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My grandpa called right before I left for work today to notify me of a fire downtown near the Spokesman building. Nick was giving me a ride, so he grabbed his video camera gear and told me to ask whether they needed him. The smoke was looking white when we drove by, as if the fire were almost out, but then as I entered the newsroom the whole building went up in flames again. So I called Nick back to send him over and recorded scanner chatter at his request.
It was enough to get my adrenaline going, and I earned a new speed record for my morning task of sorting and distributing newspapers. Then I paced around awhile because there was nothing else I could do. My heart rate is still high.
Print forces us to do a lot of stupid things in journalism. I’ve done plenty of design and I greatly admire talented designers, but the fact remains: The pages of a print newspaper often end up being the proverbial “box” we’re supposed to be thinking outside of. Print forces us to cut stories that could be longer, or put a insignificant story on the front page because it’s the one with a photo, or use an imprecise headline because, well, it has to fit. We end up trying to make brownies in a bundt pan.
The internet changes all of that. We’ll still have the concept of “dominant art” on the web, and there’s still value in keeping stories concise — but so many of those news judgment decisions will be freed from the influence of print limitations. It’s really exciting.
There are two main breakthroughs:
1. Freedom of the internet (choose your medium, any medium)
2. Freedom from print (goodbye, newshole)
Also, I apologize for all this essay stuff. Without school I have to be earnest about things on my own time.
Seeing your own haunts and hometowns in national television documentaries is a very modern mirror. It’s a warped mirror and we know it, but we can’t shake the atavistic vanity and giddiness of seeing a piece of our own lives on television. Or the internet, such as it is now, which is how Nick and I watched Dateline’s “Death on the Palouse” (about Frederick Russell) and “The Case of the South Hill Rapist” (about Kevin Coe).
One last aside before I get to the point of all this: I know the car crash was very serious and tragic and all that — I’ve been a part of it as newspaper editor, after all — but I can’t read the title “Death on the Palouse” without saying it aloud in an overwrought dramatic voice.
And now, the point: I’m reading “Son: A Psychopath and His Victims” by Jack Olsen. Some of the attacks happened just blocks from where I live, on the same sidewalks where I run and walk to work every morning. It’s really, really creepy.
Yesterday the Spokesman published a same-sex couple’s wedding announcement for the first time. Some editors were concerned about the possibility of angry calls, and I’m glad there’s been discussion about it, but really the response was negligible. Libby dealt with one irate woman who called yesterday morning and there were a few emails, but that’s nothing compared to a mixed-up crossword puzzle or mislabeling a WWII airplane in a photo cutline.
Today we have an engagement announcement for another lesbian couple and no one’s even mentioned it.
Thinking a lot about newsroom work flow recently, mostly in connection with this reorganization think tank project going on at my paper, I just wanted to map out the most basic of work flow models. It’s nothing new, but it seems like every conversation about newsroom operation would be easier if we all had our basics straight.
For example, everyone always talks like the internet makes things so much more confusing. It’s really the exact same flow, just with different tasks at the Producer step. The roles here are the basic archetypes, the essential components of getting news content to the public. Each role is not necessarily designated to one person, as the Position example illustrates. Five or six different people may be involved in the editor role for a single piece of content; conversely, a single person could fill all the roles, like when I publish something journalism-like here on my blog.
This chart is hardly comprehensive. It doesn’t even indicate deadlines, let alone all the decisions and routines established in a newsroom work flow. The point is to get everyone thinking in the same framework to further discussion about how newsrooms can be more efficient and integrate multiple platforms.
I first started reading about photojournalism ethics when I was doing my thesis, and despite thesis burnout I’ve maintained an interest because how we choose to believe in pictures is just so darn fascinating.
Digital manipulation and “Photoshop” as a verb are recent innovations, but the concept has been around as long as we’ve had photography. (That’s why some of the most confusing Photoshop tools to young digital-age users are the ones like dodge and burn that are based on old darkroom techniques.) There are two main ways to make a photo lie: 1) Change the photo after its been taken or 2) say it shows something other than what it actually shows.
