same experience as the person, that's empathy. If you can say "I know how you feel" and that's actually true, that's empathy.

It wasn't until years later that I learned a more subtle definition, one that's about more than feelings. In my original definition, empathy was something that could only be gleaned from personal experience; it can't be learned, it just happens if you and a friend have had the same experience.

But then, in my sophomore year of college, I fell into a pseudo-spokeswoman role for a program called Reacting to the Past, in which students learn philosophy and history through role playing. I have learned Rousseau's Social Contract by playing a Jacobin in the French Revolution, Gandhi's teachings by playing the president of the Indian National Congress, Abul Kalam Azad during India's fight for independence. I have helped students learn about the New Testament through the trial of Anne Hutchinson, Confucius' Analects through a succession crisis in Ming China, and Plato's Republic through the establishment of Democracy in Athens and the trial of Socrates.

Studies about Reacting have found that students in reacting display better public speaking skills than their peers in standard seminars. But the same study also found that Reacting students gain more capacity for empathy. That one always made me a bit skeptical; did Reacting students develop some sort of uncanny ability to really understand how other people feel? Did they become more attached to historical characters? To fictional characters? Are college courses supposed to have that kind of impact on your personality?

The Sotomayor confirmation hearings are forcing me to revisit my definition of empathy. Assuming that it can be learned as is assumed in the Reacting study, empathy can't possibly mean that you have to share the exact same experiences. The last three words of the dictionary definition then become essential: "the capacity for this."

Based on my Reacting experience, I would redefine empathy as the ability to understand the other person's experiences through consideration of his values, history, and way he approaches the world.

I have made a passionate speech about the dangers of a free press. I don't have enough rhetorical skill to make that argument on total B.S. In the context of the French revolution, I really needed to believe that for this shaky nation in need of a functional government, a free press would cause more revolution than order.

Reacting forces students to draw both on experiences they have actually had and on experiences that, prior to the research, they can barely comprehend.

The capacity for empathy, what Obama appears to be looking for in a Supreme Court nominee, is something that is being taught in Reacting classrooms, where you can spend a month being a revolutionary and the next month arguing for the status quo: for a monarchy or a theocracy.

The capacity for empathy appears to be part of being objective, of actually understanding both sides of a story or of an oral argument presented before the Supreme Court; I don't think it has anything to do with feeling bad for anyone, or for using emotions to make decisions.

At least according to the Reacting definition, empathy requires a lot of knowledge, understanding of the facts, and the basic tenets of everyone's beliefs.

No Second Chances

2009-07-14T12:57:00.003-04:00

There are ethics in journalism. They vary from country to country, but these two are pretty darn clear:

" Never plagiarize."

"...Never distort the content of news photos or video. Image enhancement for technical clarity is always permissible. Label montages and photo illustrations."

Those are direct quotes from the Society of Professional Journalists' code of ethics. There is nothing fuzzy about them. Mistakes happen, but violating either of those two are rarely accidental (I did plagiarize accidentally once. I was nine years old. I didn't know any better, and it was an essay based on a poem that I had read so many times I knew it by heart. I apologized to my teacher and wrote a new essay. Everyone should learn this lesson in fourth grade)*.

If you are a professional journalist--- and I include anyone interning for a newspaper as well in this--violating either of these things should be entirely inexcusable: one strike and you're out. I think that if I were an editor of a college paper, I'd do it on a case by case basis, but I'd tend towards the one-strike rule there too.

Plagiarism and intentional deception through image distortion should be career ending. Period. To that end, I have absolutely no sympathy for Hailey Mac Arthur. A few people on Gawker argued that Gawker should have cut her some slack. Gawker is mean, but in this case right. Journalism is suffering enough as is, without people who take a first person account of the death of a woman's daughter, change the prepositions and call it a day. There is no excuse for that.

(So you can see for yourself, here are the passages as highlighted by the Colorado Springs Gazette.)

Gazette, July 2: Grief over pregnant mother's death overwhelms family
The collision of life and death plays out in this nondescript home at the end of the cul-de-sac in a quiet northeast Colorado Springs neighborhood. King stares blankly. ... Mike King stands up, carrying the weight of a man tossed into a cascade of disbelief, despair and depression.
. . . The crushing weight of death descended upon her family, her friends, the entire second floor of Memorial Hospital North.
NY Times, Feb. 18, 2007: Generations: A daughter's death, and a quest for answers

The collision of life and death tossed me and those close to me into a cascade of disbelief, fear, anger, confusion and grief.
. . . At that moment, as the crushing weight of death descended upon all of us, I promised my sweet daughter that I would seek justice for this tragedy. I would find the answers, hold people accountable.

To that end, I have no more sympathy for Edgar Martins who digitally altered photos of houses submitted to the New York Times Magazine. There are a ton of talented freelance photographers looking for their big break. If you get yours and mess it up, that should be the end.

* Weirdly, years later, I was reading Cricket Magazine, and saw that a kid had submitted a poem as part of her letter to the magazine. It was word for word, line for line, a copy of Jean Little's "An Afternoon In March" from the book Hey World Here I Am. It was the same poem I had plagiarized for that essay a decade earlier. But this kid got it in print. I hope someone caught her.

A Questionable Photographic Choice

2009-07-13T14:06:00.001-04:00

Photo by Jim Wilson, via New York Times

To put it mildly, my mother isn't a fan of Sarah Palin. Raised in a fiercely Democratic household in New York City, she now lives in Massachusetts -- the only state that voted for George McGovern in 1972--she's a Democrat through and through (though not to the extent of voting for a Democrat just for the party). Sarah Palin particularly rankles her for reasons that I have never heard fully articulated (past general complaints of inexperience and incompetence) because she can't even talk about Palin without getting angry.

But none of those concerns factored into her reaction to the above picture. Glancing at my computer, where I was reading the New York Times homepage, she gasped and said "is that a dead baby?" From her quick glance at an angle, she didn't see Palin, she just saw that kid, and thought it was a lead story about some sort of atrocity rather than an analysis about why Palin resigned.

Putting aside the content of the article, which I found to be dangerously close to not having enough sources to back up the assertions laid out, I question the use of this photo both on the homepage and as a the lead photo on the print version.

The derision of Palin in the wake of her resignation has been fast and furious, and included several people jumping to diagnose her with all sorts of mental illnesses in addition to a lot of generic "she's so weird." While I suspect there was nothing sinister in the choice of this photo -- it really is one of incredibly enthusiastic fans-- that kid looks like she is in a huge amount of pain, and my mom's initial reaction of horror is one that I am sure others shared. It tells a story it was not designed to tell: one of the strangeness of Palin and her followers, and likely will send people wondering why the Times never publishes photos of Obama with a child who may be mistaken as being in excrutiating pain.

Siiigh.

I'd love to know the decision behind the Times' photo choice. (Though I guess the people who think the Times is biased in the other direction could argue that it looks like Palin is some sort of religous figure healing the child).

Slate V Hits A Little Too Close To Home

2009-07-09T22:25:00.003-04:00

I don't know: it just seems a little mean to have an online-only publication mock newspapers. And seriously, high and mighty Slate, your parent company is now an education company first, and a media company second. Doesn't that make you a little sad?

Words of Wisdom from Eduardo Galeano

2009-06-15T12:57:00.004-04:00

Before this morning, I didn't know who Eduardo Galeano was. Now I know that he is a Uruguayan writer whose books have been banned in more than one South American country, but who seems to inspire many.

