Conversation

It is appropriate that my final assignment of my undergraduate career at UMass is a post about comment culture. My whole degree is about communication of one form or another.

The first assignment, letters to the editor, was certainly a high point, as the letter I wrote was about something I cared about, and it was published. I really feel I added to the conversation because I addressed a topic of broad interest to the readers of the Recorder. Hopefully, I convinced a few readers (besides myself) to shovel out their fire hydrant or storm drain. I think that it is interesting that I started the class with old-school, one-way conversation using a newspaper. These day, of course, even newspaper content is almost always interactive, where people post comments on all stories and letters to the editor. But the Greenfield Recorder, like many small regional newspapers, limits the content that they put on line in an effort to not give away too much content for free. One of the things they don’t have on their website is their letters section, so I didn’t have an opportunity to interact with other readers. I just put it out there and hoped people read it and took action.

Submit to the current theme

For my user generated content assignment, I submitted a picture to Pictory. Unfortunately, the topic won't close until after this class is over, so I won't be able to find out if they selected my photo or to see any feedback which is a little disappointing.

When I was looking at the different options for this assignment, when I saw Pictory for the first time I knew that was where I wanted to share my content. The site impressed me with how beautiful it is. The pictures are amazing, the stories compelling and the organization and layout of the site itself is nicely done. Clean look, easy to read and navigate, the overall experience is really enjoyable. My wife and I spent a long time looking at the Overseas and Overwhelmed and Platonic Love Stories themes. Setting up my account was as easy and fast as I could have hoped for.

Scott Simon on interactivity

Top Tips For Six-Pack Abs? Cast Your Vote.

Scott Simon, host of NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday had this commentary on interactive content on the web.

Yelp

The Haven was my choice for the first Yelp review. I ate there with some friends who live in the neighborhood on my way to the Pogues concert and I just loved it. I actually planned to write a Yelp review for it that week because I was so impressed, but never got around to it.

It was fun remembering the things we ordered and all of the things I liked about the place, then crafting all of that into a review that was long enough to be thorough without being too long for the medium. I'm guessing people on Yelp are not looking for The Tale of Genji. I was glad to see that my review had already been voted "funny" and "useful".

Reddit

I have found many very cool, interesting interactive places on the web this semester.

Reddit was not one of those. I found the layout confusing and uninteresting. It was as much of a jumble as 4chan, only without the pictures, just a set of links. The categories weren't much help either. I found out the "trees" category is for weed smokers, from my brief look there you would have to be high to find any of it funny.

Pictory

For my UGC, I submitted a photo and story to Pictory.
I don't have a link for it yet because I'm waiting to hear back from the editor, so I put it up on my Flickr page.

 

I was visiting my best friend Mark shortly after he and his wife lost their daughter. They had been foster parents to her with the intention of adopting, from three days old to 17 months, when the state gave her back to the meth-addicted birth mother. 
I saw the unlatched safety lock on the kitchen sink cabinet and it seemed to sum up the heartbreaking situation.

In Praise of Scribes

People who are committed to an older technology fear change. Often they are not willing to admit when the world has passed them by. This is understandable, who wants to recognize that the thing to which one has dedicated one's life is no longer useful. This is true whether you are a scribe, as described by Shirky, a video store owner, or a traditional print journalist. This is clearly where Shirky is aiming his tale.

I found it particularly funny that after Johannes Trithemius, the Abbot of Sponheim writes his impassioned defense of scribes, how does he choose to distribute it? The moveable type, of course! Scribes are too expensive and take too long. The parallel between that and Gladwell writing his attack on social media on a blog is just great. You can't make this stuff up.

Viral babies

In my look for a You Tube video gone viral , I went to the obvious place: Facebook. I didn't have to look too far into my friend's links to find a good example.

Nothing beats cute babies. A video with twin babies laughing at each other, just that with nothing else going on; no special effects, explosions or famous actors, gets over 50 million views on You Tube.

Pictures that DO tell a story

Having failed to find a set of Flickr images that told a story, I thought I would post a link to some photos that definitely do. I have to post it as a link because the site won't let me copy or otherwise repost the pictures themselves.

But this is definitely worth a look. Here is the artist statement:

Nyaba Leon Ouedraogo

Artist statement

The Hell of Copper
Over the past few years Ghana has become one of the principal countries to receive electrical waste materials coming from Europe and the United States. In “The Hell of Copper” I wanted to be as precise as possible, not showing my images for what they depict, but for what they transmit. These thousands of used computers have dramatic consequences for the environment and the health of the workers.

Flickr

Did the Going Deaf For A Fortnight pictures on Filckr tell a story?


Not really, and it's too bad. Just a repetitive set of band pictures. You almost never get to see any context. He could have used some pictures to set the scene, show me who was in the audience, etc.

Poole/Jennings

I haven't changed my stance on anonymity. It is not inherently good or bad. People can be truthful or not; write interesting and useful posts that add to public debate or lousy posts, either way. It's like my old advertising professor used to say:

"There is no such thing as bad advertising, just crummy ads or insufficient audience. Saying 'advertising is bad' like saying 'motherhood is bad'."