Example from both angles have been in the news recently, so here’s a roundup of good stuff:
- Errol Morris (he’s awesome) on the purpose of Iran’s missile manipulation, also including vintage Soviet comrade erasure photos. Back story. Morris’ awesome NYT blog. His original post that got me hooked.
- Poynter’s Kenny Irby interviews the NYT picture editor about how they chose to run a photo of a hurt child from Zimbabwe that ended up being mispresented. The child has club feet, but his mother lied with a more poignant account, depserate to get her son care. Original correction.
- Finally, this one isn’t about lies. It’s about repercussions of the truth, and basically what my thesis was about. Warren Zinn writes about wondering whether the picture he took of Army medic Joseph Dwyer at the beginning of the Iraq War contributed to Dwyer’s PTSD-related suicide.
This, from an article about catching rides on friends’ private jets in the NYT Sunday Styles section:
In fact, [socialite Marjorie Gubelmann] Raein added, more often it is just a matter of friendly convenience. “It’s not like you’re some moocher,” she said. “You’re going somewhere and someone happens to have a plane.”
Green that formulation is not, and yet it does possess a kind of poetry for its beneficiaries.
The important paragraph there is the second one. Congratulations if you, like me, recognized it as an allusion to one of Federico Garcia Lorca’s more famous poems, “Romance Sonambulo.” I mean, it’s so subtle it could be accidental except that it’s so clever.
People who don’t read The New York Times think it’s stodgy and elitist. It’s actually quite playful, and while I wouldn’t rule out elitist it seems to me like a bunch of writers who’ve learned to have fun with what they do without worrying that every reader will catch every little thing. As for the readers, they catch a reference here and there and feel clever about it like they’re in on some smart-people joke. I get paranoid thinking about how much I probably miss.
I have nothing against advisers in college newsrooms, except that so often advising is just a front for interfering.
This story about the St. Louis University student paper (via Romenesko) made me cringe.
Basically, the administration might ban the old adviser from the newsroom because he keeps showing up even on production nights even though the adminisration hired a new full-time adviser as part of process to “rewrite the newspaper’s charter.”
“We think it serves everybody to have one voice as an adviser,” [university spokesman Jeff] Fowler said. “You shouldn’t have two people with different ideas causing confusion.”
Mindwash the baby watchdogs, that’s bold. If you can prevent journalists from growing up as critical thinkers, you’ve got a pretty effective censorship tool. Ugh, the cringe-count is astronomical. The sad part is this kind of interfering from all sides probably isn’t that rare. I’d like to think student editors would better rise to the challenge if they weren’t coddled or threatened all the time.
Thank goodness for smart student editors willing to train a new guard, independent budgeting, an administration that wouldn’t dare censor, and Al Donnelly. The memory of free reign might make the rest of our careers harder, but thank goodness for the Evergreen, where our mistakes and our triumphs were always our own.
Idea: Create a promotion where families get a 10 percent discount off their annual newspaper subscription for each child verifiably enrolled in a local school.
If a family has three school-age children, they get the paper for a 30 percent discount. There would be some initial revenue loss from families that already subscribe, but it would also encourage new subscribers and train a new generation of little newspaper readers.
Children who grow up in households with newspapers assume everyone subscribes to the paper. They assume this makes you a good family, and they secretly wonder what’s wrong with their friends’ families that don’t get the paper. You could work in other tie-ins, like a weekly email that gives parents age-appropriate ideas of how to relate the newspaper to their children’s schooling, or a corresponding online forum or blog.
I don’t know much about revenue and loyalty projections on these things, but I assume it would work.
There’s been a lot of talk recently about the future of journalism, and my job places me amid stimulating conversation while conveniently providing me with lots of pondering time as I complete repetitive tasks.
I figured it was time to wholeheartedly throw my fedora into the ring. I’m tired of hearing certain assumptions tossed around with no factual basis. I’d like to think journalists would know better. These assumptions also tend to ignore the fundamentals of journalism: Serve the community by providing useful and understandable information. Here are some of the ones bothering me:
1. There are web people and there are print people. These groups do not overlap.
2. Young people only care about the internet and think newspapers are lame.
3. Young journalists only care about the internet.
OR
Young journalists are conservative and nostalgic.
Read on for a much longer explanation.
