Careful Reading Those Labels

So after a nine hour drive through storm-induced traffic, we stopped for dinner at this Applebee's in Marietta, Georgia.

We were seated quite quickly.  We mulled over the order.  Chicken or steak?  Steak or shrimp?  Or should we get a burger.  Or a salad.  Or a burger.  Or a steak.  But eventually, we settled on a steak for me, and a turkey bacon club for my companion.  Something simple that would come out quickly.

Our server came and took our order. And then we sipped our Sweet Tea and waited for dinner to arrive.  And waited.

And waited.

 A long while later, my dinner companion asked the waitress about our order, and she promised to check it out.

About 15 minutes later, we asked again.  She apologized, and went back to the kitchen.  Five minutes went by.  Ten.

She finally came back to report that the kitchen was out of turkey, a required ingredient of the Turkey Club Sandwich that was half of our order.  "Would you like to order something else?"   My companion stared at her blankly.  It had taken 15 minutes to choose the damned sandwich.  And now she had to pick something else out of the air? 

It took our server a moment to realize that we didn't have a menu.  "Oh," she stammered, "Shall I get you a menu?"

"No," my dinner companion said, "just get me a burger.  You have burgers, right?  Do you still have hamburger back there?"  Hunger can make you cranky.  Very cranky.

Our waitress- sorry, server - ran our order back to the kitchen, and immediately returned to let us know it would be right out.  We inquired about the status of the other half of our order; would an ice-cold steak show up with a hot burger?  We were assured that both entrees would be hot.

The manager did come by to apologize, and explained that the kitchen staff really hadn't told our server that they were unable to complete the order.  It didn't sound like he went all Gordon Ramsay over anyone back there, but at least he tried to deflect blame from the server. Save that tip!

Actually, he'd have chewed US out:
"Applebees?  Are you fucking kidding me?
What did you fucking expect?"

It puts a whole new spin on the motto they proudly display out front, which we hadn't really paid attention to going in, but when I read it coming out the door, the irony was apparent:

The actual sign out front.

To be fair, that did feel about how long it took for dinner to arrive.  Order today, and you'll get it tomorrow.

But Does It Do Windows?

Today's screen capture off of CNN:

Admit it, doesn't it make you picture something like this?

Putting Mitt in Perspective: PBS

For fiscal year 2012, PBS received $442 million dollars from the federal government.  That's an "m" in there. $442 million for the entire year.

That constitutes .012% of the entire Federal budget.  That's POINT zero one two percent, or less than 1/8 of 1%.


"But it's $400 million dollars" you say.  OK. Let's put that in perspective.

We're spending $300 million dollars PER DAY on the war in Afghanistan.  Obama is trying to remove our troops from Afghanistan in a safe and responsible manner.  Mitt says we shouldn't pull our troops out of Afghanistan just because it's expensive.

It seems to me that Mitt is saying we have to take Sesame Street away from inner city kids because we need to kill people on the other side of the planet.

Race and the Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich

Perhaps you've heard about the comments elementary school principal Verenice Gutierrez made during an interview with the Portland Tribune:

“What about Somali or Hispanic students, who might not eat sandwiches?” says Gutierrez, principal at Harvey Scott K-8 School, a diverse school of 500 students in Northeast Portland’s Cully neighborhood.  “Another way would be to say: ‘Americans eat peanut butter and jelly, do you have anything like that?’ Let them tell you. Maybe they eat torta. Or pita.”

While I can't find a quote where she flat-out states that a PB&J is racist, the article frames it as "example of a subtle form of racism in language..."

Quoting the article again:

"...the premise is that if educators can understand their own “white privilege,” then they can change their teaching practices to boost minority students’ performance."

The implication we're getting is that by including peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on school menus, schools are subtly pushing a diet that reinforces some kind of white privilege. Or at least, as some news sources are interpreting it; "Peanut Butter And Jelly Sandwiches are Racist."

Perhaps it's because most people use WHITE bread.

Sound ridiculous?  It does sound unlikely.  But to simply claim that it's ridiculous isn't the same as debunking the statement.

Let's look at the history of the sandwich, to see if it really is tied to some kind of privilege.

And of course, we have to start with peanuts.

The Origin of Peanut Butter: Part 1
 
Peanuts are native to the Americas; the Aztecs ground them into a paste for use in many dishes.  This mealy paste probably wasn't very spreadable, but it was certainly made of peanuts. 

The Aztecs were not considered white, as far as I've been able to determine.  Neither were they Latino, although some people often confuse all denizens of Central and South America as being Latin or Hispanic, instead of Native American.


I haven't been able to determine if Aztecs reserved peanuts in any form for the noble class.

The Origin of Peanut Butter: Part 2

And it's still edible.

In 1884, Marcellus Gilmore Edson of Montreal, Quebec, Canada, was issued a U.S. Patent for a process of milling roasted peanuts between heated surfaces until they entered "a fluid or semi-fluid state."  The resultant product was described as having "a consistency like that of butter, lard, or ointment."

