They can pull media's leg until it falls off

Every bunko artist counts 

on the victim to help make the con.

The hoax as a media phenomenon has been around a long time.

Damn MSNBC for falling for an election campaign scam. But don’t guilt the cable guys into thinking such things have never been done before.
A guy came into a newsroom where I once worked. He had some highly credible story. It relied on every newspaper’s drive to break a big news story.
In other words our own newshound tendency outweighed the actual facts.
Every bunko artist counts on the victim to help make the con.
His tale relied on him and him alone. He nimbly turned aside every attempt to identify someone who could collaborate. But we could trust him, he said, and wasn’t he standing right there in front of us?
He’d even be willing to stay in town — at our expense — until we published the expose. That way we could hold him accountable.
Asking for financial backing of course was his undoing.
All I had to do was Xerox his fake driver license and fax it to “the authorities,” I told him. That convinced our confidence man to skedaddle.
Election facts and myths flew helter-skelter before the Barack Obama election punctuated it all. A blog and false identity were behind a wavelet of deception about Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. She supposedly didn’t know Africa is a continent, according to a claimed leak inside the John McCain presidential camp.
When so much was being said bizarrely and so much being supposed imaginatively about the VP candidate to nowhere, you can palpably feel the drive to go on air without verification.
The New York Times parsed the fraud ever so gingerly a week later. The Times wasn’t so absolutely sure the explanation of the prank wasn’t a deception too. Remember the old Mad Magazine’s spy vs. spy?
If it’s to be believed, two “obscure filmmakers,” the newspaper said, concocted the ruse with a Web site connected to a fictitious think tank.
The tricksters earlier had gulled The New Republic and The Los Angeles Times.
In another exercise in sophomore humor, someone printed a spoof of The New York Times announcing the end of the war in Iraq.
Ask it. You’re already thinking it: Is truth no longer sacred?
Never was. Never will be. That’s the answer to that.
The ruse we have with us always.
The age of the blog, of the hack, of the wannabe triply guarantee it.
Sometimes it’s for laughs. Sometimes it’s for ego. Sometimes it’s for money.
The continental Palin sting was supposed to help pitch a television script concept.
But I suspect there’s something in the head of some people who’d find an excuse to put one over on media types anyway.
We’re asking for it all the time. Because we value an exclusive break on a big story more than we do waiting for the driver i.d. on the swindler to show up bogus.
The only antidote to the practical joke is fact checking every item broadcast, published and digitalized.
Do I think the media will adopt the absolute cure absolutely?
Nope. That you can bank on.

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.

Food for thought: Have another banana?

Editors who get on their high horse are apt to slip on a fruit peel and go down, steed and all.
We see so many ethical stands. We hear so many grand statements of news as separate from advertising, which journalists call “the dark side.”
Then in the middle of every week we get their food sections, glaring in self-contradiction.
These labor intensive, soft journalism, tepid ventures into consumer reporting, if you can call recipes serious reportage, are a bigger staple than rice and potatoes.
The media critic may lose a job. The book page may disappear. The news bureau may shut down.
Food sections endure.
They wrap supermarket fliers and run grocery coupons. Some peddle wine and spirits or boom high-end restaurants for this nation of foodies.
Now this is the entry point for Harry Highminded, the editor, to blurt at me that eating is news too: “Ever see anyone give up food, heh-heh-heh?”
Well, yes, actually. Famine is increasing. Food riots are starting. Americans are malnourished either through obesity or poverty.
The real news of food is in genetic crops, the biofuels competition for corn and the safety of meat and produce.
News pages covered the massive South Korean protests against American beef imports. How many food editors followed up with coverage of safety in local meat markets?
Or how many check out jail, school and nursing home menus for nutrition?
Or publish health department inspections? Some do, to be sure.
But it’s the unusual food editor who sees a role in questioning advertisers who are the reason the editor has a job.
Media’s hypocrisy over the weekly homage to buying and eating is not a moral cesspool we’ll all drown in. And I’m not on my own high horse.
But it does us all good to admit our hunger for ad revenue isn’t satisfied by pretense at purity.
I agree food is a huge category of news and ripe for investigation and exposition.
Tell me where my milk comes from and why the price is zooming. Explain why Super Wal-Mart is America’s breadbasket but what that’s done to competitive choices. Report on the Food and Drug Administration for scaring us but not protecting us against salmonella in our produce.
Cover nutrition, the real story, not gluttony as typical food sections do.
But don’t try to con me into believing most newspaper food sections are any more than advertising vehicles.
That’s too big a bunch of bananas to swallow on horseback or anywhere else.

Who do you want in a digital knife fight?

