Real News: Manitoba Tories to stop subsidizing air travel for medical escorts, but some on Facebook wonder if that’s ‘fake news’

Way back aeons ago, say around August 2014, when I last wrote in print, the phrase “fake news” hadn’t yet entered the popular lexicon. It’s not that fake news, especially in the form of state-sponsored propaganda, didn’t exist. It did and it had a long history. Octavian famously used a campaign of disinformation to aid his victory over Marc Antony in the final war of the Roman Republic,” noted James Carson, head of search engine optimization and social media at the Telegraph Media Group in London, in a March 16 piece headlined “What is fake news? Its origins and how it grew in 2016,” which appears in the Telegraph online at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/0/fake-news-origins-grew-2016/

Carson also notes that in the aftermath of Octavian’s final war of the Roman Republic, from 31 BC to 29 BC, also known as Antony’s civil war, Octavian “changed his name to Augustus, and dispatched a flattering and youthful image of himself throughout the Empire, maintaining its use in his old age.”

The British, in particular among the Allies, made good use of propaganda against the Germans during the First World War from 1914 to 1918, demonizing the “Hun” with unsubstantiated false reports of atrocities. Twenty years later in the lead-up to the Second World War, the Nazi party in Germany “used the growing mass media to build a power base and then consolidate power in Germany during the 1930s, using racial stereotyping to encourage discrimination against Jews.” That’s why the name Joseph Goebbels, who served as Reich minister of propaganda, still sends chills down our spine.

It wasn’t until Donald Trump’s first press conference as president-elect on Jan. 11, when he pointed at CNN reporter Jim Acosta, while refusing to listen to his question, saying, “You are fake news!” that the phrase entered the popular lexicon. Two days after Trump became president, Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, added to the lexicon, telling Chuck Todd, host of NBC’s Meet the Press, that White House press secretary Sean Spicer had used ‘alternative facts’ in his first statement to the press corps Jan. 21, when making false claims about the inaugural crowd size. Spicer had baldly told the pants-on-fire lie that Trump drew the “largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period.”

Lo-and-behold, on Friday, I posted on Facebook links to two media stories, one from May 2, written by Jonathon Naylor, a hometown Flin Flon boy, whom I have known for 10 years, and who has edited the local newspaper, The Reminder even longer, headlined “Patient escort subsidy for airfare to be eliminated” (http://www.thereminder.ca/news/local-news/patient-escort-subsidy-for-airfare-to-be-eliminated-1.17447605), and a similar May 4 story from CBC News Manitoba, headlined “‘Who’s going to help them now?’: Manitoba cutting airfare subsidy for escorts of northern patients” http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/northern-patient-escort-subsidy-1.4100111

Naylor wrote: “The provincial government plans to cancel a subsidy that offers affordable airfare to the escorts of northern Manitoba patients who fly to Winnipeg for medical appointments.

“The Northern Patient Transportation Program (NPTP) currently allows patients and their escorts to purchase commercial flight tickets for $75 each, far below the standard price.

“While eligible patients will continue to have this option, the province plans to remove the subsidy for escorts at a date yet to be announced.

“Manitoba Health spokeswoman Amy McGuinness said the move is important for financial reasons.

“‘This ensures that costs are being managed for medically necessary trips,’ she said, adding the change is estimated to save about $1 million a year.

“Escorts, she said, ‘will need to travel by land, or to purchase a regular ticket with the air carrier.’ A one-way plane ticket from Flin Flon to Winnipeg costs up to $859 without the subsidy.

“McGuinness could not confirm when the change will be implemented, saying the health department will work with the Northern Health Region to confirm timelines.”

Amy McGuinness is press secretary to cabinet for the Pallister Progressive Conservative government.

While I may not much like some of the news delivered by her and her Tory bosses, including this news of the cancellation of a subsidy under the Northern Patient Transportation Program (NPTP) that offers affordable airfare to the medical escorts of Northern Manitoba patients flying to Winnipeg and back to Winnipeg for medical appointments, I would never have dreamed McGuinness was offering up “fake news” or “alternative facts” here.

Just because I find something in the news I definitely don’t like and find most unpalatable, such as the cancellation of the medical escort subsidy, doesn’t make it “fake news,” whether I post it on Facebook or elsewhere on social media, or not.

Back in the day, when I edited the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News here for seven or so years, I was never accused, even by another name, of faking the news or linking to fake news stories online.

What I was accused of sometimes was running too many real but inconvenient “bad news” stories, especially actual crime and crime-related statistical stories on how Thompson finds itself for crime, along with some OmniTRAX rail stories on freight train delays, derailments and plans (now scrapped) to ship oil-by-rail across Northern Manitoba from The Pas in the southwest to Churchill and Hudson Bay in the northeast.

The timing was bad, to say the least. The oil-by-rail to Churchill plan, unveiled in Thompson on Aug, 15, 2013, met a firestorm of public opposition, ranging from local citizens, members of First Nations aboriginal communities along the Bayline between Gillam and Churchill, with whistle stops in places like Bird, Sundance Amery, Charlebois, Weir River, Lawledge, Thibaudeau, Silcox, Herchmer, Kellett, O’Day, Back, McClintock, Cromarty, Belcher, Chesnaye, Lamprey, Bylot, Digges, Tidal and Fort Churchill, opposition fueled in part no doubt by the tragedy only 5½ weeks earlier at Lac-Mégantic in Quebec’s Eastern Townships where a runaway Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway (MMA) freight train carrying crude oil from the Bakken shale gas formation in North Dakota in 72 CTC-111A tanker cars derailed in downtown Lac-Mégantic on July 6, 2013. Forty-seven people died as a result of the fiery explosion that followed the derailment.

While many of the comments were spot-on in reacting to the news of the province cancelling the subsidy under the Northern Patient Transportation Program (NPTP), several others wondered on my timeline if this had been confirmed by the government or was it just media speculation?

Either some of my well-meaning Facebook friends perhaps needs to read links a little more thoroughly before commenting, or Amy McGuinness, press secretary to cabinet for the Pallister government, needs to raise her profile a little more when quoted in news stories. Perhaps something like AMY MCGUINNESS, PRESS SECRETARY TO CABINET FOR THE PALLISTER GOVERNMENT, said today. I suspect, although I could be wrong, part of it is that some of my Facebook friends, especially ones with Tory leanings (yes, I do have friends like that) were a bit blindsided by the news of the province cancelling the subsidy under the Northern Patient Transportation Program (NPTP) that offers affordable airfare to the medical escorts of Northern Manitoba patients flying to Winnipeg and back for medical appointments, and couldn’t quite believe what they were reading at first. They didn’t want to believe it was true.

The topper, however, was the one Facebook friend from here in Thompson, who managed to post the comment “Fake news” with zero elaboration twice on a single thread (well done, Ron). But he also “liked” the story (I think), although it’s always hard to know exactly what that means on Facebook. Now Ron, speaking earlier of Huns, I consider to be somewhere just to the right of Attila the Hun. But here’s the thing about small Northern towns. You know people personally. And I like Ron in person. While we don’t run into each other in real life so much, we do on occasion and we have great chats about the State of Thompson, as it were.

But I must confess after readings Ron’s somewhat cryptic “fake news” allegation, I went for a little troll on his Facebook page, to see what he was reading, listening to and watching these days. A few days ago, on April 28, Ron shared on his Facebook timeline the Metaspoon story, “Ship Went Missing In The Bermuda Triangle. But Then It Shows Back Up 90 Years Later” http://www.metaspoon.com/ship-bermuda-triangle?so=pgshM&cat=shock&fb=17036M1mwr3565a0&utm_source=17036M1mwr3565a0

It’s a great story. And one that appeals to me having written soundingsjohnbarker posts such as “Invisible ships: Romulan Star Empire Birds-of-Prey and the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard’s USS Eldridge” on Nov. 25, 2015 (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/11/25/invisible-ships-romulan-star-empire-birds-of-prey-and-the-philadelphia-naval-shipyards-uss-eldridge/) and last Oct. 23, “Can meteorology use science to unmask the long-cloaked air and sea secrets of the Bermuda Triangle?” https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/10/23/can-meteorology-use-science-to-unmask-the-long-cloaked-air-and-sea-secrets-of-the-bermuda-triangle/

Ron’s Metaspoon story goes like this. The SS Cotopaxi, a tramp steamer that disappeared in December 1925, was discovered by the Cuban Coast Guard 90 years after it vanished in the Bermuda Triangle. The story originated in the World News Daily Report, which on May 18, 2015 published an article reporting that the Cuban Coast Guard had intercepted the SS Cotopaxi that disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle while en route to Havana in 1925. The story originated with the Weekly News Daily Report and has been widely picked up by “news” aggregators such as Metaspoon.