Call in the Big Show

So my decision with the call-in project was where to call. This was the easiest part. The only kind of call-in show I am really interested in is sports. Given that there no longer is a local sports show that I receive, and I have no interest in Those Idiots On Fox, as I call them, that leaves WEEI.

My first plan was to call them last weekend, because I figured I would have an easier time getting on the air, but their coverage of the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament on Saturday, and the Red Sox spring training game on Sunday neatly covered all of the possible hours I was able to call in.

Wiki world

Having just seen the Pogues March 12th in Boston, I thought it would be fun to update the Pogues page on Wikipedia.

I also have been a big fan of my Thursday Night Baseball teammate Justine Siegal's efforts to throw batting practice to six different Major League Baseball teams, so decided to edit the Women's Baseball page to include her info.

Overall I found Wikipedia easy and intuitive to use, very similar to Blogger. Most functions (adding links, references) I could figure out myself. Stuff I couldn't figure out was easy enough to find in the help sections.

Is talk radio "journalism"?

In general, the answer to this question is "no."
Journalism requires a commitment to principles: finding out the truth, fairness, verifying facts, looking out for the interests of readers/listeners instead of advertisers etc.

Genereally, none of these are present in talk radio. This doesn't mean that there aren't issues of importance discussed. Often there are. But talk radio is an entertainment format. There is no presumption that the hosts, producers or call screeners are trying to follow journalistic principles.

Talk Radio callers

My initial answer to the question to the question:

"How does Bogosian portray the talk radio callers?"

is "with great disdain."

The difference between a work of drama and the every day reality of call in radio is in a drama, all of the callers need to advance the plot of that drama. The run-of-the-mill caller has no place in a drama. As a result, all of the callers in Talk Radio are greatly caricatured. They all server to illustrate how stupid the Champlain character's callers are and show how fed up he is with them and how he is smarter than them. The only caller who asks a sensible question, one of those identified only as "caller", asks

"why does an intelligent fellow like yourself spend so much energy hurting other people?"

is hung up on, leaving the question unanswered.

Talk radio and responsibility

The fact of the matter is that it is not John Ziegler’s job to be responsible, or nuanced, or to think about whether his on-air comments are productive or dangerous, or cogent, or even defensible. That is not to say that the host would not defend his “we’re better”—strenuously—or that he does not believe it’s true. It is to say that he has exactly one on-air job, and that is to be stimulating.

--Host by David Foster Wallace

Certainly this quote is an accurate description of the facts relative to commercial talk radio. John Ziegler has one job: bring in ratings to maximize billing for the radio station.Whether what he chooses to do for a living is making the world a better place, a worse place, or not doing either is between him and his sense of morality. Like the rest of us.

Ziegler comparison

It seems to compare John Ziegler to other talk radio hosts, it make sense to compare him to other political, conservative hosts. To compare him to the Car Talk hosts or Jim Rome would be silly.

From the descriptions in the story Host by David Foster Wallace, he sounds more sensible and polite than many of his contemporaries.Granted, that's not high praise, give how far off the deep end Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage and others are. To be sure, I think his brand of spreading hate is lowering the debate in this country at the best, at the worst encouraging racism. To say that "...we are better as a people, as a culture, and as a society than.." the (undefined) "Arab world" is, based on the actions of the most extreme members of the Muslim faith is the same as defining "we" by the actions of Timothy McVeigh.

Another letter "published"

Last week I was listening to WBUR's Only A Game, which contained a story about FIFA president Sebb Blatter. I later commented about it on their Facebook page (post February 19 at 7:49pm), and in this week's show they read my comments in their letters segment.
I've sounded smarter.

(insert clever Twitter pun)

This Twitter assignment has been a lot of fun. Until now, I have been using Twitter to lurk. I follow sports and music people and organizations I'm interested in. The star seeker in my likes that they are more accessible on Twitter than through other means. I also follow some organizations to get information for news, product info and work. I also follow some strictly for fun (Denis Leary, Weird Al, Sarah Silverman).

...and this is Fresh Air

The one thing that stood out most for me listening to the interview with Biz Stone was how quickly and how totally Twitter changed. When they started it was seen as the height of frivolousness. He and the other founders were ridiculed by their friends, who told them Twitter was useless (I liked his statement "so is ice cream"), that it was like Seinfield--about nothing. Which was fine with him, they were having fun.

Three years after it just started being widely used, Twitter is now a method of communication of great importance. Twitter was instrumental in the Egyptian people bringing down Hosni Mubarak, one of the longest running (since 1981) dictators in the region.
Twitter has been contacted by the United States State Department to postpone scheduled maintenance, to make sure protesters in Iran could communicate with each other.

This is a good example of how quickly technology in general, and specifically communication technology is changing. Twitter didn't exist in public use in 2006, and now it is changing the political landscape of the middle east, thereby completely changing the lives of millions of people. Like all mass communication, it can also be used in important, but negative ways. Like all tools, it is up to the users to choose to make positive changes.

wading into comments

Well, not much success with my first concerted effort at posting comments on online stories.  I commented on three stories. The first was on Yahoo about the Tennessee women’s basketball team beating Vanderbilt. I wrote:

"Funny that Coach Balcomb beat Tennessee when she was coach of Xavier in the tournament, 

but has never beat them since becoming coach of Vandy."

