A few surprises in the 'favorite baseball teams' poll

A few weeks ago, Harris Interactive released the results of its annual poll on America's favorite baseball teams. It's almost a month old now, but anything that illuminates who roots for what team (even unscientifically, like Nike's United Countries of Baseball map) is still fascinating to me. A few things from the poll that struck me:

--I hadn't really pegged the Indians as a fanbase full of bandwagon jumpers, but they haven't shown themselves well this year. The team dropped from a nearly perennial top-half team in terms of numbers of fans all the way down to 25th, tied with the Florida Marlins(!). You'd think that if a franchise had gone a half-century without a World Series title, one awful year wouldn't be enough to cause fans to leave in droves, but that's apparently what happened to the Tribe.

--The Angels are even lower, at 27th. And they've always had no fans, never finishing higher than 16th. I guess I had always thought of them as a pretty strong fan base. It's tough to end up with the fourth-fewest U.S. fans in baseball while playing in the second-largest market, but the Angels' brass must have done something seriously wrong. And don't tell me it's the Dodgers' fault.

--I'm amazed the A's have hung tough, solidly occupying the 19-23 spots for nearly all of the past six years. That's certainly not great, but I always thought of the A's fans as sort of a ghetto of "Moneyball" enthusiasts or the unwanted stepchildren of Giants fans.

--The Tigers were much higher than I expected. I didn't think they had much appeal outside the state of Michigan--or even all that much within it, until they started winning again a couple of years ago. Turns out they apparently have more fans than the Mariners, who own the Pacific Northwest, or the Mets, who partly own the national media.

--I thought Braves fandom had dropped off since that dominant run during the 1990s, especially since TBS doesn't broadcast all their games anymore. But they're almost as strong as ever, even remaining in front of the Cubs. As Nike's map shows, if you're in the South and you like baseball, chances are you're a Braves fan.

Anything that struck you?

It's all RSS' fault.

Instead of apologizing for not posting in way too long, I thought I'd take a closer look at why. It may actually be illuminating. (Well, that's the goal, anyway.)

I had planned to post once or twice a week on here, but other things--lack of a coherent focus on the blog, lack of motivation, lack of readers, a much busier life in general--have kept me from doing that for most of this blog's life. But now I haven't posted since June 14, the longest drought since I started this blog.

When I started thinking about why I haven't posted so long, I realized the reason went back to a change in the way I read blogs. Namely, I stopped posting because I started using RSS.

I actually started using RSS--through Google Reader--late this spring. For the uninitiated, RSS provides a simple way to get all of the new posts from the sites you regularly visit sent to one place. The idea is that instead of visiting bunches of blogs to see if they've posted since you were last there, you can open your RSS feed and get all of the new updates in one window.

RSS is incredibly convenient--it saves you a lot of browsing time, while you still get all the information you were looking for. But it's also an incredibly passive experience--instead of having to go to the web, the web comes to you. I don't have to have the presence of mind and curiosity to go, "Hmm, I wonder if my friend MattO has written anything lately," because as soon as MattO posts anything, my RSS feed will tell me. Again, it saves a lot of time, but I lose a lot of the serendipity of spontaneous discovery, too.

So once I started using RSS, I also started unconsciously assuming (stupidly) that everyone else must read my blog through RSS, too. In other words, they don't need to wander over here to find out if I've posted anything, because their feed will let them know. A long break between posts is no big deal for them, since they'll know when the break ends, and it won't cost them any effort. But for readers who don't have RSS, of course, my gap between posts is going to lead them to stop coming here, since they're not rewarded for their effort with any new content.

So consider this my apology to those without RSS (shoot, I ended up apologizing anyway), and my lament that though RSS has added quite a bit of convenience to my web experience, it's also taken away a lot of spontaneity in browsing and my urgency in posting. And those are qualities worth lamenting.

My top 10 board games.

I got back from a vacation to Colorado with my family last week, and extended time with them means one thing: games. Lots and lots of them. We should just call our vacations what they are -- one big game tournament in an exotic location, interrupted by various other diversions (in this year's case, whitewater rafting, a baseball game and hiking).

So I was already in a gaming mood last week when I had a brief Twitter exchange with ESPN.com baseball analyst Keith Law about the board game Ticket to Ride. He referenced a December post on his personal blog with his top 10 favorite board games, and I decided to shamelessly steal the idea. The only difference is that mine includes card games. Enjoy, and add your own in the comments.

10. Carcassonne--You'll notice pretty soon that this list is heavy on German-style board games. My summary of Wikipedia's description of the characteristics of those games also serves as a pretty good rundown of why I like them: They downplay luck, they have mechanisms ensuring that they won't go on forever, they focus on economic rather than military strategy (I'm horrible at the latter), and no one gets eliminated before the end. Carcassonne is a relatively simple example of the genre: You're working to finish roads, cities, monasteries and farms as the game's map builds and builds. One downside: My brother always destroys me at this one. (That's a common theme among the games on this list, too.)

9. Power Grid--Another German-style game, but this one's much more complex. The goal is simple, though: Use plants, lines and raw materials to power as many cities as you can. What I love about this one is how richly it replicates real-world economic forces. A huge portion of the game is built on anticipating future supply and demand based on your competitors' past decisions and likely needs. The auction system through which power plants are bought heightens the interdependence of each player's decisions, too.

8. Dictionary--Most people know this game in its commercial form as Balderdash. I've never played Balderdash, but when I was growing up, my family played its own low-tech version, picking obscure words out of dictionary, then having everyone write their own ridiculous definitions and seeing if anyone could pick out the real one. We haven't played it in a decade or so, but I always enjoyed the excuse to make up stuff about poisonous shrubs in the remote highlands of northern Mongolia.

