Politics schmolitics

I want to run coverage of the presidential election campaigns, but I can only rarely bring myself to put any of the crap that AP writes into my paper. I do not care about:

Who’s ahead in the latest poll. Screw the horse-race, we’ll know a year from November.
Infighting among campaigns. Of course they’re fighting; duh.
Stenography of candidates’ scripted statements. When was the last time a candidate said something fascinating, witty or statesmanlike on the stump?

I want to give readers at least a semblance of info that will help them make a choice in the primaries and then in the election. (Call me an eternal optimist, but I’m willing to suspend the disbelief that our votes will actually be counted and honestly reported by Mr. Diebold.)

But there is precious little in the coverage that comes across the wires that fits that criterion. And let’s not kid ourselves about how much time and energy that I, a small-time, small-market newspaper editor, have to put into such a quest. I need hard-nosed looks at who’s paying for whose campaigns. I need subtle, revealing biographies. I get a steady stream of crap. And I won’t bore my readers with it.

I’m telling you, the Associated Press (not to mention all of us who enable it) is hastening the demise of the American newspaper.

Awww, they like us

When you work for a newspaper, you’re mainly apt to hear from the public when you screw something up, or failed to catch someone else’s screw-up. And woe be to a copy editor or designer if he lets slip in public that he works for the paper: Then he has the unenviable task of explaining what he does for a living and/or having some bitter ass grind his axe for 30 minutes. Or answering the (intended to be) rhetorical question: “Don’t newspapers proofread, anymore?” Or all three.

Those were largely my experiences in the news biz for many years. Not everyone was actually mean, but the ratio of unpleasant encounters to pleasant wasn’t all that great.

Then I went to work for Bluffton Today. I don’t know if it was because it was delivered free, or folks liked our snippets of self-deprecating humor, or because we ran lots of fluffy pets stuff, but people loved us. Publicly. Like, in the checkout line at the grocery store. It was astonishing.

I got a tiny taste of that with the new gig, today, in the form of an anonymous voicemail:

“I’m not going to leave my name and number, I just wanted to let you know that I got one of your papers today and I think it is positively great. There used to be a newspaper like yours, it was only weekly, called the “Tarheel Shopper” and a nice little sales paper called the “Fayetteville Trader,” but the
“Fayetteville Observer” stomped them down and bought them out. They even bought out the Paraglide.
I was so glad when someone threw one in my yard today that I ran down the street thanking them. Don’t let them buy you out. They are not the only newspaper in town – now. This is so great. I stole one from my doctor’s office the other day. I was so glad when someone threw one at my home today. Thank you very, very much. Keep up the good work.”

I do think there is hope for news. I don’t know if there is room for multiple newspapers in all our markets, but there is in people’s living rooms.

P.S.: Regarding the caller’s comparison of SmartNews to a couple of defunct shoppers — We only dream of having the ad content of a shopper. We are a free paper, but we’re not a “total market coverage product.”

Colbert

I thought Stephen did a nice job on the “tasered kid” story, ripping the daylights out of the (admittedly obnoxious) kid’s fellow students for their utter lack of reaction, and of Gen-Why for preferring virtual protest to knocking heads in the streets. Uh, wait, that sounds like this blog. Ah, well, I got a good coupla belly laughs from his “The Word” segment and his Atone Phone bit with Ed Asner.

Asner: “I’ve got to admit, you’ve got spunk.”
Stephen: “Why, thank you.”
Asner: “I hate spunk!”

Class move for those of us decrepit enough to remember.

That kid who got himself Tasered at the Kerry forum …

… was waving a book, I saw it in the photos on AP. A closer look indicates it was a book by lefty journalist Greg Palast, “Armed Madhouse.” According to Palast’s blog, the out-of-control student, Andrew Meyer, was quoting passages from the book that claimed Sen. John Kerry won the 2004 presidential election and confronting Kerry about having failed to challenge the vote count.

You can’t say it’s not interesting stuff.

