Infomaniac: Behind the News

Holiday weekend diversion

2008-11-29T15:54:00.002-05:00

For something totally silly, especially if you're a fan of sites like Stuff White People Like, here's a new one: Stuff Journalists Like. Like 'Professional Organizations':

Journalists need to connect with others who enjoy long talks about deadlines, copies and incompetent editors. That is why journalists like professional organizations.
Groups like Society of Professional Journalists and Investigative Reporters and Editors give journalists a sense of community and a place to feel better about the career choices they have made.

(Via Miranda Writes.)

Good stuff

2008-11-21T15:26:00.002-05:00

Europeana is a just-released Web site that is a repository for information from archives all over Europe, including "digitised books, films, paintings, newspapers, sounds and archives from Europe’s greatest collections."...
Unfortunately the demand has exceeded server supply and the site is now down and being retooled to re-open in 'mid-December'. A development site is still up, in English only.

Measuring Worth gives you 'six ways to measure the relative value of a U.S. dollar amount, 1774-present.'

Policy Archive, a 'a comprehensive digital library of public policy research containing over 16,000 documents'.

The Bivings Report gives us The Top 10 Best Newspaper Websites. The Washington Post and New York Times, no surprise, but how about two Tennessee newspapers?

40 Years Ago

2008-11-21T12:32:00.004-05:00

(An occasional reminiscence on the events of 1968)
(See the posts in chronological order)

A few days after the election, as the reality of Nixon's election sunk in, Washington Post cartoonist Herb Block ran his 'free shave' cartoon: it depicted his studio, with a barber pole outside a window, and a sign on the wall: "This shop gives to every new president of the United States a free shave. H. Block, proprietor." A shaving mug and brush stood on the desk next to post of pens and bottles of ink. (For those who don't remember, Herblock's depictions of Nixon had long featured a thuggish dark-bearded character. During the campaign, Post editor Russ Wiggins had sent Block a razor with a poem asking 'Give that man a shave'. Block's response: "He's shaved with new Gillettes 'n' Shicks 'n' Still he is the same old Nix'n.")

One happy result of the election: Shirley Chisholm of New York was elected to Congress, the first black woman ever.

1968 had been a bad year for airplane hijackings to Cuba, with almost 1000 people diverted to Havana. In November at least 3 planes were hijacked, including a National Airlines plane from New Orleans, an Eastern Airlines plane from Chicago and a Pan Am plane to San Juan. Things had gotten so bad that in early December Time magazine published a guide to what to do if your plane is hijacked to Cuba:

"DO enjoy your stay. Most layovers last overnight, because Cuban authorities will not permit U.S. jets to take off with passengers from Jose Marti Airport, and it takes time for the airline involved to ferry over a substitute prop plane. Passengers meanwhile are billeted either at Jose Marti Airport or at one of two good hotels...You will probably be treated to a nightclub, complete with daiquiris, a chorus line and an audience of gaping Eastern Europeans. The shopping downtown is better..."

In Miami, Dr. Orlando Bosch was convicted in his September bazooka attack on a Polish freighter. He would serve four years of a ten year sentence and later mastermind an attack on a Cubana airlines plane that would kill 73.

In November, the first Whole Earth Catalog was issued, from Menlo Park, California, with a photo of the earth from space on the cover. The issue is dated 'Fall 1968'. The goal:

"We are as gods and might as well get used to it. So far, remotely done power and glory--as via government, big business, formal education, church--has succeeded to the point where gross obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing--power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG."

It was a month of music: Van Morrison released his Astral Weeks album sometime in November (it had been recorded in two sessions, in September and October). It would become one of the most honored albums of the century.

Also released this month: George Harrison's soundtrack album, Wonderwall Music, some of which he had recorded in India earlier in the year. it would be the first release by the Beatles' new company, Apple Records, and the first solo Beatle recording.

The Who were in London recording their rock opera, Tommy, which would be released in 1969.

The Beatles' animated movie, Yellow Submarine, was finally released in the U.S., November 13.

The Beatles' White Album "The Beatles", their only double album, was released Nov. 22. Some of the recording sessions had been attended by John Lennon's new love, Yoko Ono, who sang some backup. On Nov. 8 John's wife Cynthia's divorce from him was finalized. About this time Yoko suffered a miscarriage.

On November 26 Cream held their farewell concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London. The band, consisting of Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, had had a success with the release of their Wheels of Fire album over the summer. By October they had decided to break up and began a 'Farewell Tour' of the U.S. On November 3, they played the Baltimore Civic Center. Several of us rode in someone's van from DC to Baltimore where we got to see the second to last concert given in the U.S. by this astounding superstar band. I remember walking the cold downtown streets and seeing this new city for the first time.

Topping the Billboard charts in mid-November: Number 1, The Beatles' Hey Jude. Also: the Supremes' Love Child, Those Were the Days by Mary Hopkin (another Apple release),Steppenwolf's Magic Carpet Ride, White Room by Cream, Abraham, Martin and John, by Dion, and Glen Campbell's Wichita Lineman.

For Thanksgiving, I likely flew from Washington to Rochester, to spend the holiday with my family: here in our backyard, my mother is wearing a poncho I knitted, in multicolor stripes that reminded me of a Gene Davis painting. I'm wearing a coat that I think I bought at Casual Corner, near the Post's building. The fourth young man is a German exchange student who lived with my family part of this year. It was probably my first visit home after moving to DC the previous late December or early January.

Life pictures on Google

2008-11-20T12:37:00.003-05:00

The announcement yesterday of the availability of the Life Magazine photo archive on Google Image has lots of sites buzzing. (See Sheila Lennon, for example...) Getting access to this treasure trove is nearly unbelievable, and will be invaluable to researchers and historians.

Take one search, for example: searching 'Miami' on the archive finds two great collections, a series of many photos taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt in winter 1940, mostly on Miami Beach; and a large number of photos from the 1972 Republican National Convention that nominated Richard Nixon. A small collection of other random photos completes the list, some well-identified like the Eisenstaedt photos and others nearly unidentifiable.

A couple of the 1940 Eisenstaedt photos:
(The second photo is from a cold spell in which temperatures hit 31 degrees for a couple days. There are others, including one of a woman wearing a mink jacket over her bathing suit -- fascinating stuff.)

Changes at Change.gov

2008-11-18T13:57:00.002-05:00

At ProPublica, Jennifer LaFleur reports that the Obama agenda pages are back at Change.gov. Some have been rewritten. (See previous reference here.)

Some good research links

2008-11-15T14:38:00.001-05:00

Wall Street Journal's Photo Journal large versions of photos in the news, like the Boston Globe's Big Picture.

The Plum Book (United States Government Policy and Supporting Positions): 2008 Edition, list of openings in the Federal govt.

Comics.com has opened up a huge archive of United Features comics for free, including 50 years of Peanuts. Also:

The British Cartoon Archive.

Credit card industry facts, debt statistics 2006-2008

Plant Information Online From U. Minn. libraries, "finds sources in 1054 North American nurseries for 107631 plants, find 377083 citations to 140104 plants in science and garden literature, link to selected websites for images and regional information about 12759 plants, and access information on 2448 North American seed and nursery firms. "

World Stadiums Database, the "most comprehensive stadium database on the net, which currently contains more than 10 000 stadiums in over 223 countries".

Concerns for gun owners

2008-11-13T11:35:00.002-05:00

All over the country, gun stores are seeing sales jump in response to Barack Obama's election. Gun enthusiasts...never comfortable with Obama's stated laisse faire policy on guns....are saying 'I told you so' now that the election is over and it's clear that Dems will control both houses of Congress and the presidency. The biggest concern to many: the assault weapons ban put in during the Clinton administration and allowed to expire after G. W. Bush became president.

So what's the truth about Obama's policy towards gun ownership?

Factcheck.org published a good rundown during the campaign, citing NRA propaganda that made all sorts of outlandish claims about what could happen to gun laws. Most of the claims are debunked, but the report does link to an early Obama policy agenda sheet on Urban Policy that does promise to make the assault weapon ban permanent, close the 'gun show loophole' and make all weapons childproof.

This policy sheet has been seized on by anti-gun law activists and linked to from several reports being emailed to gun owners around the country. Some bloggers are concerned that a copy of the Urban Policy report was posted on the Change.gov site, then removed or "quickly disappeared down the memory hole after staff realized their plans had been revealed just a bit too soon." according to one blogger. Lots of reaction indicates a huge disappointment in Obama's claims during the campaign that he would respect Second Amendment rights.

And who cares about assault weapons, anyway? Any gun owner who has a semi-automatic weapon, including former military weapons like AKs and ARs, popular with gun collectors and recreational shooters. I can say from experience that this includes lots of normal law-abiding citizens who love their guns and enjoy owning guns that the U.S. military uses, and find lots of enjoyment in them.

Here's a summary of the ban and list of affected weapons, from the Salt Lake Tribune. A bill to renew of the ban was introduced in Congress this past spring, so it's quite clear a new Congress will probably face a renwal bill in the coming session. Would President Obama sign this legislation? Most likely.....

PS, I hate guns. But I love some gun owners and feel their concern.

Eight years

2008-11-09T14:34:00.003-05:00

I started a website with a 'blog' page in early November 2000, which I remember because I missed the Ramble at Fairchild Tropical Garden that weekend, putting it together, and because just about that time we discovered that the results of the presidential election were in doubt -- and would be for several weeks.

Most of the first postings were about that election and the legal and political wranglings around the Florida results. I also posted a page of links about it, which I still get asked for at times (I have found a copy of that page but haven't posted it since all the links are out of date). The original Web site and 'blog' are gone now, since I changed Web providers last winter. The blog was converted to a Blogspot blog in August 2002.

Learning from the campaign

2008-11-07T11:55:00.002-05:00

Good posting from Ken Doctor on his Content Bridges blog: 10 truths the press can learn from the Obama campaign.

New government Website for Obama

2008-11-07T11:14:00.004-05:00

There's a new website for the president-elect: Change.gov. Lots of information here on the inauguration, the new administration, the agenda (or will be).

It includes a link to Presidential Transition Resources site, a directory of new position holders as they are named.

Should be very helpful.

(Updated:) Also see Sheila Lennon's posting on the new site.

This is a surprise, I think, considering that in the past I haven't found federal government websites to be particularly current; I must say there has been a big change in the last year or so and new websites have been coming online in response to current issues. (Example: another new site for information on veteran services, Warrior Care.) But: was this created by the Obama team and a totally new product, not a product of the current administration's web team?

It'll be interesting watching what the Obama administration does with the federal Web. I just hope there aren't lots and lots of URL changes, as happened when the Bush administration took it over. It wreaked havoc with intranet and web directories which all had to be tediously changed.

How it was in DC

2008-11-06T12:08:00.003-05:00

I love Joel Achenbach's blog posting with photos of the spontaneous demonstration that erupted outside the White House Tuesday night: All-Night Party at the White House; as well has his report on the lines for copies of the Washington Post the next day. (And more, on other demonstrations.)

Washington was always a place where you never knew what was going to happen next, and people came out to express their feelings. I still miss it some days.

Looking a little deeper

2008-11-06T11:58:00.003-05:00

In The Times Online, an interesting analysis of the state of American politics: It was a great victory - but not for the Left.

The Guardian has a good three-part Obama biography: The Obama Story. Slide show: Road to the White House.

Then there's Newsweek's blockbuster, Secrets of the 2008 Campaign.

How the Times covers Iraq

2008-11-05T10:54:00.001-05:00

Great story in next month's Vanity Fair about the New York Times bureau in Iraq, the only U.S paper that hasn't cut back it's in-country coverage. The New York Times’s Lonely War.

40 Years Ago

2008-11-04T13:08:00.005-05:00

(An occasional reminiscence on the events of 1968)
(See the posts in chronological order)

November 5. The election was upon us, a scary time. The choice, between LBJ's vice president Hubert Humphrey, a likable former mayor, congressman and senator from Minnesota who had for years been a reliable liberal campaigner, and Nixon. In 1948 HHH had been one of the first who stood up to the southern Democrats and demanded a civil rights plank. He introduced the bill that created the Peace Corps. He had tried for the presidential nomination in 1960 and gave up his senate post and majority whip position to become LBJ's VP in '64.
Despite all his good points, many Democrats and other voters, especially the young, deplored his complete loyalty to LBJ and support of Johnson's war effort and were upset he was the nominee instead of the dead Bobby Kennedy or Eugene McCarthy. A Tom Lehrer song "Whatever Became of Hubert?" went "I wonder how many people here tonight remember Hubert Humphrey. He used to be a senator..."

Some possible Humphrey voters were also voting for the third-party candidate George Wallace, the former Alabama governor who had attracted blue-collar voters to his campaign of racism and disgust with anti-war protests.

Nixon, on the other hand, was a polarizing candidate: you either loved him or hated him. Many voters had never forgiven him for his 'red-baiting' campaigns of the 1940s and 1950s, the Alger Hiss case, his win over Helen Gahagen Douglas for the Senate in which he accused her of being 'pink' (It was Douglas who dubbed him 'Tricky Dick', according to Wikipedia); his 'Checkers' speech.

As Eisenhower's two-time VP he was always expected to have a chance at the presidency but his close loss to John F. Kennedy in 1960 and his 1962 loss at the California gubernatorial race, in which he claimed he held his last press conference ( 'you won't have Nixon to kick around anymore') seemed to have ended his career.

His return -- and nomination -- in 1968 was a surprise to many, and disgusted many young voters in particular. He was old politics, and we didn't like his appeal to the so-called 'silent majority' and the outrageous campaign statements and attacks on anti-war protesters of his VP candidate, Spiro Agnew. Spiro Agnew watches were a popular fashion statement, by supporters but also by those who thought he was a joke (one campaign ad: "President Spiro Agnew? (laughter)).

So November 5th was an uneasy day. For my first election night in a newsroom, I discovered the library's job was to set up as an information center for Post readers. We were expected to come in a bit later that day, and work as far into the night as necessary.

We would get copies of wire reports on the returns as they came in; the copy staff had to make extra copies and drop them on our desks as quickly as they got other copies to the reporters and editors working on the night's stories. Readers had been told to call the library's number, and when a reader wanted results in Iowa, for example, we had to find whatever numbers we had amongst the piles of torn-off wire printouts. It could get frustrating, especially when callers couldn't understand why we didn't have the latest news. Even the TV in the corner with the network news coverage didn't always help.

I don't remember how late I had to work that night, or how soon we knew the results, but it was demoralizing. Nixon won with 43.4% of the vote to Humphrey's 42.6%. Wallace had taken 13.5% so may have made the difference. Worse, though, Humphrey took only 191 electoral votes from 13 states, whereas Nixon took 32 states and Wallace 5.

Headline in the New York Times the next day:

NIXON WINS BY A THIN MARGIN, PLEADS FOR REUNITED NATION; NIXON'S ELECTION EXPECTED TO SLOW PARIS NEGOTIATION
Allied Diplomats Suggest All Sides May Adopt a Wait-and-See Stance
NIXON'S ELECTION MAY SLOW TALKS

Many of my friends talked of moving to Canada, Paris, or somewhere else. A year later I'd leave for London (but stay only a few months). 1969 would be a sad year.

What could you buy with it?

2008-11-04T11:49:00.001-05:00

Dress Like Palin. What you could do with Sarah's spending money.

I voted

2008-11-04T11:33:00.003-05:00

Right here. No lines. (Although one began to accumulate as we were leaving.)

Another good news research story

2008-11-03T15:06:00.002-05:00

How The Times followed a trail to find Barack Obama’s aunt.

