Will potheads save the newspaper industry? No, I’m not referring to the current crop of J-school grads, I’m sure they could pass any drug test if given enough time to study for it. I’m talking about the readers.
Anyone who has read through the comments section of any newspapers’ website would reasonably suspect that most of the writers were under the influence of something. The level of anger and hostility displayed by the comment writers however, would suggest that they were ingesting something stronger than pot.
Vitriolic commenters aside, I can’t help but notice that my local newspapers have begun to resemble a visitor’s guide to Amsterdam. In a time of declining ad revenues, the marijuana dispensaries are splashing out money for full-page, full-color ads week after week. And there sure are a lot of them. Who knew there were that many sick people in Sacramento County?
The Sacramento News & Review has even started publishing a big, stapled pull-out section devoted almost entirely to ads for medical marijuana. Frankly, that’s not surprising. SN&R lets their writers use the F-word in their articles. SN&R would probably accept ads from crack cocaine dealers if they thought they could get away with it.
What is surprising is that The Sacramento Bee has quietly added its own weekly, pull-out pot section. The horror! A family newspaper, bearing a mascot drawn by Walt Disney himself, is now publishing ads for schedule one narcotics? I suppose Scoopy shall have to be drawn holding a bong in the paper’s banner from now on.
It is odd really that it has taken The Bee as long as it has to begin accepting ads from the dispensaries. It’s not as if they have some strict moral code about what sorts of ads they accept. I’ve seen ads for patent medicines and all manner of dubious cure-alls in the pages of The Bee. And don’t get me started on the classified ads. Tarot card readers, "massage" parlors and ads from people seeking anonymous sex have paid for a lot of ink down at 2100 Q street.
Even some of their legitimate ads are distasteful. I remember ( I should say: "can’t forget") one ad that The Bee ran for weeks; it was a full-page ad for a diabetes clinic and it featured a picture of a foot ravaged by the disease. It was, of course, rendered in full-color and life-sized. I mean, who wouldn’t want to sit down to breakfast, open the paper and look at lurid pictures of a fat, rotting foot? The sight of that foot is enough to send anyone running for a dispensary for relief.
Who can blame The Bee for grasping at the dispensaries’ filthy lucre? If anything, they’re behind the curve, pot ads have become normal. The weed from the Devil’s garden is advertized on radio and television and even on huge, electronic billboards by the freeway. It was inevitable that The Bee would succumb to the lure marijuana’s lustrous green color and enticing smell. The lustrous green color and enticing smell of freshly minted money that is.
Friday, September 30, 2011
Friday, September 23, 2011
P.J.O'R: O.G. GOP
P.J. O’Rourke has spent the better part of his career trying to make Republicanism fun. Ironic, considering that he freely admits starting out as a far-left hippie.
Winston Churchill famously remarked that, "A man under 30 who is not a liberal has no heart, a man over 30 who is not a conservative has no brain."
O’Rourke describes the process of how age changes one’s politics in the introduction to his book Age and Guile, Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut thusly, "It is, I guess, interesting to watch the leftist grub weaving itself into the pupa of satire and then emerging a resplendent conservative blowfly." This lack of reverence for his conservative ideals is typical for the man who wrote the book Republican Party Reptile, a collection of columns about reconciling his Republican beliefs with his, um, lets say "libertine lifestyle."
Born in Toledo Ohio, in 1947, Patrick Jake O’Rourke is a scion of our nation’s heartland, reared in its conservative traditions and mores. While attending college at Miami University (in Oxford Ohio) during the late 1960's O’Rourke was galvanized by the radical new politics of the era...for a while at least. "I went from Republican to communist and right back to Republican" O’Rourke was quoted as saying, adding that, "At least I was never a liberal."
O’Rourke’s first national exposure came in the early 1970's when he was hired on at the notorious National Lampoon magazine. The Natlamp brand is mostly remembered today for slapstick Chevy Chase movies but the magazine, moldering copies of which can still be found in the less-reputable used book stores, was legendary for its writers’ willingness to offend every possible demographic. O’Rourke’s article, "Foreigners Around The World," in which he describes all the different nations on Earth solely in terms of their particular ethnic stereo-types, was a good example of a typical National Lampoon article.
After his stint at National Lampoon, O’Rourke went on to write about cars for the automotive press. He described later how getting paid to drive and review exotic sports and luxury cars made him realize how journalism could make the world a better place. His world that is.
