A new media slant from Apple:



The Incredible Edible iPod

By Cynthia L. Webb
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Monday, December 20, 2004; 10:11 AM

2004 is turning out to be the year of the iPod. Last week retailers reported that they're running short on the popular digital music players. This week brings news of novel ways that people are putting their iPods to work.

No. 1: Homemade broadcasts. The Boston Globe today wrote about "podcasting," a digital twist on the ham radio world: "Richie Carey has heard the future of radio. It's on an iPod music player. Carey, a 38-year-old website developer and marketing consultant from Sandwich, is among an early wave of fans for a new broadcast medium dubbed 'podcasting' -- audio content that listeners download from websites to iPods or similar digital music player devices. ... Carey is not just a daily consumer of podcasted talk shows about technology and politics but a fledgling podcaster himself. He has a regular audience of about 50 people who download his 'definitely not polished' spoken musings about life, personal electronics, and even the importance of getting your brakes checked -- a 'podcast' he made and instantly posted from his cellphone while sitting outside the Sears repair shop one day recently. 'This is technology that gives me a voice I never had a month ago,' Carey said. 'It's amazing how someone can now make a cellphone call that can be heard all around the world.' If Internet-based weblogs turned everyone into a potential newspaper columnist, and digital cameras let them become photojournalists, podcasting is promising to let everyone with a microphone and a computer become a radio commentator."
• The Boston Globe: Computer, Microphone, IPod Make Broadcasting Personal

Thought you might be interested:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
ELT News/eigoTown Xmas Party -- Wednesday, December 22nd in Yurakucho
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

The ELT News/eigoTown International Xmas Party will be held in Yurakucho at
the prestigious Foreign Correspondents Club (20th Floor with stunning views
of Tokyo) this Wednesday, December 22nd. (Thursday is a national holiday.)

The party runs from 6:30 to 9:00 and includes food and drink for 4,000 yen.
Don't miss out! Reserve your place now:

http://www.eltnews.com/party/index.shtml#register

We already have over 300 people pre-registered -- this is going to be the
best party yet!

The FCC is at the top of the Yurakucho Denki Building which is just across
the street from Yurakucho JR station and directly above Hibiya subway
station.

More information in English (and a map) here:
http://www.eltnews.com/party/

More information in Japanese (and a map) here
http://www.eigotown.com/party/party.shtml

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
ELT News/eigoTown Xmas Party -- Wednesday, December 22nd in Yurakucho

Frank Dies! I have watch many wonderful magazines launch and sink. This is another good one down the drain.

TORONTO - Frank, the satirical magazine that delighted in afflicting the comfortable, has ceased publication.

Famous for its gleeful mix of gossip and lowbrow humour, the magazine printed its final edition last week.




Frank's demise confirms the rumours, which had been circulating for months, that new publisher Fabrice Taylor was having difficulty turning the magazine around.

When Taylor – a former Globe and Mail columnist – took over from founding editor Michael Bate last year, circulation was 8,500, down from a high of roughly 16,000 during the 1980s.

Taylor had promised to relaunch Frank with a new focus on Bay Street gossip

Never embraced by the mainstream, the biweekly publication prided itself on reporting stories no other news organization would touch.

One of the main audiences for Frank was journalists, who eagerly devoured the Remedial Media section in the hopes of finding out what was really going on in the nation's newsrooms.

To be "Franked" came in some circles to mean that one had been the subject of an unflattering story in the magazine's newsprint pages.

CTV correspondent Mike Duffy was among the people who sued Frank for libel.

In an e-mail interview with the Canadian Press, Bate said that because of his business agreement with Taylor, the Frank trademark now reverts back to him.

"I believe there's still value in the name and I'm going to spend the next couple of months trying to figure out where the future lies," he said.

Bate also hinted that Frank may come back as a web-only publication, saying that "these are good times to be in the satire business."

The magazine was the subject of a 2001 documentary, The Frank Truth.

The much tamer Atlantic Canada Frank, Frank's former sister publication, is not affected by the demise of the national edition and will continue to publish as normal.

Written by CBC News Online staff

What is the difference between Journalism and History? Conventionally it was distance from the event. A time to consider more carefully and perhaps collect a more deverse set of sources so as to fit the event properly into its place. Take a look at this great article from the Columbia Review of Journalism:

Issue 5: September/October





IDEAS AND REVIEWS
ESSAY
Whose Turf is the Past?

BY ANDIE TUCHER

Journalists have been making history. In big, fat volumes.

It’s getting harder and harder these days to tell the difference between books of history and books of journalism. Dozens of current or former journalists — like David Halberstam, Anne Applebaum, David Maraniss, Melissa Fay Greene, Richard Kluger, Stanley Karnow, and Robert Caro — have been writing meaty books about events they may not have witnessed, set in times that are well past, and often involving people no longer available for interview. Neither first nor rough nor drafts, these books have the heft of history.

Historians, meanwhile, no longer waiting until the passions have cooled, are incorporating interviews and on-the-spot research into their writing about current or recent events, and more of them are aiming for audiences beyond academia. Oral historians may be best known for collecting the reminiscences of elderly Holocaust survivors and retired cabinet secretaries, but interviewers from Columbia’s Oral History Research Office were out on the streets just days after the reporters were to ask people about their experiences on September 11, 2001.

