Narrative journalism can make some sense of humanity's senseless disasters

F5: Devastation, Survival, and the Most Violent Tornado Outbreak of the Twentieth Century
By Mark Levine
Hyperion, 2007, 307 pp., $25.95

We know storms, we Southerners. Violent weather writes large in family Bibles.
Hurricane Gustav bears down on Breaux Bridge, La. as I write these words. We wait word our son’s family is safe there.
Our storm child once lived through the worst tornado outbreak in memory. He was 18 months old on that date, April 3, 1974 – in Hillsboro, Ala. for his doting grandmother’s birthday.
Today we’re swapping text messages to stay in touch. But 34 years ago I have to wait hours to learn the safety of my child and his mother, visiting the Lawrence County farmhouse she grew up in.
I suffer separation guilt even now, stuck as I was in Washington, D.C. as a correspondent. Finally I learn Granddaddy covers my little family with mattresses and pillows and stands watch as tornadoes dance their deadly hoedown.
Before the twisted ballet finishes 17 hours later, 148 funnels click their heels in 13 states and a province of Canada. Their paths add up to 2,584 miles. The dead number 335 souls, the injured 6,000 people and the damaged property $600 million for 25,000 families.
It all starts over my own family. But the most devastated Alabama region lies just to their north, across the Tennessee River, in Limestone County.
Mark Levine describes the devastation like a novelist. Or with the quality of Sebastian Junger’s Perfect Storm. Or Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down. Narrative journalism makes sense of disaster, roughly a Greek derivation for “losing your lucky star,” Levine writes.
He pursues his story of the “superoutbreak” through the memories of survivors: In a moment your life changes. It’s that sudden…You don’t know why it happened to you and not someone else. And since it happened to you, why did you survive it? Others didn’t.
The Alabamians who fill his book are people you know. They are people you care about. They are people of the whole family of humankind, more subject to disaster than we care to think about.
The science of severe weather grounds the narrative, told through the quirky tale of a Japanese physicist, Tatsuya Fujita. As an immigrant to the young science of meteorology in America, “Mr. Tornado” creates our “Richter Scale” for storms. So “F5” means winds above 261 miles per hour on “The Fujita Scale” of intensity.
Fujita determines Limestone suffered “incredible” winds up to 318 mph.
The year 1974, Levine reminds us, produces streaking at the Oscars when The Sting wins. Evel Knievel plans a rocket ride across a mile-wide canyon in Idaho. A French daredevil crosses twin towers of the new World Trade Center on a cable.
It’s odd the author omits the context of legislation the storm system inspires. Since I covered Kentucky issues for The Courier-Journal, I stand in the Oval Office when the also star-crossed President Nixon signs the Disaster Relief Act of 1974.
Louisville took terrible hits from nature’s April 4 attack, backgrounding my story.
My own family stories of storm survival still ground me as a Southerner. As an American. As a human.

Political platforms and weather shelters are OK but we need foreign affairs coverage too

It’s like taking Gov. Sarah Palin at her word that she is Alaska’s Snow White gift to the nation instead of really being as politically pure as the driven slush upon revelation by reporter scrutiny.