According to his website, O’Rourke has been published in: Automobile, The Weekly Standard, House and Garden (!), Foreign Policy, The New York Times Book Review, Forbes FYI, World Affairs, and the Atlantic Monthly. O’Rourke also wrote for Rolling Stone, where he said his job was to be the "house Republican."
It was at Rolling Stone that O’Rourke began his career as an international correspondent. O’Rourke made a point of going to every foreign war zone he could find. He has covered the overthrow of Marcos in the Philippines, the U.S. intervention in Somalia, The Nicaraguan civil war and the first and the current Iraq war among many others.
O’Rourke is a contemporary and friend of writers like Hunter Thompson and Tom Wolfe and his style reflects their vision of the "new journalism." His war reporting is Gonzo Journalism at its finest. It is written in the first person and generally begins by describing how he finagled his way into the country. The stories O’Rourke files from the front lines are sharply opinionated and full of cynical, black humor. He has published his war reporting over the years in books including: Give War a Chance, Peace Kills, and Holidays in Hell.
O’Rourke is a modern H.L. Mencken, a sharp-tongued iconoclast who not only can see the emperor’s nudity, but delights in calling attention to it. Despite his oft professed devotion to the GOP, he has never endorsed a specific candidate, he instead holds to Mencken’s maxim that "The only way a journalist should look at a politician is down."
Winston Churchill famously remarked that, "A man under 30 who is not a liberal has no heart, a man over 30 who is not a conservative has no brain."
O’Rourke describes the process of how age changes one’s politics in the introduction to his book Age and Guile, Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut thusly, "It is, I guess, interesting to watch the leftist grub weaving itself into the pupa of satire and then emerging a resplendent conservative blowfly." This lack of reverence for his conservative ideals is typical for the man who wrote the book Republican Party Reptile, a collection of columns about reconciling his Republican beliefs with his, um, lets say "libertine lifestyle."
Born in Toledo Ohio, in 1947, Patrick Jake O’Rourke is a scion of our nation’s heartland, reared in its conservative traditions and mores. While attending college at Miami University (in Oxford Ohio) during the late 1960's O’Rourke was galvanized by the radical new politics of the era...for a while at least. "I went from Republican to communist and right back to Republican" O’Rourke was quoted as saying, adding that, "At least I was never a liberal."
O’Rourke’s first national exposure came in the early 1970's when he was hired on at the notorious National Lampoon magazine. The Natlamp brand is mostly remembered today for slapstick Chevy Chase movies but the magazine, moldering copies of which can still be found in the less-reputable used book stores, was legendary for its writers’ willingness to offend every possible demographic. O’Rourke’s article, "Foreigners Around The World," in which he describes all the different nations on Earth solely in terms of their particular ethnic stereo-types, was a good example of a typical National Lampoon article.
After his stint at National Lampoon, O’Rourke went on to write about cars for the automotive press. He described later how getting paid to drive and review exotic sports and luxury cars made him realize how journalism could make the world a better place. His world that is.
According to his website, O’Rourke has been published in: Automobile, The Weekly Standard, House and Garden (!), Foreign Policy, The New York Times Book Review, Forbes FYI, World Affairs, and the Atlantic Monthly. O’Rourke also wrote for Rolling Stone, where he said his job was to be the "house Republican."
It was at Rolling Stone that O’Rourke began his career as an international correspondent. O’Rourke made a point of going to every foreign war zone he could find. He has covered the overthrow of Marcos in the Philippines, the U.S. intervention in Somalia, The Nicaraguan civil war and the first and the current Iraq war among many others.
O’Rourke is a contemporary and friend of writers like Hunter Thompson and Tom Wolfe and his style reflects their vision of the "new journalism." His war reporting is Gonzo Journalism at its finest. It is written in the first person and generally begins by describing how he finagled his way into the country. The stories O’Rourke files from the front lines are sharply opinionated and full of cynical, black humor. He has published his war reporting over the years in books including: Give War a Chance, Peace Kills, and Holidays in Hell.
O’Rourke is a modern H.L. Mencken, a sharp-tongued iconoclast who not only can see the emperor’s nudity, but delights in calling attention to it. Despite his oft professed devotion to the GOP, he has never endorsed a specific candidate, he instead holds to Mencken’s maxim that "The only way a journalist should look at a politician is down."
Friday, September 16, 2011
The Media: Who's fault is it?
