Last Profile

Here's a profile of a teenage violinist.

Let's discuss it Wednesday for our finale.

Tweeting about "Off the Record"

There's a discussion of what "off the record" means in the era of Twitter. Link here.

Discussion at Poynter here.

Poynter letter-writers weigh in here.

Profile Readings for Week of April 26

Here are profiles we'll be discussing in class the last two weeks. I'll get to them roughly in this order:

"Nails Never Fails," a profile of former ballplayer Lenny Dykstra.

My profile of Don Schrader. NOTE: You'll find the main story itself after several sidebars. The story proper begins with the quote from Thoreau.

My profile of Jim Villanucci, the radio guy. NOTE again: The story proper starts with the line: Jim Villanucci is where he wants to be.

And there's this profile of a copy editor who began suffering from dementia. She died recently. This is a profile from a few years ago.

We will use a framework for discussion similar to the one a few posts below that we are using for the Gene Weingarten feature about parents leaving their kids in cars.

In the News

• That movie "The Joneses" opened today. Here's a link to the trailer.
• The Associated Press made a bombshell announcement that rippled through the journalism community and was the talk of the meeting in Philadelphia of the American Copy Editors Society. The word website is now one word and lowercase. It takes effect immediately, including on any future quizzes in this class.
  

Event Feature

In anticipation of next week's assignment, the event/feature, let's discuss THIS STORY on Monday (4/19). (You can stop on Page 5, when you get to the mention of Lyn Balfour.)

It is Gene Weingarten's gripping story of a man on trial for absent-mindedly leaving his child in the car to die. It just won a Pulitzer for feature writing.

WARNING: It has graphic detail in it. Feel free to skim over the parts that may trouble you, but know that such detail can be crucial to the telling of such a story.

Pay attention to:

• The opening.
• The details of descriptions.
• Narrative techniques, like creating questions in the readers' minds.
• The extended list he employs on Page 2.
• The Sections method.
• The juggling of characters, including parents, as well as medical and legal experts.
• The general writing style: types of words used; sentence structure; scene descriptions.
• Ask: How long does he wait to give you the verdict? Too long? Just long enough?
  

Libel Part 2: The Tupac/Diddy story

Back in 2008, the LA Times was duped by a con artist who linked P. Diddy to the Tupac Shakur shooting.

Here's the story about it that The Smoking Gun broke.

Here's the LA Times' mea culpa. (Note, it's two pages.)

Here's Jack Shafer's analysis at Slate. Note the list of ways to have avoided the problem. Be prepared to discuss them.

Libel Part 1: Boston Herald, TV station sued

Let's discuss this case when we go over libel this week:

Here's the overview story.

Here's a mini-analysis from a respected blogger.

Link to Obama Speech

Click here.

It's the third video down the page. The page also includes the text of his remarks.

The Diversity Gap

We'll focus on newsroom diversity in a week or two. Here's a link to a Washington Post ombudsman's discussion of that paper's problem in recruiting, retaining and engaging the minorities on its staff.

We'll talk about this piece during our discussion of the topic.

Quick writing sample

We'll discuss this piece in class today, just to point out a few examples of cluttered writing.

One more example of clean vs. cluttered

Here's an interesting piece about a music festival in Mexico.

What do we think about the first 4 or 5 grafs?

For Wednesday 3/24: Edit me

In addition to discussing the three profiles linked to previously, let's also talk about this Abq Tribune piece I wrote in 2007 about the band Alaska in Winter.

Note, the main story starts about halfway down, with the line: "It takes a while, but Alaska in Winter eventually warms up."

Think about theme, common threads and the use of quotes throughout.

NPR's Choice

A broadcast outlet takes the path of least resistance and succumbs to "pro life" and "pro choice":

In the Abortion Debate, Words Matter

Profile Example: 2 from the NY Times

Here's a shorter profile: on boxer Manny Pacquiao.

And an interesting job shadow with a lactation specialist.

Let's read these and discuss this week, along with the Ebert piece.