“The Cuban authorities spotted the ship for the first time on May 16, near a restricted military zone, west of Havana. They made many unsuccessful attempts to communicate with the crew, and finally mobilized three patrol boats to intercept it,” the Weekly News Daily Report says.

Problem is, Ron, while there was indeed a real SS Cotopaxi, which disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle in December 1925, it unfortunately did not reappear to the Cubans on May 16, 2015. Or at any other time. World News Daily Report is a news and political satire web publication, which may or may not use real names, often in semi-real or mostly fictitious ways. It routinely publishes clickbait hoax articles. All “news” articles contained within worldnewsdailyreport.com are fictitious. Any resemblance to the truth is purely coincidental, except for all references to politicians and/or celebrities, in which case they are based on real people, but still based almost entirely in fiction.

Fake news, Ron. Didn’t happen.

Another Facebook friend posted on my timeline: “Media is a tricky business to navigate . I’ve learned that the hard way when it comes to being misquoted or have had things taken out of context (not by you personally ). I’m grateful for journalists that look into all sides and facts before stating an opinion.”

Perhaps so. In the old days we used to talk about things like a story having a “ring of truth” or whether it passed the “smell test.”

Today, I might point to something like, Deception Detection for News: Three Types of Fakes by Victoria L. Rubin, Yimin Chen and Niall J. Conroy, which appeared last year in the Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology. The abstract can be found here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pra2.2015.145052010083/pdf

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Journalism

Earth faces sixth extinction-level event, scientists say, while the mass media, as we know it, faces its first, according to the fossil record compiled by today’s advertisers and readers/viewers

A research article published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science last June 19 by scientists Gerardo Ceballos, Paul R. Ehrlich, Anthony D. Barnosky, Andrés García, Robert M. Pringle and Todd M. Palmer from Stanford, Princeton and Berkeley universities in the United States suggests that the world has begun a sixth extinction-level event, this one driven primarily by humankind. Mind you Ehrlich’s 1968 best-seller, The Population Bomb, should have had us pretty much extinct by now anyway, had it come to pass, so who knows?

Meanwhile, as scientists pronounce on the likelihood of a sixth mass extinction for the Earth – to wit, the Holocene extinction, advertisers and readers are delivering a similar message, or so it seems, to what’s left of the incredibly shrinking mass media manufacturers, which are in some ways today’s equivalent to yesterday’s buggy whip, typewriter and video store retailers. Blockbuster, we hardly knew you.

As for so-called “digital disruption,” well, it’s not just digital disrupting the heirs of Gutenberg these days, and it’s no longer just a disruption. Can you say ad blockers and mobile platform-of-the day?

Back around the dawn of the 21st century, when newspapers still had a few new millennium choices or even just good bets that might have ensured their survival on some sizeable scale, there was talk about the theory of disruptive innovation invented by Clayton Christensen, of Harvard Business School.

The “innovator’s dilemma” for print media newspapers was the difficult choice they faced sometime between the mid-1990s and the 2000 Millennium (it really was in retrospect, with the benefit now of uncorrected 20/20 hindsight, a much narrower window of about five years, give or take, than publishers realized before they were left behind forever) in choosing between trying to hold onto readers in their existing market by doing the same thing a bit better (the Glacier Media-owned Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News, for instance, went online with the same content only slightly repackaged from their print editions in June 2009, about a dozen or more years after most larger Canadian daily newspapers did pretty much the same thing) or capturing new markets by embracing and adapting to new technologies and adopting new business models.

Where are we today, 16 years post-millennium?

Consider these three exhibits, if you will.

Exhibit 1: Jeff Gaulin graduated from journalism school at the University of Western Ontario in 1995. He started Jeff Gaulin’s Journalism Job Board that same year as an online employment service to help his classmates find work after graduation. His job board quickly became the go-to online job board for new journalism graduates across Canada looking for their first job and to a lesser but not insignificant extent also became an important resource for even experienced journalists looking to switch jobs. I landed four newspaper jobs off it myself in a six-year period between 2001 and 2007.

Before Jeff Gaulin’s Journalism Job Board came on the scene, aspiring journalism job applicants, believe it or not, often sent out resumes hit-or-miss over the transom in 9 x 12 brown envelopes, which also contained their “clips.” As terribly inefficient and labour intensive as that was, it actually worked. At least sometimes. I landed at least a couple of my early daily newspaper jobs in the 1980s that way.

I also interviewed a fair number of job candidates between 2004 and 2013, as a result of Jeff’s job board, and was involved in hiring a number of them as reporters. As recently as several years ago, it wasn’t unusual to see 60 to 70 print jobs advertised on any given day, although the number fluctuated, and dropped briefly but dramatically in 2008-09, during the Great Recession, before rebounding.

As of noon today, there were just eight print media jobs from coast-to-coast listed on Jeff Gaulin’s Journalism Job Board. Eight. And if you think things might be better on the digital side in Jeff’s “new media” section, think again. It has four – half as many – jobs advertised as the “print” section.

Exhibit 2? RBC Dominion Securities just cut its price target on Postmedia Network Canada Corp., publisher of the National Post and proprietor of Canada’s largest newspaper chain and various digital media properties, to zero from $0.50.

Zero. As in zero-sum game.

Exhibit 3:

Mass extinction, niche survival.

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Journalism, Virtual Reality

Des Moines Register and PBS’ Frontline use Virtual Reality (VR) in news stories as journalism moves beyond Augmented Reality (AR) to fully ‘immersive’ storytelling

A year ago, I posted a piece here on newspapers beginning to embrace Augmented Reality (AR), technology making use of the camera and sensor in your smartphone or tablet to add layers of digital information – videos, photos, and sounds – directly on top of items in your newspaper.

Vancouver-based GVIC Communications Corp., which operates as the Glacier Media Group and owns the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News here in Northern Manitoba, launched Augmented Reality for editorial and advertisements throughout its Lower Mainland media properties in British Columbia in February 2013, teaming up with Dutch businessman Quintin Schevernels’ innovative Layar application, which can be downloaded on your iOS or Android smartphone or tablet. The Winnipeg Free Press also launched its own Augmented Reality (AR) in September 2014 with Blippar, a British first image-recognition smartphone app.

Revisiting the scene a year later, journalism is moving beyond Augmented Reality (AR) and finally to true immersive or Virtual Reality (VR), a tantalizing dream of sci-fi aficionados since the 1950s at least. Remember Virtual Reality (VR), the computer-simulated environment that can simulate physical presence in places in the real world or imagined worlds? Sure you do. Or at least one derivation of it known as simulated reality, as long your virtual memory goes back as far as Sept. 28, 1987 and “Encounter at Farpoint,” the pilot episode for Star Trek: The Next Generation, written by D.C. Fontana and Gene Roddenberry, and the first appearance of the Holographic Environment Simulator, better known simply as the “holodeck.”

Data, who was fond of Sherlock Holmes, loved it and in later episodes would often play the 221B Baker Street detective in holodeck programs, often accompanied by Geordi La Forge in the role of Dr. Watson. Prior to the late 24th century, Federation starships were not equipped with holodecks. In 2151, the Starfleet vessel Enterprise NX-01 encountered a vessel belonging to an alien race known as Xyrillians, who had advanced holographic technology in the form of a holographic chamber similar to the holodeck, which Starfleet developed two centuries later. A holo-chamber was also later installed aboard a Klingon battle cruiser, given to the Klingons by the Xyrillians in exchange for their lives.

Here in the 21st century, most current virtual reality environments are primarily visual experiences, displayed either on a computer screen or through special stereoscopic displays, but some simulations include additional sensory information, such as sound through speakers or headphones.

Some advanced, haptic systems now include tactile information, generally known as force feedback, in medical and gaming applications. As for the origin of the term “virtual reality,” it can be traced back to the French playwright, poet, actor, and director Antonin Artaud and his 1938 book The Theatre and Its Double, where he described theatre as “la réalité virtuelle.”

While newspapers have added a lot of bells and whistles to our various online “platforms” in recent years, they’re not quite at the Holographic Environment Simulator or holodeck reality. Yet. But consider this. In its first Virtual Reality documentary last May, PBS’ Frontline, in an 11-minute immersive effort by filmmaker Dan Edge, took its viewers to the spot under a tree in West Africa, believed to be where the world’s most recent Ebola virus outbreak began in late 2013. The film launched on Google Cardboard, a virtual-reality system that requires an Android smartphone and a simple cardboard viewer. The hand-held box holds a smartphone before the viewer’s eyes. An app presents 360-degree environments, explored as viewers move eyes and heads to explore their surroundings. Frontline collaborated with Secret Location and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University to produce Ebola Outbreak.

Meanwhile,in Santa Monica, California, Nonny de la Peña and her company Emblematic Group are working on a Virtual Reality project for the Formula 1 Singapore Grand Prix car race in which not only one, but two “players can experience what it’s like to be in the pit crew and race each other.

