This article has never appeared in print

The NY Times has started, in the last week or so, to note when an article on nytimes.com has appeared in print. It gives the date, the section, and the page number.

I don't know what prompted this change, or what good it does, unless you're trying to put together a bibliography for an academic paper and still think the print edition holds more authority than the web version.

Maybe the Times still thinks that way, too.

Great moments in the intellectual history of journalism?

I was working on my PowerPoint for my presentation today at the AEJMC convention, trying to find online photos of University of Wisconsin journalism instruction pioneer Willard Bleyer and found a Wisconsin page that mentioned that he and First Amendment theorist and philosopher Alexander Meiklejohn overlapped in their time at Wisconsin, and that both were involved in Wisconsin's Experimental College, which Meiklejohn founded.

Bleyer was one of the most academically-minded early journalism educators (as opposed to the professional-instruction crowd), and Meiklejohn is a 20th-Century bigwig in the First. I wonder if there's a paper in this, one of those meeting-of-the-minds sorts of things like The Metaphysical Club.

ProPublica's daily email

I really like a lot of what ProPublica is doing. I think the not-for-profit model is a good idea, if not the future of professional journalism. And I don't just say this because I met Paul Steiger in his last week at the WSJ.

But their daily email is impossible to read. It's like a poorly designed web page, not an email. I'd even rather they email me their whole web page. I've subscribed since they went live, and I still don't understand exactly where to look for what, and what's original material.

I'm officially unsubscribing, and just reading their posts in my RSS reader instead.

FCC, see-ya!

Proposition, in re the "wardrobe malfunction" decision:

The Federal Communications Commission is at best an out-of-touch relic from an earlier era (that of the "mass media") and at worst is unconstitutional.

Discuss.

I'm (going to be) Huge in Japan

So sometimes I ride my bike around Central Park. And when I do, I often like to pull off at West 100th Street, which is one of my favorite parts of the Park, and I buy a bottle of water.

Today, I did that, and as I was getting off my bike, I was approached by a really friendly Japanese film crew, in a way that told me they wanted to talk. Usually, I'm not into that, and mutter something about being in the media myself, though I don't really know why that would matter. They wanted me to pose on my bike, but that wouldn't look so good, so I stood in front of it, and made sure that my helmet was off, since even Lance Armstrong looks stupid in a bike helmet.

Anyway, the very bubbly woman who interviewed me told me that it was for a Japanese TV show or documentary (she said both, though I'm not sure which is right, exactly).

About raccoons.

And strangely enough, I have a good New York raccoon story. Several weeks ago, maybe two months, I was walking back to my apartment from Central Park West, and I heard scuffling on the metal pole of the construction scaffolding I was standing under. I looked to my right, and there, grasping desperately to the vertical pole, right at my eye level, was a 40-pound raccoon. He was having some trouble climbing, since his claws couldn't get a grip on the metal. We stared at each other for a solid few seconds, as if to say to each other, "hey man, I don't want any trouble..." And then he managed to hoist himself up to the crossbar, at which point he had much more mobility. And since he might very well have had rabies, too, I moved on.

I was less articulate in my retelling for Japanese TV, but I think I got the gist across. I couldn't tell, as I was talking, if the host was laughing because she thought my story was funny or because she wanted me to look comfortable on camera, but I didn't really mind being patronized, if I was. I asked why they were curious about raccoons, and she told me that, apparently, Tokyo has a raccoon problem. People kept them as pets (really? a raccoon?), then couldn't handle them and released them into the streets.

They thanked me and moved on to a little old New York-y woman who passed by and talked in a loud Noo Yawk drawl. She talked longer than the film crew was interested in her, and the camera man took to shooting B-roll of the inside of a trash can instead.

So if anyone out there sees a sweaty guy in a gray University of Pennsylvania t-shirt talking about raccoons on a Japanese tv show (and I have a two-week growth of beard, so I probably look a bit like a big rodent myself), let me know. I'd be curious to know what comes of this.

Blogging my quals

My main task this summer, besides prepping three courses for my new gig, is to begin reading for my qualifying exams. I haven't set a date, but I'm probably going to take them in the spring, likely over spring break at Seton Hall, when I won't have teaching commitments to interfere with writing.

Between now and then, I need to do a lot of reading, and a lot of note-taking. I think that in order to keep myself honest and not piddle away the rest of the summer, I'm going to start blogging my reading list. I've set a goal of 150 pages per day. I think it's reasonable on most days to expect that.

