Still Spanning the Globe

I stumbled upon the end of an era this morning...the last "Spanning the Globe" segment by sportscaster Len Berman on the Today Show (at least that's what I thought...see note at end of this post).

When I was in college, I used to love watching Len Berman, who covered sports at WBZ-TV in Boston in the 1970s. I think that's when he started putting together his wacky "Spanning the Globe" sports clips. He later moved on to NBC...and I moved on to take my first reporting job in the middle of nowhere in the Midwest. It was a long way from home, and I was delighted to stumble across Berman and his "Spanning the Globe" sports report on a local NBC affiliate.

It's hard to believe now, but I was a bit of a sports fan when I was a kid. My Dad was an avid Boston Red Sox fan, and I remember Carl Yastrzemski, "the man we call Yaz" (yes, I can still sing it!), and the "impossible dream" summer of 1967, when the Red Sox came this close to winning the American League pennant. One of the things I'm truly grateful for is that my father lived long enough to see the Sox finally win the 2004 World Series.

For my Mom, it was the Boston Celtics. I remember the golden era of Coach Red Auerbach and legendary players like Larry Bird. When my Mom was in her 50s, she took her first cross-country road trip -- and one of the highlights for her was passing through the town of French Lick, Ind., the birthplace of Larry Bird.

Since then, sports have become so much harder edged and more commercial. Now I rarely pay attention to it, or miss it...except when a marker comes along like Berman's last "Spanning the Globe."

Note: Imagine my surprise at finding an email from Len Berman in my in-box this evening. He wrote:

Hi Cynthia......hopefully you'll be happy to hear that Al Roker was
just kidding this morning. "Spanning the World" is alive and well and
will next air on the Today Show December 13th.
Best regards,
Len Berman

How cool is that!

The BOBs: Best of the Blogs

The U.S. blog Sunlight Foundation won the top award for Best Weblog in the third annual Deutsche Welle Best of the Blogs (BOBs) Awards. The international blog competition is sponsored annually by Deutsche Welle, the German international broadcasting service.

The 2006 BOBs jury members said they admired the Sunlight Foundation blog for its work to increase transparency in government. They called the project "a positive example of how blogs can shape political discourse" and praised it for its potential to be adapted for use in other countries.

Here's one example cited of what that blog has accomplished:

The [Sunlight] Foundation helped bridge the ideological divide in the blogosphere by bringing together liberal and conservative bloggers in its "Exposing Earmarks" project. Volunteers tried to find more information on 1,800 earmarks -- or hidden funding -- inserted into a Labor bill. This effort led to a new transparency law in Congress mandating a publicly accessible online database with detailed information on all future spending bills in Congress.

BOB Awards were also presented for the best blogs in several different languages, including English, German, Spanish, Arabic and Chinese. PaidContent.org, which won the award for Best English Weblog, tracks the different business models being tried and tested in the realm of digital media.

In the Reporters Without Borders category, the BOBs first prize award was shared by two Persian-language blogs, the photo blog Kosoof, which publishes photos of Iranian dissidents with their families after their release from prison, and Hamed Mottaghis' Weblog Tanine Sokut, which focuses on human rights violations in Iran and issues not covered by Iran's national media.

The BOBs also named a top podcast, Mezumei Studio of China, and gave its coveted Blogwurst Award to Aref-Adib, an Iranian photo-commentary blog that I've already bookmarked for posterity.

For just a taste of Aref-Adib, a recent post shows a noose labeled with the names of Mideast nations and the caption: "Saddam verdict didn't give Bush the big swing he was hoping for!"

More than 5,500 blogs in 10 languages were nominated for this year's BOBs by internet users from around the world. That's double the number nominated last year.

Nominees were first vetted by an international jury of bloggers, independent journalists and media experts, who created a shortlist of 10 nominees in each of the contest's 15 categories. Then the nominations were opened up to the public for three weeks of voting. The BOBs includes both jury awards and user awards.

One of this year's jurors was from the Bay Area: Lisa Stone, an organizer of the locally based BlogHer conference. She gives her take on the BOBs, including the user-named favorite English Weblog, Black Looks by Sokari Ekine, on a post on the BlogHer site.