Peanut butter as we know it in the USA is usually credited to Dr. John Kellogg.  Yes, the man who put corn flakes on our table also put peanut butter on our tables.  In the 1890s, he developed it as an alternative protein source to meat. In St. Louis, Dr. Ambrose Straub prescribed it to patients who had no teeth.  It was introduced to the world at large in 1904, when C.H. Sumner promoted it at his booth at the St. Louis Universal Exposition as a health food.  Heinz (yes, the ketchup company) advertised its health benefits in magazines.

G.W. Carver, Man of Science

 But it took a black man to put peanut butter into large-scale production.  George Washington Carver was trying to help black farmers improve their land; their primary crop of cotton removed minerals from the ground which rendered it fallow.  By rotating crops of peanuts through their fields, the soil would be renewed for productive yields.  The farmers were reluctant to change their habits, so Carver worked out 105 practical uses for peanuts, including peanut butter.

Once he demonstrated the usefulness of the legume, farmers were willing to take a chance on a crop that had not been in demand before then.

The Origin of the PB&J Sandwich

Prior to Dr. Carver's work, peanut butter was indeed considered a delicacy.  The creation of the peanut butter and jelly sandwich is credited to Julia Davis Chandler in 1901.  Variations were served almost exclusively at fashionable tea rooms.

But two things contributed to the downfall of the sandwich as a rare treat: the drop in the price of peanuts thanks to increased production (see above) and the invention of - wait for it - sliced bread.

"Sliced bread meant that children could make sandwiches for themselves without slicing the bread with a potentially dangerous knife.  As a consequence of low cost, high nutrition, and ease of assembling, peanut butter sandwiches become one of the top children's meals during the Depression."
-- Peanuts: the Illustrious History of the Goober Pea

Conclusion

Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches have become ubiquitous in school cafeterias not because they reinforce any level of white privilege; they are wide spread because they are cheap to make, and packed full of nutrients.  Further, the popularity of peanut butter and other peanut products have supported generations of black farmers, who were convinced to plant the crop by a black man, George Washington Carver.

While we can find no evidence that Ms. Gutierrez actually considers that PB&J sandwiches advance some kind of racist agenda - intended or otherwise - we can safely conclude that such claims have no substance.

Information for Tod "I'm an Idiot" Akin

From the Department of Redundancy Department.

NASA lost a prototype spacecraft, according to ClickOrlando.com. And it illustrates perfectly what happens when interns replace actual journalists:

Frankly, one should hope that everything in the navigation system has something to do with the navigation system, but perhaps I'm just old-fashioned that way.. 

Birthers Redux; Three Strikes

My conservative relative who will remain nameless sent me another in a long line of easily exposed right-wing propaganda; it seems that the Birthers have renewed their efforts to "prove" that Barack Obama wasn't actually born in the United States.

And like every other attempt, this three step "exposé" does not stand up under scrutiny.  It's even more lame than their original thoroughly fraudulent theory.

This new failed attempt is called:

“Very Interesting Bit Of Detective Work”

That really should read "defective".   Sorry, didn't mean to cut in this soon.

STRIKE ONE:

“Very Interesting Bit Of Detective Work”

1. Back in 1961 people of color were called 'Negroes.' So how can the Obama 'birth certificate' state he is 'African-American' when the term wasn't even used at that time?

Ah, just as the Swift-boaters determined a font was wrong, these "detectives" have determined that because a modern term was used, it's obvious that the document is fake.

There's only one problem with this "fact."  It's completely false.  Not about the usage of the term; about the birth certificate.  I found a copy of it on the Huffington Post.  And here's what it actually says about his father's race:

AFRICAN.  Not "African-American".  Since Barack Obama's father was from Africa, this is the correct usage for the time period.  Africans were black people from Africa, Negroes were black people from the United States.

And this one didn't take any research.  I just had to read the damned certificate.

So much for glaringly obvious lie number one.

STRIKE TWO:

2. The birth certificate that the White House released lists Obama's birth as August 4, 1961. It also lists Barack Hussein Obama as his father. No big deal, right? At the time of Obama's birth, it also shows that his father is aged 25 years old, and that Obama's father was born in "Kenya , East Africa ". This wouldn't seem like anything of concern, except the fact that Kenya did not even exist until 1963, two whole years after Obama's birth, and 27 years after his father's birth. How could Obama's father have been born in a country that did not yet exist? Up and until Kenya was formed in 1963, it was known then as the “British East Africa Protectorate".

Wow.  So Kenya didn't exist until 1963, huh?  That would be a compelling piece of evidence, if it were true.

But it's not true.

Let's turn to the front page of the Toronto Daily Star for February 6, 1952:

Let's zoom in on that date:

It's a little messy, but it reads Wednesday, February 6, 1952.  Of course, feel free to look up the death of King George IV to confirm the dates.