De la Peña’s been dubbed the “godmother of Virtual Reality.” She began her journalism career in print and was a correspondent for Newsweek in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but left the news magazine because it didn’t allow her to use the visuals she imagined for a story. For a time, she worked as a documentary filmmaker.

She discovered Virtual Reality through a pair of VR goggles during a trip to Barcelona. “Once I saw that experience, I couldn’t put people out there again,” she told Andreana Young, an editorial assistant at Editor & Publisher magazine, for an Oct. 1 story. “I want to bring them inside the story.” de la Peña said.

Her first Virtual Reality project, called “Hunger in Los Angeles,” illustrated what it’s like to go hungry in Los Angeles, and premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.

She worked on the project with Palmer Luckey, creator of the Oculus Rift headset. Last year, Luckey sold his Virtual Reality platform to Facebook for $2 billion.

Young put on a pair of Emblematic’s VR goggles for her story for a scene from Kiya, a collaborative story between Emblematic Group and Al-Jazeera America. “I stood near a woman on the phone with 911, who was telling the operator her sister, Kiya, was inside the house with her ex-boyfriend. He wouldn’t let her leave and he had a gun,” Young wrote.

“I was able to turn 360-degrees … observing the neighborhood around me. The scene changed, and I was suddenly standing inside the house where Kiya was being held hostage by her ex-boyfriend. I searched the home with my eyes; when I turned around images of baby furniture and a “Family Forever” decal hanging on the wall struck me as I listened to Kiya’s sisters begging her to leave with them.”

Kiya relied heavily on real-life audio recordings obtained from the scene, including 911 calls, and cellphone audio and video recordings and recordings from interviews that provided accounts of what took place.

Virtual Reality creates what developers call a “duality of presence” allowing the viewer to feel like they’re right there in the story, and that can have a greater impact than simply watching video or reading words on a page.

Devices such as Google Cardboard and the Samsung Gear VR have created opportunities for anyone with a smartphone to experience Virtual Reality. By placing a phone with a downloaded VR app onto the front of the device, viewers can watch Virtual Reality content right on their smartphone. On Amazon.com, a Google Cardboard kit costs less than $20. Even a 360-degree Ricoh Theta camera can be purchased for $400.

In September 2014, the Des Moines Register was one of the first newspapers to incorporate Virtual Reality into one of their news stories with its “Harvest of Change” project illustrating the life of today’s American farmer using satellite map imagery, photographs of the farm, the Unity 3D gaming engine, 360-degree video, coders and game designers.

The Associated Press recently announced a new Virtual Reality project called “The Suite Life,” an immersive experience through the Samsung Gear VR headset in which viewers can explore luxury hotel suites.

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Journalism

Who’d a thunk it? Readers says it’s a toss-up when it comes to whether robo-journalists write better than human journalists

OK … we’ve all heard the phrase “fishwrap” applied derogatorily by critics assessing the quality of newspapers wherever they live from time to time. Methinks some weeks that does a disservice to how my favourite pickerel from Paint Lake should be treated, but it isn’t just local newspapers that are problematically bad at times. Take the venerable Associated Press, affectionately known by working journos simply as the AP. They managed to move this alert last Wednesday: “BC-APNewsAlert/17. New York Yankees Hall of Fame catcher Yogi Bear has died. He was 90.” Actually, Yogi Bear, the beloved Hanna-Barbera cartoon character is only 57. He was created in 1958, making his début as a supporting character in The Huckleberry Hound Show, and was the first breakout character created by Hanna-Barbera and was eventually more popular than Huckleberry Hound.

Yogi Berra, the beloved baseball player, on the other hand, was created in 1924 and born in 1925. A native of St. Louis, Berra signed with the New York Yankees in 1943 before serving in the U.S. Navy in the Second World War. He made his major league début in 1946 and was a stalwart in the Yankees’ lineup during the team’s championship years in the 1940s and 1950s.

Berra was a power hitter and strong defensive catcher. He caught Yankees’ pitcher Don Larsen’s perfect game on Oct. 8, 1956, in Game 5 of the 1956 World Series against the Brooklyn Dodgers, the only perfect game in Major League Baseball (MLB) post-season history. After playing 18 seasons with the Yankees, Berra retired following the 1963 season. Berra was also famous for his string of truisms, tautologies and malapropisms, including “Nobody goes there any more; it’s too crowded,” along with, “It ain’t over til it’s over” or, “Anyone who is popular is bound to be disliked,” as well as, “Half the lies they tell about me aren’t true” and, “If you ask me anything I don’t know, I’m not going to answer.” My personal favourite, which I managed to inject into several columns, editorials or news stories over the years, was the well-known, “This is like déjà vu all over again,” which I had used again as recently as Aug. 24, less than a month before Yogi Berra died.

It was while I was pondering how a boo boo like the Yogi Bear/Yogi Berra obituary mix-up happens in journalism (I suspect the eagle-eyed Ranger John Francis Smith from Jellystone Park would have known the difference) that I came across the latest information on robo-journalism (not to be mixed up with Tory robo-calls during the 2011 federal election campaign, I should point out to my friends still remaining in Canadian journalism.) Turns out that unlike most human journalists, who are for the most part seriously mathematically challenged, robot journalists that already work for such illustrious newspapers as the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, as well as Forbes, the storied business magazine, have shown a natural aptitude for data, making them ideal for the sports and business desks, and as such are now about ready to branch out into breaking news and investigative journalism.

Neil Sharman (believed to be a human writer) and former head of research and insight at Telegraph Media Group on Buckingham Palace Road in London, writing Sept. 22 in TheMediaBriefing, also based in London, noted that robots, “Like junior reporters … can learn from and draw on a back catalogue of great writing – but with more powerful memories and analytical techniques.” You can read Sharman’s full piece here: http://www.themediabriefing.com/article/robo-journalism-the-future-is-arriving-quickly

“Machines are adept at investigating data sets,” Sharman says. “Publishers have set them to tax records, homicide data, meteorological reports and more –looking for patterns and describing them. They’re thorough, not prone to error and they’re fast.

“The LA Times uses robo-journalism to break news about earthquakes because machines can analyse geological survey data faster than a human. It takes under five minutes to spot a story and get it online.”

Tim Adams, a staff writer for the “The Observer: The New Review” at London’s The Guardian newspaper, wrote a piece June 28 on Kris Hammond, a professor of journalism and computer science at Northwestern University and co-founder and chief scientist at Chicago-based Narrative Science, which developed a writing program for robots known as “Quill.” Hammond also founded the University of Chicago’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He told Adams, “we are humanizing the machine and giving it the ability not only to look at data but, based on general ideas of what is important and a close understanding of who the audience is, we are giving it the tools to know how to tell us stories.”

Adams observes, “It’s not deathless prose – at least not yet; the machines are still ‘learning’ day by day how to write effectively – but it’s already good enough to replace the jobs once done by wire reporters. Narrative Science’s computers provide daily market reports for Forbes as well sports reports for the Big Ten sports network. Hammond predicts that 90 per cent of journalism will be written by computer by 2030. Automated Insights, one of Narrative Sciences competitors, based in Durham, North Carolina, does all the data-based stock reports for AP.

Adams also notes that “last year, a Swedish media professor, Christer Clerwall, conducted the first proper blind study into how sports reports written by computers and by humans compared. Readers taking part in the study suggested, on the whole, that the reports written by human sports journalists were slightly more accessible and enjoyable, but that those written by computer seemed a little more informative and trustworthy.”

Clerwall, an assistant professor in media and communication studies at Karlstad University in Karlstad, Sweden concluded that “perhaps the most interesting result in the study is that there are [almost] no… significant differences in how the two texts are perceived.”

In terms of narrative arcs, Hammond says, “Like any decent hack, the machine is coming to learn that there are only five or six compelling tales available: back from the brink, outrageous fortune, sudden catastrophe and so on.”

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Blogosphere, Journalism

Versioning Weblog World 2.75: Dish no more

A “weblog is a website where a person writes regularly about recent events or topics that interest them, usually with photos and links to other websites that they find interesting.” So says Oxforddictionaries.com, helpfully describing the origins of the word as dating back to the 1990s “from web in the sense ‘World Wide Web’ + log in the sense ‘regular record of incidents.’” In recent years, Oxford also points out, weblog is almost always abbreviated simply to blog.

Wikipedia will tell you that as of Feb. 20, 2014, there were around 172 million Tumblr and 75.8 million WordPress blogs in existence worldwide. Origins are always a bit of a murky business, but Justin Hall, who began posting online in 1994, while working as a student intern at San Francisco-based Wired magazine in the summer of his sophomore year at Swarthmore College, just outside Philadelphia, was among the pioneers of online diarists and web loggers who started personal blogging.

