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:

---

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.

WordPress YouTube ad surprise

The video-player link at the bottom is an ad, not part of my article.

WordPress.com has made it very easy to post YouTube videos, a feature I’ve used a lot. (See the Video and WP Tips menu items above.)

However, I’ve just discovered that WordPress.com, is also embedding YouTube video ads in my pages. I knew that new visitors sometimes would see clearly marked text ads at the end of blog posts, but I don’t like the fact that these video ads are indistinguishable from the content of the page.

Since they are not shown to logged-in users, I never see them. But today I visited my Newspaper Heroes on the Air (jheroes.com) blog using an old laptop, and discovered an unrelated YouTube video at the bottom of the page — looking just like the embedded videos I sometimes use as part of blog items.

I can make all of the ads go away by paying WordPress.com an annual fee, and that’s probably what I’ll do — as soon as I balance my budget for the year. I’ve read the original terms of service for using WordPress, but only remembered a reference to “We very occassionally show Adsense (contextual text ads) on post and tag pages.” Unlike text ads I had seen, the video (or graphics) not only look like part of my “content,” they also slowed down the loading of pages on that old laptop.

If you know of a WordPress page or forum discussing this YouTube ad policy — Is it new? — please add a comment below.

Sometimes you can’t get the story out

I stumbled on this interview while tracking down a YouTube video to explain ocular migraines to a friend. I’m lucky — the migraines I get are the “ocular” variety, only visual-effect symptoms with some minor numbness and verbal confusion, and the episodes are brief and infrequent. I’m also not on camera at the time.

California TV reporter Serene Branson gave a great demonstration of aphasia with a migraine headache attack on camera last winter, and mentioned blurred vision as one of the precursor symptoms, along with some mental confusion.

“I knew what I wanted to say, but I didn’t have the words to say it,” she said. That’s it in a nutshell. Here’s another site with a discussion of Branson’s aphasia-migraine symptoms.

Meanwhile, it’s nice to see that some YouTube uses with Flash or other animation skills have tried to document their ocular migraine experiences. So far, these two are the closest I’ve seen to mine.

Unfortunately, no one has documented what these look like when you are trying to present information to a class, read a book as part of your research, grade a stack of student papers or preview a few dozen Web design pages.

I’m glad to see that a couple of these have explicit (if obvious) advice about what to do if one of these things starts while you are driving: Stop. It would be very bad if the first onset were a blindspot that hid a pedestrian crossing the street — or a Miata changing lanes at high speed on the interstate.

Ocular-only migraines don’t have the traditional horrible headache and nausea; I had full-feature “classic” migraines like that when I was in my teens and twenties, but appeared to have outgrown them throughout grad school and my first teaching job.

The painless visual version started about 7 years ago, but rarely has happened more than a few times a year, until recently. Mine sometimes are accompanied by a slight aphasia and numbness. Other websites agree with what doctors have told me — that the dynamic visual effects put the whole thing in the “migraine, don’t worry unless they get worse, longer or more frequent…” category, not something more serious like a stroke or TIA.

(Knocking on wood again.)