Bob Stepno\’s Red Liner

I used this space last week for a first draft of a page that I’ve moved to my main weblog here.

Berkman regulars will notice links to a few of the usual suspects.

More about writing for the Web …

Why do people go online looking for political information? Where do
they go?

I have some ideas on the subject, but my
colleague Barbara Kaye at UT Knoxville and her research partner at
Southern Illinois
University-Carbondale are trying to be scientific about it.

They conduct an annual online survey that examines
the motivations for
accessing the Web, weblogs, chat rooms, bulletin boards and other
Internet resources for political information. (The survey has been
approved by the University of Tennessee institutional review board and
is being conducted for academic purposes
only.)

Knowing that I do not say
much about politics here, Barb thought my blog might be a way to reach
a few readers (and bloggers) who have broader interests than
just politics, such as, say, the Berkman Center
bloggers.

So here’s Barb, explaining what she’d
like:
“We are specifically looking for individuals who connect
to online
political information to fill out our survey. We are wondering if it
would be possible for you to link to our survey. All we are
asking is for an icon that directs your readers to the survey
URL.

“Your help would be greatly appreciated and we would be more than
willing to share our findings with you.”

The survey takes about 20 minutes to complete.

Survey URL: http://apps.ws.utk.edu/politics

Web and Politics Survey …

One of the last best things I did in Cambridge was to go see the July 4 fireworks from the bank of the Charles with blogging friends (Thanks, J!), getting closer to the flash and crash than my previous years’ vantage point in a crowd of neighbors atop Prospect Hill, a mile or so from the sound and smoke.

This weekend I was watching more pyrotechnics from atop another hill, the one I live on now. I’m so new here that I don’t even know if the hill has a name, but it gave me a new perspective for a fireworks show that competes for excitement and audience with Boston’s Independence Day.

Knoxville calls the Labor Day event Boomsday. A sponsor also calls it “the biggest single-day event in the state of Tennessee and the largest fireworks show in the southeast United States.”

Whille Boston fires its rockets from a barge in the river, these fireworks are launched from a high bridge over the Tennessee River — a bridge that just happens to be anchored to my new hilltop. Down along the river, the city closes a stretch of highway, turning it into a midway for the day, stretching off toward the university stadium. Hundreds of thousands of people join in the fun, and the “Tennessee navy” drops anchor in the river — about 200 powerboats that stay for Sunday’s Big Orange football game.

The Boomsday show doesn’t include the Boston Pops, Stars & Stripes Forever or the 1812 Overture cannons… but I read that there was some Gershwin broadcast to coincide with the most elegant part of the display, and at a more climactic point I did hear a few people singing along with Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.” Next year, maybe I’ll find a seat closer to the sound system.
Beyond the Esplanade …

For students who first heard about “Really Simple Syndication” in my
class at UT this week, the “Read what I read?” menu item on the top
right corner of this page is an example of a “aggregator” page that
republishes “syndicated” news summaries from news sites and weblogs.

Free places to build your own RSS subscription lists include
http://my.yahoo.com, http://bloglines.com and http://my.feedster.com

For a lot more than you need to know about RSS, go here.

My “Other Journalism” weblog is serving as to-do list, moving-to-Tennessee narrative, and parking place for links I want to share with news-writing students… at least until I decide how I’m going to use my new home page (http://web.utk.edu/~rstepno) and the Blackboard course-management system.

As long as this one is still here, perhaps I’ll post a note from time to time for any Cambridge, Somerville & Boston friends who wonder whatever became of me.

So far teaching in Knoxville is full of surprises — having the school director who encouraged me to apply for the job decide to quit the week I got here… and then starting the first day on the job with a power failure and ending it with my face on the evening news!

I did find the local contradance (small, but enthusiastic) and lucked into a class schedule that lets me sleep late the morning after it. A next door neighbor plays mandolin and banjo, and there’s a bluegrass and oldtime radio station to take the place of WUMB.

So far so good. My Thursday nights are still a little on the empty side, though…
Crimson to orange: Settling into new home, job & computers …

This is a month for (pick one or more)

• Mystery (audio)
• Vacation
• Travel
• A new job
• A new car
• Reading entire books, not just newsfeeds
• A new place to live
• A haircut
• A new color scheme
• All of the above
• All but the haircut?

