Occupy your favorite newspaper

If you wonder why I consider the state of the American newspaper with such despair, take a look at this. Who cares about Wall Street? It's time to occupy the newsrooms of America.

CE quiz

We'll all be working soon

Flawed genius

Doughnuts in Whitefish

The new Tea Party?

Are you ready for some stupid?

I'll get the quiz up later this weekend.

A little light viewing

Who needs facts?

CE quiz

Sorry I'm late getting this ready. If any of you have trouble completing the quiz before class tomorrow shoot me an e-mail.

I promised Colter a question about this.

We're living large now.

Oops!

Texas gov's bid for GOP nomination hits a snag

Controversial pipeline

CE review

This sucks.

School officials under fire.

DC disfunction.

More bad news in the outdoors.

Duck!

I'll get the quiz posted this evening.

Quiz review

Sorry, I didn't get to this last night.

Hard to believe it's been 20 years.

Bad bus trip.

Post office woes.

Some relief for Libby?

Execution on hold.

I'll post a quiz this evening. You'll have a few days to take the quiz. Once you open it you'll only have five minutes to complete it.

Franco, Spain and futbol

Just to show that I'm not totally nuts, here are a few links related to this morning's stream-of-conscious discussion on FC Barcelona, Gen. Franco, Chevy Chase and the Spanish Civil War, in case you're interested.

Chevy Chase

Franco

The best painting ever

More than a club

The Decline of Western Civilization as measured by shoddy journalism

A rather sad commentary on the state of the America media from one of the most important advocates for a return to rational discourse, Jon Stewart.

There's a distinction here that I want you to understand. It relates to the topic we've discussed in class about the elements of news, namely conflict and resolution. There is a real conflict here, the conflict as to how the resources of our government should be used to deal with the jobs crisis. We should be having a real, meaningful debate about that conflict. But what does the media focus on instead? The conflict regarding when Obama's speech to a joint session of Congress was scheduled, and who was the winner of this faux conflict?

Stewart demonstrates how pathetic even the White House press corps — presumably the elite of the elite of our nation's journalists — has become by simply holding up a mirror to the White House briefing room. Twenty-three questions about the scheduling conflict, and just nine on the actual substance of Obama's jobs proposal, a proposal designed to deal with the unemployment crisis in this country, a crisis that is causing substantial pain for millions of Americans.

It makes you wonder if, instead of covering our nation's government, these "journalists" should by out chasing Brad Pitt around to find out which person with a name other than Angelina he's having sex with. If only they had the capacity to feel shame.

Current events

Here are some stories to review before you take your practice current events quiz tomorrow.

It hasn't been much of a fire season, but things are heating up here and here.

President Obama will address a joint session of congress Thursday to talk about jobs.

A new entrant into the 2012 Montana governor's race looks like a strong contender.

Where were you on 9-11 10 years ago?

OT: Can your instructor write?

BTW, OT is an abbreviation for "Off Topic," just as BTW is online shorthand for "By the way" and LMAO is short for, well, you know what it stands for.

Anyway, I have a column in the current edition of the Flathead Beacon, which you can find here.

Maybe this isn't entirely OT after all. We should start compiling a list of all text/online short hand. It might be useful in class. OTOH, doing so would take a lot of time.

Net neutrality

You may have heard of Net Neutrality, a concept that requires service providers to keep the Internet free and open to all information providers. In other words, service providers would not be able to block access to sites they don't agree with or those of competitors.

Not surprisingly, service providers don't like being told what to do.

Bullet in the Brain

Here's a link to that short, short story, by Tobias Wolff I talked about today. The link takes you to a Seattle Post-Intelligencer blog post. Don't read the blog post (actually, you can if you like, it's interesting too), just click on the "Bullet in the Brain" link in the first sentence of the blog. That takes you to a PDF of the story.

It's short, only four pages. But it is very good. Sorry, there are a couple typos in the PDF file. You'll need to buy the book and load it onto your Kindle if you want a mistake-free version.

This has nothing to do with news writing. But I promise you if you can ever craft a paragraph as brilliant and as perfect as the one that ends this story, you will go far as a writer.

Cheers,
Rob

More on quotes

Here's a timely piece on quotes from he New York Times public editor involving the use of blog quotes in a story. Actually, the reader comments are more interesting than the column.

Free speech or hate speech?

This week the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment protects the right to protest at military funerals. Members of a small church in Kansas travel the country staging protests at military funerals, claiming that the reason our soldiers are dying is because God is punishing the United States because we tolerate and promote homosexuality.

Read the news story

Read a discussion by legal scholars

All a twitter in Egypt

Here's a column by Frank Rich of the New York Times is essence pooh-poohing the notion that somehow Twitter or Facebook played key roles in the Egyptian uprising. He suggests they were tools used by activists, but not the catalyst for the uprising.

For a different perspective, you'll find a short video about young Egyptians and social media here.

What you think? Does technology make unrest more likely, or is Facebook just the handbill of the 21st century?