Useful and different elections info sources

2008-11-02T15:17:00.005-05:00

Our Vote Live tracks election problems during election day.

Google Elections Gallery will show real-time elections results on maps.

fivethirtyeight.com on electoral projections.

Early Voting Database, 2008.

2008 Electopedia from New York magazine.

Ballot Measures Database from Natl Conference of State Legislatures.

Ballotopedia.

The International IDEA Voter Turnout Website.

And something else in the news:

Failed Bank List from the FDIC.

Thoughts from the mountains on this election

2008-11-02T14:30:00.004-05:00

Up the mountain road near us on the way to Hiwassee Dam, a sign at a small country church, saying something like this:

'Never fear change. Think how glorious fall is'.

Yet, in front of many of the houses nearby, little shacks with junk and dead cars in the yard and little insulation or even siding, lots and lots of McCain/Palin signs.

Hmmm.

Then again, in the Asheville Citizen Times, a 103 year old woman voted for the first time in her life. She and her husband raised their children in a log cabin and she says she never voted because 'he took care of all that'.

Urged by a granddaughter, she got in an absentee ballot -- for McCain. 103-year-old woman becomes first time voter.

Speaking of those fall colors: Photos at Southern Highlands Cam.

Can't resist this

2008-10-31T10:33:00.002-04:00

Here's a novel take on a political ad. Subtle but effective. It's the 'Wassup' gang from the Budweiser commercials, 8 years later.

This one via KnoxViews.

Political language

2008-10-30T16:57:00.002-04:00

A topic that needs more discussion, and here's a great one from Anil Dash on What Sarah Palin is Saying.

Here's your chance....

2008-10-30T16:54:00.003-04:00

To carve a pumpkin online. The only one I'll do this year.....

Thanks to ~~Knox Views~~ Ashvegas.

What they think matters

2008-10-30T11:49:00.003-04:00

Via Achenblog, a fun graphic from Foreign Policy: If the world could vote...

Heresy to some who think we should ignore what the world thinks of us, but I'm on the side who believes it matters very, very much....

Facebooking

2008-10-29T10:22:00.003-04:00

Posting is slow again as I've been undergoing some medical treatments that slow me down.

But over the last couple days I've succumbed to another social networking tool: after news librarians, and then my college classmates, set up Facebook groups, I decided it was finally time to join up.

I've enjoyed using LinkedIn to keep in touch with work collegues and thought that was all I wanted to participate in, but now I've seen the light and have discovered how much fun it is to be able to converse with friends on Facebook, as well as see their photos, etc.

Not to take it too seriously, but I admit it's amazing how, among school, work, and family contacts your Facebook lists can grow. I've only been on a day and already have a full platter there.

Posting here should resume a more normal schedule in a few days.

40 Years Ago

2008-10-17T12:16:00.007-04:00

(An occasional reminiscence on the events of 1968)
(See the posts in chronological order)

On Oct 2, US Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas withdrew his nomination as chief justice; his nomination had been held up for months by a Senate filibuster. (Six months later, he would resign from the court, admitting he'd made a financial deal with the Louis Wolfson Foundation.)

On October 2, the disturbances in Mexico leading up to the Olympics reached a head as a student procession in La Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco, Mexico City, led to a bloodbath.

Supporters claimed soldiers with automatic weapons killed 300 or so students. The government claimed that only 50 students died in the five hours of gunfire. It became known as the Tlatelolco massacre.

Ten days later, the 1968 Summer Olympics opened in Mexico City. The high altitude of the venue caused problems for many athletes, but created opportunities to set records for others. American Bob Beamon jumped nearly 9 meters in the long jump. It was the first Olympics to have doping tests, resulting in expulsion of a Swedish athlete for alcohol use. the closing ceremony was broadcast around the world in color, the first time for the Olympics.

The most controversial event of the Olympics was the stand taken by two of the medalists in the 200-meter dash, Tommie Smith (gold) and John Carlos (bronze) as they raised their fists in a 'black power' salute as the national anthems were being played. (The silver medalist, an Australian, wore a human rights badge.)

Other events of October this year: the 10th anniversary of NASA, world premiere of the cult horror movie "Night of the Living Dead".

Top songs that month: "Hey Jude" and "Harper Valley PTA". Barbarella was released. Traffic released their second album, and Led Zeppelin was recording their first. The Lion in Winter came out the end of the month.

The Motion Picture Association of America adopted its film-rating system, created by Jack Valenti.
Dadaist artist Marcel Duchamp died on the 2nd.

On the 5th, police attacked demonstrators in Derry, Northern Ireland, marking the beginning of 'the troubles' there.

On the 11th, the first manned Apollo mission, Apollo 7, was launched, carrying Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele, and Walter Cunningham. They would do the first live television broadcast from orbit.

On the 14th, the Defense Department announced it would be sending 24,000 army and marines back to Vietnam on involuntary second tours.

On October 20, JFK widow Jackie Kennedy married Aristotle Onassis on Skorpios.

That month, the four American auto manufacturing companies sold 885,358 cars, a huge increase and a new record for any month. Inflation was rising prices on everything.

In the Atlantic Monthly that month: an article entitled The War Against the Young, by Richard Poirier.

Ove the last couple months, I'd gotten friendly with some people I'd been introduced to by a coworker. Mostly from the Princeton, New Jersey area, they had mostly attended, and recently graduated from, George Washington University in DC.

Some of them had an apartment near the GWU campus in Foggy Bottom, around the corner from the DAR's Constitution Hall, where I'd attend some great concerts over the coming years (The Band and Derek and the Dominos most memorable).

The apartment was also across the street from the Selective Service office so there were constant pickets and demonstrations there.

With these new friends, we got to occasionally get a car trip out of the city, towards Virginia's Blue Ridge and Skyline Drive, a welcome break especially as fall arrived.

One Sunday afternoon, probably October 20, I got to take another short road trip with them to Alexandria, Va, where there was a concert being held in the Roller Rink there. I remember that day as the first time I took some drags from a marijuana cigarette, but the concert would have been memorable anyway: the opening act was the Jeff Beck group, with Beck, Ronnie Wood, Nicky Hopkins, and (maybe?) Rod Stewart.

But the main event was the one and only Janis Joplin, with Big Brother and the Holding Company. Wow. I remember sitting on the floor to the right and very close to the acts. It was a great day.

On October 27, 50,000 people joined an anti-Vietnam war protest in London.

On October 31, President Lyndon Johnson announced his 'October surprise', designed to aid the election of his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, as president: he would end the Vietnam operation called "Rolling Thunder", basically ceasing "all air, naval, and artillery bombardment of North Vietnam". During this three year bombing campaign the U.S. had dropped the equivalent of 800 tons of bombs a day on North Vietnam. Johnson said progress in the Paris peace talks made the cease fire possible.

Help for researchers

2008-10-14T11:38:00.004-04:00

I hadn't heard of Google's 'In Quotes' until I saw it mentioned in the AskSam newsletter. What an intriguing idea, and hopefully useful. It's just quotes from John McCain and Barack Obama, but searchable or browsable by category. Some Biden and Palin quotes, too, I tried 'hockey mom' and and got it.

Also from Ask Sam: a searchable version of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008; the Presidential Debates transcripts; and the Vice Presidential Debates transcripts. These available to search online, as usual, or download to use with the free AskSam reader.

The Commission on Presidential Debates has lots of history, transcripts, quotes, etc. online, too.

Good stuff for these final campaign days.

Newspaper by hand

2008-10-13T11:53:00.003-04:00

Roy Greenslade points us to a new newspaper being published in London, on a very tiny basis:
The Manual is an actual hand drawn, hand lettered newspaper, 150 copies distributed to commuters at London stations this morning. How it was published...

Fascinating.

Politics today

2008-10-12T11:22:00.009-04:00

Interesting stuff (updated, see last entries):

From Christopher Buckley (son of William F.) in The Beast: Sorry, Dad, I'm Voting for Obama

This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?
...having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves.

Dear Pup once said to me sighfully after a right-winger who fancied himself a WFB protégé had said something transcendently and provocatively cretinous, “You know, I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.” Well, the dear man did his best.

Harold Ford, Jr: Will McCain Do Anything to Win?

When I ran for the Senate in 2006, my opponent, Bob Corker, also found himself trailing in the October polls. His campaign and the Republican National Committee launched a series of false and vicious character attack ads, including the infamous "call me" ad, in which a scantily clad white woman looked at the camera and said, "Harold, call me."

Every major news organization and independent ad-checking group ruled the ad a smear and deemed it way over the line. But that didn't stop John McCain from coming to Tennessee and campaigning for my opponent while the "call me" ad and other smears were broadcast across the state. Not once did McCain speak out against that ad as he did about the smear against John Kerry. In fact, the first manager he hired for his 2008 presidential campaign was Terry Nelson, the person who produced the "call me" ad.

From Frank Rich, in today's New York Times: The Terrorist Barack Hussein Obama. (How many people will read that without looking at the column, and say 'See? Even the New York Times knows.)

(Updated:) In the Times, again, The Man Behind the Whispers About Obama .

Seems the best thing a news researcher can be doing these days is looking into all the rumors and trying to show where they come from. Note researcher Kitty Bennett's contribution to the latter story, by Jim Rutenberg.

(Speaking of misinformation...or just weird thinking, here's from a letter to the editor in Saturday's Asheville Citizen Times that will shock you -- or not:)

Obama...and Biden...are pro-abortion.
A child has just as much right to live as they do. If they win, however, those who voted them in can call them 'president' and 'vice president'. I will not.
Biden lied when he said he would not be vice president. I don't think the KKK will like it very much if Obama gets elected.
I used to be a Democrat but I have switched. Give me John McCain any time.

(um...isn't he pro-choice?)

...Vote the Bible.

For those who care....

2008-10-10T09:59:00.003-04:00

...about politics, anyway, an amazing effort by the staff of Esquire to put together a database of endorsements of every Congressional-and-up candidate in the country.

Wow.

This includes their endorsement of Barack Obama,

Esquire Endorses Barack Obama for President
We thought this election would be a serious fight over the future of this country, but only one candidate showed up.

This is a thoughtful and very thought-provoking argument, particularly on the links between -- and political effect of -- Justice John Paul Stevens and Obama.

Far as I can tell, the rest of the endorsements are not online. Worth buying a copy, I'd say. Among the lists, the 10 best -- and 10 worst -- politicians in the country.

Cheap shots, or real facts?

2008-10-09T12:58:00.004-04:00

Here's a well- researched compilation at Random Pixels of various published reports on the details of John McCain's service record. This is interesting. John McCain's service to his country...the stuff he doesn't talk about.

Ar all the questions about who did or said what, or what we know about Obama/McCain tax plans, driving you crazy?

Don't forget to see what other factcheckers have discovered is true or false, at Politfact (with it's Truth-o- meter), or Factcheck, or Fact-Checker.

And don't forget good old Snopes.

Blame it on CAR

2008-09-29T17:33:00.003-04:00

Fascinating brief link on Romenesko today, to a conservative blog that links to a claim that the mortgage/credit crisis is all the fault of the Atlanta Journal Constitution!

Back in 1988, Bill Dedman did a pioneering Computer Assisted Reporting project for that paper, The Color of Money, comparing mortgages issued to people in white and black sections of the county. No surprise, blacks -- no matter their income levels -- didn't get mortgages as easily as whites. Dedman won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting.

The column linked on Red State Conservative was by Mike Masterson of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, who says:

...a former investigative reporter for Atlanta’s daily newspaper likely pitched the snowball that grew into the avalanche and buried our leading mortgage institutions...
...exposed the practice of redlining by banks that routinely declined risky home loans in low-income neighborhoods...

Dedman replies to the Red State link,

See what he did? Hearing "black," Mr. Masterson decided that meant "low-income." He thought "black" meant "risky."
Mr. Masterson's assumption is precisely the same one that many bankers in Atlanta and elsewhere applied at that time. For years they had made loans in even the poorest white neighborhoods, while avoiding Atlanta's middle-class and more affluent black areas.

Fascinating, especially to those of us who've followed the evolution of CAR over the years.

Some updates

2008-09-27T15:57:00.003-04:00

Not much to report here, except that I have added some new news researcher blog links to the NewsliBlog's sidebar.

And, for those of you reading the 1968 recaps and wanting a chronological version, I've taken all the blog postings so far and put them on the website: 40 Years Ago: 1968. I'll copy the upcoming posts there, too, as they're published to the blog.

There's a lot more to remember about 1968.

Miami makeover

2008-09-25T08:24:00.002-04:00

I hadn't seen the new Miami Herald website until I noticed a mention at South Florida Daily Blog.

Yep, the site is easier to navigate for sure, much closer to what seems to becoming the standard site layout for newspaper front pages, rather like the NY Times.

Says Executive Editor Anders Gyllenhaal, about the makeover and the site:

Online readers of MiamiHerald.com have skyrocketed in the past year, making this the leading website for news and information in South Florida...

So, my question is, is the Herald online readership 'skyrocketing' because of the content and layout, or is it because in the last couple years bloggers like Rick of South Florida Daily Blog have been heavily linking to the best stories that readers might not have found -- or looked for -- on the site on their own?

Where's a news researcher when you need one?

2008-09-25T08:12:00.001-04:00

Interesting stuff in this first part of Katie Couric's interview with Sarah Palin.

Obviously, she needs a researcher:

Couric: But can you give me any other concrete examples? Because I know you've said Barack Obama is a lot of talk and no action. Can you give me any other examples in his 26 years of John McCain truly taking a stand on this?

Palin: I can give you examples of things that John McCain has done, that has shown his foresight, his pragmatism, and his leadership abilities. And that is what America needs today.

Couric: I'm just going to ask you one more time - not to belabor the point. Specific examples in his 26 years of pushing for more regulation.

Palin: I'll try to find you some and I'll bring them to you.

40 Years Ago

2008-09-23T11:21:00.007-04:00

(An occasional reminiscence on the events of 1968)

This month, Yale junior Garry Trudeau began to draw a comics series about the football team, called 'bull tales'; they would run in the Yale Daily News, starring BD and Mike Doonesbury.

On the cover of GQ, September 1968: Omar Sharif, wearing a plaid wool jacket.

On September 7 at the Miss America pageant, Atlantic City: Despite the legend, no bra burning took place. several dozen women's liberation protesters from New York City joined with women from around the country to stage a show on the boardwalk. From Jo Freeman, who was there:

Women’s liberation took advantage of this to stage several guerilla theater actions. A live sheep was crowned Miss America. Objects of female oppression – high heeled shoes, girdles, bras, curlers, tweezers – were tossed into a Freedom Trash Can. A proposal to burn the can’s contents was scuttled when the police said that a fire would pose a risk to the wooden boardwalk. Women sang songs that parodied the contest and the idea of selling women’s bodies: ‘Ain’t she sweet; making profits off her meat.’ A tall, Miss America puppet was auctioned off.

That weekend, Led Zeppelin performed for the first time at a club in Europe; at their first show, they were billed as The Yardbirds (the Yardbirds had disbanded two months earlier, and guitarist Jimmy Page subsequently formed this new group).

On September 16, Dr. Orlando Bosch, an anti-Castro terrorist, drove his Cadillac to Dodge Island, the Port of Miami, where he and his accomplices fired a 57-millimeter bazooka, hitting the Polish freighter Polanica. Years later a Cuban news report would accuse Bosch and cronies of being responsible for several dozen bombings or attempted bombings against countries that traded with Cuba, that year.

