sterlinglikesilver

Smart people doing smart things

2012-01-19T12:59:00.001-08:00

The first link on my blog roll there is the blog maintained by the 8th Floor, which is a Tulsa-based technology training center for educators teaching at all levels.

They asked me to be on their advisory board this year, and I was so happy!

Every time I attend an event there I come away energized and happy and rededicated to teaching.

I feel very lucky that I found a second career that I'm enjoying so much.

College football bragging rights.

2012-01-10T05:37:00.001-08:00

So! Alabama beat LSU, as they say, soundly.

NOW who's really number one?

I think our team has as much right to say it's number one as Alabama, now. I do, I do, I do.

So there.

Go Pokes.

Lightbulb

2012-01-09T06:59:00.000-08:00

I got some advice from a writing group critiquer several years back, advice that I've really tried to follow.

This has been both good and bad, because I realized recently that the advice or guideline from this beta reader or peer editor or whatever term you want to use, was good, but the second half of the guideline was missing!

She advised me not to change point of view within a scene. To stick with one character's head space for the duration of one scene.

Which is good advice, but ONLY IF you are using some sort of LIMITED THIRD PERSON.

Following that guideline effectively made it impossible for me to play around with omniscient third person viewpoints in my fiction.

Oops.

Don't get me wrong -- I love limited or tight third person (I actually usually prefer it to first person, even though it's extremely similar to first person), but by leaving off the second half of the rule, I've made some stuff impossible for myself.

So: The new guideline is, don't change points of view inside a scene WHEN you are writing in limited third person.

The things I realize from reading those Gardner books! Wonderful stuff.

As good as advertised

2011-12-10T12:54:00.001-08:00

That Gardner book, "The Art of Fiction", with advice for young writers, is just as good as I'd been promised.

And it was so fun to read! I glanced at the first page and immediately got sucked in. That hardly ever happens.

What is the internet?

2011-10-26T08:44:00.001-07:00

This is one of the most brilliant things I've read about it in a long time!

The Web is a Customer Service Medium, by Paul Ford.

Found in a comments threat at Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog.

Just wow.

Books about writing that you have loved

2011-10-11T12:20:00.000-07:00

Taking a page from a former colleague, I'm seriously considering having my creative writing students next semester offer reviews of useful writing books.

To that end, I need to generate a list of such books.

I own a bunch, and know of a bunch more, and of course "Writing Down the Bones" by Goldberg will be at the top.

What are your favorites?

I'm trying to remember a classic book about plot that I've been meaning to read for a while, and this would be a good excuse. By Gardner? Maybe by Forster?

I welcome your suggestions.

This is my frowny face

2011-09-14T08:37:00.001-07:00

I saw this all over the writing blogosphere yesterday.

Authors say agents try to "straighten" gay characters

The authors followed up with a list of LGBT-inclusive books in the fantasy, SF and YA areas, and also agents who aren't trying to erase queer characters from new fiction.

ETA1: And a round up of the fallout afterward, from blogger Cleolinda.

ETA2: And a cautionary perspective from the always thoughtful Deepa D.

First day of class tomorrow

2011-09-06T15:51:00.000-07:00

Always such a feeling of anticipation before classes start! I have six classes to teach this semester, which to me seems like a lot!

My fourth academic year at OSU's branch in Okmulgee. Also hard to believe!

Wish me luck!

No sign of fall yet...

2011-08-01T15:16:00.000-07:00

... but I find I'm dreaming about work! And my work-related emails have increased.

And this is a good thing!

One of the incredibly fantastic benefits of being off in the summer is that I look forward to and anticipate with happiness getting back to teaching in the fall. I'll be back at work at the end of the month and I find I'm already daydreaming about it, planning various lessons, etc.

Taking a break is so wonderful. And I am so so fortunate to LOVE MY DAY JOB.

My big challenge will be a 7:30 a.m. INTRO TO SPEECH CLASS. OMG, the coffee we'll all need!!!

:)

Update: "They" as singular

2011-06-22T08:39:00.000-07:00

Remember a while back I was musing on this issue? Using "they" instead of "he" as the catchall singular pronoun?

I don't know why it took me so long to discover sources for this, but some other internet friends helpfully supplied them, and now I can say I learned something new about grammar! Go me.

After reading, among other things, this article, I'm relieved!

It's ONE LESS THING to nitpick about when I next teach Freshman Comp.

In which I discover texting

2011-06-22T08:30:00.001-07:00

Yeah, I know. Late to the party.

I was a late adopter of email; never cared about it until forced to use it at a job. Never cared about message boards or forums until theonering.net. And now finally I've gotten into this texting thing, mostly because I have a teenager with a phone!

It's great.

Like internet communication, though, it's funny how strange it feels without verbal and facial cues. Two of my acquaintances prefer texting to any other form of communication, and it's interesting how my trust in our existing relationship informs the shorthand I feel comfortable using in text messages. If we weren't already friends, it would feel very brusque!

I find I'm texting another good friend who lives in a distant state when I don't really have anything to say, but I want to check in. She has the same instincts; we'll text back and forth just to feel the connection, but if we have news we'll email and if we need to commiserate or celebrate we phone.

I didn't know I'd take to texting this easily and this quickly, though. That was a surprise.

C U ltr.

I'm not even half through this...

2011-05-10T16:03:00.000-07:00

...and I know it's a must-read!

The Columbia Journalism Review is offering a multi-part investigation, The Story So Far, about the business side of digital journalism.

Wow!

One to chew on

2011-04-28T04:53:00.001-07:00

Utterly fascinating and thinky post called The Rise of the Amateur by poet and critic Alison Croggon.

The piece is centered on Australia, but it's relevant to the USA too.

It's an examination of a lot of things, including the impact of criticism on art, the amateur nature of art, the impact of the mass media and especially the internet on culture and cultural critique, just a ton of stuff.

One to ponder.

Looking ahead, looking back

2011-04-19T15:50:00.000-07:00

Before I get to my personal news, something bigger and more important.

I don't think anyone who lives in Oklahoma can let this day go by without taking notice.

Sixteen years ago I was an assistant city editor at the Tulsa World newspaper, and was called to the phone by a friend at 9 a.m. and told to turn on the television. I watched for fifteen minutes, threw on some clothes, and rushed to the newsroom. I, and many others, worked for eleven days straight, editing stories, making phone calls, grieving and in a state of shock.

Sometime later that spring -- the date escapes me -- a fellow editor and I decided we should drive to Oklahoma City to see the Murrah Building with our own eyes, before its ruins were demolished.

Years later, I visited the memorial and the museum, and cried all over again.

