COMM 337: In class exercise for Oct. 29

Television producer David Simon, the subject of Margaret Talbot's profile of his TV show in The New Yorker, was a reporter for The Baltimore Sun before he left the newspaper business and went to the HBO show "The Wire." What specific attitudes and instincts of a reporter has he taken with him into TV?

[Here's an example, Simon complains about "the bullshit of bean counters who care only about the bottom line." That's typical of reporters, who tend to see the effects of cost-cutting by management, i.e. the "bean counters," as taking away the resources reporters need to do their job right, making them "do less with less." You will find plenty of others as Simon and other newspaper people quoted in Talbot's article talk about their philosophies of life, their ways of getting information out of people, the way they listen to people, their attitudes toward the truth and a wide variety of other matters, large and small.]

In class today: Skim-read back through Talbot's article "Stealing Life," and find three or four passages containing good examples of a reporter's way of thinking on the part of Simon or his former Baltimore Sun colleagues who are working on the show. On the blog you're keeping for COMM 337, (1) quote the passage, (2) explain what you learn from it about reporting and (3) analyze how it can help you in your career as a professional writer and editor.

Since it's on your personal blog, don't be afraid to use your own voice. A couple or three of you are establishing a distinctive way of writing on your blogs that I think you'll be able to include in your portfolios. And most of the rest of you are showing raw talent, and I think everybody who's bothering to post will be able to develop it into the kind of thing you'll be able to show editors and personnel office people before long.

COMM 337: Journaling on Steve Lopez / IN CLASS / REQUIRED

Blog the following and be ready to discuss in class --

Did you ever wonder why news people always call the stuff they write a "story?" Steve Lopez of The Los Angeles Times has a gift for narrative, for story, and his stories are always based on good reporting. Always.

Let's see how it works. Lopez has been assigned to write color sidebars about the fires in Southern California. (What are color sidebars?) The assignment is a natural for him, since he writes the "Points West" column for The Times and is considered a newsman's newsman ... a guy who knows how to tell a story. In the paper's directory of Lopez' recent columns he has not only stuff about the fires but also a wide variety of stories about people. To one degree or another, they're all based on narrative. Let's find out how he does it.

On your blog, I want you to choose on of his stories and analyze it for narrative technique -- which is just a fancy word for story-telling, right? Consulting Donald Murray's "Notes on Narrative" (pages 152-55), choose one of Lopez' stories in the LA Times and analyze it for his mastery of the story-teller's art.

For example, if I were writing up the story we looked at Wednesday, the one where he interviewed former San Diego fire chief Jeff Bowman about the brush fires, I would focus on the dialog and description. I would notice his use of first person (no matter what they did to the capital "I" on the typewriters at Murray's old paper in Boston)! How many other narrative techniques do you see in this brief quote?

About 8 a.m., Bowman gets a call from his mother's nursing home.

They're evacuating the residents.

"I'll go get her," he tells Denise, and we pile into his truck for a short ride to a nearby neighborhood called Hidden Meadows.

This, I think is pure storytelling, pure narrative. The first person puts us on the scene. There's dialog. The present tense lends immediacy. So do the very short paragraphs. There are bits like that all the way through the story. What other narrative techniques does Lopez rely on? There's a list in Murray.

Your assignment: Pick another story. See how many of the narrative techniques Murray describes you can find in the story. Quote them. Quote freely. Post your analysis to your blog. Be sure to link to the Lopez column you analyze.

COMM 337: Feature story link, Oct. 29 assignment

Your next 1,000-plus word analysis of a feature story is due a week from Monday, in class on Oct. 29. It's on an article in this week's New Yorker by Margaret Talbot. It's titled "Stealing Life," and it's a profile of television producer David Simon, a former reporter for The Baltimore Sun who now writes and produces the HBO show "The Wire." It's available on line. Hurry up and print it out, because The New Yorker may not archive the story on its website much longer. I also have a print copy of the magazine if you need to photocopy it.

Either way, you should get started reading it now. It's long. I haven't counted words, but 6,000 words is a pretty standard length for magazine features. And I'd say it's at least that. It takes up 12 pages in the magazine.

But it's an excellent story. Talbot is a New Yorker staff writer and a senior fellow of the New America Foundation. She's written for quality publications like Atlantic Monthly and the New York Times Magazine. Her writing, at least this story, is solidly based on in-depth reporting.