Despite what reporters may say, there is a lot of money to be made in journalism. If you don’t believe it, take a trip down to Hearst Castle in San Simeon. Newspaper publishers have traditionally enjoyed profit margins nearly double that of other industries.
The internet may have ended the salad days of print news but the explosion of news sites online would certainly suggest that there is still a vast marketplace of news consumers. There are, after all, enough consumers to support four separate 24 hour cable news networks. Those are in addition to the three or four hours per day the four local channels devote to news each day.
Information is clearly a commodity that people are willing to pay for. There exists, however, a sense that journalism should be above anything so base as trying to turn a profit. Ironically, it is those working in the industry who are often the most outraged that the publishers and owners run it like a business rather than a public service.
The notion that providing news was a duty owed to the public originated with the FCC at the onset of the television age. The FCC required broadcasters to include news shows among their programming. This is considered the golden era of TV news with anchors like Edward R. Murrow setting the standards by which all successors are to be judged.
What is forgotten however, is that those post-war, FCC-mandated news programs were only 15 minutes long. The broadcasters, like any business owners confronted with an irksome federal regulation imposed upon them, complied with it in the cheapest and most desultory manner they could get away with.
It wasn’t until CBS scored a ratings hit with its gamble on a Sunday news show called 60 Minutes that the networks saw news as anything but a grim onus that siphoned off profits. There has since been the explosion of network news magazines like 20/20, Dateline and Primetime.
Industry competition is supposed to benefit the consumer, but has the diversity of the media marketplace actually created a better informed citizenry? Poll after poll conducted on Americans’ knowledge of current events suggest not.
The ideological polarization of two particular T.V. news networks is often cited as the nadir of modern media but peddling slanted stories is hardly new.
A more widespread and insidious trend is the appeal to the public’s bloodlust in the quest for a share of the increasingly fragmented audience. Crime has come to dominate the news. The stranger and gorier the better.
In a nation that has been involved in a two-front war for a decade, that is teetering on the brink of a severe depression if not collapse, a woman accused killing her child dominated all the major news outlets for months.
Is the media to blame for their lurid crime coverage or is the public to blame for their consumption of it? Should newsrooms be run as businesses? Does the pursuit of profit inhibit reporting?
These are some of the issues I hope to explore in this blog. In the coming weeks I will examine topics such as: the conglomeration of the media, the increasingly cozy relationship between police agencies and news organizations, the use of staged news events and photo-ops, pack journalism, and the influence of media scrutiny on the criminal justice system.
The internet may have ended the salad days of print news but the explosion of news sites online would certainly suggest that there is still a vast marketplace of news consumers. There are, after all, enough consumers to support four separate 24 hour cable news networks. Those are in addition to the three or four hours per day the four local channels devote to news each day.
Information is clearly a commodity that people are willing to pay for. There exists, however, a sense that journalism should be above anything so base as trying to turn a profit. Ironically, it is those working in the industry who are often the most outraged that the publishers and owners run it like a business rather than a public service.
The notion that providing news was a duty owed to the public originated with the FCC at the onset of the television age. The FCC required broadcasters to include news shows among their programming. This is considered the golden era of TV news with anchors like Edward R. Murrow setting the standards by which all successors are to be judged.
What is forgotten however, is that those post-war, FCC-mandated news programs were only 15 minutes long. The broadcasters, like any business owners confronted with an irksome federal regulation imposed upon them, complied with it in the cheapest and most desultory manner they could get away with.
It wasn’t until CBS scored a ratings hit with its gamble on a Sunday news show called 60 Minutes that the networks saw news as anything but a grim onus that siphoned off profits. There has since been the explosion of network news magazines like 20/20, Dateline and Primetime.
Industry competition is supposed to benefit the consumer, but has the diversity of the media marketplace actually created a better informed citizenry? Poll after poll conducted on Americans’ knowledge of current events suggest not.
The ideological polarization of two particular T.V. news networks is often cited as the nadir of modern media but peddling slanted stories is hardly new.
A more widespread and insidious trend is the appeal to the public’s bloodlust in the quest for a share of the increasingly fragmented audience. Crime has come to dominate the news. The stranger and gorier the better.
In a nation that has been involved in a two-front war for a decade, that is teetering on the brink of a severe depression if not collapse, a woman accused killing her child dominated all the major news outlets for months.
