Opportunities

They’re gonna have to introduce conscription
They’re gonna have to take away my prescription
If they wanna get me making toys
If they wanna get me, well HELL, I got not choice

Career opportunities are the ones that never knock
Every job they offer you is to keep out the dock
Career opportunities, the ones that never knock

Careers
Careers
Careers
Ain’t a-never gonna knock

Joe Strummer, The Clash, "Career Opportunities"

Jobs. Wow, really. I'm going to have to get one. I think I have pretty good skills, and regardless of what it is I grab a hold of after May graduation, I'll still be able to build toward magazine writing with freelance work.

Over the turkey break I stopped by a friend's house, an older friend from back in the day who is now teaching in the Real World. He asked me what I was writing about lately. I stammered something about how I'm putting a lot of work in at the Buzz. True true, but it felt unsatisfying; I wanted to say, "Oh, I've got work coming into x, y and z publications." But I don't.

I've had a pair of summer internships and loads of time with Illini Media. I'm a research assistant (read: type transcripts) for a fairly prominent magazine writer. I blog regularly (no, not just here). So my resume isn't weak -- at least I hope not -- but I feel pressure to do more and more. Thankfully, I've had a lot of multimedia training through the News-Gazette class this semester; I'll continue that trend for next semester.

We'll be coming out the other side to a dying industry in a tanked economy. Reading through everyone's blogs, I can tell that those concerns are weighing heavily on all of us. There is hope; though, for times of upheaval are the best for the innovative and creative. If you think you need multimedia experience, do it. Make multimedia. What is going to make you better, make you more of an asset to a company, do it.


The voices in your head are calling
Stop wasting your time, there's nothing coming
Only a fool would think someone could save you
The men at the factory are old and cunning
You don't owe nothing, so boy get runnin'
It's the best years of your life they want to steal

Strummer, The Clampdown.

Barack and the (Puppy) Bowl System

Well, OK, so I might talk about our president-elect a bit. He's going to do good things. One habit that could get him in trouble, however, is his mixing of light and heavier topics: I love Barack talking hardball in a figurative and literal sense (as in, Go White Sox). When you're president; however, everything you do becomes a political issue -- even adopting a puppy. He says he wants to get a mutt, just like him, but daughter Malia is allergic. Hypoallergenic shelter animals are a bit hard to come by.

I would go with a hypoallergenic Welsh Pembroke corgi. It is well documented that corgis are adorable, playful and intelligent, all traits that I would also assign to our soon to be commander in chief. The corgi, known for its extensive herding ability, would be a fit in any place within the White House, from the West Wing to Secret Service Detail. I can already see the made-for-TV Disney Channel Production, A Barker in the Office.

Gratuitous cuteness.

On Barack's victory (and the frontpages afterward)

Call me old-fashioned, but I'm going to have to say that the Chicago papers. The Sun Times went with a very narrow-focused portrait of the president elect, and I think it works quite well -- but it isn't the home run that the MLK and Obama mirror was, while the Trib cover carrier the "new traditionalism" of the redesign. But let's check out the other regions.

I find it delightful that nearly all are incredibly triumphant, from "Yes He Did!" (Huntsville Times) to the San Bernadino Sun's "HISTORY." Some go with the simple -- (Obama wins) and others choose the superlative (Historymaker). We in the press love a good story, and Obamamania certainly provided it.

Inertia

In response to Amy Gahran's excellent blog, I would have to say that a number of things have to happen within the j-school to remain relevant. I often banter about institutional inertia and its evils -- it's one of the reasons that I became (or am becoming) a journalist. A major project of mine is a story about information science schools -- they call themselves iSchools -- isn't that cute? Information science is incredibly interdisciplinary. GSLIS here on campus is tied to a plethora of departments, each needing its number-crunching, database-building expertise. Am I saying we should be so promiscuous? No, but we do need to reach out.

Madness!