Another Blog on July Hiatus… …

The New York Times has just upped its RSS channel total to 27 feeds, but while writing about it yesterday, I discovered a newspaper with a whopping 576 page-specific feeds… including one in (and about) Gaelic and another about men in kilts.

In case that isn’t enough of a hint, the feeding-frenzied paper is The Scotsman, national newspaper for the land of at least some of my ancestors… a fine place where it was apparently worth a headline to tell folks that, “Penny Lancaster, the underwear model, has failed in a bid to buy Jack McConnell’s infamous pin-striped kilt for her partner, Rod Stewart.”

Talk about using RSS to get “News on Demand“!

Actually, if there’s an online newspaper out there doing more to provide varied and useful RSS feeds, tell me about it in the comments or by e-mail!

(More fun facts than you could possibly want to know about the “land of my ancestors” reference:
Hidden behind the generic “Bob,” I’m named after my grandmother’s hero and Scotland’s legendary king, Robert the Bruce. My Glasgwegian grandmother had consented to name my father both for “Robert” and for my Stepnegian grandfather, “Stanley.” That made my late Dad the initial ”RSS” in my experience. He was pretty good for a feed and a decent aggregator, too, and I wish I’d gotten to say that to him on Father’s Day because he liked a joke, no matter how bad. On any day, this has been a fine excuse to type the words “Glasgwegian grandmother” and coin the word “Stepnegian.”)

Dave Winer’s farewell feed, his last Thursday dinner meeting as
organizer of the Berkman blogging roundtable, was captured on what used
to be film by Dan Bricklin — not only a fine programmer, but a fine
(and fast) photographer. 

(And I’m so glad I wore the Hawaiian shirt.)

Bloggercons I and II, the Thursday night sessions, and this growing
crimson community of weblogs are a fine legacy for Dave to leave behind as he
moves on to new adventures… providing not only RSS feeds, but plenty of food for thought for those of us trying to sort out the relationship of blogs to our lives or, in my case, to professional journalism.

Here’s one more try:

Dave, for one, has the brass to take a more personal and emotional
risks with his blogs than many folks carrying the reporter’s notebook.
His writing and the things he links to pass through a filter that is
personal, colorful and opinionated. That risk-taking is rarely my style, but I’m glad it’s his, and that he lets us all watch and learn.

Blogging at its best can do what journalism does… but I’ve learned in the past year that with those
personal filters — and an occassional Thursday night out — it also
can find you new friends.

There has been a sincere
“Thanks, Dave” in the right margin of this blog since the beginning,
but I think it’s worth repeating it here — appropriately using the “edit this page” space Dave created for us and swiping the headline for this item from Jessica, who I hope gets to help keep the Harvard blog sessions going.

Thanks for all the feeds …

Howard Rheingold was in Cambridge last week and shared some of his thoughts about
the present and future of civic networking, art and journalism, over
lunch at Berkman. I took some notes, but Dave Winer actually caught the whole session on audio, 25 MB worth of MP3 file.

Those with less bandwidth available can read a summary of Howard’s commencement address to Stanford communication and journalism students last weekend, which covered some of the same ground.

Offering Alternatives to Disinfotainment …

with apologies to Katie Hafner and the New York Times
(read her story before this one, or see the red disclamer at the bottom)

TO celebrate four years of marriage, John Smith and his wife, Jane
Jones, recently spent a week in Key West, Fla. Early on the morning of
their anniversary, Ms. Jones heard her husband get up and go into the
bathroom. He stayed there for a long time.

“I didn’t hear any water running, so I wondered what was going on,” Ms.
Jones said. When she knocked on the door, she found him seated with a
copy of The New York Times balanced on his knees, reading a collection
of observations about the world from a printed page.

Newspaper reading is a pastime for many, even a livelihood for a few.
For some, it becomes an obsession. Such readers often feel compelled to
read several times daily and feel anxious if they don’t keep up. As
they spend more time hunkered over their papers, they neglect family,
friends and jobs. They read at home, at work and on the road. They read
openly or sometimes, like Mr. Smith, quietly so as not to call
attention to their habit.

“It seems as if his paper is glued to his hands 24/7,” Ms. Jones said of her husband.