In a Jan. 28 note to his readers, Andrew Sullivan announced he was shuttering his blog after almost 15 years. Originally known as The Daily Dish (later called simply the Dish), it had been online since the summer of 2000. “Biased and Balanced” became the blog’s motto in January 2012.

Sullivan wrote the blog alone for the first six years, “for no pay, apart from two pledge drives. In 2006 he took the blog to time.com and then to theatlantic.com, where he was able to employ interns for the first time to handle the ever-expanding web of content,” the Dish reported at http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/about/

In explaining his decision to end the Dish, Sullivan wrote:

“Why [end the Dish]? Two reasons. The first is one I hope anyone can understand: although it has been the most rewarding experience in my writing career, I’ve now been blogging daily for fifteen years straight (well kinda straight). That’s long enough to do any single job. In some ways, it’s as simple as that. There comes a time when you have to move on to new things, shake your world up, or recognize before you crash that burn-out does happen.

“The second is that I am saturated in digital life and I want to return to the actual world again. I’m a human being before I am a writer; and a writer before I am a blogger, and although it’s been a joy and a privilege to have helped pioneer a genuinely new form of writing, I yearn for other, older forms. I want to read again, slowly, carefully. I want to absorb a difficult book and walk around in my own thoughts with it for a while. I want to have an idea and let it slowly take shape, rather than be instantly blogged. I want to write long essays that can answer more deeply and subtly the many questions that the Dish years have presented to me. I want to write a book.”

His last blog post, “The Years Of Writing Dangerously,” written by Sullivan, was posted Feb. 6 “@ 3:00pm.”

In that post, Sullivan points readers back to a Sept. 3, 2002 post of his, “Are Weblogs Changing Our Culture?” published in Slate’s “Webhead. Inside the Internet” section. Wrote Sullivan more than a dozen years ago: “[T]he speed with which an idea in your head reaches thousands of other people’s eyes has another deflating effect, this time in reverse: It ensures that you will occasionally blurt out things that are offensive, dumb, brilliant, or in tune with the way people actually think and speak in private. That means bloggers put themselves out there in far more ballsy fashion than many officially sanctioned pundits do, and they make fools of themselves more often, too. The only way to correct your mistakes or foolishness is in public, on the blog, in front of your readers. You are far more naked than when clothed in the protective garments of a media entity.

“But, somehow, you’re liberated as well as nude: blogging as a media form of streaking. I notice this when I write my blog, as opposed to when I write for the old media. I take less time, worry less about polish, and care less about the consequences on my blog. That makes for more honest writing. It may not be ‘serious’ in the way, say, a 12-page review of 14th-century Bulgarian poetry in the New Republic is serious. But it’s serious inasmuch as it conveys real ideas and feelings in as unvarnished and honest a form as possible. I think journalism could do with more of that kind of seriousness. It’s democratic in the best sense of the word. It helps expose the wizard behind the media curtain.”

Closing down a blog has always been part of the life cycle of the web. “I’ve seen this happen a thousand times,” said Rebecca Blood, author of The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog, which was published in July 2002. Blood has been blogging since April 1999 and can be found at http://www.rebeccablood.com

“It’s usually people have a baby, or get married, or get a new job – interests changed, and they stop posting.” Blood wrote those words more than a decade ago. She still blogs herself at Rebecca’s Pocket, and her most recent posting on Feb. 28 was on season three of BBC One’s Sherlock, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes, and Martin Freeman as Dr. John Watson. Rupert Graves plays Detective Inspector (D.I.) Greg Lestrade.

Mind you, Sullivan was not much of a fan of Blood’s book, The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog. In his Sept. 3, 2002 post “Are Weblogs Changing Our Culture?” published in Slate, Sullivan refers to Blood’s book published earlier that summer in July: “It’s almost silly to write a dead-tree book about blogs anyway, don’t you think? The critical language of blogging—the hypertext links to other Web pages, for example – cannot even be translated into book form, and you end up with lame appendixes and footnotes crammed with web addresses. There were a few amusing essays in We’ve Got Blog – Julian Dibbell’s ‘Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Man,’ and Tim Cavanaugh’s ‘Let Slip the Blogs of War,’ for example – but both these tomes struck me as products of old media thinking: ‘Hey, there are all these blogs out there. Let’s Do a Book.’ How about ‘Let’s Not Do a Book?’”

Bloomberg View columnist Megan McArdle, whose Asymmetrical Information blog appeared in Newsweek and the Daily Beast, and who has also written for the Atlantic and the Economist magazines, wrote in a Feb. 5 Bloomberg View story – the day before Sullivan’s departure from blogging – “Journalism is a lecture; blogging is a conversation … My industry faces two big challenges. The first is to find a business model that will pay for journalism — which is not being killed off by bloggers, but by giant web companies that sell lots of ads without doing any of that expensive reporting. Andrew was the pioneer of one possible model – subscriptions – and I think his experience has shown that this model won’t work. The Dish got an amazing amount of support from loyal readers, far more than anyone else could hope for, and it pulled in enough money to cover the cost of operations, but only if those operations operated at an unsustainably high pitch.

“The other challenge is ‘what will journalism careers look like?’ My profession, after grousing about ‘pajama-clad bloggers’ who were allowed to say anything they wanted without editorial interference, has moved toward that model. As ad dollars have died, we have come to rely more and more on armies of people putting out quick content.”

As for me, I write pretty much what I want when I want. Which is about what I did as a print journalist for the most part, some of my critics would no doubt remind me. “Write what you know” remains good advice to writers, I think, although I’d go a bit further and add write what you’re truly interested in and write about things you may want to know more about. Then let the chips fall where they may. As I wrote in a blog post last Sept. 11, “In the old days, publishers and newspaper owners would from time to time ‘kill’ a writer’s column before publication. Despite their ballyhoo and blather about freedom of the press, publishers and newspaper proprietors are almost universally in my long experience with them a timid lot, if not outright moral cowards at times, always afraid of offending someone. Freedom of the press is the last thing they want when it comes to staff.” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/11/retroactively-spiked-the-post-publication-killing-of-msgr-charles-popes-blog-post-on-new-york-citys-st-patricks-day-parade/)

That latter notion of writing about things that interest you but you may want to know more about is particularly apropos for bloggers where your readers are often more than happy to comment and in some cases are almost guaranteed to have more expertise and background in a particular area than you do, which they may blog about themselves, and are usually happy to share with you and your readers.

Why online commenting on news stories seems so often to bring out the worst in some people is still something of a puzzle that researchers continue to study with some wondering if it is the anonymity afforded them by many commenting modules that don’t require real names, but only pseudonyms as usernames, that causes problems.

Still, it rarely has been a problem for me blogging, with the odd notable exception. While it seems likely much of what is said in online commenting on news stories would never be said face-to-face, person-to-person, it has been only a minor – and even then, exceptional – annoyance for me. But if you are interested in a broader discussion on some of these issues, you might check out these links: “Robert Fisk: Anonymous comments and why it’s time we all stop drinking this digital poison” at http://www.independent.ie/opinion/comment/robert-fisk-anonymous-comments-and-why-its-time-we-all-stop-drinking-this-digital-poison-3349527.html, or Margaret Sullivan: Seeking a return to civility in online comments at http://fores.blogs.uv.es/2010/06/22/01-seeking-a-return-to-civility-in-online-comments/, or Katie Roiphe’s Slate magazine article, “What’s wrong with angry commenters?” at http://www.slate.com/articles/life/roiphe/2011/12/what_s_wrong_with_angry_commenters_.html

As a generalist, who writes on an eclectic (perhaps even at times eccentric) range of topics and ideas, I find readers who are more than happy to comment and share their expertise and background in a particular area very helpful. And even if they can’t help sometimes, other bloggers and commenters will often offer encouragement.

A couple of days after I posted a piece in part on the Sir Leonard Tilley Building (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/01/28/canadas-other-national-spy-agency-the-communications-security-establishment-used-its-internet-cable-tap-program-atomic-banjo-for-http-metadata-monitoring-and-collection-from-free-file-upl/), the old Communications Security Establishment (CSE) five-storey headquarters at 719 Heron Rd., near Carleton University, and well known to the intelligence community as “The Farm,” located at the corner of Riverside Drive and Heron Road, within the boundaries of the federal government’s Confederation Heights campus, in Ottawa, I serendipitously came across Bill Robinson’s Lux Ex Umbra blog, which bills (pun intended) itself as “monitoring Canadian signals intelligence (SIGINT) activities past and present.”