What to look for ... and what I'll be looking for in your papers:

• Simon's experience at The Baltimore Sun gives him an inside perspective on the newspaper business. What does he say about the past, present and future of newspapering? How is his world view shaped by having been a reporter? How does that experience affect the way he goes about writing the show? What do you learn about the craft of newspapering from Simon?
  
• This year's story line will be about a fictional newspaper that is based on the Sun and even uses its name. Several of the people working with him on this year's "Wire" show are ex-colleagues at the Sun. How do their backgrounds in newspapering shape their world views? What do they say about journalistic standards? How do their professional standards, values and instincts affect the show? What do you learn about journalism in 21st-century America from reading about Simon and his colleagues?
  
• How good a reporter is Talbot? How does she manage to reflect in her writing the subtle flavor of speech in the Jewish community (look for phrases like "keeping kosher" for following Jewish dietary laws), and in people from Baltimore and New Orleans? Cops? Politicians? Street hustlers? Musicians? (Notice, too: They're all interested in language, in listening to people, really listening, so they can get just the right word.) How much of Talbot's story is based on interviews, and how much on direct observation? What does she hear and what does she see that lends versimilitude to the story? What do you learn about the craft of reporting and writing from reading her story?

Week in and week out, some of the best reporting in America appears in the New Yorker. (I'm afraid Simon and his co-workers are right when they say you don't see much of it in newspapers any more.) And Talbot's is one of the better stories I've seen there lately.

Here's an insight I especially liked:

After years of reporting in Baltimore’s ghettos, [Simon] found himself at ease with being the only white person in a room, or the only person in the room who didn’t know how to re-vial drugs, and found, too, that he could channel the voices of people in the game. “To be a decent city reporter, I had to listen to people who were different from me,” Simon explained. “I had to not be uncomfortable asking stupid questions or being on the outside. I found I had a knack for walking into situations where I didn’t know anything, and just waiting. A lot of reporters don’t want to be the butt of jokes. But sometimes it’s useful to act as if you couldn’t find your ass with both hands.”

A warning, though: It helps you keep it covered if you can find it with both hands. Don't ask how I know that.

Another insight. It's gloomy, but unfortunately it rings true. Talbot says:

This final season of the show, Simon told me, will be about “perception versus reality”—in particular, what kind of reality newspapers can capture and what they can’t. Newspapers across the country are shrinking, laying off beat reporters who understood their turf. More important, Simon believes, newspapers are fundamentally not equipped to convey certain kinds of complex truths. Instead, they focus on scandals—stories that have a clean moral. “It’s like, Find the eight-hundred-dollar toilet seat, find the contractor who’s double-billing,” Simon said at one point. “That’s their bread and butter. Systemic societal failure that has multiple problems—newspapers are not designed to understand it.”

Fortunately, reporters like Talbot and magazines like The New Yorker are.

COMM 150, 207, 337: Obit for 'reporter's reporter'

This morning's Washington Post carries the obituary of a reporter who was shot to death Sunday in Baghdad, apparently by "soldiers from the Iraqi army, believed to be infiltrated by the militia." A sidebar collects appreciations by his colleagues at the Post. "He was a reporter's reporter," says one. "And we all admired his courage."

John Ward Anderson said the reporter Salih Saif Aldin, 32, was tenacious:

Salih loved a scoop, and he reeled in a whopper in the spring of 2005. Like many Iraqis, Salih was deeply committed to justice and democratic reforms. One afternoon, he collared me in the living room of the bureau and, through an interpreter, told an amazing tale of a 37-year-old man in Tikrit who had been arrested by Iraqi police, was brutally tortured and died in police custody.

I was skeptical and told him so. Most important, we needed evidence. He would have to go to Tikrit, hunt down the relatives, confront the police, find the U.S. military officials and get some documentation. There had to be a paper trail, I said. Find it.

Most reporters would hang their shoulders at such instructions. Not Salih. He smiled, and his eyes sparkled. He left for Tikrit the next day.

A few days later, he came back with the story.

And Ellen Knickmeyer recalled he had a reporter's gift for accuracy:

He could be very sweet, deferential, polite and kindly . . . he always called me "Miss," in English. On a trip out of Baghdad last year, he got me past a lot of checkpoints by telling the insurgents I was his mother.

"You couldn't say sister?" I asked him.

"Sorry, Miss, sorry," he said.

