Writing About Writing (and Religion)

Posted on June 18, 2012 by Kari Lucin

Not to be hopelessly twee or self-referential here, but I’ve noticed a buildup of journalism- and media-related links building up here on my browser, starting with a couple of things about religion reporting.

First, Romenesko linked a report that found Americans believe their religion news is too sensationalized. The religion reporting I do, personally, tends to be featurey, rather than hard news, and it’s not generally something that lends itself to sensationalism–even if I wanted to sensationalize it, which I do not.

And the religion reporting that’s available through the Associated Press skews heavily Catholic, probably because 1. their church is centralized and a little easier to write about, 2. it’s a very big church and 3. they have their own country.

Do you find your religion news to be sensationalized? Local or national?

And now on to other topics!

People who’ve read Plato’s “Republic” and its criticism of fiction and thought “Bah!” might be gratified to read this article noting why fiction is actually good for us. That’s right, kids. Eat your broccoli and read your fiction!
Here’s another historian noting the changes in journalism are just like previous changes in journalism, and are not really unprecedented. (In fact, there’s very little as much like Twitter as the random-seeming social notes in newspapers circa 1910.)
As a reporter, what do you do when someone you’re writing about makes a decision that could cost him his life? This reporter ended up watching a snake-handling pastor die for his faith. (via BoingBoing)
A writer calls out a newspaper in which the top brass are (almost) all male. What impact does this have on a paper? Is diversity an issue in newsrooms nationwide? (via Romenesko)

Reporters Are Never Realistic on TV

Posted on June 12, 2012 by Kari Lucin

There are a few movies that I am, for the sake of other people’s fragile sanity, no longer permitted to watch.

The most notable of these is probably “Shakespeare in Love,” which missed the mark for me for the sole reason that the woman pretending to be a man (pretending to be a woman) who was Shakespeare’s girlfriend in the movie did not have the initials W.H. To me, this meant the writers of the film clearly did not care about Shakespeare, which made the whole film evil.

Other than that, though, I am no longer allowed to watch movies about reporters–specifically, newspaper reporters and news writers.

These are the characteristics of reporters on TV:

They do not carry a notebook and a pen, nor any technological equivalents such as recorders. Because we all memorize everything we hear and/or never have to have quotes in a story.
If they have a job writing features, they hate that job, and want to write big, important political news instead. Because that’s what everyone likes to write, without exception, you know! Not stories about saving puppies or the new restaurant in town! (Actually, my ambition in life is to become the official Puppy Editor for the Sun, but that’s a story for a different time.)
Alternately, they cover big, important, political stories. They never have to sit through four-hour meetings about ditch repair in order to do this.
These types of important-things-reporters very often get shot at by conspirators. I have been shot at exactly once in my years of reporting, and that was a result of covering a small-town shooting tournament in which people shooting at a metal bird managed to ricochet a shotgun blast about ten feet from where I was standing. It was an accident. And they probably should have put the “Do not stand past this line” line a little further away from the metal bird.
They have some sort of axe to grind, some sort of agenda. This extends to the reporter in “Star Wars: The Old Republic,” who doesn’t have a recording device and is bent on getting dirt on some guy. You know, some of us just like to write down what happens, with as little bias as possible and as accurately as possible.
They are hardened to tragedy and love mayhem, eagerly chasing after it like a lion hunting a wounded gazelle. I’ve cried at least a few times in my reporting career, and I know at least a few people who go and cry in the bathroom when a story hits a little too close to home. Stories do that sometimes, even to the hardened newsroom veterans. Some people do love mayhem. But a lot of us chase it because we have to, and would much rather cover puppies, thank you.
They are irreverent and smart-alecky, often with a fairly morbid sense of humor. This is actually somewhat true, not of all, but certainly some reporters. Humor is a defense mechanism, and it does work. Don’t mistake it for not being genuinely sorry about a tragedy, though. If my obituary’s not hilarious, I fully intend to haunt whoever writes it–or maybe just their puppies.

