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.

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).

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!

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.

Yankee presses stop as pigs fly and YouTube shows the past of new media

I’ve been putting some fun things on the AEJMC Newspaper Division blog:

• Guardian unleashes pigs to explain social-networked news media, with hooks from Twitter tipsters and a wolf with asthma to a ton of huffing.
• Back before the new media were new: Videotex at Knight-Ridder, 1982
• Connecticut lives with fewer presses, as “Digital First” Journal Register Co. turns to nation’s oldest continuously published newspaper to keep printing — Tribune-owned Hartford Courant.

Thinking about the future of news, with or without newspapers

Darn… Cyber scholar and new media thinker Clay Shirky was almost in town today and I missed him… When someone who was there posts a report, I’ll link to it here. Until then, I’ll let this ramble from link to link.

As promised follow these links: Beth Macy and Carole Tarrant both shared their accounts of Shirky’s visit to The Roanoke Times, the “almost in town” I referred to above. I wish I’d been able to make it, but I was off at the doctor’s office learning how to avoid having a stroke — not entirely unrelated to this business of keeping up with a dozen new Web technologies at once.

Meanwhile, even a near-miss is a good enough excuse to post this link to a speech by “Digital First” newspaper publisher John Paton, who mentions Shirky in a recent speech gently titled “Old Dogs New Tricks and Crappy Newspaper Executives.”

Paton doesn’t actually link his Web post to the article by Shirky that he mentions — not that anyone reading his speech couldn’t slap the title into Google and be there in an instant: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable.

I can’t help but think Paton is right about community knowledge and identification with local news, and I love his idea about the newsroom as public coffee shop… but I wonder about the extent to which the audience has to have the news habit in the first place.

Torrington, Conn., is home of his open-newsroom-coffeeshop experiment and, coincidentally, I’ve spent some time there back before the Web was spun. Back then, the two papers (Torrington Register and Winsted Citizen), apparently now merged at http://www.registercitizen.com, probably benefitted from the disappearance of The Hartford Times (RIP c. 1976) and the decline of The Hartford Courant under Tribune co. ownership since 2000. When it had The Hartford Times as well as these smaller papers to compete with, the Courant had strong bureaus in both Torrington and Winsted and stringers in all the smaller towns surrounding both cities. (I was a bureau reporter, later bureau chief, in two comparable bureaus on the other side of the state.)

For my students and colleagues in southwest Virginia: Imagine a city of 20,000 to 40,000, about the size of Radford, with FOUR competing daily papers, three of them with full-time resident reporters, plus a strong local news radio station!

Some people still living in Torrington or Willimantic, where I was a reporter, grew up with that kind of news-consumer-culture. Add a strong League-of-Women-Voters and New England Town Meeting civic culture, and whether it’s “digital first” or “print-only,” a news organization has something to tap into. (That “print-only” link goes to a recent Nieman Reports article about The Boston Courant, a small weekly that is no relation to the Hartford institution.)

How do you “grow” a civic-minded news culture or revive one that has been dormant? Before the end of the semester, I hope to get students thinking and talking about that — and this page’s links should help.

Here are a few more links for good measure: “The Washington Post — a Newspaper, and a Legacy, Reordered,” a New York Times piece from last week, and a Times letter to the editor by Rachel Davis Mersey, author of Can Journalism Be Saved? She apparently is almost a former classmate of mine. (I was pointed to her letter by Philip Meyer, who admits to having both of us as students, and who has just added an autobiography to his list of publications, and a Twitter feed. )

Finally, it dawned on me that I’ve written blog posts about these issues off and on over the years, so I’ve started my own “Old News” aggregation page — on the menu at the top of this blog.

Early online-newspaper nostalgia

• Niemanlab.org on: The forgotten history of Access Atlanta, one of the early Web’s most innovative newspapers
• CJR.org on: The San Jose Mercury, The Newspaper That Almost Seized the Future

Prodigy, mentioned in one or both of those recent articles, was the first graphical online service I used, c.1988. (The Macintosh version of what became AOL may have been earlier, but I was PC until ’88.) Early rollout served Hartford, Atlanta and San Francisco — perhaps the only time those cities have been seen as having something in common.

Designed for e-commerce over a closed network at under $10/month, it started before the Internet was open to commercial use. Prodigy restricted bulletin board discussion topics, but did have general news sections. It began to do newspaper sites under contract — just before a more flexible America OnLine and a more open Web ate its lunch.

I interviewed beta users and experts for a review/article about Prodigy in ’88 or ’89 for PCWeek, which paid me well but didn’t print it; a new editor said it was because the publication’s focus was now business apps, not “consumer” services, and despite the involvement of major companies, Prodigy was aimed at the home-computer market. (It started as “Trintex” — the three being Sears, IBM and CBS. The network dropped out before the service went online.)

So I set aside my research on networks and hypertext, and switched to writing about boats — until the Web happened and I sailed off into a Ph.D. program… paying the bills with a part-time job at another online news pioneer, The News & Observer’s NandO.net in Raleigh, and (slowly) writing my dissertation about another, http://wral-tv.com, across town.

