In the 12 years I worked in newspapers, I turned to the Associated Press Stylebook for advice on everything from the difference between Baptists and Lutherans to the correct way to note the caliber of pistol ammunition. I still keep the stylebook close at hand. But the AP Stylebook is a practical, no-nonsense guide to how to construct discrete elements of whatever it is you happen to be writing, regardless of whether it’s a serious analysis of international monetary systems or a column about a new cartoon show on TV. It spends little space trying to inspire writers to write, encouraging them to be creative or gushing about the joy of being a journalist. Even the AP’s Guide to News Writing is more “how to” than “how marvelous.” “140 Characters,” on the other hand, seems mostly concerned with convincing the reader of the unbearable wonderfulness of using Twitter.
I love Twitter. It’s interesting and informative — dare I say wonderful? — and I use it every day. I really wanted to like this book, but I don’t have any time for 179 pages of syrupy evangelism for Twitter. If “140 Characters” had been subtitled something such as “Find your voice on Twitter” and presented as an inspirational tome, the book might have been easier to swallow and might have been more clearly targeted toward the kind of people who go to writers’ groups to talk about how great it is to be a writer.
If the past is prologue, perhaps I’m not too late to point out communications guru Bert Decker’s list of the 10 best and worst communicators of 2008. I was pleased to introduce San Francisco Examiner readers to Bert’s observations back when I was editorial-page editor there, and he’s never failed to produce relevant insight each year. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has the uncommon distinction of making the 2008 list twice: once among the best, and once with the worst.
PretePress readers may recall a similar observation I made following Palin’s speech to the Republican Convention in September.
From Bert’s blog:
1. Barack Obama As his star continues to rise, there’s just no contest for #1 Best Communicator.
And it’s not just because he was elected President that he deserves #1, but that he was elected President BECAUSE of his communications ability. President Elect Obama is the first repeat at #1 (2006) and for the same reason. He vaulted from obscurity on the strength of his words and speeches at the 2004 Democratic Convention, and just kept talking. To date he hasn’t really done much except communicate. Shows you how important that skill is. One of the greatest modern orators, we’ll now see if he can replace Bill Clinton as “the great communicator” while in office.
2. Tim Russert He was one of the best, and we’ll miss him.
One of our best TV journalists died this year, and he would have made this list without the posthumous honor. Russert was personable, energetic and open but also tough, incisive and smart. Meet The Press, and Network TV News will never be the same. His son Luke Russert was eloquent in his eulogy, and maybe there will be more…
I’m really pleased to report that I’ve almost reached full funding for my story about San Francisco’s Muni express bus service on spot.us!
Muni may be watching its funding get yanked out from under it right now, but that makes it even more important for Muni to run well with the resources still available. And clearly, people are interested in why Muni doesn’t run more expresses to serve the needs of daily commuters. As of the afternoon of Dec. 11, my story pitch for crowd-funded journalism site spot.us was just $60 away from full funding.
MetBlogs’ Anna explains the concept this way: “You submit an idea, either a story you want reported, or one you want to report, and people vote or Digg it *before* the work is done. Crowd-sourced journalism.”
Muni bus on Market Street.
I’m also pleased to report that thanks to some generous pledges, funding for my story is just $180 from the goal. For just a few dollars (really — a donation of 10 bucks makes a big impact), you can be part of this new direction in journalism, too. And if you’re a media outlet or other publisher of news, don’t forget that this is a great way to get unique content at a very reasonable price.
Have you ever missed the last Muni express bus and had to endure a slow bus ride home through San Francisco at the end of a long day at work? Have you come to know your fellow bus commuters a little more intimately than you might have liked because those express buses are so crowded? Have you ever thought of giving up driving your car to work in San Francisco, only to find that the express bus just doesn’t meet your needs? What’s going on? Why doesn’t Muni run more express buses?
You can help get the story on San Francisco’s Muni express buses by taking part in a new direction in media and the news: crowd-funded journalism. Crowd-funded journalism means that instead of a single publication or other media outlet paying for a news story, lots of people pitch in a little bit to fund the story. For print publications, blogs and other publishers of content, this means good content at a very low price. For news consumers, this means that they can decide what news gets published, by making even a small contribution.
I’ve pitched this story on the new crowd-funded (or “community-funded,” if you prefer) journalism site spot.us. For more information about my story on Muni express buses, or about spot.us and crowd-funded journalism, watch the video below or visit http://www.spot.us/pitches/39.
One year ago, the container ship Cosco Busan hit a bumper on one of the towers of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, spilling more than 50,000 gallons of toxic bunker fuel in San Francisco Bay.
(More following video below)
I went down to Ocean Beach to see the damage for myself, and things were pretty bad. I expected the beach to be completely black with oil, and thought it wasn’t that bad, it was bad enough, with blobs of oil from the size of marbles up to the size of dinner plates all over the sand, and more stuck to the wrack that always rests on the beach.