7. Boggle--My college roommate Mike turned me on to this one. Pretty simple word game--find short words in a small grid of letters. It's fast and fun, though. It's also one of only a few games here (maybe the only one) that works just as well with two players as with more--a big reason it's become popular among my wife and me. It just usually makes her angry when we play. Why? It's one of the few games on this list I regularly win.

6. Blokus--My wife got me into this one over the past six months or so. The rules of this game are about the simplest of any game on this list--you're just trying to fit all of your differently shaped pieces onto a grid by connecting them at corners. But it's the only game on this list that requires you to think spatially, and I really like that mental exercise. There's also zero luck involved, so it's got that going for it, which is nice.

5. Settlers of Catan--If you've only played a little bit of German-style gaming, chances are this is the one you know. There's a reason it's the most popular: It's got a gameboard that constantly changes from game to game, and it hits that sweet spot of not-too-hard, not-too-simple difficulty. For my tastes, it still relies too much on luck, which keeps me (along with my mathematically minded sister and brother-in-law) from embracing it as much as everyone else does.

4. Scum--In my mind, it's still the classic party game. So easy a 5-year-old could do it, yet it always entertained. It goes by a heck of a lot of names, but in our family, it was called Scum. You're basically just trying to get rid of your cards, and the higher they are, the better. I was unaware until I read the Wikipedia article on it just now that it's primarily a drinking game, but as we were a teetotaling family playing with four kids, that wasn't going to happen in our house. This was the game my dad would bust out anytime we were entertaining friends, and I can't think of anything that fit that purpose better. Oh yeah, and don't ever, ever let anyone make you pay to play this game. Guh.

3. Puerto Rico--I played this German-style game for the first time less than two weeks ago, and it's already at number three. That's a pretty steep climb, but this is a pretty sweet game. You're a governor in colonial Puerto Rico, and you're trying to produce crops, refine them, then sell or ship those goods. It's got a really steep learning curve (it took us almost two hours to set up and read through the rules the first time), but once you play it, everything just falls into place, because the game just makes sense. I have a feeling we'll be playing this one quite a bit at the next few family gatherings.

2. Pounce--If you want to understand my family--scratch that, I don't think anyone will ever truly understand my family. If you want to try to understand my family, participating in a nine-person pounce game is a good place to start. The card game is most commonly known as nertz (that's how my wife knows it), but holy alternative names, Batman! It's more or less simple solitaire modified for a multiplayer environment, but when my family plays it, it's transformed into the most intense and just downright ridiculous card or board game experience of your life. I'm not even kidding. We've suffered pounce injuries. Usually from diving across the table.

1. Ticket to Ride--I have yet to meet anyone who's played this game and doesn't like it. It is, quite simply, the most universally likable game I've ever played. You're trying to build trains across Europe (or the U.S., or Switzerland, or Germany, or Scandinavia) to complete routes that you've chosen. It has a beautiful board, simple rules, a ton of options for strategy, and just the right level of interaction. Color me hopelessly addicted.

Of course I'm not racist. Now what's so bad about segregated proms?

The New York Times Magazine has a fascinating (if way too short) article in today's edition on the segregated proms at a rural Georgia public school.

What amazes me about the story is the nonchalant dichotomy in the white students' attitudes toward their white-only prom. (How is a white-only prom legal, you ask? Well, both proms are organized privately by parents, not by the school.)

On the one hand, it seems the students aren't particularly enthusiastic about the idea of splitting their proms by race. Interracial friendships and even a few interracial dating relationships are common, and it sounds like the kids have engaged in a few half-hearted attempts to end the practice in the past. "I don't think anybody at our school is racist," says one white student who calls the practice "awkward."

But when asked why the school still has segregated proms, the student gets all meh on us. "It's a tradition," he says, echoing the rationale many of his classmates apparently also gave.

This response, of course, leads to the maddeningly obvious question: If you don't like your segregated prom, then why don't you just do anything about it? Tell your parents you refuse to go any prom at which your black friends aren't allowed, and things will change in hurry.

So here we have the paradox: These white students have black friends, significant others and claim not to be racist in any way. Yet they don't care enough about the fact that these friends and significant others can't go to their prom by virtue of the color of their skin to do anything to change it. Are they just liars, or are the social pressures of the status quo greater than we're led to believe?

My guess: They don't really think their segregated proms are racist. They also don't think their black friends are hurt by the fact that they can't come to same prom as them ("After all, they get their own prom, and some of them even come to our prom entrance to cheer us on!"). So they see it as a minor inconvenience, a bow to tradition, something they have to do to oblige their parents, but nothing more significant than that. If everything's hunky dory between black and white students for the other 363 days of the year, these two days can't mess much up, can they?

Dead wrong, of course. By the time the more enlightened students realize that holding segregated proms (anytime, really, but especially in the 21st century!) is ridiculous and absolutely unacceptable, they're off in college and well beyond the point of caring about what their high school does anymore. I don't know much about how issues of race play out in the modern-day South (I've read this eye-opening book, but that's about it), but my initial guess is that the values behind this segregation are rooted so deep in the local culture that students have a difficult time realizing that there's anything wrong with them, even as they fervently disavow racism by name. 

Podcast #2: Get to know ... The Band

Back by popular demand (umm ... I think my sister said she listened to it) comes my second podcast. Same format as the first, but the recording quality is much better, thanks to a new computer.

I had fun putting this one together. Hope you enjoy it too.

Get to know ... The Band

Maybe we should be a little more discriminating in choosing our subculture's leaders.

My fellow Wheaton grad Sarah Pulliam had an entertaining Q&A with America's favorite plumber, Samuel Wurzelbacher (who is neither Joe nor Plumber. Discuss.) for Christianity Today. Most of it was the standard "the Republican Party has deserted true conservatism--let's get even more conservative and take back this country!!!1!" that we've been hearing from the Limbaugh crowd since November 5. Move on, nothing to see here.