The long knives go slit-slit faster and deeper at benighted newspapers. Publishers reserve the longest, sharpest blades for slicing off their own noses to spite their faces.

It's the darndest thing. Newsroom budgets have a one-for-one ratio of product quality. So where does the front office slash? Why, the very place that would bring in more customers for themselves and their advertisers.

Ad reps advise clients to buy more space in a downturn when merchants need more traffic. They don't do it. They advertise less. But that's the argument.

When publishers need a better product to boost the bottom line, they invariably cut back too. If that's not hypocritical, it's sure short-sighted and makes for a brutal nose job.

They imagine they are in the business of printing words on paper. So they reduce pages and the wordsmiths to fill them.

The truth is, they really are in the information business. They need constantly to create demand and to generate ad attraction with more and better information. But they do the old biz school thing that reduces costs in a version of supply side economics instead of spending wisely to create product demand.

The newspaper industry is a metaphor for failed imagination.

If Silicon Valley had thought that way, I'd be writing this on an upright typewriter instead of a computer.

That's why I like the advice of columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr., although he admits he was slow coming to his own view. The Internet should be at the core of journalism, not off to one side, he now writes http://www.miamiherald.com/living/columnists/leonard_pitts/story/574088.html

"And then maybe we should hire away the bright people who figured out how to make Yahoo and Google profitable and ask them to make our sites profitable, too."

Go, Leonard.

Publishers recognize the virtual world when their IT Departments show them. But they're not thriving in it like Jeff Bezos at Amazon, now competing with downloadable texts via Kindle, http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Amazons-Wireless-Reading-Device/dp/B000FI73MA or like Craig Newmark, the Internet entrepreneur taking the classifieds away from conventional print http://www.craigslist.org/about/help/user_accounts.

Bezos and Newmark and all the Google, Yahoo, Facebook and other dagger gaggles may look like a publisher's worst nightmare.

But if I'm in a knife fight, I want a guy who's good with a stiletto at my side.

Media generations: MTV and the AARP crowds can set government right again

MTV may save the republic
Ladies Home Journal and the Crown Forum book How to Raise an American and even The AARP Magazine will help.
’Bout time someone did something. Really. It’s all about time or at least age. The issue is how to motivate the youth vote, and those media are onto something.
The big news is Viacom’s countercultural music broadcaster announcing it will now take political ads.
It’s for the money of course. When Sen. Barrack Obama passed up public funding of his Democratic presidential campaign, he put a monster ad budget in play with a youth orientation.
But an ad is information, too, not just a commercial. If campaign advertising weren't suddenly cool, MTV wouldn’t break its 27-year ban against marketing candidates.
This is watershed stuff. Potentially, anyway.
Just a few years ago David T. Z. Mindich wrote Tuned Out, explaining why Americans under 40 don’t follow the news. He said political process alienated the young who found it immoral, unresponsive to the people and irrelevant along with the news media that covered politics.
Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam broke that ground with his landmark study of civic disengagement.
And journalist E. J. Dionne, Jr., decried the exchange between politicians and the governed as “unintelligent” in his book, Why Americans Hate Politics.
For the smart set, the young set, the MTV set to tune back in as both the Iowa caucuses and the Obama millennials indicate is big for the future of self-government.
A letter to Reader's Digest calls this "The Facebook Election." But ultimately, the writer said, two things will have to happen:

• These young activists will have to run for office;
• And leadership in both major parties will have to step aside to "let younger, more open minds take over."

Too soon to say if the information industry and especially newspapers will reverse their own downward spiral related to civic malaise.
Mindich anticipated some rise from the ashes, because “despite their disengagement with news, young people are as thoughtful and passionate and self-reflective as they have ever been, ready to interact with news if we just provide the right conditions for them to do so.”
One condition could be for parents and grandparents to be civic-minded and to model participatory government for the generations to come of voting age.
Myrna Blyth, former editor of Ladies’ Home Journal, started Take Your Kids 2 Vote, promoting the idea of adults taking their children into polling places with them. She remembered it when she was a kid.
She and cofounder Chriss Winston researched Election Day involvement and wrote How to Raise an American.
Naturally http://www.takeyourkids2vote.org/ is their Web site. Emphasis is on recollection and narrative.
“Sharing your memories of voting makes kids realize their family is part of the American experience,” Blyth said to writer Nick Kolakowski of AARP http://www.aarpmagazine.org/.
And that’s cool too. For the self-described “World’s Largest Circulation Magazine” to publicize civic lessons across the generations really does link MTV’s ad policy news with shoring up the Republic’s future.
Rap that tune.