So, at least as far as Canada was concerned, there was in fact a place called "Kenya" nine years prior to 1961.  Princess Elizabeth and her husband, Prince Philip, were called back from Kenya (and not the "British East Africa Protectorate") so Elizabeth could be crowned queen. 

And while this piece of information alone is enough to completely savage the riotously insane notion that Kenya didn't exist in 1961, I don't want to waste the research I did before I found this lovely image.

The British East Africa Protectorate was created in 1888.

Kenya was, in fact, a part of the British East Africa Protectorate, which consisted of Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and parts of Somalia (then known as Jubaland).

Kenya was the part known as KENYA.

In 1895, the British East Africa Protectorate was reorganized into the East Africa Protectorate, or simply East Africa.

Kenya became a formal colony, the Kenya Colony, in 1920.  Kenya, East Africa.

Which, hey, is EXACTLY what is on the Birth Certificate!

So much for glaringly obvious lie number two.

STRIKE THREE:

3. On the birth certificate released by the White House, the listed place of birth is "Kapi'olani Maternity Gynecological Hospital". This cannot be, because the hospital(s) in question in 1961 were called "KauiKeolani Children's Hospital" and "Kapi'olani Maternity Home", respectively. The name did not change to Kapi'olani Maternity Gynecological Hospital until 1978, when these two hospitals merged. How can this particular name of the hospital be on a birth certificate dated 1961 if this name had not yet been applied to it until 1978?

How could it be?  Because that's what its name actually was in 1961.

SacredHealing.com has a service called TriAdoption.

TRIADOPTION® was formed as an information center in 1978 to gather and dispense data to assist adoptees, birthparents, siblings and others in locating family members.... We began with a very important work by Reg Niles where he documented hundreds of adoption agencies, orphanages and maternity homes that cropped up in the 20th century and in many cases closed, moved or disappeared. For adoptees and birth families seeking their information, this is a valuable resource.

They've scanned and uploaded Reg Nile's book: Adoption Agencies, Orphanages and Maternity Homes:An Historical Directory - Volumes 1 & 2, ©1981.  This book was culled from records of state governments; from licenses issued and articles of incorporation filed through the years.

And it has a chapter on Hawaii.

Here's the entry for the hospital Barack Obama was born in:

024  KAPIOLANI HOSPITAL. 1979 TO 1973: KAPIOLANI HOSPITAL,  1319  PUNAHOU  ST., 96826.  1972:  SAME NAME.  1611 BINGHAM ST.. 96814;  USED FOR  DELIVERY OF PATIENTS FROM THE SALVATION ARMY  BOOTH UN-WED PARENTS PROGRAMS  [SEE  ENTRY  0151.] 1958:  KAPIOLANI MATERNITY  AND  GYNECOLOGICAL  HOSPITAL,  1611 BlNGHAM ST.;  115 BEDS.  1937:  SAME  NAME,  PUNAHOU  AND BINGHAM  STS.;  687  BIRTHS IN  1935;  PRIOR TO 1931, IT WAS CALLED THE KAPIOLANI MATERNITY HOME;  ESTABLISHED IN 1891. 1925: KAPlOLANI MATERNITY HOME, 1538 BERETANIA AYE.; 25 BEDS. NAMESAKE: THE DOWAGER QUEEN KAPIOLANI, WHO HELPED ESTABLISH THE HOME.

So, according to state of Hawaii records, the name "Kapiolani Maternity Gynecological Hospital" goes back to 1937, and was still the name of the hospital when Barack Obama was born there in 1961.

Three strikes, you're out of the game. So all you pathetic birthers can put on your tinfoil hats and run home to drink the green Kool-aid.

Unfortunate Proximity

My brain keeps trying to combine these two news stories from the Sun-Sentinel:

Miami Herald; Everything but the Facts.

First, the Herald incorrectly reports about a show at the Broward Center. That's bad enough. The lack of research conducted by reporter Jose Pagliery was quickly pointed out by Herald readers, who left corrections - and a link to an accurate story - in the comments section.

But if that wasn't enough, the Herald re-posted the exact same story the very next day verbatim, all errors intact.

Pagliery reported that no performances were scheduled in the Broward Center's Amaturo Theatre, although Christine Dolen wrote about the show - and comedian Steve Solomon - in great detail on her Herald Blog "The Drama Queen." A Google search using the keywords AMATURO "DECEMBER 19" returned 400 hits identifying the performance and its star. It's also listed on the South Florida Theatre Scene.

Pagliery didn't even get the circumstances of the emergency right - that was left to the Sun-Sentinel and the South Florida Theatre Scene. At least the Palm Beach Post story was updated to include the performers name, as gleaned from the Sun-Sentinel.

Anyone still curious about why newspaper sales are plummeting?

Sun-Sentinel: Shoddy work, poorly done.

It's been four months since the Sun-Sentinel re-vamped its website. While an overhaul was desperately needed, the initial response was largely negative. Website navigation was haphazard, and the layout of the sections made little sense: it was like the newspaper had hired a webmaster who had never seen a newspaper. Worse, a lot of the content was old: new content somehow evaporated with the new layout.

