What are we giving up in the name of security?

If you haven't listened to this segment from On The Media this week, you should. And it should make you think greatly about what we are giving up in the name of "security."

On The Media - My Detainment Story or: How I learned to Stop Feeling Safe in my own country ...

Earlier this month, OTM producer Sarah Abdurrahman, her family, and her friends were detained for hours by US Customs and Border Protection on their way home from Canada. Everyone being held was a US citizen, and no one received an explanation. Sarah tells the story of their detainment, and her diff difficulty getting any answers from one of the least transparent agencies in the country.

Nouns as adjectives NPR style

Caught this on NPR the other day, a story by Julie McCarthy on how troops from India and Pakistan are facing off - and dying - on a remote glacier in the Himalayas.

And right at the end came that tin-ear construction of using a noun in place of an adjective. What made this one ring tinny was that she combined both forms:
"Pakistan-Indian relations."

You won't find it on the transcript - NPR has cleaned it up to "Pakistan-India" (though I'd argue Pakistani-Indian would be better). So much for accuracy in transcripts, eh?

But you can hear it right at the end of the audio:


As I've argued before, I wish we'd stop doing this noun-for-adjective thing because it produces these tin-ear constructions. I know I'm spitting into the wind, as the old Jim Croce song goes. Still, one can hope.

Editteach: Two good examples from NPR

If you are teaching writing and editing, you could do worse than to have students listen to these two examples from NPR

(I like using audio to help teach because it shows the power of creating pictures in people's heads while also being a bit more dimensional than just print. It also shows the necessity for all writers to use their ears and eyes in ways to pick up details like nat sound that yo  can then describe in text.)

Wade Goodwyn's moving and detailed story about troops returning home in December 2-11

Tracy Samilton's fun story today about how Craftsman decided to debut a riding lawnmower at the Detroit Auto Show (unfortunately, the transcript has taken some of the life and fun out of the story - make sure you listen).

O'Connor leaving The State

Statehouse reporter John O'Connor says he's leaving The State for a new NPR/WUSF project in Tampa, Fla.

John doesn't provide details, but I assume it is part of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's local journalism initiative - WUSF is part of the Central Florida/Gulf Coast cluster (more here).


(Note the absence of South Carolina's ETV/ETV radio from any of this, probably because when it comes to news, it gives a whole new meaning to the term "black hole" (with apologies to the folks at "The Big Picture," who have the Sisphyean task of trying to elevate ETV's otherwise dismal record).

Good luck, John. He's been a wonderful thorn in the side of various pols at the Statehouse - a life well lived.

April Fool - did NPR subtly blow it

I love a good April Fool's joke as much as the next person - probably more so, which is dangerous because I tend to do things like spring a "pop" quiz on my 8 a.m. editing class on days like today, putting my life and limb in danger when the truth comes out.

But I think NPR's attempt at one today missed the mark.

The premise of the story "Advances in 3D may mean no ridiculous glasses" is that a San Diego doctor has developed experimental surgery that enables one to see in 3D natively. Of course, there's a minor complication of regular vision blurring - but they have lenses for that!

Now, I trust it was an April Fool story. If not, I am reminded of the line that those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad, because this would be madness.

The problem, to my mind, and why it makes an interesting ethics discussion for classes, is that it was NPR and it was done in the traditional dead-pan NPR way - complete with audio clip from "Avatar," supposed entertainment industry expert, the doctor and the woman who had the surgery. All the names were entirely plausible, etc.

There is some hint this may be a put on with this tag line by the announcer after the reporter's close: Dr. Marsh and his team hope for a wider release of the procedure in select cities starting April 1st, 2012.

Oh, stop being a wet blanket, Doug.

But let's dissect this a bit.

Parody pieces are fun, and lord knows we should have a lot more fun in this business. But parody is like sprinkling a few dynamite sticks among the fireworks on July Fourth - light the right fuses and the display is spectacular. Get careless and the results get messy.

To do effective parody you have to match tone and content to your audience and your reputation, and you have to understand the situation under which it will be consumed. This is where I think NPR went wrong and what could make for some interesting at your next journalism ethics class.

• Your established tone and reputation determine how obvious you have to be. Were we to read this in the Onion, there'd be no problem. We know we're getting parody and satire for our efforts. But this was just dropped into NPR's "Morning Edition" lineup with no particular difference. Is  a sly reference to "April 1, 2012" at the end enough/
• We exist in an era of Botox and "Nip and Tuck." What once might have been thought of as outrageous plastic surgery no longer is.
• We also live in an era where 3D is becoming commonplace.
• The piece itself is likely to be consumed "on the fly" while people are driving to work, rushing to get the kids to school, etc. That sly little reference at the end is likely to be missed. (And online, there's not any additional hint.)

Finally, there is subject matter. Again, unless you are The Onion, I think people's health and safety are subjects you should just generally avoid making fun with. They are almost guaranteed to get the wrong reaction.