News from–and in–the Oil Patch

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Kari Lucin

The oil boom is affecting newspapers in western North Dakota just as much as it is every other industry, it seems.

Three people in the newspaper business had a roundtable discussion Friday morning at the North Dakota Newspaper Association conference, which I attended, and all three of them and the moderator had a lot to say about how their businesses had been affected.

Forum Communications Company Reporter Amy Dalrymple, whose work we often run in the Jamestown Sun, covered the discussion. Her story’s great, check it out!

There are a couple of other things I’d like to add:

At least one paper has so many ad purchases coming in that it’s having a hard time keeping the ad content down to 75% of its pages. If it doesn’t do that, it’ll lose its favorable mail rate, which is bad.

The obvious solution is to hire another reporter to write for them so they have more content to fill pages with. Unfortunately, hiring reporters to work in the Oil Patch, like hiring anyone else to work there, is hard.

They hire people, who then can’t find a place to live, and go work somewhere else. Or they hire someone, who decides they don’t like the job, and then just literally wanders off because they can get ten other jobs in ten minutes.

This means the newspapers sometimes hire people right off the street, because if they leave, they might not get another shot at that person.

That’s how scarce workers are. And of course they have to pay them more, too.

Staff members are so short that when the three joked about poaching each other’s people, I had the uneasy feeling that there was a little bit of truth to the jokes. They needed people badly, in other words.

I was surprised no one tried to recruit me on the spot, or lure me into a parking garage to make me an offer I couldn’t refuse. But nobody did.

Westward! To the Oil Patch!

Posted on May 2, 2012 by Kari Lucin

Tomorrow I’m heading out with a colleague to the modern-day Wild West, filled with oilmen, money and trucks so big they will make you say “That’s no moon!” and back away with horror.

I’m going to a newspaper conference, but along with some shiny continuing education-type stuff, there will also be a tour of the Oil Patch.

I’m greatly looking forward to getting out there, and I’m really glad I won’t have to drive. My car, though normal-sized, would turn into a bumper car out there in the Oil Patch at worst and a golf cart at best. My assistant editor has a TRUCK. So we’ll fit in with everybody else out there who isn’t driving a semi.

I’ll try to post a couple of times while I’m out there–just some observations on what it’s like, nothing too complex–and hopefully I won’t get smushed by a truck or anything like that.

Plagiarism in North Dakota, Minnesota

Posted on March 9, 2012 by Kari Lucin

One of the biggest stories of the day is this sad tale of a 28-year journalism veteran who allegedly plagiarized most of the columns he wrote in North Dakota and Minnesota.

Jon Flatland even won an award for one of the columns he submitted to a statewide contest, which apparently turned out to have been written by someone else.

What on earth could make someone think that sort of thing is okay? There are certain gray areas in the profession, such as press releases, which in some newspapers are used in whole or in part without attribution because they’re given to you for that purpose. The people who send them want you to use them. Mostly, we edit those or trim them down to fit our style.

And then there’s the question of attribution for ideas. If I write about sexism in gaming, maybe I should really be linking not just the original sources, but add a little via at the end, to give credit to the people I found the source through (this is very often BoingBoing or Brainiac). I’m not taking words from them, but they did think of it first, or find it first. I’ll try to do a bit better at attribution in the future.

So yes, there are some grey areas.

But then there’s taking a whole column and slapping your own name on it. Who even does that? I can see why Blooming Prairie didn’t think to vet Flatland for plagiarism–he’d been working in journalism for 28 years, for heaven’s sakes. It certainly wouldn’t have occurred to me that someone could go on grabbing other people’s writing for that long without getting caught.

Once I was asked by a nervous editor whether I had actually interviewed a source, because another media outlet had the same quote I had used. (I think the source had written down the comment and read it back to both of us.) I was a little confused. Of course I’d interviewed him. How else would I have gotten the quote?

Oh. I could have stolen it.

And now look at poor Blooming Prairie. (via Logan Adams) It’s apologized and made efforts to let people know what happened. Other papers Flatland worked for are doing the same thing.