So, have they fixed it?

Nope.

It seems like they still haven't grasped very basic concepts necessary to the basic production of a news source. Like the definintion of "news." Or the difference between sports and arts. Or that the Florida Keys are not in Broward County.

Let's take a peak at the Culture section. The good news is that they dropped the stupid title they initially chose for the page: "Going Out." And that's it for the good news.

Here's the top half of the page for November 10:

Initially, it doesn't look too bad. Wait, let me fix something for you:

Yeah, they recycled the Legally Blonde story from March, when it played at the Kravis Center. Isn't news supposed to be, well, NEW?

So Four out of the five stories are current. Oh, didn't you notice? There are FIVE stories, not four. Take a closer look at the right hand column. I know that it looks like it's a title, followed by a lead-in, and then another title followed by another lead-in, but it's not.

It's actually:

It's the kind of sloppy layout that would embarrass a high school newspaper in Podunk, but it's what passes for "style" at the stinking corpse of what was once a mediocre metropolitan newspaper.

So, four out of the five stories are... wait a minute... I almost forgot:

So, it turns out the Sun Sentinel is leading its Culture section with five four three current Sun Sentinel articles.

On the other hand, the Sun-Sentinel IS the only regional news outlet reviewing shows at the Broward Stage Door Theatre. They do deserve credit for that. Kudos to Special Correspondent Bill Hirschman, who makes that effort to cover them.

Do we dare peak below the fold? We do.

Shockingly, most of the articles in the BOOKS section are less than a week old, with only two dating to November 1. Not bad. How many were written by Sun-Sentinel writers? Only one.

Did they do any better in the STAGE section? Of course not!

So, one third of the STAGE section is old, stale stuff. LOCAL stuff, but STALE stuff.

Another sad fact: they dropped some current theatre reviews to hold on to a month old review and a two month old "breaking news" article. And they knocked out more current stories from the top to regurgitate the March article about Legally Blonde.

But that's not the worst of it! The ART section is so unbelievably bad, it's impossible to conclude that the Sun-Sentinel is paying anyone to oversee the page!

Maybe I'm missing something with the Rodeo story; let's take a peak at it:

The event features 96 cowboys from nine states competing in seven events — steer wrestling, team roping, bareback riding, saddle bronc riding, bull riding, tie-down roping and barrel racing — for $100,000 in prize money.

Nope. Sounds like a sport to me. Only a drooling idiot would stick this story in the ART section. An ART section with only one ART story. And worse,that one art story is over a month old. It was news back in September.

No, the Sun-Sentinel still lacks competent editors and a strong guiding hand.

FAIL: Miami Herald Broward Section

Palm Beach is not now nor has it ever been a part of Broward County, even if you want to find a good place for the "Horshack as teacher" story.

Eric Suesz; with help like this, who needs enemies?

As you know, I've been following the collapse of the Sun-Sentinel, and peering into the feedback from rabidly unhappy readers of the paper.

One complaint got "Buried." And that made me look at it:

This topic was buried on 08/25/09

Buried because: This topic was started by someone using multiple accounts in our system to harass employees, which is against our community guidelines.

And the complaint?

By the way, the original title of this complaint was "second hand news." It was changed by Eric Suesz, and employee of GetSatisfied. About twenty minutes later, he buried the topic.

Here's his immediate response to the user posting the complaint:

This isn't the first time that Suesz has responed to this unhappy Sentinel reader:

Brilliant, Mr. Suesz; the Sun-Sentinel is bleeding readers, and you're telling one reader who cares enough to use your feedback system to kiss off. Hey, why fix the problems so people will stop complaining when you can simply tell them to go away?

At least the Sentinel staffer actually addressed the complaint:

This is where I got involved:

clj replied 5 days ago
If everyone "aggregates," we end up without any news. I don't need to the Sentinel to "aggregate" stories from the Herald or the Post, because I already read those papers. And while it is true that they do include the occasional Sentinel story, the Sun-Sentinel uses more of their content by a very large margin.

You won't survive this way. And frankly, if you can't provide your own content, you don't deserve to.

And Eric did for me what he wouldn't do for Unsatisfied: he responded to the actual complaint:

Eric Suesz replied 5 days ago
clj: This is indeed the challenge that most newspapers face. It's compounded by the fact that newspaper readers more and more prefer to get their news online. And, they don't feel like paying for it anymore. It's a huge struggle. In addition, most readers say they want more local coverage, yet their actual reading habits often run contrary to that.

Some people think the answer may lie in community sourcing the local news. I'm not sure where you live, but where I live there are blogs popping up that are written by my neighbors (even though I don't know them), and they only write about what's going on in my neighborhood, and perhaps the surrounding neighborhoods. Would you agree that this would be a great thing to aggregate? I think it would. That kind of content is perfect for newspaper Web sites to collect and present as "news."

So, perhaps the answer isn't that aggregating stories is bad, but that aggregating relevant stories is the key to success. Just my opinion as a former newspaperman.