But it did contain a few nuggets that were genuinely entertaining in their absurdity. The first was this gem toward the end of Joe's answer to the question, "What do you think about same-sex marriage at a state level?"

"I've had some friends that are actually homosexual. And, I mean, they know where I stand, and they know that I wouldn't have them anywhere near my children. But at the same time, they're people, and they're going to do their thing."

Joe's definition of "friend" must be reeeeeaaaalllly broad. Let's try a thought experiment: Think of all the people you're in reasonably regular contact with. Friends, acquaintances, mild annoyances, serious annoyances, enemies. How many of those people would you not let anywhere near your children? We're not talking about baby-sitting or even being left alone with your children; we're just talking about going near your children. Can you think of anyone who would fit this criterion? I sure couldn't (if I had children, that is).

What kind of level of distrust and loathing would you have to have to be at that point with such a person? Yet Joe calls people with whom he has this type of relationship "friends."* I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if you won't let them anywhere near your children, they're not your friends. In fact, they're much closer to being your mortal enemy.

*Another question: Why exactly is Joe so afraid of letting his children even be in the vicinity of a gay person? Because they'll spread their gay germs? I'd love to hear Joe parse his reasoning out on this one.

Second, we have this question and response:

Who do you see as emerging Christian leaders?

James Dobson. I love Dobson. I love John Eldridge's [sic] Wild at Heart. The last book I read was The Five Love Languages [by Gary Chapman].

James Dobson?!? James Dobson is a lot of things (incendiary, influential, intelligent, old), but emerging is not even close to being one of them. The man's 73 years old, for crying out loud! It's been 32 years since broke into the Christian subculture with Dare to Discipline. He's already stepped down as president, CEO and chairman of the board of Focus on the Family. He's now essentially a figurehead who's preparing to retire. That's about as far from emerging as you can get.

Joe concludes by answering the question, "What are a couple of Christian books you like?" which, incidentally, was not any of the questions that were put to him. My guess: He really doesn't keep up with who's who among Christian leaders, so he named the only two he could think of off the top of his head, plus another Christian book he had read recently. And that's fine for a random plumber from Ohio, but if you're aiming to become a prominent Christian leader,* you sure as heck had better know whom you're inheriting that mantel from. This is what happens when we thrust uninformed Joe Blows into undeserved positions of prominence and influence, and when they insist, against their better judgment, on staying there.

*Guess why Joe was giving this interview in the first place? He's traveling the country on a book tour.

Adding value in a crowded media ecosystem

Jeff Jarvis, a professor at the City University of New York's journalism school and prominent media critic, had a fantastic post yesterday asking journalists a crucial question about the way they do their jobs: "Where do you add value?"

Here's the meat of it:

Journalism can’t afford repetition and production anymore.

Every minute of a journalist’s time will need to go to adding unique value to the news ecosystem: reporting, curating, organizing. This efficiency is necessitated by the reduction of resources. But it is also a product of the link and search economy: The only way to stand out is to add unique value and quality. My advice in the past has been: If you can’t imagine why someone would link to what you’re doing, you probably shouldn’t be doing it. And: Do what you do best and link to the rest. The link economy is ruthless in judging value.

The question every journalist must ask is: Am I adding value?

I've tried to let that question guide my reporting for the last three years (and I'm pretty sure I've asked some version of it in a newsroom meeting at some point), and I think Jarvis is spot-on: We have less time and fewer resources to do our jobs than ever before, so there's less leeway than ever for the mindless, repetitive fluff that has made up so much of the daily grind of journalism since time immemorial.

I've been troubled at times by how much of my time at work is spent on stories in which my added value is minimal at best. I mean the stories that the local weekly is going to cover just as well as we will; the ones where I'm just retracing another paper's steps because I've been beaten on a story; the quick-turnaround, one-or-two-source stories that are there literally to fill space over the weekend cycle.

There's a reason we do these kinds of stories. As a small daily newspaper with just five news reporters, we need these stories just to reach that critical mass of news that keeps readers from opening their papers and saying, "There's nothing in here." And many of these stories are news to our readers: Just because we aren't the first or only outlet to cover them doesn't mean they aren't still newsworthy. (This is a fallacy to which I'm especially prone; I regularly have to remind myself of the previous sentence when deciding whether to follow on a previously reported story that I know I still need to cover.)

Here's where I think Jarvis' flaw lies: He seems to be operating on the assumption that if a story is out there, people will find it. That makes sense for much big-issue national coverage. No one wants to read the AP's summary of the State of the Union; they want to watch the speech itself and then read some trenchant analysis of it. (And no one wants to read the Washington Post's summary of the New York Times' warrantless wiretapping scoops; they want to read the Times' original.)

But on the local news level, that's simply not the way things work. A local TV station might be the first ones to report a kidnapping arrest last night and I might not have much to add to their account, but that doesn't mean the story is at the level of "commodity knowledge," as Jarvis calls it. I can't assume that most of our readers are voracious news consumers who will find a story soon after it's reported, no matter where. People have lives; they don't watch the news every night, and they don't constantly check the websites of several area newspapers throughout the day to spot the first iteration of every news story. Isn't that part of what we're learning in this new media ecosystem--that the news now has to find consumers, rather than vice versa? I think that's exactly what we're doing with some of these less "value-intensive" stories.

That said, I wholeheartedly agree with Jarvis that we simply can't afford repetition and stenography anymore. The shift is going to take a lot of tough concessions and inspire quite a few "But that's the way we've always done it!" objections. But it absolutely must be done. If old media institutions (or any media outlets, for that matter) want to play a role in the new media ecosystem, every inch of type and every second of video needs to add some value to the consumer. Anything less is not only bad business; it's a dereliction of duty.

Way to represent, Larry.

I love Slate as much the next guy, but let's be honest, their operative worldview--East Coast, liberal, urban, secular, upper-middle-class (at least), very culturally hip--is a couple thousand miles from mine.