Here’s Dave Fox’s story of the whole sordid business. Fox is the humor writer who discovered the alleged plagiarism in the first place.

Edit: Poynter has a bit on how Flatland learned the jig was up.

Games, Laughs and Generational Speculation

Posted on November 25, 2010 by Kari Lucin

A few random pieces of amusement for you, many of them garnered from BoingBoing:

Dogs Don’t Understand Basic Concepts Like Moving, a blog post about trying to move two dogs across the country, one of whom has approximately three brain cells and the other, a neurotic, nervous wreck with an anxiety problem. Complete with hilarious illustrations of one dog’s discovery of how to make food. Posts like this are why I don’t have a dog, by the way.
Enemy 585 is a platform game (think Super Mario Bros.) in which… you play the platform. I can’t figure out how to get past the first couple of hazards, but you may enjoy the game.
Which generation do you belong to? An online quiz game purports to be able to tell you what generation you’re from and what year you were born, to within a few years. Mine said I was 3 years older than I am, but that’s pretty close.
Better Book Titles, a site that renames books with the obvious, self-explanatory titles they should have. (Warning: At least one of the titles is crude, and I’m guessing a few others are as well.) For example: Beowulf is “The Danes Outsource an Exterminator.”
Finally, here’s a list of iconic newspaper headlines and their front pages. I think they missed the most famous one.

Windmill Controversy

Posted on February 17, 2009 by Kari Lucin

We’ve gotten a few interesting responses to a letter about the windfarms going up all over southwest Minnesota today.

The letter-writer points out that the windmills are noisy and have bright red lights, and that it can be annoying to live near them.

I believe it. However, I do know at least one person who might like living near a wind farm: my dad.

My dad is a highly educated, intelligent person, and for the most part he’s a lot less eccentric than I am. But for the last few years, when he wants to relax or just go for a drive, he heads up to the local wind farm, parks near one of the massive windmills and just hangs out there for a while.

He finds the woosh-woosh-woosh sound soothing, which kind of reminds me of something I read that advised putting a fussy baby on a washing machine to calm him down. They like the repetitive, soothing sound and I suspect adults don’t really grow out of that either.

On a more intellectual level, dad finds the windmills pleasing because they represent progress and a small step toward more sustainable energy, something he and I both find important.

I like to relate this to Genesis 1.28: And God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth."

It’s our world and we need to use it wisely and take care of it. Windmills can be a part of that.

I can certainly see that some people would find the constant woosh-wooshing of the windmills to be irritating. I’m glad someone wrote a letter to the paper to let people know about it, too. Much better than having someone be surprised later on.

At the same time, not everyone finds the windmills annoying, and if my dad got the chance to live near one, he might jump at it, especially if it didn’t involve living too far out in the country.

I’m not so sure myself; I’d have to sit under one and listen for a while to see how it is. But it might be nice.

Pretty Shiny Things at the Bridal Fair

Posted on February 8, 2009 by Kari Lucin

I have to tell you, the Globe’s bridal fair/prom extravaganza was impressive this year. There was quite a bit more space due to the venue change, but there were also a ton more people than there were the last time I went, two years ago. (We’d suffered bad weather that day.)

There were also a few vendors that I thought were nice additions to the show–the hair places, specifically. Any girl who’s ever been to a prom or been in a wedding knows that the hair is a Big Deal and an essential component of getting everything to look great.

As far as the styles go, I caught the entirety of the bridal style show.

I liked a lot about it, but the thing I liked the most is that the show featured real people, not professional models. (Some of the real people were actually part of the Globe’s staff, which was fun for us to see too.) They all looked great, from the gorgeous plus-size gals (whose figures look a lot like mine) to the gorgeous slim gals, and they showed styles that looked good on all sorts of figures and types, not just the stereotypical model-thin girls.

I really liked that about the show.

