Graduation, fall 2009

It takes about two hours for all the students in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences to graduate, and yes, it is a bit boring to sit there while each student walks across the stage, but I pass the time listening to the poetry of all those names from all those countries. President Khatur said 72 countries and 35 states were represented.

As usual the Valenti School had a big class, about 115. Communication continues to be the largest undergraduate major in CLASS, next to psychology. Last night at a party someone asked me again if students aren’t worried about the collapse of newspapers. I pointed out, as always, that most journalism majors won’t be journalists, anymore than most English majors will teach English. But they know the skills of  journalists will be in demand. Few journalism majors should count on a lifetime job at a newspaper, but all of them can count that learning how to report, write and edit will help them in a multiplicity of jobs in all sorts of fields.

We know that newspapers are hurting in large part because advertising is declining. We’re in the beginning of a technological revolution and we don’t know where it will lead. Our students will need technical skills in the digital media for certain. But most of all, they need to know how to get a story. That’s a skill that’s never going out of style.

Department of self-promotion

My piece on the election of Annise Parker as mayor appears online at the Texas Observer today.  

This is also my first published video, show with a high definition Flip camera. I hope to figure out how to use the editing software soon, and get a steadier hand.

Didion & Berendt: two of the best

Today’s Writer’s Almanac features two of the country’s best non-fiction writers, Joan Didion and John Berendt. Didion is a great essayist as well as memoirist.  She visited Houston a couple of years ago for the Inprint reading series after her best-selling memoir about her husband’s death, The Year of Magical Thinking, was published. Berendt wrote a wonderful book called Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. What great titles. 

Berendt got a lot of grief about Midnight for altering chronologies, condensing events, and so on. It was not really a nonfiction book, but it was not really fiction, either. He resolved not to be accused of cheating after that, and wrote a fine book about Venice, The City of Falling Angels.

Dickens’ famous lead

No, not the one about the best of times, the worst of times. I mean the lead of A Christmas Carol, which carried a subtitle, A Ghost Story. 

The lead is: “Marley was dead.” The story is all about death and regret. Strange material for a jolly holiday, but Dickens made it work. 

And now the New York Times has posted the original manuscript here. What a great Christmas gift. Dickens, like many a journalist, and he famously had been one, wrote the tale for money in six weeks. There’s nothing like the pressure of a deadline and the need for money to produce good writing. It’s not all about romantic inspiration.

Shield law extends to student journalists

Ever wondered whether a student journalist is different from a “real” journalist? The Student Press Association has released a story that the new shield law applies.

According to the amended text of HR 985, a covered person is, “A person with the primary intent to investigate events and procure material in order to disseminate to the public news or information…”

Frank LoMonte, Executive Director of the Student Press Law Center, said the current definition of a journalist contained in the bill is good news for student news organizations.

“The compromise language is as good as student journalists could expect because it focuses on the news gathering aspect, not where your paycheck is coming from,” LoMonte said. “As long as you set out to gather information to inform the public, you’re protected.”

 

Investigative journalist: “Look for the nerds”

Lise Olsen, investitgative journalism for the last six years at the Houston Chronicle visited the advanced reporting class today, and one of the things she said stuck out. It was “Look for the nerds.” She meant the people who know where information is buried in computers and files. Mostly computers these days.

We had a great time hearing her explain the complexities of doing investigative journalism, and the care with which it must be done.

I’m posting her handout with its advice on websites. A great resource. It’s on the upper righthand corner with Jessica Robertson’s advice for beginning reporters.  So now you have it, beginning and advanced reporting.

Great advice from one of our graduates

Jessica Roberterson visited David McHam’s advanced reporting class Monday and gave some great advice that I am posting on the blog in upper right-hand corner reserved for essential information. Jessica graduated from the UH School of Communication in 2006 with a concentration in print journalism and was one of the senior reporters at The Daily Cougar, where she  covered the administration. In her last semester, she began writing for The Baytown Sun and stayed there until September 2007, when she came to UH Bauer College of Business as the college’s communications manager. You might see her around the building. She is pursuing a master’s degree in mass communication studies.

She offers great tips about writing for papers, any and all of which could apply to writing for the Daily Cougar. But the lead advice works in any situation, which is this: handle small tasks with grace and good will. Be open and gracious with people. You never know when you will need to call on them for something really important. As you cultivate your intellectual skills cultivate your personal skills.

When I first started reporting for a daily newspaper, I asked the senior avuncular editor in charge of hiring what the most important quality of a reporter was, and he didn’t say intelligence, or skepticism, and certainly not cynicism. He said, “You’ve got to like people.”

Texas Tribune launches tonight

I just got off the phone with Evan Smith, former Texas Monthly editor, now editor of a  web-based nonprofit journalism site called Texas Tribune. The Tribune will focus of Texas politics and public policy and it will be a test of  whether public-spirited Texans will support journalism.

