Brad Marley's Blog

This just in: nothing too important.

Some of my friends don't trust the media. Until last week, I didn't understand why.

I grew up in a household where the newspaper hit our front porch every morning and I devoured it -- along with my oatmeal -- every day before school. News gathering was as common a daily task to me as food gathering was for Cro-Magnon man.

How could anybody go about their daily lives ignoring the news?

Then, one morning last week, I turned on my computer and saw the catastrophic news: a shortage of Eggo waffles.

While I tried to imagine a future where breakfast tables sat waffle-less, I was blindsided by another piece of news that will surely dampen the holiday spirit: canned pumpkin pie filling is in short supply.

I didn't have to scrounge to find the news, either.  It was front and center on Yahoo - a site that averages four million visits per day.

Suddenly, I had an inkling as to why my friends are so anti-news: most of it is non-news.

As the hard copy newspaper goes the way of the woolly mammoth, we are forced to sift through the noise on the Web to find the hard news.

If it's any indication of where our priorities lie, historians might look back on 2009 as the year the One Piece of Pumpkin Pie Rule was signed into law, and real news became extinct.

Revenge of the Weekly Grab Bag of Links - 10.31.09

You probably think I have a ton of links saved up since I haven't posted a weekly grab bag of links since early September, right?

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but your thinking would be incorrect.

Truth is, work and baby preparation have gotten in the way of reading.

But with a week of little-to-no sleep on the horizon, I should have more time than I need to stay current on my blog reader.

For now, these will have to do.

• You don't mess with Montana's Communications students (Deadspin) - When Montana's football coach told his players to stop talking to reporters from the student newspaper, the student newspaper relatiated by covering the team's opponents. The coach has since allowed players to talk to the paper. Communications students 1, jocks 0.

• 5 Social Media Disasters (Penn Olson) - The headline says it all, really. Learn how Honda and Taco Bell handled social media the wrong way.

• An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All (Wired Magazine) - This is an article every parent-to-be should read. The topic of vaccinating your kids is polarizing, to be sure, but when the facts are laid out in a straightforward fashion, it's easier to make a decision.

• The Robots Are Coming! Oh, They're Here (Media Decoder Blog - NYTimes.com) - A group of students at Northwestern University have created a bot that writes game recaps that "captures the overall dynamics of the game" using stats from the game. It's called Stats Monkey, and I'm wondering if they set out with the intention to eliminate more jobs.

• Inside the NHL's social media innovations, growing pains (Puck Daddy) - This article explains how the NHL is actively trying to engage its fans (and fans-to-be) on social networking sites.

As always, you can see all of my links on my Delicious page.

Why We Need News: The Case of Cameron Todd Willingham

I don't want it to seem like I despise the media, because I don't.

While I stay away from the shows that lean decidedly one way or another, I do like watching Anderson Cooper present his subject matter in a way that allows the viewer to draw their own conclusion.

For instance, if you watched last night's report on the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham, you would conclude that Willingham's defense lawyer, David Martin, was, quite possibly, drunk.

With his cowboy hat sitting askew atop his head, Martin tiptoed around Cooper's questions regarding the idea that his ex-client might have been innocent, using words like "absurd" and "absurd" again to refute the preposterousness of such a claim. He challenged the investigative reporter from the Chicago Tribune(who was participating in the discussion) to name the names of the experts who said the arson investigation was faulty, then simply let out an "pssssh" when he was given the names of the experts who disagreed with his take on the trial.

If you're not familiar with this story, Cameron Todd Willingham was sentenced to die by lethal injection after he was found guilty of killing his children by setting his north Texas home ablaze on a December night in 1991. The trial lasted all of two days and the jury delivered a verdict in less than one hour.  (You can read the entire story here. I suggest you do.)

There was always a question of whether or not he really was guilty, but the evidence presented at the time was enough to put him on death row.

Since his death in 2004, fire forensic investigators have updated their procedures. Some of the science behind arson investigation presented at his trial has since been cast off as outdated.

That brings us to last night.

This story is back in the news because Texas Governor Richard Perry recently disbanded a Forensic Commission slated to publicly accept a report by nationally recognized fire expert Craig Beyler that questioned every single piece of evidence of the case. In an election campaign, there are some who question Perry's motives.

Martin, who was tasked with defending Willingham during his trial, was adamant during his interview that Willingham was justifiably handed the death penalty, but he acted like a fool on national television.

A fool who's too headstrong to realize he may have sent an innocent man to his death.

A Story Full of Hot Air

Wouldn't it make things a lot easier on the media if, like Sunday morning golfers, they got mulligans when they erred?

If that do-over was in place, here's how the headline would have read for today's breaking news event:

Empty hot-air balloon floats harmlessly over Denver skyline; absolutely no one harmed

At the very least, it would make the news more accurate.

The national media demonstrated again today why they struggle to earn our trust when they led us to believe a six-year-old boy was stuck helplessly in his father's homemade weather chaser, headed for certain injury, until the balloon crashed and we discovered the basket was empty.

Oops. 

Did anybody think to search the house before, you know, breaking into daytime soap operas across the country? Or is it now sufficient to accept the word of parents who once traded each other in for a different model?

This is the problem with 24/7 news. They tend to make things news that never should have been made news in the first place because they have the time, so we become desensitized to the important stuff.

Nowadays it takes a story of epic proportions to rattle us out of our talking head-induced daze. We would rather watch television shows about women with pickle cravings who -- surprise! -- didn't know they were pregnant, or arguing parents with eight kids, because they are more believable than Wolf Blitzer.