Profile Example: Esquire on Ebert

Here's a link to an Esquire magazine profile of Roger Ebert, the Chicago film critic. Let's discuss this next week as we cover the topic of profiles and begin to plan for Assignment #2 and the Final Paper.

Vigilance Against Plagiarism

See this Slate article from the dogged Jack Shafer.

What are people reading online?

The New York Times studied its own Most E-Mailed list and was surprised by what it found.

An excerpt:

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have intensively studied the New York Times list of most-e-mailed articles, checking it every 15 minutes for more than six months, analyzing the content of thousands of articles and controlling for factors like the placement in the paper or on the Web home page.

The results are surprising — well, to me, anyway. I would have hypothesized that there are two basic strategies for making the most-e-mailed list. One, which I’ve happily employed, is to write anything about sex. The other, which I’m still working on, is to write an article headlined: “How Your Pet’s Diet Threatens Your Marriage, and Why It’s Bush’s Fault.”

But it turns out that readers have more exalted tastes, according to the Penn researchers, Jonah Berger and Katherine A. Milkman. People preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics.

Read the full piece here.

Let's edit a Journal story

Critique Questions Film Incentive Impact

A study regularly cited by supporters of New Mexico's film industry incentives as proof the tax breaks more than pay for themselves may have significantly overstated the revenue they generate, a policy analyst with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston says.

The analyst also says the cost to New Mexico taxpayers for each film job created here is more than 20 times the amount estimated in the 2009 economic impact study by Ernst & Young.

The critique by Jennifer Weiner of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston New England Public Policy Center is one of dozens of film incentive studies circulating in the Roundhouse while lawmakers consider a Senate bill that would cap the amount of money the state will provide filmmakers, said Lisa Strout, New Mexico Film Office director.

The Ernst & Young report issued in January 2009 found that each dollar of incentive generated a total of $1.50 in revenue — 94 cents in state economic activity and 56 cents in local activity.

But Weiner argued in an April 2009 memorandum that the study could overstate capital investment by the film industry, spending in New Mexico by highly paid people who live out of state, and the impact of filmmaking on tourism.

She estimated state level revenue is 39 cents — compared with the estimate of 94 cents by Ernst & Young — for every dollar of incentives. She did not evaluate local revenue.

Ernst & Young found New Mexico taxpayers spend $307 for each film industry job created. Weiner said the cost of each job is $7,543.

Ernst & Young was commissioned by the Richardson administration and paid $50,000 for its work.

Weiner, who studies public incentives for economic development, had concluded in January 2009 that film industry incentives in Connecticut did not pay for themselves.

She wrote in an April 2009 memo to Connecticut's Voices for Children that she wanted to understand why Ernst & Young concluded incentives offered by New Mexico and New York did pay for themselves. Connecticut is a state in the Boston Federal Reserve Bank's district.

Weiner's memo says her evaluation does not necessarily reflect the view of the Boston bank or of the Federal Reserve System.

"We will stick by Ernst & Young," Strout told the Journal in an interview Monday.

Strout said Ernst & Young spent eight months creating a model of the state's economy and gathering data about the film industry. "Ernst & Young were very tough. They said if they could not get the data (to support an analysis) they would leave it out."

Strout said her office saw Weiner's memo when it was first published, agreed with some of its findings and felt she raised important policy questions.

Weiner found:

• Ernst & Young assumed all film activity came to New Mexico as a result of the incentives, though some projects may have come here without them. Strout said the film office is convinced virtually all recent film activity is a result of incentives because the state's record of attracting filmmakers before the incentives was so spotty.

• The study did not account for New Mexico's requirement that its state budget balance. Therefore, taxes lost to the film industry have to be made up somehow, which would tend to depress economic activity elsewhere.

• Study findings that increased tourism accounts for between 25 percent and 40 percent of the incentives' economic impact are "difficult, if not impossible" to verify. Strout said data such as these were gathered through direct contact with businesses and local governments.

• Ernst & Young probably overstates the impact of industry capital expenditure. The study looked at activity in 2007 when Albuquerque Studios was being built. Weiner said a project of that size is not likely to be repeated and the revenue-generating impact of construction projects is short-lived.