As far as specific things I noted about the show this year: vibrant pink seemed to be extremely popular, as did a rich cranberry red. These were the most-frequently seen colors on bridesmaid gowns. Bridal and bridesmaid dresses seemed to show a great deal of variety in figure this year, much more so than in previous years — from princess-style skirts to mermaid skirts to pencil skirts. Lots of choices, so you can find something flattering for sure.

This is a nice change. I remember shopping for my first prom as a junior in high school, when the long slim silhouette was in fashion and you practically couldn’t find anything else. I’m a chubby girl with an hourglass figure and would have looked like an overstuffed sausage in one of those dresses, so I found a pretty (but decidedly non-trendy) black dress and wound up looking a bit like a chubby Morticia Addams.

Also, I spotted quite a few sashes (which I like) and bows (which I don’t care as much for), but since the bows weren’t the big floppy ones of the 80s they were actually pretty cute too. I also noticed a lot of asymmetrical beadwork and gathers, but not nearly as much ruching as there used to be. (I don’t care for ruching much; it reminds me of an upholstered sofa. But I’m probably alone in this opinion.)

I’m going to get a photo gallery up some time today or tomorrow (probably tomorrow) as well as video from the show, so if you missed it, don’t sweat it too much. You’ll still get to see something!

Earning a Reputation as the Napster

Posted on February 4, 2009 by Kari Lucin

Today was a busy day at the Globe, and I didn’t find much time to blog. I had two meetings, an interview and a story today.

So I went home after work and took a nap.

It’s funny, but I take a lot more naps now that I’m an adult than I ever did when I was a kid, and it’s not because of my current weird sleeping habits. I’ve always had trouble with sleeping habits, and of course, I blame my family. That’s the fashionable thing to do, right?

But in this case it may actually be true. I’m not sure whether we’re genetically predisposed to keep weird hours or if it was just environmental, but we’re all weird sleepers.

For most of my life my mom worked a 3-11 p.m. shift at the local hospital, so she always stayed up late and slept in late. Dad got me up every morning (no matter how much I whined) and got us kids to school. Dad developed a habit of taking a nap sometime during the day so he could get to see mom when she came home.

I was also one of the only kids I knew who didn’t have a bedtime. It was usually whenever dad (or mom, when she was home) noticed we were still awake after 10 p.m. or so. Sometimes I tried to covertly stay awake so I could say goodnight to mom, but this usually failed, since my dad was too smart to fall for distractions.

Me and my brother, we’re just night owls. I read somewhere that humans don’t actually have a 24 hour cycle, and that on average, it’s a 26-hour cycle. This seems a bit right to me, as if I don’t have a very good reason to keep a 24 hour clock I tend to get out of whack.

Every once in a while in college I’d end up sleeping during the day (except for classes) and being awake all night. This was always super awkward, because for people who aren’t into the bar scene there’s just not a lot going on after 11 p.m.

I’ve noticed my brother tends to keep weird hours when he’s home from school too.

These days I manage to keep a good… well… acceptable… sleeping pattern because I must come to work during normal business hours (8 a.m.ish to 6 p.m.ish). This forces some regularity of sleep, which is actually very helpful. Occasionally I still end up staying up too dang late, which leads me to be tired at work, decreasing my productivity.

Sometimes my work schedule is flexible enough to let me take a long lunch hour, go home and take a nice nap and stay a bit later in the evening so I can get everything done. (Napping never seems to impact how tired I am at night when I go to bed either.) It makes me feel more productive, useful and energetic, and I feel I get more done that way.

I have acquired a reputation at the Globe for napping.

So I gotta ask: Do you nap? Do you find yourself to be more productive and energetic afterward?

A Tragic Anniversary

Posted on January 28, 2009 by Kari Lucin

I would have missed it, if Logan Adams hadn’t posted about it, but today marks the 23rd anniversary of the Challenger disaster, which killed seven people. I don’t remember it; I was too young. (I do remember the Columbia, but not the circumstances I heard it; just the shock.)

I just watched it on YouTube. One minute they’re talking about how the engines are running fine and the crowd is cheering, and the next, shuttle pieces, on fire, were hurtling in several different directions.

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