The Press should be more like the Pentagon. Russia shows why.
World peace depends just as much on understanding international conflict as shooting the globe up.
Military planners classically prepare to wage two American wars at once with enough assets left to meet a third emergency.
It’s the attention span as much as anything. But our Information Industry can’t meet the same standard.
Well, come to think of it, neither can the admirals and generals. But they at least try in theory.
Media are concentrating on politics. ’Tis the season.
With some effort they also are monitoring the machine gun-like rat-a-tat of ferocious storms strafing from the weather-Atlantic air war.
Yet for a long time journalism has lost sight of the shooting war that never quits giving hell between Israel and the Palestinian people.
Lebanon lies abandoned between bombings.
Iraq may be a success story. But we haven’t looked at it with the critical consideration of what happens to a corner crime scene when the beat cop moves on.
Iran was the subject of much Press speculation about our possible invasion. Too little real reporting is going on now that our government hasn’t pulled that trigger.
Military Intelligence – that cliché of an oxymoron – lacks analysts who can speak Farsi. Media lack sufficient folks who even know adequately the difference between the Persian culture of Iran vs. the Arab rest of the Middle East.
Food, fuel and water shortages portend more resource wars, especially in Africa.
North Korea seems to have backslid – as the preacher would say – on nuclear disarmament. But just try to find a coherent news story explaining independently the American role.
The news consumer is thrown on too much dependence of our own self-serving government for explanations of worldviews, especially in the gaze toward Russia.
That’s the same Administration reinventing the Cold War.
Missiles in Poland, NATO expansion in Eastern Europe, patronizing attitudes toward Russian self-esteem – all got fashioned into a new containment policy.
But the bear doesn’t want to go into that cage. It even got restive, invading Georgian territory that leans toward Moscow anyway.
Now we have Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, and his oddly subordinate president of Russia, looking at the real prize, The Ukraine.
The new czars can cut off gas and oil to Europe on whim as a strategic weapon. That potential is akin to terrorists or rogue states shutting down the flow of Middle Eastern oil through the Straits of Hormuz – a crippling but real potential.
President Bush has made bear trainer threats he can’t enforce, because he has our diplomatic and economic and military assets stretched too thin.
Vice President Cheney castigated Russia from a Tbilisi pulpit on an aid trip as though he were a two-bit Ronald Reagan saying, “Mr. Gorbachev, bring down that wall.”
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice cut her academic teeth on the Cold War. She quaintly denounced the Russian moves as unacceptable in the 21st Century. Yet it’s her Administration’s leadership that fails to move out of the Reagan era into realistic foreign affairs of this time.
Without intense, systematic, independent reporting and analysis on front page and prime time, those government pronouncements stand unchallenged by the benefits of journalism.
It’s like taking Gov. Sarah Palin at her word that she is Alaska’s Snow White gift to the nation instead of really being as politically pure as the driven slush upon revelation by reporter scrutiny.
Or it’s like depending on the National Weather service as the sole source of hurricane coverage instead of the animated maps, on-scene reports and progress updates by the energized Media.
American foreign affairs deteriorate badly and rapidly while The Media deploy their assets to other stories. The winning presidential candidate is going to have a greater problem than the drain of jobs, housing and affordable fuel.
We’re in for shock about world affairs.
And all because self-imposed cutbacks of resources and interest prevent The Media from providing the independent information democracy needs as much as it needs political platforms and weather shelters.

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.

The morning jitters just get worse

Too many newsroom executives are so deeply imbedded in that mechanical culture, they are slow to adapt to electronic alternatives. Some can’t or won’t adopt at all. They prefer to ride out this info-technology endgame until personal retirement or until their embrace of the dead tree industry ends in a forest denuded of everything but computer screens.

My newspaper didn’t come this morning. Am I grumpy? You bet. And so’s my labradoodle, Jack.
He and I walk out to the front porch every morning at 5. He does what he needs to do. I look for what I need – my ink and newsprint fix. A sensitive animal, Jack picks up on my moody empty-feeling when the paper is not there.
Dogs and newspaper readers have a lot in common. No, I don’t mean the puppy puddle training stage on yellowing newsprint. I mean regular, repetitive reward for behavior is what conditions us.
It’s the open secret of newspaper circulation departments.
They interrupt our training pattern at their peril.
I can if I must skip the printed edition yet still get the news and features.
My laptop is primed and ready to dispense a lot more information than the broadsheet and from far more sources.
At 5 a.m. the regional news and weather are coming on TV. CNN is already telling me what the world markets are doing and what the overnight events are. Why, wonder of wonders, that includes even those occurrences since the local editors put to bed the newspaper, the one that didn’t rise and shine anyway.
Non-delivery simply underscores the anachronism of the printed word.
But the paper remains a comfort to hold in the hand, to turn the pages, to have an outward and physical sign of the inward sense of place where it’s published.
How comforting it is to get mad at its opinions or to mentally upbraid the columnists or to disagree with the selection of news. The faux anger gets my day started.
I love a paper I can hate and still keep coming back to. As long as it keeps coming back to me!
Oh, I could call the newspaper office where someone would dispatch a replacement carried by a fawning, apologetic route manager tugging his forelock and promising to do better if I just won’t drop my subscription.
I’m hooked. I won’t drop. But it will happen again that the paper won’t show up. And again. And again in a random string of unpredictable breaks in the delivery ritual. Even now I’m surprised when the paper does arrive on time and unsurprised but still petulant when it does not.
The newspaper factory is a relic of industrial technology with an infinite number of things that can go wrong on the transmission belt that ends at Jack’s and my doorstep.
Forget all the modernization and good intentions, which are considerable.
The mechanism of newspaper production wheezes and creaks and ultimately depends on some scarcely paid, non-professional driver to open bundles in the nighttime and to wrap a rubber band around a paper (double wrapping it with plastic in bad weather) and to get it to me before I get cranky for having to wait.
Too many newsroom executives are so deeply imbedded in that mechanical culture, they are slow to adapt to electronic alternatives. Some can’t or won’t adopt at all. They prefer to ride out this info-technology endgame until personal retirement or until their embrace of the dead tree industry ends in a forest denuded of everything but computer screens.
Established readers like me encourage the old ways with memory feelings of romance. And of habit.

