Showing posts with label newspapers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label newspapers. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 09, 2016
in a world with no editors . . .
Headline, March 6, 2016, The (Syracuse) Post-Standard:
Granted, the story was in the Auto section, but in this day and age one could argue that the writer of the "hed" should have been sensitive to, um, alternative meanings.
Granted, the story was in the Auto section, but in this day and age one could argue that the writer of the "hed" should have been sensitive to, um, alternative meanings.
Saturday, March 21, 2015
ad newseam
Since the time I followed baseball box scores, at the age of six, I've been a news hound. I devoured something we called "the news." My older brother and I would hungrily await the afternoon delivery of The (Stamford) Advocate, hand it to our father, just home from work at the factory, and then respectfully wait for him to drop the sports section (or any other section, for that matter) after he finished reading it. "Current Events," another name for news, was always my best subject in school all the years before high school, and I was the best in that subject, long before trivia games that featured "current events" became popular. Lately? Not so much. As John Lennon lamented in song, "I read the news today, oh boy." Oh boy is right. What does the Gospel of Matthew say, "wars and rumors of war"? Oh, we've gone beyond wars, rumors of wars, all right. Beheadings, slaughter, burnings, torture, suicide bombings, and myriad forms of mayhem and carnage. Yes, these woes are not new to the human form except in the particulars. But lately I want to avert my eyes . . . and ears and so forth. It does not mean I want to be oblivious to the suffering and travails of the human condition. Though when I was younger, it used to be that this knowledge, these informations, somehow led to more empathy on my part, whether I was moved to action or thought. Was that so? Me, a news nut. Driving around in the car, always sure to catch the NPR news on the hour, if I'm listening to the radio, and not a music CD. Not so much. Not today. Burying my head in the sand, you say? Sounds like the latest atrocity.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Ad Newseam
"I read the news today, oh boy . . . "
I've been a news junkie ever since grade school, or grammar school, as we called it, loving what was then termed Current Events as my favorite subject. The afternoon Stamford Advocate would be delivered the same precise time every day, it seemed. 4:26. My father came home from the shop at precisely the same time every day, 4:14. My brother and I would listen for the soft thwinnnk of the Advocate being placed between the screen door and the front door of our apartment in the William C. Ward Homes. The Projects. Jack and I would race to the door, open it, and fight to surrender the paper to my father, to place it, as if it were an offering, on our dad's footstool. An unspoken protocol prohibited grabbing and reading the paper before Dad had had first dibs. Then Jack and I would wait like cats to pounce on the paper when Dad would casually finish each section and place it on the footstool. As much as I was a news junkie, let's be honest: Jack and I both were vying for the fiercely coveted second section: Sports.
I went on to work as a copy editor at a daily, from September 1976 to February or March 1979. Great atmosphere: surly, hard-boiled, intense, witty, competitive. Filled with characters. Smart folks. Hard-working. Competent. Whiskey bottles kept in drawers. The ring of Teletype machines. Headlines written by hand. Something strange on desks: VDTs, or video display terminals. We did not think of them as computers or PCs. I even obnoxiously smoked a cigar on the rim sometimes and for fun wore one of those vinyl newspaperman visors seen in movies.
News junkie.
Now, I wonder. News? Hard to take. I don't mean just the string of endless tragedies. That's always been part of the news game. No, I mean something like this: 1984. LIES ARE TRUTH. WAR IS PEACE. That sort of Orwellian nightmare. Maybe, in my mind it started with the Swift Boat campaign of 2004 [was it 2004] that discredited John Kerry's reputation as a hero through lies and distortion. Forget about whether you supported him or the Vietnam War. It was the fact that "the media," "the press," now saw fit to give lies the same footing as truth. Rumor got the same attention as news. We'd been Drudged. Tabloided. McPapered. Under some sort of perversion of the Fairness Doctrine, every crackpot theory got equal play with reason and sobriety. And it only got wackier. Want a war? Enter: the media passing along unsubstantiated hysteria perpetrated by the government about alleged "weapons of mass destruction" and "terrorism." The so-called august New York Times, a year later, 2004, apologized to its readers for abdicating its role of healthy skeptic. The tease was on A1. The rest of the story was buried on A17 or wherever. You can look it up. And so it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut [met him, with my son, Ethan; another story, another time] would put it. Vaccines. Creationism. Global warming. Birthers. Bailout. Stimulus. You name it. LIES ARE TRUTH. News? What's that? Whatever works to grab attention. This is not whining or whingeing that "my take," my perspective, is getting short shrift. No, it is lamenting that utter quackery and poppycock share the front pages with sober renderings and analyses of complex issues.