The Sir Leonard Tilley Building was built in 1961 and custom designed for use by intelligence services. The building’s exterior elevations conceal specialized features linked to intelligence gathering such as the design of “slippers” beneath the floor plates and the electrical and mechanical systems. The Communications Security Establishment’s $1.2 billion new headquarters at 1929 Ogilvie Rd., completed last July, dubbed “Camelot” in official Department of National Defence documents, is the most expensive federal building ever constructed in Canada, and located next door to the only slightly better known Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), which also has its headquarters in Gloucester in east-end Ottawa.

Bill, as it turned out, had written in some detail on the Sir Leonard Tilley Building about three years ago on April 7, 2012 (http://luxexumbra.blogspot.ca/2012/04/cse-facilities-sir-leonard-tilley.html), so I sent him an e-mail query Jan. 30 asking if subsequent to writing his post he “had any success discovering more about the ‘slippers’ beneath the floor plates and the electrical and mechanical systems in the Sir Leonard Tilley Building in Ottawa?”

Bill replied Feb. 1: “Sadly, I haven’t learned anything more about the Tilley building’s systems. I wonder if we’ll learn more about the building after CSE finishes vacating the premises (assuming they haven’t already).”

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Arts, Books, Journalism, Popular Culture and Ideas

This one’s for you, Christopher Heard

I have never accepted a Facebook invitation for an app. In fact, just recently, I have blocked Zynga Bingo, BINGO Blitz, Criminal Case and Slotomania Slot Machines, although I admit, Criminal Case is kind of tempting to check out . Philosophically, it’s not that I have a problem with them. They’re no better or worse, I suppose, than a myriad other things you can do on Facebook. They’re just not my thing.

Bingo? Well, my only connection to bingo in recent years has been working some monthly ones as fundraisers at St. Lawrence Parish Hall here in Thompson with my brothers from Knights of Columbus Thompson Council #5961. Hey, you can’t be Catholic, right, and have no connection to bingo? Before I joined the Knights of Columbus, the last bingo games I had been to were circa 1972 and 1973 when I was 15 and 16 years old, working for Len Ovenden and Doris Metcalfe, selling refreshments on the wooden flooring over the hockey ice surface at the old Civic Auditorium in Oshawa, Ontario. In those days, bingo players used plastic chips, not daubers, a fact I didn’t discover until 2013. It wasn’t as good a gig entertainment-wise as working OHA Major Junior A hockey games – where we worked the first two periods only – so I could watch with undivided attention the Oshawa Generals play the often crucial third period – for free.

But bingo players were big spenders (as were women at wrestling when wrestling made occasional appearances in Oshawa in the early 1970s … Jody Hamilton, the American masked wrestler, who wrestled solo at the time under the ring name The Assassin, once either deliberately or accidentally [probably deliberately] kicked over a whole tray of pop in waxed cups with lids, I had sitting on the floor, as I served another patron, en route to the ring. His manager promptly but discretely bought them all with a generous tip. Just a bit of unscripted show biz for the fans.)

As well, while I “like” posts and photographs that I spot on Facebook with some frequency, and even comment on some of them occasionally, I rarely accept out of the blue invitations to “like” a particular page, but there are exceptions. Like this morning when I got an invitation to “like” Christopher Heard’s, The Suite Life: The Magic and Mystery of Hotel Living, which you can find a link to here at: https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Suite-Life-The-Magic-and-Mystery-of-Hotel-Living/231463750263919?notif_t=fbpage_fan_invite

Mind you, in the interest of transparency, I have to tell you Christopher Heard, an accomplished author and film historian, is my second cousin. While I haven’t seen Christopher, who is about six years younger than me, in about 40 years now, we both grew up in Oshawa, and crossed paths at family events, often at my Aunt Norma and Uncle Ray Seager’s place, which had an above-ground pool. What I remember was Chris was a tall and quiet kid. Not how you would describe (quiet) my five Seager first cousins, who were a fun-loving rambunctious lot! Me? I was probably somewhere between those two poles. A bit on the quiet side, but not above getting up to a bit of mischief, especially in my teens and 20s, as Joanne, David, Sharon, and Maurice Leveille, Joanne’s husband, could attest to and no doubt happily would if the occasion was right. The recurring common elements of various escapades seemed to revolve around motorcycles and girls.

Christopher Heard’s dad, Bill Heard, was my sacrament of confirmation sponsor on May 8, 1968 at St. Mary of the People Roman Catholic Church, built 11 years earlier in 1957, when Bishop Francis Marrocco, still an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Toronto, confirmed me. Bishop Marrocco was named bishop of the Diocese of Peterborough just over a month later on June 10, 1968. My confirmation name is James. Bill Heard was a convert from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism.

What I only learned a couple of years ago, at least that I recall, from Marie Heard, the family genealogist, was that my father, William Barker, himself a convert from the United Church of Canada to Catholicism, had been Bill Heard’s confirmation sponsor years earlier.

As I wrote here not so long ago on Feb. 20 in a post headlined, “Newsgathering travels: From Tuktoyaktuk in the Northwest Territories to Churchill, Manitoba to Middle Musquodoboit Harbour, Nova Scotia, and a few places in between” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/02/20/newsgathering-travels-from-tuktoyaktuk-in-the-northwest-territories-to-churchill-manitoba-to-middle-musquodoboit-harbour-nova-scotia-and-a-few-places-in-between/), “As a journalist, I always enjoyed getting out of the office or newsroom to travel whenever the opportunity presented itself and I could talk my way into a trip somewhere. Newspaper travel meant someone was spending money to send me somewhere, hence the story was usually interesting….” I’ve been able to write about polar bears and beluga whales in Churchill, after a boat trip out on Hudson Bay into the territorial waters of Nunavut, and up the Seal River; travel to The Pas to Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Cathedral for the episcopal ordination of Archbishop Murray Chatlain, as the sixth bishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Keewatin-Le Pas; take Manitoba road trips into Cross Lake, Nelson House and Snow Lake for stories and photographs, while former Churchill riding Liberal MP Tina Keeper, and Kevin Carlson, then with Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak (MKO), were kind enough to let me fly into Tadoule Lake and Lac Brochet with them on a day trip; fly into Tuktoyaktuk at 69.4428° N in the Northwest Territories from Inuvik on an 18-seat Twin Otter for a story; drive for almost three hours through continuous freezing rain out to the Nova Scotia Community College (NSCC) Strait Area Campus in Port Hawkesbury to hear then Nova Scotia Progressive Conservative Premier John Hamm talk about a proposed Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) project to be located on the Strait of Canso; as well as more pleasant drives on assignment in Nova Scotia, such as one on a balmy Maritime spring evening into Middle Musquodoboit Harbour on the Eastern Shore’s Musquodoboit Harbour River, or the Folly Lake-Folly Gap-Folly Mountain area and through the Cobequid Mountains and Wentworth Valley to Londonderry, formerly known as Acadia Mines, in Colchester County.

Pity my poor cousin, Christopher Heard, then. While I was traipsing around in such Canadian glamor destinations as Tuktoyaktuk and Middle Musquodoboit Harbour, chasing stories, Chris was making something of a name for himself as a luxury hotel living Toronto writer ensconced comfortably as writer-in-residence at the Fairmont Royal York Hotel! The Suite Life: The Magic and Mystery of Hotel Living, pun, of course, intended, was published in 2011 by Dundurn Press and is an exploration of hotel culture. As Mark Medley noted in a Nov. 13, 2010 National Post story on Heard (http://news.nationalpost.com/2010/11/13/the-royal-york-is-haunted-and-author-christopher-heard-should-know-he-lives-there/), “living in the Royal York, one of the poshest hotels in the city, means you encounter a curious assortment of people. Since moving in, Heard has run into Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens), Slash, Ricky Gervais, Martin Sheen and the Dalai Lama, among others.”

Heard has also written a number of other books, including celebrity biographies on subjects such as Britney Spears, Kiefer Sutherland, Johnny Depp, John Woo and Mickey Rourke.

He got his big break 20 years ago in the mid-1990s working as a movie reviewer for CBC Newsworld’s On the Arts, when he was sent to New York to interview Kapuskasing, Ontario-born Titanic director James Cameron. In an Oct. 18, 2011 story, Heard reportedly told Matt Bone of the Toronto-based online entertainment magazine, The GATE (http://www.thegate.ca/spotlight/interviews/010958/how-christopher-heard-became-a-biographer-to-some-of-hollywoods-elite/), “We had this wonderful conversation in New York, Cameron and I. When I got back to Toronto, I checked my stuff and the tapes for the interview weren’t there. “The tapes of the other people were there, Katherine Bigelow and all these other people but Cameron’s wasn’t there. So I panicked, as that was the main person I was there to interview. So I called New York and said, ‘Jeez you forgot to put the tape in,’ and it turned out that Cameron had enjoyed the chat so much, he had kept the tapes aside to make a copy so he could use that tape in his corporate video for his company Lightstorm Entertainment. So when the show aired, Random House Doubleday publishers called me and said ‘nobody has written a book about James Cameron, would you consider that?’ I’d always wanted to be an author but I had grown up such a painfully shy and introverted kid, that’s not something you think would be possible. I signed the contract to do the Cameron book [Dreaming Aloud: The Films of James Cameron], and as it was released [1997] at the same time as the film Titanic, the success of Titanic sort of dragged the book up with it, and Random House said ‘whatever you want to do with your next book, you can have it’.'”

