AT&T Internet - RIP DSL? Pony up for the changes

If you are an AT&T DSL user, I suspect you will be getting a notice before long telling you to pony up for new service under AT&T's U-verse.

AT&T has issued new terms of service making clear it can force you to convert to the costlier U-verse system when it wants to. It would appear to be part of the telco's larger strategy to pump some more growth into the higher-margin fiber networks and offset loss of DSL customers to cable operators.

So what do you get? Well, you do get higher speeds - AT&T touts 3 MB download speeds for its U-verse level that roughly equates to the same DSL level that's at 1.5MB. But it's also about 15 percent more expensive (after the 12-month discount), and you will get hit for a $100 bill for installation. See this from AT&T's pricing site.

All of this, of course, is part of a larger shift in phone service in which AT&T is playing "who blinks first" with the FCC and is preparing for the end of copper-wire service in favor of IP.

Not surprisingly, AT&T is putting some limits on usage as well (although it is fairly generous):

Are there any usage limits for my broadband service?
Yes.  As of May 2, 2011, AT&T's residential DSL High Speed Internet plans will have a usage allowance of 150 Gigabytes ("GB") per month, and its residential U-verse High Speed Internet plans will have a usage allowance of 250 Gigabytes ("GB") per month.  The usage allowance is the amount of data you can send and receive each month.

It's an extra $10 per 50GB.

For now, you'll be getting an e-mail telling you about the new TOS. It's probably worth sucking up the tendency to glaze over and spend the time reading it. (And AT&T has put up a site for you to monitor your usage: http://www.myusage.att.com/)

Numeracy from the mouths of ...

Sometimes former students just warm the cockles of your heart:

"Japan" as adjective

I know I've raised this issue before - but since when did country names become adjectives of common use?

Yes, I can understand it in the occasional tight-count headline (the Wall Street Journal has adopted too much, I think), though it still strikes me as a bit off tone. But then there are sentences like this from my local paper:

The report by Lochbaum’s group last week came at a time when much of the world is asking questions about nuclear safety in the aftermath of the Japan earthquake and tsunami.

And I've seen them in plenty of national news dispatches as well. What ever happened to things like Japanese as the adjective form in most uses? Perhaps it's because when we say United States there is no equivalent form (Japan = Japanese but United States = United States)? If that's the case, permit me to demur and suggest a rethink.

 Of maybe it's to save a few spaces on Twitter:

I still demur. Save the space with a little editing: Japanese reactor pressure rises again ...

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.

Do online readers notice editing?

Fred Vultee presented a session today at the American Copy Editors Society conference in Phoenix delving into some of his research into this question.

The answer: Yes -- and no.

Readers notice details and grammar. But in a sort of counter-intuitive finding, he says online readers are  more likely than other readers to find stories we journos might consider well-edited to be badly organized, while stuff just thrown up is more likely to be considered better organized.

Go figure. Nick Jungman has a complete rundown of the session on his blog.

AP Style - technology marches on - email, cellphone, smartphone

Last year at the American Copy Editors Society meeting, AP announced it was following the crowd, giving up its stubborn insistence on Web site and henceforth going with website.

Today, with ACES in session in Phoenix, AP announces it is going with the flow again and making cellphone and smartphone one word and dropping the hyphen from email.

AP also is adopting handheld, one word, for the noun (though I hope the use of that jargonish term will be rare) while hand-held, the preferred dictionary spelling, stays for the adjective.

Who knows? If this keeps up we might yet get "workforce" and "underway," as most of the rest of the universe now does it.

In another change not yet from AP, but I see posted on the ACES convention site, AP is adopting Kolkata, instead of Calcutta, for the Indian city.

 ------
Update: The backlash, such as it is, already has begun on Twitter at #teamhyphen

A bit more from the meeting: Nick Jungman reports AP is abandoning its short-lived idea (from last year) to spell out state names in datelines.

Burkeman sets us thinking about virtual-physical merger

There's a lot of hype and, frankly, a lot of dreck, that comes out of South by Southwest - it has to be so when the program is 300+ pages.