I intend on finding some of his books today, because of his essay is the Washington Post's (occasionally resurrected) Book World. It's part of the series that makes up one of my favorite books The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think And Work (not the one written by Annie Dillard, which I still have not read). More a series of anecdotes than an essay, there were three paragraphs that I wanted to tear out of the paper and keep with me always. I managed to tear two (worried that doing this on the Metro, I both looked bizarre and would get newsprint all over me), but accidentally threw out the third.

There is one about how is book saved a life, and another about how a book he wrote got past prison gaurds. But the ones that stuck with me are more universal. Here are the three anecdotes that could be carried in any writer's wallet, all of them difficult but worthy things to strive for.

A few years ago, at a school in Salta in the north of Argentina, I was reading stories to 8- and 9-year-olds. Afterward, the teacher asked the children to write to me, commenting on what I had read.One of the letters counseled: "Keep at it, you'll improve."
At one of my storytelling sessions, in the Spanish town of Ourense, a man in the back row kept staring at me, an unblinking, impassible mask. When the reading ended, he approached slowly, fixing me with his gaze as if he wanted to kill me. Fortunately, he didn't. Instead, he said, "It must be so hard to write so simply." And after that remark, the highest praise I have ever received, he turned on his heel and left.

The Bolivian town of Llallagua lived from the mine, and in the mine its miners died. Deep in the shafts in the bowels of the mountains, they hunted veins of tin and lost, in a few short years, their lungs and their lives. I spent some time there and made good friends.
The last night, we were drinking, my friends and I, singing laments and telling bad jokes till just before dawn.
When little time remained before the scream of the siren that would call them to work, my friends fell silent, all of them at once. Then one asked, or pleaded, or ordered: "And now, my brother, tell us about the sea."
I was speechless.

They insisted: "Tell us. Tell us about the sea."

It was the most difficult challenge in all my storytelling life. None of these miners would ever know the sea; each was doomed to die young. And I had no choice but to bring them the sea, the sea that was so far away, discovering words that could drench them to the bone.

"Your Paper Stinks" "Readers Hate Change"

2009-05-11T15:23:00.012-04:00

Stephan Pastis over at Pearls Before Swine has been doing some hilariously heartbreaking comics on the death of newspapers. He's not the only one -- I mentioned Candorville the other day -- but Pearls is the comic that keeps getting forwarded to me. Here's a sample:

This I Used to Believe: Newspapers That Make Me Cry

2009-04-20T00:55:00.014-04:00

This week's this American Life is titled "This I Used to Believe," based off of the "This I Believe" Web site, which lead me back to the blog post that has been gnawing, tickling the back of my brain and the back of my throat.

It's been almost two years ago since I graduated, two years ago since I wrote "the nervous feeling that it’s going to be a long time before I find another paper that will be able to make me cry and laugh."

In the last month, this blog has been dominated by my sappy, unhelpful cries to save the Boston Globe. I have a post in the works about my actual critiques of that newspaper and the role it could and should play. But for now, a quick reflection that while the Boston Globe has yet to make me laugh the same way my college newspaper did, it certainly has made me cry.

Last week my friend sent me this excerpt from a column on ESPN.com.

For the past few years, as newspapers got slowly crushed by myriad factors, a phalanx of top writers and editors fled for the greener pastures of the Internet. The quality of nearly every paper suffered, as did morale. Just two weeks ago, reports surfaced that the New York Times Company (which owns the Globe) was demanding $20 million in union concessions or it'd shut down the Globe completely. I grew up dreaming of writing a sports column for the Globe; now the paper might be gone before I turn 40. It's inconceivable.

My eyes heated. And I told him. I can't read this. I can't read anything about the death of newspapers, the death of the Boston Globe.

I too have dreamed about working for the Boston Globe, at least since I was ten. There were other internships I really wanted: I really wanted to work for the Washington Post, I really wanted to work for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, but when the recruitment editor from the Boston Globe called me to tell me I didn't get the internship I wanted there, I sat on my bed in my college dorm and cried. When I got the official e-mail a month later, I cried again. Every time I imagine the idea that I will never get the chance to apply for a job at let alone work for my hometown newspaper, I worry I will cry again.

At my parent's house outside of Boston, I had flashbacks when I picked up the paper at Walgreen's (annoyed that my parents have chosen the Times). Alex Beam's column is the first newspaper column I read. The first thing outside of the comics and Student Page. I was floored when I met his son, but I only realized this week how much the senior Beam's column was part of my Globe reading experience, which was in turn part of the beginning of my love affair with newspapers. My official narrative about realizing I had become a metro reporter with the quirks and passion that comes with it, has nothing to do with the Globe, it has to do with my amazing college city editors. But I realize now that the metro reporting at the Globe, which I still respect and admire, was part of my inspiration and push towards the city section of my college newspaper.

I used to believe that the first newspaper I had a hand in editing would be the only one to make me cry. Now I know, it's the first newspaper I read that can have a similar effect. I believe in the importance of hometown newspapers.

---

Another take on dying newspapers from the comic, Candorville:

Sources=Pirates?

2009-04-13T14:17:00.001-04:00

At risk of divulging trade secrets, I just want to point out how remarkably similar suggestions for negotiating pirates are to suggestions for negotiating with recalcitrant newspaper source.

Here's what I learned about sources who arbitrarly go off the record:

If someone says he would not like his name printed, ask him why. More often than not, he'll realize he has no reason and give you his name.Often the request is irrational.

"The fireworks rocked. Off the record."
"That's a great, but benign quote, why don't you want your name used?"
"Oh, I guess you can."

Or, you can negotiate for some attribution.
"Off the record, there is no way in hell this bill is going to pass." "How about I attribute that to Rep. Shmoe's staffer?"
"No way."
"How about a Democratic staffer?"
"Fine."

Or, in the case of a correction, read back the option.
"I want a correction! I didn't say there was no chance in hell, I said never in a million years."
"Sure. Let me read you the text, the staffer did not say 'no chance in hell,' he said never in a million years'"
"Uhh those sound the same. Maybe I did say the first thing."

Obviously, these do not always work. But look how Chris Beam, over at Slate, describes negotiating with pirates:

Another strategy is to make the hostage-taker realize that his plan is unfeasible. Negotiators do this by peppering the hostage-taker with questions. If the hostage-taker wants a bus, ask what kind of bus. If he wants a plane, ask where he wants to go. If he demands a billion dollars, ask how he would spend it. More often than not, the hostage-taker can't answer the questions because he doesn't have a coherent plan. If the captor realizes that what he's asking for is irrational—and if surrender seems easier—he's more likely to cave.

Sound familiar? Yeah, that's what I do every day.

Also, because it's awesome: How a 12-year-old got to talk to the pirates.

Don't Let Atlas Shrug

2009-04-07T14:57:00.002-04:00

I think this is a little hokey, but who knows, the ether of the Internet may actually save the Globe. As I said earlier, I love that paper (maybe I will treat all of my readers to the book review I wrote for the Globe in 1994. I was ten). I love it enough to participate in an eye-roll inducing "blog rally" so here goes:

"We view the Globe as an important community resource, and we think that lots of people in the region agree and might have creative ideas that might help in this situation. So, here's your chance. Please don't write with nasty comments and sarcasm: Use this forum for thoughtful and interesting steps you would recommend to the management that would improve readership, enhance the Globe's community presence, and make money. Who knows, someone here might come up with an idea that will work, or at least help. Thank you."