The love of plaintalk vs. hated editorspeak

God made copy editors. So love-hate relationships would agitate newsrooms.
Desk hounds can save your butt. They also can make you and your reader question the whole enterprise of journalism.
When I sat on a copy desk, naturally, we could do no wrong. Then I moved to reporting. I learned to insert a small error in everything I wrote. That way a copy editor could triumph over the “find” and move on instead of repeatedly reworking my story in agonizing self-justification.
“An Elegy for Copy Editors” on the editorial page of The New York Times reminds me of past ways and of the future of journalism. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/16/opinion/16mon4.html?ex=1371355200&en=4871a499fb7ba4b7&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
The elegist Lawrence Downes had visited the Newseum, our industry’s shrine to itself in Washington. He searched in vain for a niche of tribute to copy editors. The death rattle of the copy desk foreshadows the obituary for print journalism.
Machines and those who operate them without time to get form and content completely right are lapping the bypassed word-checkers many times over in the relay race that is news delivery. The self-correcting blogosphere doesn’t seem to mind that much about accuracy.
The NYT elegy laments the decline of newspapers and of readers. Budget cuts lop the heads off the copy editing headline writers. Those guardians of credibility in word use and fact and meaning and readability no longer provide quality control. So publishing declines more, costing it more readers in the industry’s downward spiral.
Newspapers are shrinking or eliminating “multiply redundant levels of editing that distinguish their kind of journalism,” the elegy recounts. Layers of editing no doubt applied themselves to that very article for publication on the editorial page of The Times.
Yet what a weak sentence!
The word “redundant” doesn’t need or want the modifier “multiply,” as if to say, “redundantly redundant.”
The eye stops and stares at “multiply.” Does he mean the verb “to increase?” Or does the writer mean the opposite of “singly?”
See. I told you I used to be a copy editor.
Elegiac language is not the way people speak, a goal of the popular press in every era when volume matters.
The ambiguity actually proves the thesis in The Times where a copy editor should have prevented the reader from pausing in mid-sentence. Too many pauses produce too few readers.
But the passage also reveals too much deference to editors with their arcane ways and too little attention to readers with other ways to get information.
Even bloggers know to use plainspeak.
Print writers and their copy editors violate the Hippocratic Oath by first doing harm when they make the language more austere and not more readable.
Let’s not lament old ways too much while we improve ways to communicate.
Meanwhile you may take for granted any error you read here is inserted intentionally just to see if you could catch it.

Pink slips for newspaper ombudsmen – Can other jobs be far behind?

Reporters hate questions about their work.
Editors do too. They just scapegoat better.
So official question-askers inside the newsroom fill an important position.
Call the position an ombudsman or a reader-representative or a public editor. Call it what you will. The role is not a newsroom popularity contest.
The job is all about journalism credibility:

Make sure the reader can believe the news.
Protect against undue victimization.
Guard against institutional neglect.
Correct the correctable.
Explain the rest.

