“Top 50 Journalism Professors” — who, me?

Last year I was named one of America’s “Top 50 Journalism Professors” of the year, and I’ve finally decided to share that link with my students as an end-of-semester exercise in critical thinking, while we talk about the differences between journalism in print, on the air and on the Web.

After class — or after next week’s final exams, or after I clean out my office the  week after that — I may come back to this page and add a few paragraphs to explain why I’m taking at least a semester or two off from teaching.

(I am also making jokes about going to a tractor-trailer driving school so that I can declare myself “semi-retired.” If I come up with better jokes, I may add them to this page, too — or at least delete that one.)

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After-class update.

I was very pleased that a good number of students in my intro news writing class came up with appropriate “critical thinking” questions about that site — in particular,  two questions they should ask any news source:

• Who are you? (In this case, who runs the website, who pays the bills, and what is the site’s real purpose?) 
• How do you know that? (In this case, what are the criteria for the top-50 list and how was it assembled?)

In addition to “interrogating” the Web pages themselves, reading the “Home” and “About” pages, I suggested students try the zip-code search to find interesting journalism schools. Surprise! Almost all the results were for for-profit schools or online-only programs. Nowhere was there any link to the major accrediting or research associations in journalism education (ACEJMC and AEJMC), and the search never turned up schools at which the “Top 50″ professors teach.

Henchmen as kittens… porn, yo?

Writing about old time radio programs at http://jheroes.com means a lot of transcribing from  mp3 files made by collectors over the years from tapes of even older transcription discs.  With my eyes bothering me on a recent morning, I decided to see whether Google’s Android voice recognition  could expedite the transcription process.

Could my Android phone “listen” to an old radio show and convert the dialogue to text? I tested the idea with the plot summary a couple of minutes into episode 6 of an “Adventures of Superman” story titled “Ruler of Darkness.” (See the “Ruler of Darkness” JHeroes.com entry.)

I admit it is not the most static-free recording in the Internet Archive collection, and background organ music probably put the voice recognition to an unfair test.

Here is my eventual (manual) transcription, followed by Android’s two unassisted tries, for your amusement. I’ve highlighted a few words that came out right… but I’m especially curious about the words that Android replaced with asterisks. Did it think the radio announcer said something naughty?

“And now The Adventures of Superman.
“When cub reporter Jimmy Olsen was seriously injured by henchmen of Mike Hickey, political boss of Metropolis, editor Perry White swore he would drive Hickey and his corrupt political machine out of power.
White opened an attack on Hickey in the Daily Planet and chose Joe Martin, war hero and brother of Beanie Martin, the Planet’s copy boy, to run for mayor against the machine candidate in the approaching election.
Enraged, Hickey swore he would nip this reform movement in the bud.”

Android 1.

No seriously injured my kitten or you could drive up with you so don’t want to be my wife definition of elections oregon live in the b*** status other joe wasn’t serious come on out free porn yo

Android 2.

Oh yeah you’re phone daniel seriously injured my kitten like 40 with drive she out of our over then so still want to be my stuff white directions great looking forward sleep well in the b*** account brother

Definitely room for improvement…

Footnote: The accurate transcription also was made with Google’s speech to text. I would listen to a phrase, press pause on the mp3 player, press record on my phone, then speak the phrase in a normal voice at conversational speed or a little slower. I discovered that I couldn’t read the dialogue at radio actor speed if I wanted to!

Finally, I edited the result to fix proper names, capitalization and a few words here and there. End result: My eyes were still tired and my thumb hurt.

But I’ll try again sometime with a more recent, slower-paced radio show. And I’ll do some homework about Android Speech-to-Text or “voice typing” — and  Android Text-To-Speech for good measure.

A seriously undercover reporter: Lee Tracy vs. Dr. X

An old-time-film blogger’s Twitter feed (Nitrate Diva) just alerted me that the original “Dr. X” is now available on YouTube at full-length, so here it is. I had hoped to show it to my “Portrayal of the Journalist in Popular Culture” course last semester, but couldn’t get my hands anything as good as this copy — now online, presumably because it is sufficiently out of copyright for YouTube to allow it.

(You Tube has quite a few classic “newspaper” movies.)

Maybe some of the students are still following this blog to see what they missed: A reporter versus a serial killer in a horror/comedy with hints of secret high-tech (for 1932) medical research, madness, sadism and cannibalism. The title character, Dr. Xavier, is the head of a medical lab at the center of the murder investigation, while his daughter is the reporter’s romantic interest — played by Fay Wray, a year before she was carried up the Empire State Building by King Kong.

