Connecting the Dots
by Glynn Wilson

Former New York Times editor and Alabama native Howell Raines popped out of his Pocono Mountains retirement this week to take on Fox News in the editorial section of the Washington Post.

His point was that newspaper reporters should take on Fox News for the biased way the cable network has covered the health care reform debate.

“Why haven’t America’s old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration — a campaign without precedent in our modern political history?” Raines asks.

Everything he says is true. It’s just that it comes a bit late in the game, long after Raines himself was in a position to do something about the kind of bad, corporate journalism that was already developing while he was still in it full time.

Some of us on the Web Press have been calling Fox biased and wrong for years.

Where was Raines in this fight when he ran the New York Times as executive editor in 2002 and 2003?

Read the rest of this entry »

Toy Boy Troy Shows Up in Public

Connecting the Dots
by Glynn Wilson

Alabama’s unqualified attorney general Troy “Toy Boy” King held a televised news conference in Montgomery today to announce that, even though he claims the legal authority, he will not intervene to stop Gov’nah Bob Riley’s warrantless war on computerized bingo, the biggest threat to the chastity of the state’s citizens since the scourge of whiskey during Prohibition.

According to one of the bloggers at al.com, by sidestepping intervention, King avoids a legal showdown with Riley, a lame duck governor who can’t run for reelection. Yes, that’s the same governor who originally appointed King to fill the attorney general post five years ago, even though King had never seen action in a courtroom as a prosecutor.

The governor and attorney general have grown increasingly antagonistic toward each other on electronic bingo and other issues. Sources say Riley was largely behind rumors that surfaced on the Web and talk radio a couple of years ago that King was a gay Republican hypocrite, in spite of his own war on dildo shops in Montgomery.

Read the rest of this entry »

And What You Can Do About It Now

Connecting the Dots
by Glynn Wilson

During the 1995-96 academic year, I spent most of my time sitting in the Gorgas library at the University of Alabama scanning the New York Times on microfilm and reading stories about the environment along side public opinion polls. I spent a small fortune paying to print those stories for a Master’s thesis looking at how media coverage affects public opinion.

There was no search engine called Google in those early days, and most newspapers had not yet started backing up their stories in online databases such as Lexis-Nexis. So to conduct research, you had to go to the library and pull up old newspapers on microfilm and put change in the machine to print the stories.

The Internet company America Online was just coming on the scene, the Web browser Netscape had just been created, and a conservative convenience store clerk named Matt Drudge had 1,000 subscribers to one of the first e-mail lists. By the fall of 1996, about the time I moved to Milledgeville to teach at Georgia College the year the Olympics came to Atlanta and put up my first Web site, Drudge had started the first “news aggregation” Web site, The Drudge Report.

Bill Clinton was enjoying a great run as president and was reelected in a landslide that fall, in part because the U.S. economy was booming thanks to the dramatic increases in worker productivity due to the personal computer revolution.

Yes, old Bob Dole fell off that stage and didn’t run a great campaign. But a majority of the American people felt the government and the economy were working, so why change? In fact, by the year 1999, the Clinton-Gore administration had wiped out the Reagan budget deficit. Remember the “peace dividend?”

Read the rest of this entry »

Technology U
by Glynn Wilson

I’m just going to come right out and say it. I know how to save the press and democracy — and the right to sue in this country.

The question is will the right people listen? Will they listen in time?

For an excellent discussion on where we are, check out this post from David Campbell, a professor of cultural and political geography at Durham University in the United Kingdom associated with the Durham Centre for Advanced Photography Studies.

Revolutions in the media economy: The context of crisis

Many of the points he makes have already been discussed here, but perhaps people will listen to him.

“The way news and information is reported and delivered to citizens is undergoing profound transformations, especially in the United States and Europe,” he starts out. “In the last 12 months commentary has been rife with claims about ‘the death of newspapers,’ the end of journalism, and the impact this crisis will allegedly have on democratic politics.”

I won’t take the time or space here to summarize all his points. If you are interested in this information, go read his piece and then come back to see how I am going to fill in some gaps he’s missing in answer to the question: “How do we fund the good stuff?”

Read the rest of this entry »

“Life’s but a walking shadow…a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing…”
- William Shakespeare, Macbeth

by Glynn Wilson
Technology U

Do you ever feel the pressure of change in your life?

Do you ever get the feeling that new technology is coming on so fast you can’t keep up?

Do you ever get the feeling that there’s too much information in the world, but that not enough of it is getting into the minds of some of the people you know who need it the most?

If so, you are not alone.

We are living in a time of great technological change, greater than at any time in human history. Feelings of stress and anxiety are inevitable, unless you are just determined to use an analogue phone and avoid cell phones, avoid digital cable or satellite TV, to read an old fashioned daily or weekly newspaper instead of getting your news online.