On September 18 presidential candidate Richard Nixon appeared on Laugh-In, sticking his head through the well-known wall of opening doors and saying “Sock it to ME?”

Protesters against the government continued in Mexico, increasing as the international focus was on the Olympics, to be held in Mexico City in October. President Díaz Ordaz ordered the army to occupy the National Autonomous University campus on the 18th. Students were beaten and arrested indiscriminately and fighting continued around the city including at Polytechnic, occupied five days later.

60 minutes debuted on CBS September 24, the first weekly news magazine on television. It was on a Tuesday.
Funny Girl starring Barbra Streisand, opened in theaters. Streisand had been a hit on Broadway in 1964 with this musical about the life of Fanny Brice.

On Sept. 26, President Johnson appointed Washington Post editor J. Russell Wiggins to be UN ambassador, after George W. Ball resigned to join the Humphrey campaign. Russ Wiggins would be sworn in on Oct. 4, leaving Ben Bradlee as the top editor of the Post 3 months early. Graham and Bradlee offered the managing editor job to Eugene Patterson, recent editor of the Atlanta Constitution. Howard Simons, passed over for the managing editor job, would get it three years later when Patterson left the Post, disgruntled. About this time Steve Isaacs was named metropolitan editor and Richard Harwood, national editor.

September 29: “Piece of My Heart,” the lone Top Forty hit by Big Brother and the Holding Company, enters the charts. It would reach #12.

On September 30, the first Boeing 747 rolled out of the Everett, WA, factory.

On that day, the 900th US plane was shot down over Hanoi. 538 Americans were killed in action that month, highest of the year.

Sometime around this time the Post library staffer who had casualty duty went on vacation. I got to fill in, and call the Pentagon a few Fridays for 'body counts'. Many things made the war personal to me, despite not having a loved one in it. This one was deeply felt, talking to the enlisted man who read the numbers in a dull voice over the phone. Just numbers.

Books...and social networks

2008-09-22T12:00:00.006-04:00

When I was a kid, maybe 12 or so, I was enjoying reading so much I wanted to keep track of my books. So I started a file card system. It lasted a few months.

I was getting my own little collection of books. You could buy Pocket Books of the classics for 25-50 cents. When my mother took me downtown shopping we would often stop at the lunch counter at Sibley's department store. Right next to it was a little book section. I'd spend some of my allowance each time on a book. I got lovely little copies with attractive covers of things like Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Last of the Mohicans. Still have some.

I still have wanted at times to track my reading, just to see how much and what variety I've read, or to be able to remember a book whose author or title is foggy.

A year ago my niece Kerry invited me to Goodreads. Sounded like a fun thing to do, if just to list my books. Now I discover in a year I've read 52 books. Just as I thought, a book a week.

The first book I listed, which I'd actually read a week or so before I started this, was John Scalzi's Old Man's War. I'm still meaning to find more in this fascinating science fiction series. The last, on my 'reading now' list, Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns. Finished it last night. Wonderful.

I hadn't joined any social networks but this one; I later joined LinkedIn, which I like for the connections it gives me to former colleagues, but I use it lightly.

I've resisted any others so far. But I did recently get a Facebook invite from a former colleague, which I've been pondering. I think I'll join, thanks for asking, Kathy. And thanks, Kerry, for Goodreads. It's been fun.

One more thing: Sheila Lennon posted a link to this song, which I hadn't heard in years. Jesse Colin Young was a genius. Darkness, Darkness, Youngbloods.
(Update:) Jesse's website, where he sells his home-grown Kona coffee and songs, has a link to something I hadn't heard of before but endorse wholeheartedly: A Nobel Peace Prize for Pete Seeger.

Charts, sometimes no other words needed

2008-09-20T16:07:00.003-04:00

From Digby, today: (Via Economists for Obama)

From South Florida Daily Blog, a few days ago: (Via Little Joe)

Or even this earlier version, comparing the two, via Digby:

A new news researcher blog

2008-09-18T15:57:00.002-04:00

Sharon Clairmont, of the Orange County Register, has started the Answers. Sources. Knowledge. Blog.

Lots more news researcher blogs listed at Newslib.blogspot.com.

Follow up

2008-09-15T12:12:00.002-04:00

Just a bit more on the last post.

Just in case you missed it, we knew Tina Fey would be perfect as Palin but this is amazing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnRUKIMegn8.

And one comment from Rick at South Florida Daily Blog:

I'm frustrated that I'm unable to make Sarah Palin a Democrat for one week so that we could all sit back and watch the same hypocritical gasbags who have exalted her as the new Ronald Reagan tear her experience and background to shreds.

That woman

2008-09-13T16:02:00.003-04:00

Amazing the amount of interest Sarah Palin's raising around the country. I heard talk of her everywhere this week, places I wouldn't have expected.

Daily Source has compiled a comprehensive list of resources on Palin's background, at Special section: an in-depth look at the record and policies of McCain’s VP choice Sarah Palin. There's similar coverage at Mahalo: Sarah Palin.

The Anchorage newspaper, of course, compiled all their news coverage of Palin on their website, at Gov. Sarah Palin: Background from Anchorage Daily News.

A blog: Women against Sarah Palin. With links to more, like Impalin. (Thanks Deb.)

Drug mystery, research roundup, and blogging status

2008-09-07T15:56:00.004-04:00

I'm always a sucker for a good conspiracy mystery, especially when it involves drug planes, the CIA, and south Florida.

So here's a good one, with a roundup from Boing Boing (Update on CIA drug plane owned by “Donna Blue Aircraft, Inc”), linking to the site that seems to be breaking this story, Mad Cow Morning News, by Daniel Hopsicker. A lot of fun research went into this report. Enjoy.

Only a couple research links this week:

Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence

Gov. Sarah Palin: Background from Anchorage Daily News.

And in other news, I'm starting treatments for a health condition that has been building for the last couple months. I don't know how much I'll be able to blog over the next few weeks, and things have already slowed down here quite a bit as I have been spending much of my time visiting doctors and hospitals for tests and preliminary treatments.

Hope things will get back to normal around here but for now expect light blogging. I have continued to post photos to my other blog (Southern Highlands Cam) and may be doing so there. We'll just have to see. Wish me luck.

Political conventions, protests and politics (shades of '68)

2008-09-02T12:08:00.003-04:00

Deja vu. Amazing news about the arrest of Amy Goodman and two colleagues from FSTV and Democracy Now, as St. Paul and Minneapolis police seem to be overreacting to anti-war protesters and media coverage.

Goodman's gentle but determined coverage of the news has been growing on me over the last few months.

The networks' websites have details; lots more links at Boing Boing. In 1968 it was the democratic convention that exploded. This year, Republican? Hmm. Is this just the beginning?
(Updated:) Michael Froomkin has been following links to the protests and police reaction in the Twin Cities, too.

In other political discussion, interesting reactions to the Palin appointment. Among them, PolitFact's Flip-o-Meter, which has added a new posting about Palin's so-called opposition to the 'bridge to nowhere'. PolitFact's ruling: a complete flip.

Joel Achenbach, as usual, has some interesting thoughts about the Palin questions, in Achenblog: Vetting is for Wimps.

You can see why America is a great country.....You can go from beauty queen to sports anchorwoman to snowmobile saleswoman to mayor of a town so small that the town hall looks, according to Carville, like a "south Louisiana bait shop" -- and still, in just a couple of years, with a twist of fate here and there, wind up first in line to be the Leader of the Free World.

That 'bait shop' city hall? Think Carville's exaggerating? Note these photos of Wasilla, Alaska, posted on the South Florida Daily Blog.

Isn't it time for some fun about the campaigns? The Jib Jab folks have done it again, with Vote Here. (Thanks, Deb.)

40 Years Ago

2008-08-25T16:55:00.005-04:00

(An occasional reminiscence on the events of 1968)

The Whole World is Watching

The Democratic National Convention opened in Chicago on August 26.

For months, anti-war groups had petitioned the city to get space to carry out demonstrations while the convention was ongoing. The Youth International Party (YIPees) had decided to hold their own national convention, a five-day "Festival of Life" the same week as the democrats, nominating a pig as their presidential candidate.

Mayor Daley had responded by denying permits, calling out the national guard and barricading the convention sites. The city was crippled by taxi and bus strikes. The weather was hot and humid and air conditioning was erratic.

The television networks and party insiders had encouraged the Democrats to move their convention to another city, maybe Miami Beach (which President Johnson had rejected, saying 'Miami Beach is not an American city').

Yippee flyers posted around Chicago in the weekend leading up to the convention advertised "free motel...sleep with us in Lincoln Park. Vote Pig in '68". The city refused to allow any gatherings in Lincoln Park and said everyone would have to clear the park at 11 pm. On Sunday night, a concert was to be held in the park, but the unorganized event turned into a disaster, as the music lasted only a short time and police drove the crowd out with tear gas and clubs at curfew.

On Monday night, convention opening day, thousands milled around the park, where beat celebrities like Allen Ginsberg, Terry Southern, William Burroughs, and Jean Genet would speak in support of the crowd. Norman Mailer was drawn to the event, but missed the aftermath:

he ...enjoyed himself until the morning when he discovered the attack by the police had been ferocious, and Ginsberg had been targeted, his throat so injured he could barely speak....And worse. Seventeen newsmen had been attacked by the police...the counterrevolution had begun.

Inside the convention hall, several miles away near the stockyards, there were ' daily shouting matches between red-faced delegates and party leaders often lasting until 3 o'clock in the morning' according to Haynes Johnson, who was there. The nomination of Hubert H. Humphrey was in progress, but was not taken well by the many supporters of Eugene McCarthy and the late Robert F. Kennedy. Many supported the nomination of Kennedy's younger brother Edward. One of those pushing for Ted Kennedy's nomination: Richard J. Daley. George McGovern had also offered himself as an anti-war candidate.

On Tuesday, President Johnson's birthday (he stayed at his Texas ranch), an 'anti-birthday party' was held at the Coliseum, where attendees protested the Chicago police and their violent tactics. When protesters returned to the streets, police attacked again. Chicago streets smelled of mace, tear gas, and blood. Thousands then marched to Grant Park, across from convention headquarters at the Hilton. The National Guard moved in, and surrounded the hotel with armored car barricades. All night kids in the park sang songs and appealed to convention goers to flash their room lights in support. Tear gas drifted into hotel public areas.

When the convention leaders delayed the debate on a Vietnam platform plank, dove delegates began an impromptu demonstration, finally cut off by an order by Mayor Daley.

On Wednesday afternoon, the plank calling for an end to the war in Vietnam was defeated by a 3-2 ratio, despite many speeches in support by party leaders. After the vote, delegates began an impromptu chorus of "We shall overcome", eventually drowned out by the convention orchestra, ordered to play loudly by mayor Daley. Delegates responded by holding up 'Stop the War' posters.

Meanwhile, another mass meeting was held in Grant Park. Protesters started a candlelight march to the convention hall at the Stockyards. On the way, police attacked once again. Lines of police wielding billy clubs trapped the marchers at an intersection overlooked by the Hilton. Convention attendees watched in horror as protesters were mowed down. The crowd began to shout "The whole world is watching". At home, watching this on television, we began shouting it too.

At the convention, one delegate asked for the floor to enter a motion to delay the convention for two weeks, moving it to another city. Delegates kept leaving the floor to watch the mayhem on television. As the nomination speeches continued, CBS correspondent Mike Wallace was punched in the face as he tried to ask why a delegate had been turned away from the floor.

At one point, Connecticut Sen. Abraham Ribicoff, in nominating McGovern, said "With George McGovern as President, we would not have to have such Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago." As the cameras turned to Mayor Daley in the front row, he could clearly be seen to be shouting 'fuck you' at Ribicoff, along with an ethnic slur. Ribicoff's answer: "How hard it is to accept the truth".

Finally, Hubert Humphrey was nominated, with 1,761 3/4 votes, to McCarthy's 601, McGovern's 146 1/2, and 100 for other candidates. (Among the others: Rev. Channing Phillips of the District of Columbia, the first black candidate ever to be put in nomination; he got 68 votes. Ted Kennedy got 12 3/4.) When, during the celebration, a picture of Humphrey's wife Muriel was splashed on the screen behind him, he ran over to kiss her image.

After the nomination, a film was shown honoring the late Bobby Kennedy. When it was finished, delegates began singing "Battle Hymn of the Republic". As convention leaders tried to gavel the demonstration to a halt, the singing got louder. After several minutes, Chicago leaders signaled their minions to start chanting, "We love Daley". The two demonstrations continued for several minutes until floor leader Carl Albert announced a tribute to Martin Luther King.

The next morning, Humphrey announced his vice presidential candidate: Maine Sen. Edmund Muskie.

After the convention adjourned that night, police who claimed someone was throwing objects from rooms at the Hilton, stormed the building in the early morning hours, dragged young campaign workers from their beds to the lobby, and beat them. Haynes Johnson, on his way to an appearance on the 'Today' show, saw the results:

They had been bludgeoned by Chicago police, and sat there with their arms around each other and their backs against the wall, bloody and sobbing, consoling one another. I don't know what I said on the "Today" show that morning. I do remember that I was filled with a furious rage. Just thinking of it now makes me angry all over again.

We watched the whole thing, in shock. Was this America? It changed everything we knew. Nothing would ever be the same.

On the last day of August, the Rolling Stones released the single 'Street Fighting Man', based on Mick Jagger's experience watching the spring antiwar demo in London's Grosvenor Square. It was the song of 1968.

Sources: Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago; Witcover, 85 Days; Haynes Johnson, Smithsonian Magazine, Aug '08, 1968 Democratic Convention: The Bosses Strike Back.

A roundup, of sorts

2008-08-25T11:31:00.004-04:00

After a slow week, a couple interesting new research blogs:

Paper Trail Blog from Center for Public Integrity, links to useful and interesting public records background to stories in the news.

Lisa Gold: Research Maven: she lists great tips for finding research resources, writing, and more.

A couple research resources:

Sports Illustrated's Vault gives access to 50 years of fulltext stories, covers, and images.

State Digital Resources: Memory Projects, Online Encyclopedias, Historical & Cultural Materials Collections. The Library of Congress compiles a list of state resources. This is great. I know of a few states' encyclopedias but knew there had to be more. They're all listed here.

And this:

5 ways newspapers botched the web, from Valleywag. Interesting recap of several of Knight-Ridder's online initiatives like Viewtron, Real Cities and New Century Network, along with The New York Times' Abuzz and newspaper consortium's Classified Ventures. On Knight Ridder's involvement, this:

Knight Ridder ignored the pessimists and committed to investing $25 million in its new online business. "I live in terror that some big thing's going to happen that I don't see coming," Knight Ridder New Media President Bob Ingle told BusinessWeek. What Ingle didn't envision: nothing happening.

(Updated:) Oh, and I should have added this, posted to the Newslib group this week by Kitty Bennett: Convention History (1856-2008), a great compilation of links from Poynter's David Shedden.

40 Years Ago

2008-08-21T10:21:00.004-04:00

(An occasional reminiscence on the events of 1968)

Former President Dwight D. Eisenhower remained in Walter Reed Army hospital, after being moved there in May to recover from a spring heart attack. He had another in June and two more on the 6th and 16th of August. Doctors were trying several new therapies to try to relieve the situation, but nothing was working.

One day that month, on a day off, I accompanied a Post reporter to the hospital to sit on watch. The situation was dire enough that Post reporters were staying round the clock there, just in case. The reporter who asked me to go with him was bored with the assignment and at least with me there we could play cards, probably whist, which I'd learned seemed to be the most popular card game among Washingtonians.