One hundred and sixty eight people died that day, including nineteen children. Six hundred eighty more were injured. The events of that day touched me only from a distance, but I will never forget.

~~~

It's official -- I get to furlough from my university teaching job this summer and spend it being the mom and writing! Hope to have some really exciting news to announce on the writing front shortly!

Also, I'm also told that I get to teach Creative Writing again in the spring semester of 2012, after creating an online version last summer.

This can't end well

2011-03-01T14:31:00.000-08:00

Facebook is going to share telephone numbers with third parties, according to this article.

I don't have a Facebook any more, and frankly, I'm quite glad about that.

You know, "1984" was all about the government invading our privacy, but nowadays I'm more worried about corporations doing that.

Attack of the pronouns

2010-12-20T10:06:00.000-08:00

I noticed a discussion in another online venue about an issue I face in teaching written English.

Apparently some textbooks are starting to recommend using "their" instead of the admittedly cumbersome but gender-inclusive "his or her"? In other words, turning "their" into a general use, singular AND plural pronoun?

I haven't seen this in written English, myself. The texts I use do not recommend it. (Of course we do it all the time in spoken English.) I would not want to teach it, myself.

I advise students to change everything to plural so that they can match plural nouns with plural pronouns, and avoid the gendered pronouns entirely.

Anyone seeing other solutions? Or seeing "their" used in this way, as singular? It just seems wrong to me, though of course eventually spoken English will rule our practice and I'm fine with that.

(For example, I gave up on split infinitives and "hopefully". But I am still holding the line on "irregardless." Grr!)

Essay writing: How not to do it

2010-09-19T14:14:00.000-07:00

As you know, I teach writing, which includes Freshman Composition and Technical Writing, and for many years I wrote for a living as a newspaper and broadcast journalist.

I ran across this pretty damning quote from web guru Clay Shirky in an interview he did for Barnes and Noble's website earlier this year:

Shirky recalls: "What I wrote at Yale was for an audience of a single person, my professor, and … it was intended to convince him that I knew what I was talking about so he would give me a good grade, rather than being intended to communicate something to him that would convince him to change his mind, or trying to give him a framework for thinking about something.

"In a way, writing a college paper in its current structure is almost custom-designed to crush in the student the idea of writing as a communicative act, because it feels like a long, highly structured interoffice memo rather than an address to the world.

"…[I]n my ordinary classes, my experience of writing was that it wasn’t a communicative act to people I didn’t know."

I really, really don't want my students to leave the class feeling that way. This quote was a reminder to me to re-examine the relevance of everything I do in the classroom.

Book review: Journalism, money, the internet

2010-08-06T06:43:00.000-07:00

Here's a review from the Huffington Post by Magda Abu-Fadil of a new book, "Funding Journalism in the Digital Age."

I guess I'm doing better at keeping up with these issues than I thought, because the book sounds like a great roundup of current issues and approaches most of which seemed familiar to me. I think it's an issue that will be with us for a while.

Announcing a new blog

2010-06-16T11:10:00.000-07:00

Convergence is certainly a buzzword in my field of media studies!

But today I’m not talking about how I’m waiting to see how the “stream internet over your big screen TV” thing shakes out.

Today I’m talking about something more personal -- how my former career of journalism has found a way to converge with my current career as a college instructor of writing, with both being deeply and permanently affected by New Media technologies.

It was a drastic shift for me to leave the newspaper business for teaching, and it took a long time for me to start to feel like a college instructor and not a journalist. I’ve always been one of those people who defines herself through work, through career, as much as by relationships or by personal-life roles, so these changes have not been minor for me.

However, I have a friend and fellow journalist in the UK who reminded me that the skills and worldview of a journalist need never leave me, even though I did leave my full time job as a newspaper reporter -- which was the truth, and was also something I needed to hear at the time! Because, although I love teaching, I did feel the end of my career with daily newspapers as a real loss.

I found a way to bridge the gap to a certain extent, because it was journalism I was teaching, at first, but when I moved on from that first assignment, briefly to Tulsa Community College and then to Oklahoma State University, I definitely became a generalist. Now I teach English and writing -- and not the very specific type of writing that is journalism, with all its affiliated values, practices and history.

So, now, I am excited to report (pun intended) that I have yet a further new opportunity to bridge the gap between my career as a teacher and my career as a journalist!

I have been invited to co-launch a blog for the academic journal “Transformative Works and Cultures,” a blog intended to broaden the audience for this journal, and hopefully build its audience too, as it will be more accessible to non-academics than the parent publication. You can find it here: The Symposium Blog.

And what will I be using to produce content for this blog? My journalism skills, of course.

*VBG*

I am very amazed and happy to have found this convergence happening in my work life! Because I miss journalism, and my friend Sandra is right -- you never really get over it!

The blog, and its parent journal, focus on a subdiscipline within both media studies and my new field of English (and writing) -- that of fan studies. Academics also may approach fan studies from the vantage points of technology, sociology and/or cultural studies, and even more varied disciplinary approaches are, I imagine, possible. But of course, because of my own background in journalism, I approach it primarily as a writer and a teacher of writing, and also because, like journalism, the entire field has been immensely affected by the internet and associated technologies.

So I’ll probably be pointing you over there from time to time, and introducing you to my co-blogger, who uses his fandom nom de plume of Cryptoxin, but I will also continue to post here about all things writing.

What’s in my toolkit?

2010-05-25T12:40:00.000-07:00

I’ve posted here before about the mild identity crisis I had when I moved from being a teacher of journalism to a teacher of several other forms of writing -- basic academic essay writing, including that which uses research; technical writing for business; and creative writing.

What is the same and what is different when writing in these forms, compared to journalism? How has what I focused on in journalism affected or informed my focus as a teacher of academic writing? What remains of my technique? Three things come to mind immediately: simplicity of language, clarity on citing and documenting sources, and familiarity with internet forms and formats.

One thing, however, has changed entirely: The approach to defining the audience. In my current writing endeavors, the question of the audience is much more complex than it was when I was a working reporter. Further, in teaching journalism, the idea of the audience was easier to convey to students. In journalism, when you write for a specific publication, or even a certain type of publication, your audience is that market. The audience is chosen for you, and limited, by the choice of publication. Your choice of topics, your tone, just everything, is affected by the decision to write a piece for the "Tulsa World" versus, say, "Mountain Bike Action."

But in English composition classes, the question, “Who is my audience?” is much more abstract. Because in reality, the students’ audience is me. The teacher. Unless they go beyond the requirements of the curriculum and do something with their writing on their own, such as post it on their own blog, or market it for professional publication, they can disregard the question of audience (even if they shouldn’t) and focus on pleasing the teacher.

This makes essay writing more artificial. As a genre or format, it’s limited to academia. This, will, of course, be useful to them -- it’s intended to be the format they can use in all their academic writing, assuming they intend to pursue a bachelor’s degree or a graduate degree. But the academic essay has limited applicability outside of the ivory tower.

On the other hand, in my technical writing classes, the audience for each given assignment varies. In some ways it is equally abstract, even imaginary, to talk about audience in these classes. The students find that they don’t have the person of the teacher to write to; they must write to the imaginary typical intended audience for the type of writing we’re doing in class at the moment. This might be an imaginary boss or a coworker, if the assignment is writing a memo. Or an imaginary customer, if writing a proposal. The degree of imagination required is equal to that of writing fiction!

So, some things I left behind when I left journalism, and some things changed drastically, especially the concept of the audience. But I still hope to spark a love of writing in my current students, though only a few of them desire to write for a living as fiction writers or journalists. This does not trouble me. I am totally in tune to both the idea of “writing for a purpose and to get paid, or because it will help me in college” and “writing for writing’s sake.” Writing as a practical job skill that puts food on the table -- that makes perfect sense to me; it’s what I did for nearly twenty years, after all. So it’s easy for me to present writing as a career or school skill.

But I’m also in love with writing; with writing for love, with reading for love. Writing as art and craft. And a few of my students share this love. With them, it’s easy to sell them on the doing for its own sake, and they are very receptive to learning new forms into which to pour their content, their discoveries, their experience -- the narrative essay, the argumentative essay, the proposal. And now I'm teaching creative writing, which is a whole new collection of forms to explore!

I’m still, however, kind of sad when I’m faced with the attitude of “writing under duress just to get a grade and pass the class." It is a fact that some of my students will never want to write for writing’s sake, but maybe they can least get a sense of why and how writing really will “help you in your future life.” It’s not directly tied to their careers in the sense that auto mechanics or a programming language will be. But it really is one of those fundamental skills of being human, and I’m still delighted to be a transmitter of it.

Writing is not English

2010-03-30T12:08:00.000-07:00

Wow, time has flown. I am resolved to try to post here more now that I have gotten my feet a little more firmly on the ground here at OSU.

One of the things I've recognized about myself is that I am definitely a writing teacher, not an English teacher.

My students at OSUIT run the gamut. I have students who excel scholastically and academically and are pursuing four-year or advanced degrees, and students who qualified for college by taking GED's and are working on a two-year degree to prepare them for a trade.

While I have learned that there is no way to predict which student will enjoy writing and which will not (I currently am teaching an aspiring auto mechanic who posts poetry at My Space, and last semester had an IT student who played and wrote folk music), quite often I have students who are approaching writing and English after years of failure or marginal progress.

I usually make no attempt to review much grammar with them, or teach them labels like "subjunctive mood" or "past perfect tense."

I focus on quick and dirty tricks for improving their punctuation usage -- like reading their essays aloud in order to identify the pauses that signal the need for a comma or a period. Another couple of tricks that clean up their writing immediately and are easy for them to understand: Noun/pronoun agreement in number, and scrubbing all use of second person.

I also focus on practical or creative types of assignments that are relevant to their future classes or to the work they will someday do.

But I always stress that the hardest thing for me to overcome as a teacher is not presentation of the course material. It's the students' attitude that they are terrible at English, that they are bad writers and that they gave up on excellence long ago and are only trying to escape with a C-.

