Angry Hartford Guitarophiles Duke It Out On Craigslist

Oh how guitarists loathe it when others try to rip them off on craigslist. (Note: He’s right, the dude’s asking way too much.)

‘Cross My Palm With Silver, You Can Publish My Essay’

Harlan Ellison wants to be paid, man.

Welcome To The Machine

Well folks, It’s been a few days since I’ve written anything and here’s why: I was busy putting together a little project called NutmegMachine.com

It’s intended to be a blog, a news service and a resource for manufacturing in Connecticut, a topic I have been writing a column about (“Industrial Strength”) for the Hartford Business Journal since April.

New Writings (Dec. 10, 2007)

Hey folks. In case you were wondering what I have been writing lately (other than my blog), here are some new stories for this week:

• These pesky Broadway and Hollywood strikes are creating an interesting ripple in the insurance world. (Via Insurance Journal)
• The head of the Connecticut Workers Compensation Committee group warns that changes could be afoot in that state’s workers comp system. Why? Because most of the legislators are newbies. (Via Hartford Business Journal)

New Tools To Track People Down

Via Lifehacker. One of the tedious parts of being a journalist is finding ways to track down the people you want to talk to. Lifehacker puts together a nice little 101 on how to find folks beyond merely googling them.

If you don’t feel like visiting the link, here are the highlights:

• To find a person’s home address and phone number: Try Zabasearch. This is a search tool that can be done on a state-by-state basis, e.g. John Smith, Anytown, Mass. It also pulls up birth date information, although sometimes it’s conflicting. I use this tool often to track down the home addresses and phone numbers of businessmen and businesswomen I write about — particularly when their PR flacks and secretaries give me the runaround.
• To find background on a person: Try Pipl. This is a tool I haven’t tried much yet. You need the name and city address for a person you are looking for to make it work best.
• To find out what a person says about himself on social networking sites: Try Wink. Once you know the name and address of the person you’re tracking down, see if he is a member of any social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn. A lot has been written about the info on these sites damaging people’s job prospects. But in researching the backgrounds of alleged criminals, it can be a gold mine. I know a certain reporter who found this type of tool very useful when breaking a story about a high school teacher who had sex with a teenage student: Sure enough, the teacher had a racy MySpace page, which was taken down the day after the story came out.
• If you’re a Firefox user: try the “Who is this person?” extension. This feature will allow you to instantly run a name through Google, Zabasearch and a few other sites. Could be useful, but I prefer doing these by hand.

Boston University’s Strange Journo-Marketing

I just got around to sorting some of the mail and magazines on my desk. I was reading through the most recent issue of Bostonia, which is the alumni magazine of Boston University. There is a profile of WBUR, the NPR-affiliate based at B.U. At one point in the piece, the writer makes this awkward reference to an alumna, considering the story is running in a combination marketing and journalism mag.

As recently as two years ago, newspaper stories about WBUR described the station as troubled. They noted its growing debt to BU and the cancellation of The Connection, then the station’s flagship program, with a huge national following. Prior to that was the October 2004 resignation of longtime general manager Jane Christo (CAS’65) amid accusations of mismanagement, many eventually deemed not credible by a BU investigation.

Does that strike anyone else as weird, knowing this is a puff piece promoting B.U.? I can’t quite decide if it’s very bad marketing or very good journalism.

[BTW, the things an internal investigation found that Christo did were not all that interesting.]

Simile For The Chimera

Similes bedevil me. I have been sitting here for 15 minutes trying to ponder a meaningful or poetic manner in which ignorance is like a raven, greed is a like a clock and integrity is like a nail.

These, friends, are some of the similes created especially for me by the simile of the day generator I just found. A new, meaningless simile appears every time you click a button.

The Lede Is The Thing

Has anyone checked out this One Sentence project? It’s pretty nifty — people trying to tell stories in one sentence, some of them quite swell. None are really quite stories, but quite a few would make interesting ledes to stories.

Some of my favorites from today:

• “I realize now that his being a passionate person is no excuse for him trying to choke me to death when he found out i was pregnant.”
• “Eyeing the intriguingly attractive girl in line, it took me a moment to remember that it’s almost impossible to find lesbians in birth control clinics.”
• “To think… it all started with a wayward icecube.”

Update: Questioning The AIDS Rate Story

Here’s an addenda to my earlier post about the AIDS infection rate growing among teens and young adults. I suggested that one reason for the jump might be the rise of abstinence-only sex education. Well, lo and behold, a new study comes out and says that the teen birth rate has jumped and the reason: the rise of abstinence-only education.

(S)ome experts said they have been expecting a jump. They blamed it on increased federal funding for abstinence-only health education that doesn’t teach teens how to use condoms and other contraception.

Isn’t this really a very similar scenario with a totally different analysis? Both AIDS and pregnancy are direct results of unprotected sex. Both AIDS infections and teen pregnancies saw their first rise in years. Yet for AIDS, experts blame a perception that AIDS is less dangerous; for teen pregnancy experts blame abstinence-only education. Couldn’t it be true that rising AIDS infection rates could ALSO be related to the rise of abstinence-only education? It at least seems probable.

To be fair, it could also be vice versa: The perception among teenagers that pregnancies don’t happen has led to an increase in teen pregnancies. To some degree this could be happening, but I doubt it’s the best explanation.

Feel free to comment below.

Iraq Makes For Costly Coverage

Columbia Journalism Review has a pretty good editorial in the Nov./Dec. issue about how news organizations are learning to boost news coverage and reduce costs. I had never given much thought to how much it takes to staff a news bureau in Iraq, but according to CJR, it’s a lot. In discussing this lengthy package in the New York Times, CJR says:

According to their editor, the writers, Damien Cave and Stephen Farrell, spent more than half of their time for nearly two months on the piece, including a number of days as embeds. Their research was supplemented by the work of twenty-nine other reporters, photographers, videographers, editors, and members of the graphics staff. The foreign editor, Susan Chira, devoted roughly the equivalent of two weeks to the story. Just to maintain a bureau in Iraq these days, between life insurance and blast walls, guards and transportation, guns and generators, takes more than $3 million annually at the Times—plus staff salaries.

This, to me, hits on what I see as the major issue that confronts journalists in our time: How do you make journalism work when budgets are tight? No one knows what the best answer is yet, but the editorial talks about a few other efforts that are interesting.

• ABC News is setting up one-person “micro-bureaus” in places like Rio, Dubai and Jakarta, where reporter-producers will tape and edit their own packages.
• ProPublica, which is something like a nonprofit investigative journalism wire service
• MinnPost, another nonprofit daily news Web site based in Minnesota.

Speaking of things I would like to see in journalism: Why hasn’t anyone taken the muckety approach to covering local news? I think this site is just the neatest idea in Web news I have seen. I think back to all of the boards of selectmen, small towns and insider deals I wrote about, yet had no great way to showcase. The muckety tool would be perfect for it. I am surprised no one else has tried something similar.

Here’s one that takes a look at the connections to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.