Please Save My Hometown Newspaper

2009-04-05T20:02:00.003-04:00

I love the Boston Globe. It has gotten thinner over the years, and it runs more wire stories, but it has some incredible local coverage and it is the paper for which I dreamed of working for years.

When I was in fourth grade, I had the thrill of seeing my photo and my words in the (now defunct) student pages. That 100-word book review was my first newspaper clip, and lead to a loyalty to that newspaper that has lead me to give sources who leak stories to them some slack, and has left me dreaming of working their even when their staff shrivels.

The New York Times Co. is considering closing the paper. Even though it seems the web staff can't code for their lives (that article is absurdly hard to read because of all the random symbols that seem to fill in for punctuation), please keep the paper alive.

Happy Birthday Very Hungry Caterpillar

2009-03-20T15:20:00.003-04:00

This makes me happy. Did you know that the book is more popular than The Cat in the Hat or Goodnight Moon?

Also, Newsweek has a great write up of Eric Carle's life. It's chilling in many ways and certainly worth a read:

He developed a special bond at school with his art teacher, Herr Krauss, who secretly showed him the works of Picasso, Matisse and Braque, all banned by Hitler. He remembers wading in the Rhine when a warplane flew by and shot at him. The bullets missed him by a few feet. He also remembers an unexpected knock at his family's house, days before the Germans surrendered. "Some Nazi official came to the door and said to my mother, 'Your son tomorrow morning has to report to the railroad station, we'll give him a bazooka.' I thought it would be exciting to get a bazooka. But she didn't let me go."

Sigh

2009-02-25T13:18:00.003-05:00

Recently, I was at a speech, in which former LA Times Editor Dean Baquet spent some time lambasting the Tribune Company. I got some looks from my friends that seemed to say "remember when you were in love with your Tribune Company paper internship?" I do remember. It was an amazing summer. And the summer that Sam Zell bought the Tribune Company. Since then, there have been huge layoffs company-wide, page counts reduced, redesigns that put less news on the front page and (in the case of the Chicago Tribune, at least) a move toward tabloid for one of America's once glorious newspapers.

I honestly don't know who is to blame, and (in case there are any employers reading this, but it's true even for non-employers) if that Tribune Co. paper that I worked for (or several of the other ones for that matter) decided they wanted to hire me, I'd go back in a heartbeat.

But, this story about the Hartford Courant made me want to cry.

I don't know how high up the chain this decision was made. But, at least give journalists some respect. It's the least they deserve.

Baquet, now the Washington bureau chief of the New York Times urged his audience not to listen to the doom and gloom, and not to read Romenesko. But it's pretty darn hard in this day and age to keep on smiling and say "evolution" through gritted teeth.

I believe the evolution will come. I believe I will be part of it. Just don't leave journalists' dignity in the wake of change.

Maybe we should just hug journalists instead.

"Deeply Odd and Unusual People"

2009-02-25T12:28:00.011-05:00

My sister was forwarded a bizarre e-mail the other day. For the sake of everyone's privacy, I will not go into any of the details, but will recount the conversation a friend and I had after reading the e-mail.

Some background: this girl and I have been friends since ninth grade, when we first bonded after being accidentally locked in our history classroom and then later bonded over our shared love of writing and all things literature. She is a poet. She is, in fact, the poet who featured relatively heavily in my own high school and early college writing, as someone who I admired for her talent in poetry and her ability to see poems in the mundane.

I have edited for length, some typos, and identifying detail (blogger currently hates me. I will fix the font size issues when I can).

Friend: oh my. I love this life. So many odd little things

me: my mind is kind of blown

Friend: by this email?
me: well, not the e-mail itself, so much as the character behind the e-mail [the person who wrote the e-mail]
Friend: it's soooo odd

Friend: well, it's the last paragraph that's so odd. I mean, it really is a sort of "literary" undoing of a person, in my sick imagination where everything = material,

like, it could be a Nathan Englander story or something

me: hahah I was totally thinking the same thing

Friend: that makes us deeply odd and unusual people, by the way

me: don't think I have not already visualized her apartment

Friend: or what kind of computer she wrote the email on

me: a desktop PC. obviously
Friend: yeah. one of the tan ones

me: ok. I have a plan. Given the information that we have, we should each write something and send it to the other. You can use the info however you want, and change whatever facts you need.

me: we can each choose the genre

Friend: ok. OK, you realize that you have a huge advantage given the fact that you know her [the writer of the e-mail] and I don't

me: you can make up whatever you want

Dead Trees

2009-02-13T14:14:00.001-05:00

In order to write an article about how -- if at all-- the stimulus bill will help the environment, I printed a 500 page summary of the bill.

Yes, I recognize the irony.

Kids in the Gym, The Curve in A Back, News Worth Remembering

2009-02-09T23:45:00.008-05:00

1991 The United States bombs Iraq. Iraq bombs Israel. We leave the radio on over shabbat in my house. In the basement. It is the only time I remember us doing such a thing. A girl from Tel Aviv joins my first grade class. I am overwhelmed with anxiety about my former babysitter who is living in Israel.
1992 An athlete from the former Soviet Union wins a gold medal. Countryless, the athlete watches the Olympic flag raised instead of her own.
1992 Bill Clinton runs against George Bush for president. In my third grade class, Bill Clinton wins the election, but Ross Perot gets a bunch of votes. People liked the size of his ears.
1993 Yitzchak Rabin shakes hands with Yasser Arafat. The entire elementary school goes to the gym to watch the broadcast of the signing of the Oslo accords. I was far back, and the televisions were small.
1995 O.J. Simpson is found "not guilty." I was home early that day. My British grandmother and I watched the verdict on television.
1995 Someone calls friend or family from the synagogue as soon as shabbat is over. There is crying. A man, standing in the hallway, near the women's bathroom, bends over. All I can see is his back and his bent shoulders. I hear a man telling another man: "Yitzchak Rabin is dead."
1996 A bus full of children dressed for Purim is blown up by terrorists. I am in sixth grade, in the hallway, wondering how someone could kill kids.
1998 I get a question about Monica Lewinsky's mother wrong on a current events quiz.
1998 I am in my new high school, on my way to the bathroom, discussing the fact that President Clinton has been impeached. I don't remember if that's when I was first told.

That's it for political and current event memories for the first half (and then some) of my life. There aren't even ten of them, and none of them have any relationship to newspapers.

There are memories later, once I was already reading the news, that have a newspaper tie in, but even those have more powerful image related to them. I saved the newspaper from September 12, 2001. In October 2001, I visited Ground Zero. Back in the hotel, I could smell the smoke on my clothes and my hair.

When Ilan Ramon died, I was still awake when the Jerusalem Post was delivered to my school in Jerusalem. But by then, I was older, more aware, and already thinking of becoming a journalist. By Israel I was getting New York Times headlines e-mailed to me so I could figure out when America was going to invade Iraq, and I'd have to go back home for a while. But what I remember more clearly, is that kids still dressed up as Ilan Ramon that Purim.

But the earliest memories have no newspaper headlines at all. I didn't even know if the Olympic memory was true until I looked it up for this post. I remember the ice, so it must have actually been pair skating.

I think about this after spending the evening fretting about middle school students in Washington D.C.

