Journalism's future

The column was filled with venom. You could tell the young writer didn't have a clue, but she thought she did. Her anger, so childish in a way, came through. It said loudly and clearly to the newspaper adviser: "Just who the hell do you think you are?"
Sorry, but that anger is misplaced and evidence of her cluelessness is demonstrated to all.
She said in her final column for the student newspaper that those who criticize her work are wrong. It isn't her fault if her work is less than perfect. If we want to criticize we need to criticize those who really should be blamed, her professors in the department of communication.
Blame my professors?
Is there no sense of personal responsibility? No understanding that you don't learn it all in a 16-week semester? No understanding that a part-time student journalist just cannot match the experience and wisdom accumulated over a 30-year career?
No. There was no such understanding demonstrated in this column published in the student newspaper last week.
Every day I see evidence that the age of newsprint just might be coming to an end. Our harsh economy seems likely to finish off what arrogant editors and publishers threw away in their rush to appease the gods of readership and profit. Newspaper have been shedding readers for a half century, and for the past quarter of a century one newspaper after another has been gobbled up by chains which owe their financial future to the barrons of Wall Street. Today those chickens are coming home to roost.
Many of our newspapers are only bloodless corpses today, and some of the others have the rattle of death hanging in their throats. For example, the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and other Tribune Co. properties. Sam Zell, the real estate tycoon extrordinaire of Chicago, has announced he's going to take the Tribune Co. into bankruptcy. That after he raided the employee pension plan to finance his purchase of the company. The only thing this would-be savior has shown is that the old business school adage that a businessman can run any company is baloney. Zell's complete failure as an owner is evidence every day. He created this debt heavy load himself and now finds he can't make payment on that debt. I guess for Sam Zell, he has discovered that running a media empire is vastly different that running the overblown real estate empire he created.
So, my arrogant student journalist will graduates in a few days. I wonder if there will be any journalism jobs there for her, and question just what we have prepared her to do. For her sake and for the sake of all our student journalists, I hope we soon find the model of the future for journalism.

Beauty sends our minds wandering

Thanksgiving 2008 has come and gone. For my wife and I it was a marathon trip from Boone, North Carolina, to Rome, Georgia, and back in 72 hours. You could say that we are getting beyond our prime for these long car trips. Bathrooms and the need to stretch creaking knees get in the way of long stretches between fillups. So, our travels have taken on a less hectic and more leisurely pace.

Saturday morning, after driving from 9 a.m. until 7 p.m. on Friday, I attended my weekly Bible study and in the discourse made the point that Heaven must be like A&W Rootbeer stands. I don't know of any in North Carolina, but it seems Tennessee and northern Georgia are filled with them. So, if you love the frosted mugs and the supercooled elixir as do my wife and I, then those A&W stands are like Heaven. They are far away and hard to reach, but oh so worth the journey to get there.

Of course one of our more well-off retirees made the point that he didn't think A&W was Heaven. In fact, he thought more of the other place since he had invested a lot in the stock and had evidently lost much of his investment. Well, I guess I should have told him that faith required patience; but I let it pass.

On our trip back from my wife's mother and her third husband's place, we stopped in a small town in Tennessee called Ocoee at a Huddle House Restaurant. It was there we both ventured on flights of imagination. Cynthia, of course, took the more romatic path while I, as a journalist trained to observe, took the more practical path.

Our waitress, for lack of a better description, had the fading beauty of a Playboy Bunny, and that's where my wife went. She envisioned this aging beauty as one who had left for the bright lights of the world only to be bruised and sent back home broken but defiant. I, on the other had, first noticed she was not wearing a regulation T-shirt as were the other waitresses, or the cook. That said to me that perhaps she was the day manager or, possibly, the franchise owner for Ocoee.

Now, the truth is probably nothing at all like our mindless wanderings as we left Ocoee and headed toward Maryville, Severville, North Carolina and home. Our beautiful, friendly waitress was probably just that, a hometown girl grown up with children, a husband working in the local whatever plant, and both attending the local Baptist church on Sunday mornings. Take your pick, but if you ever are passing through Ocoee on Highway 411, stop at the Huddle House and enjoy an order of bacon, overeasy eggs, hashbrowns, toast and coffee. It's a clean, friendly place to break your travels.

The Gang of Four

It was so surreal on Friday. Our economic world crashed around us last week and there were our president, George W. Bush; the secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson; the Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke; and the chairman of the Security and Exchange Commission, Chris Cox standing in the Rose Garden of the White House assuring us they had things under control. All that was necessary was for Congress to forget about partisanship, and the abysmal track record of these four so-called wizards in regard to the economic collapse.

