Open Mind Project

I’m a recent convert to podcasts. I’m an avid proponent of newspapers as the best form of media and outside some of the more literate forms of radio, (and of course the Daily Show, which I KNOW is not actual news) I don’t dally all that much in forms of broadcast media. Recently, as a way to reconnect to my past, have a few laughs and theoretically make myself a smarter person I downloaded two podcasts from NPR. The first was “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!” which is the biggest throwback to my past. I used to listen to it in the car with my mother on weekends and it’s a great way to get the news and laughs at the same time. So, that went on my podcast list on iTunes. Next came “This American Life” which is produced by Chicago Public Radio and is a great feature-length story program that I have the personal imperative to listen to because I think it might make me smarter. Also, one of the contributors is Sarah Vowell, who is one of my favorite authors and someone I admire very much.
That was before. Listening to the 10/31 class, I was astounded at how easy podcasting could make my daily life. There’s not a day when I don’t spend at least five hours on my computer and having a five-minute update of the news from NPR is great. This may be one of my fads, but I think the whole idea of podcasts is an excellent idea. As a way to get ideas out, to make people smarter (which is needed by everyone in society), podcasts are almost better than forcing a New York Times on someone and saying “Read This!” So, go out there and listen. You may find something that you weren’t expecting and at a cost of generally no more than an hour a week, it’s a cheap price to pay for knowledge.

Before I start, I’ve got to warn you that if you haven’t watched the lecture for the Tuesday 10/19 class or actually been in the class then go and do that now. Besides the fact that it will be nice to have some frame of reference to understand what I’m talking about, it’s just a very informative and stunning lecture and I think the guest, Nick Sylvester, was very interesting.
One of the first things you learn in journalism school, before they teach about the inverted pyramid and how to craft a lede, is that you plagiarism, in an any form, is very likely to end your career. It’s a big thing that’s sort of crammed into your head and reiterated with stories by each successive teacher who’s had a student fall victim to it.
One of the most poignant things that Nick said, or at least something that got to me, was that he had a good idea and he just got in over his head. Journalists want to tell you a story. They want to find out something that no one else has ever done before and shout it to the hilltops (and ride the successive wave of fame into a book deal and descriptions that they’re the next Woodward). It’s the idea of journalism as the Watergate babies saw it. Now in the intervening years, the idea of breaking the next Watergate has somewhat diminished and in some ways, it informs everything we do.
I’m a journalist. I don’t mean that I’ve written for a student newspaper, not that they produce anything less than quality journalism, but though I’m still in school I’ve had articles published in very reputable papers. I’m also young, I haven’t yet reached 30 and I have a laundry list of mistakes in my life that I could point to and shake my head at. I tell you this not because I’m trying to give you a biography of my life, but because I want it to be understood that when I talk about this topic, I talk about of the frame of reference of having been in similar situations.
It’s amazing to have a good idea, but to have an editor think that you have a good idea is even better. But the problem with good ideas is that they sometimes end up not being the greatest stories. Sometimes you’ve got a wealth of information and the research and quotes are overflowing your notebooks. Sometimes you can get someone to tie something together neatly with a bow, and sometimes you can paint a picture that shows something to be unequivocally true.
The problem is sometimes you can’t. Sometimes the facts show something but you have no proof, only lukewarm assumptions. And this is where the fear comes in. If you don’t have what it takes, you can end up out of a job. And that’s where the thought hits…well can’t I just say that? In a humorous piece, you get a liberty that you don’t have in straight news. But it all comes down to facts. People want to know that what you’re reading is true.
When you’re under 30, with rent and other innumerable bills to pay, sometimes this happens. I don’t agree with fabrication in any way. I don’t think it’s a good thing. I don’t think it should ever be done. But I also don’t think that someone who’s got a bright career ahead of them, someone who can write and craft stories that make people want to read a newspaper should get thrown out on their butt for one mistake. When you’re young, you make mistakes. It is the folly of youth. It’s not something to destroy careers over.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe in a business that prides itself so much on objectivity and the search for truth, it’s a one-shot deal to success and failure. I don’t want people to demand any less of journalists; I just hope that people can keep in mind that we too are people.

We’re at a crossroads right now. The world, our country, is in a flux period where broad swaths of the electorate are really beginning to question what the powers that be are doing. I have to admit that I’m no fan of television news (I’m one of those print journalists that still writes with a pad and paper) but I think that community television can be very useful. By allowing people to interact, to put themselves out there, people have the ability to find other people who share the same ideas as them. To be the lonely dissident in this world is no fun and in some ways quite useless. But if communities around the country and the world can interact and find common ground then maybe there is change possible. Supporting old growth forests or local restaurants may not catch the fancy of everyone in our county, but maybe there are people in other parts of the state that do care. The idea of strength in numbers isn’t a euphemism, people banding together do have strength. Here’s a shout out to all the causes that don’t end up as front-page news. Find your community television station, start a blog, gather your community- do something. It is with us that the fate of the world rests.

The first time I heard of social network analysis was not in class, but was in fact on the CBS crime drama Numb3rs. I’d like to say that I watch the show because my best friend’s a mathematician and he’s given me a profound love of math but that’s not true. It’s because I have a carryover love for Rob Morrow that comes from years of watching Northern Exposure. But the show is quite good and also quite math-centric. Whether or not I believe that math rules the world and that social network analysis can tell you things about society that individual people can’t is very interesting.
But what I found most interesting in David Lazer’s lecture was the idea that communication was bad for a society, that it could cause a certain plateau in thinking. I found this sentiment extremely logical. People are ingrained to think in a certain way. Everyone’s told that there are a certain set of rules in everything and that by following the rules you can find the answer. But who are some of our most brilliant creators and thinkers and innovators? People who don’t follow rules. Rules are good for a lot of things. They given a developing brain a safety net that they can hang on to when it’s learning something new. But in the same vein, one of the most prominent rules has to be that the only way to discover something new is to break the rules. I’ve been reading a lot about discovery lately, about finding new planets and discovering giant trees. There was an article this summer in the New Yorker about Mike Brown, a professor at Caltech, who discovered Eris (informally called “Xena”), the would-have-been tenth planet. Brown was waiting one night to use one of the four telescopes at Caltech and wandered into an older telescope that took pictures of larger areas of the sky than the telescope he normally used. He started using this telescope only, eventually incorporating new technology to find what then could have been the next planet. What I take from this story is that you can’t be afraid to break the boundaries of what has always been taught (which seems eerily like the motto of the Public Opinion class) because you just might end up finding a completely new way of doing things. On Numb3rs, Rob Morrow’s character is an FBI agent whose math professor brother starts working on a case with him. Eventually the brother and his colleagues become an integral part of the team and are instrumental in solving cases. Now this is all TV of course but I think they make a good point. Just because it’s different doesn’t mean it’s wrong and just because there’s rules doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be broken.