Now for something completely different...

Check out this seriously entertaining blog post, Chutzpah, Truffles & Alain Ducasse, or this one, My New Favorite Restaurant, on Adam Roberts ' Amateur Gourmet blog.

These posts are kind of like a cross between a restaurant review and a comic book, and they really hit the spot. Delicious fun!

(I found this link on Guy Kawasaki's blog, How to Change the World: A Practical Blog for Impractical People, after clicking over to read a post I saw mentioned on Micro Persuasion...no wonder I'm not getting caught up on my grading.)

Road trip team

A former PR student of mine, Abel Habtegeorgis, popped by my office this afternoon. He just wanted to say "hi" and remind me that he and his two teammates will be speaking on campus tomorrow about their summer adventures traveling for the PBS series "Roadtrip Nation."

As you may recall from an earlier post in The JMC Journal blog, Habtegeorgis hit the road for six weeks this summer in a green Roadtrip Nation RV with two other SJSU students -- Cairo Person, a journalism major, and Kisura Hendrix, a PolySci major -- to interview interesting people. Two other teams, from Emory University and Concordia University in Montreal, also participated in the program. Their travels and interviews, caught on film, are being made into a PBS documentary.

Habtegeorgis, Henrix and Person will talk about their travels and the people they interviewed at 12 noon tomorrow in the Umunhum Room of the Student Union at SJSU. They'll also show some of their clips from the upcoming documentary.

Be there or be square!

Words and their consequences

“Anybody who is in a position to serve this country ought to understand the consequences of words,” said the man who just last week insisted that he hadn't just spent the past year telling us to "stay the course" in that growing disaster known as Iraq. Did he forget about TV cameras?

Bush also spent yesterday campaigning, insisting that we are going to win in Iraq. He also praised Donald Rumsfeld, asserting that his secretary of defense is doing a fine job. Yeah, right.

Do we need any more reasons to send the president a strong message (a.k.a. a Democratic majority) in the upcoming election?

Halloween fun

Don't be late to class or the schoolmarm will rap your knuckles!

I sure had fun dressing up on Halloween in a vintage hat and retro clothes. Note my "schoolmarm" props: the slate and wooden ruler (a Coca Cola collectible) are out of the attic (does it sound like I've been watching too much Antiques Roadshow?).

Many thanks to the J-school students who humored me in class, as I waved my ruler at them and generally tried to act like a stern schoolmarm of yore. (Maybe the candy helped.)

For more fun Halloween shots, check out the Spartan Daily's Halloween on Campus slide show.

Most important things you can read this week

As you prepare to vote next week (unless, like me, you've already voted absentee), here's some food for thought:

• After Pat's Birthday -- If you haven't yet read this scorching essay by Kevin Tillman, posted on truthdig.com, you should. It is past time, as the saying goes, to "speak truth to power."

• "The Army has recently completed a new center in San Antonio specializing in amputation, [called] the Intrepid Center...." -- This passing mention came in the next-to-the-last paragraph of a lovely NYT article about service dogs being trained to assist disabled veterans of the Iraq War. Just think about that. Then think about the more than 100 U.S. service members killed this month alone, and who knows how many more severely injured and disabled for life. This is the Iraq War. No plan, no strategy, no way out. No end in sight. Don't you think it's time to shake up the deadly status quo in DC?

• Still not sure? Read The Forgotten Wounded by Ron Kovic, a Vietnam vet , also posted at truthdig.com.
  

• Voters Can Spark an Energy Revolution Before It's Too Late -- This chilling article on global warming, by Bill McKibben, appeared in Sunday's Mercury News. I wish I could make it required reading for all California voters...maybe that would offset the torrents ofnegative ads funded by Big Oil money against Prop. 87. Time is running out.

Challenge authority. Do good. Make a difference.

What's that smell?

I first thing I noticed was a small group of people, four or five, clustered under a tree, some kneeling, some bending over at the waist, picking up something off the ground. Then, when I got closer, I got a whiff of that smell.

"Eew," said a passing student. "What is that? Did somebody throw up?"