We've been kicking around for a decade when to say the 20th century ended. So many have wanted to peg its demise to the establishment of the Internet as a viable communication tool for average people, but I'd like to suggest that the end of the 20th century arrived this past week, on September 12th, when Wall Street finally melted.

As we listened and watched the news last week, it was sobering how many commentators were talking in terms not heard since Black Friday, when the Stock Market crashed in 1929. And there was the Gang of Four, assuring us they had things under control. All that would be necessary would be for us average tax payers to pick up the tab for the failing hubris of men and women frantically chasing your and my wallet. Once again it seems that Wall Street had figured out how to swindle the pants off all of us. But this time, unlike 1929 when those who were guilty had to actually suffer the pain of their greedy money grab; the guilty will be bailed out by the Federal Government.

Frankly, I just wish some of them would have the common decency to jump from their New York skyscraper windows like their grandfathers did 80 years ago. It does make one wonder whether we have finally reached the end of the long rope we have been dangling from for a half century in this country.

One of my favorite pieces of music has been Aaron Copeland's Fanfare for the Common Man. It has been associated for so many years with Abraham Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address. It resonates with the solemn grandeur of the man who must roll up his sleeves and work his butt off to feed his family, all the while being asked to sacrifice for God and country, sometimes giving the ultimate sacrifice for his nation.

When one thinks of that image, one repeated so often in our nation's history, one must wonder about the squealing pigs at the trough of Wall Street greed. Are they offering sacrifice? Are they offering to protect the nation? Are they offering to set aside their personal fortune for the survival of the nation? The answer is no. As often happens when the course of events slaps a stiff call for sacrifice on them, it is to the federal government they run with pleas to be bailed out at the expense of people who actually work their tails off every day to just make ends meet.

One could ask what else did you expect.

A confusing Sunday night

The noise outside my office door is growing steadily into a crescendo of sound. Youthful voices challenge each other for dominance as everyone tries to talk at the same time and tries to be heard at the same time. It is Sunday night and the newspaper staff is gathering for its latest meeting. The staff meets Sundays and Wednesday’s at 8 p.m., and I, as the adviser, am here. I don’t actually control the meeting. That’s the editor’s job. I do, however, offer criticism of the last issue or two in an effort to get them to improve as reporters and editors, graphic designers and photographers. Lately I’ve come to believe it just might be a lost cause.

As the frost on my head grows ever whiter, and the waddle of my neck grows like that of an old Tom Turkey, the failure of my voice to crack through this cacophony is more and more evident.

Over the past three weeks I have been attempting to convince the young editor and his staff that they, talented as they are, do not have all the keys to the journalism kingdom. Their stories are poorly edited, with quality greatly dependent on the raw talent of the writer. Of course that means there’s a great disparity between stories in terms of style, grammar, quality of thought, you name it. While John McCain has been making much of Obama’s off-hand remark about “putting lipstick on a pig,” the newspaper staff seems to believe that just a bit more color on the front page will hide all their sins.

Perhaps I have finally reached a point in my career in which I have failed to understand how to reach a new crop of students. Each year it has grown worse, from the standpoint of convincing them they can do better with just a little more work, until this year when it seems the feeling among the senior staff is they already know what to do and no one can really tell them anything they don’t already know. So, they don’t listen.

I wonder if a younger hand might cut through the bullshit with more force than I seem to be able to slice it. Then I watch and listen and I have come to believe it is not an age thing at all. It is an attitude, a mindset that refuses to admit any culpability.

The First Day of Class

The excitement is growing. The students outside my door are loud today. Despite the rain from Tropical Storm Fay, they are having a blast being back at school.

A large portion of the excitement is from the quickly approaching start of the football season. Appalachian State will get its day in the sun on Saturday as it takes on LSU in Baton Rouge. Of course, everyone expects ASU to valiantly struggle against daunting odds, but to in the end fold its tent and accept the inevitable.

That, of course, is to suffer a staggering and embarrassingly one-sided loss to the Tigers.

The entire world of the Bowl Subdivision wants to slap us down. The Mountaineers were audacious enough last year to go to Ann Arbor and beat Michigan. And the football world hasn’t been the same since.

What do I think? Well, coaches can talk too much about the possibilities of getting embarrassed by a school you should easily beat. Sometimes if you over coach, your team reacts in ways you don’t expect when they get their nose bloodied. After all, isn’t that what happened last year when Michigan found out those boys from that small school in the mountains of North Carolina knew how to play football?