So you have an entire plausible situation dealing with people's health being consumed on the fly without very clear indicators it is parody on a channel known for its seriousness. I think that's a formula for "messy."

Most of these things I've seen go wrong (and college newspapers are a litany of parody gone horribly wrong) involve that failure to step back and look at subject matter, publication's reputation and situation of consumption - and then failing to incorporate the proper signals. NPR's could have worked, even had the announcer said something like "and happy April Fool" at the end.

One of the best parodies I've ever seen or heard was 40 or so years ago on WCBS-TV news in New York - the disappearance of the gefilte fish from the lakes and streams of New York.

There is no such thing as a gefilte fish, of course. Gefilte fish is a chopped-fish dish common to Jewish menus. This would not work in Dallas, or Columbia, where your local megafood might have a few jars tucked away behind the pickles. In New York, of course, where food stores devote feet of space to such items, it makes perfect sense.

And while you might argue that joking about people's food is an invitation to trouble as well, in the WCBS case, the product was so well-known for what it was that there was less chance of misinterpretation. And the reporter had the sense to tag the piece - after giving the standard lockout - "and happy April Fool's."

Parody should be pursued with care. It should always be looked at from 10,000 feet. If it still works, go for it. Just make sure it is clear.

Feel free to disagree with me.

NPR's Guy Raz - Five books for journalists

Normally I avoid most of the e-mail entreaties I get from this or that website seeking a backlink to promote some add-water-and-stir journalism piece they've done. (You know, the Top such-and-such or so-and so ways to pimp your reporting or whatever.)

Although, in the spirit of full disclosure, a couple of them have named this piece of online real estate a top journalism blog or whatever the entreaty of the week is.

But I was intrigued enough by an email (going to take a while to get used to the AP's new hyphenless form) from The Browser that I gave it a look.

The piece in question is an interview with NPR's Guy Raz about the five books he'd recommend for journalists. They are definitely not your standard fare:

• Daniel Schorr:  Staying Tuned: A Life in Journalism
• Edward Bliss Jr. and James Hoyt: Writing News for Broadcast
• George Orwell: Homage to Catalonia
• George Packer: The Assassin's Gate
• Christopher Hitchens: Letters to a Young Contrarian

As I said, not your standard fare.

Nor is the London-based Browser, which goes by the monicker "Writing Worth Reading." I rather fancy it and kind of wish I'd known about it before my recent trip to Britain. Would have been fascinating to sit down and have a conversation with the folks behind it.

Congrats to Elise Hu

Elise Hu, a former Upstate S.C. TV reporter who went to Austin and then to the well-regarded online startup Texas Tribune, is going to be digital director of NPR's "Impact of Government" initiative.

Congrats!

Ah, to be blissfully ignored

Much has been written on how newsrooms are hard places to change, resistant to innovation, etc. -- so much so that the best thing is just to point you to a Google search and let you graze.

But sometimes there is a moment in time when things become just a bit clearer, and it was on the way in to work this morning listening to NPR talk about, of all things, the nation's power grid.

The report contained this, from Martha Duggan, vice president for government affairs at solar energy company SunEdison.

Duggan, who began her career in the regulated utility world, likes to tell a story about a utility engineer who said the nature of his job was either to be ignored when the electricity was on, or criticized when it was off.

"And so his goal, really, was to be ignored," Duggan says. "When you apply that kind of thinking across an organization — as you might imagine — the opportunity for creativity or new ideas is not necessarily in top of mind for folks who work in that environment."

I've written here before how papers in the 1970s through 1990s, as competition fell away and staffs grew to meet "peak demand," became more and more like utility companies. But as I heard this today, it also explained so much about newsroom psychology.

For all those supposed "free spirits" among journalists, let's be honest, the real goal for most was simply to "get the paper out." Miss a deadline, you get noticed. Screw up a story or even write one that is solid as hell but draws some angry calls, you get noticed. And "getting noticed" in a newsroom in those kinds of ways was at least an invitation to take some antacid.

(At the AP, for instance at one time, even the smallest of "correctives" required an extensive packet that went to New York and ultimately the president's office.)

In other words, their real goal inside the organization and outside was to be ignored - at the same time they wanted the world to pay attention to what they were writing.

Sure, it came from the top of the organization, but, like utilities, it was so ingrained that it permeated every facet of corporate culture.

Is it any wonder journalists are a bit neurotic?

Despite all the talk about blowing up newsrooms and all the new fancy titles, I've really yet to see any news organization effectively address this ingrained problem. Or to put it another way, if the publisher got a bunch of angry calls tomorrow about something the newsroom had put out, even if it were the most solid thing in the world, what are the chances that at least some crap would not run downhill? Or what if someone said, hey, we really need to be late on that paper tonight because we really need to get it on the Web first and think of some new ways to do it in print?