Asked why they don't read newspapers, they had the liveliest participation of the day.

"My grandfather reads the newspaper... I like to play video games."
"It's what old people do."
"Most of it is in black and white."
"It's boring, stupid, and hard to understand."
"It has nothing to do with my life."
"It's messy." (This was easily remedied by a quick session on how to fold a newspaper.)
"I already saw this on T.V."

It turns out that the Washington Post is hard for kids to understand. Especially kids who do not have newspapers in their houses. I fondly remembered reading the Student Page of the Boston Globe from third grade through middle school, so I assumed that my life was different: that I read the newspaper.

But then, when I look back on what I remember from elementary and middle school, it has almost nothing to do with the newspaper. It has everything to do with television, radio, or where I was standing when I heard the news.

It's going to be an uphill battle to teach these kids to put out any semblance of a newspaper. We're probably going to do it online: that's a reflection of the times. They struggle to read captions and headlines. Some of them rely on sight words and guess the end of a word. None of them can understand the headlines on a Washington Post feature. That's a reflection of their education (and a memo to the WPost features desk).

But, I'm going to stop grousing about how much more I read the newspaper. Because maybe the habits stuck, but television sure made for better memories.

I am going to teach them all to fold a newspaper. The one girl I taught looked at me like I showed her a magic trick.

Illustrated Childhood

2009-02-03T15:18:00.003-05:00

I have been negligent about this blog. There are a lot of things I'd like to say: musings about how I've yet to read a John Updike novel, but I relished his short stories in the New Yorker, photo essays about election and inauguration in the nation's capital, and the shocking realization that my editors disapprove of my drinking coffee on the metro (which is, yes, illegal).

But for right now, I'd just like to say that the illustrator of Tiki Tiki Tembo died today.

I had forgotten how much I loved this book until I saw news of his death, but now I can remember the exact intonation that my father used (and that I imitated later) when reading the name " Tikki tikki tembo-no sa rembo-chari bari ruchi-pip peri pembo."

Further, it is amazing to me that this story, about the younger sibling saving the day and the overly-revered older child who is stupid enough to fall into a well in the first place, charmed my oldest-child heart. But it did. And Blair Lent, whose name meant nothing to me before today (but who I now know is a Boston native!), deserves to be properly remembered.

As an added bonus, the other books that Amazon suggests based on customer's purchasing history is a delightful trip back to hours of childhood story time:

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
The Story about Ping
Caps for Sale

Those books, particularly the last two, were some of my favorite books, and I'm glad that people seem to still be buying them.

HaHa

2009-01-21T15:09:00.006-05:00

More to come on coverage of fashion as a news story and on inauguration coverage in general, but right now, I just want to point out that J. Crew is wasting no time boasting about the clothing choices of the Obama girls. (Also, that exclusively designed J. Crew is not really the same as "grounded" or "moderately priced," but it's not like the Obamas need to cut corners anyway).

I can't get the screen shot of the ad right now, but it says:

"We are truly honored to have been able to be a part in this HISTORIC OCCASION. The pieces worn by MALIA and SASHA were designed exclusively for them from the COLORS to the STYLES to the FABRICS and currently are not available. But you can shop our entire crewcuts collection or find a crewcuts store near you."

How long until they are available, you think?

In the meantime, the Daily News devotes a whole story to their clothes, and, oddly, a paper in Australia devotes a whole story to the Obama girls becoming "fashion icons" complete with experts on tween shopping. Sigh.

Photo from the Daily News

ARGH!

2009-01-12T16:13:00.002-05:00

There is a long, thoughtful post on media bias, elections, and war in the works. In the meantime I present you the "man on the street" who will never fade away: Joe, the Plumber!

"I think media should be abolished from, you know, reporting," Wurzelbacher said.

Excuse me while I go yell at someone.

Eerie Joe The Plumber doll via www.herobuilders.com

Lucky

2009-01-06T15:03:00.006-05:00

Bartlet: Sweden has a one hundred percent literacy rate, Leo. One hundred percent! How do they do that?
Leo: Well, maybe they don't, and they also can't count.
-- The West Wing

A few months ago, I turned down a request to teach journalism to third graders in a D.C. public school. It's a project I'm passionate about. Even if I don't think these kids will be able to become journalists in the way that the job is currently defined, if a couple of them want to become reporters, there will be a platform for their reporting.

But even more importantly than training new reporters for a new age (because let's face it kids will change their minds a million more times between third grade and twelfth, let alone after college) I still believe that journalism, in its classic sense, presents a ton of incredible life skills that can be absorbed at any age.

As a friend put it in her farewell column at our college newspaper:

" Reporting kills tentativeness, though, and then kicks it for good measure. Last summer during a scavenger hunt, I was cajoling two greasy-haired men in a Duane Reade into posing for photos in ugly plastic hats when an editor-friend who taught me loads about reporting took gleeful credit for my current lack of shame."

I too learned about lack of shame from that editor, who laughed at me when I told him that I consider myself to be naturally shy. Journalism teaches you to stake your place in the world, to demand information, to accept self confidence and assertiveness as the asset that it is.

On a more basic level, journalism teaches life long academic skills: writing clear sentences, processing and analyzing information, looking critically at the facts given to you. All of those things can be taught to third graders at an age appropriate level. And, now -- when there are two elementary school children who are in the news every day and who are breaking barriers for these Washington D.C. students just by playing at the White House--seems like as good a time as any to teach underprivileged third graders about journalism.

But I said no.

I said no, because I was worried that I didn't have the skills to teach journalism to third graders, or rather these third graders: because I am worried that they don't know how to read. Or if they do know, they are not comfortable enough to read Kids Post let alone write their own articles. I didn't know the stats at the time, but I wasn't so off: In 2007, 61 percent of fourth graders had "below basic" scores on the National Assessment test.

I volunteered to do middle school instead. So, while I looked up the above statistic for this blog post, I had an idea that literacy in this country was poor. But still, I was shocked when I read the graf below in a Slate article:

And a lot of people never do learn to read well: Approximately 40 percent of fourth-grade children in the United States lack basic reading skills; 20 percent of all graduating high-school seniors are classified as functionally illiterate (meaning that their reading and writing skills are insufficient for ordinary practical needs); and about 42 million adults in the United States cannot read.

Twenty percent of High School seniors? Who are graduating?

Forget about feeling lucky for the skills that I gained in the process of becoming a journalist, I'm just feeling lucky that I'm literate. Thanks Mom.

Facebook Ethics?

2008-12-16T12:26:00.002-05:00

I'd be the first to admit that when I write stories about college or college age students, I use facebook to find sources. I am a master facebook stalker. I've found the phone numbers of people who had specifically made their accounts private. Which, of course, makes me more wary of what I put on mine.

Today, I got a friend request from a source. As far as I can remember, this is the first time that happened. I am facebook friends with some students who were sources when I was at my college paper, but they were also my classmates. This person is an adult, a spokesman for an organaztion I spent a lot of time covering.

My facebook profile is remarkably clean. My mom once worried that it was too sarcastic, but she's particularly sensitive to sarcasm, and the sarcasm is about newspapers and novels. Any photos where anyone under 21 is holding alcohol are only open to the people who were at those parties. Photos that are open to the public include things like: college students sitting on the grass playing Apples to Apples, college seniors at senior dinner or wearing matching t-shirts. I'm talking wholesome. My facebook profile comes across as an over protective parent's dream of what college should be.