Is the media to blame for their lurid crime coverage or is the public to blame for their consumption of it? Should newsrooms be run as businesses? Does the pursuit of profit inhibit reporting?
These are some of the issues I hope to explore in this blog. In the coming weeks I will examine topics such as: the conglomeration of the media, the increasingly cozy relationship between police agencies and news organizations, the use of staged news events and photo-ops, pack journalism, and the influence of media scrutiny on the criminal justice system.
Friday, September 9, 2011
The Value of a College Education
Astute readers may have detected a slightly cynical tone regarding higher education in the previous post. Is this attitude warranted? Is there nothing good about attending college? What keeps a person grimly marching on the academic treadmill semester after semester?
It certainly isn’t ease of access. College is expensive and time consuming. Tuition is constantly being raised while the number of available classes shrinks. All of which acts to stretch out the time required to earn a degree. It isn’t ease of use either. Enrolling in classes is a complex and often counter-intuitive process. University employees approach their jobs with a paradoxical combination of love for bureaucracy, and an air of being too important to deal with the red tape themselves. Even physically getting to school is a hassle. Until I began attending CSUS, I had never seen a traffic jam inside a parking structure.
So why do I keep showing up on campus? The main reason, I guess, is the same thing that inspired me to go to college in the first place: it beats manual labor. After a decade or so of working at jobs that basically boil down to moving heavy objects from one place to another, I decided that there had to be a better way to make a buck. Not that college is making me any money right now of course. Quite to the contrary, it’s costing me money. Driving me into debt and penury in fact. Which is, in itself, a reason to continue going to class. As soon as I stop, my student loans come due. That’s going to be a tough nut to make even with a degree. I figure that with Section 8 housing vouchers and the generosity of the local soup kitchens, I should be able to get by on the kind of salary a journalism degree commands, but paying down my student loans will be another matter. Student loans are the one kind of debt you can’t discharge by filing for bankruptcy, so those usurers have me on the hook for life. I’ve been planning an Ocean’s Eleven style casino heist (the one with Sinatra and Sammy Davis, not the Clooney and Pitt version.) To get out from under the student loan sharks.
In all fairness, I have had positive experiences at school. I explored different creative outlets. I took a photography class and my final exam from the class decorates my apartment to this day. I’m proud of some of the work I did in a creative writing class. I even took a class onresidential electric wiring at junior college that enabled me to fix an outlet at my Dad’s house. Well, I didn’t so much fix it as cause it to not work in different way than it was not working originally. The house didn’t burn down after I tampered with the outlet, that’s the main thing.
I must also concede that the level of the discourse on campus is superior to that one finds on the loading docks. When working blue collar jobs, there are only three acceptable topics of conversation: Sports, Jesus and Pussy. Discussing anything else on the jobsite will cause your coworkers to question your sexuality. At least when college students talk about distasteful subjects they employ sophisticated vocabulary and proper grammar.
Let us never forget the best aspect of attending college however. It bestows a piece of paper upon people that entitles them to work in air-conditioned comfort seated in front of a computer. A bachelor’s degree is a talisman against menial labor. After all, if we wanted to work hard, we would be out earning a living rather than sitting in a classroom.
It certainly isn’t ease of access. College is expensive and time consuming. Tuition is constantly being raised while the number of available classes shrinks. All of which acts to stretch out the time required to earn a degree. It isn’t ease of use either. Enrolling in classes is a complex and often counter-intuitive process. University employees approach their jobs with a paradoxical combination of love for bureaucracy, and an air of being too important to deal with the red tape themselves. Even physically getting to school is a hassle. Until I began attending CSUS, I had never seen a traffic jam inside a parking structure.
So why do I keep showing up on campus? The main reason, I guess, is the same thing that inspired me to go to college in the first place: it beats manual labor. After a decade or so of working at jobs that basically boil down to moving heavy objects from one place to another, I decided that there had to be a better way to make a buck. Not that college is making me any money right now of course. Quite to the contrary, it’s costing me money. Driving me into debt and penury in fact. Which is, in itself, a reason to continue going to class. As soon as I stop, my student loans come due. That’s going to be a tough nut to make even with a degree. I figure that with Section 8 housing vouchers and the generosity of the local soup kitchens, I should be able to get by on the kind of salary a journalism degree commands, but paying down my student loans will be another matter. Student loans are the one kind of debt you can’t discharge by filing for bankruptcy, so those usurers have me on the hook for life. I’ve been planning an Ocean’s Eleven style casino heist (the one with Sinatra and Sammy Davis, not the Clooney and Pitt version.) To get out from under the student loan sharks.