So here's my response to Eric Suesz of GetSatisfied, in response to his comment on behalf of the Sun-Sentinel: I'm having to post it here, because apparently once a comment is buried, you can't comment on it any further.

The fact that I'm concerned about the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel should be a small clue as to where I live. A good reporter should be able to take such not-so-subtle clues and make some good deductions.

If I wanted to aggregate my neighbors' blogs, I'd use Google to choose the blogs that I feel do the best job. In fact, I have done exactly that for years. Like most people who follow the news, I also aggregate the Miami Herald and the Palm Beach Post's news (hey, former newsboy, can you figure out where I live yet?) So when the Sun-Sentinel runs those same stories a day later, of course I'm not even mildly happy about it. No one is. And we're NEVER going to be.

Nobody needs the Sentinel to aggregate local news. I need the Sentinel to find the facts behind the news - something that most bloggers can't do. I want professional writers using their training, specialized tools; and exclsuive database access to bring me what my neighbors can't; ACCURACY. I need them to find out what the Herald and Post missed; because they WILL miss something. Good journalism is driven, like everything else, by competition. If the papers aren't competing with each other to get the best version of the story, then we, the readers, are not getting the entire story. We're probably not getting half of it.

I need the Sun-Sentinel to do its job. And it is failing miserably at that. Sure, the others are also falling down on the job, but they are not pushing as much content from the Sentinel as the Sentinel is from both of its "competitors." It's obvious; management isn't even pretending that they're still in the news business.

And neighborhood blogs? Oh, the blogger next door can tell me that a car was broken into around the corner. But they can't tell me if the guy was caught, or if police catch the guy a couple of weeks later. They can only tell me what they see. And that leads to another point: eyewitness testimony is the worst kind; eyes are notoriously easy to fool.

Journalists, in theory, are trained to be objective. That blogger who rails against the city may be able to inform me that sewers are being dug up, but he's likely to skew the story to suit his opinions. We should not rely on bloggers for news. And for someone working for a newspaper - even in an advisory capacity - to state otherwise, only illustrates how poorly advised newspapers have become. If YOU are who the Sentinel is listening to, no wonder it's in the toilet.

As for blaming the readers: "they don't feel like paying for it anymore" - well, that's another incidence of ignorance paraded as wisdom.

The fact is that readers have never paid for news. Oh, sure, they bought papers. But that wasn't what paid for the news. Advertising paid for that, not the cover price. Ads have paid for the real costs of the paper since Ben Franklin posed as a Puritan widow to write advice to the lovelorn. And if you don't know that, then you never learned much about the business.

And do you know what else advertising pays for? Internet websites.

The problem isn't that people don't want to pay to read the online stories, the problem is that a lot of idiots think that's the problem, so they ignore the actual problem, which is the quality of the content, and the ease of access to it.

Early on, the troglodytes running newspapers thought that only their subscribers should be able to read news online. Or that at the very least, they ought to block non-subscriber's access for a couple of days. Their mistake? The belief that they are the only available place to get news. The mistake still being made by you and the Sun-Sentinel.

Those first few years shaped internet users' preferences: they learned that there were websites that didn't block or limit access, so users went there INSTEAD of waiting for their local news provider to "let" them see current stories. For YEARS, the Sun-Sentinel - and most newspapers - actively drove prospective readers away.

"Aggregating" that content won't save any newspaper anywhere, ever. Only an idiot could think this was a viable plan. And here's why: WE ARE ALREADY GOING TO THE PLACES YOU ARE AGGREGATING. We were there yesterday. Why would the fact that you have it a day later attract us? Can you imagine a restaurant raiding the trash bin of a successful restaurant so it could sell the scraps? "Well, you ate there last night, so we went and got it for you!"

If the Sun-Sentinel is to survive, it must bring me something no other news source is bringing me. And it CANNOT accomplish that by bringing me stuff from the other news sources.

That's just my opinion as one of the millions of people you need to read your newspaper.

Hey, Eric: you miscalculated again. You didn't end comments by "burying" the discussion, you simply forced me to take it somewhere else. It's just the like what the Sun-Sentinel - and you - are doing to its readers; driving us to go someplace where we can get what we need.

Isn't about time you guys started learning from your mistakes, instead of protecting them from criticism?

And you'd better start learning quick. We won't bother with you much longer.

Herald's Levinson: STOP HELPING THE HERALD!

Today we examine Suzanne Levinson's action against a local blog. It's an action that is already drawing ire from other professional journalists. Sadly, Suzanne Levinson is Director Of Operations for the Miami Herald.

It's sad because she's apparently blisteringly stupid.

Here's the story: a blog called Random Pixels posted some pictures he found on the Herald site, buried in a slideshow. He's a photographer and a journalist, and as a journalist, he often offers insight into the news media, and sometimes it's bluntly critical. Other times, not so much, such as the entry in question.