I remember little of the hospital except that we sat along a gallery overlooking a large room. Eisenhower would survive August, but die, still in Walter Reed, the next spring.

That month, ‘Cheap Thrills,’ by Big Brother and the Holding Company,was released on Columbia Records. It would top the chart for seven weeks.

Other new albums we were probably listening to: the Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo, and Creedence Clearwater Revival, both released in July.

Tom Wolfe published a new book, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, about Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters and their trip on the painted bus 'Further' across country. "Are you on the bus or off the bus?"

During August, negotiations were continuing between the governments of Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. On August 3 they signed the Bratislava Declaration, agreeing, along with other Warsaw Pact members, to uphold Marxist-Leninist principles. But following talks were unsatisfactory and the Soviets under Leonid Brezhnev decided this rogue ally needed disciplining. On the night of August 20-21, 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops and 2,000 tanks invaded Czechoslovakia. 72 Czechs and Slovaks were killed and hundreds wounded. Alexander Dubček called upon his people not to resist. He was arrested and taken to Moscow along with several of his colleagues, where most of them agreed to sign a promise to give up many of their reforms. They were returned to their posts within a few days.

Many years later it was revealed that several conservative members of the Czech government had asked the Soviets to intervene to prevent 'counterrevolution'.

On Aug. 22, CBS News' Walter Cronkite demanded, and got, a 1 hr evening news broadcast because there was too much news to cover in 1/2 hour.

There would be a lot more to come.

I want one

2008-08-19T13:36:00.002-04:00

Via Boing Boing, a link to a Times Online story, Just right for the garden: a mini-cow. Irish Dexter cows are small, about 40 inches high, and can produce a couple gallons of milk a day, containing up to a quart of cream per gallon. Enough to share with all the neighbors! Fresh ice cream every day. No need to pasteurize! It's perfect!
(Wonder if our little acre-and-a-half or so pasture would be big enough.....)

Coverage, or publicity?

2008-08-19T10:07:00.002-04:00

Over at the Nieman Watchdog, George Lardner wonders, in Spreading Lies, Rather Than Debunking Them, about a recent Washington Post story that he calls a 'front page ad' for a couple of new books about Barack Obama.

...why did the Post put a so-called news story about the book (and incidentally, for the sake of “fairness” no doubt, a pro-Obama book) on Page 1? And why did it fail to cite its lies instead of just saying that the main-stream media had pointed some out.
...The Post couldn’t bring itself to do what a newspaper should do and tell its readers what was true and what was false. It has been unable to do this in its presidential campaign coverage for many years, but most often in the last two decades.

Interesting reaction from Lardner, who wrote for the Post for many years. But what if the paper made the story more even-handed? It would be accused of 'liberal bias'.

Fun with birth certificates

2008-08-12T11:02:00.002-04:00

This is just too good to pass by. Question: How many presidents (or candidates) have gone by different surnames?

From David Weigel at Reason Magazine: More fun with the stupidest people on the Internet.

Research links of the week, and ex-journalists

2008-08-08T14:20:00.002-04:00

After a long respite, some new research links, and a couple more references to what's going on in the world of laid-off journalists:

We Were Print a blog from several "Former and Soon-to-Be Former Print Journalists". Includes a body count, and links to job listings.

42 Things I know from William Lobdell, recently bought out at LA Times, about the current state of newspapers (and the Times).

The research links:
News:

The Newsfilm Online Digitisation Project offers selected newsfilm from ITN/Reuters archives, by subscription or free browsing.

PopURLs, shows the most popular links on the Web today.

Beijing Olympics News from NewsNow.

Reference:

A Chronology of Data Breaches, from Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. I've used this in the past but don't think I linked it. Very helpful when searching for past hacking or theft incidents.

A Big List of Sites That Teach You How To Do Stuff from ReadWriteWeb.

Public Records:

Criminalsearches.com: this beta from PeopleFinders offers free national criminal records searches, with the usual caveats.

Safe Road Maps, a database of fatal traffic accidents overlaid on Google Maps.

Business:

BizToolKit, from James J. Hill Reference Library in Minneapolis, organizes the business web, featuring the Web's best business information sources. Free but has a pro subscription version.

40 Years Ago

2008-08-08T12:53:00.011-04:00

(An occasional reminiscence on the events of 1968)

On August 5, the Republican National Convention opened its sessions at the Miami Beach Convention Center.
Norman Mailer on attending that event in Miami Beach in August:

The vegetal memories of that excised jungle haunted Miami Beach in a steam-pot of miasmas. Ghosts of expunged flora, the never-born groaning in vegetative chancery beneath the asphalt came up with a tropical curse, an equatorial leaden wet sweat of air which rose from the earth itself, rose right up through the baked asphalt and into the heated air which entered the lungs like a hand slipping into a rubber glove....Of course it could have been the air conditioning: natural climate transmogrified by technological climate. They say that in Miami Beach the air conditioning is pushed to that icy point where women may wear fur coats over their diamonds in the tropics.

(It's no wonder for years after 1968 I considered Miami a place I would never go.)

Nixon entered the convention as front-runner but the Rockefeller forces still had a bit of hope. Ronald Reagan, bolstered by his California primary votes, announced his candidacy.
Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, the former Democrat who had turned republican in 1964, supported Nixon over Reagan or the independent George Wallace and pushed for Nixon to choose a conservative VP candidate like Maryland Gov. Spiro Agnew over a more liberal candidate like Fla Gov. Claude Kirk or Illinois Sen. Charles Percy. It was the beginning of Nixon's 'Southern Strategy' which would turn politics on its face as formerly Democratic southern states moved en masse to the Republican party.

On the first ballot, Nixon got 672 votes over Rockefeller's 277 and Reagan's 182.

From Nixon's acceptance speech, the night of August 8:

As we look at America, we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame.
We hear sirens in the night.
We see Americans dying on distant battlefields abroad.
We see Americans hating each other; fighting each other; killing each other at home.
And as we see and hear these things, millions of Americans cry out in anguish.
Did we come all this way for this?
Did American boys die in Normandy, and Korea, and in Valley Forge for this?
Listen to the answer to those questions.
It is another voice. It is the quiet voice in the tumult and the shouting.
It is the voice of the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans -- the non-shouters; the non-demonstrators.

(Photos of the Florida delegation led by Gov. Claude Kirk, and Nixon supporters' signs, from Florida Memory. )

On the night of August 7, as Nixon was being nominated, across the bay in Miami's predominately black Liberty City area a 'Vote Power" rally had been scheduled but never happened. Youths gathered in the streets and threw rocks at some passing cars during the afternoon. Later in the evening, a white man with a George Wallace for President bumper sticker drove into the crowd. Angry participants pulled the man out of his car, beat him, then overturned it and set it afire. Police moved in, setting off tear gas.
Gov. Kirk and SCLC leader Ralph Abernathy left the convention to walk the streets with Metro Mayor Hall, as things calmed.
But violence continued the next day, with police reacting to possible sniper fire with a barrage of bullets, resulting in two men dead and a young boy injured. National guard troops were called in. Another man had died from a stray bullet the night before. The violence abated after 150 arrests and a couple nights of curfew and rain. It was Miami's first riot.

Mailer:

He (the reporter) had no idea at all if God was in the land or the Devil played the tune. And if Miami had masked the answers, then in what state of mind could one now proceed to Chicago?

(updated:) In a curious twist of fate, it would be on the six year anniversary of Nixon's acceptance speech in Miami Beach that he would resign his presidency, on August 8, 1974. That night I would watch the Washington Post's "Nixon Resigns" front page being laid out. 34 years ago today.)

Sources: Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Norman Mailer; Miami Herald archives.

Anthrax redux

2008-08-07T10:32:00.003-04:00

Seven years later, whenever the anthrax story comes to mind I remember the several weeks spent trying to learn everything there is to know about anthrax and compiling the information for reporters trying to understand the terrible death of National Enquirer photo editor Robert Stevens (whose widow is holding a news conference this morning to explain her reaction, and her suit against the government).

Now The Smoking Gun has made available lots of the documents summarizing the case against army researcher Bruce Ivins: Inside the Anthrax Probe.

What a strange, strange story (Washington Post profile of Ivins).

Very annoying newspaper web tactic

2008-08-07T10:24:00.002-04:00

Hmmm. Just tried to read a Joan Fleischman column in the Miami Herald, and a screen came up asking me to participate in a survey. A readership survey, I thought, so why not answer a few questions?

Turns out the survey was a detailed list of questions about my perception of several 'casual dining' restaurants like Outback and Applebee's. I had absolutely no interest in this, since I never eat in such places.

Why do newspapers allow such things on their websites? I know I had the option to opt out of the survey, but thought it would be useful. I am going back and trying again on Joan's column, but how many readers will just leave the site disgusted?

40 Years Ago

2008-08-06T17:48:00.008-04:00

(An occasional reminiscence on the events of 1968)

Somehow July slipped by me, so, a bit late, here's what we were doing that month in 1968:

On July 1, President Johnson signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, an agreement with 58 other countries in efforts to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.
Also that day, customs stops ended between European Common Market countries. (But the UK's admission was still being thwarted by deGaulle).

Early in the month, Intel Corp. was founded.

Gen. Creighton Abrams took over command in Vietnam. Congress passed a 10 percent federal income tax surcharge to help finance the cost of the war. Early in the month, North Vietnam released 3 American pilots shot down over Hanoi. Later, President Johnson met with Vietnamese president Thieu in Hawaii.

In France, a new government was formed July 13. Two days later, France detonated a nuclear bomb in the Pacific.

Later in July, a fight between two Mexico city schools led to a police/miliitary attack, becoming a riot; there were brutality accusations. On July 26, a demonstration crossed the lines of a march supporting the July 26 revolution in Cuba; this led to several more days days of rioting, 1 dead.

On July 17, Saddam Hussein was involved in a military coup that overthrew the government, bringing the Baath party into power, and became vice chairman of the military council in Iraq.

On July 25th, Pope Paul VI published the encyclical Humanae Vitae, condemning birth control.

And a new group, formerly Bob Dylan's backup, released an eagerly anticipated album: The Band's Music from Big Pink. This would quickly become one of my favorites.

On the radio: Tiptoe thru the Tulips, by Tiny Tim. Number one: Herb Albert's This Guy's in Love with You. Yellow Submarine, the movie, came out in Britain. We couldn't wait to see it when it would be released later in the year in the U.S.; we began painting copies of some of the artwork from the movie.

Back in Washington, we'd discovered the agony of DC's hot humid summers. With no air conditioning, sleeping at night meant a window fan and lying barely covered on top of the bed.

But the parks were full of people, especially the park in Dupont Circle and the 'P Street beach' next to Rock Creek just across the bridge from Georgetown. Some days the places looked like a 'be-in' with hippie clothes, beads, incense and marijuana smoke; at Dupont there was more of an African American crowd with lots of drumming.

We got to meet some of the neighbors on the sidewalks on our street, too.

Finding a new kind of journalism

2008-08-06T16:44:00.003-04:00

Is there a place for 'former' journalists in this new world? You bet there is. Here's a wonderful example, from American Journalism Review: Voice in the Wilderness. James Gannon, former editor of the Des Moines Register and Detroit News Washington Bureau Chief, took a buyout a few years back and moved to rural Virginia.

With only a weekly paper in the area, he decided there was a need for more updated news, so he started an online news service, The Rappahanock Voice.

What does this old newsman think about the new media?

It's kind of made a believer of me, Gannon says. I'm an old print guy. I love newspapers, and I still love picking up newspapers and turning the page reading, but that's happening less and less. This is where journalism is going whether we like it or not, and you have to get with it.

One of the good papers

2008-08-05T15:06:00.004-04:00

Since we moved to far western North Carolina, where we can get the daily paper from Asheville delivered by mail only, we began buying the Sunday Chattanooga Times Free Press (even though we have to drive 5 miles to get it).

I fell in love with this paper immediately. Founded by Adolph Ochs and carrying national and international stories from the NY Times, McClatchy and more, it gives me more news than some other papers I've read regularly. The local coverage is good and the features and sports often interesting. When the war started it was one of the first small city papers to send an embedded correspondent who came up with great stories. For in-depth coverage of big stories like Chattanooga's successful bid to get a VW plant, it's incomparable. I like the Web site, too: even though I can't get the daily paper without driving at least 15 miles, I can catch up on the news during the week online.

So I'm thrilled to see Mindy McAdams' review of the paper, on her Teaching Online Journalism site: Tactics of a smart newspaper.

I liked the layout, the type families, the headlines, the story choices. I even liked the weight and texture of the newsprint. Wow, what a nice newspaper, I thought, about halfway through my biscuit with sausage gravy.

My feeling too. What a nice newspaper. Wish I could get it more often, but I'm happy with my daily Asheville Citizen Times, too.

Life's detours

2008-08-04T11:27:00.002-04:00

Sorry for lack of posting. Went in for an outpatient procedure last week and ended up spending 5 nights in hospital.
A new experience for me, haven't been hospitalized since I was six years old, with tonsillectomy and then polio.
Interesting. And very different. Waiting to go home now.

How good is your political information?

2008-07-29T19:31:00.005-04:00

I love this column in HuffPost by Peggy Drexler: The High Cost of Low Information.

With so much information out there, sometimes it's easier to stick with the sources we're comfortable with. How do we fight the lethargy?

The From the Editors column in the latest AARP Bulletin (You Be the Reporter) encourages voters to get informed. Among the tips:

2. Differentiate among news, opinion and advertising. As Stony Brook professor Jim Klurfeld says, “Evaluate sources. Evaluate sources. Evaluate sources.” There’s a difference, for example, among the Congressional Budget Office, the Heritage Foundation, the White House Office of Management and Budget, and the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities.
3. Be aggressive. Being a good news consumer today is hard work. On the Internet, rank and popularity of a story do not necessarily mean reliability.

This is hard work, even for professional journalists.

But our future depends on it.

Random links on journalism, research, and news

2008-07-28T13:47:00.003-04:00

New video game lets players kill Woodward and Bernstein. Is this part of the anti-media conspiracy, or what? In New Yorker.

Top 25 Web 2.0 Search Engines. From the Online Education Database. Have heard of only a few of these....

15 journalists' outstanding personal sites, from 10,000 Words. Not one here I'd seen before. Good stuff.

10,000 Words. Hadn't seen this before, but it's "Where journalism and technology meet". Looks useful, with guides to online tools, shooting video, recording audio, lots more. Including one explaining that text is the foundation of journalism:

...good text will always be the foundation of any website, news or otherwise.
Text is what pulls in search engines and, in turn, visitors. If they don't like what they are reading, whether it be a story, blog post, or caption, they won't return.

On that note, over at Web 2...Oh really, from Craig Stoltz: five lessons from a year of blogging. Last recommendation:

Write short and use pictures. ... I wish I followed this one more.

Me, too.

Following up: Seven Steps to Writing Like a Digital Native, from The Idea Factory's WebU. Yes, yes, yes. First in the list: link to original documents. Add photos. Add maps. Link to past stories. Are you hearing this, newspaper web editors?

From Howard Owens, who's losing interest in blogging: Media Geeks, a search engine for media-related sites.

Good stuff recently on Mark Shaver's Depth Reporting, including this from last week: Just how stupid, shortsighted and out-of-touch are newspaper executives?, which debunks the notion that all newspaper companies didn't get the Web. Cited: Knight Ridder's Mercury News Online and its Viewtron system, many years ago.