But I am still really wary of accepting this friend request. And, I think more than anything, it's in the name. I'm not friends with my sources. I'm not allowed to be. Not in real life and not in facebook life. I have a professional relationship with them. And so no matter how G-rated my Purim costume is, I don't really think my sources should get to see it.

Am I crazy to think that? I have 590 "friends". Maybe I should just be thinking "what's one more?"

But I'm not. I'll be sending the source an e-mail instead.

Haze, Hope, and a Phoenix

2008-12-15T18:40:00.006-05:00

Since I last wrote a "death of newspapers" post, the world of print seems to have thrown up its hands and taken a plunge into the depths of who-knows what.

The Chicago Tribune declared bankruptcy, throwing the fates of America's most respected newspapers into question.
The New York Times used its own brand new building as collateral on a loan.
The Detroit newspapers decide home delivery is a thrice a week option
Small town newspapers close their doors.
Washington bureaus from papers all over the country continue to shrink or disappear

A year ago on this blog, I defended the future of newspapers. They still seemed viable. The rumors of their demise seemed greatly exaggerated. But, when the dust settled from the election and the recession hit papers, rumors of the demise of print seem realistic at best.

I could fill this blog with sob stories, or with worries that storied newspapers will tell their last.

But, despite the obvious snark in the Onion article, which declared "Dying Newspaper Trend Buys Nation's Newspapers Three More Weeks," there is a legitimate truth. Newspapers cover the death of newspapers, and while I might look on with horror and desperately try to suppress the panic that comes from watching my plans grow vague and hazy, I have to admit, it's a great story.

I get to watch--and be part of-- the evolution of something that, I believe, will be, ultimately, fascinating.

There is a real need for news. Whether it be to revel in victory (photo essay of people waiting in line for the Nov. 5 papers to follow) to follow, or mourn a tragedy, or to understand the intricacies of scandal and failure, there is a need for reporters, writers, and editors.

Despite our low job approval ratings, I'm not sure readers are ready to give up on journalist-driven news and opinion all together.

The question is, how to make sure people see that, and how to profit off of the way readers consume their news.

There is an answer. There has to be. And this evolution is something that I will tell my children about. Not only so they can laugh at their old-fashioned mother, but also so that they understand the evolution of industry that will be shaping, exposing, and probing their world.

Watching my industry -- or any industry for that matter -- struggle is painful. But I can't help thinking about the Phoenix and how the bird, who combusts and then is born from ashes enchanted me when I first discovered it in E. Nesbit's books.

In reading parts of the book, this line seems particularly apropos:

"It was felt that Robert, as the pet of the Phoenix, ought to have the last melancholy pleasure of choosing the materials of its funeral pyre."

It seems to me that the reporters, the ones who are still proud to call themselves ink stained wretches, should be the ones who figure out how to let this incarnation of news die, and how to facilitate the next one rising from the ashes. Or, to keep the analogy withing this particular phoenix mythology, they should be the ones to build the pyre, but then to throw the golden egg back into the flames.

The death and rebirth of news might be one of the biggest story of my time. And I'm glad that it's one in which I can participate.

December

2008-12-11T20:48:00.004-05:00

I once had the belief that if -- while cold or wet -- I simply said to myself "well this is nothing like the time you covered the transit strike in December and couldn't feel your legs for hours" (for cold) or "well this is nothing like the time you stood outside in the rain to write about McCain's speech, and then had to stick around in the mud and wet after all the other reporters could go home" (for wet) then I would somehow, in the present moment feel less wet or less cold.

I have since determined that this is hogwash. I cannot pinpoint a time that I was colder than that night standing outside of a bus station waiting for the striking bus drivers who never arrived. Nor can I think of a time -- short of swimming or a shower--when I was more wet than the afternoon I covered McCain. But the memory of those moments does not suffice. The fact that I am cold and wet right now is not abated by the fact that three years ago (almost to the day!) I was colder and two-and-a-half years ago I was wetter.

Just something I thought I would share after coming back from a hibernation because I've been playing around with this.

Metro Moments: Elections Edition

2008-11-04T17:51:00.003-05:00

I looked at the map last week, trying to gauge how early I would have to wake up. But today, walking and drinking overly bitter coffee, I forgot where to turn, overshot and turned back around when I realized I saw fewer "I Voted" stickers on this block.

A man and a woman move closer together in the slight breeze, each wearing their own stickers over the staid uniforms of the Washington morning commute crowd. I smile at them, excited at my ability to participate--however minimally--in the act of democracy. They smile back, ignoring the usually obligatory averted gaze, knowing they will get more smiles in this one day when everyone gets to wear stickers and it's as cool as it was in elementary school.

A man in a dark suit pressed the sticker onto his lapel and bends down next to a stroller. His blond haired baby, too young to have helped connect the arrows on the ballot, contorts her face into a scream. The Obama Biden t-shirt is still a little bit too large. "Smile" the mother says, giddy on the shorter-than-expected lines and mini pencils at each voting booth. The baby continues to scream, the father continues to balance on the balls of his feet, and the mother snaps a picture.

Today it seems particularly poignaint to watch the Potomac reflect the gray sky and strain to see glimpses of the squat Washington skyline. It seems right to watch Lincoln's memorial appear and then slide out of view as I run my finger over my own sticker. Today, whatever happens, is history, and I move from the city of monuments to the office building blocks away from a highway named for the president of the Confederacy, to the state back in the national spotlight back in the election tug of war after watching from the sidelines--as my states have always done--in elections past.

At the top of the metro, a woman stands with a "Yes We Can" hand-painted sign. She is surrounded by the printed McCain-Palin placards. A little further off, there are two more Obama signs. Everyone, McCain or Obama, smile and wave their signs when I bring my camera out.

Reasons Not To Drink Snapple When Reading NYTimes.com

2008-10-28T15:39:00.002-04:00

I just choked when scrolling down the page and coming across this headline: "Christian Science Monitor to Publish Online Only."

While I understand the drive, particularly for a ~~weekly paper,~~ paper that is put to bed (i.e. final deadline) in the afternoon and while I can't say I have ever purchased the paper. It's sad that such a noteworthy paper had to make this choice. Or as the Times writes more ominously, "The cost-cutting measure makes The Monitor the first national newspaper to essentially give up on print."
Sigh.

National Newspaper Week

2008-10-07T15:52:00.005-04:00

This year's theme could have been better. Really the best they could come up with was celebrating public notices? Not investigative journalism, government accountability, or bringing information to voters in an intelligent non-stump kind of way (that would have been my choice for 2008).

But, it's National Newspaper Week! So choose a theme that you like better than one that has the tagline "good government on display," and buy a newspaper -- a copy, a subscription, or a failing company in need of fresh blood. Enjoy the ink stains.

Somewhat heart-warmingly, South Carolina seems to have it's own--admittedly optimistic--theme: "Newspapers.... Still going strong."

While that poor use of an ellipsis strikes me as both ominous and annoying, it is true that local newspapers--which are the type of newspapers promoted--are going strong.

Let's keep it that way.

Elegy For The Printing Press

2008-10-06T22:04:00.003-04:00

I am pretty sure this is a different type of press, but I've been thinking about it ever since I saw it on a friend's blog.

Ghost of a Printing Press, by Chris Norris.

