COMM 150, 207, 337, 393, etc. --sportswriting

Cross-posted to all my journalism blogs. -- pe

I surfed into this column by ESPN Page 2 sportwriter Scoop Jackson while I was "reading the paper(s)" on the Web this morning. It was linked to Jim Romenesko's blog on newspapering. I don't follow sports very closely (other than Illinois Statehouse politics). So I'm not familiar with Jackson. But this time he was writing about a meeting he had with high school journalism students in Kansas, and he headlined it, "A Fresh Perspective on Sportwriting." I think some of you will enjoy it.

Jackson says the kids had been studying his writing, and they came at him with a depth of knowledge and interest:

They came with it. Straight -- no chaser, no ice, no water back. They didn't ask about how this person was or what type of person that person was. What's Shaq like in person? Have you ever met Tom Brady? Is AI as cool as he seems? Who do you think is going to win the World Series? Is Derek Jeter really that cute in real life? None of that. They didn't come with the standard, star-obsessed questions that sportswriters usually get when we walk into a school full of young girls cute like Kaley Cuoco and young guys smooth like Shia LaBeouf.

Instead, they asked about the writing. The art of storytelling and meeting deadlines. Angles and ideas. They asked about the seriousness of what it is that we sportswriters do and how we approach our craft differently every day, so that we can continue to generate interest. They came authentic.

And Jackson came back at them with candid answers. I liked the way he said, "that sports journalism, just like sports itself, is a business first -- that the writer's goal is to provide meaningful content and the job of the company that employs us is to make money." My sport was politics, and that's how it was back in my newspapering days -- I was working for a business, and my job was to make the politics meaningful for my readers.

And I liked what Jackson said about writing. Like this:

... I told them -- as I had once written -- that nothing I write will ever be considered for "The Best American Sports Writing" because of how I write, but that should never be a writer's goal: "Learn to enjoy the process of writing and the end results will take care of themselves." My mouth to their ears.

I told them that as writers, we should believe in the craft first, self second. In that order. Always.

He recommended the kids read widely, "that expanding their reading base beyond sports will make them better writers because -- as much as we'd like to think it is -- life is not all about sports." He even suggested a reading list, which I'll let you read in his column.

And I especially liked what Jackson said about editing, and being edited. One thing you get used to when you're a professional writer is having editors change your copy. And one thing you have to learn is the humility to realize when they've made it better. So I liked this bit:

Before I left Blue Valley Northwest in Overland Park, Kansas, Matt (one of the two students who sent me the e-mail that initiated this whole thing), still with the smile on his face that appeared the second I walked from backstage to surprise him at 8:30 a.m., said something to me.

"Scoop, you know the [New England Patriots and coach Bill] Belichick piece you just did? The one titled '22 Questions?' Well, I read it a few times and you actually have 25 questions in the story not 22."

"No sirrr," I said back. "I made sure there were 22 questions in that piece. Trust me, there's exactly 22."

"Sorry," he said while handing me a copy of the story he had marked up, as if he were already an ESPN editor. "There's 25, Mr. Jackson. I counted."

Which I knew he did. He was thorough like that. I knew he was right because I now knew that's who he is. That he didn't want to test me or check me, just make sure that in his eyes and in the eyes of every other student in the school I remained the best writer I could possibly be, that I remained his inspiration -- which is why his teacher knew I should meet him in the first place, why she wanted me to meet all of them.

COMM 337: Storyline on Carl the cat

Please see also linked stories and in-class assignment below. -- pe

Posted to the Anchorage Daily News' website at 3:56 a.m. today was a wrapup on Alaska's martahon trial over custody of an orange tabby cat that lived in an insurance office.

Mat-Su borough correspondent Andrew Wellner opens what I'll bet he hopes is his last story on the trial with a crisp lede that looks ahead to something he hasn't reported yet. It's about the only thing he hasn't reported yet, in fact, since he posted a brief story on the verdict as soon as the jury came back at 3 p.m. yesterday:

PALMER -- Carl the cat is coming home to Palmer.

After deliberating nearly three days, a Palmer jury decided 11-1 Thursday to award ownership of the 7-year-old orange tabby to Catherine Fosselman, owner of a local accounting firm.

Then he uses the rest of the story to give a storyline of the case.

Important tangent: A storyline is not just a rehash of what happened. It's more like the plot of a short story. It's what Don Murray calls the "line." There's even a Wikipedia article that defines a storyline as the "narrative of a work, whether of fictional or nonfictional basis," and, more elaborately, as a set of "narrative threads experienced by different but specific characters or sets of characters that together form a plot element or subplot in the work of fiction. In this sense, each narrative thread is the narrative portion of a work that pertains to the world view of the participating characters cognizant of their piece of the whole,and they may be the villains, the protagonists, a supporting character, or a relatively disinterested." While the Wikipedia article speaks only of fiction, it's pretty clear Murray has this kind of thing in mind when he speaks of "line" in a story.

Back to Carl the cat. Welner has a nice bit of scene-setting for the verdict: "The courtroom gallery was packed; the audience included two judges, court clerks, attorneys and others who'd been following the four-day trial." And he managed to find a juror who was willing to talk about the deliberations.