There's some good stuff, too. And then there are those few pieces that make you go, "Wow, that really pulls this all together." Such is The Virtual and the Physical Worlds are no Longer Separate By Oliver Burkeman of the Guardian and featured on Paid Content.

Aside from being a very good piece of writing with just that touch of British disdain or snark (my students, please note), it's one of those rare pieces that really sets my brain racing and going, yeah, yeah.

The ah ha moment came about a third of the way in:

If Web 2.0 was the moment when the collaborative promise of the internet seemed finally to be realised – with ordinary users creating instead of just consuming, on sites from Flickr to Facebook to Wikipedia – Web 3.0 is the moment they forget they’re doing it. When the GPS system in your phone or iPad can relay your location to any site or device you like, when Facebook uses facial recognition on photographs posted there, when your financial transactions are tracked, and when the location of your car can influence a constantly changing, sensor-driven congestion-charging scheme, all in real time, something has qualitatively changed.

 I recommend you take it for a spin and see what you get out of it.

One of those headlines you've got to love

What can I say?

Thanks to former student Crystal Bennett for the pointer.

James Fallows throws in the towel?

It might seem so at first glance at Fallows' piece in The Atlantic: Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media

But read on and you'll find a very nuanced and intensely thoughtful piece on where this all may be going. Useful for reminding us that the gold old days were often not the good old days, and perhaps a bit too hopeful that something, something good has to come out of all this. But a worthy read overall.

A couple of my favorite passages:

Indeed, the relative stability of big media in the golden-age decades after World War II left a misleading impression of how tumultuous the news business had been through most of America’s past. The mid-1940s to the late 1970s was a time when newspapers were fat, national magazines were widely read, and TV news reports were sober and “responsible.” Like the idealized sitcoms of the same era—Father Knows Best, The Donna Reed Show, Happy Days—they presented as normal and traditional what was in fact an exceptional moment in American existence....

If we accept that the media will probably become more and more market-minded, and that an imposed conscience in the form of legal requirements or traditional publishing norms will probably have less and less effect, what are the results we most fear? I think there are four:
• that this will become an age of lies, idiocy, and a complete Babel of “truthiness,” in which no trusted arbiter can establish reality or facts;
• that the media will fail to cover too much of what really matters, as they are drawn toward the sparkle of entertainment and away from the depressing realities of the statehouse, the African capital, the urban school system, the corporate office when corners are being cut;
• that the forces already pulverizing American society into component granules will grow all the stronger, as people withdraw into their own separate information spheres;
• and that our very ability to think, concentrate, and decide will deteriorate, as a media system optimized for attracting quick hits turns into a continual-distraction machine for society as a whole, making every individual and collective problem harder to assess and respond to.

Chris Jones on writing profiles

There are times you come across a blog post - and occasionally across an entire blog - that makes you go "Yesssssss!"

Thus, I introduce you to Chris Jones of Esquire and his "Son of Bold Venture" blog. Aside from the fact I find myself wanting to read every post at least twice, let me point you to, as of this moment, his two most recent.

First, you could read books and books about profile writing - or you could read Jones' post that reaches into the chest of the beast, pulls out the heart of it and lays it bare. As one commenter said, "Excuse me while I tattoo this on the inside of my eyelids."

Then follow that up with his five-question interview  (part of a larger series with writers) with Charlie Pierce, one of the funnest-to-read writers on the planet (and not bad to listen to, as well, as I try to do each week to NPR's "Only a Game" and "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me."). Warning- some of the language is a little strong if you are easily offended, and I'm not talking about the cursing.

Publishing on demand

Pardon the absence. It's been a busy half-semester so far in the Carolina Reporter, our practicum newsroom. Check out the good stuff on Dateline Carolina.

But, to the reason I have resurfaced now that spring break is here.

About three years ago, Dennis Meredith wrote a good how-to article about print-on-demand publishers for the National Association of Science Writers. Until recently, it was behind the NASW's members-only wall. But now it has been made public. It's a good guide, so I thought I'd bring it to your attention.