Not a bad guess. The sidewalk was littered with small golden-orange blobs of something...and the odor was, well, foul.

It reminded me of dog doo...you know, the pungent fresh-laid, mustardy kind that gets lodged in the treads of your shoes at the worst possible moment...like when you're on your way to a nice restaurant, or late for a meeting...when you're headed to the kind of place where a big stink and a yellow crust on the bottom of your shoe will tend to get noticed. That kind.

But clearly, this was more than one dog could doo. And why were these people picking it up?

They all wore plastic gloves, at least on the hand that was doing the picking...a wise move, I thought, considering. I stepped off the sidewalk and spotted more blobs on the grass under the tree.

"What are they?" I asked the nearest person, an older Asian woman. She glanced up, but decided to ignore me.

I paused a moment, watching as they gathered the foul golden blobs and placed them in plastic cups and old plastic grocery sacks. A breeze rustled the leaves of the tree overhead, and more golden blobs fell to the ground. Ah! One question answered.

A woman wearing a scarf was piling hers on sheets of newspaper laid atop of a brick wall. She separated each fleshy golden blob from its inner core -- a seed? a nut? -- and put it in a small blue bag.

I tried again. "What are these?

"Ginko," she said.

"What do you use them for?"

Her English was heavily accented and somewhat limited (hey, my Chinese is non-existent), but the gist of it is that she makes a dessert out of it...the meat of the nut, that is, not the stinky, pulpy flesh.

First, she said, you have to remove the seed from the flesh, and wash the seed and let it dry. Then you crack the seed open, remove the nut meat, and pound it into a paste that can be used in cooking.

Must be a very special dish to be worth all that work and all that smell.

Another woman scooched down on the ground beneath the tree, processing a pile of the golden fruit. It was her first time harvesting Ginkos, she said, and she was doing it for her mother and grandmother who remembered harvesting Ginko fruit in China. You can buy them sometimes at the market for about $3 per pound, she added, but they aren't as fresh and freshness is important.

She continued separating the seeds from the smelly pulp, dropping them one by one into a large plastic Jamba Juice cup. I thanked her, took a couple pictures, and continued on my way.

When I got to my chiropractor's office a few minutes later, I realized I'd brought something with me.

"Eew, what's that smell?"

I hurried to the restroom, grabbed some paper towels and tried to wipe the yellow pulpy residue off the soles of my shoes. But even if you rinse the soles of your shoes under a faucet, that yellow crap stays in the cracks.

I sure hope the smell goes away when it dries.

Say it isn't so, Steve!

Talk about disillusioned! It turns out that one of my favorite bloggers, Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion (and of Edelman PR), has lately been a party to PR fraud.

Eew! Say it isn't so, Steve!

In case you've been stuck in the same closet I've apparently been in, and missed all the ruckus, Edelman PR created a couple of fake blogs or "flogs" (some call them "astroturf") for its client, Wal-Mart (gee, why am I not surprised!).

You can read all about it in this article on BusinessWeek.com, which first exposed the fraud. BW notes:

It all started last month, when a folksy blog called Wal-Marting Across America was set up. The site featured the musings of a couple known only as Jim and Laura as they drove cross country in an RV, and included regular interviews with Wal-Mart workers, who were dependably happy about the company and their working conditions.

But it turned out "Jim and Laura" weren't real RVers, or real bloggers...they were paid schills for Wal-Mart.

Apparently Edelman PR organized the RV trip and accompanying "flog" through a fake-populist group called Working Families for Wal-Mart, which BW notes is funded by Wal-Mart. Once BW pulled back the curtains and exposed the fraud, it took Edelman over a week to admit to making it all up...so much for its vaunted quick-response crisis communications.

For a tongue-in-cheek (or maybe not) rant on this situation, check out strumpette's call for Edelman and Rubel to resign.

A bit extreme? Maybe. But I do seem to recall some sections of the PRSA Code of Ethics that relate to this kind of situation. For example:

HONESTY: We adhere to the highest standards of accuracy and truth in advancing the interests of those we represent and in communicating with the public.