I once gave a friend advice about her hair length by explaining the economics concept of point of diminishing returns. I’ve been known to compare photography with calculus (points on a curve) and make Venn diagrams of my conflicts of interest.
Recently I’ve been reading “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” by Jared Diamond, and I keep thinking about the newspaper industry and the lessons we can learn from the Vikings and the Mayans.
This is just a sneak preview. I’ve only halfway through the book and it will take me a while to organize my thoughts on the whole thing into something useful. But it may be wonderful.
Celebrity sighting, awesome! Cougar basketball player Aron Baynes was looking trim and teammate Caleb Forrest was back to yeti hair when they were spotted among the crowds at Hoopfest. They had a little entourage of giddy middle-schoolers following them around and left a wake of people doing double-takes and saying things like, “Is that the Baynes kid?”
Nick talked to them and looked really short. Most of the team is just staying in Pullman all summer and they came up to see the Hoopfest madness and sign stuff for fans. Nick and I agreed there were more citizen ballplayers sporting Cougar gear than Zags gear out on the courts, so it’s nice to see people haven’t forgotten. Here is a gratuitous paparazzi shot for Christina:
And if you want to reminisce with the original Christina Meets Baynes post, it’s here.
Sometimes I feel like I came into journalism late, that I’m behind people like Brian and Jacob who did it in high school. However, I had in fact been a reporter, editor, publisher, pressman and delivery boy long before I ever got a byline in the Evergreen.
I founded and ran the New News Newspaper for my second-grade class. It think it published about monthly, and I’d completely forgotten about it until I found this old copy. It was one of the first issues, maybe the actual first one. There weren’t that many total. As usual, I apparently got into journalism due to boredom and needing a challenge.
It’s a well-known fact among linguists that the natural life of English words is evolving from nouns into verbs. I specifically say “evolving” and not “devolving” because I’m not a language purist. Some people will sit around moaning about how language is breaking down and whatnot, but these are probably the same people who complained about automobiles and women wearing pants and The Beatles. It’s been going on since before Shakespeare first used “torture,” “gossip,” “forward” and “lapse” as verbs (he also moved some, like “scuffle,” from a verb to a noun), so it’s about time to get over it.
The series of tubes neé internets neé cyberspace neé World Wide Web (in standard parlance) has certainly accelerated the process, partly because it spreads everything faster and partly because it provides so many new opportunities for new verbs. This is really just a continuation of my old wikiwandering post.
The argument about whether “Googling” is allowed originated during my time as a journalist, but it still seems like a really long time ago. Same with “Photoshopped” as an adjective, or lawl- neé lol- neé LOLspeak as a system of syntax. I was already an editor before papers stopped using www.MySpace.com on every reference. (Look for a manifesto regarding “website” in coming days.)
The most recent noun/verb evolution in use in my household is “internetting” for the general activity of using a computer (aka internets machine) to access the internet for general purposes like blogging, reading blogs, checking news stories, checking email or browsing YouTube (the standard round of websites). This led to the variant “internetzing,” derived from “internets,” obviously, and cuter with a Z because it looks like waltzing or something. This leads to sentences like, “I internetzed for a while after breakfast” or “I’ll just being internetzing until you’re ready to go.”
There’s a certain amount of futile nobility in trying to freeze it exactly as-is, but it’s just obstinate when it starts interfering with the purpose of language, which is communicating ideas in the most efficient way possible.
I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but I had to create a “working” blog category long after I already had a “journalism” one. Rather than explaining the difference, it was easier to make an adorable Venn diagram
(The post title is playing off Socrates, by the way, in case it sounded familiar but you remember “Sophie’s World” and high school philosophy less sharply than I do.)
You can tell the letters that come from very old people by the handwriting. Sometimes it’s in slanted script and other times it’s simple printing, but it always comes with subtle tremors. It’s not clumsy like a child’s unpracticed writing, but stilted from decades of wear on a well-used hand.
Today I opened a letter addressed vaguely to the newspaper with the handwriting of an old woman. Inside was a request to cancel her subscription, along with a handwritten sentence of justification:
“Service has been wonderful but money is running low.”
I resealed the envelope and sent it on through interdepartmental mail with “circulation” written in red letters.
This is why a world with journalists also needs novelists. Or blogs.