So it's always a refreshing surprise to see a legitimately Christian viewpoint there, let alone an argument for orthodox Christianity. But that's what I found this morning with a short essay by Larry Hurtado, head of the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh, called "Why Was Jesus crucified?"

It's just a good, simple, something-to-think-about essay outlining some of the historical context of Jesus' death. And Hurtado's right: "Crucifiability" needs to be made a big part of the "historical Jesus" discussion, stat.

A good-movie overload--not a bad problem to have.

Dana and I have been busy watching Mad Men on our Netflix, so we've seen approximately two movies (Doubt and Benjamin Button) since Christmas. That changed last week, when Slumdog Millionaire and Gran Torino played at our town's wonderful historic, volunteer-run theater on consecutive weekends. (You'll have to excuse our town. It's a little slow when it comes to getting good movies.)*

*Of course, both movies were playing at the mall theater a month ago, but we're cheap. And we love seeing movies at a historic theater.

So when I've gone from seeing two movies in three months to watching the two best movies I've seen in at least a year within the span of a week, you know I've got to write about it. I'll avoid spoilers, so have no fear and read on.

Slumdog: I couldn't help but compare Slumdog with the 2002 Brazilian film City of God. Both chronicle life in the slums, both are coming-of-age films, and both follow two boys as they take morally diverging paths from their roots in a makeshift childhood gang ("The Tender Trio" in City of God, "The Three Musketeers" in Slumdog). Slumdog took off a ton of the harder edges of City of God--an absolutely brutal film--and with the "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" conceit and occasional humor, tinges the entire thing with a latent sunshiny glow. In doing so, I think Slumdog loses a little bit of City of God's epic scope, but it also makes the film much more accessible to mainstream audiences. Sure, it's comparatively whitewashed, but I had the strong impression that Slumdog is essentially City of God with some significantly redemptive qualities--a reward that's more than worth sitting through the brutality for. And that is most definitely a good thing.

The one thing that troubled me about this otherwise fantastic film--and it may be more my fault than the movie's--was the simplicity of its theme. I like to come away from movies that bill themselves as substantive thinking about difficult moral decisions, ambiguities and conundrums, and just generally pondering the meaning of life. I didn't really have anything like that to think about as I left Slumdog. I came away with an incredible affirmation of life itself, but I didn't see much more there thematically than "love conquers all" and the moral purity of Jamal. (The game show bathroom scene and the one that followed were an indelible illustration of the latter.) It was an epic love and rags-to-riches story--two of the classic themes in movie history--extremely well told. Is a familiar story told incredibly well enough to make a movie an elite one? Or are my expectations outrageous?

I talked about this with my friend Matt, and he suggested that the main theme was instead redemption--that out of the most horrible circumstances, Jamal's family, his love relationship, his place in life are redeemed through his honesty, loyalty and moral purity. Oh, right--that's probably the "redemptive element" City of God was missing. On second thought, I'll take that as a theme. Ain't nothing wrong with that.

Gran Torino: An absolute gem of a film. This may have been one of the most Christian movies I've ever seen. In fact, the Christ-imagery almost reaches the point of overkill at the end, but it still remains a profound, complex, fully alive example of just what atonement, grace and freedom truly mean.* The problem for most evangelicals is that this wonderful explanation comes wrapped up in an R-rated stream of f-bombs and racial slurs--"many of which, quite frankly, [Focus on the Family had] never heard before." (Spoiler alert on that link). It's a shame, really, that that will keep many Christians from seeing such a fantastic movie. A few friends of ours said folks from our church were arguing with them this week that Gran Torino was an awful, anti-Christian movie. They hadn't even seen it. I'm not saying the flood of racial epithets aren't disturbing--they're ridiculously offensive, and I'm not sure I'd recommend this movie to my mother--but let's look past the f-word count and focus on the more substantive values of this film, shall we? If we avoid it as typical Hollywood corruption, it's our loss.

*I'd love to go into a deeper examination of that imagery, but it's really tough to do without spoilers. And you should all go see it, so I'm not going to ruin it for you.

Podcast #1: Get to know ... Led Zeppelin

The first-ever Feel The Funk, Y'all podcast is here! I had all but given up hope of ever finding someplace that would allow me to host a 23-minute podcast online for free, when, thanks to Twitter, Omaha wedding photographer Lane Hickenbottom came to the rescue with some leftover space he wasn't using. So I guess I was wrong: There's probably no way to host a 23-minute podcast online for free--unless you have an exceptionally generous former co-worker who's willing to bail you out. Thanks, Lane!

This first podcast is essentially a "Get to know..." post in audio form (where it belongs) on Led Zeppelin. As you listen, you may think to yourself, "Between the boring host, occasional background fuzz and sloppy editing, I would rate this podcast somewhere between mediocre and downright horrid." And you might be right. But remember these facts, dear listener, as you issue your silent judgment:

1. I'm just producing these as a way to learn a skill that I'll probably find necessary at some point over the next several years. Public consumption isn't a primary aim.

2. In fact, I realized while editing this podcast that it may not be legal by copyright law, so I finished it not expecting to make it public at all. But my paper's web editor assured me that I'm probably on the right side of the law on this one, so I decided to throw it up there, haphazard production quality and all.

3. I have bigger plans for a few future podcasts. I still like the idea of more "Get to know ..." podcasts, but I also want to have guests so you can listen to someone more interesting than me.

4. Come on, it's my first try!

Enjoy.

Get to know ... Led Zeppelin

Seriously, I have an excuse.

I know you're not supposed to do "sorry I haven't posted in a while" posts, but I feel like I need to.

I've been busy the last week or two trying to familiarize myself with the world of Audacity, server space and FTP clients so I can start posting podcasts up here.

Yes, that's right, podcasts. The first one is done, but I'm still trying to get it uploaded onto my own little free slice of server space. (Don't get too excited--I only decided after the fact that it was going to be for public consumption, so it's not very good.)

