Jim Stasiowski, writing
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Boredom alert: Much of this column is about two activities that some people (mostly intellectual snobs) have little or no interest in: golf and television.
If you’re a journalist, however, I already have enticed you into reading more because you’re curious about how I am going to pull off an unlikely connection between writing for newspapers and watching golf broadcasts.
What you learn early about golf, as a player or a spectator, is that there is a story in every shot, every hole, every round, every competition.
Think for a moment what a story is: Someone (or some group) is trying to accomplish something, and to do so, he, she or they must overcome difficulties, which is the very definition of golf.
I know people who never play golf, but when it is on TV, they’ll watch because of the constant compelling drama. Even if you don’t know Jordan Spieth from the River Jordan, you can witness a vast range of emotions in a golf broadcast, not unlike in some sappy love story on another channel, as players reach for excellence and succeed spectacularly, fail dismally or fall somewhere in between.
I love golf, love playing, watching, talking about it or even thinking about it. And on a recent Sunday afternoon, as my wife, Sharon, and I were watching a hotly contested professional tournament on television, the broadcast abruptly switched from the live action to an electronic chart listing where a dozen (or so) competitors ranked in some apparently meaningful statistic.
Picture this: An attractive woman steps up to an electronic screen and touches it to show me, a golf fan, some names and numbers.
Why, why, why would the broadcast’s director, who should know that every shot is a story, yank me away from the reason I tune in and instead show me lifeless statistics?
Because he can. Because the broadcast team used fancy communications and computation gizmos to compile the stats, and because the network has invested in these gimmicky touch-screens, if the director doesn’t use them at least once in the tournament, some executive upstairs will scream, “So why did we invest in that fancy touch-screen and in all the computers and smart-stuff required to create the statistics if we’re never going to use them?”
The lesson to all of us should be that although statistics can be illuminating and graphics can aid understanding, they should never take the place of telling a story (or, in the case of a TV broadcast of a golf tournament, aiming a camera at players and letting them tell their own stories).
“But Jim,” you’re saying, “we’re newspapers, and that’s TV. We’d never fall for the superficiality and flash that networks rely on.”
But we would. We have. I have proof: USA Today.
In the late 1970s, early ’80s, newspapers freaked out because TV news was stealing our faithful readers, so Gannett invented USA Today, which so blatantly imitated a local news broadcast, readers every few minutes would involuntarily read an ad so as to duplicate the commercial interruptions of the “News At 11” experience.
(Incapable of subtlety, Gannett even made USA Today’s street-sales boxes look like TV sets.)
Before long, throngs of newspapers were blatantly imitating USA Today, with cartoonish (and only occasionally relevant) graphics, stories short enough to finish in the time a reader takes to swallow five or fewer spoonfuls of Cheerios, punny headlines and straining-for-clever six-word teasing lead sentences that call to mind the silly bantering between the shallow anchorman and the weather-forecasting starlet.
Our TV role-playing didn’t work; it simply made readers who value depth – in other words, our core readers – lose faith in us.
The problem newspapers face today is that as staffs shrink and the availability of click-for-everything data expands, we risk relying too much on easy research and too little on writers who know how to use their judgment, curiosity and storytelling skills to explain the world.
I’m not anti-statistics; I am, however, anti-ostentation, anti-showing-off. When I do seminars, I don’t use PowerPoint or other electronic gizmos that would illustrate my points. I eschew such frills because when I’ve sat through PowerPoint-aided seminars, I have noticed that people in the audience stare at the screen rather than watch the seminar presenters in action.
I want people to watch me, read my expressions and gestures, focus on my words and experiences, just as the best golfers in the world deserve all the attention as they present their stories of glory and failure.
Journalists need statistics, yes, but to add to, not replace or distract from, our stories. The unstoppable growth of glitzy computing and presentation tools tempts us to dilute our storytelling, but we have to resist TV’s mindless addiction to them.
THE FINAL WORD: Avoid the dumbing-down word “timeline.”
