“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.

My conclusion: While it’s flattering to be on a top-anything list, that’s about all I can say about the “JournalismDegree.org” site. Its operators didn’t respond to my request for information about their criteria or its ownership, and I assume the site is just an advertising ploy to get people to visit and click on links to “journalism schools” that are not on anyone’s “Top 10.”

I recommend that students try to look beyond the window-dressing of such list-making link-farm sites. In all searches for information, look for sources that show why they are authoritative. In dealing with higher education, that means finding real “.edu” institutional sites with lists of faculty that give names, degrees earned, publications, professional experience, previous employers, scholarly interests and contact information.

(Last year I tried that with one of the universities advertised at “JournalismDegree” and chatted online with an “admissions” salesman, who ultimately could not direct me to a page listing any journalism faculty member.)

Personal Transition

As for my own status as a “Top 50 Journalism Professor,” the final irony is that right around the time the site in question was putting me on its “Top 50″ list, the personnel committee at my school was prepared to drop me off its list entirely. There were no actual journalism professors involved in the decision, and no one from my other teaching area, Web production, so I didn’t feel too bad. I was told I would probably win another year’s contract if I appealed, but I decided not to.

I’ve had enough “best teacher I’ve ever had” student reviews to feel O.K. about my career here, even though those reviews were the exceptions more than the rule. For the past few years I simply haven’t been able to manage a four-course-a-semester teaching load and a schedule of publishing traditional “peer-reviewed” academic articles. My own disorganization and some health problems didn’t help. Student teaching reviews and conventional publications were all the committee cared about.

I’ve been better at keeping up with Web-publishing and social-media developments, with hundreds of pages published through my home page and in a half-dozen blogs, a podcast and a Twitter feed. But those things didn’t count for much to the non-journalist, non-Web-focused faculty who served on the personnel committee. (In contrast, all that online media is probably what counted most to that link-hungry “Top 50″ list site.)

As a result, I’ve decided to retire from the faculty of Radford University and take a semester or two to get healthy, play more music, and finish the book I’ve been writing online. You can watch its progress at JHeroes.com — Newspaper Heroes on the Air. And you can check out my past, present and future at my Stepno.com homepage, or get some day-to-day links by following me at twitter.com/bobstep. I may return to teaching in 2014, here or somewhere nearby.

Last update to this page May 18, 2013

Sing a song of journalistic responsibilities…

I wonder if you have to audition for the Society of Professional Journalists chapter at Columbia?

I wonder if there will be a sing-along at the national SPJ convention? With just a little more pitch control, this could be journoGlee! (Click through to YouTube to see the singalong lyrics.)

More: The group’s singing minutes include this tribute to getting employed… “Let’s call ourselves the SPJ band…“

Thanks to Deborah Potter for the link…

By the way, more than a half-century ago there were newspaper people singing about their jobs. Pete Seeger resurrected one of those tunes some time ago, and I added it to my old blog. (Lyrics included.)

Looking for it today, I found an older recording, by Earl Robinson and Vern Partlow — just audio, but including the more critical “publishers are such interesting people” chorus and Partlow’s Newspaper Guild verses.

The song also was updated and recorded in the 1960s by Steve Addis and Bill Crofut… with more recent jokes, a little sexist quip about Jayne Mansfield (or about media sexism?), and nice harmonies. But there’s less hint of leftist sympathies or union recruiting, with the reference to “press-titution” coming after Jayne instead of the original linking of publishers and advertisers.

Did you notice the Nixon verse — “He says he’s through with politics…”? History fans will deduce that it was written after his failed bid for the California Governor’s seat in 1962 and his “You won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore” speech to the press, seven years before Nixon became president. And if you’re curious about the reference to journalists being sent to jail in Germany — in the 1960s — this Wikipedia page on the “Spiegel scandal” may help.

Here’s the verse some recordings left out, from The People’s Song Book, 1948:

Oh, publishers are such interesting people!
Their policy’s an acrobatic thing.
They shout they represent the common people.
It’s funny Wall Street never has complained.
But publishers have worries, for publishers must go
To working folks for readers, and big shots for their dough.
Oh, publishers are such interesting people!
It could be press-titution, I don’t know.

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Personal note: I met Bill Crofut in 1981 when he was teaching occasionally at Wesleyan University. I don’t recall whether we discussed this song, but he did tell me that he learned to play the banjo from Pete Seeger in exchange for helping work on Pete’s house on the Hudson River. Maybe “Newspapermen Meet the Most Interesting People” was part of the lessons.