If you are reading this, you are already taking at least one step into the future. If you know someone who refuses to read on the Web, consider printing this out for them. I am about to tell you something that will help you understand and deal with it all.

The only way I know how to do that is to tell some stories. And the only way I know how to tell a story that informs is to put myself into the story. That is “new journalism,” whether the people who still cling to the corporate PR style of detached newspaper journalism are ready for it or not.

Read the rest of this entry »

Connecting the Dots
by Glynn Wilson

After spending a good part of the day Tuesday studying the U.S. attorneys response to the motion for a new trial filed in federal court by former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman and HealthSouth founder Richard Scrushy, I re-watched The Other Boleyn Girl film on Encore last night.

As many long-time readers will remember, we spent a good bit of time and space back during the Bush years showing parallels between American democracy then and European monarchy in the days of Henry VIII as well as King George III.

So what’s the lesson for today?

There is a great and telling line in the film that should help readers understand where we are today in American law.

Elizabeth Boleyn, the mother of Mary and Ann Boleyn, is arguing with her husband Thomas about sending Ann off to exile in the French court, while offering up Mary as a mistress to King Henry. She is trying to convince her husband that the family’s rise to wealth and power by courting the king will end badly, but he is too greedy to listen.

When Thomas downplays her assertion that the head of the previous resident of their new palace is now resting on the end of a stake, he counters by saying yes, but “he committed treason.”

“What is treason,” Elizabeth asks, “but whatever the king and his lawyers say it is?”

Read the rest of this entry »

OK, I take back SOME of what I said about Facebook…

Rowland Scherman

Izzy Stone in his print shop…

by Glynn Wilson

When I signed up for Facebook a litte more than a month back, I was not thrilled with the prospect. I already manage several Web sites, most of which carry an economic interface where I can get paid and create something for the future with the real possibility of generating enough revenue to pay other writers and photographers.

My skeptical question was: How is Facebook going to help with that goal considering that the programmer geeks at Facebook make all the money off the free content tens of thousands of people post there every day?

Now, thanks to an incident that happened today, I see the power of social networking software and realize the utility of the concept.

I ran into my old friend Rowland Scherman on Facebook in the past couple of days. Today, he sent me the photo above to use on this site. This gives me the opportunity to tell a couple of stories and connect a few dots.

The photo is of an old investigative journalist named Isidor Feinstein Stone (December 24, 1907 – June 18, 1989) better known as I.F. Stone or Izzy Stone. He was an iconoclastic American investigative journalist, best remembered for his self-published I.F. Stone’s Weekly. At its peak in the 1960s, it had a circulation of about 70,000, but was regarded as very influential. In fact, The Weekly was ranked 16th in a poll of his fellow journalists of “The Top 100 Works of Journalism in the United States in the 20th Century,” according to Wikipedia.

Stone was an intellectual descendant of the muckraking journalists of the early 20th century, and this site is influenced by their work and Stone’s, as well as Jack Anderson, Henry David Thoreau, Norman Maclean, Hunter S. Thompson and even Norman Mailer. I am the modern day descendant of those traditions, just publishing on the Web rather than in print.

This should not be that hard to grasp, but you would not believe some of the idiotic comments I get from time to time from right-wing critics in Alabamaland, who have as much trouble grasping this concept as Sarah Palin understanding why so many people are appalled at seeing her shoot wolves from helicopters.

The people of Birmingham seem to get it when one of our heroes who have made it to the finals of American Idol talk about their musical influences. So why is it so hard to grasp that writers and photographers draw upon influences as well?

Rowland Scherman gets this right away. He’s one of the smartest guys I know : )

He may not remember me so much from the first time I met him, since he was fairly souced on red wine at his old jazz bar on Southside, a bar called “Joe,” and since I was just a mere teenager just old enough to drink and play the drums in bars like the old Cadillac Cafe and The Courtyard.

But I remember him as the curmudgeonly proprietor who hung out with writers such as Dennis Covington. I met Covington at Joe Bar and then took his creative writing class at UAB in 1981. Not long after that, I moved back to Tuscaloosa to finish my undergraduate work in journalism and then headed for Baldwin County and other points out of Birmingham.

I ran into Rowland again when I returned in 1986 to open the Newsbreak bookstore and coffee shop on Birmingham’s Southside well before Books-a-Million and Starbucks came along. In fact, and Rowland may not realize this, but I was in negotiations to rent the space right next door to Joe Bar for the shop — when sadly, the historic Studio Arts building burned down.

I ended up renting the space at 30th Street and Highland Avenue instead, and the rest, they say, is history.