The new word from politics these days must be 'Umbrage'. Two columns: Taking offense is the best defense, from John Dickerson, in Slate; and All Umbrage All the Time, Jonathan Alter at Newsweek.
Via Joel Achenbach, who calls it 'the umbrage epidemic'. Joel is susceptible too:

Today the Post reports on executives making $14 million a year, or maybe $27 million. Some of them work for places like Freddie Mae [and Fannie Mac]. I find myself on the verge of taking umbrage.

He has lots of other reasons, too.

The new Red Menace

2008-07-28T10:48:00.003-04:00

When things aren't going well, Americans need to find a bogeyman to blame it on. The 'communists' were an easy target in the 1950s and 1960s, with a real menacing country to blame. After the end of the Cold War, things got murky. There were always hippies and left-wingers, race baiters and internationalists.

Lately, though, the focus on 'Liberals' has been becoming toxic. All someone has to do is suggest Obama has a liberal, left-wing record and it becomes exaggerated to 'extreme left-wing, socialist'. The 'greens' are responsible for gas prices because they've destroyed America's ability to extract all the oil we want. 'Liberal' has become an offensive political charge. How in the world did this happen?

The fruit of this hatred: the man who went into a church in Knoxville yesterday firing a shotgun, killing two and wounding seven more. Why? The police reported this morning it was 'hatred of the liberal movement'. (Knox Views' R. Neal's notes on the press conference.)

So, where's an easy place to find a bunch of 'liberals' to shoot? Why, a Unitarian Universalist Church. They're thick as thieves there. Especially when their kids are putting on a musical.

I'm getting pretty tired of this mindset.

Lots more on this story at Knox Views, where at least one of the contributors is a church attendee. Much more at Knox News.

Catching up

2008-07-27T15:28:00.003-04:00

I've been out of town and hoped to update the blog during my trip but didn't see anything to blog anyway. I've been avoiding politics and there hasn't been much research news, but now that the political season is heating up even more, I expect it's time to start doing some politics links here. Watch for those.

Some things I've noticed, though:

In some really bad news, Genie Tyburski has announced she's shutting down The Virtual Chase. The website and weekly newsletter are incredibly helpful for legal researchers as well as news researchers, and it will be missed. Tyburski will keep the website open for several months, but is willing to hand it over to another legal librarian/researcher. Any takers?

New from Google, a website/blog/wiki blend called Knol (for unit of knowledge). This site makes it easy for writers to post long articles on subjects they have expertise in. So far the articles have a heavy medical lean, such as this excellent guide to Type 2 Diabetes, or this on Migraine. In the couple hours since I first looked at the site, many many articles have been added, however.
This concept certainly bears looking into.

And, one useful research site found last week: Motorcycle Accident Database linked to this Gannett investigative report on motorcycle accidents and safety. Accidents can be browsed by county in all states; records up to end of 2006.

Recent photos.

Some useful stats sites

2008-07-15T13:37:00.005-04:00

For lovers (and seekers) of statistics, Shirl Kennedy has put together a nice list at Resourceshelf of Niche Statistics. Among the unusual stats collected here, links to lots of the Department of Defense's personnel stats, a great resource that isn't easily found by searching (and plagued by occasional URL changes). But I'm most impressed by the great list of sports business statistics posted by an Econ professor at U.Mich: Sports Business Data. Directories of this sort of thing have come and gone over the years and sometimes the only things you can find are pay services, so this should be really welcome to any researcher needing sports data.

Also linked on Resourceshelf today, the National Archives' collection of historical documents being shared with the new World Digital Library. Included, images of the Declaration, Constitution, and other major docs, as well as photographs by great American photographers like Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange....and, well, Nixon meeting Elvis, George Bush meeting The Babe, and a hippie with his dog.....

Some depressing environmental news for Florida

2008-07-10T17:12:00.005-04:00

Ocean Conservancy Releases Report On Reef Management: How Florida and National Park Service Marine Reserve Policies Undermine Efforts to Protect Coral Reef Ecosystems. Turns out that Biscayne National Park is in worse shape now than it was when it was created in 1980.

FWC and NPS have taken no action to fulfill their obligations to protect coral reef ecosystems in Biscayne National Park since they began reviewing their management plans in 2002.
"Biscayne National Park once had some of the most spectacular coral reefs in Florida. The native communities they support desperately need our immediate action"...

During our years boating and snorkeling southern Biscayne Bay and the offshore reefs, we watched this happening. By the time we left Florida, it wasn't fun to look at the ruined reefs any more, here or in the Keys.

And this: NOAA Report States Half of U.S. Coral Reefs In "Poor" or "Fair" Condition. So sad.

And, from Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, U.S. Sugar Buyout May Not Help The Everglades

....Crist’s plan to purchase 300 square miles of U.S. Sugar land as the “missing link” to restore the Everglades may be an expensive pipe dream. Ten years ago, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers conducted a detailed analysis of re-creating a “flow way” from Lake Okeechobee as envisioned by Gov. Crist and rejected it as unworkable...

(Updated:) And in this thoroughly depressing Time magazine article, Is Florida the Sunset State?, there's this:

We have water, water, everywhere, but much of South Florida's per capita use is 50% above the national average, and we've lost half the wetlands that used to recharge our aquifers. So water shortages threaten to limit growth in a way that wetlands regulations or bad headlines never could. "Florida is astonishingly wasteful," says Cynthia Barnett...
...In the words of the novelist and columnist Carl Hiaasen, the bard of Florida's decline, "You don't have to be a wacko enviro to want your kids to be able to swim in a lake or maybe see an animal that isn't in a cage or a seaquarium. And even people who don't give a rat's ass about the panther will care when saltwater comes out of their faucets."

"Trained Democracy Superheroes"

2008-07-10T11:49:00.005-04:00

That's what this MSNBC report calls librarians, specifically librarian (and former newspaper reporter) Carol Kreck, who was ticketed for holding a "McCain=Bush" sign outside a town hall meeting. ProgressNow has the video, plus an appeal for Kreck's defense fund.

(Updated:) but wait! the wingers have found out that, yes, she is a former reporter! and may be connected to Progress Now! So obviously she's a bad person and deserves whatever she gets (one commenter here wondered why she wasn't tased). Arghhh.

More bad press for the McCain campaign: MojoBlog's shocked reaction to McCain's calling Social Security a 'disgrace'.

This is not the first time that McCain has hinted that he will follow in Bush's Social-Security-dismantling footsteps.

More here and here (McCain's Ignorance about Social Security Is the Real "Disgrace").

Following up

2008-07-09T22:03:00.003-04:00

Great discussion by Jay Rosen on the Jessica DaSilva flap (yesterday's post) at Pressthink: Big Daddy Newspaper Has Gone and Left Journalism. Lots of links to reaction to her blog and the story of dying newspapers in general here.

Most of all, a link to a new site that is an antidote to the 'curmudgeon class': Tree House Media Project. Check out the blog, too. You gotta love a site that proclaims: Fuck Craig's List. Fuck Wall Street. Yes, we have ample reason to be bitter. Times have never been worse for newspaper journalists.

And Da Silva? The girl's got a future in some sort of journalism. Here's her comment on the Pressthink posting:

I admit I'm young, but I like to think of myself as optimistic and hopeful about journalism. And I attribute that to having an open mind in describing the role of journalist; it's not just paper anymore.
Another problem I (and my peers) have encountered in internships is an eagerness to turn us away from journalism or jade us in some way. We all wonder why. I mean, if we all followed the popular mantra of "go to law school and make your mother proud," then what would be the future of journalism?
I'm sure people will jump all over me for saying that, but I have tough skin. I've gotten much worse reporting on the student government.

New vs. old journalists and the 'mediasphere'

2008-07-08T15:35:00.004-04:00

On the journalism front, there's a little flurry of discussion over how news organizations need to rebuild themselves, leading to this memo from Tampa Tribune editor Janet Coats on the plans for an 'interactive newsroom' joining the newspaper, online and television news processes.

Last week, lots of bloggers and commenters reacted to a posting by Tampa intern Jessica DaSilva, "It's worth fighting for", quoting Coats' talk with newsroom staffers. Lots of the comments here were negative (sample:)

Wow, you really are young and naive, aren’t you? Someone sent me the link to your blog, and I almost had to laugh, it was so ridiculous. I’m truly amazed that in one of your other posts, you can tell reporters to stop whining and do something about their situation. What, praytell, young lady, would you like them to do?

This lead to Ryan Sholin's posting, Declare your independence from the curmudgeon tribe.

Hmm. It's hard all around, and on some of these discussions journalists are getting dissed because suddenly they care about job losses when it's been happening everywhere else.

See Mark Shaver's post attempting to compare news layoffs to other industries'... And see Joel Achenbach's comments about the history of one attempt to make journalism more local, at the Miami Herald 25 years ago, in his 'Memo to the new boss', the Washington Post's new editor, Marcus Brauchli.

Where is this all going? Who knows? There have been lots of plans to change journalism. (I watched lots and lots start up, and fizzle out.) When you see a newsroom's collective memory leaving, seasoned reporters being replaced by recent interns new to a city, you have to wonder. But then....those old reporters started out new, once, too.

But. No matter how many reporters you have, or how much they know the community, there are lots more people out there that know a whole lot more about it than your newsroom does.

Trying to keep up on the news from Miami, I check the Herald's site most days. I usually find only one or two stories -- if any -- to click on from the front page. Much more often, I go to South Florida Daily Blog, where I always find things to look at, whether newspaper or TV stories, or blog links.

Isn't this an example of what news websites should be doing? Or, as Howard Owens says, Is your news site the center of the local mediasphere?

...why should a reader need to go to any of those other sites FIRST to get news or information. Should you be directing traffic?

Sometimes it doesn't take a journalist at all to know what the most interesting news is around town. Newspapers should be hiring people like 'Daily Blog's Rick, or Knox Views' R. Neal (who also has created Tenn Views and Blount Views, and once was the popular South Knox Bubba), or Ashvegas' Ash (oh wait: he was let go from the local daily) to mention three I read regularly.

Gas myths and help, and waterboarding

2008-07-08T14:35:00.004-04:00

Swiss Army Librarian, a nice blog from a Mass. reference librarian (now on my bloglist), compiles a good set of links to sites about gas economy myths, driving tips, and cheap gas finders.
Included, a link to a Snopes debunking of a persistent email about boycotting gas companies that buy gas from the middle east. Why does anyone read, let alone pass on, these things?

In Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens gets waterboarded, somewhere in western North Carolina, and says, guess what? It is torture.

I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

(For those who would find this educational -- or amusing, there's a video.)

Who gets the news? And a disturbing development

2008-07-08T11:29:00.003-04:00

Joel Achenbach is watching the blogs who claim to get the news the 'mainstream media' don't: News we remembered to report.

And, in a later posting, down near the bottom of this roundup, Joel links to a Blogoland comment on blogger Glenn Reynolds' brag about 'better than mainstream media' reporting on Iraq, which links to:

A New York Times story expanded upon by a blog
A straight ABC News report (twice)
A straight Reuters story
A straight Knight-Ridder story
The New Republic’s Iraq’d blog
A link to USAid’s website
A link to Iraq the Model commenting on some local newspaper accounts
an L.A. Times story examined by a blog
a Seattle Post-Intelligencer story examined by a blog
A straight AP report
a New Zealand newspaper story examined by a blog
A link to a round-up of Iraq blogs
A link to the WMD- Intelligence Commission report
A link to some sort of ID bracelet/donation site
A link on “ways to support the troops”
A link to an Iraq toy drive

Blogoland's comment: "Yeah, who needs the press at all when you have bloggers who rely almost exclusively on them for their content?"

Unrelated sidebar: also mentioned in the first Achenbach posting, a story about the U.S. Forest Service making a deal with a developer to open up millions of acres of Montana land for subdivisions. Scary enough, but with a great summary from Joel:

The problem with this kind of development is that it's sort of the worst of all worlds: You lose the open space but don't get, in exchange, anything that resembles a real community. The houses are vacant most of the year. No one has roots there.

Yup. Exactly what we are seeing around here, where although we live in a national forest area, much of the land is still privately owned and developers are glad to buy an unused, forested hill from descendants of those who farmed the valleys and put in manicured treeless ridgetop lots for vacation cabins (where it's too hot in summer days with the trees gone and too windy the rest of the year). Ruining the view for the rest of us.

A few research links

2008-07-06T14:47:00.001-04:00

A couple of these may have been posted before, but worth a reminder:

The Mike Wallace Interview, from the 1957-58 TV program, archived at UTexas.

WTO Trade and Labor Issues , a guide to resources on the Web from a Cornell librarian.

Health News Review, rates news stories on health issues.

New ResourceShelf Collection: Media Guides, Factbooks, Backgrounders, and Press Kits

Policy Archive search or browse for public policy research including topics from agriculture to transportation.

VINcheck lets you find out if a vehicle is stolen or has been totaled. Free for 5 searches a day, from National Insurance Crime Bureau.

Herald layoffs

2008-07-05T10:54:00.003-04:00

This memo has been forwarded, I suppose, to lots of people, but luckily, one of them was Bob Norman, who posted it on his Daily Pulp blog: the list of 42 newsroom staffers who are leaving the Miami Herald, with commentary on several of the long-timers from Manny Garcia.

Included, three of the few remaining library staff. Not needed, now that archiving's being offshored to India.....

So sad.

(Oh, and speaking of the Pulp and layoffs, it is just stunning to read the comments on the post about layoffs at the Palm Beach Post from last week. Apparently it was linked on Drudge, and neanderthals from around the country decided to use the post as a vehicle to proclaim their hatred of 'liberal, left-wing, commie socialist' journalists. How depressing.)

Dereliction of duty

2008-07-04T14:45:00.002-04:00

Haven't posting anything here for a few days. Just haven't seen anything I wanted to link to.

But if you'd like some pictures from the mountains to cool off your hot summer holiday, I've been posting some things to my other blog, Southern Highlands Cam. Including pictures from today's small-town Fourth from this morning.

In support of journalism

2008-06-27T12:38:00.004-04:00

Via the McClatchy VP Howard Weaver's blog, Etaoin Shrdlu, I was stirred by the report on a column in the Macon Telegraph by Editorial Page Editor Charles Richardson, Why We Do What We Do.

Richardson, responding to attacks on his paper for printing the wonderful McClatchy Washington Bureau report on the detainees at Guantánamo, accusing the editors of being 'unpatriotic':

We are afraid some of our readers have a stilted view of our constitutional duty. But first a little history. Our country was founded as a nation of laws.
...Should the American press emulate the history of the former Soviet Union's Information Telegraph Agency of Russia, better known as TASS? Should the American press become the propaganda arm of the government such as "The Attack" newspaper in Nazi Germany, set up by the Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels? Is that what our founders had in mind?

Thank you, Mr. Richardson.

40 Years Ago

2008-06-27T12:06:00.005-04:00

(An occasional reminiscence on the events of 1968)

Since Dr. Martin Luther King's murder in April, investigators had been following a trail of a man who seemed to have been following King, and went by the name of Eric Stavro Galt. Although information linked him to King's murder in Memphis, it was three months before he was finally caught.
Police in London arrested him June 8 at Heathrow Airport, where he was trying to leave the UK with a Canadian passport under the name of Ramon George Sneyd. James Earl Ray was extradited to Tennessee and charged with King's assassination. He would confess in 1969 and be sentenced to 99 years in prison. He later recanted the confession and was supported in his effort for a retrial by King's family.
40 years later questions about James Earl Ray linger, Atlanta Journal Constitution.