Crofut said their paths diverged during the Vietnam War, when he and Addis were musical ambassadors for the U.S. State Department and Seeger was mightily against the Vietnam War. Addis and Crofut visited South Vietnam; Seeger visited the North. (From the title, I suspect there might be something about that in Bill’s book, “Troubadour: A Different Battlefield,” published in 1968. Maybe I’ll add it to my summer reading list.)

Bill Crofut wasn’t teaching banjo at Wesleyan that year. He told me he had heard that legendary Irish singer Joe Heaney didn’t have enough students to support his commute (by bus, I think) from New York City to Middletown, Conn., so Crofut signed on as a student. I did the same. I thank them both for the opportunity. Joe moved to Washington state the next year and passed away in 1984.

When a Pickle Showed Patriotic Colors

A reminiscence: According to one of the authors, this was an April Fool story that got misdirected to the Fourth of July.

Back in the summer of 1979, I was writing the daily “People in the News” column that ran on page two of The Hartford Courant. While never proving any threat to Liz Smith, I would cull through Playboy magazine interviews, tabloid papers’ gossip columns, and the major wire services’ “Names in the News” features to find material to rewrite and fill my “combined wires” space.

It was a lot like today’s aggregation-style blogging; it gave me time to write longer features, and by relying heavily on each evening’s wire stories I had mornings free to go to grad school. (In anthropology and ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University, which, in a round-about way, led to my career shift into the software industry, which webbed my way back to journalism.)

One July day in 1979, the copy desk chief tossed me a couple of feet of wire-printer paper and said something like, “We don’t have room for this; maybe part of it will work in the People column.”

It was a remarkable story about a man in Winsted, Conn., “inventing” a red, white and blue pickle. It had been in a July Fourth weekend Waterbury Republican newspaper, and the wire service picked it up from there. I couldn’t believe it, and set it aside to process other items.

Some papers did run it, as you can see above… But before I got back to the Winsted item, the copy chief tossed over another piece of wire paper and said, “Hey, don’t use that pickle thing. It’s a hoax.” That also made it into print elsewhere…

I looked at both wire stories. The second one said the reporters (“stringers” or “freelancers”) would no longer be writing for the Waterbury paper. Google News’s archive of scanned papers provides the evidence above that elsewhere in the country, there were editors who fell for the pickle piece or at least entertained their readers with the after-the-fact hoax story.

(It’s intriguing that the Sarasota paper carried the story. Sarasota, you may know, is the home of the Ringling Bros., Barnum & Bailey Circus Museum. The famous hoaxster P.T. Barnum, like the pickle story, was a Connecticut native, born about 27 miles from Waterbury.)

Before I decided what to do, I looked at the Waterbury paper. It had a picture of the man holding his innovative pickle. It had stripes. It had a square field of blue with stars — or at least dots. As I recall, he was wearing a moustache, sunglasses and maybe a pith helmet, reminding me of Leon Redbone without a guitar.

“How on earth could they have believed this thing?” I asked myself. I forget how I tracked down the reporters, but I did. Maybe someone at the Republican gave me their number, or maybe their names were in the story. In any case, I got one of them on the phone, and I asked clever journalistic questions like, “What on earth were you thinking?” and “How in heck did you get this past the editor?”

After all, Americans generally do not make July Fourth a day for hoaxes.

The co-author of the hoax had a fascinating explanation. I forget whether I checked it with his editors in Waterbury. By then, my deadline was probably approaching. And, after all, all that I needed was a paragraph for the “People” column. But, from memory, here’s what the writer said:

He and his partner had written the story as a joke, he said, but not for July Fourth. He said they wrote it months earlier, for April Fool’s Day. They turned it in, then didn’t hear back from the paper, so they assumed an editor thought it was a stupid idea, even for April 1st, and threw it away. It hadn’t been the first time they gave the paper something silly.

After the story appeared in July, he speculated that instead of reading enough to get the joke back in April, someone at the paper must have seen “red, white and blue” as a theme and filed the item in a “follow” folder for possible use on a patriotic holiday, without doing a lot of critical thinking or fact-checking… or, perhaps, without even reading it.

Then along came the July 4 weekend — notorious as a “slow news day” and as a day when the “A-team” staff takes a vacation. Again, it’s easy to conclude that not a lot of critical thinking went on at the Waterbury news desk that day… And the same apparently was true at the wire service office…

Or at papers like the Sarasota one that fell for it, hook, line… and pickle.

Today, with the Internet as a research tool, you can even learn that the red-white-and-blue hoax wasn’t original in Winsted. Decades earlier, another journalist from that quiet community had faked a story about a chicken’s red-white-and-blue eggs, presumably to get through yet another slow holiday weekend. According to that item, he went on to be general manager of the Winsted Citizen, and had a bridge over Sucker Creek named for him.

