Tag Archives: free speech

Blogging akin to conversation on barstool or in schoolyard?

Posted on March 22, 2008 | 2 Comments

On National Public Radio’s All Things Considered yesterday, Stefan Fatsis, who covers sports and the business of sports for The Wall Street Journal, spoke with Noah Adams about sports blogs.

As a former newspaper reporter and editor and now blogger, I’m quite interested in the intersection of blogging and professional reporting. This 4-minute story is set in the sports world,
but it’s still about that junction.

NBA Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban recently banned three bloggers — who work full-time for The Dallas Morning News, the Los Angeles Times and ESPN — from the locker room.

It’s interesting to note that this defensive new policy is instituted by a dot-com billionaire (although I personally didn’t know his name until he was on Dancing With the Stars).

Apparently Cuban’s rationale is that the locker room is too small to accommodate everyone. He wrote on his blog that blogs are bad marketing, bad branding.

“More and more sports blogs are thoughtful, they’re smart, they’re sophisticated, they can be adjuncts to the mainstream media, but they’re very, very worthwhile, they’re useful. And some of them are getting bought by the mainstream media. This week three bloggers in Dallas were barred from the Mavericks locker room. They work full-time for the Dallas Morning News, the Los Angeles Times and ESPN. They use a different kind of software to write, and this newish medium seems like an absurd rationale for banning them from one particular place in an arena,” Fatsis said. (Emphasis mine.) Makes sense to me.

Sportscaster Bob Costas, in the Miami Herald, called blogs “a high-tech place for idiots to do what they used to do on barstools or in schoolyards if they were schoolyard bullies or on men’s room walls in gas stations. That doesn’t mean that anyone with half a brain should respect it.” Adams seemed to agree with much of this.

Costas gets called out online, like all announcers, Fatsis explains. Costas is referring to the snarkiness that comes out, particularly in the comments section of blogs.

OK, sure. But people should be able to separate what is said in the comments from what is said by the writer. A newspaper isn’t criticized based purely on what’s in the letters to the editors. I strongly disagree with what Costas — and Adams — said about blogging vs. writing. Blogging can be writing. There is no inherent dichotomy.

“When you step back you’ll realize that value … will be determined not by the medium but by the message, what people are writing,” Fatsis said.

Blogging should not be compared, as a medium, to conversation on a barstool. Blogging can be done professionally, and probably is done professionally especially if the writers have full-time positions at news organizations. Sure, that may not be the case in every instance. But that doesn’t mean that the medium should be dismissed or dissed. That argument is even more ludicrous in light of newspapers’ current financial situation that’s directly related to the institutions’ ability or inability to adapt to the internet. Newspapers must be blogging, and blogging must be taken seriously.

As a side note, Fatsis points out that the blogosphere’s anonymity is going away; bloggers are realizing that they need to be held accountable if they want to be taken seriously.

Note: Here‘s where Dallas Morning News blogger Tim McMahon discusses the new policy.

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Posted in journalism, newspapering, reporting, technology, writing

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Prescriptive grammar?

Posted on June 5, 2007 | 2 Comments

According to a Language Log post I saw first at A Teacher’s Education, the military wants us all to capitalize Soldier, even when it stands alone. Army Chief of Staff General Peter J. Schoomaker apparently thinks this will help instill respect for the people who are in the military.

It won’t work.

My first thought was not would people get it, but rather: would people DO it. I understand that we write, now (you and I, anyway, and your readers here), mostly according to the established pattern. But this seems like an iffy time to try such a thing: It seems to me (albeit as no historian) that the English language is accepting and conforming more and more to today’s digital shorthand — which basically ignores (intentionally or not) the accepted grammar rules.

I’d imagine the print media (which are resistent to change in grammar rules, particularly those pushed on them by people and institutions they’re working to guard against, as watchdogs) would ignore such a prescript. The AP Stylebook is notoriously slow to change — it was just in the last (yearly) edition that it finally conceded to popular opinion that internet shouldn’t be capitalized and that online doesn’t need a hyphen.

It’s good for the military to take charge of this where they can — but that’s basically in its own writings, which are seen by the general public quite rarely. Working at a newspaper, I saw a good chunk of them, and they, for several years now, have Soldier, Sailor, etc., capitalized. The copy desk routinely replaced all those capitalized letters for title standing alone with the lowercase letter. They corrected the releases. Capitalizing titles only before names is a long-standing tradition. It will be difficult to change. I’m sure a few publications will be quick to change — Stars and Stripes comes to to mind, although I’m not very familiar with it.

How long has it taken for a rule to change in the past? Take the serial comma, for instance. I was taught in high school (I had several different English teachers) that first the serial comma was used always, and later that it’s only used when needed for clarity. My nonuse of the serial comma was reinforced in college and in journalism classes particularly. Some teachers still require the serial comma’s use today, 12 years after I graduated from high school. Just because the government wants to institute a change in proper capitalization, does that mean it will happen? How many generations will it take for the change to take hold?

Finally, even if this did catch on, it’s a slippery slope. It’s no stretch that it would make writers rethink capitalization generally, and it would become a sign of a writer’s world view. Or, if a person is feeling particularly anti, he or she could simply not capitalize the titles (even with the names!) of the offending parties. What a mess.

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Posted in newspapering

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Government interference with baby’s name: shouldn’t be

Posted on April 7, 2007 | 1 Comment

A Swedish couple’s life is being put on hold and frustrated by the refusal of that country’s tax authority to OK the name of their 6-month-old daughter. The name the couple chose and the government rejected: Metallica.