I don't know what these posts are going to look like. Maybe short summaries combined with commentary, like formal annotated bibliographies or short response papers. Maybe just notes and thoughts on ideas they inspire for my dissertation.

But if you happen to read this, and think you might want to follow along, you're likely to see a whole lot of U.S. journalism history covered here, particularly the intellectual history of American journalism (which is a theme I may take up in the dissertation), and the history of journalism education. There will also be a lot of First Amendment reading, which will be the biggest subset of the intellectual history of American journalism reading that I'm doing.

First off, I'm going to re-read E.H. Carr's 'What is History?' which I read at the beginning of David Greenberg's media history seminar at Rutgers. I think a good philosophical look at historiography is a good way to start.

Lorber or hate her

We media types seem to be obsessed--not quite to a creepy extent--with MTV's The Paper, a "reality" show about a high school newspaper in Broward County, Florida. And I'll admit to being one of them. I never worked on my high school paper (that was mostly the province of a classmate I barely knew who seriously used the byline--granted, based on his real name--I.P. Lakes), but I did devote 1998 almost entirely to my undergraduate newspaper's weekly entertainment magazine. So I know what the publication obsession is like. Most of my best friends from college were from the Daily Pennsylvanian or 34th Street, the magazine I edited.

I don't see myself in the characters, but I do see some potentially pernicious caricatures. Chuck Barney pointed out the fairly obvious "bitch" characterization of Amanda Lorber, the editor of the paper. But I don't think there's much reason to hope that this will drive kids into j-schools. The paper is almost absent in the paper. You could almost substitute the Latin club for The Circuit, and have the same ambitious, smart, nerdy kids jockeying for control so that it will look good on their college apps.

But these kids aren't just smart. They're white. They're wealthy. And what's even more subversive, they're surprisingly Jewish. They're Jewish in a pretty secular way--no one's running around in a skullcap and a prayer shawl--but they toss off casual references to remembering Hebrew school. I'd like to think that this would help show the world (i.e., MTV viewers) that Jewish kids are just like any other, but as a half Jew myself, I can't help but wonder if this will just perpetuate Jews-in-the-media stereotypes instead.

Am I really concerned? Probably not. Will I still watch Amanda scheme and the rest of them scheme against Amanda? Yeah, I will. In the end, will it matter much one way or the other? Again, probably not.

But media types love nothing more than to watch and write about media types. Just look at me.

But frankly, I think they should move The Circuit completely online. It would more accurately reflect the world they're going to go into--if they go into journalism at all.

Professionalization Without Standardization: Journalism Education, Voice, and Democracy

I attended two conferences a week ago on a sort of crazy schedule: Auburn, Alabama on Friday afternoon; back in New York City for conference number two on Saturday morning. But I presented two papers I care quite strongly about.

Friday's paper was the first in what I hope will be a series developing a theory of the First Amendment based on one of my media theory heroes, the late Jim Carey. I call it a "Conversation Model" of the First Amendment, one that is rooted in the cultural studies idea that conversation constitutes culture--or the idea that we are a product of our interactions with each other, our environment, and with various media. It's a theory that I think encourages individual voices.

Saturday morning, I presented my history of American journalism schools from the end of the Civil War to the founding of Columbia's J-school in 1912. My thesis there is that journalism didn't take up the opportunity to solidify itself as a professional school when others (law, medicine, education, and on and on) did, fusing Progressivism, German universities' ideas of research and the burgeoning middle-class professionalism.

Bt as I was gathering material for yet another paper that I plan to write (this one analyzing the robust history of anti-J-school rants), I had the idea that the real problem with journalism school is that it doesn't teach ideals; that it teaches standards. And standardization is the enemy of voice. And voice is the primary component of conversation. And conversation is essential to Democracy. And a free press is the great bulwark of liberty.

(The impetus for this link was an essay by Ron Rosenbaum on a wonderful NYU compilation of essays about J-school.)

So here is the challenge to myself. Three things I need to write now:

1. That analysis of the anti-J-school rant.
2. An essay (or maybe a reported article, even for the mainstream media?) about how the Columbia J-school revitalization (which spawned that NYU online colloquium) got derailed--telling the story from Lee Bollinger's halting of the dean search in 2002 until Nick Lemann's (accidental?) release of his self-evaluation a couple of months ago.
3. My dissertation, fully exploring the links between democracy and the education of journalists.

Maybe that last one is too ambitious. But I like ambitious.

Anyway, the implications of this for journalism instructors: teach the democratic implications. Don't stifle the voice with "technique."

It's not a fully-formed idea. Feel free to pick it apart.