Assessment: High-stakes test quote of the day

From The Independent, a center-left newspaper in London, the quote of the day -- perhaps the quote of the year -- on high-stakes testing. It comes in a story about new secondary school testing standards announced by the Labour government, raising mandated proficiency levels on the GCSE tests taken by 11-year-olds nationwide. Said Jovan Trkulga, a supply (substitute) teacher at Deptford Green primary in Lewisham, south London:

"High-stakes testing has got to a ridiculous state... it is making children unhappy. Telling teachers they have to improve their children's performance is like teaching your grandmother to suck eggs."

British GCSE tests measure students' mastery of the national General Certificate of Secondary Education curriculum. The government, which is more directly involved in curriculum than the U.S. government, today announced tighter new standards in math and English:

The new targets will mean ministers expect 53 per cent off youngsters to obtain five A* to C grade passes at GCSE – including maths and English – by the end of the decade. At present, only 45 per cent do – although this figure has risen from 35 per cent in 1997.

In addition, ministers have repeated their target of getting 85 per cent of youngsters to reach the required standard in national curriculum test for 11-year-olds by the end of the decade. Previously, this target had been set for 2006 but it would need a five percentage point rise in English and nine percentage point rise in maths to achieve the target.

Sounds a little bit like No Child Left Behind in the U.S., doesn't it? So does the reaction:

Teachers' leaders breathed a sigh of relief after it emerged ministers planned a bigger increase in education spending than had previously been forecast. However, they warned that the targets could lead to more "teaching to the tests", with the danger that more pupils could be put off learning.

COMM 337: Robert Fisk interviews Osama bin Laden

On Wednesday I'll have an assignment sheet for your first analytical paper, on a piece of public affairs reporting by British correspondent Robert Fisk. In the meantime, here's a link to the piece I want you to read ... it's a chapter from his book The Great War for Civilisation: the Conquest of the Middle East. In it he tells about the three times he has interviewed Osama bin Laden.

(The "s" in the title is CQ. Fisk is British, and he uses British spellings.)

Fisk writes for The Independent, a center-left newspaper in London. He has lived in the Middle East since the 1980s, and he is a fierce critic of U.S. and British foreign policy in the region. He is no less critical of Israel, and he has been accused of anti-Semitism. I don't think those charges have been proven, at least not by my definition of anti-Semitism, but you should be aware of the controversy over his writing.

In a perceptive review of The Great War in The New York Times, English author Geoffrey Wheatcroft says Fisk "is one of the most controversial journalists of the age, winner of numerous prizes, much admired by some, including colleagues who respect his obsessive attention to detail and sheer physical courage, execrated by others because of what has been seen as his open hostility to Israel, America and the West." Wheatcroft says the book is much too long, and Fisk's "ungovernable anger may do his heart credit, but it does not make for satisfactory history." But when Fisk sticks to straight reporting, Wheatcroft says, The Great War is "a stimulating and absorbing book, by a man who speaks Arabic, who has known the region better than most and has met the leading players, from bin Laden to Ahmad Chalabi (who offered to introduce him to Oliver North)." Fisk has reported, quite literally, on one war after the other since he was first posted to the Middle East in 1982.

"This is really several books fighting each other inside the sack," says Wheatcroft.

Another reviewer, a former British ambassador Libya, Luxembourg and Greece named Oliver Miles, agrees Fisk's book is "excessively long ... a real War and Peace, but with precious little peace." (We're reading about 25 pages out of 1,283.) In his review in The Guardian (U.K.), Miles says, "Vigilant editing and ruthless pruning could perhaps have made two or three good short books out of this one." But when Fisk isn't venting his opinion, his reporting is masterful. Says Miles, "His forte is straight reporting, such as his three interviews with Osama bin Laden."

COMM 337, 393, 207, 150: News or Fark?

Cross-posted from my Mackerel Wrapper blog, with some comments about the midterm in Communications 150 deleted.

Jack Shafer, who writes the Press Box media criticism column for Slate.com, has a review of Drew Curtis' new book, It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries To Pass Off Crap As News. Intriguing title? I picked up a copy a couple of weeks ago at Springfield's friendly local neighborhood big box book store, and the book's worth reading. Or at least knowing about.

But what the f--- is fark?

