Americana J. Rev.
[this post completed on tape delay. Helpful note to others when you have a tooth with a deep cavity but which still has a live nerve inside - do not jam a toothpick into the tooth, better yet do not do this a second time a few days later]
I was looking through the latest issues of the
American Journalism Review last week. This is edited out of the Journalism school here at Maryland. So they leave free copies in the foyer. That's free - like in beer not just open source. But then it's not beer, its a magazine by journalists about journalism. I suppose if it were a beer, which its not, it would be a Sam Adams.
It had a large article on blogging in it The Expanding Blogosphere By Rachel Smolkin. Professional journalists love to point out how how bloggers hate Journalists and believe bloggers live to point out pro-jo's (as I'll call them) failings. Less often do they own up to the collorary that web logs make professional journalists antsy and defensive, and that generally they would rather give up an internal organ than say something nice or objective. Given that that is archtype of any such articles, you have to focus on the local variations. I was disappointed that she focuses exclusively on a handful of A list web logs, a reinforcement of the 80-20 power law, but even there she writes about people who are and were professional journalists to begin with: Glenn Reynolds, Mickey Kaus, and Josh Marshall. To the unnamed rest she attributes the highly opinionated, highly variable, and rapid fire over-brimming writing that everyone knows web logs consist of. All things I couldn't do if I tried.
I think I wanted to be a journalist once. I thought my college studies were leading towards this. I don't remember entirely, I've suppressed my college years. I recall once sitting in Ledo's pizza, the original one on New Hampshire ave University Boulevard. with my friend Nancy; this is back when she was still Nancy and hadn't become Micaela yet, so this must have been a long time ago. She was asking me what I wanted to do with my life. At that time I wanted to get a degree in Government and Politics with a minor in Economics and some journalism courses perhaps even a double major. I never accomplished these things, but afterwards she entered the Journalism post grad program and eventually obtained a masters with the thesis Sugar and Spice and the Persian Gulf War : Discourse and Ideology in Teen Fashion Magazines.
They also have an article on NPR and its post Bob Edwards ambitions. Quicker and Deeper? . Even though it was always brought up to deny, I notice the phrase the CNN of radio kept turning up in that article. I read that the same day that I read this piece from Alternet
AlterNet: Public Broadcasting Veers to the Right. The combination left me with a certain number of questions. A year or two ago, I remember a web discussion - probably Metafilter , maybe K5 - on PBS tightening up the rules to its Red Book. This is the document that governs the professional and technical standards that a documentary piece has to have to be considered for one of PBS's distribution vehicles. At the time it was felt this move was an attempt to freeze independents out and kept public television safe for corporate sponsored broadcasts. I would keep writing about this, but I think there is an episode of NOVA coming on concerning how our high tech weapons are winning us our global wars.
I apologize for that brief interlude of sarcasm.
The back page op-ed of the AJR Scalia and His Speeches is about that strange incident a couple of months ago when a deputy U S Marshall went over and yanked a cassette tape out of a reporters recorder. Hard to say which is more eregious: a Federal marshall with no understanding of the law and with a desire to act like a private security goon. Or a Justice who will lecture on laws that he personalizes for himself. Justice Scalia's behavior has seemed curious for some time now and not just perennial malcontents like myself that think so, but his fellow Justices (old article alert) Yahoo! News - Rehnquist Orders Study After Scalia Flap. I tend to believe that he's just acting out because he's realized even George Bush is unlikely to try to name him Chief Justice.
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