So, what’s going to happen Saturday in Baton Rouge? Appalachian State is going to come out a winner, regardless of what the score is. On national TV football fans will see a talented, well-coached group of young men play a game they love to the best of their abilities and when the final gun sounds, they’ll walk out of the stadium with their heads high.

And, who knows, lightning can struck twice.

Parley Vous .....

Did you see the snappy photograph of French President Nicolas Sarkozy with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev the other day? You know the one that appeared on front pages around the world as Sarkozy successfully negotiated a cease fire in the dust up between Russia and Georgia.

My initial reaction was "What???"

My adult life and study of international relations has always had the United States as the principal negotiator with the former Soviet Union when these flare ups happen. The person in that photograph should have been Condoleezza Rice, the American Secretary of State, or Vice President Dick Cheney. But it wasn't.

In fact, we heard that President George W. Bush conversed with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin while at the opening sessions of the Olympics in China. Well, Putin left China to return to Russia and hurried to the war zone to cheer on his troops. A fat lot of good Bush's conversation had. I guess he was looking deep into Putin's eyes again. The image of Bush as this tragedy continued to unfold was of him batting balls or something a round with some of the athletes. It wasn't until the situation in Georgia looked to be spiraling totally out of control that Bush returned to Washington. I guess this was another of those Katrina moments.

I don't remember a time in my life when the United States failed to move decisively in an international crisis. Now, our movements might have been more inclined to diplomacy than to militarism, but at least we were doing something. And you can bet that Henry Kissinger would have been standing before the cameras mumbling something about the "Vorld" and "Var" before he hopped onto an airplane to head to the world's capitals to negotiate a settlement. In fact, even during the Iranian crisis in the late '70s our diplomats were working the world to negotiate a settlement. This time, it seems we were content to let the French carry the load of peace.

Shame on us.

What's in a name?

Your name is all you have, at least that's the lesson my mother instilled in me as a young boy. She said if you treat people with honesty, dignity and respect, your name would be an asset. That was another time and place if we are to go by some of today's examples.

Wachovia announced this week it had lost $8.9 billion in the second quarter, mainly in its mortgage divisions. If you accept the comments of CEO Bob Steel, these losses came about from faulty management decisions within the mortgage division. Yeah, the same old story we've heard so many times the past few months, it seems like the needle is stuck in a groove.

What's the solution for Wachovia? Cutting 10,750 jobs, that's what. Putting people on the street. It sounds more and more like the 1930s after the banking crisis.

What does all this have to do with a post about names? Well, Wachovia is a good example of how one company, at least, continues to trash its name and its reputation.

If you're from North Carolina, you probably remember the hometown First Union National Bank branch. In the 1960s these were small places, with people you knew working the teller windows and in the offices. Small town values were the norm along with small town Chamber of Commerce sensibilities. But that has changed.

For First Union National Bank, it began to change in the 1980s when the banks management decided it was no longer profitable to be a small bank playing at banking in a middling state. First Union National Bank had to grow and the place to grow was Florida.

Do you remember the Florida of the 1980s? That was the decade of fast money in a state powered by the legalized laundering of drug money through the real estate and development industries. No one was crude enough to come out and say it, but First Union National Bank wanted into that action, as long as it was legal.

Well, once First Union National Bank moved outside North Carolina, the old small town name had to go. So, FUNB it became, then just First Union.

Over the next two decades, however, First Union, like all other banks in this country, began to sell themselves to the big customer and to forget or downright gouge their small customer.
Granny with her small checking account suddenly was eaten alive by overdraft fees, late fees, fees to answer the phone, or fees to talk to a live person.

It was treatment like this that led to the spurt of small town bank development in North Carolina. Hey, Boone has a couple of these going right now and people love them. I don't hear people talk about Wachovia that way. Oh, Wachovia, I almost forgot.

After First Union had succeeded in trashing its own name in the eyes of many of its customers, it bought Wachovia Bank, a smaller state competitor with a really top notch reputation and name recognition. You guessed it, suddenly First Union became Wachovia, playing off the positives Wachovia had earned but First Union only bought.

Well, it seems this banking giant we know as Wachovia has succeeded in tarnishing its name again. You'd think they'd learn a lesson or two along the way.

Football is not too far away!

Football season is only a few weeks away. The pros go to camp before too many weeks will have passed, and the colleges will be putting on their pads in August. I can't wait.