Oil blob, Ocean Beach
The worst part was the birds. I saw a dead bird covered with oil right away, and farther down the beach I found more that were still alive but heavily oiled and clearly in distress. I think the saddest sight was two little eared grebes hunkered down in the sand near the end of Sloat Boulevard, desperately trying to preen the oil out of their feathers. They likely ingested quite a bit of the oil stuck to them, in which case they probably didn’t survive.
Dead murre on Ocean Beach
One year later, some measures have been taken to prevent another spill and to better clean up afterward, but much more remains undone. A proposed law requiring double-hulled fuel tanks on cargo ships is stalled in Congress, some proposals for faster required response times have been rejected, and most glaringly there still is little training available for people who want to be part of volunteer cleanup crews in preparation for the next spill.
Oiled grebe on Ocean Beach
As for the impact of the spill on the environment of San Francisco Bay and the nearby parts of the Pacific Ocean coast, that’s still under study. One important piece of information will come in just a matter of weeks, when schools of herring make their annual journey into the bay to lay their eggs on eelgrass and various seaweeds. The herring fishery is the last commercial fishery in the bay, with herring eggs (preferably still attached to the seaweed) fetching a good price in Japan.
The pilot guiding the Cosco Busan on the day of the crash is set to go to trial in the spring.
For more photos of the oil spill, including some that the Weather Channel picked up for an episode of its Forecast Earth show, click here to visit my Flickr photostream. I’ve separated some oil spill photos into two folders to make them easier to find.
The San Francisco Chronicle did a good job of covering the Cosco Busan spill when it happened, and they’ve done a good job following up a year later. I don’t see any reason to reinvent the wheel here, so here are some links to my posts from last year, plus some Chronicle stories:
U.S. presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain meet at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y. tonight for their third and final debate of the 2008 race. Does McCain still have a chance to turn his campaign around? Can Obama conclusively nail the race tonight?
Barack Obama
Barack Obama has what looks like an overwhelming lead in Electoral College votes, according to most polls, and he continues to press the Republican candidate in states that McCain should have sewn up a long time ago.
But John McCain has been newly energized about promoting his plan for handling the current economic crisis and recharging the U.S. economy. Tonight’s debate is viewed by some analysts as a do-or-die moment for the McCain campaign, when he either will seize his last chance to get American voters excited about his candidacy or watch the presidency slip irretrievably out of reach.
I’ll make my own prediction — it’s a safe one — and say that neither candidate will do anything tonight to change the minds of voters who already have made up their minds for the other guy. Furthermore, my guess is that Obama will convince some undecided voters to throw in with him, but will still leave most of the undecideds questioning who should get their votes.
John McCain
However, this debate does present a convenient opportunity for McCain to decide how he wants this campaign to fit into his legacy as a war hero and respected legislator. Does he make one last push in an attempt to surmount long odds, using whatever methods are expedient, at the risk of marring his reputation even if he wins? Or does he look beyond this election, distance himself from some of the campaign tactics he previously disavowed but now employs, and ask history to remember him as he was before this run for the White House?
That’s a choice only McCain can make — but if he want to keep pushing for the presidency, he needs to take advantage of tonight’s debate, even though the debate alone is highly unlikely to make the difference.
McCain has spent the past few days pushing an economic plan that he bills as new, even though much of it simply reflects the core of the Republican economic agenda of the past decade or so. But it sounds new enough to most people that McCain should keep going back to it as often as possible in the debate.
He needs to do tonight what Obama did in the first debate: present concrete ideas in clear, simple language. If McCain did no more than adopt Obama’s answering style of a simple preface followed by three or four numbered points, he would be way ahead of his performance in the past debates and well on his way to quashing the notion that his campaign has run out of ideas and can’t come up with a credible alternative to Obama’s proposals. Now that McCain has a relatively coherent plan — for the purposes of the election it doesn’t really matter whether it will work as economic policy or not — he needs to push it and push it and push it.
Obama could choose to play defense tonight, seeking long-term victory by simply avoiding errors in the debate. If he can, though, Obama should use the debate to keep McCain off-balance. McCain’s best ammo for the debate is his “new” economic plan, but pushing it as strongly as he will need to leaves McCain vulnerable to Obama coming out with a strong presentation of his own domestic policy plans.
Both candidates would be unwise to even address the attacks their campaigns have made on each other in the past two weeks. It makes for dull television and seems not to play well with undecided voters in this election.
The debate starts at 6 p.m. Pacific time, 9 p.m. Eastern. On nearly everywhere. Ostensibly the topic is domestic policy, but both candidates are likely to direct their answers where they want to go.
* * *
Parting Shots: I’m no economist, but there’s one idea both Obama and McCain have suggested recently that even I know is foolish in the extreme. That idea is the proposal to offer tax relief to people withdrawing money early from their 401Ks and other retirement savings accounts, and it’s dumb on two levels. First, for many people this will serve merely to enable them to put off reckoning with their overextended lifestyle, giving them a way to spend money they previously had reluctantly saved. When that money is gone, what good will it have done them? Second, at a time when investors only worsen the economic downturn when they withdraw their money from the market, this proposal would give many more people a tax incentive to do just that. It doesn’t make any sense.