If you simply must have something decent to read, I present to you my Delicious page, which I've been working on this week to start building up a library of nifty ideas about newspapers, journalism, evangelicalism and all that fun stuff. Enjoy.

So what happens next? Fiery inferno or somewhat less fiery inferno?

I've probably had/heard more conversations about the future of newspapers in the past two weeks than the previous six months combined, and surprising number of them have involved people who aren't in the industry themselves.

If you're so inclined and have plenty of time on your hands, here are three long big-picture pieces published in the last two weeks that are required reading for anyone trying to understand what's next for newspapers and journalism. I was pointed to all three by NYU media professor Jay Rosen, so hat-tip to him and to "mindcasting."

In order from most to least depressing:

--"Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a New Era of Corruption)" by Paul Starr, The New Republic. This is the traditional-media viewpoint, the classic "you'll miss us when we're gone" argument. The title says it all: Starr chronicles how newspapers are dying, then warns of the widespread government and big-business corruption that will result without an institutional watchdog. It's pretty scary stuff. He finishes by looking at a handful of economic models (like public and nonprofit funding) that could save newspapers.

Like many in the newspaper industry, Starr (a professor himself) is primarily concerned with the question, "What will happen to newspapers?" The next two have already moved on to the next question: "What will happen after newspapers?"

--"Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable" by Clay Shirky. Shirky, a pioneer of internet philosophy, argues that the correct answer to that question is essentially "No one has any idea, and that's OK. Information revolutions are, by nature, chaotic." He compares the current situation to the one soon after the invention of the printing press, when old institutions like the church and the Ancients were beginning to be viewed with distrust, but no new ones had yet sprung up to take their place. We're in the middle of that phase right now, says Shirky. The systems to take up the work to be left behind by dying newspapers haven't been developed, and they may not be for some time. But realizing this is far better than pretending everything will be OK just because we feel it has to be.

--"Old Growth Media and the Future of News" by Steven Johnson. Johnson's essay sychronizes well with Shirky's; both start with that same fundamental question, and both acknowledge that nothing sufficient is in place to succeed newspapers yet. But Johnson has a more optimistic slant, using the examples of technology news and political news to argue that the internet has already shown an ability to produce an information "ecosystem" on various subjects that is superior to the old newspapers-and-TV-dominated one. It's only a matter of time, he says, before that ecosystem develops for local and regional news and sports. 

And one bonus, for those of you not as into the whole "reading" thing: This podcast (hopefully this link works--if not, you're looking for Part 2 of their podcast) is a fascinating discussion of why newspapers are failing from two rather unlikely sources: ESPN's Bill Simmons, the premier sports columnist of the internet generation, and Chuck Klosterman, one of the top pop-culture critics of that same era. It mostly takes the angle of sports news, but it's a fun listen anyway.

Welcome back to the real world, buddy.

I drove through the night to Chicago last weekend for an energizing, encouraging, exhausting weekend with friends--then drove through the night back. (There were three of us, and we rotated driving. Don't worry, we were safe.)

It was one of those whirlwind retreat weekends where the "real world" seems a lot less "real" when you get back. But I had about 24 hours to catch up on sleep and generally veg before heading back to work Tuesday afternoon.

An hour after I arrived, I watched a coworker clean out her desk in tears in front of all of us after being laid off.

Layoffs suck. Period. They're demoralizing, depressing and humiliating.

I still have a job, but I think all of us at work feel a little bit less employed, a little less ownership in the place where we spend half our waking hours each weekday, after the events of this week. Layoffs are happening to a lot of people all over the country in far worse proportions than what we saw, and those people need our kindness and our prayers. It's times like these that I think the middle-class segments of American church (which among evangelicals sometimes feels redundant to say) could end up being infused with a fresh sense of urgency to apply Jesus' teachings to the hurting people around them. We try to shield ourselves from this type of physical need, but it's not--and shouldn't be--avoidable.

One step forward, 14 steps back

So you may or may not have heard, but there's this thing called the "digital TV transition" that went down around here a couple of weeks ago. Apparently, the goal was to switch our signals over from analog to digital so our beloved boob tube experience could become that much more magical. And in my case, that process instead involved destroying said boob tube experience. Let me 'splain.

No, we're not morons who forgot to get a converter box and then decided to start complaining now about how "they never warned us." When my wife and I bought a TV two years ago, we decided to obey the Best Buy salesman when he told us to make sure we got one that receives both analog and digital signals. We don't get cable or satellite--just rabbit ears--so for one year and eleven months, that's exactly what we got. Five analog stations came in, along with two digital signals from stations (CBS and PBS affiliates) that had started high-powered digital transmission early. I could watch football and March Madness, and the better half had her Bachelor. Life was good.

The first station in our area to switch completely to digital was our NBC affiliate in December. That went fine--we just rescanned and got the new digital station with great reception. Then out of nowhere at the end of January, that channel went dark. OK, whatever--we watched The Office online, anyway. Then came Feb. 17, when our ABC, CBS and PBS were going to make their switch--no problem with the latter two, since we had been getting those digital signals for two years, right? Yeah, no. When we rescanned, the only digital channel that came in was ABC. No matter how many times we rescanned, CBS and PBS were gone, as was NBC. If you're keeping track at home, that means we're down to two channels--ABC (which is spotty) and our still-analog Fox. And in two weeks that also means three of the scariest words in the English language: No March Madness.

In conclusion, what the crap? The day after the transition, this AP article says, nearly half of the 25,320 calls into the FCC were about this one issue. TV stations responded to this flood of phone calls by frantically putting together stories telling viewers that "Oh, by the way, not only do you need a converter box, but you also need a new antenna." First off, why were we not told this during this $1.2 billion advertising campaign? How could we put such a ridiculous amount of resources into public education for this transition and not figure out that once people converted their TVs to digital signals, they still couldn't receive them? Oh wait, a research firm did figure this out--but they were shouted down and called scaremongers by the FCC and the broadcasting industry.