Filmed in an early color process in 1932, “Dr. X” features Hollywood’s leading “rascal” reporter, Lee Tracy, the original actor to play star journalist Hildy Johnson in “The Front Page” on Broadway in the 1920s.

Tracy wasn’t chosen to play that role in the 1931 film, which cast Pat O’Brien as Hildy, but Tracy had a wisecracking style that kept him playing reporters and publicity men for more than a decade.

In addition to “Dr. X,” he was a tough Broadway gossip in “Blessed Event” (also 1932), a Miss Lonelyhearts columnist in “Advice to the Lovelorn” (1933), a press agent in “Bombshell” (1933), a foreign correspondent in “Clear All Wires” (1933) and a tough city editor in Samuel Fuller’s “Power of the Press” in 1943… and probably other reporters in between.

“Dr. X” is a Lee Tracy classic — in fact, the character is given the name Lee Taylor, suggesting how close the actor and this type of role were identified. As a Daily World reporter, he hides under a shroud at the morgue to get literally undercover information,  slips into a whore house to borrow the phone, startles a beat cop with a handshake buzzer, misrepresents himself as a policeman using a press-credential badge, climbs a drainpipe to sneak into a second-story window, steals pictures from someone’s parlor, hides in a closet during the scientist’s secret investigation, and ultimately solves the murder and gets the girl.

The film was popular enough to rate a sequel in 1939, “The Return of Dr. X,” which has no Lee Tracy and none of the original characters, but a similar plot. In that movie, Humphrey Bogart plays one of the suspicious characters, while Wayne Morris plays another scrappy reporter investigating horrific murders.

And now it’s “Spring Semester”

That’s Friday morning after Thursday’s storm… Now three days of melting-and-freezing before classes begin.

I’ll keep my WDBJ7 weather app handy.

For now, sure is pretty…

(Distant visitors: That’s from the top of a hill in Radford, Virginia, looking west across the New River valley toward West Virginia.)

Celebrating a do-it-yourself Web apprenticeship

Updated Jan.15, the day of Aaron Swartz’s funeral; I changed the headline and added a few more links

About finding things out for yourself.

I first saw Aaron Swartz in 2000, when he visited MIT as a runner-up in a youth programming contest, having accomplished at 13 something I couldn’t do at 50 — and me with most of a Ph.D. I don’t remember whether I had a chance to say “congratulations.” At least I got to applaud, and shake my head in wonder.

Many heads are shaking this weekend at the news that Aaron apparently took his own life on Friday, at 26, beset by a federal prosecution over his copying a lot of files from an MIT computer without permission, and probably suffering from depression.

The “why” of his death is just terrible and sad. I would rather celebrate his life by sharing some of his writing, especially items that reflect his passion for tracking down information, asking questions, learning and building things.

In his own words, here’s how a 7th grade assignment helped Aaron find his heroes. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/mylifewithtim

About a dozen paragraphs down, that page’s picture of Aaron and “TimBL” (Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web) speaks volumes, but so does his unnecessary apology for the quality of his writing — which was already excellent.

I suspect his skill with words — posting curious questions and articulate arguments in email lists — is what set in motion his brilliant, passionate and much too short career.

When he was 14 or so, he wrote an essay on self-education and Web apprenticeship that is no longer at its original address on a family website, but I quickly found a copy in the Internet Archive using its Wayback Machine. Here originally: swartzfam.com/aaron/school/2001/02/19/

From writing he eventually moved on to public speaking, again with self-effacing comments, and posted this script from an online talk he gave to a gathering in India. He borrowed the title from Kurt Vonnegut, another hint of how well-read this young man was: How to get a job like mine.

He was even more public after a successful campaign against legislation he saw as online censorship, and you can see him talk about it on YouTube.

I lost track of Aaron for years. I used Creative Commons and the OpenLibrary.org and the followed the campaign against SOPA and PIPA; I probably used other tools, sites and projects he was involved with, but I didn’t make the connection back to that 13-year-old visiting MIT. When news of his death started spreading from the MIT Tech newspaper to Twitter and beyond, I spent a day following his links and being amazed.

I remembered that I heard from him in 2005 or 2006 after I linked my blog to an automated “river of news” style aggregator for New York Times news stories — something he had set in 2002, using the paper’s first RSS feed. It’s probably not what the feed’s creators had in mind; I think the original idea was to help bloggers link directly to Times stories for discussion purposes, not to build alternatives to the paper’s own front page and archives. But the RSS feed system made it possible, so Aaron did it.

(At 14, his age entirely irrelevant at the keyboard, Aaron had joined an email-list working group of Web experts drafting a formal specification for a more complex “RDF Site Summary” version of RSS, but the Times earlier “Really Simple Syndication” version was good enough for this project.)