Hard to take.
It's enough to shut off the news, whether online or in print or on TV -- as I do when I'm at camp.
Ad newseam.
Of course, that raises the solipsistic question about care, concern, and commitment about the State of Affairs, as if "knowing the facts" itself is a power, is a tool of democracy. (It should be.) As if carrying the burden of knowledge was a redemptive gesture.
It should be.
Is it?
Is that day gone, as gone as the idyllic image of the 1950s described above?
I've been a news junkie ever since grade school, or grammar school, as we called it, loving what was then termed Current Events as my favorite subject. The afternoon Stamford Advocate would be delivered the same precise time every day, it seemed. 4:26. My father came home from the shop at precisely the same time every day, 4:14. My brother and I would listen for the soft thwinnnk of the Advocate being placed between the screen door and the front door of our apartment in the William C. Ward Homes. The Projects. Jack and I would race to the door, open it, and fight to surrender the paper to my father, to place it, as if it were an offering, on our dad's footstool. An unspoken protocol prohibited grabbing and reading the paper before Dad had had first dibs. Then Jack and I would wait like cats to pounce on the paper when Dad would casually finish each section and place it on the footstool. As much as I was a news junkie, let's be honest: Jack and I both were vying for the fiercely coveted second section: Sports.
I went on to work as a copy editor at a daily, from September 1976 to February or March 1979. Great atmosphere: surly, hard-boiled, intense, witty, competitive. Filled with characters. Smart folks. Hard-working. Competent. Whiskey bottles kept in drawers. The ring of Teletype machines. Headlines written by hand. Something strange on desks: VDTs, or video display terminals. We did not think of them as computers or PCs. I even obnoxiously smoked a cigar on the rim sometimes and for fun wore one of those vinyl newspaperman visors seen in movies.
News junkie.
Now, I wonder. News? Hard to take. I don't mean just the string of endless tragedies. That's always been part of the news game. No, I mean something like this: 1984. LIES ARE TRUTH. WAR IS PEACE. That sort of Orwellian nightmare. Maybe, in my mind it started with the Swift Boat campaign of 2004 [was it 2004] that discredited John Kerry's reputation as a hero through lies and distortion. Forget about whether you supported him or the Vietnam War. It was the fact that "the media," "the press," now saw fit to give lies the same footing as truth. Rumor got the same attention as news. We'd been Drudged. Tabloided. McPapered. Under some sort of perversion of the Fairness Doctrine, every crackpot theory got equal play with reason and sobriety. And it only got wackier. Want a war? Enter: the media passing along unsubstantiated hysteria perpetrated by the government about alleged "weapons of mass destruction" and "terrorism." The so-called august New York Times, a year later, 2004, apologized to its readers for abdicating its role of healthy skeptic. The tease was on A1. The rest of the story was buried on A17 or wherever. You can look it up. And so it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut [met him, with my son, Ethan; another story, another time] would put it. Vaccines. Creationism. Global warming. Birthers. Bailout. Stimulus. You name it. LIES ARE TRUTH. News? What's that? Whatever works to grab attention. This is not whining or whingeing that "my take," my perspective, is getting short shrift. No, it is lamenting that utter quackery and poppycock share the front pages with sober renderings and analyses of complex issues.
Hard to take.
It's enough to shut off the news, whether online or in print or on TV -- as I do when I'm at camp.
Ad newseam.
Of course, that raises the solipsistic question about care, concern, and commitment about the State of Affairs, as if "knowing the facts" itself is a power, is a tool of democracy. (It should be.) As if carrying the burden of knowledge was a redemptive gesture.
It should be.
Is it?
Is that day gone, as gone as the idyllic image of the 1950s described above?
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Luscious Luddite Lassitude
Ah, the joys of a news blackout. . . .
