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.

Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady Journalist

Henrietta Stackpole, a foreign correspondent with “fewer illusions…”

For any hardcore English majors among my “portrayal of the journalist in film, fiction and popular culture” students, I should mention another great American novel with a newspaperwoman lurking in its pages: Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady, which is conveniently discussed at great length in this week’s New Yorker magazine.

Alas, the journalist, “Henrietta Stackpole,” is not the lady of the title, and she doesn’t get much mention in Anthony Lane’s almost 5,000 word article, itself in response to a new book, Michael Gorra’s “Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece” (Liveright).

But Lane’s article may give students some ideas about writing about literature, as well as probably convincing them that Portrait of a Lady would be a lot to bite off as a two-week assignment in the middle of a broader course, even if it might be worth it just to meet Henrietta and ponder the life of a woman correspondent abroad 130 years ago.

They may be intrigued by Lane’s references to the journalist, at first comparing her to Isabel Archer, the title character:

“… her friend Henrietta Stackpole, an American reporter, who nourishes fewer illusions about European allure.”

… and, in a discussion of James’ Victorian sensibilities:

“When Henrietta heads off to see the Paris sights with a jovial bachelor named Bantling, and we hear that ‘they had breakfasted together, dined together, gone to the theatre together, supped together, really in a manner quite lived together,’ it is precisely in not knowing what they did together by night—whether they proceeded to feast in foodless ways upon each other—that one finds, as so often with James, a pleasurable ache of dissatisfaction.”

But if I catch any students turning a phrase like “feast in foodless ways upon each other,” now I’ll know where they stole it.

Lane also quotes Henrietta a trifle enigmatically:

“… consider Henrietta, the journalist in search of a topic, who admits to Isabel that ‘I should have delighted to do your uncle.’”

That tease (words do take on new shades of meaning over the years) may convince students that a 19th century novel might be a bit too risque for classroom discussion. But Henrietta is merely debating issues of privacy and publicity with Isabel, talking about painting word-pictures of people for her article, “Americans and Tudors.” Thanks to the searchable plain-text Project Gutenberg edition of the novel, here’s a  more complete quote:

“And I should have delighted to do your uncle, who seems to me a much nobler type — the American faithful still. He’s a grand old man; I don’t see how he can object to my paying him honour.”

Alas, Henrietta was entirely written out of the one radio adaptation of Portrait of a Lady that I’ve found (by NBC University Theater), but here it is, if you want to hear an hour of Jamesian prose…

I also haven’t seen the 1968 TV series or the 1994 film adaptations to see how much attention they paid to Henrietta. Mary-Louise Parker — pre-”Weeds” and “West Wing” — played her in the 1994 Portrait of a Lady, opposite Nicole Kidman as Isabel, but those reportorial spectacles were enough to inspire me to put her picture on this page, along with a YouTube clip of the movie trailer.

Meanwhile, my more general page about journalists in novels is over at my mostly-about-radio blog, under the subtitle “Books: The Truth with a Dragon Tattoo,” referring to the two novels most students read last year. Maybe I should move that whole page over here, since I already have my YouTube collection of films about journalists pages here.

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.

The stand-up reporter and the question Siri won’t answer

March 16 update: Retraction There were fabrications in Mike Daisey’s story about Apple’s Chinese factory workers. See Ira Glass’s retraction: This American Life Retracts Story; Says It Can’t Vouch for the Truth of Mike Daisey’s Monologue about Apple in China

“We didn’t think that he was lying to us and to audiences about the details of his story. That was a mistake.” – Ira Glass

Marketplace program caught the error, interviewed original interpreter.

“Daisey lied to me and to This American Life producer Brian Reed during the fact checking we did on the story, before it was broadcast. That doesn’t excuse the fact that we never should’ve put this on the air. — Ira Glass”

Washington Post blog about the story

Bob Garfield on feeling betrayed.