Also to give him what has to be one of the all-time great quotes on any courthouse beat anywhere:

"There was just so much stuff to sift through we needed a scoop ... like the kind you use to scoop out a litter box," said juror Carrie Wininger, squinting in the sunlight on the courthouse sidewalk.

She said the jury was split evenly after the first day of deliberations and by Thursday morning only one juror had switched sides. The votes of at least 10 of the 12 were needed for a decision.

Wininger said the jurors spent the three days primarily debating the law that applied to the case.

But to her, the choice was clear. She said she never changed her pro-Fosselman vote. The most convincing evidence, she said, was testimony that Carl lived at the office for six years and [plaintiff Debbie] Fosselman's company records that show expenses for taking care of the cat.

"You don't have something for six years and take care of it just because," Wininger said.

As to serving on a jury to decide who owns a cat, Wininger said it didn't seem too far-fetched to her.

"I've got four pugs and two cats and two rabbits," she said. "I know how attached you can get to animals and for me I thought that wasn't so unreasonable."

That last quote isn't half bad, either. Nor is the way he works in color and background without calling attention to himself. The juror squints in the sunlight, for example. And he's able to tuck away the procedure at the bottom of the graf announcing the 11-1 verdict. (He has to, too, because a 11-1 vote in a criminal court case would be a hung jury. Right?) There are other nice bits of detail further down in the story.

COMM 337: Verdict on Carl the cat

My conscience tells me we shouldn't be spending time on this ... but a civil court jury in Palmer, Alaska, has awarded custody of Carl the cat to the owner of an accounting firm that was gutted by fire in 2006. The ADN posted a brief report to its website at 4:01 AKST (which would be 7 p.m. our time). Carl, an orange longhair tabby, goes back to Catherine Fosselman, owner of Fosselman Associates. She sued former employee Staci Fieser, who had been keeping the cat since shortly after the fire.

The case took longer to decide than many murder trials. Testimony began Thursday, Sept. 20, and continued through Monday. Final argument was Tuesday morning, and the case went to the jury that afternoon. In Wednesday's paper, Mat-Su correspondent Andrew Wellner said, "A highly conservative estimate is $4,000 to pay the judge, clerk and jury for the four-day trial."

Wellner reported Wednesday:

The trial as it unfolded was a topic of conversation throughout the courthouse on Gulkana Street [in Palmer]. Clerks, lawyers, front-door security guards seemed amused or baffled that it was even happening. A group of about a dozen spectators have been a regular presence in Judge Eric Smith's courtroom.

Closing arguments packed the gallery.

More so than testimony, which tended to be muted and may have reflected a desire by witnesses not to take sides in the custody fight, final arguments hinted at what the conflict was really about. Wellner said:

Eric Conard, attorney for the Fiesers, in his final plea to the jury Tuesday morning said the case isn't really about a cat. It's about a vendetta Fosselman carried out against Fieser for leaving the firm. Testimony from witnesses on both sides painted Fieser as a talented, thorough accountant.

Fosselman is a bully, Conard said, who attacked the Fiesers with a $100,000 lawsuit. To hammer home his point, Conard stepped from the lectern to the defense table and pantomimed beating his clients over the head with a sheaf of papers.

"Take that, Fiesers, coming after you for a hundred thousand!" he shouted.

The play-acting was part of a larger performance punctuated by banging the jury rail and stomping his feet. He incorporated a brief musical interlude that featured Conard flourishing his hands above his head, dancing from side to side and singing, in part, "I own Carl."

Fosselman's attorney, Andrew Robinson, was noticeably more subdued, spending most of his time behind the lectern.

If anybody acted outrageously it was the Fiesers, Robinson explained to jurors. They had the audacity to put themselves ahead of Fosselman and the 30 company employees with emotional ties to Carl.

"To say that this case was motivated by bad will on (Fosselman's) part is totally unsubstantiated," Robinson said. "This thing was motivated by the Fiesers and their utter disrespect for the employer that gave Staci her first job in Alaska."

Many witnesses testified to Carl's magnetism and charming habits -- his penchant for bottled water, how he played with visiting clients' pets, his habit of drowning stuffed animals in the office toilet.

Final arguments in this case also suggest why small-town courthouses are known for their theatrics everywhere.

Your assignment in class:

1. Read the stories in the ADN. There are about a half dozen linked to each other, but you may do better by entering keywords "Carl" and "cat" in the paper's internal search engine. Evaluate the coverage of the trial in terms of the "Qualities of a Good Story" that Don Murray lists on pages 71-72 of "Writing to Deadline." Also review "What is News?" by Rich Cameron of Cerrito College's online journalism program. Any list of the common elements of news value or newsworthiness (timeliness, proximity, conflict, etc.) will do -- they're pretty standard. But Cameron's discussion is better than most.

2. Analyze the Carl the cat story in terms of its basic newsworthiness and Murray's discussion of what makes a good story. Be specific about which specific elements of this story relate to specific elements of news value -- for example, does Carl's habit of "drowning" stuffed animals in the toilet enhance the appeal of the story? Or is that just something cats do? Look at some of the comments posted by readers on the ADN website, too, and they may give you ideas about the story's human interest (feline interest?) value. How important is this story? What emotions does it stir up with readers?

3. Post a good, detailed paragraph or two of your analysis as a comment to this blogpost, read your fellow students' comments and be ready to discuss in class.

