News Quiz Time! For Friday, September 11, 2015

My latest Week to Week News Quiz is out! See how much you know about current events.

Threats Galore in This Week's W2W News Quiz

Threats from the RNC, from sharks, and BART. Can you handle it? Find it in my latest Week to Week News Quiz over on Huffington Post San Francisco.

And They Wonder Why Voters Are Confused

Well, some voters are simply confused in all aspects of their life. But look at the headlines above from today's front page of the Huffington Post, and you'll see why even voters who pay attention to the news and think about it can still be confused.

On the left, "National Tracking Polls Show Romney Uptick," while on the right, "Romney Still Surging? Polls Say No."

So he's no longer surging, but his polls are on the upswing. Clear as mud? Welcome to Internet news. The Land that Editors Forgot.

The News, Short and Sweet

I wrote a lot for the current edition of the Marina Times. Here's a media column:

MEDIA
The News, Short and Sweet: One in depth, one in brief
By John Zipperer
Opinion articles about the media are often critical, pointing out everything that is wrong with all or certain media outlets. Here is a corrective. 

There are countless professional news and information outlets available via the Internet. Some are good, a few are great, and many are bad or incompetent. Here are two very different websites that take divergent approaches, and each succeeds in increasing the reach of news and ideas. Newser is arguably the best place to ...

Read the complete article

Putin! Gay Marriage! Romney! Take My Latest News Quiz

It's been quite a week. Putin is playing hard to get; Obama's making the most of a Biden announcement; Mitt Romney's dealing with more men-behaving-badly behavior in his past. It's been that kind of a week.

See how up-to-date you are: Take my latest Week to Week news quiz on Huffington Post San Francisco.

Take My New News Quiz on Huffington Post San Francisco!

Today, I launched a weekly news quiz on Huffington Post San Francisco. It's 10 questions that I hope you will find to be smart and fun. Some answers you'll know easily; others might stretch your skull a bit.

Take the quiz!

Read Me on Huffington Post Today: News, Civility ... and Lunch?!?

Read it here

This Chinese Life

Or is it??

It's been a bad time for Ira Glass and his staff at the public radio program This American Life. This week, they had to publicly acknowledge that an episode of their quirky radio program was not true. Or at least not entirely true.

I won't recount the entire controversy, because it's been rehashed elsewhere ad infinitum. But, briefly, the January episode featured performance artist Mike Daisey reporting on a trip to the infamous Foxconn factories in China, where Apple products are made. He tells of meeting underage workers, an iPad factory worker who'd never seen a working iPad, armed guards outside the Foxconn factory, workers crippled by industrial pollutants, and more. But when a China-based reporter for another public radio program, Marketplace, heard the Daisey story, he knew that it sounded wrong, so he did actual reporting, and what he found was that Daisey lied, made up things that didn't happen, pretended to be in places he wasn't, tried to cover up his tracks, pretended to see things that had happened at factories (and at companies) hundreds of miles away.

There's enough reporting out there to let us know that Apple's Foxconn factories are bad places to work, so it's amazing that Daisey thought he had to fictionalize it to make it attention-grabbing. But he did, Ira Glass and his producers didn't catch it during their fact-checking, and the program aired. Now, Glass and his producers are bravely admitting the shortcomings of themselves and of Daisey.

I have to admit, I'm not a fan of This American Life, and the reason why is not unrelated to how they got themselves into this mess. I could never get past the serious, sometimes heart-wrenching stories being narrated while in the background hip music plays. The music is basically saying, "This isn't important. Life is quirky, innit?" That sound combo always struck me as the producers trying harder to be hip, rather than relying on the power of the journalism.

Well, their correspondent in this now-retracted story does not claim to be a journalist. (So why use him?) He is a performance artist. (So why use him?) His story had problems during fact-checking. (So why use it?) They went ahead with it even though they couldn't corroborate all of Daisey's claims. (So why use it?) I'm not being snarky when I say that This American Life's producers are having something of a journalistic come-to-Jesus moment as they look at what went wrong.