Today I entered a child who was born to be an example for journalism students and cub reporters everywhere: Emalie Smythe.
Never assume anything.
An hour outside Spokane on winding narrow highways where roads have names like Gas Line Road and St. John Gun Club Road, thousands of people set up colorful sun canopies and gather for the day on one particular hillside. They’re out there to watch Webb’s Slough sprint boat racing, the Northwest’s loud, dirty version of Nascar that smells of hot engines and waffle cones.
Nick was doing a video for the Spokesman, so I went along for the ride. The race venue was cut into the base of a hill just off the highway, with kids from a local sports team directing traffic in the cut-field parking lot. Basically, teams of two (a driver and navigator) race around a twisting course, trying to beat the clock and avoid running aground on tight corners while plumes of muddy wake water douse members of the “Slough Crew” (it rhymes). Nick got caught on the wrong side of a mud splash trying to get a shot.
Sometimes I’m embarrassed by my Nikon D40. Designed specifically to market SLR cameras to the average consumer, it’s not an unusual camera and doesn’t command any sort of respect in the professional world. It’s like having read “Gone With the Wind” three times – people who know very little will be impressed, and people who know quite a lot will smile indulgently and inwardly snicker. Either way is awkward.
But the same thing that makes it too pedestrian to be really awesome is what makes it a technical marvel. I played around with all the settings at first and tried to treat it like a tiny D1H (the only other SLR I’ve handled), but it just doesn’t work the same. It’s missing crucial settings like white balance, and the auto settings are just too good to not use.
Today I finished stacking the past year of newspapers at the Spokesman. Along with giving me plenty of time to think, it was a tour through the ups and (mostly) downs of the newsroom. Papers were fatter last June, before bylines disappeared in October and the stacks I was dealing with became less organized. Nick’s first front-page story came up in the issues from about a year ago, right about when he was hired, right about a year before I was hired under vastly different circumstances.
This goes on for quite a while regarding the McClatchy news, the past year, the bleak future and continuing the struggle.
I was reading Sports Illustrated during breakfast this morning and turned to the column at the back even though I know Rick Reilly stopped writing sometime between now and when I used to read SI at home. The column by Selena Roberts shocked me.
She’s writing about trying to visit Pine Valley Golf Club, hailed as the nation’s top-ranked golf course:
I didn’t get past heaven’s gate. “It’s just for members,” said the polite guard with the clipboard, “just members.” We both knew I could never be one of them unless I were willing to reconfigure my plumbing with a sex change.
Women still aren’t even allowed to enter some private golf courses. Uh, what? I grew up with the idea that sexism was an anachronism, at least in its overt form. Sure, girls are expected to be more polite and grow up to make smalltalk at the office and offer to bring in brownies whenever anyone mentions it, but that’s way better than the “girls can’t handle schooling or athletic activities” mentality of not that long ago. Wikipedia tells me Pine Valley does now allow women after 1 p.m. on Sundays. Oh, fantastic!
Roberts, formerly of the NYT, makes a number of good points in her column against barring women from the elite courses: it’s discriminatory, it’s doesn’t make sense financially, it spreads the sexist reach to the corporate world where female executives can’t play a round with the guys. But it seemed strange even reading the reasons, as if they have to be reiterated. I can’t believe they actually do.
I’ve been thinking a lot about feminism and sexism recently, and it’s neat to see the discussion getting play in the national media even if it’s due to Hillary Clinton’s concession of the Democrats’ presidential nomination. I never thought about it much before college in the paradigm of feminism, but I’ve lived it for most of my life as an athlete and more recently as a journalist: Women have to fight harder to earn the same amount of respect as their male peers.
But that’s a much longer battle. I thought we’d at least won against obvious discrimination already. But I guess if rich white males need to keep a small piece of the world where their frightened selves can remember what it was like to be not just most powerful, but omnipotent, at least it’s a golf course. What a boring game.