The boundaries between historians and journalists are crashing. Does it really matter that much? In some ways, perhaps not. “Both are basically telling a story,” said Barbie Zelizer, a former reporter who now teaches at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. “And anybody who can should be tackling events that are unsolved or traumatic; it’s not reserved territory. It’s only the historians and journalists who are traumatized if there’s no demarcation.”

That demarcation, like so many others, began its long goodbye during the intellectual and social tumult of the 1960s and 1970s. Rejecting as elitist and deficient the traditional emphasis on politics, diplomacy, and the acts of great men, historians focused instead on ordinary and even marginalized people — women, children, peasants, slaves — who have rarely left much of a paper trail in the libraries and archives. Their lives required different research methods to reach and different techniques to narrate.

Weird things began happening to academic conventions of style, method, objectivity, even the historian’s relationship to fact. In a striking reversal, Natalie Zemon Davis’s book followed the movie version. After serving as a consultant on the popular 1982 film The Return of Martin Guerre, a mysterious true-life tale about an abandoned wife and a dramatic imposture in sixteenth-century France, the Princeton professor went back to the archives to reexamine the events with a more analytical eye. She wrote a book with the same title, ruefully acknowledging that sometimes even the most scrupulous historian can’t be any more certain about events and motives than a movie. In his 1991 book Dead Certainties: (Unwarranted Speculations), Simon Schama, then at Harvard, tackled the problem of historical uncertainty with more glee than rue, tickling some colleagues and appalling others with his freewheeling reimaginings — complete with interior monologues and multiple points of view — of a heroic battlefield death in the eighteenth century and a sordid campus murder in the nineteenth.

In the news business, insurgent New Journalists, dismissing traditional reporting as boring, stagnant, and inadequate, were shattering just about every convention there was: the “5 Ws” style, the 750-word article, objectivity, permissible subjects, the use of the exclamation mark, and the old-fashioned dictum that reporters should never be part of the story. The result was long articles about baton twirling and whole books about oranges, and reporters who had been covering the era’s biggest stories, especially the civil rights movement and Vietnam, took those long stories to more permanent homes between hard covers.

A generation’s worth of changes in the way historians and journalists do their jobs has brought them so close together that the differences between their books sometimes seem notional, even anecdotal, to be summed up in a few generalizations — some of them, clearly, gross. Historians tend to have more endnotes, journalists more acknowledgements. Historians are the hedgehogs who know one big thing, journalists the foxes who know many things. Historians locate themselves within and draw upon (or argue with) a community of scholarship; journalists parachute in and take everyone out to lunch. Historians are freer from the pressures of the marketplace; journalists are freer to make the bestseller list. The darkest temptation of the historian is plagiarism; of the journalist, fabrication. The historians are the ones most skittish about using the first-person singular. The journalists are the ones most sunburned on the nose.

But both journalists and historians do see one consequential difference — and both see it as a strength. Nicholas Lemann, the dean of Columbia’s journalism school, is working on a book that won’t include a single interview with any witness or participant in the events he describes. It’s about a battle over voting rights in the Reconstruction South that foreordained the election crisis of 1876, and everybody involved is dead. But besides historical significance, it has what most journalists are trained to look for and, says Lemann, what professional historians are less adept at handling: a “hell of a story.”

“Historians try to pose a really interesting problem or contribute to the debate in a field,” says Lemann. “But it’s striking how little professional historians know about how to tell a popular story. They think ‘popular’ means ‘picking a good topic.’ They don’t see that storytelling is a learned skill; they don’t see that’s what the nonprofessionals are doing.”

That’s also why, Lemann continues, it’s the journalists — the Robert Caros and David McCulloughs — not the academic historians these days who are doing most of the “big-canvas books about big guys doing big things,” those sweeping accounts of war or the lives of presidents. Those are news stories.

Diane McWhorter, who spent nearly twenty years researching and writing her Pulitzer prize-winning Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, did get to interview people, including her own father, whose lives intersected with the lethal 1963 church bombing that lies at the heart of her book. But as a journalist venturing into history, she was, she says, “doubly obsessive; I had to be thorough, to dot all the i’s.”

And that wasn’t all. “I came to a point where I thought I understood it all,” she says, “but as a journalist bent on telling a story I also felt like I had twice the work. I had to understand the issues, but I also had to figure out how it all fit into some character’s story. I was used to having to figure out what the conflict was.”

Yet historians say they’re not immune to the appeal of a good yarn; they just use it differently. The Princeton professor Robert Darnton has noted a surge of academic interest in what he calls “incident analysis,” in which the historian starts with the sort of dramatic event any journalist would grab in a minute — a crime, a disaster, a dramatic imposture, or, as Darnton himself once did, the “great cat massacre” by roistering apprentices in eighteenth-century Paris — and “uses the narrative material to argue a case, one where an interpretive problem is at stake,” he said in an e-mail. The emphasis is on developing the thesis and sustaining the argument with adequate documentation. Indeed “narrative skill takes second place, if it figures at all.”

But the journalist’s professional conditioning to look for the good story, says Darnton, raises its own questions. Journalistic storytelling has a “stylized quality, which can be a disadvantage as well as an advantage. By that I mean a tendency to look for a lead instead of an argument, to hype things, overuse colorful quotes, and exaggerate the importance of personal quirks.”

