A+ Podcasts for Com Majors

Here in the Communication department we are all in the business of words. Whether we're hoping to get our ideas out via print, online or broadcast media, the English language is our stock and trade. We all need to learn to use words accurately, efficiently and powerfully.

If you're like me, learning vocabulary, proper spelling and grammar is about as fun as doing your tax return, but without the refund to look forward to at the end!

I checked out some educational podcasts that focus on language skills in the hopes that someone out there was taking the sting out of 'stertorous'.

Revenge of the Word Nerds

"The Word Nerds: A Podcast About Language" is produced by three language teachers and features themed shows that last around 30-40 mins. Here's an excerpt from their website.

The Word Nerds is a podcast about language and language change. It has been published on the Internet since March 21, 2005. Originally published every week, it now appears once every two to three weeks.

Three language teachers, Dave Shepherd, Howard Shepherd, and Howard Chang, talk about nearly any topic you could imagine having to do with language. We are all native speakers of American English. Dave is a high-school German teacher, Howard S. teaches high-school English, and Howard C. teaches high-school Latin.

I chose the episode called "Equivocation and Discourse" because I had no idea what equivocation was. The episode gets off to a slow start, but the hosts get into the swing of things in a few minutes. Here is a breakdown of the episode from iTunes:

• Howard Shepherd talks about his favorite summer reading book--Special Topics in Calamity Physics, a first novel by his former student Marisha Pessl. (2:47)
• Reasons for equivocating (4:37)
• Music bumper from "Ockham's Shaving Kit," by George Hrab (14:46)
• Verbal and lingual ways of equivocating (15:27)
• Song: "Maybe I'll Wait," by Robin Welty (21:36)
• Rude word of the week: "weasel" (25:16)
• Music bumper from "Telepop" by The Jerrys (28:57)
• Paralingual and nonvocal equivocation (29:36)
• Music courtesy of The Podsafe Music Network and IODA Promonet
• Theme music by Kick the Cat
• Closing music from "Grapes" by Evan Stone

If you can get comfortable with the conversational tone and somewhat slower pace, you are sure to find something in this podcast to pique your interest. What makes the content so interesting is the way the "word nerds" connect their linguistic theme of the week to the real world in all kinds of ways - political, academic, and sports related speech all make an appearance. I learned about upspeak & how it relates to psychology, and about differences between formal and informal, British and American, and public and personal speech. And let's not forget the rude word of the week - weasel! - a recurring segment that spotlights terms from "windbag" to "bullshit."

From a technical perspective, the sound quality is good and the podcast makes good use of musical snippets to break the show up into smaller chunks, with one full song at about the halfway point. The "word nerds" are not working from a script. They use a broad outline and the conversation seems to flow more or less smoothly from there.

So while you may think that the podcast sounds a little, well, amateurish at first... all those ahs, ums, somewhats, kind ofs, and so forths are just, like, sort of, well, hmm, a little bit of, er, equivocation after all. You know?

Check Out These Other Highly Recommended Podcasts

The Princeton Review Vocab Minute
Researchers say music helps us remember. These goofy vocab songs are only one minute long, but that's plenty of time to fix each word in your memory!




Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing
Grammar Girl provides short, friendly tips to improve your writing. Whether English is your first language or your second language, these grammar, punctuation, style, and business tips will make you a better and more successful writer. These are only about 5 minutes long.

On The Media
Join On the Media (from NPR) for compelling radio that examines the impact of media on our lives. Each episode runs about 50 minutes.

More on the Future of News

Thought I'd also include a link to this excellent article from the January 29, 2007 issue of The Nation called "Newspapers...and After?" by John Nichols.

Convergent Journalism in the Real World

There's an article in the current edition of Business Week that talks about how Gannett, publisher of USA Today and 89 other dailies, is making convergent journalism a reality and blazing new ground along the way.

Columnist Jon Fine calls Gannett

"the newspaper chain with the most interesting and coherent approach to rethinking journalism and news-gathering."