Yeah, right. Well, as much as I enjoy reading Rubel's explorations of new/social media, maybe he needs to take a "time out" to brush up on the basics.

$5 million new media challenge

"Turn the web on its head. Show us how online news can help people improve their lives and shape their communities."

That's the challenge recently issued by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. It's called the Knight Brothers 21st Century News Challenge, and it's a worldwide call for new ideas, pilot projects, commercial products and leadership initiatives that will improve the flow of information and news in the public interest.

To back up its challenge, the foundation is putting its money where its mouth is...in 2007, it plans to award $5 million to those individuals, organizations or businesses that can show how their ideas will transform community life.

Interested? The deadline for applying and submitting a letter of inquiry is Dec. 31, 2006.

The categories for this initiative are:

• Ideas
• Pilot project
• Leadership
• Commercial products and investments
• Open (for great ideas that don't seem to fit in the other categories)
  

Specifically, the Knight Foundation is looking for:

• New ways to understand news and act on it, including new ways to collect, prepare and distribute information, news and journalism that reveals hard-to-know facts, identifies common problems, clarifies community issues and points out practical courses of action.


• New ways for people to communicate interactively to better understand one another, to generate real passion in solving local problems and to share the know-how they need to improve their communities;


• New ways for people to use information, news and journalism to imagine their collective possibilities as communities, and to set and reach common community goals.

Also be sure to check out what they're not looking for, so you don't waste their time...or yours.

Questions? Check out their FAQ page. Think you've got the next big idea? Here's how to apply.

Seize the donuts, seize the day!

If I had kids in college, or thinking about going to college, this is the commentary I'd urge them to read: Seize the Weight by Marisha Pessl. You can find it in today's New York Times.

Time to enlist??

As I was signing off last night, after putting up my post about the Mozilla guy, open-source marketing and the pop-up stopping Firefox browser (which I almost always use), I found a surprise under my window: an Army recruiting pop-up!

I almost never see a pop-up, unless I happen to click on the wrong button by mistake. So my first thought was, "How did that get here?" And I took a screenshot (left).

Then I wondered, "What site did I cruise tonight that might have harbored an Army pop-up?" Maybe it was when I read Sidney Blumenthal's "At War, In Denial" on Salon.com. You think?

I mean, I know the Army is getting desperate for recruits, but if they're now targeting 50-plus, out-of-shape female academics who sometimes need a cane to walk...well, they're more desperate than I thought. Especially since I think the war in Iraq is a lost cause, and our commander in chief has gone off the deep end.

Think I should reqest an Army Info Pack?

Make like Mozilla...with viral marketing

If you want make like Mozilla, it helps to have a compelling product that's a good value and solves an annoying problem. It also helps if you trust your users, and arm them with the tools they need to spread the word.

That's what Asa Dotzler says, and he should know. As community coordinator of the Spread Firefox project for Mozilla, he's been one of the innovators of open source marketing.

Dotzler, who spoke Sept. 21 in Palo Alto, Calif., at the Third Thursday meet-up, first got involved with Mozilla as a volunteer beta tester. His avocation turned into a career.

Compelling? Well, Firefox offered something the dominant browser, Internet Explorer, didn't -- a solution to those annoying pop-ups.

A good value? Well, free is a pretty good.

The result? A lot of people tried it, liked it, and told their friends. (Hey, that's how I heard about it. Thank you, Steve Greene!)

The next step, Dotzler said, is to help your users spread the word.

For example, when positive comments started appearing in blogs about Firefox, Dotzler asked one well-known blogger who'd said he liked the new browser to put a "get Firefox" button on his blog. The blogger agreed. So he asked more bloggers -- about 100 of them -- and within 24 hours, 85 of them had put up a button.

It was working, but it took a lot of time and effort to identify and contact all those bloggers.So they asked Firefox users to help automate the process. Several volunteered and worked together to make it happen.

"You need to put it in their hands," he said. "Let them be that engine."

It was also a Firefox user who suggested asking fellow users to raise money for an ad to celebrate shipping Firefox 1.0. They gave themselves a month to raise the needed funds, but they got twice as much as they needed in just two weeks. So they decided on a two-page ad in the New York Times, with one page listing the names of everyone who'd helped to get Firefox off the ground, and one offering user testimonials about what makes Firefox special.