• The study appears to include the impact of spending in New Mexico by directors, producers and actors who make large salaries on a New Mexico-based film but who don't spend much money here because they live elsewhere. Strout said Ernst & Young used only spending data that it could verify were accurate.

The state provides a 25 percent refundable credit on most taxable expenditures film companies make in the state. Most of the credit to date has been applied against corporate income tax liability, according to the Legislative Finance Committee, the legislature's budget analysis arm.

Senate Bill 235, sponsored by Senate Finance Committee Chairman John Arthur Smith, D-Deming, would limit the amount of credit a production could claim to $2 million for direct production expenses and $2 million for post-production expenses. The LFC said that of the nearly $82 million in film-production tax credits awarded to 53 different productions in the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2009, 10 were in excess of $2 million, representing nearly 42 percent of the total dollar amount awarded.

More on the future of print

More musings on the Twitterization and the old guard from George Packer of the New Yorker.

Here's a sample in which he quotes from the newly revived Baffler:

“As the world careens one way we faithfully steer the other,” the editors state up front. “Print is dead, they say; we double down in our commitment to the printed word. Brevity is the fashion; we bring you long-form cultural criticism with an emphasis on stylistic quality.”

A little like the appearance of [William F.] Buckley’s National Review, whose original mission statement, back in 1955, declared that the magazine “stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”

The medium or the message?

Scroll down to the end of Michael Miner's column here about the iPad and check out the first comment. The poster has this to say:

The future of journalism, such as it is likely to be, appears to be evolving from insufficiently different or distinctive content channeled through the narrow sluice gates of traditional media to utterly indifferent, bottom-dollar, untraceable, unverifiable content ejected through the global-gauge spray nozzle of new media.

In short, if newspapers or other old media hope to retain their toeholds on the public imagination, they need to pay a hell of a lot less attention to the latest gadget or iteration on the Internet and start paying a hell of a lot more attention to generating passionate, distinctive and indispensable journalism, the kind of stuff that readers will not be able to live without.

That's our goal: passionate, distinctive and indispensable journalism.

Note the link by the poster, Pelham, to this Vanity Fair article, with a nod to the cult film favorite "Fight Club."

Mixing up our euphemisms

Does this report from AP let a bias slip through?

As a federal appeals court judge in 2002, she ruled against an abortion rights group that had challenged a government policy prohibiting foreign organizations receiving U.S. funds from performing or supporting abortions.In her opinion, Sotomayor wrote that the government was free to favor the anti-abortion position over a pro-choice position when public funds were involved.

Waterboarding demonstration

Vanity Fair's Christopher Hitchens agrees to undergo an "enhanced interrogation technique":

For Wednesday 2/3: Unspeak

Take a look at these two columns by Jack Shafer in Slate, and we'll discuss Wednesday:

The Devil's Lexicon: Unspeak exposes the language twisters

And the follow-up column:

Unspeak From the Readers: They find it everywhere

And be prepared to bring in your own examples of euphemisms.

Describing a scene: 2 examples

15 minutes ... at Roosevelt Park last Saturday afternoon
By J.A. Montalbano
Friday, August 24, 2007

A flag marks their realm. It's a wide, vertical white stripe in between two wide black stripes. It hangs from a wooden stake.

Two knights stand in the middle of a ring set off by loose rope. They stand in the middle of Roosevelt Park on Saturday afternoon. The rope winds around three trees and that wooden stake. It's like a makeshift boxing ring.

"Gentlemen. On your honor. Lay arms."

That's the ringleader. He's got kind of an Irish look going, with kilt and tam o'shanter. He smokes a cigarette.

At his command, two of the members of Intense Medieval Combat, in full armor and mail, with real swords, start whacking each other.

There's a "referee" in the ring, dressed in a Chinese hat and loose wraps.

If the participants' armor doesn't absorb or deflect the blow, it's going to hurt. Maybe break a bone.

One knight tries for a trip takedown, but he's the one who falls to his knees. He's quickly staring at the business end of a sword. Game over.

Other warriors mill about near the relief tent, a black-and-faded-red pagoda with harlequin trim. A participant has his helmet off, his head is shaved. He lights a cigarette.