Second, I don't need a new antenna--or least I shouldn't. My situation is different--and arguably more frustrating-- than all the people in that AP article. I know my antenna is capable of receiving every single one of the digital signals in my area. Why? Because my antenna actually already got all these digital signals. That is, until the "transition." It took my perfect capable hardware and actually rendered it useless. So much for progress.

So, um, anybody want to let me over to their place to watch March Madness?

My Rocky was gone

The first big domino in the newspaper industry's long, brutal tumble fell this week. The Rocky Mountain News, Colorado's oldest newspaper, published its final edition on Friday. And while this wasn't unexpected to the industry's observers, it's still no less a shock to the system.

If you're a Romenesko reader, you've been bombarded with awful news about the industry every weekday for the last several years--layoffs, buyouts, sales, bankruptcies, section closings, you name it. But despite all of it, the papers themselves have remained intact; they're probably the most consistent things in America this side of death, taxes and the Postal Service (and maybe not even that last one). The only exceptions were a couple of papers, like the Christian Science Monitor and the Detroit News and Free Press, dropping from daily to nondaily print circulation. But even those operations were still producing news, still updating their websites 'round the clock. That changed this week. The Rocky isn't just continuing in a different form; it's done. Like, forever.

This video is long, but well worth your time:



Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

Perhaps the video feels a bit too navel-gazing; after all, we don't do 20-minute videos every time an auto-parts plant in our town closes. But as someone who works at a paper that's been sold twice in the last 15 months, I'm still amazed at how many people in our area were not only aware of our sales, but seemed genuinely concerned. They asked me out of the blue at the end of interviews, "What does this mean for you guys? Is this a good thing or a bad thing?"

It's times like those when I'm reminded that maybe a newspaper does mean a bit more to a community than your standard auto-parts plant (unless you're in Detroit). Not only is it the hub, the lifeblood, and all those other cliches, but it's also something people feel an intangible yet strong ownership in. Like the woman on the video said, hundreds of thousands of Coloradans lost not just "the Rocky" but "my Rocky" this week.

Michael Lewis does it again.

Holy cow. For one blissful hour or so (spread out over three days) Michael Lewis actually made me care about the NBA--or, as the Times would have me put it, the N.B.A.

You need to read this. Now. And then head to your local library and check out Moneyball.

A humbler road back

A couple of weeks ago I finished reading Son of a Preacher Man by Jay Bakker, son of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker.* My brother-in-law had lent it to me, telling me that it was a pretty amazing expose of what really happened behind the PTL curtain. Nope, not really. Obviously, it's got a lot of inside anecdotes, but I found to be a self-serving apologetic for his parents. It should have been subtitled "How the World Has Always Been Out To Get My Parents and Especially Me."

*Actually, I started reading it a couple of weeks ago, too. It's a really quick read.

And that's understandable. Jay's obviously gone through a ridiculously crappy life, and it's pretty awesome that he's come through it to start a new ministry. And he wrote this book in 2000, when he was 24. I'm 24, and I know I'm not at the point where I can look back on my life with any sort of wisdom or maturity. I'm sure he's matured quite a bit since then. So Jay, if you're reading (and of course you aren't, unless you Google yourself and keep clicking on links through page 68), I totally understand why your book comes off that way. You seem like a cool enough guy.

But I've still got a problem with it. Jay spends much of the book bashing Christians for shunning his dad and his family, rather than forgiving him and restoring him to the ministry. Fair enough. But you know why people had a problem giving his ministry back to him? Because he had done some really bad stuff.

The classic example was when Jay got upset with Falwell and folks who took over PTL after Jim resigned because of his affair. Basically, he had had an affair seven years earlier and never told his wife. It only became public when the woman told the press. (PTL had actually earlier paid--or tried to pay, I don't remember if she took it--her to shut up about it, but Jay said his dad had no idea that happened.) So Jim resigned with the idea that he would take PTL back over when all this had blown over. When he did try come back, Falwell said no, and Jay called that "a corporate takeover, pure and simple. Where was the grace in that?" But Jay also says his dad came to Falwell "a few weeks" after he resigned. A few weeks? What pastor in his right mind has an affair, doesn't tell his wife and congregation until seven years later--and even then only because his hand is forced--then expects to have his ministry handed back to him within a few weeks? Rejecting that request isn't a lack of grace; it's called common sense.

Ted Haggard presents a similar situation, and this article by his former writer, Patton Dodd, offers the perfect remedy: He advises Haggard to "go away quietly, do the work of atonement, and let tales of his renewed life spring up naturally." A fallen actor can go back to acting, Dodd says, but a fallen pastor can't just waltz back into ministry because his ministry, unlike the actor's acting, is based on his integrity. And once his integrity is gone, his credibility to minister is gone, too. I think Dodd's last paragraph goes for anyone in public ministry who's fallen in a significant way:

"Haggard can't enter a pulpit, and he shouldn't seek to be a spiritual leader, at least not for eons. He can enter a congregation somewhere, and if he wants to do that, he should, as a fellow traveler with other seekers. And that congregation should embrace him. That's what his spiritual restoration would look like."

And all the people said...amen.

If it's too loud, turn it down.

From Christianity Today comes one of the best (and most constructive) rants I've heard on worship music in a while.

This guy just wants some piece and quiet while worshiping ... and for those darn kids to get off his lawn!

Actually, though, I totally agree with him.

My favorite line:

"Do not compensate for mediocrity by amping it up to MEDIOCRITY."

And yes, I yoinked this post's title from Weezer.

Because whining about it makes it all better.

I have a somewhat thoughtful post on Ted Haggard and meth-fueled trysts coming sometime soon, but before I write that, you'll have to excuse me, 'cause I've got some complaining to do.