Its use implies we cannot trust our readers to understand the vivid, specific words “chronology” (a start-to-finish list of events that have happened) and “schedule” (events that are about to happen).
Phonto is a simple application that allows users to add text to pictures on their smartphones. Kim Shepherd of Delhi, N.Y., wrote that she used Phonto for weather updates online. She was even nice enough to send a couple of samples.
Snapseed might be the best photo editing application for phones. Many of the tools available in Photoshop, Lightroom and other editing applications are available within Snapseed.
For our freedoms, is a ‘C+’ grade good enough?
Gene Policinski, inside the First Amendment
Gene Policinski is chief operating officer of the Newseum Institute and senior vice president of the Institute’s First Amendment Center. He can be reached at gpolicinski@newseum.org.
Follow him on Twitter:
@genefac
When it comes to our core freedoms, is a “C+” grade good enough?
A new First Amendment Report Card, released by the First Amendment Center of the Newseum Institute, gives our First Amendment freedoms — religion, speech, press, assembly and petition — a composite grade of C+.
The grades were assigned by 15 panelists from across the political spectrum, some of them experts on First Amendment issues overall, and some who focus on specific areas such as religion or press.
Assembly and petition — the rights to gather peaceably with like-minded people without government restriction or prosecution, and ask the government for changes in policies and practices — received the highest marks, at a “B-.” Religion and speech were graded at a “C+,” while press was given a “C.”
On press, for example, panelists pointed to President Trump’s campaign threat to “open up” libel laws to sue media outlets more easily; the administration blocking certain news organizations from attending White House briefings; the “fake news” phenomenon; and the president’s general enmity for the press.
Assembly and petition received the highest grades, with panelists noting that recent protests and political marches were classic demonstrations of both freedoms, and that the government took no action to crack down on them or the resulting press coverage.
Perhaps you — or I, since I didn’t participate in the grading — might have rated the freedoms differently. Good. That would mean we were thinking critically about those basic freedoms, which define us as citizens and enable our democracy to function as such.
And no doubt some people will say that in a contentious world, and with an electorate split straight down the middle on most issues, it would be too much to expect a more favorable assessment of the First Amendment.
But I’ll admit that a “C+” leaves me uneasy.
For too long, too many of us have either taken those freedoms for granted, assuming that they will always be there, or considered them in narrow ways (believing, for example, that freedom of speech is not for those with whom we disagree, or that so-called fringe faiths are not really covered by freedom of religion).
Many more of us live in ignorance of the freedoms that were so dearly won. Each year, when results of the First Amendment Center’s State of the First Amendment survey are released, the survey consistently finds that large numbers of Americans — sometimes more than one-third — cannot name a single freedom provided by the 225-year old amendment.
The report card, titled “The First Amendment in the Age of Trump,” nonetheless reflects issues that are not limited to the president’s first 100 days, or to the time he spends in office.
Some of those issues have been simmering for years. The Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movements raised issues around speech, assembly and petition to new levels of awareness. The “culture wars” around matters of faith — from the silly, such as whether to call them “Christmas” or “holiday” trees, to the very serious, such as federal policies that might discriminate against Muslims — have raged for decades, and show no signs of abating.
Surveys dating well back into the 1990s chart a growing public apprehension about the credibility, motives and bias of the news media, and a worrisome erosion of support for the press’s role as a “watchdog on government.” Amid worsening public opinion, journalists have also had to contend with shrinking resources as they attempt to track government officials’ performance and measure government effectiveness.
The quarterly report card is not intended, and could not be, the final word on our First Amendment freedoms — the issues are too complex and the disputes too numerous, and filled with far too many twists and turns.
But the grading system will serve to call our attention, particularly over time, to a need to defend one or more freedoms from momentary threats and longer-term assaults on our free expression and religious liberty rights.
Stay tuned — a new First Amendment Report Card will be issued each quarter, prompting us all to take a closer look at how we understand, defend and practice our First Amendment freedoms.
And maybe one day we’ll get to add another grading area — one where you and I and our fellow citizens get an “A” for effort.