I’m keeping my original post about the program below. The issues of “storytelling style,” making emotional connections, and journalism as truth-telling are still the topic. Making a story more entertaining does not have to include fabricating details.

Call it “art” or “sensationalism,” or “yellow journalism” or “laziness.” It’s a shame Daisey did it that way and gave the story to a program known for telling the truth in a personal, affective way.

In his interview with Glass and in his own blog, Daisey says he regrets using his monologue on Glass’s This American Life: “What I do is not journalism. The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism. For this reason, I regret that I allowed THIS AMERICAN LIFE to air an excerpt from my monologue.”

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I regret that in showing what a good storyteller he is, Deasey couldn’t show us better skill as an honest reporter… or, like Hunter Thompson, show us enough clues to make us respond, “This is too wild to be 100% true, but there’s some truth in here, maybe even big-T Truth and, what the hell, it’s a great ride.”

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Jan 26 post

This American Life host Ira Glass starts this program “interviewing” the Siri talking interface of the latest iPhone, cleverly getting it to refuse to answer one question: Where was the phone manufactured?

Of course the phone is stamped with a place of assembly, major manufacturers have been well-known, and Apple earlier this month disclosed a list of its suppliers.

But Glass has another point to make. His little dialogue with the iPhone introduces a 40-minute audio performance, in front of a live audience, by Mike Daisey, titled “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory.” It’s a story I’d like my news writing students to hear, although we probably won’t get around to discussing it for a week or two.

Daisey’s amazing narrative tells how he visited a Chinese manufacturing city that “looks like ‘Blade Runner’ threw up on itself,” and getting Apple factory workers to talk to him about their work and their lives. We usually tell beginning journalism students to “stay out of the story” and write in the third-person. That’s the standard approach in print and Web narratives, and in a lot of broadcast reporting. It separates “opinion” and “interpretation” from “the facts.” But here — as in some feature stories and op-edit columns — a reporter’s experience in getting the story is part of the story.

The NPR site lets you stream Daisey’s piece of stand-up news storytelling — or should we call it “performance journalism”? — plus a 20-minute fact-checking follow-up by This American Life, with links to research reports on Apple manufacturing.

You also can buy the full hour as a single download from, ironically, iTunes.

Related:

Jan. 13 blog  after Apple’s release of the supplier list.

Jan. 25 New York Times story, In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad

Mike Daisey’s blog:

In its first week the episode was the most downloaded in THIS AMERICAN LIFE’s history. The internet exploded, and the story went everywhere—I received over a thousand emails in just a few days; the response was overwhelming.

Happy New Year 2012

Enough of this 1930s and 1940s nostalgia… Here’s something that’s “only” 30 years old, The Roches getting a handle on a seasonal standard. Very, very hard to believe that was so many years ago. But remembering it was enough to get me to visit http://www.roches.com/ to see what the Roches are up to these days.

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Now, back to the ’40s…

I haven’t had a lot of luck finding journalism plots that take place on New Year’s Eve for use in my JHeroes podcast, so I’m giving in to late-night nostalgia and posting another piece of the past here: Lux Radio Theater’s production of After the Thin Man, from 1940. No journalism plot… just a classic mystery with a touch of humor and romance.

As much as I like old radio shows, the medium doesn’t do justice to Asta…

Since the movie trailer is on YouTube, I’m including it too.

Editors can be heroes, too

I’m finishing up the “Clan of the Fiery Cross” storyline from the Superman radio show of 1946, and it’s changed my whole impression of Perry White.

In earlier episodes that I’d listened to, White seemed to be somewhat old and gullible. Among other things, he gave that Kent guy a job without seeing any samples of his writing, easily tricked by a promise of a story that Kent learned about by eavesdropping on a phone call.

But in taking on cross-burning bigots, White showed what he was made of. (OK, so he also got himself kidnapped and almost killed.)

Read all about it and hear the story over at my other blog, JHeroes.com: Newspaper Heroes on the Air.