The last five months have been some of the worst in recent Wisconsin sports history. It's one thing when your teams are just plain horrible, so you can quit caring about them. It's quite another when they tease you in every single game by losing at the last second. And I can't remember another year when that's happened to my teams as much as this one.

The Packers were the worst offenders, with an epically heartbreaking season. They had nine games that went down to the final two minutes or overtime, and they lost eight of them, including a streak of four straight games in which they blew a late fourth-quarter lead. They had an eight-game stretch this season in which they were outscored by just six points total, but somehow ended up with a record of 1-7. The NFL stat gurus Football Outsiders did an analysis just before the last week of the season showing that the Packers were the unluckiest NFL team in the last 27 years. I've never followed a season like that, where every time your team got a lead, you were so resigned to the fact that they'd eventually lose it--and they proved you right every single time. It's just not fun to have your pessimism backed up so consistently.

(Badger football, of course, was awful, too, though not quite in as gut-wrenching fashion as the Packers. They lost six times, with three of those losses coming on last-minute scores. But they also won three close ones, too. All in all, they weren't an unlucky team--just a horrible one.)

Then came winter, and with it, Badger basketball. This was supposed to be a down year for the Badgers, but nowhere near this painful. Back while football season was going on and no one was paying attention, they split a couple of close games, winning by a basket against two teams (Iona and Idaho State) that shouldn't have been able to hang with them and losing two tight ones against top teams (Marquette and Texas). Then came the conference season, and specifically the last four games. The Badgers lost two straight in overtime, then two more in the last minute to bring their losing streak to five, their longest in more than a decade. This quite thoughtful Badger fan's response after the most recent of those losses sums up my thoughts on Tuesday perfectly.

Oh, and Nebraska basketball? They've led big-time programs throughout most of their last three games, only to fall short in the final two minutes. Tom Osborne had to give them a pep talk this week to tell them, basically, that things can't possibly get any worse.

But enough of my whining. At least we still have Husker football, right? Those lucky dogs.

I ain't done can write no more.

Today a reader pointed out to me probably the worst stylistic error I've ever made as a reporter. But it wasn't as bad as it looked, I promise. Allow me to explain.

I was writing an article on the state beekeeper of the year, and I started a sentence planning to write "... he still hadn't done anything." I stopped midsentence and decided instead to write, " ... he still hadn't gotten started." But I forgot to remove the word "done" from my first start. Thus I was left with this doozy:

But a year later, he still hadn't done gotten started.

Ohhhhhhhhh no. Wow. Just wow. We'll just call it a "Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel" moment, and then we'll move on and pretend it didn't happen. Right? Right?

Yup, Ricki Lake made something more respectable than Ben Stein did.

I saw two documentaries on consecutive nights last week--Expelled and The Business of Being Born. Expelled is Ben Stein's pet project and could have been subtitled, "What's So Wrong With Intelligent Design?" The Business of Being Born is Ricki Lake's pet project and could have been subtitled, "What's So Wrong With Home Birth?"

I could write a post or two (or ten) about each of these movies*, but I'll focus on one thing that I think distinguishes the latter film as a much better one: Authenticity.

*Five-second reviews: Expelled is pretty meh, though you'd probably like it if you're part of the choir it's preaching to; Business isn't perfect, either, but it's much more compelling, as long as you're OK with seeing a few no-holds-barred live births. If that assessment is all you cared about, you can quit reading now. (As if you needed me to tell you that.)

During our discussion of Expelled at church, Matt noted that movies like these are really not documentaries at all--they're feature-film-length essays. He's right: whereas a documentary is ostensibly someone just turning on a camera and filming reality by depicting a story or illuminating some aspect of culture (Hoop Dreams and Spellbound are great modern examples of what I'd consider true documentaries), these films are meant to make a point. That doesn't mean documenting reality; it means documenting reality as far as it fits the point you're trying to make.

There's nothing wrong with making a movie like this, but Expelled runs into trouble when it spends most of its time pretending that it's just an honest, old-fashioned documentary. Stein frames the film as his globe-trotting quest to determine whether Intelligent Design is as horrible as the evolutionists say. All the transitions went something like this: "I couldn't believe it--could the ID scientists' stories of being booted out by the science establishment really be true? I decided to go Seattle to find out." Do you honestly think we're that stupid, Ben? Of course you think one side is right and the other is just pompous and arrogant--that's why you're making this movie in the first place. Don't try to play it off like this movie is an honest depiction of your search for truth that just so happened to lead to Intelligent Design. It just leads the viewer to wonder, 'What else is being misleading about?'

Lake's approach with Business was the complete opposite of Stein's. Her film is a video essay, too--but it's pretty upfront in acknowledging that that's exactly what it is. She has all the talking heads explain why hospital births are often manipulative and not as safe as they're made out to be, and why home births are a completely safe and reasonable alternative. But then she does something that's almost jarringly honest: She follows five couples through their home-birth process (including her own and her director's).

She doesn't just edit to only show the relative calm between contractions and then cut to the post-birth euphoria. She shows it all: Women in pain; women grunting, groaning and pushing; husbands and midwives trying to talk them through the experience. (Then she shows the euphoria, too.) When an urgent problem develops during the director's own home birth, the scene doesn't get cut. Instead, she's shown hurriedly gathering her things, collapsing in pain in her apartment building's lobby, piling into a taxi and being rushed into the hospital for a C-section. It's not pretty, but it's what happened. And even though it's not the ideal home-birth experience, it makes for a more compelling argument: She lays her cards on the table, tells you what side she's on, then makes it very clear that she hasn't stacked the deck. Despite the chaos on screen, it's quite a reassuring effect. Strange as it feels to say, Ben could learn a thing or two from Ricki.

The guys on TV don't hate your team. Get over it.