I suppose it's like eating ice cream every single day for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Eventually you'll get sick of it.

An ode to Wired Magazine: Issue 17.09

I guess it's only fitting that a magazine focused on the impact of technology on culture, the economy, and politics, has figured out a way to avoid (or slow down) a trip to print publication purgatory.

Using inventive ideas like hiding puzzles within the pages, or urging readers to find a missing reporter in the real world (who, I might add, contributed a story on losing one's identity), Wired Magazine has taken the idea that people have more fun when they're interacting with something, and parlayed it into a successful print run.

All magazines should take a cue from this strategy. It's one thing to read how fast Usain Bolt runs the 100 meters. It would be quite another to watch a video of the reporter running the same distance to understand how far we lag behind.

But rather than continue to wax on about the most recent issue, here's a haiku that I drafted just for you.

Journalist on lam
Craigslist founder will not change
Digitized Fab Four

If that doesn't cause you to run to your nearest newsstand and pick up the latest issue -- before both the newsstand and magazine are extinct -- I don't know what will.

The Detroit Free Press didn't make up story about U of M.

I had a few final thoughts I wanted to add after my recent posts around the allegations against the University of Michigan football team, mainly that Michael Rosenberg was just doing his job, same as if I picked up my phone and called a reporter with a story idea or my wife inserted a pic line (I hope I'm spelling that correctly) into her patient.

But then the Detroit Free Press addressed them and, well, there's really nothing left to add.

If Michigan lost to Western Michigan last Saturday, I suspect this issue would have grown to epic proportions in Ann Arbor and beyond, but winning tends to sooth the savage beast.  I guess we'll have to wait until after next weekend's game against Notre Dame to pick up the story where we left off. (Kidding.)

Anyway, here's the Free Press' explanation of how this story came to be.  Worth a read, no matter which camp you are ensconced in.

Why We Need (a form of) Newspapers

The recent allegations against University of Michigan football coach Rich Rodriguez provide a great example of why we need newspapers and journalism, in one form or another, to survive.  

MGoBlog, which bills itself as "a somewhat comprehensive Michigan sports blog," has been following the story closely these past few days as more information about the investigation comes to light. (If you have not been paying attention, blogs are kind of popular.)

But we can't expect -- and the blogger doesn't try to indicate otherwise -- that a blog written by an alumnus of the University of Michigan would be objective. It would be like a Christian blogger reacting to new evidence that Jesus Christ didn't exist: their words only serve to lather up the faithful.

Journalists, on the other hand, abide by a professional code of ethics that states "public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy."  It is their job to find the truth and report to the public.  

And that truth can sometimes manifest itself as players on a college football team who were fed up with a program that, in their minds, is breaking NCAA rules.

It doesn't matter who the coach is, which school it is, or what their record is.  If journalists are given information that the public deserves to know and, after thorough research, is deemed legit, they are obligated to report it. 

We may not like it, and we may not agree with it, but without it, we would all just be preaching to the choir, and how interesting would that be?

Permission to panic? Granted.

I'm not one of those people who think media intentionally blow every single thing out of proportion.

However, I do think they have become a victim of the 24-hour news channel, as well as the fact that consumers of news have easy and constant access to their news.

They (the media) are forced to keep up and report to death the hot news items.

But in the case of swine flu, things are being taken a bit too far, which is why I was glad to see the following quote in today's Detroit Free Press:

"This flu is not different from any other flu, but it's gained notoriety." - Dr. Mouhanad Hammami, health operations officer, Wayne County.

He's being blunt. I like that. It's no different from any other year, but this time the flu has a fancy name. It's a point (and one the public deserve to be told) that a lot of mainstream media is conveniently leaving out of their reports.

At any rate, I can't help but be reminded of this scene from "Airplane II" every time I walk past the television in our lobby and see the latest headline on the screen.

Brad's Weekly Grab Bag of Links - April 17, 2009

I am so very sorry for depriving you of your weekly dose of links, but I was in Toronto to cross off the sixth stadium in our quest to see a baseball game in every Major League baseball stadium, and I completely forgot to draft the post ahead of time.

To make it up, we have extra-special links this week.

• Why Did Sergey Brin Stop Blogging? (TechCrunch)

• A private note to PR people (Scobleizer)

• Bring Back Yellow Journalism (Slate)

• Google lawyer: We're good for newspapers (Triangle Business Journal)

• Why the future of PR lies in social media (ATTENTION!)

• Online Video Surge May Be One Life Jacket for Sinking Newspapers (Wired.com)

• Putting Twitter's World to Use (New York Times)

• Should Twitter Remove Its Follower Count? (TechCrunch)

• Stealing Mona Lisa (Vanity Fair)

Don't mention it. 

Brad's Weekly Grab Bag of Links - March 20, 2009

Not a whole lot to choose from this week, but a few stories caught my eye - especially the piece from Alternet.org that wonders aloud who we can trust as media goes digital.

• Despite Recession, More Than 50 Percent of Marketers Increase Spending on Social Media (ReadWriteWeb)

• 100 Twitter Tools to Help You Achieve All Your Goals (Online Best Colleges.com)

• When News Goes Totally Digital, How Do You Create Trust? (Alternet.org)

• Skiles to Vilanueva: No halftime tweets (ESPN.com)

As always, you can find these and other links on my Delicious page.

Good luck with your brackets.