For some more serious educational value, I included links to information about real-life editors whose heroism on the same theme was recognized a few years later with the Pulitzer Prize.

Youth Radio Wins Peabody Award

An e-mail from Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning just alerted me that Youth Radio has won a 2011 Peabody Award for its Trafficked! series, an investigation broadcast on NPR, including first-person accounts by teen victims in the sex trade.

The series played on National Public Radio and was featured on The Huffington Post.

More from Spotlight:

Youth Radio is a recent recipient of a Learning Lab Award in the 2010 Digital Media and Learning Competition for its Mobile Action Lab, through which young people are developing mobile apps that serve community needs.

A new book—“ Drop That Knowledge: Youth Radio Stories”—offers resources and behind-the-scenes accounts of youth media production. Sarah wrote at Spotlight that the book is “sure to become an important resource on youth media production, consumption, and participatory learning.”

Wrapping up Women’s History Month in Radio Dramas

Over at JHeroes.com, I’ve had a fun month tipping my hat to Women’s History Month, exploring the audio biographies of famous women editors, publishers and reporters — partly because “women reporters” is a major theme my “Portrayal of the Journalist in Popular Culture” students are exploring this semester.

This week is registration for fall semester (already!) and I’ve been trying to spread the word about that course,  a “special topics” offering that isn’t in the catalog. In the process of doing the JHeroes blog and preparing that course, I’ve discovered quite a few films and novels I didn’t know about.

For example, I wouldn’t have known that the head of the Associate Press wrote a novel, “Anna Zenger, Mother of Freedom,” fictionalizing America’s first landmark libel trial. Luckily, the DuPont radio series, Cavalcade of America, turned Kent Cooper’s novel into a radio play — one they liked so much they did it twice, with different casts.

And I wouldn’t have known that America’s first woman foreign correspondent, Margaret Fuller, was also the the editor of The Dial — hobnobbing with Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne, and maybe inspiring some of Hawthorne’s women characters.

I also didn’t know how many times daredevil reporter Nellie Bly had found episodes from her life dramatized — or entirely fictionalized, including  one series of novels that has her hanging out with Sherlock Holmes.

Take a look… After visiting radio appearances by 18th and 19th century women, I’m finishing up the month with some who are more contemporary.

Behind the Microphone

Archive.org has had copies of this film at various resolutions for years, but I just noticed that it’s now at YouTube too, which means I can embed it here for easy reference.

Actually spelled “Back of the Mike,” this nine-minute 1938 film shows what’s going on in a young radio listener’s mind, along with what’s going on in the radio studio.

The film reminds me a bit of an ad for one of the old Infocom text-only computer adventures; the ad showed a rainbow-hued cross section of a human brain, with the headline “We put our graphics where the sun don’t shine.”

JHeroes: Radio Newsies for Christmas

Pickpocket Fingers Fogarty shops for Christmas … not exactly a case of journalistic detachment in this 1946 Casey, Crime Photographer episode from my online old-time radio research, but at least a little bit of Christmas cheer.

Casey’s best line…

Annie: Maybe you need glasses.

Casey: I do; several glasses.

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This 1947 episode opens with the journalists and their bartender friend commiserating about working on the holiday, even if Casey and Ann do come back with the story about “The Santa Claus of Bums Boulevard.”

Source: http://www.archive.org/download/Casey_Crime_Photographer/

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While on this Christmas theme, I noticed a Big Town episode in the archive.org collection, “Prelude to Christmas,” from 1948, a World War II refugee Polish newspaper editor teaches his daughter about postwar faith in America and freedom of the press, with help (of course) from Steve Wilson of the Illustrated Press:

Listen for a remarkably ecumenical message from a waterfront mission preacher who mentions Allah among other prophets, while searchers for the lost girl visit a synagogue as well as a Catholic church.

Source: http://www.archive.org/details/otr_bigtown