Dotzler said the ad initially created just a small uptick in Firefox users...but, as the ad itself became news, those numbers kept growing.

Recently, when Mozilla put out a call to Firefox users to create some 30-second ads, it got 280 submissions...about five or six times as many as they'd expected. Of those, Dotzler said, about 60 were broadcast quality and five were truly "top-notch." He hopes Mozilla will be the first open-source company to run a user-made ad.

The best way to go into a volunteer project like this is without any preconceptions, Dotzler said. Otherwise, you tend to end up with token attempts at user involvement...like the recent Chevy "make your own ad" web promotion. Those kinds of efforts can backfire, he said, like the Chevy promotion did when some folks found ways to create negative Chevy ads out of the promo clips Chevy provided.

A better example, Dotzler said, is CurrentTV, which requires advertisers to let viewers to participate in creating advertisements. The result, he said, has been ads that offer an authenticity missing in most commercials today.

It's really hard to fake authenticity, he added, so why not let your users take the lead?

P.S. For college students looking for internships, Dotzler noted, "You don't have to ask Mozilla for an internship...you can just come in and do it, and get credit for what you've done." Dotzler said he writes lots of letters of recommendation for college students who've worked on Firefox.

Couric confessions

I have a confession to make. I haven't watched Katie Couric yet in her new gig on the CBS Evening News.

I'm feminist enough to think it's a milestone, but jaded enough to think that winning the top seat in a dying medium isn't much of a prize.

Of course, I've got plenty of excuses for not watching. I isten to the news on NPR while I'm driving...I usually check the news online when I check my email...I get the NYT delivered to my email box...and I have afternoon classes this semester, so I'm not usually home when the evening news comes on (whenever that is...it's been so long since I actually watched a national newscast that I'm not sure).

But the truth is that I just find it hard to get too worked up over Couric being on the CBS Evening News. Wish I could, but it's just not there. Maybe I'm just not a big fan of happy talk.

Now if she'd decided to leave the networks behind and move over to the web instead...well, that would be another story.

Registered to vote?

If you're eliglible to vote but haven't yet registered, you still have time...October 23 is the deadline to register for the Nov. 7 election. But please don't wait until the last minute -- register now!

To get you started, here are links to the League of Women Voters' Smart Voter web pages for Santa Clara County and San Mateo County, as well as the Secretary of State's voter registration web page. The LWV's Smart Voter pages include county-by-county information on the fall electoral contests.

If you'd like to get your hands on a voter registration form, just ask me -- I'll be bringing voter registration forms to campus over the next two weeks, as part of a voter registration effort sponsored by my church.

Pondering those propositions?

If you're becoming bewildered by the burgeoning barrage of political ads -- all of which seem to be trashing one state proposition or another -- you'll appreciate the LWV's helpful directory of the 14 state propositions that will appear on the November ballot.

The LWV's short nonpartisan proposition summaries are a good way to get past the hype and name-calling and find out what those propositions are really about...and make up your own mind on how to vote. Links to the full text of each proposition are included.

Scoble answers JMC students' questions

Questions? Yes, we had plenty of questions for Blogger Robert Scoble, of Scobelizer fame, when he spoke at JMC Tuesday evening. Scoble came to the SJSU campus to speak to Journalism 163 students. Here's a sampling:

Are news outlets mainly going to be aggregators in the future, or are they still going to create content?

Some of both, Scoble said, pointing out that Newsweek broke the HP story, not a blogger. It's also hard for a blogger to cover Iraq, he added. Big city newspapers and news brands will survive.

However, that doesn't mean he thinks newsprint will survive.

News brands will stick around, but you're not likely to read it on paper, Scoble said. Newprint is expensive, and so is home delivery, so he thinks the paper side of the news business is going away.

"I do not read paper," Scoble said. "I don't subscribe to it, I don't read it. Because I can get tomorrow's news today (online)."

"I doubt that any one in this class is going to get hired to work on a newspaper," he added, though they may get hired by a newspaper's online side to work for the newspaper brand.