Heard, who met and interviewed actor Leonard Nimoy once (in a hotel room, of course), talked to CTV News last week about why the death of the actor, who played Spock on Star Trek, at the age of 83 on Feb. 27, touched so many people. You can watch a clip of the interview here at: http://video.theloop.ca/watch/nimoy-touched-so-many-people/4084457360001#.VPYM-Y5LOld

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Food, Holidays, Journalism

What ‘Cat Sherman’ has learned on Facebook

All food photos courtesy of Jeanette Kimball

While I wouldn’t quite qualify as the last Facebook holdout on the planet, I’ve been enough of a Luddite to be a contender probably.

In a way that’s odd because I haven’t approached all social media that way. I became the managing editor of the locally owned online-only and now long defunct Kingston Net-Times in November 1996. I very much doubt any of my almost 300 Facebook friends or 3,852 followers on LinkedIn were working in online media way back more than 18 years ago (just the kind of statement every good journalist knows invariably invites contradiction). I still remember our lone ad salesman trying to sell local advertising in the fall of 1996. It was a tough go given most of our potential mom-and-pop advertisers in Kingston had barely heard of the Internet at that point, although a few had dial-up modem ISP connections and a handful maybe had the brand-new high-speed cable broadband connection. Very few indeed.

The next year, I actually jumped back to print for a second tour of duty with the daily Peterborough Examiner as City Hall reporter (I had worked there from 1985 to 1989 as a court reporter). When I went back to the old Hunter Street building, Jack Marchen still had the desk facing directly across from me in the newsroom and Phil Tyson was still at the desk beside me. The arrival of the Apple iMac was still a year or so away for when we moved buildings down to The Kingsway. I understand the Examiner is now back on Hunter Street in East City. Good on them. Newspapers don’t belong in industrial wastelands, even if it is easier for deliveries. They belong downtown or at least close to it. Where reporters can actually walk their beats and encounter the people they are covering walking to the courthouse or City Hall or in a local coffee shop. Progress being progress, I worked my way up from an iMac to an eMac by the time I arrived at The Independent (which actually was independent) in Brighton, Ontario in 2004. Who remembers eMacs?

I also worked my up from being a reporter to managing editor in that time-honoured journalism tradition of the managing editor who hired me having enough of things less than three months after he hired me and never coming back from lunch one overcast November day. The publisher, knowing talent when she saw it, or at least recognizing the last remaining body in editorial, fast-tracked me to the top. Stories of journalists quitting and not coming back from lunch of course, are legion in the business. My predecessor at the Peterborough Examiner in 1985, I was told had enough by lunch on day one of his probation and never returned from lunch.

As for Facebook, my employer at the Thompson Citizen required me to set up a page on March 19, 2010 to keep an eye on things when our then general manager, Donna Wilson, a Facebook maven ahead of her time, set up a page for the paper. Since I was reluctant to do so, it wound up flying largely under the radar for years as “Cat Sherman,” named after my black cat, who would be with me for another two years. That may not have been 100 per cent in compliance with Facebook’s true identity requirements, but, hey, Facebook has a lot of fine print to read, and it wasn’t me looking to be on Facebook. When Donna decamped from the Thompson Citizen about six months after getting us on Facebook, the publisher told me the de facto job of moderating the Thompson Citizen Facebook page was going to fall to me alone, suggesting that as a journalist I should have been at the rudder solo on it from day one, rather than sharing the job with the general manager whose idea it was.

Ironically, the Thompson Citizen wound up leaving Facebook amidst national headlines in January 2013, after problems with racist comments in relation to aboriginal issues. While many of our colleagues in the media, not to mention academics and human rights officials, publicly applauded us for the principled stand we took, we noticed no one, at least to my knowledge, followed us in our very public pledge, by the publisher, general manager and myself, to permanently have the Thompson Citizen leave Facebook. If you are interested in what happened and the rationale behind the decision, you can read the editorial I penned on behalf of the paper on Jan. 30, 2013 headlined, “Racist anti-aboriginal slurs and offensive comments prompt Thompson Citizen to permanently close Facebook page” at: http://www.thompsoncitizen.net/news/thompson/racist-anti-aboriginal-slurs-and-offensive-comments-prompt-thompson-citizen-to-permanently-close-facebook-page-1.1372321

The Wednesday Thompson Citizen and Friday Nickel Belt News are owned by GVIC Communications Corp. of Vancouver’s Glacier Media Group. They are one of the few, if not the only, Glacier newspaper, not on Facebook in 2015. Perhaps that is just as well if you read my Feb. 11 post “Louis Riel: 21st century hero to the Métis of Manitoba; Rogers Hometown Hockey tour set to roll into Thompson, Manitoba’s hockey hotbed” at https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/02/11/louis-riel-21st-century-hero-to-the-metis-of-manitoba-rogers-hometown-hockey-tour-set-to-roll-into-thompson-manitobas-hockey-hotbed/ and then take a glance at their weekly Thompson Citizen POLL question, which is into its third week up online: “Was racism the reason for the violence in the stands at the midget AA Thompson King Miners game last Sunday, as some have alleged?”

Yes.
No.
It played a role, but it wasn’t the only factor.

As of this morning, as I write this, 49 per cent of the 63 Thompson Citizen readers who responded to the poll were saying racism wasn’t the reason for the violence: http://www.thompsoncitizen.net/thompson-citizen-7.23996?ot=gmg.PopupPageLayout.ot&showResult=true, with the helpful disclaimer, “This is not a scientific poll,” lest readers be inclined perhaps to think it might be.

Needless to say, with the Thompson Citizen no longer on Facebook as of Jan. 30, 2013, “Cat Sherman” had little that he needed to do. Somehow about 20 people back in 2010 had figured out his true identity and requested to be his “friend” and that’s where things sat until late last year when I decided since I was no longer editor of the paper, it might be time to revisit the whole Facebook issue, at least in terms of a personal page. So Cat Sherman got friendlier than he had been in the previous four years and accepted about 10 long-pending Facebook requests that had been hanging out there in virtual limbo forever. I think it quite likely that when I finally accepted the friend requests the requestors very likely had long forgotten they had ever made them in the first place and wondered how they had got a new friend called Cat Sherman.

And then being a good Facebook citizen, Cat Sherman changed his name to his true identity on Feb. 14. And what did I learn? At least so far. Well, I like to think I write a fairly interesting, if admittedly eclectic and maybe even eccentric, blog at times at https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/ On its best day ever last Oct. 4, a month after it started, a story called, “The hauntings of October: Three Thompson unsolved murders: Kerrie Ann Brown, Bernie Carlson and Christopher Ponask” https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/10/03/the-hauntings-of-october-three-thompson-unsolved-murders-kerrie-ann-brown-bernie-carlson-and-christopher-ponask/ had 5,113 “views” the day after it was posted. It’s now been looked at more than 11,000 times.

But while people do link to the blog through Facebook, sure, what they are really interested in, because they are your friends and family, after all, is your holiday pics. People love photos. While I like to think my latest prose on eschatology demands interest on its own merits, my friends want to know where the last photo from holidays was taken. And they readily “like” and often “comment” on photos on Facebook. Instantly. Really.

Perhaps my next Facebook post, or at least one sooner than later, should be on the cuisine and foodstuff we sampled on a gastronomical odyssey through Île du Cap aux Meules in Quebec’s Magdalen Islands, or Îles-de-la-Madelaine, a small archipelago in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence? Maybe even a taste of it right here with some dessert photos? Jeanette has assured me for years, if there is one thing friends on Facebook like as well ,or even more than vacation photos, it is pics of food. And if you combine food with holidays on Facebook, well, really, who needs prose anyway, eh? Bon appétit.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Journalism, Media, Popular Culture and Ideas, Urban Legend

News from the fringe: Back to the Future Part II and Chicago Cubs win 2015 World Series, Before It’s News, Alex Jones’ Infowars: There’s a war on for your mind!, Trunews: The Real News, Uncensored, Rapture Ready News, AboveTopSecret.com – Conspiracy Theories, UFOs, Paranormal, Politics, and other ‘alternative topics’ and Coast to Coast AM with George Noory

It’s a Thursday in a deep and dark (but surprisingly warm the last couple of days) December. Winter solstice doesn’t arrive for 10 days until Dec. 21 at 5:03 p.m. Central Standard Time (CST) and Christmas comes two weeks from today. Dick Cheney and the CIA are back on top of the news agenda and serious sports analysts are discussing whether the 1989 movie Back to the Future Part II will now be prophetic with the Chicago Cubs winning the 2015 World Series next year (the Cubbies last won back-to-back World Series in 1907 and 1908) in a five-game sweep over Miami in a nine-game series (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnmw6K1H-gQ), which, of course, didn’t have a MLB team when the movie was filmed 25 years ago. The Marlins arrived in Miami in 1993.

