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>

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.