The Panama Canal

2008-10-06T18:33:00.007-04:00

So, interestingly, this image of the 16th page of the Washington Post is different than the one I receive at home. Some time in between the "Home Edition" and the "Final Edition", (which is what I receive) The front page story "There's a Gold Mine In Environmental Guilt" switched from jumping to A12 to jumping to A16, with an interesting, unintended effect. The jump, which now fills both the top and left of A16 is headed "Still a Bull Market in Climate Guilt" and that article surrounds the ad below.

In college, I avoided proofing some layout that had an ad which was a petition related to a story I was covering, and my friends and I pondered a "Panama Canal" which, for the sake of our metaphor was uncrossable like the Chinese Wall. The latter separates news and opinion, the former, news and advertising revenue. This is a good thing. It essentially means that you cannot be accused of people paying for coverage. News writers don't know who's buying what ads; and it helps keep them honest and--perhaps even more important--helps maintain the image of objectivity, which is often as important as actual objectivity.

But take a look at that ad below, and ask yourself: isn't the placement a little unfortunate? An article about carbon offsets -- which can be investments in wind energy--literally surrounding an ad for wind energy.

Like the post below, in which the Times editorial page sites Time instead of its own newspaper, this is likely an illustration of the separation, rather than a failure of that separation. But, since the article jumped elsewhere before, this might have been something layout staff wanted to catch.

Oh well.

P.S. I'm back, and have much to ponder about in the near future.

Best Proof of Chinese Wall I've Seen in a While

2008-09-03T15:20:00.003-04:00

This is an e-mail sent to me by a friend. It is so true, that I am just posting the e-mail in its entirety. It demonstrates excellently, how serious NYTimes' Executive Editor Bill Keller was when he said that the news and opinion people only meet in the elevator.

From an A1 NYT article about Palin's time as mayor of Wasilla:

Shortly after becoming mayor, former city officials and Wasilla residents said, Ms. Palin approached the town librarian about the possibility of banning some books, though she never followed through and it was unclear which books or passages were in question.
Ann Kilkenny, a Democrat who said she attended every City Council meeting in Ms. Palin's first year in office, said Ms. Palin brought up the idea of banning some books at one meeting. "They were somehow morally or socially objectionable to her," Ms. Kilkenny said.
The librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, pledged to "resist all efforts at censorship," Ms. Kilkenny recalled. Ms. Palin fired Ms. Emmons shortly after taking office but changed course after residents made a strong show of support. Ms. Emmons, who left her job and Wasilla a couple of years later, declined to comment for this article.

From a NYT editorial: "According to Time magazine, she also sought to have books banned from the local library and threatened to fire the librarian."

Why I Hate Trend Stories

2008-09-02T23:40:00.003-04:00

In school, I railed against trend stories all the time: It's hard to make them actually true, and even if they are true, they are hard to prove.

Recently, I've been thawing a little bit. In one of my internships, I wrote a bunch of politics trend stories. And recently I wrote one that was backed with numbers and graphs and quotes, which is a bit of a coup.

And then Fox News has to go and shatter all of that warm and fuzzy feeling I was developing towards trend stories:

"The "Juno" effect seems to be reverberating all over the place.

In the year since Diablo Cody’s screenplay became Jason Reitman’s hit film, "Juno," we’ve seen unmarried 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears, single 22-year-old Ashlee Simpson and now 17-year-old unmarried Bristol Palin all get pregnant and decide to keep their babies....

For years, advocates on all sides of abortion and birth control issues have agreed on one thing: Unmarried teenagers should not get pregnant. They may have disagreed about whether abstinence or birth control were the best ways to accomplish this, but the end goal was the same.

Then "Juno" came along."

OMG! THREE'S A TREND!

Or, as a friend put it: "You're right. Teenagers never thought to get pregnant until they saw Juno."

It's not like there were pregnant teens in the premise of Gilmore Girls. Or Hester Prynne she totally must have been inspired by Juno 'cause that baby of hers was out of wedlock. So maybe its the Hester effect? The Lorelai effect?

Where Were The Editors?

2008-08-25T11:17:00.009-04:00

Seriously, how did a newspaper staff allow this double-entendre headline to be published? What is the goal? And if you did actually want the two-pronged meaning, why show both of their wives?

Washington Post Engages With Teenage Readers, Stoops To Their Level, Mocks Their Intelligence,

2008-08-13T22:52:00.006-04:00

The Washington Post needs its teenage readers. It needs its next generation of readers. If they all flee to the blogs and to Twitter. That's probably part of the reason that the paper's style section ran the story: "ONE, TWO, THREEEEEE! The Jonas Brothers Are Taking the Kiddie-Pop Market by Wailstorm." So they its a little condescending--" young and younger girls who act as a sort of early-warning radar for the trio of teen idols"--but it's a little further down that, apparently killed them.

"But the sound that has come to define Nick Jonas (15; the cute one), Joe Jonas (nearly 19; the hot one) and Kevin Jonas (20; the other one) has nothing to do with power chords and sweet vocal harmonies."

Today the Post decided to apologize, sort of.

"The in-box of The Washington Post's pop music critic, J. Freedom du Lac, was reduced to smoldering cinders yesterday, flamed by e-mails from readers angry at his characterization of Kevin Jonas, eldest of the chart-topping Jonas Brothers...

These words caused offense in the Jonas community.

The editors have decided that it's only fair to give the fans their say. Several of the dissenting e-mails are printed below, with unorthodox spelling and punctuation intact.

As for du Lac and his immediate supervisor, they have been chastised severely and ordered to spend the rest of the week reorganizing Bob Woodward's scrapbook."

And so they do. I can't do it justice in describing it, so here's a choice excerpt:

"i was very upset with thing about the jonas brothers part today!...he could be at collage or doing his own thing now! but by helping his brothers this has turned into a HUGE thing!!! i am going to stop now! becoase i am in tears already ! so i hope you get the picture! -- cass."

OK. Let's review. My guess is, that, generally, when a source makes a typo or two (or a dozen) they fix it or paraphrase, because it'd be a little unfair to imply that the source was stupid. But, a look at the intro to this set of e-mails that ran off of the front page of the Style section, says that not only did they want to leave in the typos, they wanted to make sure that everyone was reminded that the people who ran the original Jonas profile wins lots of Pulitzers. Once, they even broke the Watergate scandal. Remember that? "Oh, no, these teens that write in probably don't even know who Bob Woodward is. Ha. Ha. See we're The Washington Post . They're just teenagers. Who have an unhealthy crush on a singer, and who can't even spell 'because.' Ha Ha."

You know, I get annoyed when major papers like the Post and Times run technology and youth vote articles that feel like they are designed to rope in younger readers. I also would go ballistic if I were a news editor who was intructed what to run or not what not to run based on what the readership wants. But you thought the New Yorker came across as snobby? Just read today's Post.

Lost In Translation

2008-08-12T23:01:00.008-04:00

From the New York Times' coverage of synchronized diving:

"The largely Chinese crowd responded with a roar, waving oversized flags and shouting “jia you,” a cheer meaning “add oil.”"

"Huh," I thought, "that's weird, why would the Times not explain why the Chinese would cheer 'add oil.'" At an unspecified time the newspaper resolved the problem by fixing the text without issuing a correction. The article now reads:

"The largely Chinese crowd responded with a roar, waving oversized flags and shouting “Jia you,” a cheer meaning “Come on!”"