COMM 337: Wednesday's assignment

Tonight is the Mayor's Cup, a major soccer game between Springfield College and Lincoln Land Community College (directions and other details below) at the SASA fields on the University of Illinois-Springfield campus. It will be preceded by a tailgate party.

Your assignments.

1. Cover tonight's game and/or the tailgate party. Write a "color story," in other words a story that tells about the game but doesn't just tell who won, what the score was, etc. You can, and should , also go into SCI's rivalry with Lincoln Land, our athletic program, the students who turn out for the game, how it fits into student activities, etc. Write 1750 to 1,000 words. Due Monday.

2. In class today, find a sports story on the Internet that goes beyond the immediate game and interviews people -- players, coaches, managers and/or fans -- about the team, the season. Post a link to the story as a comment to this blogpost. I'll show you how below. As time permits, we'll look at your posts in class.

Directions to the Game
Details on the game:

• Tailgate (burgers and brats) will be ready at 6:00pm (FREE) – Game starts at 7:00!
  
• Admission is $3/ person, but Students get in FREE w/ a current student ID!
  
  SASA Complex
  4600 11th Street

Directions are available on line at http://sports.sci.edu/msoccer-links.htm#bb-directions

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>

If you can't attend tonight's game, you can make it up by writing a color story about any SCI or other athletic event.

COMM 337: Links to your journals

Final list (finally). Please make a note of the *permalink for this post, because this will be our roster and a portal to the journals you keep on the blogs you created.

• Quinn Allen untitled (qa-vs-qsa)
  
  
• Michele Bearss untitled (writing4weenies)
  
  
• Jeremy Cook COMM 337 Advance Journalism
  
  
• Eric Craddock eric
  
  
• Shalon Davis untitled (shalonspot)
  
  
• Jeremy Dixon Jeremy D's Blog
  
  
• Whitney Drobnack untitled (com337mwf1200)
  
  
• Terah Ellison COM 337 Journal
  
  
• Jeff Hall Journalism
  
  
• Ben Harley untitled (vicious_apathy)
  
  
• Deanna Jones untitled (Ms. Jones)
  
  
• Zach Kirchner Advanced Journalism 337
  
  
• Mitch Ladd The Best Blog Names Are Taken
  
  
• Meghan McCarthy meghanmccarthy
  
  
• Gina Moscardelli Blogger Gina
  
  
• Christina Ostermeier untitled (5568blog)
  
  
• Robert Schwartz Advanced Journalism Writing
  
  
• Marqueta Stewart queta-marqueta
  
  

_______________________
* A permalink is a permanent link for a blog post. Explains the techterms.com website, they allow us to bookmark a blog post so we can come back to it later, even after "the posting is outdated and no longer present on the home page."

COMM 337: Finding Murray's "line" in a TV series

When Don Murray, late author and Boston Globe columnist, speaks of the "line" of a story, he has in mind something like the thesis of a student term paper. But to professional writers, finding the line is much more of an organic process than what Miss Thistlebottom taught us in English class. It's also much harder to describe.

Murray comes close when he says it's "a fragment of language -- sometimes a single word, often a phrase or series of words, rarely a sentence -- that makes me follow it. " But he clear about one thing -- when he finds the line, that's the moment when I know [I] have a column" (65). He also suggests, in the chapter subhead, it has something to do with the tension in a story, "the tension between forces in the world that will produce a story." It's about conflict, he said, but it's subtler than that. "That tension may be between one indiviudal and another; between a new idea and an old one; between an individual and society; between a belief and a newly discovered fact; between what is said and unsaid, seen and unsaid; between the writer and the world; between what is being done and what should be done; between cause and effect; between reality and illusion" (64). It can be as blatant as a barn burning (a form of political expression in some parts of the South where I used to live) or subtle as a missed appointment.

When I was covering the courthouse beat for daily newspapers, the line of a story was usually my lede. Often it came to me in headline form: "Three charged in drug raid," or whatever. Other times it was in the subtly troubled relationships between politicians in upper Rock Island County and those from Moline and the city of Rock Island. Murray says:

I do not pursue the line as much as put a tail on it. I am the private eye following suspect who may saunter through a shopping mall or race along a mountain road. My job is to stay in sight, out of sight. I follow language to see where it will take me, inluencing the text as little as possible.

Again, the process is intuitive. Murray describes it by analogy because it's not rocket science, it's not a precise series of steps.

In class today, we will watch the Public Broadcasting Service's extended preview of "The War," the 15-hour series directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick that is airing on PBS stations nationwide this week. It's available on YouTube if you want to see it again at home.

As you watch, ask yourself what was "the line" of this series? What insight -- or insights -- made the show hang together as Burns and Novick researched the show? What were they looking for? (They discuss how they made the series in the trailer. They don't use the word "line," or at least I didn't notice it, but they are clearly ) What were the points of tension they focused on? How did they pursue the line? Please post your thoughts to your blog between now and Wednesday.

Some background: Rick Atkinson, critic for The Washington Post, says in his review of Burns' series "The War," it is a "compelling, flawed gem of a documentary, which enriches our emotional comprehension of an event second only to the Civil War in its enduring resonance in the national character."