I'd love to hear of some places that have figured out how not to have that happen.

NPR-fix the audio player

Permit me to be petulant for a moment.

I am a great fan of "Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me." So much so that when I was in Chicago a few weeks ago I attended one of the tapings (I haven't had time to blog about it; the pix still reside in my cell phone).

For several years, when I could not catch it on the air, I faithfully pulled up the Web site and listened to the stream. Sometimes I would download the MP3.

Recently, SC public radio, among the many annoying things it has done, moved the show to inconvenient weekend afternoons. (I always thought it made the perfect foil coming after "Car Talk," but what do I know?) So I am pretty much relegated to the stream or podcast.

Only a while back, NPR "improved" its player, and there have been nothing but problems since, with this and other NPR streams. The player constantly hangs up on rebuffering anywhere from 30 seconds to a couple of minutes into the stream. It may hesitantly resume for a few seconds, but like that old junker on its last legs, it eventually sputters to a halt, never resumes and finally times out. So we try and try again, with the same results at different times into the stream.

This happens on a Mac and a PC. It happens with Safari, Seamonkey, Fiirefox and IE.

It happens in hotels and mid-range DSL at home, where all my other streams work fine. It even happens sometimes at the office with Mac or PC and a 1 Gb line.

The last message I got from NPR was that it was aware of a problem and was working on it. That was more than a month ago. Well, fix it, dang it!

If NPR knows there is a problem, the least it could do is get the podcast loaded on time -- and maybe even earlier considering there is a problem? The site says it's to be loaded by about 7 p.m. on Sundays. It's now almost midnight and the week-old one is still there.

Maybe I'm just an island in the stream, but I tend to think others may be having these problems, too? Anyone else.

SCETV should be ashamed

Being a state employee, I generally avoid commenting on anything having to do with state governemnt, etc. But there is one agency that continues to show how deficient it is as a media outlet, that after this week's deaths of nine firefighters in Charleston has shown what an embarrassement it is.

The agency is South Carolina's educational TV network, specifically its radio operation.

In many states like this one already starving for solid radio news, the NPR affiliates have risen to the challenge. Not this one, despite its network of stations around the state.

Nine dead firefighters in Charleston. And where is NPR getting its information? Not from an SCETV correspondent as near as I can tell -- in fact I listened to various NPR newscasts yesterday, and the voicers were coming from stations in places such as Wilmington, N.C. Or when there is a big story, NPR's Adam Hochberg, who is based in North Carolina, has to work the phones or head down here.

In fact, what we get on our NPR stations in the morning that passes for local news is warmed-over AP, stuff that's often a day or more old. And even worse than the few commercial stations that do news -- if that is possible -- the program director records one or two newscasts and then they just play in an endless loop. Listen during the hour and you'll hear the same thing two or three times. Several times, clearly outdated information has been on all morning. What? It's too much trouble to rip, read and record something fresh every 60 or 90 minutes? Maybe even take five minutes to rewrite it?

SCETV used to have a pretty powerful news staff. It was gutted in a dispute with the Legislature. Now, it seems that SCETV officials are scared of their shadows if anyone mentions radio "news."

What an embarrassment.

(Please, someone from SCETV correct me if I'm wrong, because on this side of the speaker it's really bad. And, yes, I'll answer the question -- no I do not contribute because I have seen no initiative by SCETV to stand up to the state pols and try to put in even a rudimentary news operation. Show me some initiative, and I'll show you the money.)

On SCETV's TV side, there has been at least a little attempt to get back in the news/public affairs business with "The Big Picture," which tonight is devoting its time to the tragedy. NPR, on the other hand, has blanketed the story -- no thanks as near as I can tell to much help from SCETV radio -- in fact, it's so embarrassing that SCETV's "coverage" of this story on the Web pretty much consists of pointing to NPR's content.

Would we have written she's a troll?

I thought we were beyond this. But in this day and age of Hilton, Spears, et al., why does it not surprise me that some major news organizations resorted to leading off their stories about Valerie Plame with these kinds of descriptions:

AP (Julie Hirshfeld Davis): Valerie plame lent a glamorous face and a personal story to Democrats' criticism of the Bush administration Friday ...

NPR (David Welna): Platinum blond and glamorous as a movie idol, Valerie Plame Wilson set off a storm of clicking camera shutters when she strode into the hearing room this morning. (nat sound of cameras) And then this woman who's kept a mysterious silence since having her identity revealed nearly four years ago finally spoke. ...

Someone please explain to me what those phrases lend to each story -- and certainly how they frame each story by being in the lede? Would we have written it if she were ordinary or even homely? Or if she were a he? NPR's case is especially egregious. Just start with her name. Oh, and someone remind Welna about "volition" -- she didn't have her identity revealed -- it was revealed -- in other words write since her identity was revealed ...

Was there a copy editor in the house?