The article in question is titled "Random Pixels Recognizes..." In it, he salutes the Herald for the work of two of their staff photographers, and to make the point, he included the photos from the website (since you can't link directly to a picture embedded in a slide show).

This photo:

CHARLES TRAINOR JR. / MIAMI HERALD STAFF PHOTO

and this one:

JOE RIMKUS JR. / MIAMI HERALD STAFF PHOTO

Frankly, while the subjects are pretty, there is nothing particularly exceptional about these photos. Nobody is going to be winning any awards of any sort for them as photographs. In fact, that's the satirical point that Random Pixels was making. These are just pretty good pictures of very pretty girls. No one is ever going to look back at them to prove who won the game, or if a law was broken, or the state of the union. They're not good candidates for a poster or magazine cover. They aren't even worthy of a postcard. In fact, because they were buried in a slide show, it's unlikely that very many people would ever have seen them - until RP included them in a post.

He didn't claim credit for the photos - they are full attributed. He even provided a link to the Herald photo gallery, so that his readers could go and see more Herald photos. Far from doing any kind of damage to the Herald, he's actually sending traffic their way!

And Levinson's response?

Please remove these photos and any other Miami Herald content present on your site immediately.

It's obvious that the Herald's Director of Site Operations is absolutely clueless; about copyright law, and about how the internet works, either of which is bad news for the Herald.

First, the internet. INTERnet. The INTER stands for interconnectivity. The goal of every website is to have other websites link to it. It increases visibility. It's how search engines work: the website with the most links to matching specific parameters must have the best relevance to the search parameters. The website with the most links is the most likely to have data worth searching for

When I link to other blogs, their traffic goes up, and sometimes I get an email thanking me for the link. In fact, on one of my blogs, I get thank you notes from magazines and news outlets -and even reporters - for driving traffic their way. It's quid-pro-quo.

So stories with content like Random Pixels' works on two levels: first, people will follow the links, which increases traffic at the Herald. Second, it increases the the likelihood that search engines will cite the website in searches, which also drives traffic to the website. It's a win-win situation for the Miami Herald, which is why it's so mind-bogglingly stupid of Levinson to complain about it.

Some of you might be saying "But - he used those pictures! They are protected by copyright!" And yes, he did, and yes, they are. But he didn't violate copyright. When you write an article about copyrighted material, you are permitted to use small samples of that material if it's germain to your article. It's called the Fair Use doctrine, and specifically covers use of copyrighted material in news stories or satire.

It says loads about the Herald that the person in charge of its website not only is apparently unfamiliar with Fair Use, but is so out of touch with the workings of the internet that she'd threaten someone who's actually increasing the visibility of the Miami Herald on the internet. "Stop telling people to read the HERALD" is what she's really saying.

This illustrates one of the worst by-products of the massive layoffs made by the Herald - you end up with a staff consisting of the very best (whom you don't layoff because they bring in revenue) and the very worst (whom you keep because their salaries are lower). Columnists and creators of content associated closely with the Herald, tend to fill the first group. A few advertising execs are in that first group, too.

Since Levinson isn't in sales and doesn't have a byline, this action makes it very apparent which end of the spectrum she falls into.

230 mpg? As if!

So, you're a huge automobile manufacturer, your company is going down the tubes (or actually, gone down them). In a world with a finite supply of fuel, you skirted fuel economy standards by pushing vehicles that fell outside those standards.  The one sensible project you've ever started gets abandoned. 

You're given a chance to redeem yourself.  What do you do?

Well, if you're General Motors, you lie your ass off  tell the world that you've built a car that "gets 230 miles to the gallon," even though it really doesn't.

That's right, despite all their ads, their commercials, and all the hype, the fact is that you can not put a gallon of gasoline into a Volt and then drive for 230 miles before you need more fuel.

Basically, it's true mileage is comparable to the much lower-priced Prius.  The only thing the Volt does that the Prius doesn't is plug into a wall.  That's a critical difference because you can charge the batteries without running the engine.  And that's the key to the GM spin campaign.

Here's how GM is validating the 230 mpg claim:
The vehicle can go 40 miles on a charge.  Your daily commute is 23 miles each way, or a total of 46 miles - 6 miles more than the charge can take you. So the generator kicks in for the last few miles of your trip.  Since you're only using gasoline for a small portion of your trip, it will take you about 5 days to use a gallon of gas, and in that time you will have traveled abut 230 miles.

But that's a far cry from puring in a gallon of gas, and then hitting the highway for 230 miles, which is how most people think of mileage.

That's not to say that the car isn't getting great mileage - it is.  But beyond that first charge, the Volt isn't much better than other hybrids on the market that cost thousands of dollars less.  Its price tag indicates that GM still hasn't learned how to be competitive.

NBC 6 Sets New Benchmark for Poor Taste (updated)

Rick over at South Florida Daily Blog called it "Stupid Headlines R Us," so I had to see it.

Wow. This is worse than stupid. It's thoughtless. There's nothing remotely funny about this story.