While the Cubs and Marlins both play in the National League, so won’t be meeting in the real seven-game World Series in any conceivable scenario, unless one of them were to switch to the American League soon, the Cubbies’ World series dream for 2015, aside from Back to the Future Part II, is the result of the team signing Jon Lester, the 31-year-old left-hander free agent starting pitcher, to a six-year contract worth $155 million at the 2014 major league baseball winter meetings.

All in all, what better time to check out some non-mainstream media (MSM) “news?” Might I suggest your tour include Before It’s News (http://beforeitsnews.com/); Alex Jones’ Infowars: There’s a war on for your mind! (http://www.infowars.com/); Trunews: The Real News, Uncensored (http://www.trunews.com/); Rapture Ready News (http://www.raptureready.com/rapnews_db.php); , AboveTopSecret.com – Conspiracy Theories, UFOs, Paranormal, Politics, and other ‘alternative topics’ (http://www.abovetopsecret.com/) and Coast to Coast AM with George Noory (http://www.coasttocoastam.com/)

Just don’t let yourself get worked up into a lather about Code ICD E 978 and legal execution by guillotine coming to the United States via Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington if you stumble onto that meme. For some of the history of where that comes from, check out(http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2009/08/28/74549_secret-camps-and-guillotines-groups.html?rh=1) and http://urbanlegends.about.com/b/2013/06/21/government-purchased-30000-guillotines.htm

Back in November 1964, historian Richard Hofstadter wrote a famous 1964 essay for Harper’s magazine, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which opens with the sentence, “American politics has often been an arena for angry minds.” Masons, Jesuits, munitions makers, Bavarian Illuminati, the “Monarchs of Europe and the Pope of Rome,” the list of enemies has been long and variable, Hofstadter noted.

“[O]ne of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen,” argued Hofstadter. “It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop. He has a special resistance of his own, of course, to developing such awareness, but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten him—and in any case he resists enlightenment.

“We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.”

At the same time, however, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you,” says Capt. John Yossarian, the 28-year-old fictional character and protagonist assigned to the 256th squadron of the Army Air Forces where he serves as a B-25 bombardier in Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel Catch-22.

Take your pick for a worldview: Hofstadter or Heller. As for me, in the absence of conclusive proof to the contrary, I counsel that “Occam’s razor,” or the law of parsimony should apply. Namely, a problem should be stated in its basic and simplest terms and the simplest theory that fits the facts is the one that should be selected when there’s two or more competing theories and that an explanation for unknown phenomena should first be attempted in terms of what is already known.

Which means, while I approach conspiracy theories with an abundance of caution, I don’t automatically rule them out as London Times columnist David Aaronovitch, author of the 2009 book, Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History, does in his de rigueur attempts at debunking same. But ad hominem arguments and smarminess are no substitute for an open mind.

Some conspiracies are … well, conspiracies. Others remain unproven matters of conjecture. And still others exist on the fringes of tinfoil hat conspiracy theory speculation.

While conspiracy theories about Charles Harrelson, actor Woody Harrelson’s father, being one of the “three tramps” on the grassy knoll – a second shooter in Dallas – along with two other shadowy figures, Charles Rogers and Chauncey Holt, continue to have some currency, it appears the boxcar tramps actually were Gus Abrams, Harold Doyle and John Gedney, and that Lee Harvey Oswald, as the Warren Commission concluded, acted alone in assassinating U.S. President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

The assassination of an earlier American president, Abraham Lincoln, however, was part of a larger conspiracy, a fact that’s largely forgotten today. What is remembered is that actor John Wilkes Booth entered Lincoln’s State Box at the Ford Theater in Washington, D.C. on April 14, 1865 undetected and shot him in the back of the head. Lincoln, mortally wounded, was taken to the Petersen House across the street and died at 7:22 a.m. April 15. On April 26, Booth was found hiding in a barn near Port Royal, Virginia and was shot and killed by a Union solider after he refused to surrender and the barn in which he was hiding was set ablaze.

Co-conspirator Lewis Powell attempted to assassinate Secretary of State William Seward, but only managed to injure him. At the same time, another co-conspirator, George Atzerodt was supposed to have killed Vice-President Andrew Johnson, but backed out.

Eight Lincoln co-conspirators were caught over the next few days and tried by a military court. They were found guilty on June 30 and given various sentences depending upon their involvement. Powell, Atzerodt, David Herold, and Mary Elizabeth Jenkins Surratt were charged with conspiring with Booth, along with various other crimes, and all were hanged in Washington on July 7, 1865 – with Surratt becoming the first woman executed by the United States federal government.

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Food, Journalism, Thanksgiving

Mouthwatering American Thanksgiving recipes correction in the New York Times and other pardonable acts

I’ve read a good number of corrections and clarifications over the years in newspapers as a journalist. I daresay I’ve had to write a few myself. That’s the nature of the beast. But the correction appended Nov. 26 by New York Times editors to a Nov. 18 story headlined “The United States of Thanksgiving,” which overreached it turns out in scouring “the nation for recipes that evoke each of the 50 states (and D.C. and Puerto Rico)” takes the cake for both its length, reflecting the rather larger number of errors, and something unique in my experience as a reader. It was so mouthwatering it made me hungry just reading it.

As a former resident of North Carolina, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, all I can say is yum. Happy Thanksgiving to all north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line. You can read the original New York Times story here at: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/11/18/dining/thanksgiving-recipes-across-the-united-states.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0

The correction appended the bottom of the story online reads:

“Correction: November 26, 2014

“An article last Wednesday recommending a Thanksgiving dish from each state, with a recipe, contained numerous errors.

“The recipe from Connecticut, for quince with cipollini onions and bacon, omitted directions for preparing the quince. It should be peeled, cored and cut into 1-inch chunks. An illustration with the West Virginia recipe, for pawpaw pudding, depicted a papaya — not a pawpaw, which is correctly depicted above. The introduction to the recipe from Arizona, for cranberry sauce and chiles, misstated the origin of Hatch chiles. They are grown in New Mexico, not in Arizona.

“The introduction to the Delaware recipe, for du Pont turkey with truffled zucchini stuffing, referred incorrectly to several historical points about the Winterthur estate. It was an ancestral home of the du Pont family, not the sole one; it was established in 1837, not in 1810; the house was completed in 1839, not in 1837. The introduction also misstated the relationship of Pauline Foster du Pont to Eleuthère Irénée du Pont. Pauline was the wife of Mr. du Pont’s grandson, not his daughter-in-law.

“And, finally, the label for the illustration for the nation’s capital misspelled the District of Columbia as Colombia.”

Much like Canadian Thanksgiving, which I wrote about last month (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/10/11/canadian-thanksgiving-eh-february-april-may-june-october-november-a-very-moveable-feast-historically/) our American cousins have an older and equally interesting Thanksgiving history of this very moveable feast in both countries.

In the United States, Thanksgiving is a more complex feast. Originally, the Pilgrim Puritans of Massachusetts Bay Colony celebrated their first Thanksgiving Day on July 8, 1629. The following year, John Winthrop gave his famous sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” where he rightly predicted the colony would be metaphorically, as from salt and light in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, as recorded in the Gospel of Matthew, known as the “city on a hill, ” watched by the world.

“For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill,” Winthrop said. “The eyes of all people are upon us … we must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body.”

Almost four centuries later, their purposes perhaps not quite as lofty, Americans now celebrate Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November. It is the single-biggest domestic travel weekend of the year for Americans going home, wherever that might be, to visit family.

Canadian Thanksgiving, or Jour de l’Action de grâce, by contrast is a somewhat more low-key affair.

While we do travel to visit family and many of us will sit down to eat turkey with family and friends, it’s nothing on the scale of the American experience.

Perhaps that’s because we have our Thanksgiving on a Monday at the end of a weekend, not on a Thursday at the beginning of a long weekend (officially the Wednesday and Friday are not holidays in the United States, just the Thursday, but virtually no one – aside from unfortunate retail store clerks – works the Friday, as those of us who have lived there know.) Just try and get a government official on the telephone after mid-afternoon Wednesday, or all day Friday of American Thanksgiving week if you wish to test this hypothesis.