Ah ha. That makes sense, if only readers knew that it was corrected, and more curiously, how that mistranslation got in there. Actually is seems to be a literal translation that was then fixed to make sense. Either way, it's strange.

Photo of a Chinese restaurant via AdFreak. It has nothing to do with diving, but it amazing in its own right

Metro Moments: Summer Pleasures Edition

2008-08-04T23:12:00.007-04:00

Every Monday, people -- the devoted fans, and the ones who do not feel like heading to the bigger, more crowded show on the Mall-- come to watch James Bond movies.

I've never seen one of the movies, played on a satellite campus, laughably smaller than the National Mall, with tables, chairs, and umbrellas instead of slightly scratchy blankets and bumpy roots, a screen set up in hours rather than in days.

I've never watched them set it up.

But, today, I saw the cars. Like a small child's dream. Cars with the doors and trunks open. Piles of boxes in the trunk. Red and white stripes. Popcorn, in circus font. Piles of individual sized boxes. In the doors, thrown open like wings, there are more of them. Boxes leaning against the window, perched precariously and carefully on the inside door handles, peeking out of the side windows in the back.

I, in a moment of childhood, look for the elephants for the clowns.

Then, marvelling at the mass--two large, environmentally unfriendly cars filled with servings of popcorn, and just beyond them people leaning over tables to talk softly in the DC evening humidity, I slide to adulthood again and hurry to catch the metro.

* * *

The two children--a girl in capris and a baseball cap pulled with some force onto her head, wavy hair spilling out from beneath it, and a boy t-shirts, shorts, and a mohawk, 8 and 10 years old respectively--have been fighting all afternoon.

On the way to the FDR memorial, along the side of the Potomac, they fought over the right to push their brother in the stroller. Their younger sister, joyfully oblivious, plays with a stuffed poodle, as their father counts down from ten and the boy with the mohawk hands over the stroller to the girl with the hat. She takes it with glee sending the stroller in zig zags, testing her parents' reflexes by taking her hands off and letting it glide. She pulls the stroller back, raising the front wheels; she grins, her little brother cries.

As we walk past them, everyone erupts in yells. Everyone is angry. Everyone--the girl in the hat, the boy in mohawk, the girl with the poodle--are averting their eyes in a show of innocence. The girl with the baseball hat looks indignant, righteous, and fierce. She eyes her brother, eager for a fight. It's hot.

When we see them again, they've made it to the FDR memorial. The baby in the stroller is napping, the girl with the poodle dances at the edge of the water.

The two others jump from stone to stone, willfully ignoring--as I have-- the signs that ask visitors to respect the memorial to avoid wading. They stand each on their own platforms with flowing water between them, the waterfall behind them.

Purse their lips as they consider the jump, weigh the likelihood of falling in against the traction of their Crocs, which are coordinated to match their shirts.

The spray hitting their outreached palms, getting on their tongues in between the lips of their open smiles, the sound of water hitting water louder than their giggles.

The Nerds of Generation Y

2008-08-04T13:17:00.003-04:00

Friend's g-chat away message: "The 'make the copy desk do it' mind-set seems to be outliving the concept of actually having a copy desk."

Me: What is your away message from?

Seriously dorky and lovable friend: Bill Walsh's twitter account. Yes, he has twitter.

Me: Aaand, you follow it.

Seriously dorky and lovable friend (who is a copy editor): Noooooo. I just found out he had one when I looked at his blog and went on to it I will NOT follow a twitter account.

Me: Uh huh. The lady doth protest too much.

Dorky, lovable copy editor friend: :-P

UPDATE: Yeah, I put the wrong letter in the headline. Twitter is Y, not X. Oops.

Word Games

2008-07-30T16:14:00.004-04:00

From the New York Times Caucus blog:

"The ad, titled "Celeb," questions Mr. Obama's readiness to lead as well as his position of offshore drilling (he is opposed, while Mr. McCain supports offshore oil exploration)."

There's an interesting political word-play going on here. Supporters of drilling for oil offshore call it "exploration," presuambly because it sounds non-invasive. "Drilling" is what opponents call it, and it is also what it is.
It's bizarre to me that the Times chose to use both, because it sounds like what Obama is opposed to ("offshore drilling") is different than what McCain supports ("offshore oil exploration"). Interestingly, the ad in question--which is a McCain ad--uses the phrase "offshore drilling."

It'd be hard to say "Ooh! Look! Bias!" since they use both parties' catch phrases. It's more like "ooh! look! confusion!." They bought into both sides of the rhetoric at once. Which, if you think about it, is a gargantuan attempt at non-bias gone wrong.

Well Put

2008-07-30T00:01:00.000-04:00

Tourist child stepping out of her family's mini van into the DC twilight air: It feels like I just opened the dishwasher.
Sister: She's right. It's like opening the dishwasher.

I can see how the humidity is aptly compared with the sudden blast of steam that comes with the clean dishes. Well said, girls.

Metro Moments: Waiting Edition

2008-07-29T19:16:00.004-04:00

He looks --oddly--like a movie depiction of himself. A second-rate adventure or spy movie, he has the tan of the hero who has just returned from somewhere hot and volatile, Africa or the Middle East. His light brown hair idealized as dirty with desert's dust but bleached with its sun. Like a man who dropped weight from his sinewy arms, covered legs, from beneath his now-boxy too blue, too clean button up: sleeves rolled to his elbows in a too careful imitation of spontaneity. He wears the overlarge sun glasses of a man poised to capture the bad guys, deliver state secrets, the latter helped by the memory stick bouncing on his chest.

But there are too many dissonances to maintain the illusion.

I first notice him at the water fountain, taking a long drink, his arm curled around the top of the round fountain just below the basin and spout, as if he needs the extra support or needs to feel the cool metal against his skin. As he walks to the bench next to mine --at dusk, I am perhaps the only one sitting in the sparsely populated circle who does not intend to stay the night-- he is slowed by the bags he drags behind him. struggling to contain their own contents they are large enough to contain a man's life, lashed together with rope that looks strong enough for now.

His cargo pants--the obvious costume for her fictional alter ego--are pulled down by the over-full pockets, hints of paper showing through the buttoned flaps.

He sits, and we play a game of not staring, each looking away when the other turns. I am entranced by the deep-blueness of his shirt, the lack of obvious stains, his seeming calmness. He wins the game; I cannot see his eyes behind those glasses.

But he gets up again, after only a few minutes, back to the water fountain, leaving his bags at the bench. Again he curls his arm around the fountain. Again he takes his time. As he walks, the seat of his pants is revealed, whitened with dirt and frayed material. The traction on his shoes--soft black ankle boots--is entirely worn off. His left shoelace is frayed, a spray of thread.

Again he sits, again we don't stare. I focus on the lines of my book noticing the words, not comprehending their meaning. I close it quickly, smooth my skirt, and get up, walking around the inside of the circle, heading home. I glance behind me. I think he glances back, again, the glasses. He bends his elbows, reaching behind his head, pushing his head onto his palm, extending his feet, crossing his ankles, his heels just touching the ground. As if he is trying to catch the rest of the sun, as if he is in no rush with no concern, as if he is following instructions to wait for the man who needs the memory stick hanging around his neck.

On the other side of the circle, a woman in a hooded, thin sweatshirt despite the heat, hair pulled tightly back, glasses slightly tinted, sits on a bench next to her bulged bag. Her foot bounces rapidly, only the ball of her foot on the ground, her leg vibrating her body. Nervous, and impatient, she waits.