UPDATE: Oh, they also found a last haven in anonymous internet comments. Check out the comments following Roberts’ column. Here’s an example:
SI has to get Roberts off the back page. Her articles are consistently hack jobs with little basis in fact or actual knowledge of the subject matter. The most recent article on sexism in golf, though not nearly as poorly written as the horseracing article, is still absurd. First off, private clubs can have any admission policy they want, whether you think its fair or not. They arent receiving Federal or state money, so deal with it. Oddly, private clubs(golf oriented or otherwise) only receive such scrutiny when the are all male. As far as her spillover theory, her “evidence” consists of a few antecdotes. Hey Selena, my club has a “Ladies Day” once a week. If only i had been a daughter so i could play with my Mum!!!!! /cry.
Wow.
Papercuts. Mostly it’s the ads actually, but as we all know you can’t have a paper without ‘em.
Unless I’m busy with other tasks, my afternoons at work have so far been sorting and organizing the contests closet at the Spokesman. This is where they keep copies of each paper going back through the previous year or so to have on hand for contest entries. Being less than necessary for getting the paper out, it was pretty low on the priority list in the past year while the Spokesman underwent layoffs and a lot of staffing turmoil. So I’m fixing it.
I’ve been going through a stack of papers from each day dating back to April 2007. I remove all ads and inserts (pictured above, gracias to Nick for taking the photos) before stacking the papers back on the shelves in an orderly way.
And okay, it does not make me hate print. Yes, it is tedious and makes my feet hurt from standing. And I have either a hangnail or a paper cut on every finger except my thumbs, and all turn black with the ink. But it’s kind of fun, too.
The way a particular day’s papers stack up delights me aesthetically. The repetition, color and horizontal lines just strike me as a pleasing abstraction of what a day’s work means at a newspaper. I think of this as the “barcode” of that day for some reason.
This picture is from the Spokesman closet of old papers I’ve been organizing, just for illustrative purposes. (The orange is from the day a fuel depot blew up last summer, by the way.)
When I was an editor at the Evergreen, one of my favorite parts of each day was walking into the basement of Murrow East toward the newsroom and seeing that day’s barcode in the stack of papers at the front counter. It was symbolic of that truth we both cherish and curse, that each day means a new paper and a new opportunity – to both do good things and make painful mistakes.
The web is far more fluid. There’s no do-or-die deadline, no daily packaging that says, “This is everything important that happened today. Check back tomorrow.” I never worked in a newsroom before the days of all-day anytime web updates, but I can still be nostalgic for it and see it represented in the daily barcode.
I like the aesthetic of a stack of newsprint, printed and folded and creased with a certain amount of necessary haphazardness. I like the slight variations in ink tone and registration that make each paper a unique imprint of the same information. I like the heavy, utilitarian feel of newsprint, just durable enough for its one-day lifespan and yellowed fragility in old age that makes you handle history like the memento mori that it is.
Pretty much anything is possible on the internet, but not that.
In honor of finishing my first week as a Spokesman editorial assistant, here is a sampling of the things I did in my first 40.5 hours (Friday got busy).
Listened
- to a woman who said the cryptograms used to be “really cute” with puns, and they’re not funny anymore.
- to a man who said the 9/11 masterminds on trial should not get the satisfaction of the death penalty, and neither should they be locked up for life in a cushy jail with us paying for their meals and care. His solution: Give them sex-change operations and ship them overseas to be locked up for life as women in a Saudi Arabian prison. “I bet you never thought about that before, did ya?” he said. No, sir, I hadn’t.
- to at least a dozen phone messages where the caller doesn’t realize he or she has reached voicemail.
“Is it working?” “I can’t tell.” “But did you get through?” “I’m not sure.” … “Well, that was no help at all!” … “Did it work this time?” “I still can’t tell!” … “Oh, poo!
Lots more below.
I was angry about this NYT piece when I read it between calls with crazy people today. Basically Jim Sheeler wrote a book from his Pulitzer-winning story for The Rocky Mountain News about the Marine who has to notify families when their Marine has died. And some writer felt the need to cheapen the whole thing by extracting quotes that used to mean something and shoving them into a greatest-hits bastardization of one of the greatest pieces of journalism I’ve ever read.
In my memory, the writing is amazing. It’s the kind of writing that makes you think of the story first and the writer second, even if you start with high expectations. I read it all the way through twice last summer. The first time I found myself crying because of the story. The second time I read it to see how it was done, to see the blueprints and wiring, and found myself crying because there’s a chance I could never write like that my whole life no matter what I do. As Brian once said, “Jim Sheeler could write the Bible so much better than God did.”
