Hi: I'm Doreen Marchionni (Ph.D. '09, Missouri School of Journalism). I'll be your intergalactic pilot on this journey through my dissertation. Send whiskey, please.
When the New York Times reported that a Mitt Romney-affiliated Super PAC was considering attacking President Obama for falsely crafting the persona of a “black, metrosexual Abe Lincoln,” the obvious way to respond was with revulsion. The other way, however, was with delight. Insidious purposes no doubt motivated its creation, but the phrase “metrosexual Abe Lincoln” offers an anachronistic juxtaposition that’s very much worth contemplating. (“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth skinny jeans…”) Indeed, with so many other presidents to choose from, why stop at Lincoln? “
This email I just sent to students might be one for the record books:
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Hello media critics: Attached is the order of presentations for your final projects. Feel free to swap with someone, but make sure you let me know.
On an unrelated note, in yesterday’s talk about “parental advisory” labels on CDs, I mentioned Tipper Gore lobbied Congress for such labels after she overheard her (11-year-old) daughter listening to “Me So Horny.” That’s incorrect. The song the girl was listening to was Prince’s “Darling Nikki.” 2 Live Crew’s “As Nasty As They Want To Be” album, which included “Me So Horny,” was among the first CDs to receive the label, though.
I first encountered Turkle’s research on mediated communication while developing a readings list for my doctoral dissertation on journalism as a conversation. I’ve had a mad crush on her ever since. She’s a rare qualitative scholar in an ocean of quantoids at MIT, a challenge in itself. She’s also one of the first scholars/psychologists to study the Internet’s impact on human relations — and it ain’t purty.
I think it’s fair to say she’s grown increasingly concerned about our use of social media and text-messaging as a substitute for real conversation. I’m with her on that. While I consider myself a champion of mediated communication, it’s hardly a substitute for the real thing. And yet as she eloquently explains in this NYT guest editorial, we are substituting at an accelerating rate, from boardrooms to classrooms, fooling ourselves all the while.
Partly in response, I put conversation and discussion at the heart of every course I teach, at least when my students and I are in the classroom. I also forbid the use of electronic devices during those discussions, unless otherwise instructed. I confide to them I’d be the first to pull out my phone to check for messages if I didn’t, and that’s no lie. Usually, but not always, I get faint smiles of understanding from them. And, for now, that’s good enough for me.
I got so much love for this year’s Pulitzer Prizes for journalism, announced Monday. Not only did my peeps at The Seattle Times win for an investigation into abusive methadone prescriptions, but a young reporter who preceded my time at the paper years ago, Eli Sanders, picked up a prize for his harrowing account of a murder-rape published in Seattle’s alternative paper, The Stranger.
And then there’s 24-year-old Sara Ganim of the little known Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa. This bulldog broke the Sandusky story at Penn State and then pounded at it relentlessly, all while the big boys at ESPN looked on. I like her style. She reportedly wakens at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. to get working and sleeps with a police scanner at her side. Cops reporters in newsrooms get no respect. And yet many of the biggest stories of our times originate on the cops beat, among them Watergate.
Hats off to those go-to, sleepless workhorses of newsrooms. I’ll take one of them over 10 traditional beat reporters any day.
Hi: I'm Doreen Marchionni (Ph.D. '09, Missouri School of Journalism). I'll be your intergalactic pilot on this journey through my dissertation. Send whiskey, please.
