Do read John McCain and Barack Obama for citizenship, for journalism, for uplift

Hard Call, The Art of Great Decisions
By John McCain with Mark Salter
Twelve, 2007, 457 pp., $15.99

Faith of My Fathers
By John McCain with Mark Salter
HarperCollins, 1999, 349 pp., $14.95

Dreams from My Father, A Story of Race and Inheritance
By Barack Obama
Three Rivers Press, 2004, 457 pp., $14.95

The Audacity of Hope, Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
By Barack Obama
Three Rivers Press, 2006, 375 pp., $14.95

Every citizen-journalist has a duty to add our presidential candidates to his or her knowledge base.
I feel hopeful. We’ll preserve values, if we elect either man. Read their stories. You’ll agree.
Notice I didn’t say John McCain and Barack Obama share world views. The Democratic National Convention will nominate Sen. Obama this week for his principles. Then Republicans will see that bet and raise it with Sen. McCain’s ideals.
We’ll have a choice, a real choice, not the usual poker game. Their writings make it so clear.
Obama is the change candidate because his journey is founded on family generations where the future – only the future – always looks brighter. So his Dreams has substance. Dreams must, because life depends upon them. He really can understand this current national crossroads of economy and opportunity and progress after race and after class and after mean political conflict.
The Democrat is what he says, the child of always striving, sometimes failing, constant hopefulness.
The Republican is true to his forefathers too. They are Celtic warriors in every American conflict since Scottish immigration. McCain looks backward to their history for his strength.
We must ask if the warrior can govern. Hard Call does not make him out the decision maker you would expect.
The classy Barron’s columnist Alan Abelson flatly calls McCain’s campaign inept. The New York Times details his habit of adopting the last opinion he hears, of agreeing to staff decisions only to abandon them without warning and of undercutting his own spokeswoman in public.
Imagine such executive disorder in the White House and shutter.
McCain admits he’s hard pressed to explain his method. Call actually is an anthology of Horatio Alger heroes – of interest but not as forecast of a presidency.
The ghostwritten selection runs to the conventional white male usually with military or even a naval connection. The senator can’t escape the ghosts of his admiral father and grandfather and his own hellish Navy aviator life as a POW torture victim in North Vietnam.
McCain claims to live for the present. But two pages later in Faith he concedes, “My public profile is inextricably linked to my POW experiences.”
So is yearning for principled death, for projection of military power abroad, for a VFW worldview.
We have this soldier of Sparta, the Greek citystate forever associated with perpetual war footing. We have the philosophical Barack Obama, suited for Socratic dialogue.
Both suffer from absentee fathers. Both lead aimless youths. Both recover well. Both taste betrayal.
Sen. McCain fights an inept government’s misguided war. But he can’t learn from it, perpetually choosing combat as Option One, the old warrior genes kicking in.
Sen. Obama’s DNA points him forward in Hope. His Chicago pastor who suggests the concept turns on him. Eyes on the prize: The Democrat keeps, “…the audacity to believe despite all the evidence to the contrary that we could restore a sense of community to a nation torn by conflict…
“It was that pervasive spirit of hope that tied my own family’s story to the larger American story.”
Two families…two storytellers…two candidates for America.

Blandish with art but brandish the text

Looks aren’t everything. Too bad. Words count too.
I’m gazing at the graphic front page of a community newspaper. Never mind which one. The techniques I see are common to many.
What smashing news coverage!
Police break up a local drug ring. Prosecutors move to confiscate nine crack houses. Grand jurors indict 28 persons.
Photos of the defendants and a map with inset pictures of the homes engage my eye and mind. The graphics coax me to learn the story. They beckon me into the article.
This is print journalism to stop electronic news in its tracks.
Boy, howdy. Do I ever want to read the story.
But I can’t.
The first paragraph is long as a freight train when you’re stopped at a crossing with ice cream melting in the summer heat.
And there’s a word missing. Even after my mind supplies the meaning, the sentence is still awkward.
I like narrative style, when it works.
Sometimes, though, it’s best just to blurt the news out: “Cops bust drug suspects.”
As happens when any reader sees one glitch, I look for others.
The main head is dully passive.
The overline says, “Authorities disrupt alleged local crack ring.” Disrupt?!? They kicked a gang circle smack into a square.
And the named individuals deserve the softer “alleged” until proven guilty, but the general enterprise of trafficking without names attached does not.
Another line requires translation from its headlinese.
Suddenly the graphic treatment stands out more than the words.
That’s too typical these days in journalism.
TV and Internet and magazines and newspapers all show us a look.
The eye beholds a glory which fades when the content or the expression of it enters the head through the spoken or written word.
Journalists pay so much attention to appearance. They forget basics such as clarity, directness and plainspoken storytelling. Those matter as much as the graphic blandishment.
Blame specialization. We have separate desks, separate training, separate responsibilities. And in a hurry we forget to marry the specialties in a total package.
The only uniformity is in the reader or viewer, expecting the whole presentation to equal the sum of its parts.
Too bad when it doesn’t.