What do you make of Brett Favre? He can't seem to make up his mind. For the past few seasons he's hinted at retiring, then not at retiring. At the end of last season he did more than hint, he actually did it after crying his eyes out on national TV. Now he's crying some more because he wants to play afterall, but the Packers, tired of his peek-a-boo dance with stepping away from the game, don't want him back. Unfortunately they don't want anyone else to have him either. It all makes for some interesting talk during a time when baseball is in the long, slow stretch of the season; the political campaigns are in the t'ween times after the primaries and before the conventions; and we are all just a little tired of the talking heads on TV who really don't have anything to say to us.

Do you remember the old College All-Star Game? It hasn't been played in years, but I used to look forward to watching the new crop of college recruits playing the previous year's NFL champs. I remember the year the mighty Green Bay Packers took the college boys too lightly and lost. A couple of things killed that game. First, when the new recruits began signing huge contracts many opted not to play for fear of getting hurt. And, what NFL champ wants to open with a meaningless game in which they have absolutely nothing to prove, but everything to lose. But it was a wonderful bookmark on the changing seasons. When the all-stars and champs took the field in Chicago, you knew football was just around the corner.

Amo, Amas, Amat!

Amo, Amas, Amat, Miss Alley's full of snot!

Bo, Bis, Bit, Miss Alley's full of ....!

Well, you get the point. That's the only Latin I remember from my high school Latin class. My teacher first year was Miss Catherine Alley, a spinster from Georgia, and Mr. Aubrey Eggers, an old bachelor from Glen Alpine, North Carolina, was my second year teacher.

The only reason I remember that little bit of Latin knowledge is the two little ditties I and my fellow students used to memorize the conjugation of these two verbs.
Unfortunately, that's the extent of my pre-college training in the classics. Caesar's "Gallic Wars" and Edith's Hamilton's book on Roman mythology.

The next time I attempted the classics was eight years later as a returning veteran at the University of North Carolina Asheville.

UNCA considered itself to be the liberal arts campus in the UNC system. Don't know about that then, but we did have a pretty extensive focus on the liberal arts. I remember that in order to get beyond the sophomore year one had to take a battery of tests to judge one's abilities in history, basic science, literature, art and music.

I don't know of many state-supported schools today that require the training in the disciplines one needs to write clearly, think inductively, and to express one's self fairly elegantly (present company excluded, please). That seems to be a creature of the past.

Jesse Helms has won another one!

Back in the 1980s, when I was just a young reporter in Lenoir, North Carolina, Jesse Helms had taken after Dan Rather. It was 1985 and Helms called on conservatives to buy CBS stock and in sufficient numbers to gain control of the company.
Helms, our notorious “Senator No,” was upset with Rather. The CBS news hound, if you remember, had been anchor for a few years after replacing Walter Cronkite and Helms wanted Rather fired. Rather had made a habit of confronting Republicans in Washington. If you remember, Rather famously, or infamously depending on your point of view, confronted Richard Nixon at a press conference with a belligerent response to a quip by Nixon. But Jesse’s efforts failed to get CBS brass to send Rather packing.
Well, that was funny at the time and I had some fun writing opinion columns supporting the freedom of the press and getting stinging letters to the editor back from Carter Wrenn, one of Jesse’s more right-wing minions in the Congressional Club. That was Helm’s keep me in Washington organization that searched for money across the nation and even, some have said, from some foreign donors.
Rather wasn’t fired, and neither was I. All seemed safe in the world of journalism. Even a guy as powerful as Jesse Helms couldn’t crash the First Amendment.
I have come to the conclusion, however, that Jesse Helms actually won that war. While I might have won a small skirmish in that great campaign to cripple the independent press in America, Helms and his minions, like Wrenn and Tom Ellis were able to keep Helms in power by defeating the most powerful Democrat of his generation, Jim Hunt. They were able to get Republicans, and not just country club Republicans like Jim Broyhill, elected to state office. They got conservative, really off the wall right-wing Republicans elected even at the expense of more moderate Republicans office holders. Helm’s cry for conservatives to buy stock and own a network and fire its top anchor proved farsighted.
What’s going on today in our world of media? Newspapers are sloughing off newsroom employees about as fast as an Ebola victim sheds blood. Our broadcast news organizations are weak shadows of the broadcast newsrooms of the past. And we did it to ourselves. One thing you could say about Jesse Helms, there was no hubris there. He always knew that it could end for him if he ever let his guard down. But we in the news media were only too content to sit on our powerful perches and believe the First Amendment was the only protection we needed from the likes of Jesse Helms, Carter Wrenn and Tom Ellis and the others who have spent the past two decades attacking the press at every opportunity.