Yet another way to auto-filter the news

I ran across this in a LinkedIn Q&A. It’s called Ten by Ten. Here’s the lowdown:

Every hour, 10×10 scans the RSS feeds of several leading international news sources, and performs an elaborate process of weighted linguistic analysis on the text contained in their top news stories. After this process, conclusions are automatically drawn about the hour’s most important words. The top 100 words are chosen, along with 100 corresponding images, culled from the source news stories. At the end of each day, month, and year, 10×10 looks back through its archives to conclude the top 100 words for the given time period. In this way, a constantly evolving record of our world is formed, based on prominent world events, without any human input.

Sources.

Currently, 10×10 gathers its data from the following news sources:
Reuters World News
BBC World Edition
New York Times International News

In my experience, the pictures vanished from the grid after the first click, which greatly diminished the alleged intuitiveness. Maybe it’s just a temporary glitch. Your results may vary.

It’s all a bit counterintuitive to a guy who’s immediate job is to scan the wires so you don’t have to. But it’s darkly amusing to watch what we once may have thought of as a fairly intellectual job automated out of existence, like a typesetter or a factory welder. What we need is a killer app that makes arrogant, overpaid CEOs obsolete.

See you in Birdland, Joe

Austrian jazz pianist Joe Zawinul, who founded influential 1970s jazz-rock group Weather Report, has died.

Time to break out some old fusion, from back before it got all sappy and cheesy and “smooth.”

Step to the Mo

Rap Heroes Talk Smart Money at A&T

Those new Nikes are fresh, but will they rock your retirement like a money market account?

Rap artists and fans debated the finer points of money management this weekend at a seminar at North Carolina A&T University in Greensboro. The event was sponsored by the Hip-Hop Action Network, led by music industry heavyweight Russell Simmons.

Life imitates art. As soon as I saw this article, I thought of the Chappelle Show sketch. (The second of two on the link; not safe for work.) I wonder if anyone brought up the spoof at the seminar. Or would that be when keepin’ it real goes wrong?

Also, does anyone use the term “fresh” anymore?

I’m sick and tired of these …

No idea why it took so long for this story to slither into the light.

Security officers found 30 snakes, a dead bird and pieces of several other birds in the luggage of a man arriving at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport from South Korea last month.

Bonus: The link to ajc.com includes a nice photo of the asps, et al., provided by TSA, which my friend Doug says stands for Thousands Standing Around.

A racier headline than even I would have published

And that’s saying something. Read it here.

Bullish on news, if not newsprint

I’ve worked for more than my share of “former” newspapers. And at the surviving papers today, I’m seeing many bosses do the blame game and have ugly public panic attacks as their print products teeter on the abyss of irrelevance.

Because she’s preaching to my choir, I’m adding Charlotte-Anne to the blogroll. She’s a little ahead of my 2.0 curve, however. Reckon I best be catchin’ up:

Thanks to the wonders of Ajax, I can now have my 25 current favorite niches fed into little modules on my Netvibes start page. Among other things, I have the local weather, my three favorite news feeds, an online magazine, a half dozen journalism and news blogs, a Flickr photo montage of photos tagged “San Antonio,” a YouTube feed of video tagged “politics,” and a dynamic Craigslist search for something I’m in the market for.

And if the local news organization does something smart, like offering me a feed of content that I can’t get anywhere else – content about my neighborhood, for instance – then it will earn a piece of real estate on my Netvibes start page.

Footbawl

A humiliation at the hands of the champs

Watched some of the second half of the NFL season-opener, tonight, and I didn’t mind the outcome one bit. And I’m not a Colts fan.

Last season, I picked up a little bit of an attitude problem about the Saints. I’m an N.C. State Wolfpack fan (class of ‘88). Having Mario Williams picked up by the Texans as the No. 1 draft choice was about the only bright spot in the football season. Of course, the TV geniuses all pronounced Mario a bust and whined that Reggie Bush, the No. 2 pick, should have gone ahead of Mario. And ESPN couldn’t stop polishing Reggie Bush’s knob.

Not to mention, the Saints had just picked up Drew Brees, who’d decided to become a good quarterback in San Diego just in time to keep Wolfpack alum Philip Rivers from playing. And then Brees out-statisticked Rivers last year, which is irritating.

So it was fun to watch Reggie and Drew pretty much eat it the whole second half.