People have always used stories — carefully told or not — to make sense of the world, to explain its big mysteries (“Why are there bad guys?”) and its small ones (“Why did he kill her?”). And it’s first and foremost through journalism, especially the busy organism of daily mass journalism, that a society builds the stories it needs most urgently. Journalists and the public together construct stories to order the chaotic buzz of breaking events into a satisfying narrative that reconfirms what’s both important and familiar in the world.

Because of its urgency, daily journalism is more prone to oversimplifying those narratives. Mary Marshall Clark, who as director of Columbia’s Oral History Office organized the 9/11 interview project, saw that temptation in full bloom in much of the journalistic coverage of that day. While the goal of oral-history interviewers is to gather and interpret people’s testimony about their experiences — “to witness the process of witnessing,” says Clark — and allow the account to unfold in its own way, many journalists were doing exactly the opposite, fitting the tragic events of the day into “a highly nationalistic frame that emphasized the heroism of the dead.”

The oral historians, on the other hand, says Clark, “picked up aspects of the whole experience — the immigrants afraid their ‘alien’ looks might bring violence down on them, or the firefighters who were uncomfortable being portrayed as heroes because they knew they’d made mistakes.” People like them were much less likely to make it into the mainstream media coverage at the time because they didn’t advance the narrative that both the public and the press seemed to prefer.

But there’s another problem, less deep perhaps but no less frustrating, with many of the events we call stories that make up the daily budget of the news media. Often they’re not really stories at all, simply piquant episodes, dramatic or telling or cautionary slices of life served up in dizzying succession, and when their “newsworthiness” fades they’re gone from the front page and the public eye. Gary Condit may once have been our constant companion at the breakfast table, but nowadays he never calls and he never writes. Or what seems to be a story proceeding steadily to its appointed end may suddenly veer into a completely new and unexpected direction — remember that “Mission Accomplished” banner? And without a visible ending it’s not “a hell of a story” yet, or even a story — it’s a Power Point presentation.

Which suggests that the distinction most worth exploring between history and daily journalism is neither professional nor temporal but teleological. History can have endings, and most journalism does not. Even though we know in our hearts that history is never really finished, that each new generation reinterprets the past in ways that make sense for its own particular present, narratives of the past can offer what daily journalism almost always cannot: the illusion, at least, of completion. Even though there’s no odometer that clicks over from “now” to “then,” the lengthening distance between event and interpreter can bring a certain clarity of vision, as can new evidence, a shifted perspective, or someday, perhaps, even a cooler look at that dusty old archive of oral histories about 9/11. Even though the arc of any historical narrative is arbitrary — stopping with V-J Day makes a vastly different story than stopping with the Berlin airlift — writers of history have a luxury denied the daily journalist: the hindsight to choose an endpoint rather than just waiting for it to come along.

And that promise of tidy resolution may be why, as important as journalism is to the continuing conversation of society, we all ask so much of History, with a capital H. You have only to run a Lexis/Nexis search for “history” within five words of “judge” to see how widespread and irresistible is the idea that there exists some final reckoning, some great arbiter that will coolly render the verdict of the ages, Olympian and infallible, and, no doubt, enshrined within a nice strong binding with gilt lettering on the spine. Even if we don’t like any of the history we’ve got now, we never seem to lose hope in the history of the future.

During the three and a half hours of interviews Bob Woodward conducted with George W. Bush for Plan of Attack, his almost instant book on the invasion of Iraq, the journalist asked the president how history would judge his war. “Bush smiled,” Woodward writes. “‘History,’ he said, shrugging, taking his hands out of his pockets, extending his arms out and suggesting with his body language that it was so far off. ‘We won’t know. We’ll all be dead.’”

He shouldn’t count on it. We all want to be around for that history.

Also look at these three:
ATTACK OF THE APPALLED EMBEDS
http://poynter.org/forum/?id=32365
In Kuwait, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld was asked why soldiers "had to
dig through landfills to find scrap metal to up-armor vehicles." The
soldier who asked the question discussed it beforehand with an
embedded reporter. In an email to colleagues at the Chattanooga
Times Free Press, reporter Lee Pitts explained, "I was told
yesterday that only soldiers could ask questions so I brought two of
them along with me. ... Before hand we worked on questions to ask
Rumsfeld about the appalling lack of armor." Pitts wrote, "This is
what this job is all about - people need to know. The soldier who
asked the question said he felt good." The paper signaled its
support, writing that the soldier "chose to ask the question," while
Pitts "used the tools available to him."
SOURCE: Poynter Online Forum, December 10, 2004
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3108
===========================How ARE THESE TWO CONNECTED?
QORVIS GOT SERVED, WITH SUBPOENAS
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49849-2004Dec8.html
The FBI searched three offices of the PR firm Qorvis Communications
and delivered subpoenas to a fourth office. Officials confirmed the
raids but refused further comment, saying there was an "ongoing
investigation." Saudi Arabia is a major Qorvis client; the firm
called the investigation a "compliance inquiry" under the Foreign
Agents Registration Act. The Justice Department found that "the
Saudi Arabian Embassy paid Qorvis $14.6 million for a six-month
period," for such services as distributing material highlighting
Saudi Arabia's "commitment in the war against terrorism and to peace
in the Middle East." Qorvis also did media outreach, lobbied
congressional staff members and Bush administration officials.
SOURCE: Washington Post, December 9, 2004
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3103
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
LOBBY, LOBBY, LOBBY, GET YOUR INFLUENCE HERE
http://thehill.com/news/120804/lobby.aspx
What were the largest lobbying contracts on Washington DC's power
corridor, K Street, in 2004? According to The Hill, top honors go to
the Asbestos Study Group, who paid $5.5 million for six months of
"lobbying and substantive expertise." The Asbestos Study Group is "a
group of large companies that have been defendants in asbestos
lawsuits," including Halliburton and Viacom. The "Patient Safety/
Pharmaceutical Systems Group," which includes Pfizer, Wyeth, Johnson
& Johnson and other drug companies, paid $1.4 million for lobbying
on "general patient safety and related pharmaceutical issues." Other
major lobbiers include the Business Roundtable, Microsoft, United
Airlines and Hewlett Packard.
SOURCE: The Hill, December 8, 2004
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3100