On June 10, Gen. Creighton Abrams replaced William Westmoreland as military commander in Vietnam.

At Walter Reed Army Hospital, former president Dwight D. Eisenhower was hospitalized since a late April heart attack in California. He had another attack on June 16.

On June 19, president Johnson signed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, passed in reaction to increasing crime rates and the last few year's urban riots. Among the provisions of this law, first time restrictions on purchase of handguns.
Title 3 provided guidelines for wiretapping by government agencies, designed to protect individuals from government snooping, but it carried a clause allowing wiretapping for 'national security', something the coming Nixon administration would seize on. Johnson expressed dismay at the provision, saying the nation 'had taken a dangerous step' that could lead to 'producing a nation of snoopers bending through the keyholes of the homes and offices in America, spying on our neighbors' but signed the bill anyway.

On June 22, Supreme Court chief justice Earl Warren submitted his retirement; he would leave as soon as a replacement was approved, before a new president (likely Nixon) would take power. Warren had headed the court for 15 years and had headed the commission that reported on John F. Kennedy's assassination. A few days later, president Johnson nominated his longtime friend and current Supreme Court justice Abe Fortas to replace Warren as chief. Johnson also nominated a Texas crony, former congressman and judge Homer Thornberry, to replace Fortas.

France remained unstable, with ongoing protest marches and a strikes at industrial facilities including Renault, Peugeot, and Citroen factories. On June 11 a riot at the Paris barricades resulted in 70 injuries and 400 arrests. On June 16 police removed the last 2000 students from the Sorbonne. By the 18th, workers were beginning to return to their jobs, and prime minister Georges Pompidou announced an end to the crisis. In the June 23 election, huge victories were scored by the centrist Gaullist party, with losses for the socialist and leftist factions. The left would lose even further in the June 30 elections.

At Resurrection City in Washington, the mood was brutal. Uniformed 'Tent City Rangers' tried to keep order couldn't restrain the gang-like 'marshalls' who erratically enforced entrance to the compound and who ranged through the city at night. The SCLC's Ralph Abernathy was stricken by criticism of the marchers and of his staying outside of the camp many nights, and blamed it on the American culture that had created 'a monster in the ghetto'.
Despite the problems, the National Park Service extended the camp's permit from June 16 to June 24. 50,000 people arrived for the 'Solidarity Day' demonstration on June 19, 'Juneteenth'. The next night several youths skirmished with police officers, who responded with tear gas, outside the encampment, and began stoning cars along Independence Avenue and other nearby streets.
Three nights later a similar incident resulted in 'clouds of tear gas' rolling through Resurrection City, where the few remaining protesters ran from their tents toward the Washington Monument. On the morning of June 24, 1000 police arrived to close Resurrection City down. 115 people remaining in the camp were arrested as they sang freedom songs; 200 more, including Reverend Abernathy, would be arrested later on Capitol Hill. Park officials prepared to bulldoze the camp.
During the day, several incidents occurred in areas of DC previously destroyed by the April riots; it looked like another riot was coming. A curfew was called that evening. A city in shock was in shock once again, but calm was restored fairly quickly.

At the Washington Post, I was getting to know some of the Post's reporters, mostly those from the Metro Desk who covered the city. They tended to need local story background more, so spent lots of time in the library. They were young and talented and many would go on to do great things: Len Downie (who just announced his retirement after years as the Post's executive editor, suceeding Bradlee), Robert Kaiser, Bob Maynard, Carl Bernstein, Jim Hoagland, Richard Cohen, Paul Valentine, Marty Weil, Paul Levey, Glegg Watson, Hollie West, Stuart Auerbach, William Raspberry, Leon Dash, Ivan Brandon, Carol Honsa, Susan Jacoby, and lots more.

I was impressed with how they covered the April riots. Now I watched them covering another huge story under personal danger. I particularly remember seeing Paul Valentine coming in to the newsroom, having been directly hit with tear gas and stinking of it, his face red and eyes watering so badly, we feared for his health. I was developing a huge respect for journalists and the work they did.

On the cover of Time that month: The Gun in America, Aretha Franklin, Robert F. Kennedy, and graduates.

Listening to: United States of America. Taj Mahal. New friends from the Post library were listening to folk/country rock, and I was getting hooked on their music: The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Jesse Colin Young's Youngbloods...Dylan, of course. My love of British bands continued with new albums from Cream, The Who.

(Resurrection City reference: Ten Blocks from the White House, Washington Post staff.)

Going back to 1971

2008-06-26T13:28:00.003-04:00

From Howard Owens: Spare me the fancy redesigns and give me some text to read.

Among the gems:

Spare me the big graphics and four-column photos and color splashes. Stop trying to turn your print front page into a web page.
...If they want timeliness, they’ll go online.
...News isn’t about a demographic (as in, “How do we target women, age 24 to 35, with one child and two cats?”)
...The print product should provide context and a moment’s respite. The online product should say, “this is what is happening now.”
...Try digging into your archives and looking at your newspaper from 1971. Make your 2008 paper look like that.

You know, this sounds nearly right to me. I want the background and the ads (and comics, and recipes) from the paper that I get delivered by mail late in the day, and don't expect it to give me breaking news. But I also don't want briefs about national/international stories I already know about. I need the local news, the analysis, the interesting stories about people and places around here. I need that 1971 newspaper.

(And I liked that 'timeliness' quote better when I thought it said 'timelines'....)

On another front, I was impressed by this posting from the Scholars and Rogues blog: A progressive for our times. What a graphic demonstration of how much our politics has deteriorated over the years, when Richard Nixon (!)...would be more progressive than either the Republican or Democratic nominees today.
I guess that's why I find the New Nixon blog so fascinating.....I sure couldn't say I am nostalgic for those times but I'm afraid we didn't learn anything along the way.

Newspapers, bloggers, and librarians

2008-06-26T10:16:00.004-04:00

The question of journalists and blogging has been debated for years, and I've linked to lots and lots of stuff on the topic. There's so much now that I don't usually link to it, but once in awhile I notice something that stands out. Today, it's a posting by Roy Greenslade, Why journalists must learn the values of the blogging revolution. He raises some interesting ideas:

I have tended to predict that future news organisations will consist of a small hub of "professional journalists" at the centre with bloggers (aka amateur journalists/citizen journalists) on the periphery. In other words, us pros will still run the show.
I'm altogether less certain about that model now. First, I wonder whether us pros are as valuable as we think. Second, and more fundamentally, I wonder whether a "news organisation" is as perfect a model as we might think.

On a related note, I noticed another journalist/blogger spat going on in Asheville NC, where a local blogger, former reporter at the newspaper, forecast the paper's predictable coverage of a big story. Newspaper columnist takes umbrage, 'outs' the blogger, rants about anonymous criticism. Nothing new here but a good example of how the media could be building on the contributions of bloggers instead of attacking the format. The blogger's take, with links: Bellicose Boyle misses the point on coverage of trooper tragedy. Included, a lot of makes-sense analysis of what newspapers could do better when covering something like this (the terrible loss of a young state trooper, first member of the Cherokee nation to become one, who pulled over a bad guy with a foot-long Florida criminal record who killed him with his own gun).

Some of this is the usual discussion of what is respectful coverage of tragedy, whether reporters should contact next of kin or demand 911 tapes. Although I dislike some of the 911 reporting I see, I think the paper got good stuff here: a story about how truckers led the cops to the shooter.

On another topic, I meant to link to this the other day (somehow it slipped by then) when linking on the future of news libraries: J Baumgart, who's been active in the News Division for several years, got to thinking about where the profession is going. Good thoughts. Losing the Stars and Mentors.

...the News Division has a proud tradition of strong leaders and amazing librarians whom most people in the profession put on pedastals. Many of these folks have made real careers of news librarianship with professional service measured in decades. It seems like lately many of those people have been climbing down as they leave news librarianship (not that we revere them any less) and not many people have been climbing up there.

Blogging his layoff at the Miami Herald

2008-06-25T16:00:00.003-04:00

Hmm. This is why I stopped doing my Miami Herald blog two years ago when they dropped my post-retirement freelance contract. Things must be different now, since Brayden Simms, who announced his own layoff in a column, says he's being paid to blog -- on life after layoff.

It's not news, since Gawker and The Guardian, among others, have linked to Brayden's blog. But I just noticed a mention on Daily Pulp, who says:

...hey, if you're gonna fire a guy, might as well exploit him on his way out. ... Still a little weird and shameless on the newspaper's part.

Who needs copyeditors?

2008-06-23T11:42:00.003-04:00

Gene Weingarten writes that the recent Washington Post buyouts haven't affected his written product, at all: Yanks Thump Sox.

(Thanks to Doug Fisher.)

Note the version with errors noted finds more than I would ever have caught in a hurry.....

Cell phone directory, news research and interpreting the news, and politics

2008-06-20T17:25:00.006-04:00

Some more interesting thoughts on news research and other topics...

In the Wall Street Journal by Jason Fry, The Case of the Missing White Pages (link fixed). It explores the question of whether there is a directory of cell phone numbers (a question that comes up on NewsLib about once a year). A few years back there was news one was coming, but according to this story, Intelius gave up on it. Cell phone users don't want strangers getting their numbers, end of story. But it raises some interesting thoughts:

That will arouse uneasy feelings that technology has once again done away with something we assumed was eternal...Those of us who remember looking ourselves up in the white pages and thinking that now we belong to a place may lament -- not for the first time -- that our real-world communities are becoming more fragmented as people spend time in online communities of their own choosing instead.

(Via Resourceshelf.)

Mentioned in Derek Willis' report on some sessions he attended at the SLA conference, the TimesArchive, in which the UK paper pulls great stories out of their historical archives and makes them available by topic or by browsing a timeline. Actually, the archive includes every page of The Times from 1785 to 1995, and searching and viewing all those pages is free for now as long as you register. Fantastic!

I may have mentioned Newser before, but didn't include it the other day when I linked to several new sites for getting the news. And I didn't know that it was created by High Beam Research, which I use, and that it was inspired by Vanity Fair columnist Michael Wolff.
I explored it some today and find that it's a great tool for doing something that's not always easy with online news sites: finding related stories. When I looked at this report on Tribune Company's financial troubles, for example, I found lots of stories, including pay archives from Highbeam, directly connected to the topic.
There's also a feature that lets you browse New York Times stories.
I think I'll be looking at Newser more often.

From Paula Hane at Information Today, a posting on a talk about factchecking by Brooks Jackson of Factcheck.org: Coping in a world of disinformation. There's a link to Hane's good rundown of political factchecking sites, too.

Also interesting today, in Time: The Beltway-Blog Battle

....the old media, under pressure to work fast, sharpen their voices and cut costs, are increasingly making news blog-style, through argument and controversy.
...Oh, wait: there was one debate question that sparked an ongoing policy discussion (on Obama's willingness to meet with hostile foreign leaders). It was asked at a CNN debate. By a YouTube user.

Another South Florida reference, including another new blog focusing on investigative/analytic journalism, and South Florida papers: Journalism Bull.

On a wider topic, Miami CBS4's Jim deFede sets straight all the confusing reporting and political posturing on oil drilling off the Florida coast: Separating Fact from Fiction on Offshore Drilling. Getting the facts straight on this topic is critical now, as Americans fed up with oil prices clamor for more drilling. Yesterday a new poll reported more Floridians are willing to allow offshore rigs, and will vote for McCain if he supports it.
Will oil price backlash destroy any hope for environmental advances from now on?

On another political topic, I haven't seen much in the traditional media about what the Obama decision to refuse public financing means. Some say it means there will be less attack ads from 527 political organizations, in fact TPM reports that MoveOn.org is dropping its organization. But only a few days ago, New Republic was warning, Let the attack ads begin!

And then there's this, from David Brooks at the New York Times: The two Obamas. I think it summarizes this election pretty well:

...Republicans are saps. They think that they’re running against some academic liberal who wouldn’t wear flag pins on his lapel, whose wife isn’t proud of America and who went to some liberationist church where the pastor damned his own country. They think they’re running against some naïve university-town dreamer, the second coming of Adlai Stevenson.
...All I know for sure is that this guy is no liberal goo-goo. Republicans keep calling him naïve. But naïve is the last word I’d use to describe Barack Obama. He’s the most effectively political creature we’ve seen in decades. Even Bill Clinton wasn’t smart enough to succeed in politics by pretending to renounce politics.

Change happens (South Florida newspapers version)

2008-06-20T16:00:00.004-04:00

I've been following the coverage of the announced layoffs at the Miami Herald, of course, and am struck by a few things:

The first online version of the story, which I read right away, didn't include this part:

(those leaving)...include 12 newsroom supervisors, five in the International Edition, two copy editors, three reporters, four designers and layout specialists, two on the state desk, two critics, two photographers and six in archiving and calendar.
Archiving, calendar and the
International Edition will be outsourced to workers in India.

I'm not sure, but this may be a first. I haven't heard of another paper outsourcing library functions (the calendar staff was in the library, too).

More on the Herald, of course, at Herald Watch. More at Daily Pulp. And there's good stuff at Random Pixels, where names are named here and here.

I'm quite sad to hear about Phil Long, 40-year Herald employee who was my phone buddy for years when he was out on a story somewhere across Florida and calling in for background checks on people he was going to write about, or needing to find information on Iraq casualties from Florida. I miss him anyway, so sorry to hear he's leaving a job he loved so much. Phil, have a happy retirement!

A few days ago several South Florida bloggers posted pictures of a makeshift Santeria shrine in the Herald newsroom, where staffers were leaving offerings to a stuffed rooster to try to save their jobs. I didn't bother to link to any of them, but noticed in one of the photos that it was right in front of my old desk! I sat in front of the bookshelves in the background. They were full of reference books then, and the legendary Arnie Markowitz sat in the (now empty) desk in front of me. Another reporter sat there after Arnie took an (early) buyout, but she's gone too (hopefully still in Neighbors).

With the Herald decimating its library, many news librarians/researchers are mourning the future of news libraries. I hear the mood was grim at the annual SLA conference, where News Division members had what sounds to be a great program. (I'm glad to see a couple attendees blogged the conference.)
I was intrigued by the posting by Derek Willis, a sometime news researcher/data guru, who has some thoughts about The Future of News Libraries.

On a positive note, here's news of a news researcher finding a new way to enhance the online newspaper, at the South Florida Sun- Sentinel, where it's highlighted on the front page today: Flori-DUH (We've all been in the sun too long), a blog conceived and reported by Barbara Hijek with contributions by reporter Liz Doup. On Barbara:

BARBARA HIJEK, a Sun-Sentinel librarian, has spent years doing news research in Florida, the most news-warpy place in the universe. She's still passed all her drug tests and remains Prozac free.

Congrats to Barbara, a long time friend. We always said if there's weird news anywhere, it has a Florida connection. (Thanks Gail.)

No more OJR

2008-06-18T09:38:00.002-04:00

Sad to see that the Online Journalism Review, a staple of my reading since I started blogging, is going away, and that Robert Niles has left the Annenberg School at UC. Niles has been a guide for many years and has been at OJR there for a couple, now.

At least Niles is starting a new blog, Sensible Talk.

It's saddening to click on an old friend to read something really interesting (this report, about McClatchy's fabled Washington Bureau) and find bad news like this.

Research links of the week

2008-06-16T11:08:00.001-04:00

I haven't had much time to blog lately but did pick up some good reference sites last week, so here they are, in no particular order:

GDP by State. latest release from Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Legal Dockets Online has added searches of property, liens, and recorded documents. Subscription service.