Shafer says it's "[a]ll the garbage the press publishes and broadcasts when it runs out of genuine news." He provides a link to the first chapter of Curtis' book,where Curtis explains the origin of the term in more detail. Fark is also a website at www.fark.com. It's an aggragator, which means it consists mostly of links to other websites, most of them mass media sites. It's hard to classify. Tonight's for example, links to stories about a British teenager who ran "up £1,175 bill by text-messaging votes for herself in online beauty contest in order to win £100 in makeup"; a governor in Brazil who banned "use of the present participle. Yep, you read that right"; and an Episcopal church that "bestow[ed] blessings on cats and dogs" on Oct. 4, the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi, in Bangor, Maine.

If you're really, really into cat pictures, be sure to check out the blessing of the pets in The Bangor Daily News. Otherwise you can safely ignore all this stuff. That's Curtis' point. And Shafer's.

Says Shafer, in terms that remind me of Neil Postman's take on television news:

... High-octane blends of fark contain celebrity news, press coverage of itself, and news served in the context of no context. When Shepard Smith screens, say, five seconds of a burning skyscraper in Brazil, followed by five seconds of a cat rescue in Montana, followed by five seconds of a flood in Thailand on the Fox News Report, you're sucking his fark.

Curtis is irreverent, and sometimes he isn't above taking cheap shots. But he has some dead-serious points to make:

... Whenever Mass Media is really fulfilling its intended purpose, generally something bad is going on. Wars, blown elections, bad weather, you name it -- when people need to know something, it's probably because it's likely to kill them. We'd be much better off living in non-interesting times.

This presents a problem for Mass Media, however, when we are not living in interesting times. This has been further compounded by the advent of twenty-four hour news channels and the Internet as a news source. Back in the days when TV news concentrated most of its resources on one half-hour blocks of news, finding material to fill the time slot wasn't difficult. Nowadays cable news networks have to scramble to have something to talk about for twenty-four hours a day, even when nothing of important is going on. Sales departments are still selling advertisements, after all. Mass Media can't just run content made entirely of ads (with the possible exception of the Home Shopping Network). Something has to fill the space.

Over the years Mass Media has developed several methods of filling this space. No one teaches this in journalism school; odds are Mass Media itself hasn't given much thought to the process. It's a practice honed over the years by editors and publishers, verbally passed down from one generation to the next. They're not entirely aware they're doing it, although the media folks who read advance copies of this manuscript all had the same reaction: "I've been saying we should stop doing this for YEARS."

Some media people even feed him copy, anonymously, of course, if they want to keep their jobs. Says Curtis:

One interesting thing about Fark is how many Mass Media people comb Fark for story ideas, not just for radio but for television, newspapers, and Internet media outfits. Once we switched to Google Analytics for Web traffic tracking we discovered that the number one highest-traffic corporate Internet hitting our servers was CNN. Number two was Fox News. Mass Media even submits a lot of their own articles to Fark, sometimes with taglines so outrageous it's hard to believe these are the same people who run Mass Media. I can't even give any examples; it would be too easy to track back to the source and get people in trouble. The most I can tell you is that it happens multiple times every day. And we really appreciate it.

But also notice that some of the media people who hit the Fark website seem to be looking for material ... for, yep, fark they can fill their newscasts with too. How does all this relate to the social responsbility theory of the press?

COMM 150, 207, 337, etc.: Where the jobs are

Cross-posted to my mass comm. blogs. -- pe

In Communications 207 (editing for publication) this afternoon, we got off on a tangent about lobbying ... mostly because of a front-page picture in today's State Journal-Register showing people leaning on the third-floor rail of the state Capitol rotunda where lobbyists often gather.

Most comments from COMM 207 students were neutral and process-oriented. "I don't really know much about lobbying." Or a general sense lobbyists influence the government to take action on things. But some reflected a negative attitude often heard about lobbying, one that's characterized by the American League of Lobbyists as a "caricature" of "portly, cigar-smoking men who wine and dine lawmakers while slipping money into their pockets."

Even more than most stereotypes, the caricature is unfair. In fact, adds the ALL:

Simply put, lobbying is advocacy of a point of view, either by groups or individuals. A special interest is nothing more than an identified group expressing a point of view — be it colleges and universities, churches, charities, public interest or environmental groups, senior citizens organizations, even state, local or foreign governments. While most people think of lobbyists only as paid professionals, there are also many independent, volunteer lobbyists — all of whom are protected by the same First Amendment.

