“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

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.

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 as interactive medium: Journalistic stars as paper dolls!

Always the fashion plate, Brenda Starr was retired last year after 70 years in newspapers. Click for an ABC feature interviewing author Mary Schmich and others.

When I started looking into the portrayal of journalists in popular culture, I never thought I’d wind up writing about paper dolls.

But that’s what my “Newspaper Films” post about the 1989 “Brenda Starr” movie led to… a discovery that long before blogs, readers had a unique way of interacting with their Sunday newspapers.

A Web search inadvertently turned up the fact that both “Brenda Star, Reporter” and the even earlier “Jane Arden” comic strips included a reader-participation gimmick: Fans were invited to send in suggestions for the reporters’ wardrobes, and the designs were published as cut-out paper doll costumes with the Sunday color comics, sometimes reprinted as separate comic books or paper-doll books.

A Chicago teenager — male — was reported to have designed 1,500 dresses for Brenda Star, according to a retrospective in the Chicago Tribune when the strip was cancelled — after 70 years.

A quick search of eBay or the Web will find an active hobby of collecting the comic strips and dolls. Who knew?

I can’t help but wonder whether Brenda and Jane inspired more future journalists, or more future fashion designers (or cartoonists).

Top 20 Lessons for Journalism Students from HBO’s “The Newsroom”

…and 30 other random observations, many out of order (think before talk). Some are true, some not. Some are less “top” than others.

For links to reviews of the show and the Hemingway-Gellhorn film, see my previous post. HBO customers can get online videos; the rest of us can use HBO’s official The Newsroom website for supplementary information and synopses of episodes.”

Class assignment in the fall will be to decide which items on this list are true and/or important — and to make your own list, preferably thinking and talking more slowly than Sorkin characters. The more linear-minded may number their lists. I took the numbers off this one, and wish I could randomize it. The class: Portrayal of Journalists in Film, Fiction and Popular Culture.

Yes, I’ll probably edit this a few times before September.

• A democracy needs robust, honest journalism.
• Talk fast.
• Think fast.
• Opinions are O.K. when you have the facts and say where you got them.
• We’ve had enough of slogan-filled talking-head shouting-matches.
• Every pretty blonde with a power-puff question is a sorority girl.
• Sorority girls’ parents may sue if you’re not nice.
• Have a walking-around knowledge of Cervantes, Shakespeare, Frank Capra, contemporary Musical Theater, and  how to tell one from the other. (Tip: Read Joe Saltzman’s book about all the journalists in Capra films, 1920s-’40s. Watch some of them on YouTube, starting with the first 1928 link.)
• Don’t call Rocinante a donkey.
• Know the difference between the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
• Know who wrote them.
• Use the phone.
• Take notes.
• Beware patriotic buzzwords like “Freedom.”
• Believe in freedom.
• Have a sense of history and a sense of greatness.
• Office romances are essential to journalism movies.
• Anchors make millions.
• Producers do the work.
• On-camera reporters just turn up when you need them.
• Teleprompters are for wimps.
• Tough, strong older women mentor younger women by instigating romances and promising shopping trips.
• Work for a place that buys you Moleskine reporter’s notebooks ($12) not the $17-a-dozen spiral kind, or buy your own.
• Have a head full of walking-around knowledge, including facts and figures. (Know how much of your tax dollar goes to the N.E.A., how many Americans are in prison, more. Only the most obsessive will double-check to see if you’re right. When you use them in your reporting, be right.)
• Someone spouting statistics in the middle of a panel discussion is probably making up 80 percent of them.
• Don’t trust people in authority to tell you how important something is; even an Associated Press yellow alert may be posted by an intern who doesn’t have time to raise it to orange or red.
• Being there as a loyal intern can result in good things.
• Loyalty counts.
• Love counts, but complicates things.
• Respect your parents, even when lying to them.
• Respect your s.o.’s parents. Etc.
• Apologize.
• Do your best.
• Demand the best from others.
• Speak your mind.
• Let business leaders speak their P.R. platitudes if they give you something honest at the same time.
• Multi-millionaire geniuses and Peabody winners with battle scars can be condescending.
• Indians don’t mind being stereotyped as “Punjab” or “the I.T. guy” if they are really bloggers and closet science geeks. If they are under 50, they probably never read a “Little Orphan Annie” comic strip anyway. (Was Punjab also in the musical, “Annie”? If so, see rule #1.)
• Learn how to get people on the phone.
• Learn how to use the hold button.
• Blog.
• Use Twitter.
• Figure it out.
• Say condescending things about your audience, like “Speak truth to stupid,” but don’t really mean them.
• Don’t mention Hildy Johnson, Mary Tyler Moore, Lou Grant, Murphy Brown, Network or Broadcast News.
• If you want all the excitement of real reporting, such as watching journalists pore over stacks of library charge slips, see “All the President’s Men.”
• Remember people’s names.
• Remember significant statistics up to eight digits.
• Pick your college roommate wisely, and stay in touch.
• Pick your older sister wisely, and stay in touch.
• Take that grade school build-a-volcano project seriously.
• YouTube!
• More than 70 years after “The Front Page,” the best journalists still talk tough and drink straight whiskey. Protein bars are for losers. 
• It’s all about vertigo.