H.P. Lovecraft has been a favorite writer for years now; he is like Ed Wood if Ed Wood was at all respectable. Actually, a better comparison might be Bruce Campbell: You love him for his endearing goofiness. He was the master of the interrobang (a nonstandard English-language punctuation mark intended to combine the functions of the question mark (also called the interrogative point) and the exclamation mark or exclamation point (known in printers' jargon as the bang). The typographical character is a superimposition of those two marks. The same effect is also frequently achieved by using both, for example, "How could you do such a thing!?" or "How could you do such a thing?!") as well at intensely used italics, the guy could simply write, and his imagination was as dark as it was gigantic. For all of his grammatical foibles, he remains a wonderful American artist, whose nature just as our nation's is flawed but beautiful.

Subjunctivitis

The Subjunctive case? What a jerk. I won't be subjunctive to anyone!

OK, I'm sorry, but I really want to talk about the Rays victory. This is good for baseball, believe it or not. Just because all of those NESN jerks love talking about Boston all day doesn't mean that the baseball world is entireley located in the Northeast. It's crap. Baseball is a GLOBAL sport, I tell you.

My pick? The Rays in 7. They head back to Tampa down 3-2, but get going at home, winning in dramatic and historic fashion.

Diagramming Palin

Uh oh, look what's gonna happen to our language when we start droppin' the letter G off of all our words. That governor from Alaska is so adorable, with her colloquialisms and folksy solutions to real-world problems. Who care about politics when you can just make stuff up and wink into the camera to score a victory. That and the fear mongering. In any case, her language is hilarious. Let's consult Kitty Burns Florey's recent piece for Slate, a wonderfully critical essay detailing the diagramming of the G.O.P.'s vice presidential nominee:



I know that John McCain will do that and I, as his vice president, families we are blessed with that vote of the American people and are elected to serve and are sworn in on January 20, that will be our top priority is to defend the American people.

How incredibly frustrating. If she's in office, then I am out of this country.

On The Photos

Would you run these photos? In print, I would not run them, except in. They're all at the most fundamental level revolting; I extend an invitation to anyone who thinks her or she would be able to click through without wincing or gagging? Not a chance.
What criteria did you you use to make a decision? My personal taste, and the understanding of others. I'm a pretty easy to irritate, so I'm sure I would out-offend any Mega-Churching Alpha Moms.
Under what circumstances would you run the photos? If it was of national importance. As in, the capitol would be under threat of nuclear arms. In that extreme case, I would run the photographs. Otherwise we're all good.
Would your decision be different if the events were local? No, this is about not offending everybody in your town. If you don't pander to them, you'll never stay in print. This 2008, people.
Does where or how you play the photo have any bearing on your decision? I would perhaps run them online with a warning; you'd have to only let people with accounts -- who list their age -- to access the images.
With which photo did you struggle the most? The disgusting, foul incident in Seattle.
Why?Images of rape should not be displayed. It's absolutely detrimental to your interests as a publication.

Of Gambling and Schools

The Daily Illini did a commendable job with their Friday cover story. Reporter Sarah Small gets it most of the time, which is impressive, due to the subject matter. Let's take it sequentially, starting with the anecdotal lede:
Scott Johnson, junior in LAS, played his first online poker game at the age of 13. Within a week of his first time playing, he had won $900. Three hours later, he lost all of his money.

Looks all good to me -- thus far. Johnson’s age looks good, and so does the $900. Let’s see if this gets interesting.

Johnson turned 18 his first day at the University as a freshman, and during his first days on campus, he won $3,000. He cashed out $1,000 of this and lost $2,000. Since the first time he played an online poker tournament, Johnson has experienced the ups and downs of winning and losing.

Here we run into a hodgepodge of numerals. The second sentence here is a bit choppy. Maybe I’m a little magazine-y here, but I’d change $1,000 to something like “a grand,” and then follow with, “lost the remainder.”

This story is a pretty solid one -- but it could use some liveliness. That’s a tall order for a numeral-centric story such as this. Small does well with the story, but it’s not quite perfect.

Politics and the English Language

Eric Blair. As much as any man, he shaped the English language as a whole, as well as supplying vernacular: doublespeak, mindcrime, Big Brother. His work was so salient his name has become a term in and of itself: Orwellian. I believe he was aware of his standing in the world of letters, and he was very conscious of what it means to be a writer. This might be best expressed in the introductory paragraph to his 1945 essay, "Politics and the English Language."