While the fourth Thursday in November is also often the last Thursday as well (as it is this year), even a cursory glance through the years of our Gregorian calendar reveal some years, of course, have five Thursdays. Such was the case in 1939, the last year of the Great Depression, when Thanksgiving was scheduled to fall on Nov. 30, not only on the fifth Thursday of November but the very last day of November as well in fact, and less than a month before Christmas, causing President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, to use the moral authority of his office by proclamation to move Thanksgiving up a week to Nov. 23 at the initiative of Lew Hahn, general manager of the Retail Dry Goods Association, who had warned U.S. Secretary of Commerce Harry Hopkins as early as August that the late calendar date of Thanksgiving that year could have an adverse effect on retail sales, and that an earlier Thanksgiving could perhaps boost the bottom line.

To understand the rationale more fully, harken back to that bygone era where it was quaintly considered bad form for retailers to display Christmas decorations or have Christmas sales before the celebration of Thanksgiving, as opposed to the current day-after Halloween kick-off. Or is it the day after Labor Day now Christmas sales start? One of the two methinks.

Roosevelt, however, had waited until Oct. 31 to announce his thinking on the matter of moving up Thanksgiving by a week 23 days later. The short-notice change in dates affected the holiday plans of millions of Americans; while there was plenty of confusion and many were inconvenienced, others hit pay dirt.

On the downside, many college football teams traditionally ended their seasons with games against their main rivals on Thanksgiving, and had scheduled them in 1939 for Nov. 30. Some athletic conferences had rules permitting games only through the Saturday following Thanksgiving. Changing the date could mean many teams would play their season finale in empty stadiums or not at all. The change also reportedly caused problems for college registrars, schedulers and calendar makers.

The Thanksgiving winners in 1939 lived in Colorado, Mississippi and Texas. Those three states observed two Thanksgiving holidays that year; the just-proposed Thursday, Nov. 23, and then they did it all over again a week later on the originally scheduled holiday on Thursday, Nov. 30.

Now, that’s something to express gratitude for, unless your were a turkey taking a double-hit on your numbers possibly in Colorado, Mississippi and Texas. All told, 23 states and the District of Columbia, of the 48 states in those pre-statehood days for Alaska and Hawaii (both joined the union 20 years later in 1959), recognized Nov. 23 as Thanksgiving in 1939, while 22 states stuck with the original Nov. 30 date as planned.

Gradually, the fourth Thursday in November as Thanksgiving, with some see-sawing back-and-forth and general waffling, took a more permanent hold throughout the United States. Texas was the last state to change its holiday law, observing the last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving when there are five Thursdays in the month for the final time on Thursday, Nov. 29, 1956.

The considerable, and for a time in the early 1940s, still ongoing confusion surrounding when Thanksgiving should be celebrated was not surprisingly diffused in the popular culture as ripe material for laughs through cinema, as well as radio. “In the 1940 Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies cartoon Holiday Highlights, directed by Tex Avery,” Wikipedia notes, “the introduction to a segment about Thanksgiving shows the holiday falling on two different dates, one ‘for Democrats’ and one a week later ‘for Republicans.'”

In the 1942 musical Holiday Inn, starring Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, a classic black-and-white film, which I borrowed in DVD format from the Thompson Public Library a few years ago (and which was on the shelf today I noticed) there is a delightful parody where a November calendar appears on which an animated turkey jumps back and forth between the two weeks, until he gives up and shrugs his shoulders at the audience.

And speaking of turkeys getting the last laugh, no discussion of American Thanksgiving is complete, of course, without addressing the issue of the Presidential turkey pardon. In a piece called “Why presidents pardon turkeys — a history” by Domenico Montanaro, PBS Newshour yesterday offered the comprehensive history of the practice, which you can read at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/presidents-pardon-turkeys-history/#.VHbAtv1lVLA.facebook

Cheese, a 49-pound big boy born on July 4, with a height of 36 inches and a wingspan of 4½ feet, and a “strut style” described as “grand champion,” was this year’s recipient yesterday of a presidential pardon from U.S. President Barack Obama during the annual ceremony in the Grand Foyer of the White House. It was Obama’s sixth turkey pardoning as commander-in-chief Wednesday at the White House. Cheese’s gobble was characterized as “loud, romantic, with a country ring to it.”

The annual tradition now sees two turkeys spared from the dinner table, but only one is selected to take part in the White House pardon ceremony.

This year’s duo was Mac and Cheese, but only Cheese got to ham it up before the cameras.

“I am here to announce what I’m sure will be the most talked about executive action this month,” President Obama said, his two daughters Sasha and Malia by his side. “Today, I’m taking an action fully within my legal authority, same taken by Democratic and Republican presidents before me, to spare lives of two turkeys — “Mac” and “Cheese” from a terrible and delicious fate.”

He added, “If you’re a turkey, and you’re named after a side dish, your chances of escaping today dinner are pretty low, so these guys beat the odds. … They’ll get to live out the rest of their days respectably at a Virginia estate. Some would call this amnesty, but there’s plenty of turkey to go around.”

Mac, also a male born on the Fourth of July this year, came in two pounds lighter than Cheese, tipping the scales at only 47 pounds. He also had a half-foot smaller wingspan of only four feet. His strut style was described as “feather-shaker.” Mac’s gobble was characterized as “rhythmic, melodious, with a touch of bluegrass.”

Mac and Cheese will be sent to a park in Leesburg, Virginia, a Washington suburb. The property has been used to grow turkeys in the past. The estate was owned by former Virginia Governor Westmoreland Davis, who raised hundreds of his own turkeys there in the 1930s and 1940s.

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Catholicism, Journalism, Religion

Vocations hotspot on the media map again: Welcome to Fowler and Westphalia in Clinton County, Michigan in the Diocese of Lansing

First it was the New York Times in June. Tomorrow it is CNN. Fowler and Westphalia, two small farming communities, eight miles apart in Clinton County in Central Michigan, have both produced 22 priests for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Lansing. Fowler, the slightly larger village with a population of 1,224, had been trailing by two in the ordination derby until June 14 when 26-year-old identical twins Todd and Gary Koenigsknecht from Holy Trinity Parish were ordained as priests at St. Thomas Aquinas Church in East Lansing by Bishop Earl Boyea, Jr., the fifth bishop of Lansing. Three other deacons – Daniel Westermann, James Rolph and Vince Richardson – were ordained by Boyea at the same mass.

On Aug. 16, Santa, Monica, California broadcast journalist Lisa Ling, host of the original CNN documentary series, This is Life with Lisa Ling, arrived at Holy Family Parish in Grand Blanc where Father Gary Koenigsknecht is assigned and St. Thomas the Apostle Parish in Ann Arbor where Father Todd Koenigsknecht is now based to begin filming “Called to the Collar” her last show this season for This is Life with Lisa Ling, being broadcast on CNN Nov. 16 at 9 p.m. Central Standard Time and at 10 p.m. EST and PST. You can watch a 30-second YouTube trailer for the episode here at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeJlWpUHtuY

According to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown University there are 38,275 priests in the United States compared to 58,632 when the Second Vatican Council ended Dec. 7, 1965. Ordinations in the United States have fallen from 994 in 1965 to the 494 expected this year. Those figures and other Catholic data, statistics and research can be viewed on their website at: http://cara.georgetown.edu/caraservices/requestedchurchstats.html

While some have expressed concern about Ling’s revisiting the perennial hot-buttons issues of clergy sex abuse and celibacy, Father John Linden, the Diocese of Lansing’s director of vocations and seminarians, has said he’s optimistic about the CNN segment airing Sunday: “The New York Times did a fantastic job… We thought this was a good opportunity and that Lisa Ling would do something along those lines,” he reportedly told Patti Murphy Dohn, recently retired campus minister and religion teacher at The John Carroll School in Bel Air, Maryland and a blogger for The Catholic Review, the newspaper of record for the Archdiocese of Baltimore.

The June 16 New York Times story, “In Two Michigan Villages, a Higher Calling Is Often Heard,” was written by Christina Capecchi, owner of Ries Media in Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota, who is a Catholic syndicated columnist and journalist from just south of St. Paul, and who has written for MinnPost.com, the Chicago Tribune and Medill News Service, as well as the New York Times. Capecchi has a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University and did her undergraduate degree at Mount Mercy University in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Her Times story can be found online at: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/17/us/in-two-michigan-villages-a-higher-calling-is-often-heard.html?_r=1

Linden told Dohn that during Ling’s filming questions surrounding clergy sex abuse kept coming up, and the priests and seminarians who were interviewed tried to eventually lead the conversation away from this topic, but found that they couldn’t get away from it.

Linden explained that though the topic of clergy abuse was brought up in each of the interviews done for “Called to the Collar,” it is his hope that Ling’s program will “open the door for people who are searching for answers and who might take another look to the Church and see why someone might seek out the Catholic faith.”