Of the reviews I've read of "The War," Atkinson's impressed me for its awareness of its visual impact:

Perhaps "The War" is best viewed as one views an art exhibition, focusing on the pictures and not on the captions or the curator's exegesis. The narrative is just scaffolding for the images, many of which linger long after an episode ends: the vivid color footage of flamethrowers on Saipan; the photo of pedestrians strolling past a smoking body next to a burning city bus; the group portrait of butchered soldiers in the dead of winter, their frozen eyes open and lightly dusted with snow, like macabre Jack Frosts.

Here, too, are enduring brush strokes: women climbing on their knees up the steps of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church in Waterbury, grateful to God for the Japanese surrender; or the Jewish GI who kept his dog tags with the little "H" stamped on them -- for "Hebrew" -- inside his glove so he could quickly toss them away if captured by the Germans; or the Marine on Peleliu using his bayonet to extract gold teeth from a Japanese soldier not yet dead. A woman from Mobile, recalling the sight of caskets lining a train platform in St. Louis, asks, "How could you not cry?" How not, indeed.

If "The War" is occasionally turgid, so is "Beowulf." Such is the risk of epic. ...

You don't get many epics on TV.

COM 337: Attendance / READ AND POST / MANDATORY

Due to excessive absenteeism that makes it impossible for us to maintain continuity and cover the required material in class, the following revised attendance policy will go into effect as of Monday, Oct. 1: Each student will be allowed two (2) unexcused absences over the balance of the semester; one (1) point will be deducted from your final grade in Communications 337 for each unexcused absence beyond that number.

Excused absences must be approved by the instructor prior to the class period missed. In exceptional circumstances in which a student cannot foresee the necessity of missing class, I will accept a written, corroborated explanation of the circumstances after the fact; you should, however, keep such ex post facto excuses to a minimum.

AS YOU FINISH READING THIS NOTICE, PLEASE POST A COMMENT TO THE POST CONFIRMING THAT YOU HAVE READ THE NOTICE AND UNDERSTAND ITS CONTENT.

COMM 337: Cat saga continues

Two new stories on The Anchorage Daily News' website today covering the saga of Carl the cat in civil court in Palmer, Alaska. The first, posted at 3:20 p.m. AKDT, established nobody was certain who owned Carl. After two days of testimony, trial recessed for the weekend and resumes Monday.

You need a program the players straight. Instead, the ADN provides a useful background graf (well, two grafs) right after a summary lede:

Catherine Fosselman, owner of the accounting firm, is suing a former employee, Staci Fieser, and her husband, Jason Fieser, for the return of Carl, along with $100,000 in punitive damages. Trial started Wednesday with selection of a 12-member jury. Fosselman testified Thursday, and her lawyer, Andrew Robinson, has concluded his case.

According to employees, Fosselman retrieved Carl from the burning building, neglecting other items of value to her and her company, and gave him to Fieser for safekeeping. Fieser took him home, and he’s lived with the Fiesers ever since.

Friday morning's testimony established that several people took care of the cat, one of two that lived in the accounting firm's office. It also established that Fosselman stopped taking him home for weekends "after he peed on her bed."

Testimony continued Friday afternoon, and the ADN filed an update at 1:52 a.m. today. It is shorter, but includes a good, readable background graf:

By now, details of the cat fight are well known to those following the case:

Carl was brought to the accounting office as a kitten by a former co-owner and adopted by the staff. In 2006, fire destroyed the office. According to testimony, Fosselman retrieved Carl from the burning building, neglecting other items of value to her and her company, and gave him that night to Fieser for safekeeping.

He's been with the Fiesers ever since.

A couple of things I like about this bit. It's brief, it's clear and it features an irresistable pun on "catfight."

A footnote. If you were wondering what "Mat Su" means (and even if you weren't), it's not a Chinese recipe. It's an abbreviation for Matanuska-Susitna Borough, a county named after two rivers that flow together just north of Anchorage.

COMM 337: Quotes and description

Moved from my blog The Mackerel Wrapper for students in COMM 150 and 207.

When you can't be on the scene of a story, you have to get the who's, where's and what's through interviews. You'll never get as much detail as you would if you were there, but you can get enough to convey a sense of what it was like.

This CNN account of the shootings at Virginia Tech in April, posted to the web that day, fills in a lot of the gaps by quoting eyewitnesses. For example the lede:

BLACKSBURG, Virginia (CNN) -- A gunman who killed at least 30 people in one of two shootings on the campus of Virginia Tech was dressed "almost like a Boy Scout," said a student who survived by pretending to lie dead on a classroom floor.

"He just stepped within five feet of the door and just started firing," said Erin Sheehan, who was in one of the Norris Hall classrooms where the second shooting incident took place.

Sheehan described the gunman -- who later shot and killed himself, according to police -- as a young man wearing a short-sleeved tan shirt and black ammunition vest.

"He seemed very thorough about it -- getting almost everyone down -- I pretended to be dead," she said. (Watch student describe surviving by playing dead )

"He was very silent," said Sheehan, one of only four students in her 25-student German class who were not shot.

The gunman left but returned in about 30 seconds. "I guess he heard us still talking," said Sheehan.

"We forced ourselves against the door so he couldn't come in again, because the door would not lock."

The man tried three more times to force his way in and then began firing through the door, she said.