Overheard

2008-07-27T02:01:00.003-04:00

At Kramerbooks & afterwords (which, fun fact, was issued a subpoena in the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal by Kenneth Starr, who was trying to determine if Lewinsky had bought a novel about phone sex. The bookstore successfully fought the subpoena).

Female customer: He wrote a book?
Male customer: Yeah. You didn't know?
Female customer: Since when are bloggers allowed to write books?
(A minute later, with skepticism) It says it's a thorough and well reported book.

Good question, my friend, good question.
Sigh.

Ow. Just Ow.

2008-07-25T12:47:00.003-04:00

From Regret The Error via (sigh) Gawker:

I have nothing more to add. Except that maybe copy editors in fear of being bought out should post this at their desks as a warning of what will happen if they are forced to leave.

New York Magazine: Skimming The Surface One Cover Story At A Time

2008-07-24T17:45:00.007-04:00

Recently, New York Magazine has made me want to throw things --preferably the magazine itself-- against a wall.

I first noticed it with their article on Horace Mann and Facebook. Here was a story which could be, at its very basic level, a fantastic story about questions of free speech in a school--albeit a private school--that breeds New York's future politicians. It could have been a story about a school that censors its high school paper pretty heavily and about how free speech changes or should be changing in light of the Internet. But, instead, it was a gossip story. About a high school. And it was the cover story.

A while back a friend said that she realized that NYMag was not directed to her--that it was meant for white, rich New Yorkers. If the Horace Mann story wasn't enough, they followed up with a cover story on Gossip Girls. It was an article that did not live up to its subhead: "How a wunderkind producer, seven tabloid-ready stars, an army of bloggers, and a nation of texting tweenagers are changing the way we watch television."

It was essentially a gushing over a T.V. show for pages. It was insipid, in first person plural, and the authors referred to 16-year-olds as "tweens." We have a word for people whose ages end in "teen." They are called teenagers. Yeesh.

And last week, they ran a cover story: "What's a Nice Jewish Girl Like This Doing Fighting the Hasids for Her Baby."

From the headline (which I found snarky), all the way down to the photos on line, (it can't be fair to show the girl, who might end up remaining a very-strict religious Jew in only her underwear to be saved forever on the Internet) this article was irresponsible. It was essentially a glorified one source profile, which may still end up hurting both the child and the woman involved. Sure, it looked like there were other interviews conducted, but none of them shed any new light on the subject. None of them offered any new angles. Only Gitty's grandparents -- who agree with her-- were quoted at length. No one in the Satmar community was allowed to defend their side. Right of response, anyone? Again, New York Magazine dropped the ball. What could have been a great story about one woman who joins an incredibly strict religious sect, her daughter who leaves it and her granddaughter who is literally the subject of a tug-of-war between the two words.

Instead it was a tribute to a woman who seems to have a mean streak and a snide commentary on a part of a religion that was so broad and unbalanced that it made me offended enough to blink back tears.

The example that stood out was one that, conveniently, was the pull quote:

"'Great, huh? Some old rabbi looking at your panties with a magnifying glass?' Gitty says. 'This was so embarrassing to me. I just wouldn’t do it anymore.'

The thing is, how many readers know that that is not representative of marital laws of purity and impurity that most Orthodox women commit to? How many know that while some find the practice terrible others hold up the law in places where privacy and modesty are respected, and no men -- let alone Rabbis-- are part of the process. How many readers fully grasp that there are people who uphold the Jewish laws but are not as extreme? That there is a middle ground? I'm not sure, but I am pretty sure the article didn't emphasize that enough.

I am never fully comfortable with magazine writing that reveals the author as a character, but this quote struck me as embodying the problem:

"In different circumstances, the two of us, Deborah and me, from the same generation of New York Jews, might have had things to talk about. ... Deborah, however, was not of a mind to discuss her life story."

In addition to trying to explain the absence of quotes from an important character in the story, The quote also seems to imply that the author could identify with one side of the story, but not the other, always a dangerous proposition.

Maybe it's because I myself am Jewish. Comment to let me know what your thoughts on the story are.

All images from NYMag.com

Dangerous Balancing Act

2008-07-21T17:33:00.012-04:00

"Except that they sometimes ride the same elevators, the reporters and editors of the news report work in a different orbit from those who write opinion." -- Bill Keller

Here is a turn-of-phrase coined by a copy editor friend, that I liked so much, I decided it warrants its own post:

Death-defying Lede: A lede in which the reporter comes precariously close to falling off of the Chinese Wall and into the swamp of opinion.

I was going to link to a wikipedia article defining Chinese Wall, but interestingly enough, in the journalism section of the entry it only offers: "The term is also used in journalism to describe the separation between the editorial and advertising arms of a media firm," whereas I was introduced to the term as a way of indicating the separation between opinion and news, which is clearly how I was using it above.

Clearly the adjective "death-defying" could also sometimes be used to describe full articles or news columns as well.

(Interestingly, though the article linked above (and again right here) ran as a front page story about day care at Google, it is archived as a business column, which would have slightly different rules. I do not, however, remember the very long article being labeled as a column in the hard copy of the paper itself.)

Yes, that's an image stolen from Disney via a Web site with a ton of Lion King pictures. I also recognize that ~~Mufasa is~~ ~~pushed~~ Simba is forced to the cliff by Scar (I forgot that Simba, too, ends up hanging from a cliff), and that it's not a perfect analogy, but actually with Simba, who survives, it's a slightly better, or at least more hopeful analogy, implying that their is still hope of the reporter righting himself.

Words That Exist in Other Languages That Should Be Adopted Into English

2008-07-18T00:50:00.006-04:00

I am failing to come up with examples for these even though I find myself wanting to use the words in regular conversation. Let me know if you have an example.

Adaraba (Aramaic): Exactly the opposite. If you are arguing with someone, or laying out an argument yourself, you can lay out the false or opposing argument and then turn it on its head. "It's not an issue of romance. Adaraba. Writing is gritty, ugly work."

Stam: (Hebrew): The closest translation is "just." It's a verbal shrug, or a way to say that something stands on its own.

Merci (French): I like it's succinctness as a way of saying thanks with the elegance of thank you.

Davka (Hebrew): Again, the closest translation is "specifically" but it doesn't capture the fullness of the word. It's a way to draw attention to an element of the story or argument.

Yala (Arabic): Let's go. I think, however that it's Israeli slang used like that, ~~and it is not used conversationally in Arabic.~~ I've been corrected. Apparently, in at least some Arabic dialects it is used that way conversationally. Thanks Tom.

B'dieved (Hebrew? Aramaic?): A second best choice, the choice one resorts to in less than ideal situations. It is used to explain rather than describe the choice.

The Problem With Spell-Check

2008-07-17T18:09:00.003-04:00

From Regret The Error (I can't get enough of the literary corrections):

"Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel is One Hundred Years of Solitude, not One Hundred Years of Solicitude as we had it (Actor plans to film long-lost Garcia Marquez screenplay, page 20, July 15)"
-Guardian

Well done. Though this is probably worse: A friend told me today that a few weeks ago the Detroit News ran the headline "Clinton, Osama, meet to Discuss Unity." Now if that were actually the case, rather than an inability to avoid spell-check's suggestions, you'd think it would get higher placement.


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