I tell them they can actually learn something if they will let me teach them!

I'll never forget a disheartening speech I heard from a writing teacher, who shall remain nameless, during my own college years. This person claimed that writers were born and not made, that it was impossible to explain criteria for good writing that could lead to a good grade, and that one knew good writing when one saw it but to give reasons why it was good was impossible.

I believe that none of those statements is true!

I used to teach writing to journalism majors; now I have to sell the students on the idea that they can write AT ALL. I teach English and writing to students from all majors, and to a good number of students who needed remedial help in order to enroll in Freshman Comp.

But it's amazing the progress they make if they let go of their preconceptions and make up their mind to learn something.

Creative writing class

2009-12-08T05:01:00.000-08:00

I've been asked to create an online creative writing class for OSU-IT in Okmulgee. It'll be an elective that I'll get to teach next summer! This will be very exciting.

Any helpful advice for me? I'm already collecting syllabi, and we've chosen a text.

Futurists Who Still Read Actual Books

2009-12-03T04:59:00.000-08:00

Two amazing futurists who are interested in science fiction, technology, education and reading have weighed in recently online on the future of bookstores.

As you may know, I'm very interested in the future of print journalism in a Web 2.0 world, and of course all printed media are having issues because of the internet. Bookstores have been in economic trouble for years, for various reasons, and some of the parallels to the newspaper business are fascinating.

Clay Shirky recently wrote about Local Bookstores, Social Hubs and Mutualization. Fascinating post that focuses on the things people are drawn to bookstores for nowadays that don't involve just shopping for books -- coffee, socializing, book signings, etc.

Then Cory Doctorow contributed his thoughts: One Future for Bookselling.

Great food for thought. Both these writers always have fascinating things to say about the future of communication and the internet.

From specialist to generalist

2009-10-10T08:36:00.000-07:00

After nearly seven years of teaching journalism and PR courses at a private university, I've spent the last year in my new job teaching English and communication and writing at kind of a specialized campus of a public university.

One of the things I find intensely challenging and fun about this job is teaching writing to people who think they hate writing and who know they hate English.

It's a hard sell alot of the time, but I'm even enjoying that. So far!

Several things from my past have helped me with this: First, nearly 20 years ago I volunteered for the Tulsa City County Library in their awesome program of one-on-one literacy tutoring. The techniques they used for teaching adults how to read have been invaluable to me in later life, both with my kids and their struggles to read, and with adult learners.

Second, I approach teaching English as a writer and editor, not a grammar teacher or a student of critical theory or linguistics. Two of the courses I teach are technical writing courses, and my journalism background is, when you think about it, a kind of technical writing itself. I think the journalism training I had has helped me with the give-and-take with students. I'm not trying to get them to memorize grammar rules or become New Critics or Post-Modernists, which are -- don't get me wrong -- worthy pursuits. But because of my own background, I have a very skill-based, Just Do It, approach to writing.

I also see a kind of symmetry in the fact that I am teaching at the school where my husband got the degree that allowed him to get his license in a construction trade. The students I teach remind me a lot of my husband. I think this helps too!

It's been dislocating in some ways to move from teaching a writing discipline to writing majors, to beginners who don't see themselves as ever being writers. Before, my writing students already knew they loved writing. But it has its own challenges and its own satisfactions, and I'm amazed at the things I'm drawing on to inform my approach to teaching.

Also, it's huge fun when a student discovers a previously muted love for story-telling or narrative. I love it when they discover, Hey, I can do this after all.

Who's making money from the internet?

2009-10-08T05:43:00.001-07:00

Web 2.0, which is the vision of internet content that depends on individuals providing the content for free (YouTube is an obvious example), has hit newspapers, magazines, and to a lesser extent, book publishers in the pocketbook.

I've talked before on this blog about the frantic, desperate search for a new business model for the print-based businesses on the web. Some newspapers, like The Wall Street Journal, are continuing to press for user subscriptions, because people actually will pay for their content instead of expecting to get it for free.

Based on two short conversations I've had with personnel from The Tulsa World, part of their plan involves using new informational products to continue to subsidize their local print journalism effort.

So the question is, how do you make money from the web?

Well, the business who are making money from the internet are the giant search engines like Google who are actually having some success selling targeted ads.

And, the businesses who are making money are the Internet Service Providers. Comcast, AT&T, Cox -- the people who actually sell you your internet connection, for anywhere from $15 a month for dialup to upwards of $70 a month for services you can use on your cell phone (convergence strikes again -- who knew that things like the Palm, the Blackberry and now the iPhone would make cell phones an important player in the internet business?)

What about the idea of AOL, Cox, other major ISPs considering themselves publishers? I've seen a bunch of theories for how to continue to provide expensive, high quality journalism on the web -- everything from training bloggers and advocacy/citizen journalists to pick up the slack as freelancers (a model more like Hollywood, where directors, writers and actors are freelancers), to spinning off journalism to journalism professors, encouraging them to write for magazines and newspapers just as they write for academic journals (in effect making universities subsidize enterprise and investigative journalism) to using a nonprofit model, like NPR or PBS.

I know Cox Cable doesn't think of itself as a publisher of journalism. But journalism is expensive. Someone's got to pay for it if we're going to have it. Are the ISPs the next publishers?

The questions I wanted to ask, answered

2009-08-13T08:16:00.000-07:00

As usual, media scholar Henry Jenkins is asking the questions I want asked.

If you're interested in the future of journalism, please read his interview with professor, sociologist and media scholar Eric Klinenberg, author of "Fighting for Air".

The two-part Q and A on Jenkins' blog is a terrific snapshot of what's going on with local journalism these days. And it includes some terrific links.

Another must-read!

Another prediction about the future of journalism

2009-08-10T10:22:00.000-07:00

Very thought-provoking Q and A, once again from Columbia Journalism Review.

We Just Don't Know, an interview with Jonathan Glick

A couple of quotes, to whet your interest:

"Having spent a lot of time in this industry, I’m not at all concerned that there will be the loss of investigative journalism. I actually find it very funny that people think that’s a risk. Only because it’s quite obvious when you meet these folks that they will do it for free. People kill themselves to get into journalism, and no one gets paid a lot of money anyway. So, this idea that you need this traditional newspaper model is completely false.

"Now the bigger question is, 'Do you need the brand of a newspaper to do investigative journalism?’ Well, maybe, but the track record on that is terrible. We’ve just gone through the ultimate proof test. We just fought a war that didn’t need to be fought and people were just unaware. So, if it’s the case that you need big media brands, what were they doing?"

...

"I guess the main thing to realize about the history of newspapers is that The New York Times didn’t become important because it had great content. That may be the way The New York Times remembers it, but it’s not true. The reason The New York Times became important is because they controlled the printing presses and the unions; it was the means of distribution that mattered. Given that success, they obviously moved on to what they thought was important-investigative journalism.

"It was the monopoly that created the journalism, not the journalism that created the monopoly."

...

And, like I and others have been saying, there's still absolutely no idea out there of what a viable business model is for news on the internet. None. Glick looks at The Daily Kos, and also ponders if journalism could be more like movies, which moved from a studio system to a bunch of free-lancers with no lack of quality.

Must-reading.

In search of a business model

2009-07-17T11:09:00.000-07:00

Another article from Columbia Journalism review about the future of journalism as a business. This one is advocating taking national newspapers online to "by subscription only." In other words, no more free newspaper content on the internet, because, as the saying goes, why buy a cow when the milk is free?

Even with new media, old basics still apply

2009-05-17T12:29:00.000-07:00

More thoughts coming out of the New Media conference I attended May 12 in Tulsa. I indeed learned a lot at this Women in Communications conference, as I always do when I participate with this group. I contributed a lightning-fast roundtable discussion of blogging. We changed tables three times, which meant brisk, 15-minute discussions. That seemed to work well, I thought. No one had a chance to get bored!

I think one of the big problems people have when faced with all this new technology, all these channels to deliver our messages, or platforms from which to speak or publish, is which one to choose.

The basics we all learned ages ago -- whom am I speaking to? where are they? what is my message? -- have not changed, and will definitely guide us as we negotiate all the web tools.

For connecting with people you already know, Facebook is what a lot of people need, and people who already have a Facebook seem to be wondering, do I need a blog as well? How do I know if I should be blogging?

I think blogging is basically still a PR function, if you work for a nonprofit or a corporation. The blogs I follow tend to be by experts who are telling me new things they know, in an entertaining way.

An important point is: Don't bother blogging if you don't need or want the interaction with the audience that the blogging format, like here at Blogspot, or at Livejournal or Dreamwidth, will give you. It's the instant talkback with the commenters that is interesting -- getting to interact with the original poster, and see the response of other readers. Some platforms, by their design, also encourage commenters to talk amongst themselves, like a message board.

If all you want is to disseminate information without the talkback feature, think about an online newsletter instead -- or using your website in that way by changing the content often and offering an archive of feature stories about your company or group.

If you are marketing your own ideas, your book, writing or artistic services, blogging is a great way to interact with your audience. I've been reading a lot of author blogs in the last year, and some of the ones I link to here are doing a great job of using the blog to keep in touch with audiences and readers. You can do this on a service like Blogspot or Livejournal or Wordpress, or from your own website. My friend Leslie Goshko, whose website I link to here, is a comedian in New York City, and has embedded a blog in her site.

Finally, the participants at my roundtable seemed to be least interested in the topic of citizen journalism, a form of advocacy publishing that blogging has made possible. But that, of course, is also a very hot topic these days, as the Press Think blog describes. It's linked to here as well.

Keep in touch! You know where to find me. :).

Followup to today's Tulsa conference

2009-05-12T18:37:00.000-07:00

The turnout at the Women in Communications conference at OSU Tulsa today was great! So good to catch up with old friends, and the keynote speaker, Blake Groves, was wonderful.

I want to virtually wave at everyone who came to my table to discuss blogging, and encourage you to ask any questions you still have in comments here.

