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.

Happy 30th anniversary to my first computer

The Osborne I and its external monitor; photo probably from 1984. Could I have been singing its second-birthday song?

Harry McCracken, who suffered through being my editor at three different magazines, has written a fascinating history of one of the first “boom, then bust” computer companies: The one I bought my first computer from. In fact, its going bust helped get me into the computer business.

See: Osborne! at Harry’s blog, Technologizer.

I added comments to the first page of the article, but I was (ironically) writing on a screen about half the size of my old Osborne — a Droid — and it left out all the paragraph breaks, making a rather hard-to-read essay. So here’s a copy. I was also using the Droid’s “speech to text” feature, so I’ll correct at least some of the typos here. (Ironically, after posting this version, I discovered I could go back and edit the blog comment at Technologizer, so I went back and inserted some paragraph breaks.)

I was one of about 40 faculty members and grad students who bought Osborne I computers at Wesleyan University in 1982 after the university put some faculty “ideal personal computer specs” out to bid. The case, keyboard and small screen looked a lot like a portable terminal people had been using at the Hartford Courant when I was a reporter there in the late 1970s to early ’80s. I think it had a cassette tape drive built in and was compatible with the newspaper’s ATEX system. Teleram? (After posting this to Harry’s page via the Droid, I searched for Teleram. Here’s a picture and a detailed story. )

At Wesleyan the software bundle was the primary selling point for the Osborne. I recall an Apple ][, if you added to floppy drives and all of that software, would have come in at easily double the price we paid for the Osborne I with dBaseII, SuperCalc, WordStar, mBasic, cBasic , the Original Adventure game MyChess and I forget what all else.

In December 1982 (or was it ’81?) when we took delivery, the bundle also included an external monitor which would double the 52 columns screen making 104 columns (great for spreadsheets), double density disk drives and a 300 baud modem… or maybe the modem was extra. I do remember that the computer center hacked together cables we could use to plug an Osborne directly into the DEC-20 mainframe as a terminal and do file transfers.

Doing document conversion between our mainframe editor and WordStar was another thing. I became a big fan of ASCII and the print-formatting program on the DEC system. I also went to work for the university A/V wizard, Bob White, who physically hacked the insides of 24-inch classroom TV monitors to work with an Osborne so that a professor could show spreadsheets in class. I recall his trick involved cutting some sheet metal and wrapping a cylinder around the back end of the picture tube. (Kids, don’t try this at home! Ymmv.)

I became editor of the Wesleyan Osborne Group newsletter, a “support system” for campus users when the company went bankrupt, and I shared the Osborne with other students to get a discount on a 1983 summer computer course with the amazing Russ Walter of “Secret Guide to Computers” fame… starting me on the way to a second master’s and my 1986-88 hypertext research.

Russ’s courses and the newsletter plus some other how to things I had written for the Wes computer center got me my first job in the computer industry 1984 at MultiMate–also due for a 30th anniv soon) ultimately leading to working for Harry McCracken at IDG. So it’s all thanks to Adam Osborne, as I said in my post at Technologizer.

One thing I didn’t get to mention was that when I finally set to work on my Ph.D., my first faculty adviser at UNC Chapel Hill was a research wizard named Frank Biocca, whose credentials in the world of computer technology began a dozen years earlier, when he worked in P.R. or advertising for Osborne Computers.