Hi your Interview articles are all due tomorrow. That's a reminder. I have a number of things to discuss in class and would like you to read the following articles and think about what they mean:
BIOTECH CRITIC DENIED TENURE AT UC BERKELEY
http://spinwatch.server101.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=312
Dr. Ignacio Chapela, whose research revealed contamination of native
Mexican corn with genetically engineered DNA, taught his last class
at University of California, Berkeley. Chapela was denied tenure at
Berkeley, despite "overwhelming support from his own department and
from his academic peers," GM Watch founder Jonathan Matthews
writes. Chapela had also been a critic of a $25 million research
deal between UC Berkeley and the Swiss biotechnology company
Novartis (now Syngenta). Chapela supporters believe he is being
retaliated against for his criticism of the biotech industry.
SpinWatch's Andy Rowell and Matthews exposed how Monsanto's Internet
PR company, Bivings Group, was at the very heart of the campaign to
vilify Chapela and his research.
SOURCE: SpinWatch, December 14, 2004
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3119
'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
DARK DAY FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISTS
http://www.alternet.org/election04/20742/
"In 1996, journalist Gary Webb wrote a series of articles that
forced a long-overdue investigation of a very dark chapter of recent
U.S. foreign policy â?? the Reagan-Bush administrationâ??s
protection of cocaine traffickers who operated under the cover of
the Nicaraguan contra war in the 1980s," Robert Parry of Consortium
News writes. Webb paid a high price for his "Dark Alliance" stories
written for the San Jose Mercury News. He was attacked by
journalistic colleagues and demoted by his paper, causing him to
quit. Despite CIA internal investigations that later validated much
of Webb's reporting, his career never recovered, and on Friday, Dec.
10, Gary Webb, 49, died of an apparent suicide. "Unintentionally,
Webb also exposed the cowardice and unprofessional behavior that had
become the new trademarks of the major U.S. news media by the
mid-1990s," Parry writes. "Foreshadowing the media incompetence that
would fail to challenge George W. Bushâ??s case for war with Iraq
five years later, the major news organizations effectively hid the
CIAâ??s confession from the American people."
SOURCE: Alternet, December 14, 2004
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3117
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE MILITARY IS THE MESSAGE
http://nytimes.com/2004/12/13/politics/13info.html
Should "deceptive techniques endorsed for use on the battlefield to
confuse an adversary" be adopted "for covert propaganda campaigns
aimed at neutral and even allied nations"? Last year, Defense
Secretary Rumsfeld accelerated "a plan to advance the goal of
information operations as a core military competency." Pentagon
spokesperson Lawrence DiRita said, "Where the enemy is clearly using
the media to help manage perceptions of the general public, our job
is not perception management but to counter the enemy's perception
management." Critics warn that the distinction between supposedly
truthful public affairs and psychological operations will be lost,
that "misleading information and falsehoods" intended for foreign
audiences "could easily be repeated by American news outlets," and
that "such deceptive missions could shatter the Pentagon's
credibility."
SOURCE: New York Times, December 13, 2004
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3114
======================================================
SNEAKY PEET'S
http://www.cmomagazine.com/read/120104/under-the-radar.html
"Four years ago, Tom Duganâ??s company did some work for Peetâ??s
Coffee & Tea by covertly plugging a Peetâ??s promotion online,"
writes Deborah Branscum. "Heâ??d love to share the names of more
recent clients, but none of them, he says, want to speak on the
record." Stealth marketing is growing both online and offline to
promote products ranging from martinis to cell phones to TV
programs. According to Shawn Prez of the marketing agency Power
Moves, stealth techniques are especially effective with teens. "By
the time the message gets out, they donâ??t even know theyâ??ve been
hit; they donâ??t know that theyâ??ve been marketed to. All they
know is that their interest has been piqued."
SOURCE: CMO Magazine, December 2004
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3110

Hi just a reminder that your first copy of your completed interview article or tape should be turned in for next class. Could you also bring it on a floppy disk or a CD. Thanks. See you next Thur.