Lobbying involves much more than persuading legislators. Its principal elements include researching and analyzing legislation or regulatory proposals; monitoring and reporting on developments; attending congressional or regulatory hearings; working with coalitions interested in the same issues; and then educating not only government officials but also employees and corporate officers as to the implications of various changes. What most lay people regard as lobbying — the actual communication with government officials — represents the smallest portion of a lobbyist's time; a far greater proportion is devoted to the other aspects of preparation, information and communication.

What's more, the Lobbyists' league has a code of ethics. Linked at the top of the ribbon at the left of its webpage, no less.

The main thing to know about lobbying, especially for those of us who have or plan careers in Springfield, is the associations that lobby the Illinois Legislature are one of the important employers of communications professionals in town.

COMM 337: Objective bio of Seymour Hersh

I had to wade through a lot of biased writing to find it, but I finally located a fairly objective profile of Seymour Hersh, writer for The New Yorker who says President Bush wants to bomb Iran (a charge the White House dismisses but doesn't exactly come right out and deny). It's by Howard Kurtz, media critic for The Washington Post, and it came out in 2004. It only comes to three pages in printer-friendly format, but it says pretty much the same thing as the 20-page Columbia Journalism Review profile I linked below -- Hersh is controversial and opinionated, but he's a tireless reporter and he usually gets his facts straight.

Kurtz, typically, doesn't offer his own opinion. But he quotes two journalists who can offer an informed opinion on Hersh's work:

"A lot of Washington journalists act like hedge-trimmers or pruning shears," says Time defense correspondent Mark Thompson. "Sy is a noisy, smoke-spewing chain saw -- and a relentless stump-grinder, to boot."

Bill Kovach, who once edited Hersh as the [New York] Times's Washington bureau chief, says that "he's maintained a kind of groundfire of anger at abuses of power unlike any I've ever seen."

And how does Hersh unearth his information? "He's relentless," Kovach says. "He's rapid-fire. He asks two or three questions at a time. He just keeps going and going until he gets where he wants to go. He religiously tracks these sources, he talks to them all the time."

You can read Kurtz' article and come to your own conclusion about Sy Hersh, but for my money Thompson's bit about the chain saw has got to be one of the all-time great quotes.

COMM337: Assignment for Friday

In a press conference Tuesday, President Bush's press secretary declined to comment on reports by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker that Bush plans to bomb Iran. Instead, she cast doubt on Hersh's use of anonymous sources in the New Yorker article. His use of sources is a controversial issue, and it involves his reporting and writing techniques; for Friday, I want you to read his article and evaluate how his use of anonymous sources affects his credibility.

By class time Friday, plesase read Hersh's article "Shifting Targets" and answer the following questions:

• How many anonymous sources does Hersh use? Does he describe them in a believeable way? Does he explain why they aren't speaking on the record? Do they seem to have good information? How do they affect his credibility?
  
• Does Hersh's story seem opinionated, or does it sound objective? Does he try to give both sides of debatable issues? Does he back up his claims with evidence? Can you determine from what he writes how careful his reporting was?
  

Please post your answers as comments to this post.

Some necessary background follows:

This week's flap. According to Dan Froomkin of The Washington Post (who is outspokenly critical of Bush), White House Press Secretary Dana Perino dismissed "questions about Hersh's piece from CNN's Ed Henry and CBS's Bill Plante." Froomkin quoted from the White House transcript of Tuesday's press briefing:

Perino: "Look, you know, I'm glad you brought it up. Every two months or so, Sy Hersh writes an article in The New Yorker magazine, and CNN provides him a forum in which to talk about his article and all the anonymous sources that are quoted in it."

Henry: "So the President --"

Perino: "The President has said that he believes that there is a diplomatic solution that we can use to solve the Iranian problem. And that's why we're working with our allies to get there."

Plante: "That's what he said before we went to Iraq, too."

Henry: "But what's the -- can you answer actually on the substance of whether or not the White House asked -- I mean, if it's not true, then you can say Sy Hersh is wrong and CNN was wrong to air it. You could say that, but --"

Perino: "We don't discuss such things, Ed."

Henry: " -- what about the substance of whether we --"

Perino: "We don't discuss such things. What we have said and what we are working towards is a diplomatic solution in Iran. What the President has also said is that as a President, as a Commander-in-Chief -- and any Commander-in-Chief -- would not take any option off the table. But the option that we are pursuing right now is diplomacy."