This was my most successful comment of the three, which leads me to the only valuable piece of advice I have to offer from this exercise: If you post incorrect comments, people will respond:

me and my big mouth

Next time I write a letter to the editor, it's gonna be about helping old ladies across the street or something.
Either a topic that is easy to do, or hard to check if I did it or not.

So today I went out to clear the storm drain in the street across from my house. Turned out the snow bank was up to my ribs.
 










  
A couple of hours later, I found it.


Luckily, there was a reward:

Update: with the thawing and the rain, I'm glad I did it.

A river runs through it

I'm famous!

I never was contacted by the Recorder. They don't have the letters or Op Ed sections available on line (hence the scan above), so I've been trying to remember to check the paper. On my way home from getting eggs I stopped and bought today's (2/12) edition and found my letter. 75 cents well spent.

The good news: I get the 10 points.

The bad news: I now have to shovel out the storm drain across from my driveway before all my neighbors read the letter.

My Globe letter hasn't showed up yet, which means it won't be published. The world has moved on from the DOT's study of Toyota.

The closest thing to a response I got was this:

letters@globe.com

show details Feb 9 (7 days ago)

Thank you for your submission to the Globe's letters page. Because of the

volume of letters we receive, we cannot print all the letters we would like

to. In the event that we are unable to publish your letter, we hope that you

will write to us another time.

The Boston Globe

However, I did find Ben's letter while I was looking at the Globe letters page. Nice work!

Letters to the Editor (mine)

I made sure both letters I wrote were brief (under 150 words), as that seemed an important factor to getting them published.

The first letter I wrote was to the Greenfield Recorder. I picked it because I live in Greenfield, and it is more likely to run the letter because it is a small paper. I picked the topic of snow removal because it is much on everyone's mind and therefore has relevance for the whole community. Also because today's paper had a front page article about Greenfield going over its snow budget. I decided on a call to community service because that seems like the kind of letter that is highly likely to be published. I added the sentence about most towns being in a similar situation because I remembered that the The Recorder is read by people all over Franklin County. Here is the letter:

Funny still choice

On Boston.com, they have slideshow of Superbowl pictures. One of them is a screenshot from the video of Christina Aguilera's butchering of the National Anthem. They didn't pick a very flattering image among the 2000+ frames from the video.

Wahl-Jorgensen assignment 2

My reaction to the quote from Wahl-Jorgensen:

"Editors see a policy of limited editorial intervention as the only way to ensure an open and honest debate about the varied issues that face citizens of a multicultural society. They are also eager to show that ethical aims of fairness, accuracy and balance underpin the letters pages."

I think this is a fairly accurate description of how editors view their role. From her descriptions in the book (and I don't really have any other experience to go on here) letters page editors seem committed to maintaining that part of the paper as the one of last vestiges of open debate, and to fairly represent the opinions of their readers.

Letters to the Globe

The first letter to the editor that grabbed my attention in today's Globe was one titled:
Archdiocese unwavering in its commitment to aid survivors of abuse  
I was immediately intrigued because I thought, "I've never heard that before". Definitely a "man-bites-dog" story.

You want comments?

The Huffington Post has an article about the 12 worst college campuses for free speech, and UMass comes in at #4.
333 comments so far, interesting discussion on the meaning of "free speech", and the political bent of the organization who provided the list. They also gave UMass an award for "Speech Code of the Year."

Assignment #1-repsonse to Wahl-J chapters 2-3

One of the limitations of scholarly books is they are, by their nature, out of date by the time they are published. This is not a big problem when writing about Greek history, but is clearly limiting when the subject is as rapidly changing as the media, especially when you consider the influence of the internet.

Journalists and the Public is a relatively recent book, published in 2007. But, that means she was writing and editing it for some years before that, and basing it on even earlier scholarly work. The first quote is in response to a quote from James Carey in 1997. So this quote is commenting on the state of journalism 14 years ago. This is before Wikipedia, Twitter and Facebook existed, before the scales had really tipped toward online content, when the printed version of newspapers was the more important format.

Comment requirements

I'm wondering how many news sites restrict comments.
npr.org requires you to register.
You can use your account with open ID, Facebook, twitter, Google, Yahoo or Linkedin.
You can also "sign up for the npr community."


The New York Times also requires registration.
They also moderate comments. I posted one (I already have a login to get alerts) just to see what would happen, and got this:
"Thank you for your submission. Comments are moderated and generally will be posted if they are on-topic and not abusive."

Journalism 391

My final class as an undergraduate student: Journalism as Conversation.
This looks fun. It's a good opportunity to learn more about that new-fangled emerging media all the kids are talking about.
Plus it is a great excuse to spend time on the internet: "Honest, honey, I have to be reading Twitter. It's for my class!"