In all fairness, I have had positive experiences at school. I explored different creative outlets. I took a photography class and my final exam from the class decorates my apartment to this day. I’m proud of some of the work I did in a creative writing class. I even took a class onresidential electric wiring at junior college that enabled me to fix an outlet at my Dad’s house. Well, I didn’t so much fix it as cause it to not work in different way than it was not working originally. The house didn’t burn down after I tampered with the outlet, that’s the main thing.
I must also concede that the level of the discourse on campus is superior to that one finds on the loading docks. When working blue collar jobs, there are only three acceptable topics of conversation: Sports, Jesus and Pussy. Discussing anything else on the jobsite will cause your coworkers to question your sexuality. At least when college students talk about distasteful subjects they employ sophisticated vocabulary and proper grammar.
Let us never forget the best aspect of attending college however. It bestows a piece of paper upon people that entitles them to work in air-conditioned comfort seated in front of a computer. A bachelor’s degree is a talisman against menial labor. After all, if we wanted to work hard, we would be out earning a living rather than sitting in a classroom.
Thursday, September 1, 2011
Aaron Moran in: The return to campus...matriculate harder!
The temperatures may still be soaring but summer has definitely come to end. Don't believe it? Take a look at the children in your neighborhood. They know. They're walking around stoop-backed and slump-shouldered, with an aggrieved scowl on their faces. Actually, you can't look at them, because they aren't walking around the neighborhood. They're back in school, that's why they're stoop-backed and slump-shouldered and scowling. If you do see any scowling kids skulking around your neighborhood, be sure to call a truant officer; they're supposed to be in school.
I am returning to school this semester myself, and, while it is college and I need not fear the truant officer, the emotional freight that the end of summer carries has not changed since I was a child, facing my first day of kindergarten.
Despite having a couple of years of college already behind me, the nights leading up to the first day of school are marked by nightmares of being either lost on campus, or late to class or without a homework assignment. You would think that I would outgrow these types of dreams, but I get them - like clockwork - at the onset of every new semester. I've been attending college for so long now that I know the form numbers of the different types of Scantron sheets better than the professors do.
I'm almost grateful that my subconscious mind can still muster such a primal sense of dread about school. My wakeful mind is getting pretty bored with it. A new semester is more hassle than horror. The first day of school may be a nightmare, but it is a nightmare like a day at the DMV is a nightmare; not a nightmare like falling off a cliff or being attacked by monsters nightmare. My academic track is becoming a rut.
To a student pushing through the middle of his or her degree, a sophomore or a junior, each new semester is a rebirth of the one before it. Life imitates art; and that art is the movie Ground Hog's Day.
we old pros know that sooner or later the first week of classes will be behind us. The crowds and chaos on the campus will calm down. The traffic will ebb away, and the bookstore will once again be deserted. Until then I shall endeavor to embrace and even enjoy the nervous bustle; if nothing else it shakes up the monotony.
I am returning to school this semester myself, and, while it is college and I need not fear the truant officer, the emotional freight that the end of summer carries has not changed since I was a child, facing my first day of kindergarten.
Despite having a couple of years of college already behind me, the nights leading up to the first day of school are marked by nightmares of being either lost on campus, or late to class or without a homework assignment. You would think that I would outgrow these types of dreams, but I get them - like clockwork - at the onset of every new semester. I've been attending college for so long now that I know the form numbers of the different types of Scantron sheets better than the professors do.
I'm almost grateful that my subconscious mind can still muster such a primal sense of dread about school. My wakeful mind is getting pretty bored with it. A new semester is more hassle than horror. The first day of school may be a nightmare, but it is a nightmare like a day at the DMV is a nightmare; not a nightmare like falling off a cliff or being attacked by monsters nightmare. My academic track is becoming a rut.
To a student pushing through the middle of his or her degree, a sophomore or a junior, each new semester is a rebirth of the one before it. Life imitates art; and that art is the movie Ground Hog's Day.
we old pros know that sooner or later the first week of classes will be behind us. The crowds and chaos on the campus will calm down. The traffic will ebb away, and the bookstore will once again be deserted. Until then I shall endeavor to embrace and even enjoy the nervous bustle; if nothing else it shakes up the monotony.
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