The story is a "sidebar," i.e. a story that runs off to the side of the main story and elaborates on it, so it doesn't have a nut graf. Instead, it quotes other witnesses all the way through to give us an overall picture of the scene. Note how this one has a little less information than than the first:

Student Tiffany Otey was taking a test inside Norris Hall when the shooting began. She and about 20 other people took refuge behind a locked door in a teacher's office.

Police officers with bulletproof vests and machine guns were in the area.(Watch a student's recording of police responding to loud bangs )

"They were telling us to put our hands above our head and if we didn't cooperate and put our hands above our heads they would shoot," Otey said. "I guess they were afraid, like us -- like the shooter was going to be among one of us." (Watch students react to shooting )

The quoted details get fewer and fewer as we get deeper and deeper into the story. In this sense it's a classic inverted pyramid, with the most interesting stuff on top trailing off to filler on the bottom. The last graf, for example:

Before Monday, the deadliest mass shooting in the United States occurred in 1991, when George Hennard drove a pickup truck into a Killeen, Texas, cafeteria and fatally shot 23 people, before shooting and killing himself.

Please note: I left in the links to audio and video links in the CNN story, since they're such a good example of cross-platform convergence.

COMM 337: Interview assignment

Final draft due Monday, Sept. 24. Interview a classmate (we'll make time at the end of class today) about a time he or she was really surprised by the way something turned out and learned something important from the surprise. This is not a particularly easy assignment: I want you to recreate the event through quotes and descriptive writing, using details you get from the interview. So you're not only interviewing for who-what-when-and-where, you're also drawing your classmate out and getting them to remember the details. What was the weather? What was the setting? What did it look like? What did it feel like? Who was there? What did they say? The trick to this assignment is to get the person you're interviewing to describe things, to take down what they say and quote it back.

The story: A 750- to 1,000 word narrative focusing on what your classmate learned from the surprise. I'd give it a soft lede, sort of a narrative: (1) a little story for an attention-getter; (2) the lesson learned in the nut graf; (3) the body of the story, which will be mostly narrative and description.

I think you'll do best if you approach this story in stages: (1) Do the initial interviewing today. (2) Write up as much of it as you can before class Friday, and make a list of "holes in the story," questions you didn't think of at first but need to explain things now. (3) Ask any follow-up questions on Friday. (4) Do the final draft over the weekend, and turn it the finished product Monday.

I post examples of news-feature stories that do this to the blog. In the meantime, you will get some ideas by reading the Boston Globe story by Richard Knox, and Don Murray's analysis of it, on pages 140-45 in the textbook.

COMM 207, 337: Student press furor

Cross-posted to my journalism blogs.

Content advisory. The subject matter of this controversy is offensive to many readers.

A student newspaper in New Britain, Conn., is in the news for a joke about locking a "14-year-old Latino girl" in a closet and urinating on her. The editors say they're within their First Amendment rights to publish it -- and the consensus is they're probably quite correct about that -- but the incident raises questions about professional standards and student journalism.

The cartoon appeared in last week's edition of The Recorder, student paper at Central Connecticut State University. It is difficult to describe, but The Hartford Courant made a creditable effort when it broke the story last week:

The comic strip printed in Wednesday's edition features a triangle-shaped figure talking on the phone with a square figure. When the triangle tells the square that his urine smells funny whenever he eats a certain cereal, the square asks if his urine tastes funny, too.

"I dunno," the triangle replies. "I'd have to ask that 14 year old Latino girl tied up in the closet."

In one of the panels, a chain can be seen over a closet door, and a voice from behind says "I'm hungry" in Spanish.

Underneath the comic, a message from the paper's editors says, "The Recorder does not support the kidnapping of (and subsequent urinating on) children of any age or ethnicity."

This is strike two for the student paper, the Courant noted. Last school year it published what was intended to be a satire praising rape as a "magical experience" for "ugly women."

Central Connecticut State president Jack Miller has come under fire for not cracking down on the paper, but he says he has to balance interests at a public, tax supported university. "While I recognize that the Recorder's right to publish is secured by the First Amendment and a broad range of judicial court decisions, I must say that I am offended by the decisions of the editorial staff, and Mark Rowan in particular. ... "I share the concerns of my Latin American colleagues and students and others for the hurt inflicted by the editor's decision to run this offensive cartoon."

I have to sympathize on both counts. The First Amendment does protect offensive speech, but I also think the paper was highly unprofessional.

• The Hartford Courant, arguably Connecticut's most influential daily, summed up its attitude today in an editorial headlined "Recorder Hits The Gong Again." The Courant said controversy can be a good thing if it's in a good cause, but neither the rape column nor the earlier cartoon remotely qualify. "Both used questionable, insensitive and crude humor to demean women. They also appear calculated to generate controversy for its own sake. As such, they're a morally empty exercise; the literary equivalent of sticking one's tongue on a street sign in winter and reading aloud from the First Amendment."
  
  
• The Michigan Daily, a independent student newspaper in Ann Arbor, Mich. Opinion page blogger Gary Garca also noted The Record's past lapses and adds, "The cartoon is not only degrading and humorless, it has no point. Offensive speech just for the sake of being offensive is unproductive and hardly the point of the First Amendment. While some of the responses have been a little dramatic, including that from the university’s president who wants to cut off advertising (which would essentially shut down the paper), this type of material shouldn’t be accepted."