As we discussed, blogging is so useful if what you want is to not only disseminate information, but encourage and facilitate a conversation with your readers. Knowing who you want to target is key, as well as writing with passion, an individual flair, and timeliness.

I look forward to continuing the conversation. And do check out the list of sites that I follow for ideas.

I think we have a firm grip on the problem...

2009-05-02T16:44:00.000-07:00

Here's a story about Warren Buffet predicting the demise of the newspaper.

It was written by Reuters, but I found it on Yahoo!Tech.

So, I repeat the question: What's the business model that will let journalism continue, regardless of the situation of the newspaper industry, with its declining ad revenue and intense competition for an audience?

Citizen Journalism: An Example

2009-04-30T09:23:00.000-07:00

I'm continuing to gather links about the blogging for my Women in Communications presentation coming up May 12.

Here's a fascinating examination of how "citizen journalism" worked via blogs during Obama's presidential campaign:

From Off the Bus to Meet the Press by Jay Rosen. He teaches journalism at New York University.

Blogging, journalism, newspapers: The End Is Near?

2009-04-23T08:03:00.000-07:00

I'll be returning as a presenter to the Women in Communications workshop on May 12 at OSU Tulsa, talking about blogging.

As I get my thoughts together for the roundtable that I'm going to facilitate, I've been noticing that a bunch of old friends from the Tulsa World have discovered me on Facebook, which is really fun. *waves* Some of them are pitching an interest group on Facebook called something like "Don't Let Newspapers Die!"

I totally see the attachment newspaper people have to their medium. I love newspapers. I spent much of my professional life working for newspapers before I got into teaching. Newspapers have been hit over the last fifty years with several difficult changes which cut into their audience (first television, which killed P.M. dailies, and then the splintering of markets brought on by cable television, which hurt advertising), while some of the things that newspapers have chosen to do have hurt them from the inside (the corporate buyouts of the eighties, cost-cutting that led to decreased staffs and bland coverage, ethics scandals, creeping bias, focus on entertainment at the expense of news).

Newspapers are still profitable, though.

But the internet really has changed everything. It really has. The internet, as Clay Shirky says in the article I linked to here a few days ago, has finally begun to crash the business model that made newspapers possible. Publishing is so cheap now that anyone can do it. Information is just there, right on your computer screen. And thus, readers are now expecting to get their online information for free, instead of paying for it.

Couple this with the crisis of trust that journalism has been battling for years (I still see those eighties bumperstickers "I Don't Trust the Liberal Media"), and it's a scary situation.

Newspaper companies are still trying to figure out how to move both of the traditional ways of funding themselves to the web. Advertising on the web and direct subscriptions on the web are both proving problematic. Newspapers don't dare ignore the web, but what they do can't be replicated there unchanged.

As Shirky notes, it is an accident of history that journalism=newspapers for so long.

Newspapers are changing before our eyes. It's useless to pretend that they will survive in anything like their present form. Anyone who talks to people under 30 knows this. As time goes on and the internet grows and changes, more and more people will expect to get their information there. This is not just affecting news. Book publishers and magazine publishers and the TV networks and movie DVD sellers and the music publishing industry are all responding to the changes the internet has wreaked on their profitability.

Change is here. So the challenge is to somehow bring the essential practices and functions of journalism to the new forms of information dissemination that the web has created.

Journalism must survive. News -- real news; not opinion, spin, advertorials, fluff or propaganda -- must survive. Democracy can't survive without it.

But to do it right is expensive.

Some people seem to think that blogs are replacing the old media as sources of news. This is crazy to me. In general, bloggers are writers and publishers, but they are not journalists any more than Oprah is a journalist. Not all information is news. Not all talking heads are journalists. Not all information on the web is credible or unbiased.

Some bloggers do see themselves as citizen journalists, focusing on a specific issue or a specific city, being whistleblowers and watchdogs. But advocacy is not journalism, either. Blogging so far has no unified or typical practices, though it continues to evolve. Groups are forming to promote good practices of citizen journalism, but these efforts are in their infancy.

The web is grassroots information. There are no gatekeepers. Anyone can post views and vie for attention. People who are cynical about the liberal media elite like this, but it doesn't fix the problem of too much opinionated blather and not enough factual, useful, current information.

But gatekeepers are developing too. Look at the idea of Digg It, or Yahoo's Buzz Up. ISPs are publishers, too. Big information companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon.com have a lot of control over what we see and how we see it. Readers seem to appreciate being pointed toward things they want to read, and certain blogs develop a following for this reason. But the values in all these enterprises aren't journalism values. The reasons that information gets presented on the web are all over the map, from the sublime to the commercial to the ridiculous. We know by now that what's popular is not necessarily what's important, or even memorable, let alone true. But somewhere between Digg It and the history aisle at Borders lies news in this new era. And we can't let it disappear.

Traditional journalists, newspaper people among them, have to find a way to disseminate, like Johnny Appleseed, the practices and values of journalism more widely on the web. We have to teach bloggers why objectivity, fairness and a commitment to the truth are so important. We have to teach young people how to find verifiable, solid information on the web. We have to find ways to make editing and reporting profitable online.

The big "gateway" net companies, like Yahoo and AOL and Microsoft, will undoubtedly continue to put news stories from AP and elsewhere on their home pages, because people want to see this information. But it also has the effect of continuing to let people expect to get expensive news for free. They've paid for it indirectly, of course, by buying internet service, but the average reader doesn't see it like that. It feels free.

However, many people manage their internet experience in such a way as to never see any news. They're not interested in it, or they see traditional 'old media' sources as biased. And the net lets people stay inside their own subcultures, too -- every special interest group across the political spectrum can make it a point to never interact with people who disagree, if they want to, and never see coverage aimed at a general audience.

News sites on the web are now offering links to blogs, and featuring "most blogged about" news stories. I'm sure the content managers are making an effort to include blogs of all different types, but so much of what one finds in the blogosphere is just sound and fury, signifying nothing. All opinions are not created equal. I'm not sure that adding a blogroll to my newsreading is all that helpful at this stage. The blogs I do read are written by insiders in their fields; more like newspaper columnists than anything else. I don't expect objectivity from them, but I want more than opinions and rants. I follow a lot of technology blogs that are interested in consumer-generated content, changes in mass media, and grassroots participation on the web (which has resulted in things like Wikipedia). But when discussions turn to journalism, I'm not seeing the questions I want asked.

How can we spread, or teach, or disseminate, the practices and values of journalism on the internet, especially since the number of trained professionals in the field will probably continue to shrink? Of course we must start by training journalists in video and writing and technology, but where will they ply their craft when they graduate, and who will pay them? Are government or nonprofit models, like the BBC or NPR, one answer?

Should we make information ethics and journalism a part of computer literacy classes? First Amendment seminars for all, since we are all publishers now?

And finally, how can we figure out a business model that will ensure that the expensive, important, investigative, fearless and fair journalism still gets done? Because inquiring minds do still want to know.

Creative nonfiction

2009-04-08T08:25:00.000-07:00

When I used to teach feature writing to journalism or PR majors, we always had a couple of class discussions on creative nonfiction. I took a, shall we say, dim view of it, despite the fact that it was and is a hot trend. I had the students write a paper using current examples of creative nonfiction articles and examining how its practices differed from the rather "old-fashioned" journalism that I was trained in.

Several practices that are allowed in creative nonfiction seem wrong to me: Putting paraphrased conversations, recalled days later, in quotation marks. Conflating several sources into one. Focusing a piece through subjective writerly impressions, rather than factual descriptions and verbatim quotes.

All this stuff really bothered me, from an ethical standpoint. It still does. I see great value in preserving the line between fiction and nonfiction, between "based on" and documentary, just as I see great value in preserving the line between opinion and fact.

Despite my continued reservations about the genre, Truman Capote's expertise notwithstanding, I finally found a defense of creative nonfiction that made me understand it better. And I found it seredipitously, in the editor's introduction to "The Best American Short Stories of 1987," published by Ticknor and Fields.

The editor that year was the legendary Gay Talese, who along with Capote and people like Tom Wolfe and even Hunter Thompson are considered some of the founders of New Journalism, which is a kissing cousin to creative nonfiction. New Journalism, which abandoned any pretense of objectivity in favor of fairness and an honest presentation of the writer's point of view, has become totally mainstream in the last 40 years.

Yet, Talese, in his introduction, wrote that between the sixties and 1987, good examples of New Journalism became very hard to find in the mainstream press, because such articles are now considered too expensive to do the way he did them. He described the techniques he used to gather information for his famous feature story about Frank Sinatra, which appeared in Esquire. He spent weeks on the story, and though he was never granted a private interview with Sinatra, he talked to many other people who worked with him and for him. He said, describing his own work, "This method of careful lingering and careful listening and describing scenes ... was ... fortified by ... principles of tireless legwork and fidelity to factual accuracy."

Talese rarely if ever took notes during his conversations with his sources. He never used a tape recorder. He felt that having conversations created a trust with his sources that the notetaking process would have destroyed. His practice was: "I would not identifiably attribute or quote anything told to me without first checking back with sources for confirmation and clarification." But he wrote down conversations from memory and treated them as quotes. In fact, he doesn't see the importance of quotes. "Since my earliest days in journalism, I was far less interested in the exact words that came out of people's mouths than in the essence of their meaning...." and he felt himself able to interpret their meaning, because he spent so much time listening to them.

To him, writing a feature story was much more than a bald recording of the facts. Turning a gifted writer loose to get a story, no matter how long it takes, is an acknowledgement that out of facts, the writer can, given time and thoughtfulness, produce truth.

But Talese says that by 1987, most magazine journalists were producing "pieces that tell us more about themselves than about other people. They are opinioned pieces of intellectual or cultural content, or articles that are decidedly reflective and personal, not dependent on costly time and travel. They are works researched out of a writer's own recollections.... The road has become too expensive. The writer is home."