Forty years ago the first newspaper ombudsman in the country went to work at The Courier-Journal. Now the Louisville newspaper joins a trend to eliminate the “inspector general” position for cost-cutting.
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, The Orlando Sentinel, The Hartford Courant and The Palm Beach Post are other papers dispensing with their public editors, according to C-J Public Editor Pam Platt. http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080803/COLUMNISTS10/808030383/1016/OPINION
She riled editors and reporters at The Courier-Journal for the last time and will move to editorial page writing.
Lo, how the machinery for ethics has rusted shut in the information industry. Never did run at optimum.
Norman Isaacs – Stormin’ Norman to his admirers and detractors alike – failed at creating a British-style National News Council in the 1960s and 70s. Isaacs was executive editor of The C-J, an industry leader in responsible journalism and an officer in the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
The New York Times editors especially pooh-poohed the social responsibility idea behind the council. Every paper is its own best policeman, claimed The Times.
Turned out the paper couldn’t even police its own Jayson Blair, the reporter who famously made up news and published the falsehood with a straight face. Ironically The Times created a public editor as part of the clean-up that also cost the news division its two top editors.
Ombudsmen at newspapers were Norman Isaacs’s fall-back position when the Council idea floundered. That’s why The C-J was the first in the country to have one.
Who else speaks for the news consumer?
Everyone in the production of information has a conflict of interest to cultivate, a reputation to protect or a touchy, defensive attitude to nurture.
But not the public’s representative who is removed from the process.
Too late the industry realized the need for what New Yorker media critic Ken Auletta importantly labeled as accountability and transparency – the ethical twins for explaining ourselves as journalists.
As the news industry grew in social prominence, public trust declined. That’s why Norman Isaacs and others saw the need for reform – an idea before its time, as matters turned out.
Now the newspaper arm of journalism withers. You can make a case for loss of public confidence accelerating the economic trend.
Instead of getting riled at ombudsmen, reporters and editors can get riled at their own pink slips.

Arts and Letters was a horse, no press release at all

The art of the public relations agent comes out in press releases, which generally are artless.
They can be elaborate. They can entice. They can blare, rarely trying the subtle approach.
They are why city editors have messy desks.
They are the stuff of the logo, the release date, the contact information.
No tree should have to give a life for one. No electron should have to spin a tizzy over one.
But press releases are not going away, no more than their authors in media relations departments.
Press releases can be the cry of the Sirens, who seduced the crew of Ulysses on his odyssey. Tough men, they, but prone to have their heads turned by sexy maidens. Or, press releases can be terse, useful guides to the morning line for reporters to take slight notice of and then discard.
So we need to put them into perspective.
New York Times business writer Joanne Kaufman does not. She does dignify the press release with a story http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/business/media/30toxic.html?ex=1372478400&en=109705c354560eb5&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
We find out the best words a PR writer can use to attract the attention of a journalist for exposure in the media.
A kind of a science as well as a recklessly purported art figures in Ms. Kaufman's article: The proper technique uses words most likely to be picked up by an Internet search engine these days.
We even learn a book by PR stunt planner David Seaman is due out in October, "Dirty Little Secrets of Buzz." Makes you feel dirty just thinking about it.
The biggest little secret in public relations, it turns out, is timing. Make sure the press release comes out on a slow news day, the Times article concludes.
Well, there's no true conclusion. I will supply one. The story is dutifully non-judgmental. I will be, dutifully.
A press release has one value and one only, as a tip sheet. The best ones in my experience are so labelled, "Tip Sheet." Trust it any further and you're liable to tip over. Even phone numbers and addresses are suspect, to be checked and verified while the journalist re-reports any information in the release, which is never to be quoted or treated as valid information from an original source.
Did you get that, young journalist?
Ms. Kaufman did not report the journalistic value of press releases. Allow me. There is none.
Journalism is what a reporter brings to an idea. The idea may come from a tip by a useful press agent. But the journalism is value-added.
Oh, me, oh my!
You will depart this blog post with the thought journalism is an art and public relations is a service industry whose product is mechanical, the press release.
You think correctly.