More links about the series and the recent Hemingway & Gellhorn
film.

Theory worth testing: The angriest negative reviews of The Newsroom were written out of guilt by reviewers who think they should be doing serious journalism themselves instead of writing about HBO entertainment programming and wishing it were better. (See Murrow on, “merely wires and lights in a box.”)

Final random observation: Anyone so taken with Jeff Daniels as a news anchor that they want him to step out of the HBO set and move to CNN hasn’t seen “The Purple Rose of Cairo.”

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For video of episode 1 of The Newsroom and links to reviews of the show and the Hemingway-Gellhorn film, see my previous post.

Hemingway & Gellhorn, and The Newsroom

Things are looking up in the “recent examples” department for my fall course on the portrayal of journalists in popular culture.

HBO’s famous-writers docudrama about Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway reminds me a bit of United Press’s “Soldiers of the Press” radio series from the 1940s, which had actors in a studio dramatizing the lives of war correspondents while the reporters were still off on the battle-fronts.

Since Memorial Day I’ve been working my way through a batch of those World War II episodes over at jheroes: Newspaper Heroes on the Air, learning a little history, thinking about the blurred boundaries between reporting and propaganda, and puzzling through a mystery or two along the way.

I hope that when the fall semester starts, students will be able to get at the HBO Hemingway & Gellhorn film to do the same. Maybe I can convince one or two in my Portrayal of the Journalist in Popular Culture course to do research projects drawing some comparisons between docudrama and history, film and radio, or between an HBO movie and the new HBO series, The Newsroom.

Thanks to HBO for putting the full first episode on YouTube for students (and faculty) who don’t have HBO in their back-to-school budgets! Alas, HBO only kept it there temporarily… This was the link.

HBO now (August) provides a The Newsroom website with supplementary information and synopses of episodes.

I started this blog post to gradually accumulate links to reviews and reflections on the two HBO offerings. Some I’ll just tag in my bookmark collection at http://delicious.com/bstepno

• http://www.hbo.com/movies/hemingway-and-gellhorn/index.html
• http://m.motherjones.com/media/2012/05/film-review-hemingway-and-gellhorn-hbo-clive-owen-nicole-kidman
• http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/27/movies/philip-kaufman-and-walter-murch-collaborate-on-hemingway-gellhorn.html
• http://tv.nytimes.com/2012/05/28/arts/television/hemingway-gellhorn-has-its-premiere-on-hbo.html
• http://www.metacritic.com/tv/hemingway-and-gellhorn
• Martha Gellhorn in PBS series on War Correspondents
• Gellhorn: D-Day Stowaway , U.S. Department of Defense article; also more general article on women war correspondents.
• delicious.com/bstepno/Hemingway
• delicious.com/bstepno/Gellhorn
• The earlier Newsroom, 1996 (Its IMDB page)
• delicious.com/bstepno/TheNewsroom
• New York Times items about The Newsroom

Updated Aug. 30, 2012

Undead Journalism: A Summer Book List

The semester’s over, so now it’s time for the professor to hit the books…

OK, so perhaps I’ll also find time to tune up the banjo, guitar and ukulele, restring the old autoharp I bought a little while ago, and track down the old songbooks with “Newspapermen Meet Such Interesting People” and maybe “Jimmy Brown the Newsboy.”