Economic Impact Study of Completing the Appalachian Development Highway System from Appalachian Regional Commission.

OPEC Revenues Fact Sheet from EIA.

Terrorism: Locating sources of information, webliography from Assn of College & Research Libraries.

Glassdoor: new site provides company ratings, exec salaries and reviews, on 2000 companies so far.

Search 2006-2007 crime data for U.S. cities (100,000 or greater population) database from Detroit Free Press.

Congressional Research Service (CRS) Reports searchable compilation of all online CRS resources, from Internet Archive's Archive-IT.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich's Articles of Impeachment against George W. Bush.

Online Nevada Encyclopedia

Lost Titles, Forgotten Rhymes: How to Find a Novel, Short Story, or Poem Without Knowing its Title or Author from Library of Congress.

Media Channel, a new media review/news site.

Introduction to Public International Law Research at Globalex, NYU law school.

Good news, investigations and archives, and watching for racism

2008-06-12T11:03:00.005-04:00

It's really good news to see ProPublica go live. It's the new independent investigative reporting site started by former Wall St. Journal editor Paul Steiger, and has been eagerly anticipated.
In just a few minutes of looking around I'm impressed with the twice-daily Breaking on the Web update links to new investigative stories, a good place to get caught up on the news. I found links here to a couple interesting stories I didn't seen scrolling several other news sites. The original postings look interesting too. Editor and Publisher has more.

And for really Goodnews, check out this "Google News" page.
Click on any story and get the explanation of why this exists. But just browsing this fake Google News page will make you smile. It's the news of the world as it should be.

Think there's no racism in this presidential race? Jeff Fecke at Shakesville is collecting attacks and subtle digs on Obama.
Bobby at Bark Bark Woof Woof comments.

Also on this topic, from Eye on Miami: For President, reject the haters

So here is the deal: in the last presidential election it was the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth. This time, it will be race.

Lots of links to blog/news postings on this topic on Memeorandum.

Also: from the Associated Press, Obama site confronts rumors.

Via Man or Maniac, I'm Voting Republican. Just watch the video.

Back on the topic of investigative journalism, there's a new blog in Miami that some will find interesting, Investigation Miami. It joins Eye on Miami (and lately, several other -- normally non-political -- South Florida blogs; this must be a trend) in keeping an eye on local government and politician wrongdoing.

Herald Watch has been on a roll, lately, finding lots to say about how the Miami Herald is doing. Recently there's a fascinating discussion on whether the Herald should give its archived articles away for free. This has attracted lots of comments (some not all useful) and a followup, so go back to the main page for more.

Thanks to South Florida Daily Blog for some of these links.

Where do you get local news?

2008-06-09T16:33:00.002-04:00

Via Mindy McAdams' Teaching Online Journalism site, a link to a report by Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0: What Newspapers Still Don’t Understand About The Web.

Karp just wanted to get some news about a bad storm that had knocked out power to his office in Northern Virginia, and could find nothing on it on the Washington Post's website, where he went first.

Not that there wasn't news out there, and Karp explains step-by-step what he did to find it. No wonder Google is more popular than online newspapers.

Mark Potts at Recovering Journalist had a similar experience.

It turns out, of course, that Washington Post online readers have an alternative way to get to local weather news, but it's not obvious to someone just clicking on the main page.

Old news

2008-06-09T15:29:00.003-04:00

Yesterday, Dave Winer raised an interesting point about the story of John McCain's first marriage in the Daily Mail. Why isn't this getting any attention in U.S. media? Why is this different from the story on Jeremiah Wright?
One commenter says the story was pretty much covered in McCain's race against Bush. But....we have such short memories...

(Added later:) On another note, apparently the conservative blogosphere is abuzz with news that some commenters on Barack Obama's website have expressed non-PC opinions. Hmm. Some bloggers have been quick to take a look at McCain's, and find some disturbing things there, too, expressed by visitors and never taken down. In Salon's War Room, Alex Koppelmann reports: Breaking news: There are crazy people on the Internet. Oh yeah. Says Koppelman:

A warning to all future Democratic presidential candidates: If you choose to run part of your Web site in a model similar to, say, DailyKos, and allow the general public posting privileges, some crazy people who clearly have nothing to do with your campaign will take advantage of the policy. And then bloggers on the right, though they're well aware of how these things work, will pretend that these crazy people are actually representative of your campaign.

Bloggers are watching you

2008-06-09T14:53:00.005-04:00

It's becoming a given that if someone writes a news story that contains an error, bloggers will draw attention to it.

Here's one in the New York Times that has Tennessee a'twitter: 36 Hours in Knoxville in the Sunday Travel section. It starts out: KNOXVILLE is often called “the couch” by the people who live there.

Problem is, no one in Knoxville ever heard that before. And the Tennessee bloggers are letting the Times know. The story is all over the 'net since ~~Nashville's~~ Knoxville's Instapundit, probably the most read blog, posted it. (Thanks for the reader comment. Brain fade.)

Lots of links on Michael Silence's blog at the Knoxville News, including a letter Silence sent to the Times' Public Editor. Lots on Jack Lail's blog too. The story was number one on the Times list of most-blogged stories. Now I've added another.

Journalists and openness

2008-06-09T12:01:00.005-04:00

Lots of buzz about "Off the Bus" blogger Mayhill Fowler (see previous post), after a profile in the Los Angeles Times and a Howard Kurtz column in the Washington Post. Oh, and a New York Times profile too.

This woman has taken amateur journalism to a whole new level. Good for her.

Over at BuzzMachine, Jeff Jarvis discusses Mayhill's stories, too, and some comments he got about her and whether she should have identified herself as a journalist. But he is more concerned that in some of the comments, people who were obviously journalists didn't identify themselves as such, and sees a worrisome trend here.

Certainly something I've noticed, especially in blogs discussing media, like Bob Norman's Daily Pulp blog covering South Florida media. So many comments coming from people who obviously work for the media, but completely anonymous. I know it's a question of worrying about their comments getting back to their editors, but hey, no one can get a letter to the editor in the paper without being totally open about their name and address/phone number. Jarvis:

The acts of public figures in public places and even our lives there are now more public than ever. In an age that values transparency, I think that’s a good thing.

More on anonymous comments by journalists at E-Media Tidbits.

On another South Florida note, nice to see that journalism students at FIU blogged the IRE conference there this weekend.

Research links roundup, and some enlightening commentary

2008-06-08T12:45:00.003-04:00

Back on the politics commentary, a couple things I found interesting in the last couple days:

In The American Prospect, Seven Ways Hillary Clinton Changed Our Politics.

In The New Statesman, Editor Andrew Stephen writes about Hating Hillary:

Gloating, unshackled sexism of the ugliest kind has been shamelessly peddled by the US media, which - sooner rather than later, I fear - will have to account for their sins.

And, from Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland (so on my reading list), in the blog of the Campaign for America's Future, The Meaning of Box 722. In 1966 an open housing campaign in Chicago drew angry residents upset about the possibility of desegregated neighborhoods, and they expressed their anger in letters written to then Sen. Paul Douglas. Perlstein believes it was this angry backlash that destroyed Johnson's Great Society and brought Nixon's political career back from the dead. The hatred -- of which some certainly remains -- is frightening but the story ends with the hopeful thought that our 'forty year war' (see previous posting) is really over:

Now a black man from the city King visited in 1966 and called more hateful than Mississippi is running for president, fighting for all those things that made the mid-century American middle class the glory of world civilization, but which that middle class squandered out of the small-mindedness of backlash.

On another note, here's a useful analysis of how yet another false rumor hits the email circuit and gets traction: E-mail on military deaths is shaky on facts, Army Times story debunking the latest.

Not to mention a nice history of where the Internet came from, in How the Web Was Won in Vanity Fair.

The Research Links:
Reference:

Keeping tabs on the global food crisis, good links from Shirl Kennedy at Resourceshelf.

Topo Explorer is a new topographic mapping tool from National Geographic, in beta.

Fast Facts on healthcare from Kaiser Family Foundation.

A new database for shipping/trade information: Techcrunch profiles a new subscription service called Importgenius.com that could be really useful for research and business.

Public Records:

Secretaries of State links from Coordinated Legal. One of many such guides but I find that old ones I've used have disappeared, so a new reliable one would be welcome. And more:

Internet Legal Resources for Legal Professionals at Coordinated Legal.

10 Essential Web Sites for Litigators from Genie Tyburski at Virtual Chase. No Lexis or Westlaw here, just free resources that lawyers (and news researchers) can actually use.

Government:

USA.gov tutorials, give help with finding government information online, or getting it delivered to you.

Tools:

Top 10 journalistic uses for Twitter and a Twitter search, from From the Frontline.

40 years ago and now

2008-06-06T13:43:00.005-04:00

I'm increasingly intrigued by the parallels between 1968 and today as commentators write about Barack Obama and Bobby Kennedy in the same breath. Something is going on here:

Tom Hayden, an icon of 1968, writes in Huffington Post (as do most of the following): Bobby and Barack.

There are vast differences between Bobby Kennedy and Barack Obama, owing to circumstance, though both have followed hero's journeys of the classic sort. Kennedy was shaped by his brother's murder and the climate of his times, which drove all but the most robotic towards alienation. Barack is a product of globalization, immigration, even slavery, but nonetheless a privileged inheritor of the movements for which Bobby Kennedy stood.
...My hopes for Robert Kennedy might have been dashed by his subsequent policies if he had lived to be president, but I don't think so. The best evidence is the progressive course consistently pursued by those closest to him, Ethel and Ted Kennedy, to this day. It is hard to imagine him abandoning all those poor people, fervent anti-war activists, and early environmentalists who swarmed his rallies -- and who, like the farmworkers, carried him to victory on the ground in California.

RJ Eskow writes, Barack and Bobby: Compare and Contrast:

I've said this before: Had Bobby Kennedy not run for President, I wouldn't be writing these words right now. My fascination with politics is the direct result of what he made seem possible, from the symbolic to the soulful -- from his promise to make "This Land Is Your Land" the national anthem, to his tears for the Appalachian poor. I see Barack Obama having the same impact on young kids today.

And Robert S. McElvaine carries it much further, with America's 40 Years War at an End.

The charge of "elitism" is one that Republicans have heaved at Democratic candidates to great advantage since the Sixties. Indeed, the Republican Party has been running as the anti-Sixties party for four decades now. That has been the main casus belli in America's Forty Years War.
...Beginning in 1968, Nixon was the commander-in-chief of the army that launched the Forty Years War. A young Patrick J. Buchanan was its chief strategist. They set out quite consciously to divide the country, to launch a civil war that would be politically advantageous to their side. As Buchanan infamously put it in a 1971 memo to Nixon, his strategy was to cut "the country in half; my view is that we would have far the larger half."

And there's much more. Now we're getting somewhere.

Joel Achenbach posted a bit about what Bobby Kennedy meant to America, and attracted a great gathering of commenters. So many of them wrote that it was before their time and they don't see what the fuss about Bobby was about: "just another Kennedy". One older commenter made it a point to describe to them the transition we were going through in 1968 and how RFK personified it:

So the world had pretty much divided itself up as those who were changing (whether they liked it or not) versus those who weren't (our parents, LBJ, Ed Sullivan). And so when we saw RFK being thrust by fate into the same turbulent waters we were all struggling in, there was no choice but to identify with him. It had nothing to do with issues.
...yes, when RFK finally stood up, (too late, some of you say, but yes, too late, like many others of us, but we stood up, too), then *that's* the guy you identify with, not some ivory-tower poet like McCarthy.
And then there's the day King got assassinated, and Bobby goes into Indianapolis, and gives that speech. And that's the night he becomes the guy we would follow into the Gates of Hell. That's the night that has nothing whatsoever to do with politics or issues. And I can understand how, if you weren't there to see it, you can never understand it. And that's OK.

I was not a Kennedy supporter that year, or at least wasn't sure about his candidacy. I liked McCarthy for standing up early. I liked McGovern when he came in. But Bobby had a lot of baggage from his support of Joe McCarthy and his anti-union activites, and I hated it when he came in to New York and took the senate seat from the liberal Republican senator, Ken Keating, from my part of the state.

But I admired how he was continuing to change, and wholeheartedly going after social injustice, poverty, and racism. He embodied the Catholic principles I admired, like the Berrigans. His speeches could stir your heart, and his love for his children -- and all children -- was moving. His death took away a great fighter for what is good in America.

(Oh, and one more thing, from Tom Hayden's essay:

Those who denounce Obama -- and the possibilities of all electoral politics- - should ponder the effectiveness of sitting judgmentally on the sidelines while an Unexpected Future arrives through the sheer will of a new generation.

)

More news tweets than you think

2008-06-05T11:41:00.004-04:00

Via Mark Schaver, a link to a posting at GraphicDesignr that lists the number of Twitter tweets coming from newspapers around the country. Among them, news, sports, even a Miami Herald Twitter on Cuba. A lot more than I would have guessed. Guess there is something to this Twitter thing after all.

Of course, when I tried to get the Asheville Citizen-Times Twitter feed, I got the 'Too many Tweets' announcement.......

40 Years Ago

2008-06-04T18:50:00.003-04:00

(An occasional reminiscence on the events of 1968)

On Tuesday, June 4, California held its primary. Winning this primary was essential to Bobby Kennedy's successful nomination, to reverse the damage of his recent loss in Oregon, and he'd held rallies the day before in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Long Beach, Watts and San Diego, a grueling day. On primary day he, Ethel and six of their kids rested in a borrowed Malibu house and arrived in the evening at his LA headquarters at the Ambassador Hotel.
At 10 pm. California time, he was confident of victory and gave interviews to NBC's Sander Vanocur and CBS' Roger Mudd. Just before midnight he gave a victory speech in the ballroom to his California supporters. The speech ended with "...and on to Chicago".
On the way to another reception he took a detour through the hotel's kitchen pantry. It was there that Sirhan Sirhan was waiting with his gun, and there that Bobby Kennedy's campaign ended. Five other people were also shot.

He had won California by a close victory, but enough, 46.3 percent to McCarthy's 41.8. In the hospital with a bullet in his brain, and one in his neck, he lived another day, making it through surgery but not responding.
Most people in the east woke up to the news since it happened after 3 a.m. eastern time. The day was a terrible day for everyone. The news of Kennedy's death at 1:44 the next morning meant we woke up the next day to even worse news.

Members of the Kennedy family, including his brother's widow Jacqueline, flew to Los Angeles to accompany Bobby's body back to New York, where the plane was met by a crowd of New York dignitaries at LaGuardia airport. A motorcade took the casket to St. Patrick's cathedral, where a huge line of mourners would wait. All day Thursday mourners passed through the church as 8 masses were held. In Los Angeles, Sirhan Sirhan was arraigned for the murder. That night, the Kennedy family asked that the cathedral be left open for thousands more to file through to view his casket. The Friday funeral mass was filled with the famous, from Nixon to McCarthy, Goldwater to Rockefeller, Ralph Abernathy to Billy Graham. Afterwards the procession moved to Penn Station, where the body was placed on a train for the last trip to Washington.

The outpouring of emotion along the train route was heartbreaking, as was the last ceremony as Kennedy was buried near his brother in Arlington National Cemetery.

When John F. Kennedy was shot, I was a freshman at college, studying in my dorm room when I heard, and the news was so staggering it was nearly incomprehensible. I could do nothing but run to the chapel and try to pray. The next night a few of us had tickets to see Beyond the Fringe, the radical British satire review. It was hard to do, but we'd already bought the tickets, so we took the train to the city. Outside the theater near Broadway, passersby mumbled how terrible it was to be going to a comedy. What else could we do? It was a sad comedy that night, and the next morning more shock as we watched Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald to death on live TV.