Required reading for journalists in all media

2009-03-16T13:19:00.001-07:00

Futurist Clay Shirky, IMHO, is uniformly brilliant when he writes about how the internet is changing society. In his latest blog post he takes on the revolution that the internet has wreaked upon the newspaper business.

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

It reads like a eulogy, but his point is that what journalists do is not obsolete, and that despite the fact that the business model for newspapers has been blown out of the water by the internet, journalism must continue in new forms. We need journalism. Now more than ever. And, he makes a fascinating tale of the history of the internet revolution's impact on newspapers, comparing it to the invention of the printing press. It's a great post. One to ponder.

I remain deeply interested in this topic.

Jobs and identity

2009-02-23T05:04:00.000-08:00

Since last September I've been teaching in a new place, Oklahoma State University Institute of Technology, and have switched from teaching journalism and mass media courses to teaching English, technical writing, speech, and small-group communication.

It's been interesting to me to see how my publishing here has languished as my career focus changed. Previously I had a lot of things I knew I wanted to say about journalism, the internet, and how journalism is changing. It was pretty clear to me what the focus of this blog was.

But the realities of the new job have meant that I simply have not had time to keep up with that field the way I used to. My focus has changed to learning and reading and pondering about teaching writing in a more general way, instead of teaching writing to journalism majors who are already interested in writing and are learning a specific style of writing along with the traditions and conventions and ethics of that profession.

Now I am teaching a lot of students who are forced to take writing, and many of them profess to hate it or dread it.

But surprisingly, many of them are much better writers than they think they are, and I'm enjoying trying to demystify and destress the entire process for them.

I'm now halfway through my second semester, and I'm enjoying it a lot.

Changing careers, moving from a teacher of journalism to a teacher of writing, has changed me. I'm not sure I know who I am yet, or what exactly I'm doing in my new role, but I'm enjoying finding out.

I hope I can find entertaining and informative things to share here as I go about doing that. Teaching is my "day job", as I work on fiction when I'm not teaching, prepping or grading papers, and I find it fulfilling and worthwhile. I'm glad to be enjoying my new focus as much as I am. I thought of myself as a journalist for 25 years, and it's been hard (if necessary) to let go of that as my primary identity. Now when people ask me what I do, I say I'm a writing teacher. So far so good.

Losing people is hard.

2008-12-07T16:36:00.001-08:00

I write to say a final goodbye to former students Jessica Woods and Ronald Julian Ho. You will be missed.

Information and accuracy

2008-09-16T11:41:00.000-07:00

A news story I found on Yahoo! describes a new book on internet usage by Bill Tancer, who works for the internet research company Hitwise.

He told the reporter (from Reuters), "I think we will see someone come forward and develop a new type of software that can filter for the most accurate information.... Maybe accuracy is the next thing we will all search for."

This was the last topic in the story, which was mainly about the fact that social networking has overtaken surfing for porn as the top internet activity. But as a journalist, I was very interested in the idea that a better way of evaluating and ranking internet information for accuracy might be a goal.

A while back, I read an article about Google looking to hire writers and researchers to perform kind of a blurb-writing or evaluative function, but I lost the link.

Anyway. Food for thought.

Religion and politics

2008-08-22T04:44:00.001-07:00

My Oral Roberts University students and graduates will want to read this article about fellow alum Cameron Strang of Relevant magazine, who has declined an invitation to appear at the imminent Democratic Convention.

So, tell me -- did the reporter get it right? Do you recognize us in this coverage?

Whither the newspaper?

2008-08-20T12:57:00.000-07:00

I found myself wanting to stand up and cheer while reading this edition of the "Parting Thoughts" column in the online version of Columbia Journalism Review. Editor Chris Ison, formerly of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, advises today's publishers to Talk Journalism, and Win Back the Newsroom.

I worked at a daily newspaper until 2000, and I never saw, there, Ison's sort of worry and disgruntlement at the changes the internet hath wrought, but since then I've been avidly following these momentous developments in this traditional medium I love so much. The news media is really changing almost beyond recognition because of the impact of the net. It's as big, for journalism, as television was 50 years ago.

Fascinating stuff. Enjoy.

Changes

2008-08-14T04:40:00.000-07:00

I am excited to announce that I have a new, full-time teaching job. I'll be joining the Communications faculty at Oklahoma State University's Institute of Technology in Okmulgee for the fall semester.

I'll be teaching a mix of classes including English, speech, small group communication and technical writing, and hope to do both face-to-face and distance learning classes.

I'm sure this will provide me with many new avenues for pondering, right here, the changing nature of education and communication and the mass media.

I'll be diving into my prep work shortly, and you know me -- always happy when learning something new.

Keep in touch!

Online communication

2008-08-07T07:10:00.000-07:00

This week I had the opportunity to speak to a group of marketing professionals at the summer conference of the Oklahoma Department of Career and Technology Education down the turnpike in Oklahoma City.

I mostly talked about how Old Media is using New Media, and I was able to bring in a lot of fun things I've learned through the years about how the internet's interactivity, converged nature and accessibility are reinventing all the mass media. Journalists and PR professionals have to change or die in this environment, I think.

We talked a lot about blogging, and citizen journalism, and reputation management online, among many other things. Paula Bowles was interested in how companies and organizations are managing their employees' online activities. I could certainly see how employees, whether disgruntled or supportive, blogging about their work life would be of interest to their employers, though my perspective is usually from the journalism side, not the organization side.

I told her I would be looking for information on that, and posting it here, and as a starter, here's an article I found this morning when I was reading the headlines on Yahoo!.

Ways Your Email Can Get You Fired

It's not directly related to the issue of employees blogging about a company on their own time, but it was an interesting starting point for me.

The ways we use online communication differently from face-to-face or on-paper communication continue to fascinate me, and I'll be looking for more articles about this topic for Paula.

And I have to say -- downtown Oklahoma City looks great. Here's hoping Tulsa can continue to make some of the same kinds of progress.

Unsolicited testimonial

2008-07-24T06:51:00.000-07:00

One of the perks of college teaching is getting to take a look at new textbooks in the field, and here's one that I want to recommend to anyone who's interested in journalism as it is now being practiced on both Old Media and New Media platforms.

(I want to stress that no one from the publishing companies asked me to do this.)

All the News by Thom Lieb is a new book about writing the news for presentation in print, online, in a multimedia online environment, for podcast or radio, and for video, whether online or broadcast.

It's excellent, and it gives full consideration of journalism ethics, which are more needed than ever before as citizen journalism on the web comes of age through blogging and online video.

Here's Lieb's page at amazon.com, as well. I first noticed his work when I adopted his earlier book, "Editing for Clear Communication," for my copy editing class. It remains the best and most practical book on copy editing and supervising reporters that I ever found.

I believe that "convergence" is indeed the trend in this field, and that journalism programs really should move toward combining print, broadcast and multimedia disciplines. Lieb's new book succeeds in showing how you can really actually do that, and do it well.

He also tackles the incredibly important area of ethics. His book discusses the end of the Era of Objectivity in news, and the replacement of objectivity with a renewed commitment to fairness, balance and accuracy.

While I have serious issues, traditionalist that I am, with totally abandoning the ideal of objectivity in journalism, I respect his treatment of this critical topic.

His books are really the best I've seen for teaching the next generation of writers and editors.

From the front line of the copyright wars

2008-07-04T04:40:00.000-07:00

Lots of news coverage of this, but here's the article from "Computerworld":

Judge Orders YouTube to expose user viewing habits

by Heather Havenstein

Viacom and Google are clashing titans, certainly. Viacom doesn't like the copyright infringement it sees when individuals use video material owned by Viacom to remix their own video clips and post them on YouTube, which Google owns.

So a while back, Viacom sued. A judge has ordered YouTube to turn over logs that show what its users are watching.

Privacy issues regarding internet data are involved here, as well as copyright. Reposting of commercial material on YouTube, without permission, could certainly be interpreted as violating copyright, or, on the other hand, it might be part of the huge big old loophole in copyright known as Fair Use, which lets people quote from or use some copyrighted material under some circumstances for news or criticism or education or art.

These issues are central to the development of the internet, and, of course, I'm glued to the set, here.

'Help, I've been flamed!'

2008-06-23T07:52:00.000-07:00

A while back I promised to post this link, and forgot, until I realized that this, too, is a column from "Salon" by Gary Kamiya, a columnist/blogger I always find fascinating.

The Readers Strike Back

Writing in January 2007, he is surveying what happens when the interactive power that the internet gives readers is released on unsuspecting journalists.

Writers, he says, are used to a polite distance from their readers. Letters to the editor in traditional print publications allowed readers to talk back to journalists, but those letters did not have the immediacy and in-your-face quality of online feedback. Feedback that comes in comments to blogs, or comments appended to the foot of an online article in an electronic version of a newspaper.

I thought this column presented a fascinating viewpoint on how the internet is changing journalism, specifically the relationship between journalists and readers/viewers.

Once again, it shows how the internet is blurring the line between amateur and professional, between journalist and ordinary citizen. For better or worse. Journalists are having to deal with more, and more frequent, responses from sources and readers. While painful, to me this can be a very good thing.

Luckily, the thriving world of internet communities has long since come up with methods and etiquette for how to respond to angry commenters, whose diatribes are known as "flames". So journalists don't have to reinvent the wheel here.

But Kamiya has some great stuff to ponder. Enjoy.

I'd have done it for free.

2008-06-14T10:07:00.000-07:00

In August 2004, the Tulsa World sent me, a former employee turned free lancer, to northwestern Arkansas to cover the shooting of the movie "Elizabethtown", directed by Cameron Crowe and starring Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst.

The results of that assignment were published here:

Lovin' Bloom

It was a unique and serendipitous intersection of my lifelong love of Tolkien's fantasy realm, and my day job. The "Lord of the Rings" movies had turned me into a breathless Orlando Bloom fangirl. After playing the Elf prince Legolas in that three-movie epic, Bloom went on to play the bereaved son in "Elizabethtown." It was a huge amount of fun to get to watch the shooting of the day's scene, on the historic yellow suspension bridge in Beaver, Ark., knowing I was on the clock! A rare blend of fun and work.