Is MS Office dead? (A loaded question for the former Microsoft evangelist!)

"I don't use Word anymore," Scoble said. "For me, Word is dead. I moved my usage pattern from Word onto Wordpress."

Does he worry about privacy, now that he's become so well known?

"Privacy? I take the Madonna approach," Scoble said. "I'm going to exploit my privacy before anyone else does...everything's out there."

However, he said privacy is going to be a problem, particularly with the MySpace crowd as they come of age to enter the job market.

"Something in society is tilting," Scoble said, adding that in his last four interviews, his interviewers had printed out some of his blog posts and had questions about why he'd said what he said. One of them had about 20 pages of his blog printed out and highlighted.

What that means, Scoble said, is that bloggers and the MySpace generation have got to start thinking in terms of "what's this going to look like in 20 years." On the other hand, he noted, for a lot of media employers, if they can't find you in Google, they're not interested in hiring you.

"Instructors here used to work with students to get lots of clips," Scoble said. "Now, it's blogs."

Is a blog as important as a clip?

Sixty thousand times more important, he said, noting one link from Digg can bring 60 to 80 thousand people to your blog. For example, that's what happened when word got out that he was leaving Microsoft. In addition, if a blog gets linked to, it shows up [on Google and in Technorati]. And, he added, if it's a good blog, others will link to it.

What makes a good blog?

A good blog is passionate and authoritative, said Scoble. It uses links to background information and source information to help establish its credibility and authority.

How is online writing different?

It's a little bit different kind of journalism, Scoble said, not always inverted pyramid style. When you're wriitng for print, you don't have links and you usually don't have photos. Online, there's no length limit. You can put a podcast up with your story, and include photos...and that will get you more links than just repurposing print copy online. It makes it interactive. If you're online, it's almost a necessity to get more media...photos, a video clip, audio...to make it more of a package.

Still hungering for more? Check out JMC student Andrew Venegas' blog post on Scoble's visit (a different take, a better headline), as well as links to his podcast and video of Scoble's presentation to the class. Or download Steve Sloan's podcast of our pre-class conversation with Scoble over burgers and beer.

Pretexting: A lie is a lie

A man after my own heart...that's Scott Herhold, a Mercury News columnist who calls a spade a spade in today's column.

Writing about the Hewlett Packard scandal, he points out that "pretexting" is a gentle euphemism for a less than gentile activity: LYING. That's what the HP scandal is really about. Lying and deceit.

Lying to get access to someone else's private records. Spying on your own colleagues. Caring more about corporate secrecy than honor. And lying to the public about not realizing that your lies and deceits are wrong. (At least I assume that last one is a lie...but maybe HP Chairwoman Patricia Dunn simply has no moral compass...no, wait a minute, that's another euphemism, isn't it? Maybe she's just a liar.)

In the future, Herhold suggests simply substituting the word "lying" whenever you see the word "pretexting" in a news article or commentary. Go ahead and give it a try. Works like a charm.

1, 2, 3...OK, GO

Reporting "live" from Ithaca, NY, Prof. Steve Greene sent me this link to a "music exercise" video, which I pass on for your edification and enjoyment: OK GO on treadmills.

New media experiments

NPR's On The Media looks at several aspects of new media this week, including:

• an experiment with citizen journalism called NewAssignment.net from NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen
• a blogger who's experimenting with video blogging by doing a two-minute daily webcast called The Show

A link from The Show took me to eyespot, a new online video editing/mixing site (it's in beta) that's free and looks pretty interesting. It's got a variety of video clips (including vintage TV commercials) and music available for mixing with your own stuff. Check it out.

Time for fundamental change?

When I roam the blogosphere, I often find a couple new posts or blogs that are worth remembering and passing on. Here's the latest:

If you want to start thinking differently about how newspapers can leverage the power of the web, try reading Adrian Holovaty's "A Fundamental Way Newspaper Sites Need to Change."

Holovaty, an internet developer with a journalism background who is editor of editorial innovations at washingtonpost.com, suggests journalists should stop being so "story-centric" and start focusing on structuring information so that it can be repurposed. Yes, we're talking databases.