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.

End of semester links for students who follow my blogs

For Web design or  journalism students getting interested in programming, or programmers getting interested in journalism, see my bookmarks tagged with the keywords “Journalism” and “Programming” at delicious.com.

For Portrayal of the Journalist in Popular Culture students who need one more story for their comparison papers, check the films-adapted-for-radio posts at JHeroes.com.

For journalism or Web design students trying WordPress for the first time, see the “WP Tips” tab at the top of this page and my “Not a blog” site, demonstrating that WordPress isn’t just for blogs these days.

For news writing students — or anyone — following the shooting story at Virginia Tech, try my list of New River Valley journalists using Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/bobstep/nrvj

Included are individual reporters at Roanoke and New River Valley area newspapers and television stations, and a few dedicated news-watchers who post useful updates.

The staff of the Collegiate Times at Virginia Tech did a terrific job, making extensive use of personal Twitter accounts covering both the breaking news of the shooting and the community support following it.  As I pointed out to my students on Friday, during a big story, “beat” definitions go out the window and everyone pitches in to get the story covered — hence some “sports” Twitter feeds passing along timely information about an event that was far from their usual upbeat Hokie news.

New tools and new tools

Nice article, if the link works…

New Tools for Today’s Investigative Journalist

I may have chopped off a few characters at the end or the address while fumbling with another “new tool” — not one mentioned in the article. My new $90 (refurb) Pandigital Android tablet is mostly for reading, not for any high-tech news-data crunching, but it’s proving useful. Newspaper websites’ mobile editions are actually readable at the breakfast table.

Panpad (my nickname for it) doesn’t use the latest version of Android or the standard Android Market for software installation, so I can’t do my usual bookmarking yet with a Delicious.com app or send the link to myself with a Gmail app. I can copy app installers from my Droid phone via SD card, but phone-specific apps, voice-input or gps won’t work on this more modest wifi-only device, and some of the apps are meant for a newer version of Android or a faster processor.

But it’s easy enough to launch Gmail or Delicious.com in the browser for now, but I do miss the delicious-bookmarking shortcut.

The Pandigital 7-inch is no iPad in screen quality or speed either, but (unlike an iPad) it does let me tap in words with my right hand’s long guitar-player fingernails the way I did on my old Palm Pilots, and it does have the SD card slot to share mp3s and documents with my phone or Macs. It has no camera or voice recognition, but it does fit a jacket pocket on at least one of my jackets. It works with my Verizon mifi hotspot or campus wifi. And being able to tap/type right-handed is important right now while I recover from an RSI injury to my phone-flicking left thumb.

(Perhaps it’s a hidden virtue that the Panpad isn’t able to play Angry Birds.)

As for saving links “in the cloud,” while the only Delicious app I have here needs an update (new owners, new widgets), this WordPress app does work as an Android extension on the browser’s “share” button. As a result, maybe you’ll see more blog-posting here related to interesting shareable Web content, like the article linked above.

Note: Apologies if I haven’t caught all the glitches in this tap-typing — the keyboard shortcuts sometimes turn “an” to “Android, give me “for” for “do,” and change “to” to “or” while my eyes are focused on the screen keyboard. I’m also trying to make sure I’m not typing a string or l’s for backspaces, “v’s” for spaces or random “a’s” for uppercase, when I mean to hit the keys below those letters. But it’s still easier on the eyes than my 1/3-the-size Droid phone screen.

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

Step Away from the Mouse

Distracting the author -- from Twain's Editorial Wild Oats

Macintosh users may just yawn when Jane Wells of WordPress starts out her “Now More Than Ever: Just Write” essay with the demise of Internet Explorer’s old version, but she gets downright inspiring after that: WordPress (and Firefox and Google Chrome) now lets users break out of the confining window-in-a-window blog-style editing interface.

I’m using the new full-screen editor to write this, and it’s very cool. It’s especially good news to me, since I’m using WordPress to write my other blog — the one that might turn into a book someday, if I can avoid distractions this summer.

WordPress is even calling this the new distraction-free writing feature, so they’ve got my number! And the feature has its own support area and discussion forum, although that might be too much of a distraction.

It was a line on one of those linked pages that convinced me to try the new feature: “But once you let go of the mouse and get to writing, the real magic starts to happen.” The other convincer was the headline on Ms. Wells’ article.

The Paige Compositor, no mouse required

“JustWrite,” you see, was the name of a word processing program that I had some fun with about 25 years ago, during a brief foray into technical writing and public relations for a software company. JustWrite was a spin-off of the long-winded “Multimate Advantage Professional Word Processor.” Just shrinking the name of the product down to two syllables was an enormous, er, advantage.

Like MultiMate and this new WordPress feature (and the Paige Compositor, above), JustWrite could be operated entirely from the keyboard. I don’t remember whether it would  know what to do with a mouse if it saw one.  Like word processors of old, this WordPress fullscreen editor even knows to switch to italics when I hit command-I on the Macintosh. And to stop when I hit the key again. No mouse needed, until I decided to insert the woodcuts. I mean, “images.”

Actually, “JustWrite” began as something called “MultiMate Jr.” back when IBM was threatening the world with a little computer called the “PC Jr.” The computer had a wireless keyboard, but was a bomb (not “the bomb”), crippled so that it wouldn’t replace business PCs, and it was cancelled.

Driving the editor to distraction -- from Twain's Editorial Wild Oats

So was our neat little word processing program, and the cancellation cost some very creative technical writers their jobs. (I think the programmers just switched to adding features to already bloated MultiMate.) But I loved the first draft of the how-to book, which was never published: Someone on the “Jr.” team had the wonderful idea of basing a kids’ word processing tutorial on the works of Mark Twain, using lots of his early references to using a typewriter as well as bits from stories kids had read in school.

I forget whether they used anything about his losing his shirt on investments in an early typesetting machine — a masterpiece with 18,000 parts. He, if not the Multimate Jr. documentation team, might have appreciated the irony.

A year or two later, the renamed and re-branded JustWrite, now an “entry-level” word processor aimed at adults, still didn’t do much better than Multimate Jr. It “shipped,” minus the Twain-centric manual, but it was cancelled within a year. A company full of Silicon Valley hubris bought our modest Connecticut outfit and made it a less fun place to work. Soon after, I retreated back to grad school to explore something called “hypertext.”

As for Twain’s problems with technology, the evidence is still there, at The Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford, right over the river from East Hartford, former home of MultiMate International.

The Twain House preserved the last of the Paige Compositors, which its website calls the “typesetting machine that drove the family to the brink of bankruptcy, forcing them to leave their Hartford home.”

It also has Twain’s 1904 billiard table. Sometimes, I guess, even the best writers need some distraction.

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Footnote: If you need some distraction, read some of the things Twain had to say about journalism in his Editorial Wild Oats, now preserved by Project Gutenberg in a variety of formats. It’s the source of the two images above.