Many a summer I indulged in a self-imposed blackout of any news while vacationing on Brantingham Lake, in New York, in the Adirondacks. For me it cooled the fever of obsessive-compulsive attention to world events, the kind of fever that feeds the illusion that says, "This level of attention actually influences the course of events," which is not only a fallacy and nonsense but hubris of the silliest sort. Anyway, the blackout, which got to be a bit of a family-tolerated game (averting my eyes from newsstand headlines when in Lowville, or almost clapping my ears to avoid hearing anything about the baseball strike of '94 [was it '94?] on the radio in a store in Old Forge), did seem to recharge my batteries -- but not cure the obsession.
However, the tragedy of a so-called news blackout is that it is a joy, a respite, a sane retreat, a Luddite pleasure, only for news junkies.
When the vast majority of the population delights in willful ignorance or obtuse one-sidedness -- in other words when a news blackout is the daily norm -- there is no joy in Muddville or Topeka or Pittsburgh or Skaneateles or Solvay or Encino or Hibbing or Bemidji or Greenwich or Syracuse or Pittsburg or Manhattan or Springfield or Darien or Saint Louis or Collegeville or Stamford or Warner Robins or Scranton or Wilkes-Barre or Portland or Los Gatos or San Francisco or Crawford or Honolulu or Salem or Erie or Conklin or Santa Barbara or Albany or Otisco or Kalamazoo or Flint or New Canaan or Bismarck or Dickinson or Mott or Phoenix or Santa Fe or Del Rio or Bridgeport or Kirkville or Kirkwood.
"All the news that's fit to miss."
Many a summer I indulged in a self-imposed blackout of any news while vacationing on Brantingham Lake, in New York, in the Adirondacks. For me it cooled the fever of obsessive-compulsive attention to world events, the kind of fever that feeds the illusion that says, "This level of attention actually influences the course of events," which is not only a fallacy and nonsense but hubris of the silliest sort. Anyway, the blackout, which got to be a bit of a family-tolerated game (averting my eyes from newsstand headlines when in Lowville, or almost clapping my ears to avoid hearing anything about the baseball strike of '94 [was it '94?] on the radio in a store in Old Forge), did seem to recharge my batteries -- but not cure the obsession.
However, the tragedy of a so-called news blackout is that it is a joy, a respite, a sane retreat, a Luddite pleasure, only for news junkies.
When the vast majority of the population delights in willful ignorance or obtuse one-sidedness -- in other words when a news blackout is the daily norm -- there is no joy in Muddville or Topeka or Pittsburgh or Skaneateles or Solvay or Encino or Hibbing or Bemidji or Greenwich or Syracuse or Pittsburg or Manhattan or Springfield or Darien or Saint Louis or Collegeville or Stamford or Warner Robins or Scranton or Wilkes-Barre or Portland or Los Gatos or San Francisco or Crawford or Honolulu or Salem or Erie or Conklin or Santa Barbara or Albany or Otisco or Kalamazoo or Flint or New Canaan or Bismarck or Dickinson or Mott or Phoenix or Santa Fe or Del Rio or Bridgeport or Kirkville or Kirkwood.
"All the news that's fit to miss."
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
going Global
"They" can say what they want about the dearth or death of newspapers as we know them, but let me tell you, you electronic readers (we co-conspirators, if you will):
The (Toronto) Globe and Mail is as bright and shiny an example of journalism as you are likely to find anywhere, either in the tactile medium of tree-originated, new-fashioned paper or the tap-tapping medium of click-click-keyboarding.
The Globe and [no ampersand, folks] Mail has lively writing, superb international coverage, and sit-and-read-for-a-week comprehensiveness. Essays abound. And The Globe and Mail devotes a reverential amount of space to books. Books!
I rediscovered this fact this past weekend in Kingston, Ontario, when I was treated to the luxury of idly reading the paper at one of Kingston's fine coffee shops in the aftermath of the Leonard Cohen concert. (Americans may not know this, but Canada's Sunday papers come out on Saturday. Sort of. In other words, the Saturday paper is the big one; getting the Sunday New York Times-like paper on Saturday is kind of like celebrating the vigil of a feast in the Roman Catholic Church the eve before the feast, or like going to church on Saturday, for the same reason.)