About 9 this  evening the Tribune’s temporary web site will come down and possibly about 11 the new Texas Tribune will be launched. It won’t be as simple as pressing a button at midnight, Smith said. Nothing in the digital world is that easy, I maintain.

But it sounds as though Smith is going to do some in-depth journalism and it won’t just be inside politics in Austin. One story is a big five-parter on education. Another is an El Paso politics story.

There will be humanly edited aggregations of Texas stories and a blog roll of about 25 Texas bloggers. The Tribune has a staff of  about 20, enough reporters and editors to do some heavy lifting in a state that needs it. Matt Stiles, the former Houston Chronicle reporter who has visited UH journalism classes several times, has joined the staff. 

And this will be of interest to Daily Cougar writers and editors: The Texas Tribune will pull the best college journalism on Texas public policy and politics and link to it. The editor for this feature is a grad student at the LBJ School for Public Policy, Rachel Raft.

Internet rumors

Elizabeth Kolbert has written a book review about the Internet and the rumor mill in the November 2 New Yorker that will be required reading in my opinion writing class in the spring. It’s about how ideologues reinforce one another by bunching up. Here’s passage:

And what holds true for the news sites is even more so for the blogosphere, where it’s possible to spend hours surfing without ever entering new waters. Conservative blogs like Power Line almost always direct visitors to other conservative blogs, like No Left Turns, while liberal blogs like Daily Kos guide them to others that are also liberal, like Firedoglake. A study of the twenty most-visited blogs in each camp in the months leading up to the 2004 Presidential election found that more than eighty-five per cent of their links were to other blogs with similar politics.

The Internet makes it possible for like-minded people from all over the world to reinforce one anothers views, such a the notion that no one has ever seen President Obama’s birth certificate. 

Of all the metaphors about democracy, one of the most treasured is the “free market” of ideas. Only with a rich competition of ideas does democracy flourish, and good ideas inevitably will overpower bad ones, just as people will prefer to buy good cars over bad ones. 

But there’s also the possibility that bad ideas will drive out good ones, that emotions will win out over reason. If you believe that a black man is destroying your country, then all the more reason to delegitimatize him by saying he wasn’t born here. 

No one in politics seems able to fault themselves. It’s all about being right. This from this morning NY Times:

The No. 3 Republican in the Senate, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who attended one session with the president, recalled that in the 1960s, when he was a Congressional aide, Democrats and Republicans worked together on civil rights. He said he saw no possibility of a bipartisan health bill.

“White House officials don’t want one or don’t know how to do one,” Mr. Alexander said.

Bleeding newspapers and the digital future

The Audit Bureau of Circulation has released the bad news about newspaper circulation. Both the Houston Chronicle and the NY Times carried stories on Tuesday. The Chronicle reported this a drop of “14.2 percent daily and 6.3 percent on Sundays in the April-September period, compared with the same six-month span in 2008.”

With advertising revenues dropping, publisher Jack Sweeney said the new strategy is to get readers to pay more:

“Revenue from circulation needs to carry a bigger portion of our business going forward, so prices continue to be increased,” Sweeney said. “Even with increases of over 30 percent across all delivery options, Chronicle daily delivery still is only 73 cents a day. With a stamp currently costing 44 cents to deliver a first class letter, a copy of the Chronicle at your door is quite a value.”

Well, yes, but….

Joe Leydon sent an interesting story quoting Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, who compared print to the Titanic. Even if the Titanic had not hit the iceburg, it was going to go out of business because of the airplane, he said.

Newspapers face the challenge of how to master the digital technology, and here’s what I think the problem is. The core task of reporting and editing the news remains. But how to deliver it?

That’s the realm of digital technology and I’m wondering if newspapers have the world’s best computer engineers and other digital innovators working for them. I doubt it. They’re all over at Google and Microsoft and Apple making the big bucks. The Chronicle’s search engine is notoriously clunky. Sometimes you can’t find a story on the web the day it is printed because the webpage has crowded it off. And Internet readers don’t have much patience. Newspapers are not leading in digital technology, they are still using it as an afterthought.

Newspapers are going to have to invest heavily not just in technology but in the creative people who can do things with technology, just at the point they are losing money and firing editorial people. They probably need to spend a lot of money on digital innovation. That’s where the opportunity lies. 

About fifteen years ago when film cameras were still in action and the digital transition was not complete, most professionals used Nikons. Nikon built the most durable cameras with the best optics. But Canon  saw that the camera was no longer an optical device to print images on film. It was an optical device to convert light into pixels. The best camera was going to be the camera with the best computer inside. Canon surged ahead of Nikon and Nikon has been trying to catch up ever since.

Of course, it took about sixty years for airplanes to wipe out the passenger steamship business. The changes in newspapers are happening much faster.