In the end, I decided not to hate the writer of the article too much because it’s a difficult task to write about brilliant writing. Also, probably even an atrocious article is worth it if more people know about the original and read it.
I also realized I had a sort of jealous attachment to the original story, because it was probably the most meaningful piece of journalism I read during the first year I considered myself a journalist. It was the first to express this war and my generation as worthy of a place in history. It also seemed like a special tie to those of us who learned real journalism at the Evergreen – as Jacob has said, what is possible.
I also wondered whether the story would strike me the same way if I read it again now, a year later. Rather, I knew it would be different but couldn’t be certain which direction it would go. So far I haven’t had the time and/or courage to find out.
That’s my favorite newspaper name. Just putting that out there for the person who found my blog by searching for awesome newspaper names since it may have appeared I’m only interested in names or newspapers.
As we’ve discussed at the Evergreen, The Patriot-Ledger is a good second. The newspaper at my high school (which I never had anything to do with) is called The Harbinger, a pretty cool unusual newspaper name.
In terms of real newspapers most people have heard of, I’ve always liked the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and my hometown StarTribune, and I’ve grown fond of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer because it’s so weird and has a snappy little nickname. Maybe later I’ll do a post on worst newspaper names.
Yesterday I was reading an article about blogging policies and repercussions for journalists (via Romenesko, obviously) and had the expected “how does it affect ME?” response of wondering whether the Spokesman has a policy. The next paragraph answered my question:
The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington, is another paper with an explicit policy – a three-paragraph, seemingly all-bases-covered rundown that warns against a number of actions, including threatening the paper’s credibility and objectivity; writing about one’s professional work or partisan beliefs; and posting anything that might put one’s “moral character” into question. Also, slapped onto the end of its policy, the paper includes this line: “Rather than engage in the futile task of listing what is and isn’t appropriate, we expect simply that you don’t do anything that would embarrass or unpleasantly surprise editors or colleagues.”
I looked for a while yesterday, maybe 10 minutes, and couldn’t find this policy in my newly acquired staff handbook or the company intranet. But I probably just don’t know where to look. Odd that it doesn’t appear the writer of the article actually talked to anybody at the Spokesman.
All this blogging hullabaloo is just the newest product of an a weird dichotomy in news industry. You have to be an unconditional fan of free speech, and at the same time forfeit your own personal right to express opinions. It’s kind of fake, yeah, because obviously everyone has opinions, political and otherwise, whether we talk about them or not. On the other hand, in a way it’s like the tree falling in the middle of the forest: If you support a particular candidate, for example, but never say anything about it, does it really count as supporting them at all? The whole point is credibility, especially in a world where most of the public believes media outlets are maliciously biased, so I do actually believe objectivity is a full-time job. But I also think it’s dumb if newspapers get too terrified about personal blogs having too much personality. It’s disheartening to think newspapers’ “transparency” mantra is just as PR-oriented and artificial as all the blather journalists are supposed to cut through. Credible is not synonymous with stiflingly professional. I’m a firm believer that the future of newspapers relies on earning credibility through solid journalism and open doors. There are real people behind the bylines and processes behind the stories. Whether in government or the watching media, closed doors are always cause for suspicion. We may as well be open about our work and who we are as people.
In any case, I know of a handful of people who blog and also happen to work at the Spokesman. In most cases it’s not something they (we?) are trying to hide at all. My philosophy of decency is based on the Grandma Standard, as in my grandma reads my blog.
As many of you know, I got a job and it starts today. Don’t get too excited. I leave in a few minutes for my first day as an editorial assistant at the Spokesman. I answer phones, organize newspapers in the newsroom, put paper in printers, run errands, compile calendars, maybe lay out some stuff and, in an ironic twist, compile the baby names for birth announcements.
As they said at the Spokesman staff meeting I sat in on Thursday, it’s not sexy journalism but it matters to a lot of people. They were talking about something completely different that probably wasn’t a great idea (ooh, am I allowed to say that anymore?), but it fits.
I was not planning to get a job this soon. But last week I finally had two hours with nothing to do, and got bored, so it’s probably for the better.