Confusions with Headlines:
WHO SAYS BIRD FLU PANDEMIC COULD KILL MILLIONS
The regional director of the World Health Organization's Western Pacific
Regional Office says the bird flu virus is proving far more lethal than
the SARS virus that struck Asia and other parts of the world last year.
FULL STORY:
http://www.cbc.ca/story/world/national/2004/11/29/birdflu041129.html

6. CITIZEN JOURNALIST IN THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA?
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/stopthepresses_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000724065
"'Citizen journalism' is one of those buzzwords that's hot in our
industry right now," writes Steve Outing. "While some journalists
might hope it's a fad that will go away soon, I don't think that's
likely. Inviting the public to participate in online news
publishing by contributing articles and photographs is likely here
to stay -- indeed, it might allow journalism institutions to renew
some of the public trust they've lost in recent years by inviting
the public in instead of keeping them outside the ropes."
SOURCE: Editor and Publisher, November 19, 2004
To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1100840404

Here is a review of two movies about two very bad journalists who I mentioned to you before. Both showed a failure of morality and ethics that betrays a trust that their fellow works and readers had in them.
Getting tangled up in the deadline

By KAORI SHOJI



Shattered Glass

Rating: * * * * (out of 5)
Japanese title: News no Tensai
Director: Billy Ray
Running time: 94 minutes
Language: English
Opens Nov. 27

[See Japan Times movie listings]

Truth may be more interesting than fiction, but try telling that to a reporter on deadline, while he or she sits in front of a blank screen in the wee hours. At such times, fiction (or fabrication) seems much more glamorous, entertaining and, most importantly, easier to write. "Shattered Glass" is based on the true story of a reporter who succumbed to that temptation, and his subsequent fall from grace.

Hayden Christensen in "Shattered Glass"


In 1998 Stephen Glass was a hotshot staff writer for The New Republic, who also had bylines in magazines like Rolling Stone and Harpers -- that is, until it was discovered that he had cooked up more than half his articles and he was subsequently run out of journalism.

At the time of the movie's release in the United States last year, Glass was awaiting the results of his bar exam in New York, and it's a mystery whether the irony of his newly chosen profession ever struck him. How was he going to take "I swear to tell the truth and nothing but . . . " day after day? Since then, he's written an autobiographical novel called "The Fabulist" (for which he got a handsome advance) and made an appearance on "60 Minutes." A similar resurrection is in process for Jayson Blair, a star reporter for The New York Times who also fabricated dozens of articles and was exposed in 2003. The definition for the moniker "great pretender" should include something about journalism.

Written and directed by Billy Ray, "Shattered Glass" is high on dramatic density and revealing psycho-dialogue, delving not just into the characters of Stephen Glass (Hayden Christensen) and his office nemesis Chuck Lane (Peter Saarsgard), but everyone on TNR's writing staff. Witness, for example, how the underconfident and slightly overweight Amy Brand (Melanie Lynskey) is always moaning about how she can't write or get any good stories, casting a brief, tortured glance at Stephen as if to say: "What would you know about my suffering?"

Probably nothing. Stephen is everyone's talented darling, who pads around the office in his socks (as if the place were a college dorm), pays lavish compliments to every female on the premises ("That lipstick is so you!"), and is adept at appearing conscientious, asking "Are you mad at me?" to anyone who gives him less than a beaming smile.

Chuck Lane, on the other hand, is serious and laconic, too proud to stoop to self-promotion tactics. He seems to be the only one immune to the charms of Stephen. So when TNR's beloved editor Michael Kelly (who later died in Iraq -- in the movie, he's portrayed by Hank Azaria) is ousted by the magazine's eccentric publisher and replaced by Chuck, Stephen is even more unsettled than the others. Here's one person on whom his wide-eyed "Are you mad at me?" has little effect.

Chuck, however, turns out to be a fair and even-handed boss, who never lets personal issues override his professional concerns. When he's alerted to Stephen's fabrications, he painstakingly investigates and researches the stories at every step and withholds judgment until hard evidence is staring him in the face. It is only then that he unleashes some well-deserved fury at Stephen, who just seems to melt into a puddle of sweat and humiliation.

For all that, "Shattered Glass" is not an indictment of Glass; rather, it scrutinizes the ecosystem of a magazine office -- and remember this isn't just any magazine but The New Republic, "the in-flight magazine of Air Force One." The intense interoffice competition and the pressure to come up with better, sexier stories every week (by way of salutations, everyone is perpetually asking one another what story they're chasing) turns editorial meetings into veritable auditions: The reporter with the zippiest topic takes center stage.

Of course, this was likely to be Stephen, who struts his stuff with the timing and bravado of a stand-up comedian. And when his colleagues sigh in awe and envy ("I don't know how he does it"), he follows it up with an act of mock humility: "Nah, it's nothing, I stumbled on it by accident."

We see Stephen also as a byproduct of our times, when the approach to fame and success shifted from, say, hard work and industriousness to a "whatever it takes" mentality. The most interesting aspect of Stephen's character is that he seems to think his greatest mistake was in getting caught -- there was very little moral compunction involved, and right up to the end he shows signs of hoping that others will see his point of view: that it was ultimately OK to do what he did, that success was its own justification.

The Japan Times: Nov. 24, 2004
(C) All rights reserved

Here is the interview help notes. See you on Thursday. Remember you should have your interview subject selected.
Can’t think of what to say next when your source stops talking?

Don’t worry. Here are a few strategies that may help you.

Responsive: “Oh Really, please tell me more. How interesting.” Use animated facial expressions.

Mirroring: Repeating pertinent pieces of information tha the source has just stated. The idea is to repeat the words of your source while taking the time to collect your thoughts and to think and frame your next question.