We've just completed college football's bowl season, the time of the year when Americans engage in two time-honored traditions: 1) watching mostly meaningless bowl games and 2) whining about how We've just completed college football's bowl season, the time of the year when Americans engage in two time-honored traditions: 1) watching mostly meaningless bowl games and 2) whining about how much the media hates our favorite team/conference.

I've heard more of it this year than any other I can remember. It's the vicious circle of the victim complex: Big 12 fans complain about the media pushing the SEC's "speed" agenda, while the SEC kvetches about having some combination of schools in Texas and Oklahoma being foisted on them by ESPN every Saturday night. Meanwhile, USC picks up its annual grievance about being left out of the national championship game by the media who forget the Pac-10 exists, while the rest of the country complains about how the media is once again calling a USC team who's played exactly no one since September the best team in the country. And the Big Ten realizes (rightly) that everyone hates them right now, and that certainly doesn't stop everyone else from whining that "biased" ESPN keeps pushing mediocre Big Ten football on them.*

*I think much of this collective pity party stems from our culture's obsession with victimhood in general, but that's a sociological discussion, not a sports one.

The problem is, pretty much all of it is complete crap. First of all, the national sports media (and by this I mostly mean ESPN) can't possibly hate everyone. (Well, I suppose that's possible, but I'm not that cynical...yet.) More importantly, that media has no deep-seated love or hatred for any of those conferences or teams within them. They're biased toward one thing: money. They're in favor of anything insofar as it can bring in more viewers, clicks or advertisers. That means their coverage will be heavy on teams that more people care about. That's most obvious in baseball, where the disparity in size of fan bases is greatest, and much less of an issue in the NFL, where so much of the fan interest is spread league-wide (you can thank fantasy football for at least part of that).

But as regional as college football is, it doesn't make any business sense for ESPN to hold any systemic grudge against any conference, thereby alienating an entire section of the country.* And ESPN controls enough of the sports universe that it has a tentacle--and therefore a business interest--in every corner of the sport.

*Of course, it makes complete business sense for them to favor major conferences over minor ones, so if your favorite team is in a non-BCS conference, then, um, disregard this post's title.

As for the individual announcers/analysts/reporters, I can tell you as a journalist (though many of them are far from journalists) that their only real bias is in favor of good stories. For them, covering games is like when I cover a meeting: I really don't care which side wins; I just want the end product to make for a compelling story. And I'd imagine that the feeling is even greater when your audience has to watch the thing with you. So when Thom Brennaman made his rather ridiculous ode to Tim Tebow on Thursday, it didn't mean he or Fox is in the tank for Florida and the SEC; it just meant he's in love with the story of Tim Tebow.

A final note: Just because an announcer says something negative about your team, it doesn't mean he hates them. (Exception: Billy Packer and mid-majors.) Think about it: You make negative comments about your team or the people on it all the time, and you're a fan of them. So, for the last time, the fact that Kirk Herbstreit said this once does not mean in any way, shape or form that he hates Nebraska. It just means that, like any sane college football fan, he doesn't believe Nebraska has both of the top two teams of all time. Say it with me: There's no cheering in the press box.

Yes, that's right. A year-end list.

You thought I'd let a year's end go by without a list? No way, man. Well, yeah, I guess I did, since it's January 8 and all. Consider this my one-week-late, end-of-the-year (and-as-many-hyphens-as-possible) list of the top five sports events I saw this year.

5. NCAA basketball: Kansas State 80, USC 67.
This game really can't match the drama of the others on this list, but it gets a big boost because it's the only one here that I actually watched in person. Actually, Dana and I watched only the second half after being scalped for tickets, but that was plenty. Beasley vs. Mayo may have been the biggest freshman/freshman matchup in NCAA history, and they (mostly) lived up to it. Beasley was an absolute beast throughout the second half, and Mayo, well, shot a lot. Bonus: we sat with the K-State fans, so we were happy by osmosis.

4. NCAA basketball: Davidson 74, Georgetown 70.
I could have picked any of Davidson's games from this year's tournament for this one--though, let's be honest, I wasn't going to pick Davidson-Wisconsin--but this one really was Stephen Curry's coming-out party, when we all learned how to pronounce his name (rhymes with, um, effin'). Just based on his wispy, almost-fragile-looking body alone, he was possibly the most unlikely athlete I've ever seen dominate a game.

3. NCAA football: Texas Tech 39, Texas 33.
I watched this game all sped-up on Ben Reis' DVR, switching back and forth with the Wisconsin-Penn State game (possibly the best way to watch college football--two full games in three hours). By the time we got to the last two drives, we had given up on the UW game and were focused solely on Texas-Texas Tech. I remember feeling very confident that Tech would win with a field goal as they crept into Texas territory, but it's been a long time since I was as blown away while watching a play as Crabtree's touchdown. This is the first play that comes to mind, and that was a loooong time ago.

2. NFL football: Giants 17, Patriots 14.
One of the biggest upsets of all time. And it couldn't have been perpetrated on a better (and by that I mean worse) team. This just never gets old.

1. NCAA volleyball: Penn State 3, Nebraska 2.
If you're not from Nebraska, I know what you're thinking. "Seriously? Volleyball? What has Dana done to you?!?" If you are from the Cornhusker State, you know exactly why this match is here: When it comes to grit, will to win, gutsiness, teamwork, competitive fire, David vs. Goliath, all those wonderful cliches, I don't think I've ever seen a sporting event that tops this one. The Huskers were down 2-0 to a team that hadn't dropped a set all season. They then stormed back to take not one, but two sets in front of an insane crowd--the largest crowd ever to watch an indoor volleyball match in this country. Finally, the greatest college team in the history of the sport finished off the match and showed why they deserved that title. Couple that with the Huskers' incredible three-set comeback win the previous weekend at Washington, and I have to ask: Could you make a better case for No. 1? Could anyone?