But it’s his job, so nothing to be suspicious about. This is just a belated update about the softball tournament Nick was covering last Saturday and Sunday. One of the teams he was following, Montesano, won the whole thing to become the 1A state softball champs.
During the tournament, one team lost their first game because a girl who hit what would have been a game-winning home run didn’t touch first base. They were very upset. So I was telling Nick about the technicality horror stories coaches always used to tell me, and how I got myself a lot of warnings from coaches (and officials) for stepping on the white line inside the track.
That very day the girl who won the Washington state 4A (I think) 3,200-meter run was disqualified for running on the line for three consecutive curves. All her competitors felt bad and passed their medals up and whatnot, according to a Spokesman story. I’m not sure how I feel about the whole thing, because I think it’s totally irrelevant rule in a race that long, and at the same time a major part of sports is following arbitrary rules. It sucks for her, definitely, and for all the other runners who were cheated out of a fair race they could feel good about. Too bad she didn’t have good coaches to tell her horror stories she’d still remember years later.
Fast-pitch softball looks really weird. It doesn’t seem like it should be physically possible to throw like that. I watched a bunch of the state 1A high school softball tournament today in Spokane with Nick while he was covering three of the teams. Only he’s not Spokesman Guy this week, because he’s writing for The Bellingham Herald and The Daily World (better known as Jacob’s paper). Which is sort of weird, but there’s nothing in his contract that says he can’t do it since neither of those West side papers is a competitor of the Spokesman’s.
Unlike last week’s soccer game, it was miserably windy and cold today, with just enough raindrops to make you fear how much more miserable it could get. It least I didn’t get sunburned.
Also, softball turned out to be a lot more interesting than expected. I tagged along partly because I assumed it would be so boring I’d be forced to do real work (like writing a news story and Evergreen history stuff). It was actually pretty interesting, though not something I’d want to do regularly. You know how they try to scare teens into not wanting kids by making them take care of real babies? I bet two straight months of watching weekend softball and Little League tournaments would be more effective.
Today I was looking forward to a leisurely day of running, breakfast, reading the paper, lunch, reading a book, doing laundry, dinner, and going to a movie.
Then WSU announced a new provost.
I was not pleased. I have yet to have a boring day since graduation. I’ve informally been the Evergreen admin reporter, covering provost candidates, more provost candidates, A2P2 and other things that come up. But I still have no interest in looking for a job, probably because I haven’t been bored enough to care yet. How can I miss reporting the news if the news won’t let me take a break?
I do get to sleep in and go running more. So that’s nice. And I get to eat dinner and not go to class. But I’m still looking forward to a change of pace, or at the very least a change of scenery.
The Spokesman-Review periodically runs a “Then & Now” feature about some local athlete from the past and what they’re doing now. Today my uncle Dick Olsen was featured for his stellar hurdles performances back when he was in high school (he won three state titles his senior year) and college at WSU.
It was a pretty good story, but unfortunately the Spokesman continues to fail at its news industry purpose of providing information to the public, instead locking all their stories behind a subscriber-only login. So instead of a happy post about “cool, my uncle’s in the paper” (and, sure, I still have a little of that reflex even after being part of the industry), it’s a rant about how newspapers have to make their online content free if they want to survive.
You see this debate back and forth on Romenesko and in newspapers’ policy, but it’s really quite simple: Old people are the only ones who think readers will pay for online content. Young people don’t want to pay, and won’t. No young person in the industry thinks making subscribers pay for online content will work. The business of newspapers has been about advertising, not subscriptions, since the penny press was invented. The internet only continues this. How about making the internet free, and charging more for the print product that old people (who are willing to pay) still want. I would be willing to pay an environmental/production fee for a paper copy, maybe. Like once a week.
You know who wants to read that story about my uncle? The congregation of his church in Las Vegas. I bet none of them subscribe to the Spokesman, so none of them enjoyed the story or increased the Spokesman’s online advertising revenue by looking at the story. The first step to building the online page views necessary to build online advertising revenue is not blocking people who want to increase your page views!
Information wants to be free, man. But that’s not the point. Anyone who realizes older readers are going to die before younger readers should be able to figure out free content is a much better business model.