You can listen to the retraction episode (named, naturally, "Retraction") on the TAL website. It's a fine episode, and one that I hope is heard by every journalism student (and working journalist) in the country. Though I don't care for their program, I think Glass and his cohorts deserve serious praise for confronting the errors – theirs and Daisey's – that went into that episode. They are serious; from what I could tell from listening to "Retraction," they appear to be leaving no stone unturned and no sacred cow unexamined. In so doing, Glass & Co. are doing more than restoring their reputations; they are giving listeners an important lesson in why journalism has standards and why being right is more important than being hip.

Reuters in Print: Reuters magazine

This seems to be my theme this week: Unexpected one-shot magazine covers. Yesterday, we looked at the horror magazine Fangoria launching a new series of "Legends" one-shots, the first focusing on George A. Romero. Today I've stumbled across the magazine pictured above, which comes from the news operation Thomson Reuters and is titled, appropriately, Reuters.

A Davos-themed magazine, Reuters looks like it would be a pretty interesting experiment in publishing. Reuters is a news gathering and syndication company (I know, it has other arms and divisions, but as for news consumption, you usually get your Reuters fix from the Reuters website or from other media organizations that run Reuters stories). Daily news differs greatly from longform journalism, and daily journalism is something that the internet simply does better (and often worse, but mostly better) than print. But a weekly or semi-monthly magazine of longform Reuters journalism ... has promise.

I have no idea if that's what the company is contemplating. But it would be an interesting way of exploiting their brand, their vast and respected news-gathering operation, and the medium of print, which isn't nearly as dead as the skateboard crowd would have you believe.

Announcing Week to Week: The News Review Program from The Commonwealth Club

On February 24, 2012, we will be premiering a brand new series of programs at The Commonwealth Club of California, and I'm very excited about it. It is called Week to Week, the news review program from The Commonwealth Club, and it is something I've been wanting to do for a long time, but the opportunity only presented itself recently. I will be producing and hosting a weekly live program featuring a panel discussing the week's news, audience Q&A, an in-depth discussion with a newsmaker or journalist or expert on one topic, a news quiz, and thoughts about the coming week.

One thing I did not expect to achieve with the very first program in the series is to get the very first panelists I contacted – but we did. I have been very impressed with Dr. Larry Gerston, a professor emeritus at San Jose State University and a frequent commentator on NBC 11, and the San Francisco Chronicle's Debra Saunders, a frequent commentator on CNN's "Reliable Sources," because they have shown the ability to talk intelligently, civilly, yet engagingly about important news events and trends. I know they'll make a great panel.

The program will begin with a semi-monthly (twice-a-month) schedule, but it will eventually become weekly. Taking place at 12 noon on Fridays, Week to Week will likely become a must-do event for the Bay Area's news-hungry residents. We'll even have box lunches they can buy beforehand, if they want.

So if you are in the Bay Area and would like to spend your Friday lunch period surrounded by people who are engaged with the news, come on over. And if you can't make it, you'll be able to get a 99-cent download of the audio from The Commonwealth Club's online store shortly after the program ends.

Find out how you can attend or how you can download the audio: visit the Week to Week website for details and ticket information.

SF Movie News Video (beta)

Galaxis SF Movie News Dec. 2011
by: jzipperer


Readers of this blog know that I created a free digital science & science-fiction magazine called Galaxis, which can be read or downloaded from the issuu website.

Today, I present a new experiment, to be followed by more (and much better, I assure you) such videos as I learn the XtraNormal text-to-movie system. Above, my Galaxis news staffer reads the quarterly science-fiction movie news.

Like I say, it's a beta test; the timing is off, and there is much more that can be done with additional speakers, facial expressions, movements, and pauses. But I still think it's a fun experiment. And, again, it will get better...

France 24 News Site at a Loss for Words

And you can count how many words they are at a loss for, in the text crawl box that has no headline other than the instructions to the headline writer. Oops.

la tragédie!

Video: Timothy Geithner on the Dollar, Deficit Spending, and Business

Here are some short video excerpts from U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's October 18, 2010, program at The Commonwealth Club of California, in Palo Alto, Calif.