One last point. Latin American women don't call themselves Latinos. They're Latinas. So the cartoon is not only tasteless and demeaning. It's ignorant.

COMM 337 - Wednesday's assignment

Here it is in writing: Take one of the observations or potential story ideas that you or one of your classmates posted to their blog, and speculate about how you would go about writing a story on it. What angle would you take? Who would you talk to? What would you ask them? Read the part about interviews in Don Murray's chapter on "Reporting for Surprise." Toward the end, he interviews a reporter on how to do interviews. How, specifically, could you use that reporter's tips in conducting your interviews? What problems might you anticipate in interviewing somebody on your subject? What would you do to prepare for the interviews? Post a paragraph or two in answer to these questions to your blog before class Wednesday.

Here's a link to our directory of class blogs. It has links to most of them.

By the way, I'm glad to see more people posting to the blogs today. I'd been getting a little worried about several of you. There's still plenty of time for everybody to get caught up, even though some of you have quite a bit of catching up to do. But we've been in school almost a month now, and the semester isn't going to last forever. If you're not one of the three or four people who have been keeping up with assignments, it's time to start getting caught up!

COMM 337: Surprise, 'people-watching' and story ideas

Since I was assigning you guys to do a list of 25 story ideas like Don Murray's list of observations in a supermarket (Writing to Deadline 16-17), I decided I'd better do the same. In addition to jotting down quirky little things I noticed that might be developed into a story, I also started free associating right off the bat ... as I saw things that reminded me of stories I've read before, that I might be able to spin off in a new direction. So I stuffed a napkin in my shirt pocket, kept it there all weekend and scribbled down ideas as they came to me. The resulting list:

1. Sacred Harp "singing" at Christian County Historical Society. Why there?
   
2. How do Midwesterners get interested in Sacred Harp singing? It's a Southern tradition of old-time gospel singing, very old-fashioned and folk music-ish.
   
3. What is a Sacred Harp singing like? I've seen stories based on interviews at individual singings in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer-Press. (A lot of writers keep what they call a "swipe file," clips of stories they might be able to do themselves someday.)
   
4. Does anybody sing for fun anymore? Why? Why not?
   
5. Portapotty next to 1820s log building on CCHS grounds.
   
6. How do you get a portapotty? Why? What are the regulations? Where do you rent one?
   
7. Is "portapotty" a trade name?
   
8. Volunteers setting up chairs, brewing coffee, helping in kitchen, etc. What does it take to put together a statewide singing convention?
   
9. Married couple from Sheffield in England. They're Sacred Harp afficionados ... on a two- or three-week vacation in the U.S., going on from Illinois to singing conventions in Colorado, New Mexico and Texas.
   
10. Southerners dressed up, e.g. wearing dresses, shirt and tie, starched white shirt, Midwesterners in T-shirts and Birkenstocks
    
11. Variety of down-home and major metro yuppie food at potluck -- ham and beans, barbecued chicken, church basement-ish casseroles, hummus bi tahini, vegan casseroles
    
12. Singer playing kaen (a wind instrument from Thailand made of one- to three-foot lengths of reed pipe). She is a returned Peace Corps volunteer who lives in Chicago.
    
13. Combines out. What kind of a crop year for corn and beans has it been?
    
14. Sign at Rochester city limits honoring high school science fair winner in addition to athletes
    
15. Business sign in Rochester for orthodontist, "Where Braces are Fun." How can that be!
    
16. Mural showing Abraham Lincoln and Martin van Buren painted on old grain elevator
    
17. Fiberglass cow from "Cows on Parade" outside restaurant on North Grand Avenue
    ___th anniversary of Cows on Parade promotion in Chicago (I did a Google search, and Cows on Parade was in 1999)
    
18. Chicago cows at State Fair in 1999
    
19. Traces of Chicago at the State Fair ... the "et'nic village" features Chicago restaurants and it seems like stage shows of traditional dance, etc., from half the ethnic churches in Cook County. Jamaican roots band called Waterhouse ... front man is an ethnomusicologist.
    
20. "Original Red Coach Inn horseshoe"
    
21. Horseshoes as Springfield "delicacy" (??) ... does anybody still eat these things? Who? Why?
    
22. Origin myths -- north end taverns vs. Leland Hotel
    
23. North end tavern food
    
24. The north end -- is any of it still distinctive in an increasingly homogenized, Wonder Bread culture?
    
25. I just did a keyword search on "Wonder Bread," and discovered a Wikipedia entry saying the U.S. manufacurer is having financial problems. Since Wikipedia is not always reliable, I am going to keep my eye on the Wonder Bread story for a while. If it stands up (i.e. isn't corrected by an irate PR person for the manufacturer in the next few days), I could use the product's apparent loss of market share and financial stablity to peg several trend stories on whole-grain, organic breads, changing taste in foods, etc. Wonder Bread has been a bland, white, middle-class icon for my generation.
    
26. Waggin Tails shelter -- an "evergreen" that gets profiled every few years in SJ-R, Illinois Times. It's a no-kill shelter with a lot of volunteers -- what do they do? why do they do it? what do they get out of it?
    
27. African American father and daughter in "kitten room"
    
28. Little girl and kitten -- do we choose our pets, or do they choose us?
    
29. Why a separate room for kittens?
    
30. How many cats are there in the sheleter? I count at least 30. What are the logistics of having 30-40 cats in the same building?