Dude, I live where my iPhone rings

Home delivery of my paper failed the other day. Irksome
I got to thinking about people who never take the paper at all. They have 100 percent satisfaction with their subscription option. Why can’t I, since I’m a paying customer?
It’s not that newspaper companies don’t know what the non-paying public wants. Believe me. There’ve been lots and lots of studies, especially of the young.
News consumers want information on demand. That means delivery on their schedule, not the distributor’s.
They want portability. Don’t send news to their physical home. Send it to their online home, which may be in a pocket or purse.
They want to make their own news decisions. So let them select and tailor the choices of news topics feeding to them.
They want only what they want. They don’t want my experience of letting unwanted, unread sections of the news product fall to the floor while I look for something else.
They want news they can use. They probably don’t listen to opera but perhaps to rap or salsa. They may not read musty Russian novels but might check out current hot fiction. So there’s no point lecturing them into reading long, dry policy analysis that goes “on the one hand this and on the other hand that.”
They want fairness, transparency and accountability. They don’t want or need claims of objectivity, which they consider phony anyway. Everyone has an opinion, a slant, a viewpoint. Just give the other side, state yours and tell who your sources are – be fair, lucid and answerable.
They are not hung up on race, gender and social class issues. It’s not that they are rebels or “libruls” or freethinkers in the old sense. They’ve just moved on from those issues and hang-ups. So news stories and news figures playing to a divided nation seem irrelevant.
They want to feel their news organization is on their side. A certain insurance company must have read the same research – you know, “Nationwide is on your side.” It doesn’t have to be blatant, out-and-out advocacy. A sense of identification between provider and user of news will suffice.
They also want to stay connected through instant messaging or with a cool Web app that reports where friends are located at any moment or with social networks or with sites that store and exchange photos and videos. (Don’t like what you see? Don’t look). Much of their current events information and personal entertainment come person-to-person from the buzz of their friends.
Oh, and did I mention they want their news package to be free? A few Google type ads are okay, but no glaring flash or pop-ups. And no registration fees or rigmarole to get online; the view still prevails that anything on the Internet should be free for the taking.
These ideas run rampant through the information industry. A good access point I've tapped several times are the We Media showcase-seminars of iFOCUS, founded and run by Andrew Nachison and Dale Peskin. http://ifocos.org/about/
But now here’s a weird contradiction. This target group of news consumers who shun paid print subscriptions will spend money on technology. The cooler the better, like an iPod.
Or Apple’s iPhone and its clones – the smart devices that are camera, PDA, mobile computer, music and video player, game board and, oh, well, if you must, use it as a phone too.
If you want to wager on what media platform will carry information in the future, bet on the phone.
Whoa! Why, see here! What’s this I find in my own pocket? As I live and breathe, I believe it’s my personal cellular communicator, my new Apple iPhone. Scotty’s dead, but beam me up, anyone.
Does that mean I am “they” at my age? No. It means the culture is merging with the counterculture, which points to the future of media.
I sympathize with all those content characteristics of the young and the restless, although I am not one. Well, maybe I get a little restless now and then.
I even believe the old-style publishers have only themselves to blame for the traits of their customers and the ones they wish they had.
Newspapers trained us to be idiosyncratic readers. And, er, non-readers. They prepped us for the Web with all its own peculiar crazy quiltness. The difference is you had to buy everything the publisher printed, like it or not. But the Web browser points only where the surfer wants to go at the speed and in the manner of his or her own choosing, depending on broad band access.
Before there was an electronic smorgasbord of topics the user chooses, we had newsprint cafeterias. But we couldn’t just call up what we wanted. We had to slog through coverage of events, sports, features, business, advice, service information, celebrity gossip, politics, trivia, games, cartoons, truss ads, opinion and all the other cover-to-cover glory and inanity that comprise what’s starting to project deadly quaintness – a newspaper.
Americana and something our parents and grandparents cared more about than we do isn’t cool.
The newspaper experience even yet speaks warmly and wistfully of home.
But not when the carrier doesn’t come.
Besides, home is anytime and anyplace I get my IM or meet a friend on Facebook or download from iTunes on my iPhone.