On the dollar:



On reforming federal spending:



On deficits:



On perception that Obama is anti-business:

Video of Hillary Clinton Discussing the Taliban

Short (not terribly clear) video of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton telling The Commonwealth Club of California on October 15, 2010, about American policy toward dealing with the Taliban in China and Afghanistan.

Update from Iran's Elections

So this doesn't have anything directly to do with magazines, the main topic of this blog. But it's stunning -- and I think everyone who can should be paying attention and spreading reports of the amazing developments in Iran. I don't know how this will turn out; might very well lead to a bloody crackdown and an even more repressive state. Let's hope for a better outcome than that.

Here's a report from Channel 4 News in the UK:

Playboy for Sale? Not so Fast

So I was correct in suspecting it was just a "since you asked" response and not a move to begin bidding. The Washington Post reports that the company says, well, it's always open to acquisition interest; just nothing's been enough to interest them yet.

Personally, I hope they don't sell, or at least don't sell to the typical MBA-run brand maximization and strategic planning emulsifier (I ran out of business jargon words) who would just as easily turn the magazine into a pornographic rag as turn it into a copy of Esquire. I think Playboy the magazine is on the right track these past few years, and if the new editor's stated desires are followed through, then it'll continue to be a magazine to be proud of.

The Post article notes that people hoping for big change were heartened by the recent exit of CEO Christie Hefner, but now the big "obstacle" that remains is founder/editor Hugh Hefner. (Audio of Christie Hefner addressing The Commonwealth Club.)

Frankly, I'd put more store in the decisions of the man who created a miracle magazine and expanded it into a worldwide brand and movement and symbol of quality than I would trust the trading-desk opinions of some business geek who sees this as another company that can be bought and flipped or torn apart and sold for scrap. But then, I'm a magazine person, so my bias is obvious.

Vanity Fair Gives up in Germany

Vanity Fair launched its German edition in February 2007 to much fanfare. The weekly (as opposed to the monthly VF in the U.S.) magazine drew about 200,000 in circulation, but that wasn't enough -- certainly not in these awful economic times. Vanity Fair is closing its German edition and shutting its offices there, according to English-language German news site The Local.
What's important here is a note in the article that a Conde Nast executive "had said as late as December ... that the fashion and lifestyle magazine with a weekly circulation of 200,000 would power through the global economy crisis."
Yep. Things are moving that fast. Even in December, it was clear to anybody who was really paying attention that we're in no ordinary recession and that it was going to be long and ugly. So in December, Conde Nast thought its German edition could squeak through; now they're throwing in the towel.
That means this is very bad. Is anyone still an optimist?

Peanut Butter

Peanut butter, the world's greatest food (or food ingredient; depends on how picky you are), is being pulled off store shelves around the country.
Sure, this country trashed the world economic system, gutted the Constitution, waged (poorly) two foreign wars (one of them on questionable grounds), and debased our political discussion. But peanut butter ... that, sir, is too much!

Magazine News: The Inaugural Issues

With the recent news that the election of Barack Obama helped Time magazine set a newsstand sales record, it should surprise no one that the inauguration of Obama would make even more publishers slap his face on their covers and hope for newsstand magic in these tough economic times. And so it is.

You expect Time and Newsweek to put the president's swearing in ceremony on their covers. But I was surprised to see Giant Robot (a magazine covering Japanese pop culture) do so, less surprised to see lifestyle mags like Life & Style (talk about a perfect monicker) and People (with what I think is the most beautiful cover of the bunch).

Feeling somewhat left out, my own magazine, the serious Commonwealth, also slapped Obama on the cover. But then we don't include stories about celebrity bed-hopping or giant robots (though, I'd love to have the latter). Instead, our cover story is about experts such as scientist Richard Muller, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, diplomat George Mitchell, and many others offering advice to the new president, who has so many items of business to balance (hence the cover image, right?). I hope this makes our newsstand sales go through the roof. :)

Queerantine Short Film

The above short video was made by Kerry O'Quinn and others in response to the hysterical pro-Proposition 8 advertisements that tormented Californians last autumn.