Click here to read about Gannett's innovative attempts to blend amateur blogging with professional journalism.

News War

Want to know what forces are likely to impact your planned career in journalism?

PBS's Frontline is currently airing "News War: A Special Four-Part Investigation into the Future of News."

• Parts I & II: Secrets, Sources & Spin
• Part III: What's Happening to the News
• Part IV: Stories From a Small Planet

You can tune in to your local public tv station or watch the series online. Click here for a more detailed description, or listen to a podcast of the director, Lowell Bergman, being interviewed on NPR's Fresh Air.

Blogging & the Changing Nature of Politics

Who cares about blogging, anyway?

Do blogs matter - for politicians or the public - in the real world?

I began to address this issue in theory in my last post, so I thought I'd tell you the story of my first blogging experience to illustrate the personal and political power of blogging...

In the bloginning, I was trying to decide who to vote for in the 2004 presidential election. I checked out Howard Dean's website, because my cousin, Garrett Graff, was on his campaign staff. And lo, there was a companion website called Blog for America.

"Whyzit called a blog?" I asked.

"Whatsit do?"

Dean Campaign Manager Joe Trippi on Blogging & Elections

The blog could do many things:

• It introduced people from all over the US (& the world)

• It developed its own language that community members could share
  

• It linked to other blogs, like DailyKos

• It linked to traditional newspapers, both liberal and conservative, and to nontraditional media, like the online news site Salon.com

• It warned readers about errors of fact and logic in traditional news reports, & linked to sources to back this up

• It encouraged readers to swamp online polls like those at CNN's Inside Politics

• It got strangers to gather together in real life through Meetup.com

• The blog could see all news stories in all media at all times because the blog was made up of thousands of people

• The blog sent readers forth at a moment's notice to call, write & email the traditional media in response to controversial stories

People who claimed never to have been very active politically before found themselves doing the darndest things:

• They brought ideas to the blog - ideas for raising money, getting publicity & persuading voters

• They used their talents to design posters, flyers, & t-shirts, to translate information into the languages of immigrant communities, and to host parties & gatherings in their homes

• They gave of their time to strategize, write letters to voters, make phone calls, knock on doors, hang fliers, & man tables at public events

• And, above all, they blogged

You see, somehow the blog took consumers of traditional news media - political spectators - and transformed them into actors, creators...

...citizens.

Click here to read a Pew/Internet report on the impact of the internet on the 2004 election

In the end, I think the Howard Dean campaign was more about the blog than about the candidate himself. There was a sense of belonging to a community. The excitement there was palpable, and contagious. Because for the first time in a long time - or for some of us, ever - people felt empowered.

Almost overnight the blogosphere has become a political force to be reckoned with and an essential area of consideration for any political campaign.

Browse political blogs and find one that speaks to you!

Extra! Radical Blogosphere Saves Democracy!

Blogging for Democracy

When I read Jay Rosen’s essay, “What’s Radical About the Weblog Form in Journalism,” it was point #10 that caught me eye:

“Journalism traditionally assumes that democracy is what we have, information is what we seek. Whereas in the weblog world, information is what we have – it’s all around us – and democracy is what we seek.”

Unlike those who fear that blogs may be the death of traditional journalism, I think media bloggers have an important and exciting role to play in the continuing evolution of our democracy.

A Brief History of the News

In the early years of this country, the line between objectivity and subjectivity was blurred in the media. Anyone with the funds could print a pamphlet or newsletter and get their information and opinions out into the marketplace of ideas. The reliability of information was shaky, but access to the political and social conversations of the times was relatively high. As times changed,

• the news media were professionalized
• journalistic standards of objectivity were developed; ‘fact’ was separated from ‘opinion’
• news media were bought up by large corporations & profit became increasingly important
• target audiences are now often geographically diverse & highly segmented
• common spaces and community bonds diminished
  

The average person could no longer bring their ideas to market – the costs of publishing were prohibitive and distribution channels had disappeared or were now controlled by large corporations. But information is reliable now, right?