In fact, his nytimes.blogspace.com site kept running until September 2009, when the Times changed its feed hosting system. You can still find a scattering of seven years’ worth of Times links through the archive.org Wayback Machine’s copies of that aggregator page.

Even back in 2005, Aaron seemed pleased that someone in Tennessee was using the site to point journalism students to stories they might have missed.

Most of his career, before and since, was about getting people access to information online — through projects including Wikipedia, Creative Commons copyright, campaigns to make court cases and library books available for free, and a startup that became part of Reddit.com.

More recently, in the months preceding his untimely death this weekend, he had been sharing a lot of information in his @aaronsw Twitter feed and blog, on everything from economics to the deeper meanings of the Batman movies.
http://www.aaronsw.com/
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog

There’s a little consolation in knowing his work and words will be kept online through the efforts of friends at the Internet Archive and around the World Wide Web, and that his life and work may inspire more activism on behalf of the open-information causes he supported.

For now there is mostly sadness.

Tim Berners-Lee posted to Twitter:

“Aaron dead. World wanderers, we have lost a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are one down. Parents all, we have lost a child. Let us weep.”

Others:

• Doc Searls pulled more of the responses together.
• Danah Boyd wrote eloquently about Processing the loss.
• Glenn Fleishman on his contributions to the ‘commons’.
• David Weinberger contributed Why the Net grieves to CNN.
• Dave Winer put it concisely, Aaron Swartz was curious.
• Matt Stoller explained more about Aaron Swartz’s politics

Happy New Year, eventually

Ouch! I can’t believe I let December go by without a single blog post here!

The good news (and my excuse) is that I’ve been adding new content at JHeroes.com (Newspapers heroes on the air), my delicious.com/bstepno bookmarks, and Twitter/bobstep, as well as updating the more than a dozen journalist film pages on this site. (See the menu at top of page and in Thanksgiving break item below.) Next on the agenda, updating my course pages and home page, which has just moved to a new host.

The other excuse is that I’ve had a cold since Christmas Eve, although it didn’t keep me from 18 hours on the road for a family visit. But that’s a terrible excuse, which gets to the other good news: Doug Thompson is back at BlueRidgeMuse.com, having survived much more than a cold! (Scroll down to see my November item about his near-fatal motorcycle accident. Better yet, just go read his version.)

Newspaper movies to be thankful for…

… or not. Some of the movies I’ve linked to here are decidedly not “Citizen Kane” or “All the President’s Men.”

But students in my “Portrayal of the Journalist in Film, Fiction & Popular Culture” class may be happy to know that YouTube, the Internet Archive, and other sources have trailers, clips and sometimes full-length feature films relevant to their final research projects on Newspaper Movies and related fictions — projects that are due in a couple of weeks after they return from Thanksgiving break.

Of course Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and the local video store can also rent films, but the number of resources available for free online is impressive.

I’ve been collecting links to films available online — not always great films, and certainly not an attempt at a “best” or “complete” list of films with journalists in the plot. For the most complete source I know, see Joe Saltzman’s Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture website and database.

For others, just do a Web search for “best newspaper movies” or “best journalism films” or a variation on that theme. You’ll find scores of newspaper columns, blogs and websites where reporters, editors, critics and fans have compiled their own lists. A few examples, some of which I’ve linked to elsewhere:

• http://psacot.typepad.com/ps_a_column_on_things/journalism-movies.html
• http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/journalistsmovies.html
• http://trueslant.com/caitlinkelly/2010/04/17/the-10-best-journalism-movies-ever-made/
• http://pfauth.com/blogtips/movies-for-journalists-reporter/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_journalists

My other contribution to this list-making is a page about the dozens of “newspaper films” that were also presented as radio dramas. It’s part of my larger site, JHeroes: Newspaper Heroes on the Air, where I’m documenting the portrayal of journalists in old-time radio dramas of all kinds.

I’ve broken my collection of YouTube links by decade or part of a decade, to keep the screen-loading time manageable. (Some pages still may load very slowly.) They are all on the “Video” drop-down/fly-out menu at the top of the page, but here’s a shortcut: Newspaper Films. And here’s the full set, a mini-menu I’ve added to the top of each page:

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Overview | 1920s | 1930-35 | 1936 | 1937-39 | Citizen Kane | 1940-45 | 1946-49 | 1950s | 1960s | 1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 2000s

Note: I don’t maintain any of the uploaded files at YouTube, Vimeo or archive.org. From time to time, those sites discover that some of the videos people post are still under copyright protection and take them down at the “rights” owner’s request. If I have linked to one of those posts, my “player” code will also cease functioning.