But my reading list is already growing like mad, with everything from Appalachian murder ballads to a zombie apocalypse.

What do they all have in common?

Newspapers and journalism, of course. By August I’ll have expanded my list of possible readings (Books: The Truth with a Dragon Tattoo) for students enrolled in my fall course, “Portrayal of the Journalist in Film, Fiction and Popular Culture.”

I’ve already had interlibrary loan get me a microfilm copy of a rare “boy’s book” about a teenage news photographer, by Mildred Wirt Benson, creator of the Nancy Drew series. I’ve already read a couple of her Penny Parker books about a teenage girl reporter (Benson, a reporter, liked Penny better than Nancy), and I’m curious to see why the photographer series didn’t, er, develop.

The more adult items on my own summer reading list right now are Alchemy of Murder, The Devil Amongst the Lawyers, Anna Zenger and maybe Mira Grant’s “Newsflesh” series, although I’m not sure I want to be tempted into a zombie trilogy (Feed, Deadline, Countdown) — even one with that bloody RSS-feed icon on the right as one of its book covers. Come to think of it, I lost a chunk of last summer to a trilogy-plus-one that featured Nellie Bly and Sherlock Holmes on a trail of bloody murders with echoes of Dracula and Jack the Ripper.

For a dose of reality and inspiration, I’ve  ordered real-life newspaper hero Philip Meyer’s autobiography, Paper Route.

I’m also intrigued by The Daily Edge pages and videos promoting Richard Hine’s Russell Wiley Is Out to Lunch, but I’d rather read about reporters solving crimes or chasing zombies than try to find a barrel of laughs over Dilbert-style business-consultant nitwits and clueless publishers destroying the newspaper business. (Actually, what alerted me to the book was when Hine followed me @bobstep on Twitter, and I noticed his profile line “I wrote a novel about zombie newspapers in the age of vampire social media.”)

That’s enough for now. I’m keeping the list on its own page at JHeroes.com, which in the fall may double as a discussion page for the course. Visitors welcome!

Fictional journalists behaving badly on old time radio

I’ve been doing more posting at Newspaper Heroes on the Air (jheroes.com) than here lately, so a cross-reference seems in order. If you haven’t visited that site, please do.

On the weekends, I’ve been commenting on an “Adventures of Superman” storyline that includes some disturbing behavior by Clark Kent. Maybe in the first year or two of the series the writers hadn’t quite faced the moral or ethical issues of being a super-powerful being — or of writing about one for an audience of children.

In the last few episodes, we’ve heard Kent (as Superman) terrorize an admittedly annoying lawyer to get the names of the alternate beneficiaries in a will — because Kent suspects one of them is sabotaging the primary beneficiary, Metropolis University. The university needs the money to fund polio research, which seems to justify any sort of behavior to Kent. Without even switching to his costume, he also tailed and knocked-out a man he suspected of being part of the plot. While the man was unconscious, Kent became Superman to whisk him back to the city, only to be told the kidnapped man was completely innocent. At least Kent admitted his mistake.

At midweek, I’ve been commenting on a more adult serial — a soap opera called “Betty & Bob,” about a married couple who publish a crusading newspaper while also facing all the usual soap-opera issues of love, marriage, family, evil conspiracies, mental and physical illness. (Actually, “Betty & Bob” helped establish those soap-opera standards, being one of the first series by the soap-opera industry’s most prolific producers and writer, all of whom were former newspaper reporters. See my more general essay on the subject.)

Betty and Bob have also faced a troubling ethical decision: Just as they began investigating a new city manager, his daughter was arrested for drunken driving. They suppressed the story, which they saw as giving the new city manager a fair chance — but it also helped them get closer to the man. Then the troubled daughter was arrested again — this time after injuring a child.

In between the soap opera and Superman episodes, I’ve added JHeroes items for both St. Patrick’s Day and women’s history month, and updated my page about “newspaper movies” that were adapted for radio. In the fall I plan to make some use of those pages in a course on the Portrayal of Journalists in Popular Culture — including novels, films and radio.