Sen. Gramm’s Ph.D. economy goof while 'helping out' Sen. McCain proves public, press, politicians need a common language

Let’s drop the word “economics” in favor of “quality of life.”
Public, politicians and media might get it right then.
Sen. John McCain’s Republican quest to be president is but the latest to foul up. He did it through a stand-in, former Sen. Phil Gramm.
We’re but a “nation of whiners,” said that Ph.D. in economics. Gramm claimed we’re only in a “mental recession.”
Insert funny comment here: Maybe it’s the professor who has the receding mind…he taught at Texas A&M, so maybe this is an aggie joke gone bad…or as Barack Obama, leader of the Democratic presidential camp commented, “America already has one Dr. Phil.”
We don’t need a shrink to know we can’t buy or sell houses, afford fuel and food, meet the hidden tax of rising college tuition, find a job in some cases or get a raise in others.
John McCain still thinks trickle down works, corporations will save us out of the goodness of their hearts and oil policy means greasing the palms of petro execs yet again.
He’s a goose egg on money matters. So he uses Gramm to tell him what to think. But no one told Gramm how to speak.
To be fair we lack a common language about finances. An egghead looks at the numbers, the institutions, the science of capitalism and sees the engine running right along.
The people see only the result and feel the engine running them down.
Reporters don’t translate between the two opposites, which is why God invented journalism – so media would communicate.
When the Gramm-McCain gaffe broke, that’s all the story was. Media treated it as yet another misstep in the political pasture full of language cow patties.
In journalism we call this a daily process story, because it lacks context.
An enterprising reporter covering Gramm-McCain could have, might have, should have included news of the whole day: \

• The federal government is stepping up to support the two mortgage holders that account for half the nation’s mortgages, which add up to $12 trillion.
• Banks are in the tank.
• Gas isn’t, because of costs, which won’t quit with President Bush drawing a military bead on Iran.
• Food expense is tied to fuel.
• Goalposts for retirement keep moving because of all of above.

We’re not whining, Dr. Gramm. We’re living life and enjoying it less. We’re also reading the papers.
We’re just not reading the right story. It would put two and two together, linking screwy political views, the public’s disconnect from brainy economists and daily living.
No more petty political items. No more campaign gotchas. No more disconnects.
Media need to change the language: It’s not the economy, stupid. It’s the quality of life.
Then we would no longer be a nation joined asunder by so many misunderstandings about the meaning of money.
That’s one thing we all have in common, money, but commonly not enough.

The radio icon's channel comes clear

Good for Rush Limbaugh. His $400 million deal for an eight year contract extension fazes me not.
Yet I don't care for the gentleman and don’t listen to him.
That seems to me sensible instead of getting into a swivet over outlandish pay for outlandish people.
Rush comes across as the cigar-reeking, bad habit, loud-of-mouth passenger lumbering down the airplane aisle toward the empty seat next to mine.
His opinions soar with a lot of his fellow travelers. I’d have to consider a later flight if I were forced into his company.
I don’t even think it’s a liberal vs. conservative thing. My taste simply is substance over image, reason over rhetoric, meaning over controversy. Give me an open mind over an open mouth anytime.
In fact I flow from the left full circle again into conservatism and completely defend any commentator’s First Amendment right to become the unwanted flight partner.
Ah, I hear you say. How can you judge Limbaugh if you don’t listen to him?
Well, you don’t have to eat the whole egg to know it’s rotten. I’ve heard enough.
I've also read enough in Time and Newsweek and elsewhere to know their coverboy is a national phenom who isn't going away. Americans made him what he is, phenomenally.
NYT Magazine writer Zev Chavets called the guy an American icon. Yes, well, icons are one dimensional religious images.
This one's veneration comes from being "confrontational, deliberately insensitive and funny," Chavets wrote.
And his single dimension?
Well, Rush himself told The New York Times Magazine it isn't his conservatism but his business ability: "My first goal is to attract the largest possible audience so I can charge confiscatory ad rates." http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/magazine/06Limbaugh-t.html?ex=1373083200&en=96d69779ce7c0fb1&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
Sounds like sham, a case of entertainment profit and not movement standard bearer.
Is he worth what Clear Channel is paying him? Sure, if the market will bear it. Commercial radio is like every information platform, grabbing at gold-plated straw men to cope with the digital and demographic revolt by audiences.
Media salaries at upper echelons took off into the wild blue yonder long ago.
The merger of the information industry with entertainment is like gay marriage will seem 20 years from now. What once appeared strange and perverse to some people turns ho-hum in time.
That means, of course, the Rush Limbaugh star will flame out too.
Newspapers started the star system long ago when they began running photos of their top columnists and having them speak at the Rotary and booming them in house ads.
Those promos seem primitive now. But TV news built on the concept to the point Katy Couric became CBS-TV's astronomically paid evening news anchor with $15 million a year. Now there's talk she'll be pushed out.
Katy doesn’t even mouth cigars or pop an excess of prescription drugs like ol’ Rush.
Then again, for all her personality attributes, The CBS celebrity can’t match the radio man for his familiarity with audiences.
Talent? How much does it take?
It’s that connection that matters.
Instead of getting jealous at Rush Limbaugh, we should all study how he does it.
Trouble is, then we’d have to listen to him.
Clear Channel would have to pay me the $400 million.