Sometimes you have to stretch a little to give a damn about a football game. But I’m willing to go the extra mile. I do this for you, the dedicated ‘Lamentations’ blog viewer.

Therapist, heal thyself

So Apple is apologizing for dropping the price on the iPhone. “Sorry we overcharged you tech-obsessive suckas,” Steve Jobs seems to be saying.

Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs apologized and offered $100 credits Thursday to people who shelled out up to $599 for an iPhone this summer and were burned when the company chopped $200 from the expensive model’s price.

In a letter on the company’s Web site, Jobs acknowledged that Apple disappointed some of its customers by cutting the price of the iPhone’s 8-gigabyte model and said he has received hundreds of e-mails complaining about the price cut.

OK, so people being pissed off over a price cut is funny enough. But that’s only half the story, thanks to this juicy gobbet:

And for many of the iPhone’s early adopters, money is not and never was an issue. They were after the gratification of knowing they were among the first owners of something that was cool, even revolutionary.

“If they told me at the outset the iPhone would be $200 cheaper the next day, I would have thought about it for a second — and still bought it,” said Andrew Brin, a 47-year-old addiction therapist in Los Angeles. “It was $600 and that was the price I was willing to pay for it.”

That’s right, you heard right: The guy who’s happy to overpay for the gadget is an “addiction therapist.”

Scan the rest of the article for signs of the Apocalypse here.

Sometimes you’re the hero, sometimes you’re the goat

Nepalese airline sacrifices goats to help repair airplane

KATMANDU, Nepal (AP) — Nepal’s state run airline sacrificed two goats earlier this week, hoping it would please the gods and resolve technical problems with a troubled jet, officials said Thursday.

One of the airline’s two Boeing 757 aircraft has been grounded for maintenance since last month. The other jet has suffered technical problems that forced the airline to cancel several flights, stranding passengers.

Hoping to end those problems, the airline sacrificed the goats earlier this week, according to an airline official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to reporters.
It is common in predominantly Hindu Nepal to sacrifice animals hoping for good luck and blessings.

A photograph published in the Kantipur newspaper earlier this week showed the two goats sacrificed in front of the plane Sunday. The photographer was detained for hours for taking photographs in a restricted area.

Evidently, the chief engineer saw in a dream what the problem was, and the solution. Here’s the Kantipur report: http://www.kantipuronline.com/kolnews.php?&nid=121310 No goat-sacrifice photo in the online version, as it turns out.

Fear and loathing in Martha’s Vineyard

I was curious what the upshot was with the story about the guy who allegedly crashed a John Edwards function at Martha’s Vinyard in Massachusetts. I ran across a post on the Daily Kos, a liberal blog, which had been taken down. Google cached the post, though, and here’s the link:

http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:EUoBclpk82kJ:dailykos.com/story/2007/8/29/14043/9606+Michael+Duga&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=5&l=us

Seems there is a lot of confusion about Michael Duga, maybe some of which is going on in his own mind, but both he and Senator Cleland have weighed in publically now over at The Alanta Journal Constitution now.

And then here’s someone who’s done a lot more digging than I care to:
http://szuping.com/blog/index.php/2007/08/28/who-is-michael-duga-jr (“A blog by Kevin and Cathy about parenting, Home Park, Atlanta, and family.”)
The blogger’s summary:

This guy is apparently some piece of work.

Political campaigns seem to bring out the weirdness; I guess some things never change. It’ll be interesting to see if the full tale can ever be told.

If only The Onion were syndicated

… then I could run stuff like this in print. Well, assuming we could afford the feed. An article like this is just a natural for SmartNews:

http://www.theonion.com/content/news_briefs/researchers_find_link?utm_source=onion_rss_daily

A study released Tuesday by the Lyman Center for Policy Evaluation and Strategy may have uncovered a link between school-based education and human smartness.

“Based on these forms we had people fill out, and these charts we came up with, we’re pretty sure exposure to education in early life is consistent with higher levels of smartness-having overall,” said Brent Shale, one of the study’s coauthors. “Also, we figured out that the more educated-er people are, the better they are at doing complicated stuff like filling out forms and understanding charts.”

If the study results are corroborated, the researchers say, it could mean “a whole new understanding of, you know, what smartness even is.”