Some of these would make excellent stories. Others would go "pffft!" and vanish as soon as I tried to ask somebody the first question. Most of them, probably all of them, look pretty lame when you see them in a list like this. But if you start looking up background and interviewing people, any one of them could turn into a really interesting story. They're all about people, and dreaming up story ideas is nothing but old-fashioned "people-watching" focused on a specific objective.

One rule I try to make for myself when I'm brainstorming. There's no such thing as a bad idea. I don't want to censor myself. Like everybody else, I've got a little creep who sits on my shoulder and tells me, "Lame, lame. Nobody's going to want to read that." If I listen to him I'll never get anywhere, so I'm open to lame ideas. My own and other people's as well. Which leads me to my second rule. There's no such thing as an idea that's so good it can't be improved on. Especially when I'm brainstorming in a group, the best ideas often take shape when somebody says something kind of half-baked and somebody else takes it, changes it just a little bit and it turns into something absolutely brilliant.

As we look at each other's lists in class today, remember Rule No. 2. Read them over, choose an idea or two that seem especially do-able and suggest how you might go about turning them into a story -- who you might interview, what you'd ask them, how you might modify it a little bit and so on ... Post your suggestions as comments to each other's lists.

COMM 337: Surprise! Surprise!

Post to your blogs --

How does Donald Murray define "surprise?" You'll want to skim through Chapter 3, "EXPLORE: Report for Surprise," before answering this. He doesn't really define it, but he has several brief quotes you might want to include in your blog post.

How can you adapt Murray's concept to your own writing? In other words, how can you report for surprise? Hint: I think it has something to do with always being ready to be surprised.

Here's an example of how I might go about blogging it ...

So I'm sitting in a little family restaurant on 9th Street, throwing cholesterol bombs into my stomach (No. 3 on the menu, scrambled, corned beef hash, wheat toast) and wondering how I'm going to explain what Don Murray means when he says, "The constant awareness of the working journalist is not a mystery. It is something that can be learned and practiced" (35). And in the booth in front of me, I'm aware of a couple of guys with one of those tourist-y maps of Route 66 spread on across the table between them. The kind with little pictures of the Cozy Dog Drive-In and all the other tourist spots along old U.S. 66 between Chicago and St. Louis. Back in the day, it ran down 9th Street. They're in their mid- to late 30s, I'd say, and one of them is wearing a tan knit shirt with "RSPCA" embroidered on the sleeve.

With that, I start to get interested.

The only RSPCA I know of is the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, in England.

So I listen a little more carefully, and darned if one of the guys with the Highway 66 map doesn't have a British accent.

Do I have a story? I don't know yet. But I know how to find out. All I'd have to do is introduce myself, comment on the map and start a conversation. If my hunch is correct and they're Brits who are following old U.S. 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles, I could do a five-minute interview on the spot. I already know the old highway attracts occasional pilgrims from Europe, and I can get on the Internet later to fill in the background.

Anyway, that's what I think Murray means by surprise. If my hunches pan out, I've got a story. Just by keeping my eyes open, and being ready to be surprised.

But even though it's my assignment, it's your blog. So take this assignment, turn it around and adapt it to your own style, your own voice. Surprise me.

COMM 337: Reporting ... ABC, BBC, NHK poll

The subtitle. title of this course was supposed to be "beyond newswriting." See! There it is on our syllabus. But we keep coming back to the basics -- reporting, in other words -- because you never get beyond reporting.

In the news today, along with the political news about U.S. involvement in Iraq, is a poll by ABC News, the BBC (British Broadcasting Corp.) and the Japanese broadcaster NHK that finds "deepening dissatisfaction with conditions in Iraq, lower ratings for the national government and growing rejection of the U.S. role there."

At least in the U.S., it's what we call a sidebar story, one that kind of stands off to the side of the main news about Gen. David Petraeus' long-awaited report on the U.S. military "surge" in Iraq.

This time the sidebar has a sidebar of its own, a story on how the poll was done. I think it's a masterpiece of reporting.

Read it, and we'll discuss it in class.

A couple of things to think about: (1) How does this kind of reporting give a different view from that of the Iraqi priests who spoke at Springfield-Benedictine? How is it the same? (2) Should American media join with the Brits and Japanese to do a poll that some observers would say undercuts U.S. foreign policy in Iraq? Why? Why not? What are the principles to be balanced here?

COMM 337: Weekend blog assignment

Something to keep you busy and happy over the weekend ... also (and primarily) a review of your reading assignments in our textbook.

Re-read Chapters 1 and 2 of "Writing to Deadline" by Don Murray. Post to your blog a paragraph or two in answer to each of these questions:

1. Murray identifies and passes on several tips or processes that have helped him as a writer, starting with his habit of "writing" away from his desk (i.e. figuring out how to organize what he writes, word choices, etc.), on pages 16-17. Analyze your own writing processes as a communications student and therefore an apprentice professional writer, and compare them to Murray's. What tips can you pass on to other professional writing students?

2. What specific ideas in Murray's discussion of his writing practice and his interviews with staff writers for The Boston Globe can help you with your own writing? What specific ideas or anecdotes in their stories can help you develop your own sense of professionalism?