Stars Fell on Barack Obama

I will go to Korea, Ike said. He campaigned during an unpopular Asian war.
And America elected Dwight David Eisenhower as president.
I will go to Iraq, Barack Obama said, campaigning during the latest unpopular war.
Now the star system in American journalism is burning, burning bright to light up the Democrat’s presidential campaign.
If the candidate doesn’t make a major foreign policy goof, the media celestials will brightly backlight his election profile. They’re going too.
You get the impression of a royal progress by an oriental potentate. Newspaper poobahs and magazine satraps and TV sultanas will climb aboard decorated dromedaries to form the entourage. The U.S. military will assist the Secret Service in Janissary duty.
Headliners from national newspapers and magazines are going.
So are all three network news anchors – Charles Gibson of ABC, Katie Couric of CBS and Brian Williams of NBC. They’ll be doing primetime interviews with the candidate.
Clang the cymbals. Blow the trumpets. Beat the tabla. The cavalcade comes.
Obama couldn’t buy this kind of publicity.
Neither could Republican opponent John McCain. Coverage of his international trips fit into the routine category.
The old hat McCain is getting the “also running” treatment stingingly felt by Hillary Rodham Clinton in her party nomination campaign against Obama.
“He’s the new guy, though,” rationalize media executives to Jim Rutenberg in The New York Times. The reporter documents the ongoing imbalance of TV coverage in favor of Obama. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/us/politics/17anchors.html?ex=1374033600&en=00fc706cfaedd8e9&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
My own political reporting for The Courier-Journal years ago had to measure up – literally – to the standards of the Louisville managing editor, a stickler for fairness and ethics. He used a yardstick to make sure every candidate got exactly the same number of column inches.
The M.E. also said you have to rise above your ethics sometimes. So he would excuse a lack of balanced coverage for news reasons.
Barack Obama traveling to get his foreign policy ticket punched does not excuse blatant unfairness.
Neither does the “new guy” argument after a long “rock star” campaign by the now familiar candidate.
Nor does the Ike analogy. This isn’t history. It’s politics. And the star system.
Media celebrities recognize a fellow luminary when they see one in politics. So they give chase like Magi going to Bethlehem.
Stardom is an addiction constantly to be fed. Journalism egos are not too big but too little, too insecure, too threatened not to conform with the pack. They can’t stand the idea of being left behind when the court travels abroad.
And network newscasts look enviously at ratings by cable outlets for political coverage. So on caravan they will go.
They’ll need a little music.
Here’s my parody on a Mitchell Parish, Frank Perkins lyric familiar to Alabama:

We lived our little drama, we kissed in a field of white.
And stars fell upon Obama last night.
I can’t forget the glamour, your eyes held a tender light.
And stars fell upon Obama last night.

I never planned in my imagination, a situation so heavenly
A fairy land that no one else could enter
And in the center, just you and me, dear
My heart beat like a hammer, my arms wound around you tight
And stars fell upon Obama last night.

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.

The summer of the apprentice

My favorite newspaper intern was an Indiana University coed. She was so good, she gave our journeyman reporters a run for their money.
We mainstreamed our apprentices at every paper where I had a say. No hazing or sending for coffee or demeaning with assignments. At the end of her summer run, I asked the IU intern if she would consider applying for a reporting job after her upcoming senior year. Clearly she could do the work already.
Thanks, she smiled. She enjoyed the opportunity. But now that she had seen the inside of journalism, she planned to change her major to chemical engineering.
I laughed and still maintain that was a successful experience. She found direction.
Most interns stay in the profession after the first stepping stone.
The Dow Jones Newspaper Fund is in its 50th year of recruiting and placing interns. I was one of its recruits in, shall we say, the first half of its history.
The Chips Quinn Scholars program of the Freedom Forum is another valuable portal, especially for minority interns.
My own multicultural Knight Fellowship in Community Journalism includes an intern segment. That’s to ensure our master’s degree Fellows polish their practical skills before they graduate.
So I totally disagree with The New Republic article by Adelle Waldman, “Why internships in journalism are bad for young people and bad for the industry.” She writes about magazine as well as newspaper opportunities.
Her image is grunt work for slave wages by the privileged young on a career track. The internship culture works against diversity, merit and talent, to believe her.
Not in my experience. Not in my observation. Not in best practices.
TNR’s writer is correct that internships are a rite of passage in media. I don’t know of a profession without entry portals and practices.
I spent my long ago internship writing all the obits in east Arkansas, west Tennessee and north Mississippi. The state editor insisted I verify every detail in every death with a call to the survivors.
Grunt I did. But I came away with entry level respect for accuracy and fact-checks, missing even in some practiced journalists.
My experience also was directional, like the IU coed’s.
Sure am glad I didn’t go into chemical engineering, though.

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.