Silence: If the interviewer pauses the interviewee is likely to take note that he or she is still supposed to say something. Often this is how more details are gotten from a source. Essentially, you are pretending that you are still listening to what the source has to say in hopes that the source will continue to speak.

Developing: “Tell me more about this issue.” Asking for more information without specifying exactly what you are looking for. Using open-ended questions, questions that beg the interviewee to explain further his or her points with as many details as necessary.

Clarifying: Restating again what was just said but with a phrase such as, “Let me get that straight you just said that… It also helps you form in mind and memory a quotation that can be used later.


Active Listening Means:

Thinking on Your Feet


1. Listening for differences between what your source says and what you believe.

2. Listening for differences between what your source says and what other sources have said. Asking follow-up questions when you notice these differences.

3. Being willing to weight the sources’s answers based on what you know is true and what you don’t know is true. Listening again for clues until yo know the answer.

4. Listening for major points: listen very carefully to the speech following certain phrases: “I think; My point is; the idea is; the goal is…”

5. Listening for supporting evidence: Once the interviewer makes a point, listen carefully to the details he or she provides to explain the reasons for having that viewpoint.

6. Listening to what has not been spoken. Observe emotions and facial expressions for clues. Many Americans , for example, use sarcasm and expressions to reveal other messages. Listen for them. Often voice sound will change as well.

7. Asking a source to repeat or explain a point you don’t understand.

8. Asking a source to slow down his speech if he or she is talking too fast. If you are using a recording device it is better to let them continue talking rather then interrupt the flow.

9. Being and looking attentive: look like you care about what your source is saying.

10. A sneaky one is to misquote to your source and have them clarify what they have to say in different words or in more detail.

Well government bureaucracies seem to be the same everywhere. Busy making everyone else busy on your yen and producing a product that no one is interested in. What do you think?

Monday, November 22, 2004

JAPANESE PERSPECTIVES

Firms think little of government statistics, questionnaire shows

By YOSHIO NAKAMURA

Among government statistics detailing the condition of the Japanese economy, the Cabinet Office's quarterly estimates of gross domestic product, the Finance Ministry's report on corporate activity, and the "tankan" survey by the Bank of Japan are widely known. But there are many other economic statistics that are compiled by government ministries and agencies, and not all of them are useful.

Due to the sectoral division of the bureaucracy, a number of examples exist whereby very similar types of economic data are being compiled by different government bodies.

Many of these statistics concern corporate activities, and the companies that cooperate with the government surveys bear the heavy burden of responding to each inquiry from the bureaucracy. This has become an increasingly serious problem for companies that have streamlined operations in recent years, and the Keidanren is making efforts to minimize their burden.

At the same time, statistics compiled with cooperation from the corporate sector are public goods that should be used as widely as possible. However, a recent survey of member companies conducted by Keidanren shows that even major firms -- which are supposed to be sensitive to macroeconomic trends -- do not pay attention to many of the statistics.

In the questionnaire, Keidanren selected 72 government statistics that serve as short-term economic indicators and asked its members how much they use them in their operations and what they think of such data.

Each set of statistics was given a grade from 0 to 100, and any that were used by all the surveyed firms received a full 100 points. Those that were ignored by all of the firms got 0 points. As it turns out, many of the statistics received a score of between 15 and 35 points, while the average score was 38.8 points.

Many of the surveyed firms also expressed discontent with the statistics they use. Some companies complained that: a) they doubt whether the data compiled are precise enough; b) that the explanations by the bureaucracy on how to interpret the data are insufficient; and c) that the data should be released more quickly.

Many of the firms who said they do not use certain statistics said either that they were not interested in the government's data in those fields or that they did not even know such data were being compiled.

Statistics that draw no attention from relevant parties are of no use, and we must say they are being compiled merely for the satisfaction of the bureaucrats who make them. Also, lack of public knowledge about these statistics indicates that the officials who compile them are not making sufficient effort to publicize the data. I hope the government bureaucracy will take such opinions seriously.

What is important is to abolish economic statistics that are not needed, and to shift budget and personnel for researching data that are. Specifically, greater efforts are needed to improve government data on individuals and households, which are often criticized as less precise.

The Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy has set up an expert committee to scrap and build government statistics, and I hope the panel will provide good direction on the issue.

Yoshio Nakamura is a senior managing director of the Japan Business Federation (Nippon Keidanren).

The Japan Times: Nov. 22, 2004

Writing, writing, wrighting where do we find stories. Were do we find good stories. Who decides what is an important story and what is a good story. Well in our class I decide. Just as an editor would decide in the real world. If you can convince me that your story or world view is important to the public good then you win. I like this. What is happening with this same problem in Japan? We know about Minimata which is quicksilver and water and the rumour is that 50% of the solid particles air pollution in Tokyo is from China (Is this true?) How can you check? What is the source of this information. Do some research and write me a story conected to the above and the below and you will earn 50 extra points, and some of you really need them. See you next week. Clark

