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Friday, August 19, 2005
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Whether they're writing about tax reform or not (and whether they think
"tax reform" means avoiding a state income tax, or getting one),
journalism students and citizen journalists alike will find an
impressive set of research links at the Tennessee Tax Revolt Taxpayer Information Center.
The site's new "investigative reporting" section has links to national
organizations that journalism students probably know about already.
(Several are on my home page or show up during the year on my course pages.) However, I really like that section's two Google News "location" searches -- great for a class discussion of focusing a search with Boolean operators. Example:
location:tn (ethics OR corruption OR bribe OR fraud OR "Tennessee Waltz")
While we're there, I'll also be able to point out that Google News now lets you create an RSS feed of a search you want to have it repeat frequently. (New to RSS?)
Here's a search I have on my own RSS list to narrow the results when I'm not interested in celebrities and sports stories:
Knoxville "University of Tennessee" -"Johnny -Knoxville" -basketball -football -coach -athletics -golf
We can also discuss the shortcomings of such a search, which would miss crime or budget stories that involve athletes or
coaches, and why a story about the Xerox Classic golf tournament
slipped by that last filter today.
Next topic, feeds and breaking news:
In the time it took me to type and post that last paragraph, the first
item in the list changed from "Hubba, Bubba! Dickerson leads Xerox
Classic by 1" to UT, Maryville College do well in US News rankings (WATE.com),
announcing that UT moved up ten places in the annual magazine tally of
colleges and universities -- to number 85 among 248 "national
universities."
Hmmm. That story also will fit into later classes about statistics and surveys, and about differences between broadcast news, newspapers and news websites.
For instance, if that "85" number in the TV story sounds low, it's
because the "national" list includes well-endowed private universities,
but TV has to leave out details. As the News Sentinel points out in its longer version of the story, UT is number 38 among 162 large public universities, and this is its first time in the top 40. (Here's the UT press release for comparison.)
The Web not only handles the News Sentinel's longer version of the story just fine, it can provide more. In this case, the newspaper's online edition, KnoxNews.com, did attempt to link to
more US News & World Report
information about the rankings, but two of its three links didn't work
at first. I sent a note about the coding glitch to the webmaster at
12:45; it was fixed within the hour! I couldn't ask for a better
example to emphasize that the Web can be updated
during the day (unlike a printed paper) and (unlike radio and
television) website problems can be fixed before everyone has seen or
heard them.
Back to the original subject of this post: Other resources on that "Information Center" page include links to
Tennessee county and city websites, newspaper and television station
websites, pages about public information laws, state economic data, and
much more -- more than 700 links in all. Even as a long scrolling list
with little information about each link, it's definitely worth the
price of a bookmark.
Journalism students, however, had better learn to spell "muckraker" right.
11:26:14 AM 
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Along with the first Tennessean president of the United States, the
first half of the Nineteenth Century holds an early example of
something a lot like the culture of blogging -- in the works of a
Connecticut Yankee named Henry Clarke Wright.
That's only part of the story from W. Caleb McDaniel, a Johns Hopkins graduate student who published this essay earlier this summer: "Blogging in the Early Republic: Why bloggers belong in the history of reading."
McDaniel, who also blogs, describes the anti-slavery, reform and personal writings of Henry Clarke Wright, and summarizes Wright's blogger-like characteristics like this:
"...his eccentric range of
interests, his resolution 'to write down what I see and hear and feel
daily,' his use of journals to 'let off' rants of 'indignation,' his
utopian conviction that writing might change the world, and (not least)
his practice of spending the 'greater part of the day writing in his
room.'"
Even an earlier biography has bserved that, for Wright, "distinctions between private and public, between diaries and published
writings, meant little." (He mailed parts of his diaries to friends and sometimes published excerpts from them.)
And, as Wright himself put it, "writing a journal does me good":
"I can let off my indignation at the
wrongs I see and hear. I am far happier when I write a little every
day. I take more note too, of passing events, and see more of what is
going on around me. I live less in the past and future, and more in the
present, when I journalize . . ."
"Wright died in 1870, already a relatively forgotten reformer,"
McDaniel says. "Yet[~]and I
speak from my own experience in 2005[~]his reflections on writing are
eerily evocative of what it is like to blog... Was Wright a blogger?
Are not his journals the fossilized originals of a species?"
But McDaniel isn't out to enshrine Wright as the first blogger (he
gives other, earlier examples), but to point out a similarity in
the information-cultures of Wright's era and ours. And it's not the
political pamphleteers that make the connection, he says; the
similarity has more to do with an explosion in the amount of reading
material available -- the proliferation of cheap newspapers in the
1800s and the Internet today.
In both cases, McDaniel argues, one way people have coped with all that
news is to save some of it in journals, write about it, add their
opinions, and thereby "construct their own networks of information,
annotating the news to create a record of their reading." That does
sound familiar. For more, see McDaniel's full article.
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Fishing for a
Tennessee connection after my opening reference to the
Jacksonian Era, I searched for more about Wright's life... but
discovered a personal coincidence instead: He was born in my old
stomping grounds instead, the hills of Western Connecticut, Aug.
29,
1797. (And McDaniel's from Texas.) I hope someone in the Rocky Top Brigade appreciates my trying for a local angle anyway...
10:12:38 AM
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© Copyright
2008
Bob Stepno.
Last update:
7/19/08; 1:08:09 PM.
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