...the animal was probably still alive when chunks of its chest and legs were sliced off by the illegal butchers. Then the horse was lit on fire near its stable.

I don't know who is writing the headlines for NBCMiami; it probably was NOT reporter Todd Wright. But whoever wrote it, they ought to be sent out to help clean up the dead horse. That'll give them perspective on what is and isn't funny.

Shame on NBCMiami for not only coming up with it, but actually using it, and then letting it stay up.

UPDATE:
At some point in the day, they did change the title, but the URL still tells the tale:
nbcmiami.com/news/local-beat/Another-Miami-Horse-Becomes-Mr-Dead.html

Sun Sentinel: A Waste of Paper

And I mean that literally. Newspapers, including the Sentinel, keep reducing the size of the paper to cut down the costs. The length of articles are trimmed, the comics are shrunk to molecular levels, and content is generally reduced.

Because they "don't have room" for the same amount of news they used to carry, they fire their reporters - a move akin to an airplane pilot removing pieces of the engine to conserve fuel.

So it's insulting to readers and the unemployed alike to see things like the Outlook section of today's Sun-sentinel:

While it's refreshingly uncluttered with advertising, it's glaringly uncluttered by content, too. Less than a quarter of the page serves any purpose. I can't believe that I'd rather see advertising than this, but it's true. At least advertising pays the bills. Most of this page is simply wasted. The valuable space is squandered for no reason whatsoever.

But that's just the cover; it's just as bad inside:

Half the page to the left is taken up by advertising. But for once, I won't complain, because at least it's serving an honest purpose: generating revenue. Of the remainder, about 25% is wasted with a pointless repetition of the logo from the front page. And to the right, no advertising, and again, at least 25% of the page is completely wasted space. It's not informing you, it's not enhancing the story, it's just another repetition of space that should have been used to serve the paper's mission: delivering news or generating ad revenue to underwrite the costs of delivering news.

The little space that is being used for content is a discussion of the benefits and drawbacks of social media. That's three pages to give us two accounts of the same damned story. And it's one that isn't particularly important; it's been covered better, and in more detail, elsewhere. This is old news. This is a colossal waste of space.

It's stunning to think that their print edition is actually worse than their website. Which only reminds me that the opinion section of the paper and the opinion section of the website have completely different names! Is there anyone who isn't an idiot at the Sentinel?

Another page turn brings us to Sun-Sentinel's Earl Maulker, telling us that in order to remain relevant, he, and most of the Sentinel staff, are now on Twitter.

Earl, I gotta tell you, 140 characters is fine for a Tweet. But a newspaper article requires a hell of a lot more. I expect pages to be full of stories, not meaningless decorative graphics, especially for what we're paying these days. This week's Outlook section is an outrage. The image is not a graph, nor is it some informative picture of people communicating. It's a slap in the face to everyone you fired, and it's a spit in the eye of your readers.

Maulker, the Tribune should can your ass and use your salary and benefits to bring back some of the real journalists who lost their jobs so some snot-nosed interns could gut what's left of the corpse of a once-proud news source.

Tweet THAT.

The Sun-Sentinel: New Levels of Suckitude.

I try. I want to enjoy my local paper's website, I really do.

But the Sun-Sentinel website is such a lousy steaming pile of shit that it's impossible to ignore how bad the site is.

Take this, from the today's homepage:

Oooh. Inviting. I take a drink now and then. I'm up for trying out a new place. Let's see what they got:

Hmm. Nothing about a "good pour" here; Lil Kim, some asshole named "Pharrel" (he's an asshole because he doesn't spell it with an "F"), Broke I mean Brooke Hogan, blah blah blah, nothing about a good pour here.

Oh, wait, the "improved" Sun-Sentinel tends to put critical stuff "below the fold." After all, why put the story you want up top where you expect, when they can make you scroll and scroll and scroll....

Nope. Nothing relating to the link I clicked on AT ALL. Just when you think the Sun-Sentinel could not suck any more than it already does, it goes and sucks more.

Sun-Sentinel: VIEWS layout lacks Vision.

Geez, the individual pages look so pretty that I really want to like the new website. But I can't. It's a skin-deep makeover, and as soon as you click some links you discover that the pretty new website is a decaying corpse. I am appalled at the poor quality of this makeover. Just when I think it couldn't possible get worse, it does.

I like opinion and analysis, so in an attempt to give the drooling idiots at Sun-Sentinel a chance, I click on the VIEWS tab, which in most places allows you to set text, color palettes, and so on, but some clueless nitwit thought it would be a cool name for the Opinion section, because Opinion is so, you know, accurate.

And accuracy seems to be just a word at this exciting new Sun-Sentinel.

Let's take a look at the top of the page:


"Ideas and Opinions from South Florida." OK, I'm down with that. They should dump the "Views" moniker and call it this. So, what are the South Florida Ideas and Opinions at the top of the lise?

Civics, with a picture of Bob Graham. OK, that works.