Henry: "But the article very specifically said that this summer in a video conference -- secure video conference with Ambassador Crocker, the President said that he was thinking about 'hitting Iran' and also --"

Perino: "I'm not going to comment on -- one, I don't know. I wouldn't have been at any -- at that type of a meeting. I don't know. I'm not going to comment on any possible -- any possible scenario that an anonymous source, you know, continues to feed into Sy Hersh. I'm just not going the do it."

Two things are clear from this exchange. One is the White House is out to discredit Hersh. The other is the White House doesn't care for leaks.

Fromkin suggests a third, that Perino "refused to respond to any of the specific claims Hersh made in this week's New Yorker about White House support for a new path to war with Iran." However, if you read Froomkin very much, he has no use for Bush and he 's strongly opposed to Bush's conduct of the War on Terror.

Controversy over Hersh's reporting. Sy Hersh is no stranger to controversy -- or to the use of anonymous sources -- ever since he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for reporting on the My Lai massacre and its coverup in Vietnam. Froomkin says Hersh "has a history of well-sourced, groundbreaking reporting." And that view is common within the profession. But Froomkin is hardly an unbiased observer.

So I'm linking the Wikipedia profile on Hersh. It clearly has been edited by people who have strong opinions about him, both for him and against him, but the nature of Wikipedia is to get into he-said, she-said counterpoint on controversial subjects. I'd read it more for the extremes of opinion, and seek balance elsewhere.

One lengthy, but balanced and detailed profile of Hersh appeared in The Columbia Journalism Review in 2003. It comes to 20 pages printed out (in a printer-friendly format no less!), but it's the best thing I've read on a very controversial and very important reporter.

COMM 337: Read this, you @#$%!

As we read good writers -- other good writers (see yesterday's blog below) -- to improve our own writing, we not only read them, but read them for style ... read them analytically, asking ourselves questions like, "How did they do that? And how can I do it better?" Here, to get us started, is a column by Mark Morford on the SFGate.com website. He comes out twice a week in the print edition of The San Francisco Chronicle, but he's primarily an online writer. "His writing," according to Wikipedia, which hits the nail on the head this time, "is sometimes controversial and almost always non-journalistic in style, attitude and tone." How can it be non-journalistic if it's on a journalists' website?

Read the linked column. It's about fast food ads, and it's headed "Eat This, You Fat, Sad Idiot." Ask yourself the following questions: (1) Is he insulting his readers, or giving them a sly pat on the back? (2) What things about Morford's style of writing appeal to you, and what things turn you off? (3) How well suited would you guess his style is for readers in San Francisco? For online readers irrespective of location? (4) How would Morford's column fly in a conservative, Midwestern town like Springfield? With older readers? With people in your demographic? Could it be toned down without losing its appeal? We'll discuss them in class, and you'll write an analysis for your blog. Link to the column, and post your thoughts between now and Monday. (That way you'll have the weekend to catch up.)

Morford, according to Wikipedia, has taught Vinyasa yoga classes and is a two-time winner in the online segment of the annual contest of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.

COMM 337: Ledes, in-class exercise

One good way we can improve our writing is to read other good writers. (Notice I said "other good writers," so you'll have that to live up to?) Today's assignment is in that spirit.

After reviewing Don Murray's discussion "Qualities of an Effective Lead" (Writing to Deadline 93), find a story with an effective lede on a newspaper website, post a link to it and analyze what makes it effective -- post the link and a paragraph of analysis as a comment on this message.

(Notice something else? I'm setting up this assignment so you'll have an opportunity to review what Murray says about effective ledes. Clever, huh?)

Be ready to talk in class about your story, too. We'll take a look at some of the stories you found and how we can use the techniques their writers used.

You should remember how to post a link, but here's a reminder:

How to Post a Link
I like to do this with two windows open, one to the page I'm posting the link to and the other to the comment (or create post) field in Blogspot. Here are the steps:

1. In the address field in the header, highlight the address (or URL). Copy it.
   
2. Go to the comment field. Type in <a href="
   
3. Paste in the address with no space between the "less than" and the address.
   
4. Type "> with no space between the address and the quote mark.
   
5. Type in whatever words you want in the link, for example Link here
   
6. Immediately after those words, type </a>
   
7. Your link should look this this <a href="address">Link here</a>