UPDATE: At least for now, you can’t access the story at all through the Spokesman website without a password, but you can read the first page by doing a handy Google search of my uncle’s name.
The China earthquake disaster didn’t really hit me until this morning. I knew about it almost as soon as anyone in the U.S., thanks to ever-updating NYT online. And I’ve been watching the death toll rise to more than 30,000 with hope running out for those lost or buried. I looked at a few photo slideshows and videos and was fascinated by a story about how the Chinese building boom led to shoddy construction habits that made the damage worse.
But this morning I read part of an L.A. Times story printed as a sidebar in The Spokesman-Review that tore through the news absorption gauze you get from being far away and reading too many newspaper stories and lolling about in a summer haze. It’s about Chinese college students who took in teenage kids, high-schoolers and middle-schoolers, who haven’t found their parents yet and probably won’t. Maybe it’s because I still feel like a college student and I can imagine my 15-year-old sister and 17-year-old brother the same as those Chinese kids, but it made me cry.
I accompanied Nick to Spokane today while he covered the state boys 4A soccer quarterfinals. Eastlake beat Mead 3-2. It was a pretty good game, and brought back memories of that time really long ago when my life was dominated by soccer. I’m not really sure why it was such a tremendously important event for the Spokesman-Review to cover, and everyone there seems equally surprised a Spokesman reporter cared about their game. They didn’t have any media preparations, but then they didn’t even have a refreshments stand, either. They did have printed rosters, so after Nick showed Ticket Booth Mom his press badge she called after him – “Spokesman Guy! Spokesman Guy!” – to give him a roster.
It was really hot. It showed; the teams scored a combined five goals in the first half, and none in the second half. They looked tired. I got sunburned and tired, too.
I came into the Evergreen newsroom today to do some of the reporting I still feel a little obligated to do as long as I have newroom keys and a desk with crap on it. Instead I got distracted by library books I still have out about Martha Gellhorn. I think I was mostly into that before I started this blog, so maybe I haven’t written about her yet. She was a war reporter, married to Ernest Hemingway for a while, by most accounts had such a great love and compassion for humanity as a whole that she pretty much ignored her son, and had a tendency to just leave for another war when personal life got difficult or dull. So I see her as both a role model and a cautionary tale.
Anyway, this is from a letter she wrote to Hemingway in December 1943, talking about why she does journalism:
“… if such as me did not write, far worse people would do so. I can only guarantee the truth of what I write, not ever saying that I write the whole truth, because I never know the whole truth and if I did no one would publish it. But I know I am conscientious and serious, and fake nothing, and I think really that I do a sort of negatively useful thing, in employing the space and paper that would otherwise go to someone far worse.”
I quote that part because on bad days that is the reason I keep doing journalism, at least for now. It’s an awful reason, sort of. But she had other good things to say, so I put the whole portion of that letter below.
This multi-part story by a Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter facing her 1984 rape has been getting mention on Romenesko, so today I read it. Wow. This is brave journalism, daring and deep social commentary disguised in an equally powerful personal story. Read it, preferably when you have time to sit down 45 minutes or an hour to read the whole thing, but in any case read it.
I spotted this book near the table where I was sitting with Nick at Rico’s last night. The cover design is pretty awesome, it’s like space age-constructivist-archaic tech-futurism. This 5th edition was printed in 1963 and warned in the introduction that journalism is imperative for resisting communism. It taught me how teletype worked.
This was the highlight of an evening filled with work frustration stories (not mine, for a change). Until this happened …
I’ve been taking some photos this semester, mostly when we’re desperate or the other photographers are lazy. I never get assignments, but I don’t ask for them, either. I haven’t tried that hard to learn the D1H well even though I have access, and I’ll be the first to say I’m not a very good photographer yet.
I’m starting to think I should stop saying that. Not because I’m any good, but because I’m decent enough to get a little respect and right now I don’t get any. I consistently disagree with which photo (of mine) is best, but I don’t trust myself enough to really argue. Everything I do might get better if I started arguing less over my writing and more over my photos.
Tomorrow I’ll have a front-page hail photo (slow art day). Which one is better?
From the NYT website. I wonder who wrote the headline.
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