Note: This has been updated since the original post. I’m was reading the Web that day on a Nook-like Pandigital tablet, lowcost device whose software makes it easier to post a rough draft to WordPress quickly than to bookmark. Some of the roughness may still be here.

For the record, the Pandigital has an older Android WordPress app, Tweetcaster Pro with  ReadItLater, but poor keyboard and no direct hook to Delicious.com (http://delicious.com/bstepno).

Until I get something better, I can’t help thinking how GREAT this would have seemed in 1988.

Six brief news writing tips — or are they?

Every semester I tell students in the introductory news writing class that the basics of writing in a news style will be useful in other types of writing.

Take this list, for example:

1. Keep it brief. Be concise, simple and precise…
2. Keep it simple… Use short words, active verbs, and common nouns.
3. Be friendly. Use contractions. Talk directly to the reader…
4. Put the most important thing first…
5. Describe only what’s necessary…
6. Avoid repetition.

Which Journalism 101 textbook did that come from?

Answer: None. It’s part of the “writing” section of Google’s design tips for developers of apps for Android phones.

The details of each step aren’t exactly what we tell news writers. With luck, journalists will be telling their stories on a larger canvas than a smartphone screen, and to an audience whose thumbs aren’t twitching for a return to Angry Birds. But good writing should work on both page sizes. News writers might think of themselves as designing a “user interface” for the information in their stories.

I especially like the ultra-conservative Android version of the “most important thing first” rule (emphasis added):  ”The first two words (around 11 characters, including spaces) should include at least a taste of the most important information in the string. If they don’t, start over.”

The old conclusion-first “inverted pyramid” news story’s summary lead emphasizes the first sentence. But the “two words” idea isn’t unique to Google. For online reading, usability experts with eye-tracking devices have been telling us for years that readers skim down through the start of each line. The “11 characters” reference leads me to believe that  Jakob Nielsen’s work is on someone’s desk (screen, bookmark list, bookshelf) at Google.

If nothing else, following that two-word rule might get beginning news-writing students to stop starting stories with the words “Last night…” — which could be the first two words of every morning-after story in a newspaper.

Full frontal nudity in a journalism faculty discussion

That’s what you might call a misleading sensational headline, but you are still reading.

The topic is a serious one: A North Carolina university’s dismissal of its student newspaper adviser over a story that might otherwise just sound like 1970s  nostalgia. A couple of months ago, the paper published photos of a streaker at a fall football game. Autumn leaves or not, the editors didn’t do any “digital fig-leafing” of the images.

Of course the university can’t comment on the details of a personnel matter, but the Student Press Law Center quickly came to the defense of adviser Paul Isom. (His position, incidentally, reported to a marketing and publicity official at the university, not to the journalism faculty.)

“They’re clearly punishing the adviser for something he not only didn’t control, but legally couldn’t control,” Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, said.

The SPLC alert prompted a robust discussion by journalism faculty on an Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication mailing list — more than 30 messages in 24 hours, during a semester break. Professors addressed topics including the independence of student newspapers, community standards regarding nudity, the sensitivities of college administrators and public relations departments, and the responsibilities of student media advisers — as well as a need for student media advisers to get both their rights and responsibilities spelled out in advance.

You do not need to be a member to read the discussion here:

http://aejmc.net/pipermail/news-list_aejmc.net/2012-January/thread.html

I hope sharing the story with my intro class this semester will help me do a better job of addressing issues of sensitivity, diversity, community standards, taste and “responsibility.” Those issues aren’t just for editors-in-chief anymore, not when anyone can register a WordPress.com account like this one and start “publishing” to the world.

Along with my advice about “acting responsibly,” deciding whatever that means, I’ll also point out that student editors have a First Amendment right to ignore their advisers — but that they should be wise enough to listen, discuss and make thoughtful, informed decisions. For example, I wonder how many student publications have drafted their own editorial guidelines about possibly offensive images or language? I wonder if those guidelines were written when the publication’s audience was just on-campus, not a Web-published edition available to anyone in the world?

There might even be a nice research paper topic there for a grad student or two.

For inspiration, I’d point students to the ethics-related pages at: SPJ, SPLC and its FACT team, RTDNA and NPPA, and the College Media Association, including its page for advisers.

For the recent specific case, here are additional news reports mentioned in the journalism faculty discussion:

• http://theeastcarolinian.com/ (The school paper itself)
• http://theeastcarolinian.com/?p=2633 University fires student media director
• Greenville Daily Reflector
• WNCT.com Adviser Fired story
• WITN.com Adviser Fired story
• Raleigh News & Observer story (includes interview with adviser… N&O story has legs: Boston Herald)
• ScholarsAndRogues.com post by Denny Wilkins of St. Bonaventure, with its own discussion thread.
• Streaker isn’t college’s greatest embarrassment — by Gene Policinski, senior vice president/executive director, First Amendment Center, Nashville.

Nostalgic footnote: The first time I was on a television “Face the State” panel, it  was as education editor of The Hartford Courant, and the newsmaker was the relatively new president of the University of Connecticut, Glenn W. Ferguson. Between questions about political influence and university budget cuts, I threw in one about the Yale Daily News acknowledging that UConn led Yale in streaking that year. I thought his response — something about looking forward to Yale’s recognizing UConn’s excellence in other areas — was his best remark that day.