Now if you Google Rowland Scherman you will run into his unfinished Wikipedia page, where you learn this.

Rowland Scherman is an American photographer.

He studied at Oberlin College, and was dark room apprentice at LIFE magazine. He was the first photographer for the newly-formed Peace Corps in 1961. His photographs appeared in Life, Look, Time, National Geographic, Paris Match and Playboy, among many others. He won a Grammy Award in 1968 for his photograph cover of “Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits.” He published “Love Letters,” an alphabet formed by posed dancers, and “Elvis is Everywhere.” He lived in Birmingham, Alabama, and documented Alabama’s Highway 11.

You will also see that he was recently written up in the Boston Globe.

Rowland Scherman gets another shot at fame

What you won’t learn there is that Rowland also keeps up with the news online as well as anyone I know. He is an activist citizen of the United States who is always involved in the “good fight” for the advancement of American democracy.

Now, in this era of the Web and social networking, you can follow his work and thoughts on Facebook, where you can see some of his photographs from his world travels, including Ireland and Teineman square in China.

Which gives me an idea.

Hey Rowland: Have you ever been to Cuba?

I haven’t been since that crazy trip with photographer Spider Martin and Dickie Jemison in 2000. We never got out of the city of Havana to do what I really wanted to do, go a searching for that illusive ivory-billed woodpecker out in the countryside.

Now that would be a great expedition, if we could put together the budget for the trip. What are you doing for Christmas this year?

Read the rest of this entry »

Connecting the Dots
by Glynn Wilson

I almost lost my breakfast in my plate as I watched CNN’s John King interview Dick Cheney on his “State of the Union” show this Sunday. It made me want to get rid of my television set, reinforcing an idea that seems to be growing among the American population.

As newspaper circulation continues in free fall and as we begin to acknowledge that broadcast news let us down as well as newspaper reporting over the past eight years, more and more I’m hearing people say they would rather have a high speed Internet connection than a cable TV package or a newspaper subscription any day.

I mean who gives a damn what Cheney has to say at this point? Is he the only guest King could get to assess the state of the nation? What a joke.

More and more young people are getting their view of the world from shows such as the Daily Show on Comedy Central, where this week Jon Daily took on Jim Cramer of CNBC for his failed coverage of the economic meltdown. This is a video series worth watching in case you missed it.

Jim Cramer in Daily Show Showdown

It’s no wonder newspapers are dying. As their circulations fall and they lay off more news workers, they become even less interesting.

If you are interested in catching the latest stories on the dying newspaper industry, check out these recent stories from Reuters and Editor and Publisher magazine.

U.S. newspaper circulation declines accelerate

The Rocky Mountain News may be the biggest U.S. newspaper to fold in a long time, but…

Look at the latest figures for newspaper circulation in Alabama. Then compare our online readership numbers to newspapers with a long history such as the Tuscaloosa News (31,000), the Anniston Star (23,000) and the Decatur Daily (20,000).

Last week, while I was on the road doing original reporting on several important stories out of East Tennessee, 36,685 unique visitors (readers) hit our site and viewed 57,976 pages.

So after only four years in business, we have more readers than any of the medium-sized newspapers in this state. One of the reasons may be the strength of our content and the power of our voice verses the weak kneed content of the newspapers.

Read the rest of this entry »

Connecting the Dots
by Glynn Wilson

William Wilberforce, the British politician and philanthropist who is credited with ending the slave trade in Great Britain, spent his entire adult life dedicated to “creating a better world,” according to his biographies and the movie Amazing Grace. So his story is important to know for anyone with similar ambitions.

Wilberforce was inspired in part by the preacher of his youth, John Newton, who had been the captain of a merchant slave ship until he underwent a dramatic religious conversion while steering his vessel through a violent storm on the way from Africa to Jamaica. Because of his experiences, it was Newton who wrote one of the most beloved Christian hymns of all time, Amazing Grace.

A medallion created as part of the anti-slavery campaign by Josiah Wedgwood, 1795

Growing up in a devout Baptist home on the outskirts of Birmingham, Alabama, I’ve heard many renditions of this song over the years. Even though I long ago abandoned the life of “faith” for a life in pursuit of scientific and literary truth, there are times when I have been moved upon hearing the inspiring melody.

I remember hearing my grandfather on my father’s side of the family sing it with the twang of a country accent as he led the choir at the Greensport Baptist Church in St. Clair, Alabama, near Asheville, with my part Cherokee grandmother playing it on an old pump organ. I can still hear in my head the way it sounded as this good man, who fought in World War I and was exposed to mustard gas, whistled the tune as he puttered around his small farm or his wood shop.

Read the rest of this entry »