What to do when the headhunter calls

Some big jobs are open in journalism. More will come. Revolving doors churn faster with the industry in economic upheaval.
A city editor once advised me I was “on the up escalator, because management had its eye on me.”
My wife and I got a big laugh out of that. Still do.
Ambition is normal, however. No one should apologize for wanting to be considered.
The turmoil in management is so rampant and widespread across media platforms, the next call a news executive gets may be from a search firm.
Leonard Downie, Jr. is retiring from The Washington Post after a fabled run as executive editor. He’s making way so a new publisher can have her own person to meld print and online coverage.
Everyone in and out of media has a favorite candidate to succeed the late Tim Russert as NBC’s Washington Bureau Chief and moderator of Meet the Press. Actually, that could take two appointments.
How wise of the network to ask Tom Brokaw, its dean of broadcasters, to preside on the Sunday morning show in the interim.
It’s tough to take a saint’s place on a permanent basis. And Russert certainly received media canonization so rapidly, the Vatican must wonder if it could speed its own process for beatification.
Note to the halo hungry: Try to follow a sinner or at least allow some time to lapse before your own succession to magnificence. And more advice...

• Make sure you have something to add to the civic conversation.
• Journalists are content providers, so don't go too techno crazy.
• It’s a cliché to want to make a difference; choose that attitude anyway.
• Forget about the kingdom and the power and the glory; just do the news.
• Keep family uppermost as Tim Russert did; we have enough misplaced priorities.
• Don't get snowed by the perks and the bucks.

Journalism is a public service and a Constitutional privilege with responsibility attached to protect The People with information.
If that job description doesn’t fit the offer, thank the headhunter for the call and go back to work.

Me Blog Pretty One Day

You know that dream where you're naked in public? That's blogging for the first time.

But I have something to say. I have a long career to base my view on. I reinvented myself from editor to professor. Besides, I'm tired of sitting by while a million-million people fly into the blogosphere.

Look out. Here I come, naked or not.

There's a lot of company out here, all playing off each other. My title on this intro-post plays off a book by humorist David Sedaris, he of the gabby sister. I'd link to them, but some of the technique is going to have to follow along later.

I'm more into content and making my opinion known for now. I wish to be humane about it and clever when possible. Wise would be good. And informed, open to new ideas but skeptical that everything that has gone before is bad, ready for the discard pile.

I'm a contrarian. For instance I believe media were put on this earth because The People need to communicate.

So the true focus of journalism should be on the consumer of news. I observe in these difficult times for media companies, however, an introverted attitude overly emphasizes the producers.

I'm for The People. Corporate journalism will sort itself out if it takes the same view.

I agree with an advice-post on ProBlogger that less is more in word length. I'll try. God knows. Don't want to bloviate. But o-o-o-o-o-h, I've got so much on my mind!

I'll give you passion. And consistency. And a willingness to back down when wrong.

Email me at onejournalist@gmail.com even if you agree with some things I say.

And by all means add your comments to my posts, add this site to your bloglist and add it onto your blog reader.

There. I feel better now for adding all this up. I'm even dreaming like a blogger with clothes on.