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language -- so the argument runs -- must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Modern English is full of lazy idioms and weak writing; a congenital linguistic malaise. Orwell disposed of this poverty with alacrity: dying metaphors, verbal false limbs, meaningless words and pretentious diction were all on his hit list. Take heed, young writers; for when you trot out another tired “throughout all history” phrase, Orwell will be turning in his grave. Big Brother is watching, as it were.

On John McIntyre

OK, so outsourcing copy editing to Bangalore is probably not the greatest of ideas. However, let's take it point by point with McIntyre's column (quick question: if McIntyre wasn't a relative name in the industry, would he still have a job at the Sun? A lot of old dogs have been getting cut out in the past few years). The examples he uses on local geography are exaggerated at best. Google (and its Maps application) get you to the pertinent information in a matter of seconds. In fact, perhaps in the length of time it takes Mr. Older Copyeditor to ask around the water cooler to confirm parallel streets, our enterprising Indian may have already Google Earthed up the answer. In fact, after being the "beat" for long enough, the outsource employee might develop a pretty solid understanding of Respective Small Market Newspaper Town. Not that I do not agree with McIntyre on a number of points in general, as described on his rather pleasant blog. The guy really really does know and appreciate the beauty of the English language, without being didactic about the whole thing. At the same time, he might want to do a bit more hypothetical fact-checking of his thought experiments. Just a thought.

Semicolon: Semiawesome.

As you well know, the semicolon is like the delicious, tart kiwi fruit: underused, and often when it is finally used, the results are atrocious: kiwi-strawberry juice, anyone? When the semicolon is used properly; however, the results can be majestic. Want to join a pair of sentences but not use a conjunction? Our friend the semicolon can join those clauses together beautifully; it rebels against the tyranny of "and." To this end, one Dictionary Evangelist is in the process of forming the Semicolon Appreciation Society. Of course, the Times has a beautiful piece on the mark, as well as the readers' eloquent comments.

Obviously, due to the stylistic standards (constraints?) of newspapering, the semicolon is often relegated to parsing out of lists, especially in the description department. If you're a magazine writer, as I aspire to be, the semicolon (kids call it the SC) gets into the action a little more. I find a particular magic in the one sentence, semicolon joined paragraph, preferably laid in between a pair of larger paragraphs. The nature of the full, joint clauses creates an incredible pleasing and poetic symmetry to the prose; the section becomes greater than the whole of its parts.

On "Transforming American Newspapers"

Vin Crosbie gets just about gets it. Indeed, better than most. He successfully spots the elephant in the middle of the newsroom again and again, and often with eloquent, emotional language, the sort of thing that moves the soul (or moves you to use Mr. Crosbie's consulting firm, terrific!). The miasma of lethargy emanating from American papers is quite pungent, and he rightly calls it out: “{they} have long been too financially impatient to submit themselves to anything but ostensibly quick cures and they've even longer been too conceptually myopic to perceive the real reasons for their declines.”

As a cheerfully disaffected youth who has come of age with the Internet – I had a part in what you'd call a group blog in 9th grade or so – I have wrung my hands as I learn more about journalism in our age, and just how out of touch news organizations are, just look at the stocks Crosbie lists.

I agree with Crosbie when he says that advertisers' flight from print is a symptom and not the disease. I agree with him when he says that most all regional papers will evaporate. However, he gets a little beyond himself when he says that the big nationals – USA Today, The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal – are all going to fold or otherwise be unrecognizable. While I lack the depth of research of Crosbie, I am inclined to comment that people have some sort of attachment to the printed word. It might be useful to go straight to the horse's mouth, the exec ed of the Times, Bill Keller, from a talk to the newsroom Q&A.

“What makes a newspaper is not the paper. It's resources and values. It's reporters and editors. It's the difficult and expensive and sometimes dangerous business of deploying talented people to witness events, ferret out information wherever it is buried, and try to make sense of it. It's a rigorous set of standards, enforced by experienced editors.”

I'll have to defer to Keller for the moment. But maybe he and Crosbie are in agreement.