That Obscure Objectivity We Desire

Not quite. We recognize this implicitly when we speak of one news outlet being conservative, another liberal.

Someone must decide which stories are important and which are not, which facts to include in a story and which to leave out. We trust this task to the journalist because s/he is an ‘expert,’ but s/he’s a human being too! And as such, s/he has a particular, subjective view of the world – a view that is influenced by family, geography, culture, and other factors. Even in theory, no one can be perfectly objective.

There are also many practical reasons why the ‘objective’ or at least ‘fair and balanced’ information we find in the newspaper is not so balanced after all:

• ‘fair & balanced’ often means pitting one extreme viewpoint against the opposite extreme, thereby canceling out the middle ground where most people’s opinions fall
• owners often put profit ahead of good reporting
• large corporate owners often have conflicts of interest in reporting issues that affect themselves
  

So if it’s not possible, either practically or theoretically, to produce objective news, what should we do? We have information, but is it democratic?

Public Journalism Strikes Back

Recent trends in print and TV journalism suggest a sort of ‘race to the bottom’ is taking place as many media outlets, led by the likes of Fox News and USA Today, attempt to capture ratings by being more personal and entertaining at the expense (some would say) of high quality reporting.

Other traditional journalists and their supporters have sought to address this issue in a more thoughtful and civic-minded way by embracing a concept known as public journalism. Jay Rosen is a leading proponent of this approach.

Meanwhile, the online revolution has quietly produced its own spontaneous response to the problem: the blog. Blogging knits together the two themes of subjectivity/objectivity and the relationship of information to democracy. Here’s how:

To Blog, Perchance to Dream

In the traditional model, journalists are professionals who have, through their expert techniques, obtained the information about our democracy that we need. They then decide what information is important and pass it along in a fair and balanced way to the citizenry, who passively consumes it. The power to control the flow of information in and about our society is concentrated in the hands of relatively few.

Blogging flips the assumptions of traditional journalism on their head:

• power is no longer concentrated in the hands of a few professionals, since ordinary citizens can now critique the news, and post their own information
• citizen bloggers decide what information and stories are important
• bloggers talk amongst themselves and build consensus from the bottom up
• access to the marketplace of ideas is wide open once again, since barriers to blogging are relatively low
  

In a sense, bloggers are taking public journalism into their own hands:

“I am a public of one.
This is my subjectivity.”

They reshape the news through the lens of their own subjectivity by selecting stories from amongst the many different sources (both traditional and not) available on the internet, and comparing, critiquing, and building on them.

The Fourth Estate – Beta

As traditional media transition to an online format, we begin to see some real evidence of the democratization of information promised by the online revolution. Blogs are not likely to replace traditional news organizations - which is a good thing, because we need professional journalism.

We need it to hold high standards and to keep striving to produce fair and balanced information, however ‘fair and balanced’ may continue to be redefined.

And because the news media can never provide perfectly fair and balanced information, we need bloggers to remind us...

• that the world and what we make of it is always ultimately in our hands
• that good information and access to the marketplace of ideas are vital to a healthy democracy
• that we should each be an active producer and an active consumer of information

In this way, the traditional news media and the blogosphere have their own informal system of checks and balances.

E Bloggibus Unum

What does this mean for the news story?

Traditional journalists are still the gatekeepers of most of our information, and information must meet certain standards in order to enter the marketplace through the news media. But now the blogosphere can hold the media accountable by critiquing the stories they do (and don’t) cover.

Equally important is the way in which the blogosphere shifts public debate. Although bloggers are always watching the facts and won’t hesitate to pounce on suspect information, debate goes beyond asking “what are the facts of the story?” Instead, bloggers ask questions like:

• what are the beliefs that lead the writer to handle the facts in this way?
• given our beliefs, what are the implications of these facts?
  

In other words, blogging encourages us to focus on the interpretation of the information we have – the story that we weave around the facts. It throws everyone’s subjectivity into relief, where it can be examined, challenged and revised. The marketplace of ideas is once again open to (most of) the public.

What could be more democratic than that?