Soon he wanders away from the group, clanging like a plastic bag full of aluminum cans off to the recycling center. He heads to the far end of the ring, near the video camera set on a tripod. He collapses onto his back. Another knight walks over to join him.

Cl-clunk, flat on his back, too. Under a towering tree. Splayed in the shade.

Another round begins.

"Lay arms."

A young couple sit in the grass nearby eating ice pops. An ice cream pushcart circles the park.

Outside the ring, another warrior is taking a break. He is stripped of his armor down to his waist. His face is red. It's at least 90 degrees at 2 o'clock, and those suits look as if they weigh about half as much as the fighter's body weight.

With his breastplate off we can see what he wears underneath. It's a Metallica T-shirt.


#2

AMP Concerts' series of shows in homes comes to an end after seven years

By J.A. Montalbano
Friday, August 24, 2007

There are five Russian collector plates atop the mantelpiece of the fireplace behind the "stage" in Jeff Hanson's living room. They are the only precious personal items he doesn't squirrel away when he presents a house concert for about 50 friends and strangers.

His co-host, Neal Copperman, says the plates are pretty safe sitting behind the singer/songwriter types who have passed through to do 100 shows in the house-concert series the past seven years.

"You have to really be going nuts to knock things off the top shelf," Copperman noted.

And even though the headliners on this night are called the Band of Heathens, they turn out to be five friendly guys from Austin who set toes tapping with their sound that recalls the Band and the Grateful Dead.

As the band wraps up its sound check, all is calm as Hanson and Copperman greet guests and put out food before the final show in their AMP Concerts series earlier this month.

Hanson arranges a tray of bright, colorful vegetables. Early arrivals admire his dessert dish: a mango-peach-raspberry trifle, featuring ladyfingers and Cool Whip, with slivered almonds on top.

House concert die-hard Chuck Banks arrives with cakes from a bakery in Las Cruces, one of the unofficial sponsors.

Will Hanson miss the monthly invasion of bands, fans and PA systems?

"I won't miss moving my furniture once a month," he says.

Then again . . .

"I'm worried now that I won't be motivated to clean."

House concerts have cropped up around the country in the past decade as an alternative to smoky bars, chatterbox coffeehouses and other generic venues.

Music aficionados tap into a network of musicians - mostly singer/songwriters and avant garde performers - spread the word and open up their homes to 30 to 70 fans. There's little overhead, performers make a decent buck, and fans get to see fringe acts in an intimate setting.

AMP did it monthly at Hanson's house in a gated community just down the road west of Old Town. Copperman, who used the Bosque house concerts to launch a career as a promoter, is letting Hanson off the hook and moving the series Downtown to the Windchime Gallery.

[cont'd at a later date ...]

Light Reading

Report: 44% Of Google News Visitors Scan Headlines, Don't Click Through

One writer's work ethic

From this New York Times obituary:

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn was banished to a desolate penal camp in Kazakhstan called Ekibastuz. It would become the inspiration for "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich."

At Ekibastuz, any writing would be seized as contraband. So he devised a method that enabled him to retain even long sections of prose. After seeing Lithuanian Catholic prisoners fashion rosaries out of beads made from chewed bread, he asked them to make a similar chain for him, but with more beads. In his hands, each bead came to represent a passage that he would repeat to himself until he could say it without hesitation. Only then would he move on to the next bead. He later wrote that by the end of his prison term, he had committed to memory 12,000 lines in this way.

Message to young journalists

From David Weir, a veteran journalist laid off last year.

Veteran Bay Area Journo David Weir Laid Off from New Media Site

His key quote:

To all young journalists trying to cope with these troubling times I say: Keep on reporting, reporting, reporting, writing, writing, writing, and editing, editing, editing. Start a blog, send me a link, and I'll try to promote your work. Build your personal brand.

We are the eyes and ears of our society. No matter how difficult times may get, we will be essential, unless, of course, Americans decide it is better to be blind and deaf than informed. I fervently hope that that day never arrives. If it does, there is always the option to move to a remote island in the South Pacific.