Read the chapters over the weekend, post a draft to your blog by class Monday and have a final draft of your post completed and edited by Wednesday.

COMM 207, 337: Newspapers, news and the internet

Cross-posted to my masscomm. blogs. -- pe

Here's one from a guy you should get familiar with, media critic Jack Shafer of the electronic magazine Slate.com. This column on how newspapers serve up a steady diet of leftovers from their internet editions is especially timely for students in Communications 207 (editing for publication) because it updates the chapter on news editing and copy flow we read for Thursday, but it's important for all of us.

What does the future hold for newspapers? That's anybody's guess, but you'll be able to guess better after you read Shafer.

And it will affect all of us, even those of you who have no intention of going into the newspaper business (or like me who have no intention of going back to newspapering). The news business still sets a lot of the standards for the communications industry. So it's worth knowing.

Besides, questions like this -- what does the future hold for newspapers? -- have a way of popping up on midterm and final exam essay tests.

Read it, and be ready to discuss in class.

COMM 337: Newswriting review -- the lede

I've decided we have two groups of people in Communications 337 who could use a quick-and-dirty review of COMM 209 (basic newswriting), at least the part on how to write a lede and "hang" a story from it.

First, the two types of people:

Students who haven't had COMM 209 yet and haven't studied how to organize a news story. The inverted pyramid is the basic building block.

Students who've had COMM 209 and have forgotten how to organize a news story. The inverted pyramid -- of course -- is still the basic building block.

Actually, now that I think of it, there's a third category:

Students who've had COMM 209, who remember the inverted pyramid and still could benefit from a review. And it goes without saying the inverted pyramid -- I'll bet you can see this coming by now -- is still the basic building block.

I think that covers all of us. So here goes.

For my money, the best, clearest explanation for beginners is by Lawrence Surtees of the Toronto Globe and Mail on the "SSN Newsroom" website for Canadian journalism students. Read it carefully, several times, too, and you'll understand how to organize a news story. You'll also start developing a feel for when to use a hard lede, when to use a soft lede and how to craft a lede that introduces the key elements of the rest of the story. Surtees also has an excellent tip sheet on "How to Write a Great News Story" that goes into this business of hard and soft news stories in a little more detail. I've assigned it once already, but it wouldn't hurt to read it again.

Here's something I learned from my first city editor, the late Dick Smyser of The Oak Ridger, a daily in Oak Ridge, Tenn. Dick told us to think of four or five keywords that had to be in the story. "Four die in flash flood," or "City council raises taxes." Those words would be in the lede.

Here's another link. A journalism student named David Cohn has an explanation of why some of us spell it "lede" in his blog DigiDave. It's basically so you don't get "lead" (the leading part of the story) it confused with "lead" (the metal). Cohn also has an example of what "Little Red Riding Hood" would look like with a hard news lede:

"A 10-year-old girl and her bed-ridden grandmother escaped death yesterday after a woodsman hacked open a cross-dressing wolf that swallowed them whole."

Try it. Choose a fairy tale or well-known story, and write a hard-news lede for it. Post it as a comment to this blog.

COMM 150, 207, 337, 393, etc. -- "30" and career advice

Cross-posted to all my blogs.

Found while surfing The San Francisco Chronicle's website SFGate, a "30 piece" by outdoors writer Paul McHugh with a bit of advice for any young people considering making journalism a career." He sums it up in three words:

Go for it!

The column, which ran in the print edition Thursday, was McHugh's last. He's retiring after 22 years on the outdoors beat.

"I'm about to fold my tent and take a hike," said McHugh. "And yes, I do mean that literally."

Like many journalists, McHugh said he's proudest of the stories that exposed abuses and helped correct them:

One great part of a newspaper job is that it awards permission to ask questions and seek answers. I've focused on trying to wield that power well, particularly while facing folks who didn't seem inclined to answer. This job hasn't been only about fun; I've striven to address real resource and public-access issues.

On a few occasions, I've been able to perform investigative work that's at the heart of our journalistic mission. I broke up a cabal of the heedless and malfeasant, helping Asilomar become a well-managed funding source for our state parks department. I ushered an abusive administrator out the door of the California State Parks Foundation, and helped that organization to revive. Fighting for the public felt fabulous. If any of you young folks out there should feel tempted to join the right honorable crusade of journalism, here's my best advice: Go for it! You are needed. Especially if you have the insight and multimedia skills to help journalism re-invent itself for this new century.

McHugh says, "Humanity's age of exploration, of adventure and of existential challenge is far from over," even though the present isn't very inspiring. Again, his advice sums up in three words: Go for it! He adds:

History's overarching lesson, as far as I can tell, is that a time of ease ought to be used in steady preparation for times of hardship or calamity ahead - which will come to us in their turn, as surely as sunrise. If periods of ease are used only to grow soft and indolent, then after calamity returns, you'll have to shoulder more blame than you might want.

Something worth thinking about.

But what's a "30 piece?"
Back in the days when newspapers received their news over the telegraph, the custom grew up of keying in "30" at the end of a transmission. So "30" came to stand for the end of the story, and a "30 piece" came to stand for a writer's last bylined column. Nobody ever types "30" at the end of a story anymore (except occasionally an overeager public relations intern ending their first press release), but it's a bit of nostalgia that still lingers. Like this:

-- 30 --