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.

Questioning The AIDS Infection Rate Story

I am troubled by the explanations for a rising number of a new AIDS and HIV infections among young people in a story making the rounds on Yahoo! today.

The story quotes a number of experts who claim the rising infection rates among teens and young adults has to do with an image problem; that is, the perception that AIDS is less serious because there are drugs to treat it. People are living longer with AIDS, and as a result, young people are less afraid.

Experts say a number of factors may be at play, including the fact that many HIV-infected patients are now being kept healthy with powerful drugs — making AIDS seem like less of a threat to young people than it did in the past.

‘Certainly the “scare factor” isn’t there anymore,’ said Rowena Johnston, vice president of research at the Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) in New York City.

Here’s my problem with that explantion: It’s overly convenient. It assumes that young people are stupid, and cannot gauge the seriousness of AIDS and HIV. The even bigger problem? The story does a poor job fleshing out other ideas and explantions for increased numbers of infections.  

Off the top of my head, I can think of at least three alternative explanations for that increase.

• The rise in abstinence-only education that coincided with the administration of President Bush. The data in the story, you’ll note, compares recent infection rates with those going back to 2001, the year the current administration took office.
• The increasing number of young people. The lede story in USA Today makes a big issue out of the rising number of 20-somethings in this country. Quote: “A larger generation of 20-somethings, an age group more likely than others to move as they attend college, launch their careers or leave their childhood homes. The number of people in their 20s dropped from 40.5 million in 1990 to 38.3 million in 2000 but rebounded to almost 42 million in 2006.” If there are millions more in that age group, one would assume the nunber of new infections would rise on an actual basis, but not on a per capita basis.
• An increase in the availability and efficacy of testing. This was something has been seen with cancers, as technologies like CT scans and PSA tests became more widely used. Are more kids getting tested? Are tests much better than they were five years ago? I don’t know — the story doesn’t say. 

Taibbi Says: Don’t Go To Journalism School

 Thinking about going to journalism school? Check out this advice from Rolling Stone columnist Matt Taibbi.

“If you have no real knowledge or skill set and you’re lazy and full of shit but you want to make a decent wage, then journalism’s not a bad career option. The great thing about it is that you don’t need to know anything. I mean this whole notion of journalism school—I can’t believe people actually go to journalism school. You can learn the entire thing in like three days. My advice is instead of going to journalism school, go to school for something concrete like medicine or some kind of science or something and then use the knowledge you get in that field as a wedge to get yourself into journalism.

What journalism really needs is more people who are reporting who actually know something. Instead of having a bunch of liberal arts grads who’ve read Siddhartha 50 times writing about health care, it would be really nice if some of the people who are writing about health care were doctors.”

Writing Advice From The Brothers

I just found out about these guys. They’re pretty funny. And this one is about writing advice and long-lost childhood girlfriends.

In case you were interested, I recently changed the theme for this blog to “The Journalist“. I found it appropriate. Sort of.

Writing Advice, Nov. 28

“I create people you care about — and then I turn the monsters loose.”

– Stephen King

Writers strike propaganda. OK.