GIVIN' THE SMOG A BONE
Huge new study shows that smog does, in fact, kill

The largest study ever conducted on the health effects of smog, or more particularly, ground-level ozone, concludes that, well, smog kills people. Published in the latest issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, the study found that a ground-level ozone rise over a week of roughly 10 parts per billion (ppb) increases a given person's chances of croaking by roughly 0.52 percent -- higher for cardiovascular and respiratory deaths, and higher yet for senior citizens. This means, says study lead author Michelle Bell, "if ozone levels were decreased by 10 ppb, about 4,000 lives would be saved each year in [the 95 urban centers studied]." The U.S. EPA is currently reviewing its standards for maximum daily ozone levels, which were tightened in 1997 to 80 ppb over an eight-hour period. The study could lead to a further tightening of that restriction, as it shows that mortality rates rise even when ozone peaks below legal levels.

straight to the source: New Scientist, Maggie McKee, 16 Nov 2004


straight to the source: Los Angeles Times, Marla Cone, 17 Nov 2004


straight to the source: MSNBC.com, 16 Nov 2004

Being Chipped:
Just Another Chip in the (Privacy) Wall
Went to the supermarket, but left the wallet at home? No problem! Flex your bicep and the smiling cashier passes a scanner over your arm. Voila—identification chip recognized; problem solved. Passed out during a sunrise jaunt on the top of Haleakala Mountain in Maui? Fret not! The hospital down below is on the case. Arm please. Scanner! The readout on the computer is fine--you just have a little altitude sickness. Key to the safety deposit box weighing you down? Chuck it! Next time you’re in the bank, give the teller a friendly wave—and watch the doors open to greet you! After decades as the stuff of sci-fi novels and anime movies, the age of chipped humans is finally a reality. Last month, the Food and Drug Administration approved the use of an implantable ID tag that can store everything from medical records to financial information. The technology could be a gold mine for the company that makes the chips--but a civil liberties nightmare.
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/04/11/wo_kushner111804.asp?trk=nl

Update on Japanese government censorship. Perhaps there is hope for the country after all.
Hacker's talk on Juki Net flaws banned?

A citizens' group charged Wednesday that the government pressured organizers of an international security conference to cancel a lecture by an American computer expert who performed a security audit on the government's online resident registry network on behalf of Nagano Prefecture last year.

The group supporting lawsuits to suspend operation of the network, known as Juki Net, said in a statement, "The Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry cowardly suppressed free speech in an attempt to block a move to show Juki Net is full of flaws."

The group is led by Chuo University professor emeritus Narihiko Ito, Sophia University media law professor Yasuhiko Tajima and five other university professors.

The American computer security expert, Ejovi Nuwere, whose autobiography is titled "Hacker Cracker," conducted the experiment on Juki Net for Nagano Prefecture and said the prefectural government can alter private information in the system.

He was scheduled to speak at a seminar on information security held Nov. 12 in Tokyo Friday that drew around 160 security experts from eight countries.

Nuwere said on his Web site, however, that the Japanese government prevented him from speaking at the PacSec security conference.

The ministry "prevented my talk by threatening the Japanese . . . who currently are seeking contracts from the government," he said.

When asked about the accusations, one ministry official said: "We have requested that (the engineer) refrain from exposing specific vulnerable points of the system. We have not heard anything about the cancellation from the organizers (of the seminar)."

Under the network, which was launched in August 2002, each resident is identified by an individual code and personal details, including name, address, date of birth and sex, that are registered by municipalities, via prefectural governments, in a database run by the central government.

The Japan Times: Nov. 18, 2004
(C) All rights reserved

Censorship is government control of a free press it is an easy equation to make censorship = loss of freedom.
. IRAQ: CENSORSHIP FOR THE GREATER GOOD
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-media12nov12,1,1174231.story
Iraq's Media High Commission, established by the United States "to
encourage investment in the media and deter state meddling," warned
media organizations in Iraq to "set aside space in your news
coverage" of the Fallujah assault "to make the position of the
Iraqi government, which expresses the aspirations of most Iraqis,
clear." The statement continued, "We hope you comply ... otherwise
we regret we will be forced to take all the legal measures to
guarantee higher national interests." The commission also urged
journalists to "differentiate between the innocent Fallouja
residents who are not targeted by military operations and terrorist
groups that infiltrated the city."
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, November 12, 2004
More web links related to this story are available at:
http://www.prwatch.org/spin/November_2004.html#1100235602
To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1100235602

Now this seems to be heavy handed censorship by the Japanese government. This is from The MIT Technology Review Bog site:> Security and Defense
Japanese Government Bans Speech by Security Critic 
posted by Simson Garfinkel @ 11/13/2004 11:19:09 AM

JUKI net is Japan’s national ID system. Ejovi Nuwere performed a security audit of the system for Nagano Prefecture one year ago. Recently Ejovi was invited to speak at the PacSec security conference about JUKI net. Soumushou, the Japanese government agency that maintains JUKI net, prevented his talk by threatening the Japanese event sponsors who currently are seeking contracts from the government.

I sure wish that this really were the general Japanese perspective. Nice editorial piece. Clark
JAPANESE PERSPECTIVES

The importance of questioning fearlessly and answering honestly

By NORIKO HAMA

"Any damn fool can answer a question. The important thing is to ask one."

These truly insightful words were spoken by Joan Robinson, easily one of the most celebrated economists of the 20th century. Her words of wisdom are many and varied. The very title of one of her pieces of writing in 1932 states that: "Economics is a Serious Subject: The apologies of an economist to the mathematician, the scientist and the plain man." Anyone with the perceptiveness and courage to write something like this is bound to be a questioner par excellence.

