journoprof

This just in from Poynter’s Al Tompkins. What happens when United Airlines breaks a musician’s guitar? He makes a video about it, uploads to YouTube and more then 3 million people watch it. Talk about bad PR.

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Check out my latest video post to The New York Times blog, The Local. This one’s about a deer hunter who lives in Maplewood and uses his basement to prepare for his hunting trips to Pennsylvania.

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Soon, I have no doubt, all the best journalism will be readable in Top Ten format. Anyway, the latest irresistible such list is Forbes Magazine’s ranking of the country’s 100 most powerful celebrities. Making headlines is the fact that Angelina Jolie has ousted Oprah from the top spot.

Jolie raked in $27 million in the past 12 months thanks to a movie schedule that included Kung Fu Panda, Wanted and the not-yet-released spy thriller Salt. Even more impressive: The publicity she garnered following the birth of her twins, as well as the consistent headlines she grabs for her philanthropic efforts and her relationship with actor Brad Pitt, who ranks No. 9 on the list.

Barabara Ehrenreich gave the old “It’s a calling” speech to graduating students at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism a couple of weeks ago. The speech was reproduced in the San Francisco Chronicle today. Despite instructions from the Dean to be upbeat, she starts off on a rather gloomy note, no doubt making all the parents at the ceremony weep into their programs. But she’s right that there does seem to be something so compelling about the art of journalism, or the act of it, that makes people do it for free.

Here’s a chunk from the beginning:

So let’s get the worst out of the way right up front: You are going to be trying to carve out a career in the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. You are furthermore going to be trying to do so within what appears to be a dying industry. You have abundant skills and talents – it’s just not clear that anyone wants to pay you for them.

Well, you are not alone.

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Well, she’s certainly one tough cookie.

Roxana Saberi talks about her 100 days of imprisonment in Iran to NPR. She says she was forced to confess and when she recanted her confession was rushed to trial. Saberi went on hunger strike for two weeks and only stopped apparently when her mother threatened a hunger strike of her own.

A friend of mine, a foreign correspondent, who worked with Saberi in Iran, says he warned her that the climate was getting too hot there and suggested she leave. She apparently is not a quitter.

 Here’s my latest story for poynter.org. about a student newspaper, the Minnestoa Daily, using an experimental Facebook application to draw readers to its website. The application rewards readers with points for, say, sharing stories, posting them, writing a letter to the editor, and high points scorers cash them in for prizes – like tickets to see the Minnesota Twins.

It’s still in the experimental phase, but what’s interesting about Facebook is the sharing ethic which allows the newspaper to push news to readers, rather than just sitting there and waiting for readers to come.

White House reporters were miffed that they were shut out of a covering a session of hoops Prez Obama shot with a University of Connecticut basketball team visiting the White House. What particularly irked them was that the White House covered the event itself and put out it’s own video, complete with logo and all.

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Here’s an interesting rant about why journalists deserve low pay in the Christian Science Monitor.

The country’s oldest journalism school at the University of Missouri will require journalism students to get iPhones so they can get used to using the device in the field when reporting LINK.