My feature story was about the economic impact of the movie business on Beaver, famous for its unique bridge, and Eureka Springs, famous for its lovingly preserved Victorian architecture. Despite persistent inquiries, I was not granted an interview with Crowe or with Bloom. But, I chose to take matters in my own hands, and stand in line with fifty sweating teenagers to get Orlando Bloom’s autograph. My first-person sidebar about that experience was rejected by the World's weekend editor, who, I believe, found it just a bit gushing! (No, really?) But I saved the copy, and here it is.

Reporter Turns Fangirl

Just plain fun.

Religion, politics, media bias, oh my

2008-05-21T08:04:00.000-07:00

As a journalism teacher, I always tried very hard to separate my personal views from what I evaluated as the facts of a situation, and tried to present conclusions that disagreed with my own. Modeling the behavior one would like students to copy -- you know.

Doing this is hard, but, I believe, not impossible, and certainly is important if one is trying to be a journalist in the old-fashioned way that values not only fairness, but something approaching objectivity.

One of the things I used to argue in a nice way with my students (at least the ones who were brave enough to voice opposing views from mine -- I tried to encourage that, but you know. Teacher. Kinda intimidating.) was, what are the facts about liberal bias in the news media?

Teaching, as I was, in the very conservative environment of Oral Roberts University, this was a difficult discussion to have, and I was always really trying very hard to notice my own biases and judgments, and present viewpoints different from my own, which are pretty darn liberal.

Here's a new column from Salon magazine -- an eloquent discussion of conscious and unconscious bias in the media, and it supports my suspicion that the more you look at supposed media bias, the more complicated the discussion gets.

Psycho Christians and the Media

by Gary Kamiya

He writes, "The dirty little secret of mainstream American journalism is that it operates within invisible constraints that conform to some imagined Middle American consensus."

This statement was a hard sell for some of my students, who, from their more conservative vantage point, tended to see even Middle America as too liberal. Not all my students, of course, but some.

I always argued that some accusations of bias in the media have more to do with how any given group of people defines "the mainstream" than actual intentional political bias.

On the other hand, it is true, as one of my students so eloquently discussed in his senior paper last year, with the studies to back it up, that nearly all journalists self-identify as liberal, and in general are more educated and more skewed to the East Coast than the population that makes up their readers. Which makes training journalists in objectivity and fairness even more important.

Anyway, I enjoyed Kamiya's discussion of why Rev. Wright is vilified in the media while Rev. Hagee got more of a pass. At least for now.

I never get tired of discussing religion and politics and America. Even when doing so is hard.

Serious fun with the internet

2008-05-12T11:06:00.000-07:00

Here's an amazing blog post that should be of interest to anyone who has wondered about censorship here or abroad, freedom of information, activism, citizen journalism, global communication and/or the power of the internet:

Cute Cat Theory

by Ethan Zuckerman

Wow. Fantastic stuff; I learned a lot by reading this.

Not a Lawyer, Nor Do I Play One on TV

2008-05-02T11:26:00.000-07:00

This week marks the end of my seven years of teaching at Oral Roberts University, and I’m sure I’ll be posting more, as I evaluate and as the experience really sinks in, about what I’ve learned from teaching journalism after 20 or so years of doing it.

In a nutshell, it’s been great, and in many ways I’m sad to leave, but I’m very clear that I’m ready for the Next Thing, whatever that turns out to be. I’ll be doing some copy editing and magazine work over the summer, and being The Mom (of course) and am scheduled to teach English part time at Tulsa Community College starting in August.

One of the most fascinating and personally challenging things I got to do at ORU was teach the Mass Media Law class.

I have no formal background in law, but I did work as a beat reporter covering federal court and, more briefly, district court, so that was a terrific preparation for the class. As teachers always say, I learned as much if not more than the students.

I found that I enjoyed focusing on the lawsuits -- the cases -- the most. I think this is because of my love of storytelling.

I really believe that using the case approach is a storytelling approach, and that it’s the way the students best retain the information.

Studying cases lets you focus on the people, on what happened to them, on what they did, and then, looking at the trial outcome lets you present the legal principles and the importance and significance of the case, yet in a way that focuses on the human impact.

In journalism we always focus on writing about people, not things or machinery or trends or statistics. People. That makes it more interesting, I think, and the law-class students felt the same.

Sure, it’s important to memorize principles and lists of facts or tests, such as the six things that copyright law protects, or the six sources of law under the U.S. system, but studying the people and the cases is just so much more vivid.

The students always seemed to enjoy studying Napster and music downloading, when we tackled intellectual property law, because it’s something all of them are interested in and have done themselves. I always assigned papers about the legal issues we studied, and I always got a disproportionate number of papers about music downloading.

The class also included small-group discussions on legal and journalism ethics, and that portion of the class, too, focused on case studies -- real-life, true stories about people or companies involved in ethical dilemmas or ethically troubling actions.

Of those cases, the students, surpringly enough, were always captivated by the discussion of Nike’s marketing of expensive athletic shoes in low-income neighborhoods, and the fallout to the company when there were a couple of high-profile incidents of teens being murdered, apparently for their shoes. The students got very passionate in discussions on how the company responded to those killings.

Over the five years, it was a wonderful thing to show the students just how much freedom of conscience we really have as Americans. They often seemed stunned by that -- by how much personal freedom the law allows us, and by noticing how many things that their particular Christian subculture judges as immoral, are not illegal.

We could never avoid discussion of the lawsuits regarding the Ten Commandments in the courthouse, even though they were pretty much beyond the scope of the class, either.

Because ORU is a conservative, charismatic Christian university, the students are very versed in Christian morals. They focus on the inner life, on the biblical injunction that you must control yourself on the inside in order to live morally on the outside.

But the secular law is only rarely about intent. It’s all about behavior. Your conscience is really fundamentally yours.

I’ll miss teaching this class. I really learned a lot.

The view from "New West"

2008-04-02T08:52:00.000-07:00

Always interested in the future of journalism online, as I am, I found this list of FAQ's, or Frequently Asked Questions about New West very interesting.

Publisher Jonathan Weber discusses the startup, ad policy, computer/software platform, and journalism policy of his online publication based in Missoula, Montana. He also offers links to other online publications that are doing something similar.

Interesting look at a publication that is employing journalists and editors in the traditional way, but is also including content from readers -- something that is sometimes called "citizen journalism."

Enjoy!

And I found this link through an ORU student, Megan Spees, who is researching journalism online for her senior paper. That's one of the coolest things about being in the university environment -- getting the benefit of what the students learn, while sharing what I've learned with them. Go, Megan.

Journalism and the web

2008-03-17T15:54:00.000-07:00

Here is the Associated Press' story on a report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism on how journalism has adapted to the web.

In a hurry now, but I'm going to revisit this and take a look at the report itself. Some of the neatest information is in the last few paragraphs, though. Huh.

We're only as good as our sources

2008-03-03T12:07:00.000-08:00

At the recent American Women in Communication conference in Tulsa, I heard one of the speakers (and he was excellent, by the way) compare blogging to keeping a diary online.

I disgreed with his definition -- to me, blogging is more like writing a newspaper column, or giving a commentary, on line. And this is a wonderful thing, as far as it goes, but it points up one of the big problems I have with journalism these days.

I try to keep up with national news, via newspapers I can get through their websites, and I read the local papers, and I spent the last couple of years faithfully reading, specifically, Time and Newsweek, cover to cover every week. I feel like that's kind of the bare minimum necessary to stay in touch with my field. I also read Quill and Columbia Journalism Review. So that's where I'm coming from with what I'm about to say.

I'm worried, because I believe that journalism that focuses on sources is slowly being eclipsed, in practice, by journalism that focuses on the experience and knowledge of the writer/blogger/columnist.

Journalism is getting to be no longer source-centered. It's reporter-centered.

I think this happened, in part, because of television. Television news encourages us to look at the reporter; to let the reporter be our tour guide through the news. With some exceptions, television news is responsible for the celebrity-ization of the news. I love good TV news; I worked in TV news. There are some stories that are best told via TV. But. As a viewer, I didn't want Diane Sawyer to show me what happened after the tsunami in Indonesia. I wanted the reporter to step out of the frame and let the people that were actually there when it happened speak to me. I didn't want Ms. Sawyer's over-interpreted version of the event, or her emotional response. I wanted her sources.

The real power in writing journalism lies in who you choose as your sources. Whose voices you allow into your story, whose point of view you present. Our work is only as good, as accurate, as complete, as the sources we consult. Yet I notice that in Time and Newsweek nowadays, anonymous sources for Washington stories are routine. Too often, political coverage reads like an insider's gossip column.

I think we're going too far in letting the journalist, the reporter, take center stage while forgetting that he or she is not the story. The story is the story. And the more the story includes on-the-record sources and the less it includes the opinions of the writer, the better I like it.

I think that the increase in blogging as a way to bring more voices into the information mix, this conversation that is the internet, is a good thing. But bloggers are columnists. They are not trying to give us a variety of sources. It's a very personal, very idiosyncratic, very ME kind of written medium. In that way, I suppose, it does resemble a diary.

Which is great. But if you're aspiring to journalism, it's easy to get way too far into your own head and too far away from your sources. And for me, journalism will always be mostly about the sources, and not the reporter.

Links for "The Next Big Thing"

2008-02-25T18:19:00.000-08:00

I used this post, actually, to show the participants at this week's conference on new media my blog, and to link to some other sites that illustrated some points I wanted to make during my talk.

It was fun! And I hope I encouraged the attendees, because truly -- if I can get into blogging and social networking, anyone can. I am the original late adopter!

I talked quite a bit today, face to face, about the three characteristics that I believe differentiate the new, computer and internet based media, from so-called old media. These ideas are not original to me, but have been gleaned from journalism observers and from various textbooks I've used in the last seven years of teaching.

First of all, interactivity.

This link to a "Tulsa World" article chosen pretty much at random illustrates how people are now invited to comment directly on newspaper stories posted online on the newspapers' own websites, pretty much replacing the old Letters to the Editor function:

Coburn on War, With Comments

I have learned from some of my research that this newspaper is really serious about doing whatever it takes to reinvent itself for web readership, while continuing to publish a paper, hard-copy version:

Atlanta Journal Constitution

It can be uncomfortable for reporters to get so up close and personal with readers. I personally think it's great, but it does take some getting used to. Web journalism really is, or has the potential to be, a conversation now, not one-way communication. And I like conversation!

The second characteristic of new media is convergence.

I learned this word from my news textbooks, and also from Henry Jenkins at MIT, whose blog, "Confessions of an Acafan" is linked to, there on the left, and whose book "Convergence Culture" blew the top of my head off. (Acafan means academic/fan.)

Yahoo Main Page.

Many people get their news from the Associated Press, but access it through the main page of Yahoo or another full-service Internet Provider, and the AP and other news sites are all kinds of media now. Not just words. Newspaper stories are being rewritten for the web. Newspaper reporters are delivering video news stories on digital webcasts. It's all multi-media now. You get TV shows on your iPhone. All the lines between industries and technological devices are blurred. This is convergence.

The third characteristic of the new media is its grassroots nature.

Anyone with a website is a publisher. Anyone with a blog is a journalist. There are no gatekeepers. Barely any editors. Here's my own website, created as an experiment with the software that came with my new MacBook:

My Writing Website

Yes, really: I created this website myself. New acronym: DIY, which means Do It Yourself. As a previous post says, we are all content providers now. Technology has made this possible. It's also led to the enterpreneurial explosion in marketing and PR and graphic design. A one-person shop can do what an entire agency used to do, because of computer technology.

As a journalist, who believes in the basics of fairness and objectivity, this "we are all publishers" thing is more than a little worrisome to me. I don't think the training journalists get in writing, as Bob Woodward and others have called it, the "rough draft of history" will ever become obsolete. Quite the contrary. I think it's needed more than ever. I think we should be teaching those principles wherever we teach Dreamweaver and HTML. I think democracy may depend on it, and I'm pretty sure civility does. Old-fashioned, huh? I told you I was a late adopter.

Keep in touch, 'kay?

It's all about the 'content on demand' now

2008-02-09T15:08:00.000-08:00

I am not nearly hip enough to read Wired magazine, but I read it anyway. I enjoy the paper copy, the old fasioned version, but they have a totally way cool online version, as well. Of course!

So recently I was reading this article about the happening-soon revival of Futurama, Matt Groening's (creator of The Simpsons) short-lived SF show. Comedy Central is going to be airing the existing 72 episodes, and has bought a new season.

But what hit me as I was reading the story, and waxing nostalgic about both shows, was what Groening and his colleague said about the impact of DVD sales on their resurrection.

It was fan support of Futurama, as evidenced in DVD sales figures, that kept the show alive and convinced these cable execs to revive it.

But Groening also said that they believe that DVDs are shortly going to be doomed by (you guessed it) downloads.

I think they're right.

My new computer is a MacBook, and I've been availing myself of the tutoring of the geeks (and I say that in the most complimentary way possible) at the Apple Store in my town, and once they started showing me the new stuff you can buy in the iTunes store?

Girlfriend. DVDs are so doomed. Music CDs are already on the way out. Netflix and Blockbuster? Say goodbye. Because it's just way too easy to download whatever movies or specific episodes you want from a place like the iTunes store. Way too easy.

And sometime in the next couple of years, when digital television takes over in a major way? Your computer and your internet will be ever more easily integrated with your TV screen.

Downloading that content on demand is all we'll be doing. Even the late-adopters like me!

The Next Big Thing

2008-02-08T13:22:00.000-08:00

I have marked my calendar for Feb. 26, because I'll be one of many speakers at the American Women in Communication Tulsa conference on marketing using the internet.

As only makes sense, the organizers have started a blog right here on Blogger to communicate about the event: The Next Big Thing

I wear three hats nowadays -- writer, journalist and teacher -- and this conference is a wonderful way to wear them all at once!

There's definitely something wrong with that metaphor... The visual really doesn't work at all! :).

Anyway, I'm looking forward to it.

So, what did we learn?

2007-12-02T18:59:00.000-08:00

I'd been wanting to create a journalism and academic blog for quite awhile, but this class and this semester, plus my 8th Floor training experience, gave me the nudge. I'll be keeping this blog long after class is over, and I hope to update often. Maybe I need a deadline of once a week or even twice a week. We'll see. I'd welcome some advice on that, actually -- I think once a week is pretty much the minimum necessary.

I've enjoyed reading your posts in the Newswriting I class and seeing the beginnings of your explorations of the differences between blogging and journalism, and how the internet can become such a powerful tool in disseminating information and communicating.

So, as our semester finishes, I have some questions for you. How does blogging feel different from social networking? What do you get from Facebook or My Space that you can't get here?

Have you seen how in the blogs, it's all about opinion? While in class I've tried to teach you to adopt a neutral tone and to find the facts? Definitely two different kinds of writing, with very different purposes.

Has creating and using your own blogs helped you understand a bit more where all those impassioned and often anonymous comments come from, on the newspaper articles that have been coming thick and fast about ORU since Oct. 2?

In short, what have you learned? Comment here, or post, or ignore this. It's not for a grade, but I appreciate the feedback.

Also, unless you let me know that someone's going to keep your class group blogs live, and use them, I'll be deleting them, sometime before Christmas, from my index list. Because a blog that never updates is like ... dead.

So... Thanks, Newswriting I students, for helping me explore this new tool!

For me, the interactivity of blogs is amazing. Journalists can feel very separated from their audiences. Blogs end that. Also, it's overwhelming to realize how much time one can spend updating and keeping current, and how quickly one must post/react/analyze in order to stay relevant. Too fast, sometimes, for someone with as many demands on her time as I have.

But I fell in love with the various and sundry communities I've found on the net long since, and I'm here to stay. Hope you guys have found some information, some community, and some tools for your careers, as well.

It's been great!

A well written article to cheer about

2007-11-28T12:19:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I just want to get up and cheer when I see a tough subject tackled well by journalists. This article on memory research in National Geographic magazine got me cheering.

It's notable for several reasons. The reporter, for ethical reasons, had to use initials and not names for several of the people interviewed. The reason? In one case, the person was mentally disabled and not in a position to give consent to the interview. Yet, the person's family, and physicians, thought that telling the person's story was so important, and an opportunity for education, that it outweighed the normal practice of insisting that sources who are private citizens give permission for interviews.

In another case, the person being interviewed had a rare memory ability, and giving details about her would have made her a target for the curious and turned her life into a circus sideshow. In this case, preserving her anonymity was balanced against the incredible scientific contribution that knowing about her brought readers of the Geographic.

Because of the solid science reporting, and the breadth of the sources that were included, all my usual fears were allayed in terms of the credibility problems involved in using anonymous sources.

Also, the photos were creative and amazing. Not an easy subject to photograph, but as usual, the Geo did wonders there.

Yay!

Another class assignment

2007-11-06T10:14:00.000-08:00

Hey Newswriting I people -- time to dust off your blogs and do another assignment here in cyberspace.

(By the way -- I was checking out your blogs recently and I noticed that I offered the sports group some extra credit (an unspecified amount) if they would give us a round up of the controversy over the criticism of the sports media offered by the OSU football coach a while back. He was upset with a sports journalist and had some vehement things to say about that in a news conference, and the topic was discussed all over the sports journalism world, in print and on the net, for a couple of weeks, until some other story shoved it into the background.

So if anyone's still interested in doing that, the extra credit offer still stands.)

But the actual assignment for this week:

This post will be due Wednesday the 14th.

What each group will do is find an article on the internet that directly relates to the topic of your blog. You will find an article of interest to your group, read it, and link to it on your blog. Then, in the same post, you will discuss why you found it interesting. Then, after doing that, you will read the other groups' posts for this assignment, and comment on them once. Again, as always, the blog assignments (posts AND comments) are done as a group and graded as a group. Posts are due Wednesday; your comments are due by the time we start class on Friday the 16th.

Questions? Post them as comments here.

another CJR article ...

2007-09-26T11:50:00.000-07:00

on copyright...

Here's what the U.S. Copyright Office itself has to say about Fair Use.

And here's another article from Columbia Journalism Review about a lawsuit involving blogs that aggregate and disseminate information, like Marshall does:

Blogs, Fair Use and Paying to Play

by John McLeary.

I'm still updating myself on this, too... now to check on the progress of the lawsuit that McLeary writes about.

Your next assignment: Blogs and Ads and Journalism

2007-09-19T10:00:00.000-07:00

Hello, Oral Roberts University bloggers, in the Newswriting I class!

Here's your next assignment, which you will do in your blog groups. Your post, which will be the result of this assignment, must be up and visible by 5 p.m. on Monday, Sept. 24.

Here's what you'll do:

Click this link and read this article from the newest issue of "Columbia Journalism Review":

The (Josh) Marshall Plan by David Glenn

This article is a look at a blogger, Josh Marshall, who has evolved his blog into "Talking Points Memo", a profitable online publication that now has several sister publications, and employs a small staff of reporters in New York City. This blog has become very influential; for example, Marshall was the blogger who broke the story about former Congressman Trent Lott's racist comments, and the controversy that ensued led Lott to resign.

After you read David Glenn's profile of Marshall and his business, think about what stands out to you about this article. What is interesting to you about how Marshall has turned his blog into a career? How has he merged blogging, which is very opinionated and personal, with journalism, which is supposed to be the rough draft of history? Is this type of journalism the future of the internet? Is it the future of journalism?

Personally, I am very interested in the idea of advertising and blogs. To pay his salary and the salary of his employees, and to meet expenses, Marshall has raised money from his readers, and has also made a lot of money by letting companies advertise on his blog. This seems to be the business model that the internet is turning to: Advertising. Is this business model working? How do companies know if internet marketing/advertising is resulting in more profit for them? What companies have arisen to be the "middlemen" in the brave, vast new world of internet advertising? What new techniques are they using? Who is making money and who is going broke?

Another interesting issue that I see in this article is the issue of copyright. Marshal routinely links to other news sources and websites. He digests and "aggregates" for his readership the content of a lot of other news operations. Is this basically piggybacking on other people's work? Do the other news operations see this linking as a benefit to them, or is Marshall using them without making it possible for them to get anything out of it? Does copyright law cover web links like this? Copyright basically means that the original creator of the written or visual content should be the one to control it and make money from it. News media do get some exceptions to this. Does Marshall fall under those exceptions? Or what?