Such a person however, is clearly not welcome in the eyes of politicians, policymakers, bureaucrats, CEOs and other people in positions of responsibility. This is certainly the impression one gets as one watches those responsible people in action in the media and elsewhere. That impression, alas, is most acutely felt when those people happen to be Japanese.

The question-averseness was painfully in evidence as the first news of the Niigata earthquakes hit the nation last month. The very body language of the officials supposedly in charge conveyed, as no words can, their terror of questions, their paralysis in the face of them, and their deeply rooted suspicion of ulterior motives.

To be sure, Japanese officialdom does not have the monopoly on the general dislike of questions. Indeed, had Joan Robinson been present today to watch the winner of the most recent U.S. presidential election, she would surely feel compelled to admit to erring in parts of her sagacious statement. At the very least, she would feel the need to qualify it and say something like: "Any damn fool can answer a question, provided he is carrying a strange oblong object on his back, strategically concealed under his jacket."

That said, the feeling still remains that Japan is the place where questions tend to be most widely abhorred. Those in the position to answer them seem to regard questions as accusations, if not inquisitions. Questions make them feel threatened. Or humiliated. Or both. That psyche makes them paranoid. They become totally defensive. They try as best they can to get away with saying nothing. Alternatively, they become totally vicious and vindictive. If they have a nimble tongue, they fight back with facetious cynicism, as is the case with the guy with the top job in Japanese government at present.

Such attitudes are off-putting for the questioner, too. The more feebleminded will tend to forego asking the question, for fear of what revenge may be in store.

None of this, of course, is at all helpful. In times of crisis, we all just want to know what is going on. Nobody is accusing anybody of anything. Nobody wants to hear excuses. Nobody is trying to make people say things that they do not know. As yet another high-ranking U.S. official once famously observed, the known unknowns can be very significant. Not to say the unknown unknowns, of course. Here, clearly, is somebody who does not need the aid of strange objects concealed about his person to tackle tricky questions.

The supreme question-dodger is somebody who ignores the question and chooses to answer an unasked question of his own making. That way, any damn fool can, unquestionably, always answer a question. But that brings us no nearer to the truth under any circumstances. When lives are at stake, which is unfortunately and increasingly the case in this time of typhoons, earthquakes, terrorist attacks and hostage-taking, what we need more of are good questions and honest answers.

May Heaven send us more questioners of Joan Robinson's caliber. And people with the courage to respond to them.

Noriko Hama is an economist and a professor at Doshisha University School of Management.

The Japan Times: Nov. 15, 2004

Here is someone that doubted a news article and did a little research. That's what we all should do with stories that just don't sound right:


Flarey Bird

On birds bursting into flames
By Umbra Fisk
11 Nov 2004


Got questions about the environment? Ask Umbra.

Dear Umbra,

I saw the following on the CNN website. Can this possibly be true? I see birds hit, land on, peck at, and poop on power lines all the time, but I've never seen one burst into flames.


LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- Weather forecasters predicted little relief Monday for firefighters battling wildfires that have scorched thousands of acres and forced hundreds of people to leave their homes in California.

Firefighters tackling the 5,700-acre Foothill blaze, about 25 miles north of Los Angeles, said they hoped to contain it in a canyon Monday afternoon.

The wildfire began when a red-tailed hawk hit power lines and caught fire, said Jim Dellamonica, a spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

The bird fell to the ground, setting plants on fire, he said.
Karen
Murfreesboro, Tenn.



Hot off the wire?
Dearest Karen,

Yes, and it's of high concern to avian advocates. If a bird on a wire brushes against a second wire or the ground, end of bird. Birds can short electrical systems, keel over dead, or burst into flames.

To understand electrical flow, imagine for a moment the European settlement of the Western United States. Masses of electrons seek new lands where fewer electrons dwell, and they seek the path of least resistance. Pioneer electrons will choose to ride through an open valley rather than scale a sheer cliff; hence electrons encountering two sparrow feet on their copper wire will choose the wire as the path of least resistance. No benefit to be gained by going up and through bird when metal is available.

If, however, a larger bird should provide a bridge over the chasm between two wires, the eager electron explorers ride right across, sensing open lands on the far side. In other words, electricity, seeing a chance to complete a new circuit, will use the bird as a conductor. That's bad news for the bird, as you might imagine. The voltage in electric high wires is high enough to cook (and, yes, possibly ignite) a bird.

Apparently, fire-starting is most frequent with larger raptors whose wingspans are big enough to bridge wire gaps and who are likely to live in arid fire-prone regions. Bird advocates work to adapt and insulate wires and poles, but it's slow going. Poor birds. As if human settlement hadn't made their lives hard enough already.

Flightily,
Umbra

What is the similarity between these two news items?

State urged to pare, eventually end yen loans to aid-donor China
An Upper House report says Japan should reduce its yen loans to China with an eye to abolishing them because such official developmental assistance is no longer needed.
[MORE] ->
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?nn20041111a2.htm

---

Five-day-week schools get shorter summer break
To make up for classroom hours lost since the introduction of a five-day school week, students at the 24 junior high schools in Tokyo's Katsushika Ward will lose one week from
their summer vacation beginning next year.
[MORE] ->
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?nn20041111a3.htm