The Globe and Mail is truly world-class.
The (Toronto) Globe and Mail is as bright and shiny an example of journalism as you are likely to find anywhere, either in the tactile medium of tree-originated, new-fashioned paper or the tap-tapping medium of click-click-keyboarding.
The Globe and [no ampersand, folks] Mail has lively writing, superb international coverage, and sit-and-read-for-a-week comprehensiveness. Essays abound. And The Globe and Mail devotes a reverential amount of space to books. Books!
I rediscovered this fact this past weekend in Kingston, Ontario, when I was treated to the luxury of idly reading the paper at one of Kingston's fine coffee shops in the aftermath of the Leonard Cohen concert. (Americans may not know this, but Canada's Sunday papers come out on Saturday. Sort of. In other words, the Saturday paper is the big one; getting the Sunday New York Times-like paper on Saturday is kind of like celebrating the vigil of a feast in the Roman Catholic Church the eve before the feast, or like going to church on Saturday, for the same reason.)
The Globe and Mail is truly world-class.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Below the Fold
If, as noted in post ex parte a priori:
Above the fold is an expression rich in meaning, conjuring metaphors financial, erotic, biological, psychological, historical, chronological, sporting, physical, metaphysical, informational, categorical, theological, semantic, and musical. Connotations, denotations, and illustrations also abound in the world of fashion, clothing, and tailoring; or baking; or sheep-herding.
. . . then it stands to reason (or stands to emotion; though neuroscientists increasingly tell us there is no difference between reason and emotion; these are Aristotelian impositions, labels) that below the fold conjures metaphors scatological, Earthy, apocalyptic, illiquid, liquid, Venusian, recondite, illusory, underdoggerel (or is that subcaninic?), impish, secondary, tertiary, secretive, preternatural, fecund, fetid, and nascent.
Below the fold.
I like to read below the fold as well as above the fold.
It is most difficult to read or discern precisely at the fold itself. Perhaps at the fold is the most cogent metaphor for our current times.
Above the fold is an expression rich in meaning, conjuring metaphors financial, erotic, biological, psychological, historical, chronological, sporting, physical, metaphysical, informational, categorical, theological, semantic, and musical. Connotations, denotations, and illustrations also abound in the world of fashion, clothing, and tailoring; or baking; or sheep-herding.
. . . then it stands to reason (or stands to emotion; though neuroscientists increasingly tell us there is no difference between reason and emotion; these are Aristotelian impositions, labels) that below the fold conjures metaphors scatological, Earthy, apocalyptic, illiquid, liquid, Venusian, recondite, illusory, underdoggerel (or is that subcaninic?), impish, secondary, tertiary, secretive, preternatural, fecund, fetid, and nascent.
Below the fold.
I like to read below the fold as well as above the fold.
It is most difficult to read or discern precisely at the fold itself. Perhaps at the fold is the most cogent metaphor for our current times.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Above the Fold
In doing research on website (I prefer the one word, instead of web site, or Web site, both of which I feel will soon look as archaic as tele-phone or tele-vision) content writing, I was pleased to learn the term "above the fold" has new life. Above the fold. It comes from the world of newspapers. The top news items are above the folded portion of the front page (don't think tabloid, though; well, think tabloid all you want, if that's what you need to stir up excitement, fear, and panic, not necessarily in that order). Above the fold. I used to work with a textbook editor who would ask about obituaries in The New York Times. When someone famous died, he'd call out from the row of cubicles in back of me, "Was it above the fold?" in referring to the front-page obituary. (Whom was he referring to in that era? Richard Burton? Maybe.) John D. noted how rare it was for the Times to put any obit above the fold. (I can't recall if Updike's was.) Regarding websites, the meaning is much the same, but digitalized as it were: information captured on one screen at the resolution your computer is set at, without any scrolling down on the part of the reader, user, visitor, audience, etc. Above the fold is an expression rich in meaning, conjuring metaphors financial, erotic, biological, psychological, historical, chronological, sporting, physical, metaphysical, informational, categorical, theological, semantic, and musical. Connotations, denotations, and illustrations also abound in the world of fashion, clothing, and tailoring; or baking; or sheep-herding.
Any others?
Any others?
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