Where is the sin?

Elliot Spitzer has been the top story this week. As the former governor
of New York twisted in a whirlwind of his own making, we discussed
almost every aspect of his life. We asked how a supposedly intelligent
man like Spitzer could think in this day and age he could practice adultery without it becoming public knowledge. I have chosen to use that word purposely.

Spitzer apparently used the services of high-priced prostitutes for years. He was a married man, so it seems adultery is the appropriate word to use. I don't recall hearing or reading that word in the press accounts this week. For me that is revealing. One might think that by only referring to Spitzer using prostitutes, we
avoid the issue of sin. That's understandable. We realize our media isn't in the sin business, and in fact seeks to avoid discussions of sin as that places them in a religious discussion. Sin is part of religion.

Christians and Jews both look at the Ten Commandments as important building blocks of human society. Thou shall not commit adultery is the seventh commandment. Thus, it is a sin, but our media chose not to refer to it as such, because we have lately tended to view it as a personal foible.

And that is at the heart of our conundrum. We don't want to talk about sin. To do so would force us to accept that we all sin, and Spitzer is someone who should be forgiven by us for it is up to our God to deal with Spitzer.
But we are not content to do that. Instead, we want to watch his
humiliation. And we want to punish him by forcing him, at the least, to
give up his position as governor.

As this week has passed, the Spitzer
story has tended to reveal much more about us than about him. In all
the TV footage I saw, one telling moment revealed so much about this
tragedy. When he was announcing his resignation, he made some reference
to leaving the public spotlight to work at restoring the trust of his
family. When he said that Spitzer's wife, Silda, with her sad and humiliated eyes looked up and swiveled to look into Spitzer's face. One wonders what she was thinking at that time. Perhaps she thought: "Now you worry about our trust?" Who knows? I think I saw a steely glint emerge from the pain, and if I were Elliot Spitzer, I'd be afraid of her.

46 Years: What a difference!

Walking by the theater in the student union today I noticed a double feature is being promoted: "Dr. No" and "Goldfinger." Now, I realize I'm really telling my age, but a peculiar thought swept through my mind. OK. I know, it's just a crazily misdirected brain fart, but it went through my mind.

"Dr. No" was released in 1962. That's at least 25 years before this crop of college students was born. Forty-six years ago for me. Wow! That's almost a lifetime. So, my mind immediately thought, if I go back 46 years before 1962, what was going on?

Well, for those of you who might be a little more challenged than I am mathematically, that takes us back to 1918.

That was a big year for the United States. World War I ended after the Doughboys whipped the Hun over there. But Americans were also just beginning to appreciate a somewhat new medium--the movies.

In 1918 we could watch the first film stud, Elmo Lincoln--Elmo! Lincoln!--you shout. Who the heck is that? Well, Elmo was our first movie Tarzan. The movie was made just four years after Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote the first Tarzan book.

Other treats included Tom Mix in "A Child of the Prarie." Tom Mix was our first cowboy star. Mary Pickford starred in "Stella Maris" (I wonder if Stella was related to Roger?), and Gloria Swanson starred in "Shifting Sands."

Other than the Tarzan movie I can't tell you much about the movies above, except that Tom Mix created a genre, the Western, that dominated American movies for the next half century. Mary Pickford later married Douglas Fairbanks (Senior, not Junior) and started a movie studio with several of her fellow actors. She was our first SUPER STAR. And, Gloria Swanson, well her last film was "Airport 1975" which was released in 1974.

All of those movies in 1918 were silent films. So, those 92 years have seen us go from crude black and white films to color films, from silent movies to talkies, to Doby sound systems, to digital mastering and projection.

Now, you notice I have nothing to say about quality. Those films were state of the art for their day. The actors have survived in our memories because of the images we have of them from film. And what about "Dr. NO"? Well, that one started another successful genre, the spy story and in particular the James Bond series. I've lost track of how many men have played James Bond. But in that 1962 classic, it was Sean Connery. Let's see if I can remember: Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, and now Daniel Craig. Oh, and let's not forget Barry Nelson who played the first James Bond in a TV version of "Casino Royale," or David Niven, Woody Allen and all the others who were Bond in the first movie version of "Casino Royale." It's enough to make your head spin, almost as much as trying to remember all the men who played Tarzan over the years, all basically playing the same character created by Elmo Lincoln in that 1918 film.