These issues of journalism, history, opinion, making money on the net, and the future of reporting are central to our class.

Think about this article, and decide on a topic to concentrate on. Then, search the internet to find out more information about your chosen topic that's related to the Marshall article. Working with your group, write a post on the topic. In your post, you should respond to the Marshall article, and to the other articles or information that your own research turns up.

Include links to the sites or articles that you use to write your post. One link is enough; more is extra impressive!

Question? Comment on this post.

Rev up those search engines! Happy posting.

"I'm not an artist; I'm a content provider."

2007-09-05T09:57:00.000-07:00

In the old days, before You Tube, before the Fox network created "On the Lot," before Yahoo!Answers, before Wikipedia, you knew who you were out there in TV Land. You were a consumer. A viewer. A reader. You watched the ads in order to get your broadcast TV for free. You bought a paperback book to read what the author had written. You were the audience. They were the producer, the publisher, the star.

But the internet, and its ability to let anyone, anywhere, publish words, sound and pictures, is blurring the line between publisher and reader, between producer and viewer, between performers and their audience.

Furthermore, the audience seems willing to share its creations on the internet for free, but the audience also seems to think it should be able to get the content it finds on the internet for free.

Artist, author, writer, sideman, composer, designer -- here in cyberspace all these roles get lumped into the new and slightly strange term "content provider." Creative, productive people with a grab-bag of skills fill our screens nowadays with all kinds of stuff. Words, graphics, digital video, and electronic containers for same.

Because the internet is so easy to use, the technology itself blurring the line between the sellers of this this stuff and the buyers/consumers of it. People are eagerly posting things on the internet that they used to sell. The content providers are giving away their content.

In the old days, in my line of work, you got a job as a reporter and your newspaper paid you by the story or as an employee. The publisher of the newspaper took my words and the words of all the other reporters and the pictures they had hired the photographers to snap, and the ads that the ad-buyers wanted the readers to see, and put it all together in a nice big package and sold it to readers. That's how we all made our money.

But on the internet, there is so much content available for free that a lot of companies have decided there is no way to charge for it. Furthermore, they are inviting their audiences to provide that content for free instead of buying it from professionals.

Take You Tube. People are posting things on You Tube every day just for the fun of getting to see their videos up there in public, and for the thrill of knowing other people are seeing them, too. Furthermore, what we used to call producers, publishers, people who make television shows, are now turning to those amateurs to find content to show the viewing audiences. Fox's "On the Lot" was an amateur movie contest, with the winner getting access to Spielberg.

It might have started with American Idol, but the internet has embraced this idea and continues to blur these lines. We all get our 15 minutes of fame. If you have a blog, you're a publisher. We aren't the audience any more. We're all content providers now. Andy Warhol was right. But is fame enough? How is the new public of grassroots content providers going to be paid for their work? Or are they?

Join the conversation...

2007-08-22T11:30:00.000-07:00

The top five links in my "Sites of Interest" list were added today, and they are brand new blogs created by students in my Newswriting course. A couple of them already have content, and there's lots more to come. We hope to learn about the blogosphere and its impact on journalism by exploring it ourselves.

That whole "learn by doing" thing, you know?

Talk amongst yourselves...

Edited to Add (ETA): After this class ended, I deleted those links, because none of the students chose to continue using the blogs they made for the assignments. There's nothing more boring than a blog that never updates! This is what makes blogs different that websites, you know? They must be updated, or they are as flat and dull as plastic flowers.

Function follows form

2007-08-18T03:25:00.000-07:00

(Author's note: Good morning, nascent Oral Roberts University bloggers. I'm sitting here in my study at home, drinking a cup of coffee, and I want to write, to you and to anyone who might be reading, about the idea of blogging and genre.

Now do you see why online communication is so fun? All of the communication, none of the dress code. ;) ).

My title is from the words of USA architect Louis Sullivan. He said that form follows function, but I'm going to turn that on its head and and suggest that when we think about the ways that the internet has affected journalism and other forms of communication, the opposite is true. Function is following form. To put it another way, the baseball movie "Field of Dreams" indicated that "if you build it, they will come," and that's kind of what's happening with internet communication.

The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary has a nice, concise definition of the word genre.

(Pause, while you, I hope, follow the link and read it. Okay, now you're back.)

I am most familiar with the idea of genre as it relates to fiction. A reader discovers science fiction, mysteries, police-procedural novels, romance novels, and discovers that if he or she loves that, there is more of that out there, and the way to find it is by sticking with that genre.

I believe blogging can be categorized as a new kind of genre.

In many ways it's similar to the type of newspaper feature known as a column. When we teach about feature writing in my class of the same name, the column is one of the things we learn to write. Columns are personal, and equally focused on the voice of the author and on the content. They are short and to the point and each installment is devoted to one subject. They appear at regular and predictable intervals. Columnists develop or choose areas of concentration, like politics or parenthood or humor, but the topics they cover can and do range widely.

Blogging is a lot like that. The best blogs, as you are, I hope, finding out if you're in my class and reading this, are the ones that shamelessly and idiosyncratically display the passions, opinions and personality of the writer. They also should, ideally, point you to cool stuff on the internet that you wouldn't have found on your own, and teach you a little something you didn't know before.

A big difference from the newspaper or magazine column is that blogs are being created by anyone and everyone, and their audience finds them by voting with their mouseclicks. In the world of professional newspaper journalism, arriving at point in your career where you are tapped to write a column is a sign that you've become kind of an elder statesman... that your peers and your bosses have judged that you have something important and entertaining to say. The columnists in the big newsmagazines, like Time or Newsweek, were already established in their fields when they became columnists.

The idea of blogging has turned this upside down. We are building it, we are putting our ideas out there, and their audience is finding our ideas, or not. It's all very random, chaotic, and exciting. Function is following form.

Whether this is good or bad is yet to be determined. Snarky cultural critic Andrew Keen, in his new book The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture, certainly thinks it's bad.

I haven't read the book yet, only a few reviews of it, but I have a feeling, based on my personal experience, that he's wrong.

We humans, by accident and along the way, created the internet, and then the idea of blogging came along (the history of blogging is another post entirely) and now a genre has been launched, suitable for marketing, building your career as a comic or a writer, honing your writing skills, and being included in a college journalism course.

The new genre of blogging is giving a voice in a whole new way to a whole new group of people who never before would have found an audience at all.

Who are we bloggers?

2007-08-15T06:58:00.000-07:00

Despite being a journalist for over 20 years, and thus immersed in current events and the "latest things" for most of my adult life, I'm personally a late adopter of new things and new technology. For example, I waited until I was over 17 years old to get my driver's license. I know; that's unheard of. I was just kind of in no hurry, for some reason.

Thus, I was dragged kicking and screaming to learn how to use email, I still haven't started text messaging, and I didn't get a cell phone until 1999. I needed something really intriguing to get me interested in the internet and its possibilities, and it wasn't until I wanted to get involved in the internet communities that grew up around the movie version of "The Lord of the Rings" that I took much notice of the Worldwide Web, despite being introduced to its possibilities for research and information storage when I was in grad school. (I received my master's in journalism in 1997, but that's another story entirely.)

So, you would think the net would have caught my attention first in my professional life. But no. I was first interested in the net as a fan.

Hence, when I discovered this excellent survey of bloggers, I was intrigued, and I wanted to see if my experience diving headfirst into the world of discussion groups and fan Wiki's and fan commentary on Tolkien and Jackson was typical or atypical.

Bloggers: A Portrait of the Internet's New Storytellers is a project of the Pew Charitable Trusts, a well known and authoritative think tank on the state of journalism and mass media.

I found its information fascinating. We bloggers are still definitely in a technologically savvy minority, and we are skewed demographically younger than the general population. More than half of us are under 30, so at 46 I feel way more mature than I am comfortable with in these parts! But the numbers in this study exploded some of my preconceptions about who uses the net.

There are 12 million of us writing blogs, only 8 percent of internet users. But there are 57 million Americans reading blogs. Although the mass media tends to focus on the political commentary in blogs, well over one third of the bloggers surveyed by Pew said they were using blogs for expressing themselves and their own creativity. Only 11 percent of bloggers surveyed were primarily interested in politics. And contrary to the image of the net being populated entirely by white male geeks, bloggers are evenly divided between men and women, and the blogosphere is much more multicultural than the population as a whole. If you want to click on the link, the study has an excellent executive summary at the beginning. It's a PDF, by the way.

Blogs are fascinating, because they have made the average person into a historian, a journalist, a social critic, a writer and a publisher, all in one fell swoop.

People are using blogs for anything and everything, and a whole new way of doing journalism and doing interpersonal relations and building community is happening before our very eyes, because of technology.

I'm looking forward to exploring how blogging is changing society and, yes, journalism, and even publishing law. The future is no longer science fiction. It's here.

Hello, world...

2007-08-08T13:03:00.000-07:00

After years of being a lurker on the social commentary and media criticism and academic areas of the blogosphere, I decided to get serious about starting a blog of my own.

The proximate cause was an excellent class I took this summer at The 8th Floor about online learning. The more metaphysical cause was my alter ego as a media critic, acafan and consumer of all kinds of pixels having to do with the future of journalism, New Media and All That.

What can you expect here? Posts about journalism, the internet, the impact of the internet on journalism, the fin de siecle we Americans seem to be involved in, occasionally politics, feminism, and various obsessions.

Oh, and I'm writing a fantasy novel and trying to adapt a screenplay, so I might occasionally rave about that, too. And "Lord of the Rings." Can't leave that out.

Who am I? A teacher, a writer, a mom, a journalist, a fan.

This will be fun. I think. :)