The Everglades, a photo gallery guide... which has no place on an Ideas & Opinion page, but makes sense if "Views" is supposed to be a collection of images, which frankly makes more sense than the way they're using it now. But the gallery offers neither ideas nor opinions, and belongs somewhere else.

Al Franken? WTF? Al Franken is not from South Florida. But it's not ABOUT Al Franken, it's BY Al Franken! The article has nothing to do with South Florida. And that picture isn't Al Franken. I have no idea who that person is, and clicking through only deepens the mystery. This is a MASSIVE fail, and we're only at the tippy-top of the page! This doesn't bode well: 2/3 of the content so far is crap.

It's followed by a list of titles. No explanation is given about the nature of these articles, or their origin. But clicking through, you discover that each of the eight titles is an editorial. Several of them are over a week old.

Scrolling down, we get Chan Lowe's blog, presumably so they can double the fist article with a cartoon to emulate the print version. Eh. He offers opinions, I guess it works.

Next, we find "Letters." Are these letters to the editor? From the editor? It doesn't say. Like so much else in the brave new, new and improved, updated Sun Sentinel, the reader has to guess. I'd like to peruse all the letters to the editor. On other sites, not only are letters to the editor properly labeled letters to the editor, at the bottom of the little section there's a link to "more letters."

But that's just, you know, something good papers do. Good papers also let you look at yesterday's letters, and even letters from the past 7 days. Not the Sun-Sentinel! You'll see today's pathetic offering, and THAT'S IT! Want stale opinions? Scroll back up to the unlabeled editorials!

Continuing, we find another blog, TALK BACK SOUTH FLORIDA. It lists the titles of a few blog posts. Want to click through to the entire blog? Tough, because the Sentinel isn't interested in allowing you to do THAT.

Next we come upon COMMENTARY. A small selection of titles, but no explanations. Is this more letters? Something else? We don't know. Guess. WRONG! Guess again. WRONG AGAIN! HA HA! WE FOOLED YOUR SORRY ASS!

It's columnists. Each title is by a different syndicated columnist. You can only discover this by clicking on the link, going to the article, and scrolling all the way down to the bottom of the column. In a good paper, you have a page dedicated to just the columnists, and it's laid out so you can see which columns are by which columnists. But in the crass world of the Sun-Sentinel, one columnist is much like another. The Wii-playing interns that make up the web design team don't know the difference, why should you?

And after the cleverly hidden Columnists, we have .... MORE EDITORIALS! They're even clearly labeled as such. Actually, they're called MORE RECENT EDITORIALS. But they are stinky-old. You can't see yesterday's letter to the editor, but you can read last month's stale opinion that has been washed away by the tide of developing events.

I never thought I'd find myself pining for the old Sun-Sentinel website.

Sun-Sentinel: Topix Removal Turns Toxic

The Sun-Sentinel seems to have severely underestimated their readers. Browsing their Feedback page, you find the same complaints again and again, despite the moderator's best attempts at hiding the facts.

• They hate the basic format
• They hate the way the website is "organized."
• But most of all, they hate the fact that Topix was removed.
  

Topix provided the anemic Sun-Sentinel with a much-needed illusion of vitality. Readers could comment on whatever paltry stories they found of interest in the rapidly dissipating paper, and interact effectively with each other, debating issues they found important.

It went far beyond simply allowing a user to append a few words about a story: they could respond directly to each other, they could quote portions of each other's comments to help make the discussion more coherent, and they were given ample space to write their thoughts. It gave readers the impression that the Sun-Sentinel was fostering discussion of important events of the day.

It's an impression that increasingly appears to have been false.

Angry readers keep demanding to know what happened to their Topix accounts, and all the discussions that they were participating in when Sun-Sentinel pooped out the "improved" website.

When Topix tried to inform Sun-Sentinel users that their Topix accounts were still active, staffers were quick to claim it was "spam" and removed.


The Sentinel staff claims they have discontinued Topix to replace it with something better. But the fact is, they didn't replace it with something better. They didn't replace it with something that's as good. In fact, they barely left the ability to leave comments at all. Many articles don't permit comments at all, and the few articles that do have a tool so inadequate that it can't even keep up with typing, and cuts the user off after a few sentences, it's obvious that there has been only regression. Matt Sokoloff and his team keep talking about it, but the feature doesn't appear to exist beyond staff's claims that does.

The Sun-Sentinel has refused to respond to the entirely reasonable question "why did they removed a popular feature without having a suitable replacement available to it?" It seems blisteringly obvious that if the new system isn't available, the old one should be left in place until it is. But grasping the obvious doesn't appear to be a condition of employment at the Sun-Sentinel's IT department.

It seems that while the website team for the Sun-Sentinel have bamboozled management, soon-to-be-former Sentinel readers are not so gullible.

They know when they're being fed a line of BS.

Sun-Sentinel: Well, DUH.

This story was in the July 3 online edition:



Really?  Why, the next thing you know, they'll tell us that someone who was beaten to death died of blunt force trauma!