Sweden’s tax agency rejected Michael and Karolina Tomaro’s application to name their six-month-old daughter after the legendary rock band. “It suits her,” Karolina Tomaro, 27, said Tuesday of the name. “She’s decisive and she knows what she wants.”

Although little Metallica has already been baptized, the Swedish National Tax Board refused to register the name, saying it was associated with both the rock group and the word “metal.”

See here for the full news piece.

This doesn’t make sense to me.

The couple should be able to use any name they want. It shouldn’t matter that the word has been used/was created as the proper noun identifying a band.

Per this site, many people and institutions should be in uproar about naming conventions, too:

• Nivea and Terius Nash named their child Navy. Now there’s a name the U.S. government should protest.

• Sylvester Stallone has a daughter named Sistine Rose. Should the Vatican complain? Or what about Michaelangelo’s estate?

• Gwenyth Paltrow and Chris Martin named their daughter Apple. I haven’t heard the Washington state fruit industry grousing.

I’ll add to the list:

• Brooklyn was in the top 100 most popular names in the United States in 2005 (the most recent year of data), according to the Social Security Administration — number 78, to be exact. Should the name be banned, since it’s associated with the borough of New York?

• A friend of mine named her daughter Britain. Similar to the Brittany of the day, but also unique.

Naming a child is such an individual process. Each parent is pulled in multiple directions when considering the possibilities — unique? popular? family name? traditional? meaning? sound? origin?

No matter the parents’ homeland, they should be able to select the name of their choice.

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Police leave city to spy

Posted on March 28, 2007 | 2 Comments

Jim Dwyer’s piece in Sunday’s New York Times starts like this:

For at least a year before the 2004 Republican National Convention, teams of undercover New York City police officers traveled to cities across the country, Canada and Europe to conduct covert observations of people who planned to protest at the convention, according to police records and interviews.
From Albuquerque to Montreal, San Francisco to Miami, undercover New York police officers attended meetings of political groups, posing as sympathizers or fellow activists, the records show.
They made friends, shared meals, swapped e-mail messages and then filed daily reports with the department’s Intelligence Division. Other investigators mined Internet sites and chat rooms.

He continues:

Police records indicate that in addition to sharing information with other police departments, New York undercover officers were active themselves in at least 15 places outside New York — including California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montreal, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and Washington, D.C. — and in Europe.

I first heard of this story on Rocketboom today. It made me bewildered, frustrated and angry. The piece certainly didn’t answer all my questions, which is when I tracked down the NYT article.

Why did NYPD leave jurisdiction to surveill?
Why so far in advance?
Who gave the order?
Why was such an order followed?

I’ve been skeptical of police action in the United States before, but I’ve never felt like this story made me feel, except perhaps while I was in Cameroon, West Africa, a country widely touted as one of the world’s most corrupt dictatorships. Cameroon’s leader made this year’s list of the world’s worst dictators, published annually by PARADE.

I do remember there being a general hubbub regarding the Republican National Convention being held in New York City that year. It was a large, political gathering, and I seem to recall concerns about terrorist plots against the gathering being circulated.

But.

Many of the groups the NYPD was spying on were not a threat. They should have known it. Protesting peacefully has long been a right held sacred in the United States of America. Writing on sidewalks with chalk is not a threat to security. Coordinating a silent march down a street is also not a threat to security. These are examples of constitutionally protected speech.

I know people were afraid following 9/11. I understand that. However, we must understand that when “security” is strengthened, our freedom is sacrificed. This isn’t a new thought, now. It seemed so in the weeks following Sept. 11, 2001. Surely that fear did not last, in so crippling a form, for years? It must not. Our freedom is much too valuable for us to give up.

Also: I know governments move slowly, but isn’t it troubling that this is only now coming to light?

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Limiting free speech bad PR for government

Posted on March 22, 2007 | 2 Comments

This is the kind of public relations governments should not expose themselves to. Governments — large and small — seem prone to forgetting that they are merely representatives of their constituency, the public. How can a governmental body work to limit its own speech?

But that’s exactly what the Arkansas General Assembly has done.

Sponsored by Rep. David Dunn, D-Forrest City, House Bill 1367 broadens an exemption for utility companies that allows the utilities more latitude without requiring public hearings.

A near perfect example is still transpiring in Fayetteville. Southwestern Electric Power Co., with the blessing of the state Public Service Commission, was initially moving forward without filing the certificate that triggers a public hearing. In this instance (the above bill hasn’t been signed into law yet), the commission granted the city “permission to intervene” in the expansion that would replace wooden power poles within the city’s downtown with metal structures 20-55 feet taller. The commission staff, however, believe the public doesn’t need a chance to comment — or hear the details in person, which is often the main purpose of public hearings — on the project.

The Arkansas Public Service Commission, understandably, is for the bill, which was passed by the Senate Monday and forwarded to Gov. Mike Beebe for his signature. But wait, why is the commission in favor of this? And why did our elected representatives agree?

I understand that public hearings, especially about something that may not draw a huge crowd, can be a pain to hold. Public hearings prolong the process, delay “progress,” hold up projects, etc. I’ve been to some similar public hearings, in my former watchdog role. I didn’t really enjoy attending such meetings, either.

Does a hearing really drag out a project when it’s an essential part of government? Government cannot act without consent of the people, albeit sometimes that consent is via representatives. Public comment is an integral part of such projects.

The public should be given the opportunity to be part of the discussion. Period. It’s not a delay or prolongment when it’s essential.

Side note: Such bills make governments look bad. It looks like our senators and representatives have been unduly influenced by lobbyists for the utility companies, who want to push their pet projects through as quickly as possible.

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