As for my own story, the Courant does not provide free online archives  and I don’t feel like paying $3.95 for an old pickle story. If that search link found the right item, my memory is correct that the pickle story didn’t even lead the People column. The column’s first paragraph, which is all the Courant search engine lets you see for free, was, “Italians are dancing the praises of Pope John Paul II to a disco tune. A record called the ‘Wojtyla Disco Dance’ is said to have sold 30,000 copies in Italy in the last two weeks….”

I hope that wasn’t a hoax, too.

No offense meant to baristas

I’ve added some content, links and a made-up indented quote to my WordPress Notes page, after noticing one-too-many student sites made with WordPress that show signs of “this was just done for class and I left it hanging around.”

Often, they literally show a sign: The “about page” text or header “tagline” that WordPress includes on every startup installation. It’s like having a column full of “lorem ipsum” in your newspaper.

Other times, the problem is just that the student or professor set up a blog “for class” and hasn’t used it in months, or years. OK, I have a bunch of “demo” pages of my own, but I call them that and link them back to a home page that eventually leads to someplace where there’s up-to-date content.

I’m especially concerned about students looking for work in a blog-savvy, social-networked, online world. Demos, “for class” and “tried this” sites better not be all the prospective employers can find.

So… after going back into the page a dozen times adding a link here and fixing a typo there, I added this. (Quoting yourself can be tricky when you’re as wishy-washy as I am.)

“Unless something else about your site makes it clear the line is postmodern/ironic or expressing extreme gratitude to Matt and the other folks at WordPress, having ‘just another WordPress weblog‘ on your page might as well be saying ‘just another unemployed barista.’ Not that there’s anything wrong with that.” — Dr. Bob

When newspapers had…

Editor Carole Tarrant of The Roanoke Times mentioned this picture on Twitter this morning, noting that the dress is made entirely from her newspaper. (The picture was posted by Brent Watts of Channel 7.)

That reminded me of a poem I learned around the time I was in junior high. I suspect it was already quite old.

There once was a miss from St. Paul
Who went to a newspaper ball.
Her dress caught on fire,
And burnt her entire
Front page, sporting section and all.

The concept of a “newspaper ball” puzzled me at the time. But I concluded that in some olden days, maybe around the time of Captain Billy’s Whiz-Bang and back when papers wrote of “sporting,”  their publishers may have promoted their business through community events like the annual “newspaper ball.”

In fact, a newspaper I later worked for sponsored a summer camp. Its competition sponsored a camp AND a Christmas carol sing, among other things. That didn’t keep it from going out of business. Our paper just had more news — arguably a more effective way of serving its 100-some communities.

But it wasn’t a big stretch to think that a circulation-hungry newspaper might sponsor a debutante cotillion or annual “newspaper ball.” I wondered whether part of the joke of the limerick was that the girl misunderstood and actually made a dress out of newspaper. Or maybe that was part of the event. In those years before Twitter, perhaps some circulation stunt actually invited women to make such dresses. It sounds like something The New York Evening Graphic might cook up. It was famous for its contests and its Lonely Hearts Club Ball — which even figured in Samuel Fuller’s novel, The Dark Page, and the film Scandal Sheet.

The main joke of the St. Paul poem, as is usually the case with limericks, is the hint of naughtiness — referring to the young lady’s “sporting section,” indeed. For shame! Such poor taste, sinking to double-entendre puns. Who would do such a thing? (OK, is that enough foreshadowing of an unfair cheapshot?)

But I did a story about limericks once; they suit my low sense of humor and stick in my memory. (My story was about a community college limerick contest that got Isaac Asimov to be the judge; the Associated Press picked up my story and even Time magazine got in the act.)

So after seeing Carole Tarrant’s Twitter link to the photograph, I went looking for a copy of that old “St. Paul… newspaper ball…” limerick online to send her a link.

I was disappointed. The ones Google hit first were, I suspect, newer versions. Their essential double-dactyl rhythm (dot dash dot dot dash dot dot dash) was lost by lengthening the second line, even if that did clarify the meaning — to “who wore a newspaper dress to a ball” or “who made a dress of newspapers for a ball.” How sad.

The moral: Even bad poetry suffers when people can’t remember a time when newspapers were a bigger part of everyday life, when they covered all the news in their communities, and when some of them even had balls.

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(OK, that would be a cheapshot if I just ended there. If getting editors to Twitter or convincing young women to dress up in the comic sections would sell more newspapers, I’d be all for it. That’s assuming the boost in circulation would mean jobs for more reporters like the Roanoke’ Times’s Ralph Berrier and Beth Macy, more reporters to cover more news, whether they do it with broadsheet pages, books, blogs, Twitter posts or limericks. )