The number of Times readers may even have grown thanks to sites like
 The Times may have
thousands of readers, but never have so many people read so much and
done so little with the information. By U.S. Census estimate, fewer
than 50 percent of New Yorkers voted in the last presidential election,
compared to greater than 60 percent in states outside the Times‘
immediate circulation area, such as Minnesota, Arkansas, Montana,
Iowa, Oregon and North Dakota.

“Sometimes
there’s an ‘I told you so’ aspect to it,” he said.  Mr. Smith
points with pride to Times stories that agree with his prior
assumptions, such as a recent Katie Hafner story that portrayed webloggers as obsessive
geeks, or two years of “problematic articles” about Iraq “weapons of mass destruction” that The Times has belatedly admitted were sometimes inadequately supported by
facts.

Bob Brown started reading the paper three years ago while in search of
a distraction after breaking up with a girlfriend. “In three years, I
don’t think I’ve missed a day,” he said.  

Where some frequent readers might label themselves merely ardent,
Mr. Smith is more realistic. “I wouldn’t call it dedicated, I would
call it
a problem,” he said. “If this were beer, I’d be an alcoholic.”

Mr. Brown, who lives in Hollywood and works as a scheduler in the
entertainment industry, said reading began to feel like an addiction
when he noticed that he would rather be with his paper than with his
girlfriend – for technical reasons.

“She’s got a very small breakfast table that only holds magazines or
tabloids,” Mr. Brown said. When he is at his girlfriend’s house, he
feels “antsy.” “We have little fights because I want to go home and
read my Times,” he said.

Mr. Brown described the rush he gets from what he called “the fix”
provided by his paper. “The pleasure response is twofold,” he said. “You
can have instant gratification; you’re going to hear about something
really good or bad instantly. And if I feel like I’ve read something
good, it’s enjoyable to go back and read it again.”

And, he said, “like most addictions, those feelings go away quickly. So I have to do it again and again.”

John Q. Public, 26, a graduate student at the School of Information
Management and Systems at the University of California at Berkeley who
has studied newspaper readers, said that for some people reading has
supplanted e-mail as a way to procrastinate at work.

People like Mr. Brown, who devote much of their free time to the newspaper, do so
largely because it makes them feel productive even if it is not a
paying job.

The procrastination, said J. Fred Muggs, 31, a fellow graduate student
with Mr. Public, has a collective feel to it. “You feel like you’re
participating in something important, because we’re all doing it
together,” he said.

(The two graduate students’ actual research may be available somewhere
in print or online or  may be published in a dissertation years
from now… You’ll have to trust them. Or trust us.  Or go use
Google to find out what they actually studied, and how they reached
their conclusions. We don’t want to bother you with details or weblinks
to them.)

Others find they are distracted to the point of neglectfulness. Bob
Stepno, when teaching at a college in Boston, admits he
occasionally showed up “considerably late” for events and put off more
than a few work-related calls to tend to his newspaper.

He characterizes the newspaper way of life as a routine rather than an
obsession. “It’s a habit,” he said. “What you’re really doing is
searching for something that you might find interesting. When that
becomes part of your life, when you start thinking in ‘news,’ it
becomes part of you.”

Suffering from a form of “news fatigue,” Mr. Stepno simply stopped
altogether after four years of nearly constant newspaper reading.

“It was starting to feel like work, and it was never supposed to be a
job,” Mr. Stepno said. “It was supposed to be an anti-job.”

Even with some 200 papers stacked in his living room, he has not opened one since last Tuesday.

Still, Mr. Stepno said, he does not rule out a return to reading someday.

“There is this seductive thing that happens, this kind of
snowball-rolling-down-a-hill thing, where the sheer momentum becomes
very keenly felt,” he said. “And the absence of reading feels like – I
don’t know, laziness or something.”

The names have
been changed to mostly fictitious ones and quotes have been adjusted
slightly to make people laugh at the preconceived notions, unscientific
generalizations and lack of rigorous  research by Ms. Hafner in
her May 27, 2004, story “For Some, the Blogging Never Stops.”
It’s probably unfair to suggest too much of a parallel between the lazy
sourcing (two grad students as expert researchers) in her generally
amusing story about bloggers and the less amusing Iraq stories The Times is now scrutinizing to see when and where they went wrong. For more opinions on where Ms. Hafner went wrong, see Bloglines collection of links referring to her story.