Now, again, four and a half years later, we'd been through the horror of King's murder and riots, and now this. It was staggering. I remember little of these days, just that I spent them at work, probably with an eye on a television most of the time.

I know there were tears. And seeing Paul Fusco's photos of the people standing next to the railroad tracks to watch Bobby's train go by, there are tears again. 'People were watching hope pass by'. The multimedia presentation is at the New York Times website, worth a view.

In the Republican primary, California governor Reagan was the only candidate listed on the ballot. The California votes added to his popular vote total, slightly higher than Nixon's by convention time, when Reagan would actually declare himself a candidate. But the previous week's Oregon primary results had put Nixon over the top.

Now what?

Sources: Newfield, Robert Kennedy; Witcover, 85 Days.

Character of a candidate, researching size, Miami Herald legends, and politicized journalists

2008-06-04T13:21:00.008-04:00

In all the blogging and commenting this morning about last night's speeches, one stands out for me. In The Moderate Voice, by Pete Abel:

Three images from last night’s TV coverage will stay with me for years.
1. McCain’s reptitious, ill-timed, and creepier-than-usual grin … like the Cheshire cat on sedatives.
2. Clinton’s defiant smirk, as her NYC supporters shouted “Denver, Denver, Denver.”
3. Obama mouthing to Michelle after his speech, “How’d I do?” — and her apparent response, “Good. Real Good.”

Says Abel:

...if Americans truly do vote more on gut than on reason, then these images suggest (already) who will win in November … in a landslide.

On the news research front, Al Tompkins had links to a couple new tools in his 'dozen things I'm diggin'' sidebar, things that can answer one of the most frustrating questions asked of news researchers: how big is it, and how many swimming pools/football fields/Empire State Buildings will it fill?
From Nikon, Universcale, a Flash presentation that shows landmarks, items, and macro and micro-spatial entities with size and description of each. I found it hard to move along the scale, but each item's description is very useful.
SensibleUnits.com is a tool that takes a size measurement and shows you what items match it in size. For example, 8 acres equals: 4.4 football pitches, 6.4 hockey fields, or 6.0 American football fields. Very handy. Wish I'd had this years ago.

In a couple Miami Herald flashbacks, some memories: Tom Kunkel, who once was an editor at the Herald, is leaving his position at American Journalism Review and in his valedictory to all those who've influenced him is this:

Thank you, Edna Buchanan. You taught me that crime victims are real people who leave behind other real people, and the best journalists never permit themselves to forget that.
Thank you, Gene Miller, The Evansville Flash. If you had written Genesis, God would have invented the world in three days, as I'm sure you remind Him now and again when you're knocking back a few.

These two taught me a lot about what a journalist can be, too.
And, at Random Pixils, Bill posts a profile he did last year for the defunct Category 3-5 blog, on Herald photographer Tim Chapman, who he calls Miami's version of Weegee.
Always good to see true legends recognized.

(UPdated:) Oh, yes, and almost forgot: Tompkins also linked to Huffington Post's Fundrace database, where one of the searches he linked to was a list of people who have contributed to the presidential race who identify themselves as 'Journalists'. Hmm. Of all things journalists should be, isn't one of them nonpolitical? Didn't some get in trouble last year when their names showed up on donation lists? There are 570 hits in the database. Total given: over $353,000. Even worse: only $34,000 of that was to Republicans, from only 38 donors. (These are large contributions, folks.)
What will that say to those who claim journalists are biased?

Remembering who was right

2008-06-03T17:30:00.006-04:00

I didn't know, until I noticed it in Dan Gillmor's blog, that respected McClatchy Washington reporters Warren Stroebel, Jonathan Landay and Nancy Youssef, have a blog, called Nukes and Spooks. Among other things, it monitors a good list of security and counterterrorism blogs. This is one I'll be checking in on.

Gillmor brought attention to this posting, Memo to Scott McClellan: Here's what happened, in which Stroebel and Landay recap the work McClatchy (then Knight-Ridder) bureau reporters did in exposing the administration propaganda leading up to the war in Iraq. It contains a pretty damning list of administration lies and errors, which were documented long before McClellan's book.

But what I really like about this blog posting is that in a list of bureau reporters responsible for the coverage, they include bureau researcher Tish Wells.

We confess that here at McClatchy, which purchased Knight Ridder two years ago, we do have a dog in this fight. Our team - Joe Galloway, Clark Hoyt, Jon Landay, Renee Schoof, Warren Strobel, John Walcott, Tish Wells and many others - was, with a few exceptions, the only major news media organization that before the war consistently and aggressively challenged the White House's case for war, and its lack of planning for post-war Iraq.

Class. And kudos to my former colleague(s).

Worst in 40 years?

2008-06-03T14:08:00.003-04:00

Part of the reason I've been remembering and researching the events of 1968 is because I just have a feeling about this year's race that brings up the uncomfortable events of that year.

Fred Grimm, who I linked earlier today, makes the 1968 connection in his column today, Dems' future gets dimmer and dimmer:

...political rage makes up most of what I remember about the 1968 Democratic primary. I eventually voted, without enthusiasm, for Hubert Humphrey in the general election, but many of my friends, who had been so enthused about Eugene McCarthy or Robert Kennedy, couldn't bring themselves to vote for ``The Hump.''

Richard Cohen, who I first met in that year, may be having these feelings, it seems, and says this race disgusts him: A Campaign to Hate.

I see little to be happy about, little that pleases my jaundiced eye. Yes, voter participation is way up and in the end, the Democrats will choose a woman or an African American and, to invoke that tiresome phrase, history will be made. But this messy nominating process has eroded the standing of both candidates. It has highlighted the reality that racism still runs deep and that misogyny, although more imagined than real, is not yet a wholly spent force. This is an ugly porridge that has been placed before us...

And, even more surprising, this, on The New Nixon blog, from John Taylor: Chick Flick Politiks and the Clinton Sellout.

It’s ...a minor postscript on a classic political sellout. The liberal establishment’s ruthless betrayal of the Clintons is the story of the year. President Clinton was the most successful Democratic politician since FDR, while Hillary Clinton had distinguished herself among colleagues and journlists alike for her service in the Senate and had been cheerfully embraced as the frontrunner. I opposed Clinton’s impeachment and admired his Nixonian flair for governing from the center as well as his openness to RN’s counsel about foreign policy and his and Mrs. Clinton’s graciousness toward the Nixon family when the President died in 1994.

New ways to get the news

2008-06-03T10:54:00.007-04:00

I'm intrigued with today's story about the Bill Clinton rant against the author of the negative Vanity Fair story about him, recorded by "amateur reporter" Mayhill Fowler (at Huffington Post), because Fowler is the same reporter who reported Barack Obama's comments at a San Francisco fundraiser about 'clinging to guns and religion'. (Dave Winer discusses.)

After the first story, I pictured a young blogger, but it turns out Fowler is a 60-something former Tenneseean with a lifelong family interest in politics, who's worked her way into a position as a frequent 'Off The Bus' blogger.

This is exactly what the 'Off the Bus' project was hoping for, I'd think, using bloggers to find news the major media misses.

It's just one of several intriguing new ways of getting news that have been showing up this election year. They don't always last (I remember Voter.org from the 2000 election) but make things interesting while the demand is there. For straight news from the major media, as well as blogs and other new media sites, here are a few:

Dave Winer, the originator of RSS and now an evangelist for Twitter, has just launched a new service he calls NewsJunk (for news junkies). It's just plain politics news, similar to Winer's 'River of News' format, but with lots of alternative ways to access. Winer says:

For now there are five main ways to consume the flow:
1. Refresh the home page periodically.
2. Subscribe to the RSS feed.
3. Follow it on Twitter.
4. Befriend it on FriendFeed.
5. Watch for developments on the weblog.

Over the last few months I've gotten emails announcing other news portals, including Daylife, which allows you to set up pages on news you want (Bill Clinton news, for example), has news widgets for your website, an image tracker, etc.

Then there's The Daily Source, a non-profit which uses human editors to scour news sites and organize on one page.

Of course, then there's the (fairly) new AOL News.

(Updated:) And of course, how could I forget, especially since I've posted about it a couple times and have a badge on this blog, Alltop. Like this Politics list.

(And another update:) Also, note the link in comments below to Grazr, one I hadn't seen yet. I may have to try this one out a bit.

I fell in love with Yahoo! News and, particularly, its Full Coverage roundups (like this one on Sen. Kennedy), many many years ago. It was a wonderful resource for a newsroom researcher/intranet guide when a breaking or ongoing news story needed to be covered.

These days I don't go to news aggregator sites much any more, though, or even use news feeds; I tend to just browse Memeorandum and a few other news sites, and search Google News when I need something fast. I suppose many still find them useful, though.

Blogging: a true reporter's calling

2008-06-03T10:28:00.004-04:00

Miami Herald columnist Fred Grimm, in his new blog The Grimm Truth, makes a statement about journalism and blogging that strikes true to me, Blogging, Circa 1968:

Writing for a small town newspaper, knocking out one little story after another, every day, writing about everything that moved, I was utterly intertwined in the life of the community. And the community wasn't shy about telling me I didn't know what the hell I was talking about. I was blogging. I just didn't know it yet.

This one will be on my daily visit list.

Posting the pictures

2008-06-02T13:36:00.002-04:00

One of the things I miss most about reading newspapers online is getting to see all the pictures, in a size where you can make out detail. Many papers' online photos leave much to be desired, in size and number.

So I'm thrilled to see this new feature from the Boston Globe, The Big Picture, a daily blog where the best news photos of the day are posted in large format. If one photo isn't enough, there are often links to more on the topic, such as these amazing pictures from the aftermath of the Chinese quake.

I like this a lot.

On libraries and the news

2008-06-02T13:26:00.002-04:00

In the upcoming issue of New York Review of Books: The Library in the New Age, by Robert Darnton.

This discussion of how information is disseminated spends a bit of time on news, blogs, and other new media. Good stuff:

...stories about blogging point to the same conclusion: blogs create news, and news can take the form of a textual reality that trumps the reality under our noses. Today many reporters spend more time tracking blogs than they do checking out traditional sources such as the spokespersons of public authorities. News in the information age has broken loose from its conventional moorings, creating possibilities of misinformation on a global scale. We live in a time of unprecedented accessibility to information that is increasingly unreliable. Or do we?
I would argue that news has always been an artifact and that it never corresponded exactly to what actually happened.
...having learned to write news, I now distrust newspapers as a source of information, and I am often surprised by historians who take them as primary sources for knowing what really happened.

...I speak as a Google enthusiast. I believe Google Book Search really will make book learning accessible on a new, worldwide scale, despite the great digital divide that separates the poor from the computerized. It also will open up possibilities for research involving vast quantities of data, which could never be mastered without digitization.
...Meanwhile, I say: shore up the library. Stock it with printed matter. Reinforce its reading rooms. But don't think of it as a warehouse or a museum.

40 Years Ago

2008-06-02T11:01:00.004-04:00

(An occasional reminiscence on the events of 1968)

At the beginning of June, it was starting to feel as though the world was falling apart.

France was still in an uproar, with strikes, protests, riots, and de Gaulle had just disbanded Parliament and announced a new election.

Students were shutting down universities in Spain, England and Germany. Reaction to student protests in Poland had worsened anti-Semitism there and Jews were being asked to leave. There was civil war in Nigeria, where the Ibo nation of Biafra had declared its independence the previous year. A new Nigeria offensive this month led to a blockade and mass starvation.

In Washington, things were a mess at Resurrection City, with rains creating a mudfield; the papers were reporting that young bored residents, some of them urban gang members, were bringing in booze and partying all night. Park Police weren't allowed inside the perimeter and fears of crime and violence were increasing.

On June 3, Andy Warhol was shot in the lobby of his New York studio, The Factory, by Valerie Solanis. A panhandler and author of the anti-men 'SCUM Manifesto', Solanis was angry that he had not produced a play she had written. Warhol would be permanently injured, a friend was also shot, and Solanis, defended by feminists, would spend a few years in prison and mental institutions.

The next day was California's primary.
We hoped we'd soon know more about who would be running against Richard Nixon.

As diversion from the news, we were listening to the new album by the Small Faces, Ogden's Nut Gone Flake, which had come out and shot to number one in England just a couple weeks before. (One song: Itchycoo Park.) We watched first episode of The Prisoner, the strange British spy/science fiction fantasy starring Patrick McGoohan, beginning a summer run in the U.S. We were also anticipating going to the movies to see ~~the Beatles' Yellow Submarine, due to debut Jun 6~~ (IMDB.com says this was in November) the Roman Polansky movie, Rosemary's Baby, which would come out on June 12.

But things were only going to get worse.

A few research links

2008-06-01T14:52:00.000-04:00

New York Times coverage of national political conventions, 1896-1996.

Agflation: The real costs of rising food prices, news and data from Reuters.

KillerStartups.com reviews new Web sites.

The Civil Rights Digital Library, at the University of Georgia.

World Health Statistics 2008 from WHO.

Remembering a media hoarde

2008-05-31T16:17:00.002-04:00

Cross-posted from my other blog:

A reminder, in the Asheville Citizen Times, that today is the 5th anniversary of the day Eric Rudolph was caught by Murphy police officer Jeff Postell behind the Save-a-Lot on the east side of Murphy, NC.
Many Remember Rudolph Saga:

...what also stands out in (Murphy mayor)Hughes’ mind five years later is the media horde that descended on Murphy when news of the capture broke.
“I think we had 26 satellite trucks in town, and I was interviewed 15 or 20 times that week,” he said. “I think I knew everyone at CNN by name.
“It is an ill wind that blows the national media into your town. Far too many reporters wanted to portray us as illiterate, ignorant and anti-government hicks who approved of Rudolph’s doings, which was totally false.”

Gathering storm

2008-05-29T13:34:00.003-04:00

Two new reports on global warming that should make lots of people think:

From the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Florida Coastal and Ocean Coalition, a report on the future of Florida, Preparing for a Sea Change in Florida (40 page PDF).

The first and most important step, of course, is to curb emissions, but even if we do that we will need to address the impacts that are predicted to occur. We can do this by:
* Restoring coastal and marine ecosystems so they can better cope with the stress of climate change and ocean acidification.
* Discouraging development in vulnerable areas to prepare for rising sea levels, as well as restoring and protecting natural buffers.
* Preparing for extreme weather events by protecting and restoring shoreline vegetation and wetlands, upgrading stormwater management, and increasing water-use efficiency through conservation and recycling treated wastewater for irrigation and industrial use.

From another coastline I love, this report on the Great Lakes from National Parks Conservation Association and HealthyLakes.org, Great Lakes restoration and the threat of global warming (36-page PDF). Some of the changes predicted without prevention:

· Daily high temperatures in the region will increase 5.4 to 10.8 degrees relative to what was typical from 1961-1990, with wintertime temperatures increasing even more than summer temperatures.
· Increased evaporation from warming lakes—particularly in winter—is expected to result in less ice cover, contributing to lower water levels and increases in lake-effect snow.
· Lake levels could drop during the next century by approximately 1 foot on Lake Superior, 3 feet on Lakes Michigan and Huron, 2.7 feet on Lake Erie, and 1.7 feet on Lake Ontario.

Lake levels have been a problem for years so adding another couple feet on to an existing problem is scary. As well as the threat of more lake-effect snow: seems that's an increasing problem already.