U.S. presidential candidates Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama met Tuesday for the second of three scheduled debates in the general election. Who won? Did the candidates accomplish what they needed to do?
My initial impression of this town hall-style event was that it was uncommonly dull, and I’m the sort of person who gets all worked up reading an environmental-impact report.
Barack Obama, I knew, didn’t have to wow anyone last night. Unless the world around him changes radically in the next couple of weeks, Obama’s mission is to keep stimulating voters who’ve already decided to support him and to deny McCain the ability to rest. Obama needs to be vigilant against positive poll numbers lulling him into becoming complacent, of course, but he also needs to watch against trying to push so hard against McCain that he takes unnecessary chances. Still, Obama seemed off his game Tuesday, and I think he spent too much time counterattacking McCain instead of steering perceptions in the direction he wanted.
What’s interesting to me is that I don’t think it was McCain’s debate performance at the debate that forced Obama into a reactive stance: McCain was jumpy, vague and awkward, and he didn’t effectively make a case for a McCain presidency. Instead, Obama seemed to have decided before the debate to respond to and counterattack against McCain, and it didn’t come off well.
I’ve written before that I think McCain conservatism is much better for our nation than the Bush brand, so it was with some regret that I watched McCain’s ineffective performance last night.
All right, so what grades do the candidates get?
Keep in mind that I’m grading two different things in this analysis. First, I grade the candidates on their performance in the debate, looking at it as a stand-alone contest that could be reduced to box scores like a baseball game. This tells who “won” or “lost” the debate but doesn’t get into what that means for the campaign as a whole. Second, I assess the debate not as a single night’s contest, but rather as part of the continuum of the campaign. In other words, how does the debate fit into the context of the race as a whole? The candidate who “loses” the debate doesn’t necessarily hurt his campaign, and a candidate who “wins” doesn’t necessarily help himself going forward.
Overall grades on the debate itself
John McCain C-plus
Barack Obama C-plus
The second McCain-Obama presidential debate was so boring I’m not going to spend much time on the debate itself.
As far as McCain’s performance went, he got in a number of good points and clearly won a couple of the questions, but overall he didn’t produce a memorable narrative. In the first debate he gave a good narrative of himself, but this time he couldn’t articulate a narrative of how a President McCain would turn around the American economy. There were bits here and there, but nothing that came together in a memorable way.
If all an undecided voter saw of Barack Obama was Tuesday’s debate, he would be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss is about. He wasn’t awful: Like McCain, Obama got in some points and dominated some of the questions. He also did better according to the gut-check that CNN’s Approve-O-Meter provided — strikingly better among women. But there still was no there there.
Grades on the debate in the broader context of the campaign
Many observers of the vice-presidential debate between Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin noticed that Palin shares President George W. Bush’s mispronunciation of “nuclear” as “new-kyoo-lurr.” Why would an otherwise intelligent person mistake the correct way to say a word that isn’t any more difficult than “likelier”?
In a radio commentary from 2002, language expert Prof. Geoffrey Nunberg explained that in Bush’s case, the mispronunciation may be deliberate, a sort of modern shibboleth — a way to distinguish “us” from “them.” And in such cases, it’s used only for nuclear weapons. Could Sarah Palin be using “nucular” the same way?
In the mouths of those people, “nucular” is a choice, not an inadvertent mistake — a thinko, not a typo. I’m not sure exactly what they have in mind by it. Maybe it appeals to them to refer to the weapons in what seems like a folksy and familiar way, or maybe it’s a question of asserting their authority — as if to say, “We’re the ones with our fingers on the button, and we’ll pronounce the word however we damn well please.”
RT @greathighway: Had been open only since Fri afternoon RT @sfdpw: Traffic alert: Southbound Great Highway closed Lincoln to Sloat due ... 1 month ago
Posted by Tom Prete 
Third Obama-McCain presidential debate preview
October 15, 2008U.S. presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain meet at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y. tonight for their third and final debate of the 2008 race. Does McCain still have a chance to turn his campaign around? Can Obama conclusively nail the race tonight?
Barack Obama
Barack Obama has what looks like an overwhelming lead in Electoral College votes, according to most polls, and he continues to press the Republican candidate in states that McCain should have sewn up a long time ago.
But John McCain has been newly energized about promoting his plan for handling the current economic crisis and recharging the U.S. economy. Tonight’s debate is viewed by some analysts as a do-or-die moment for the McCain campaign, when he either will seize his last chance to get American voters excited about his candidacy or watch the presidency slip irretrievably out of reach.
I’ll make my own prediction — it’s a safe one — and say that neither candidate will do anything tonight to change the minds of voters who already have made up their minds for the other guy. Furthermore, my guess is that Obama will convince some undecided voters to throw in with him, but will still leave most of the undecideds questioning who should get their votes.
John McCain
However, this debate does present a convenient opportunity for McCain to decide how he wants this campaign to fit into his legacy as a war hero and respected legislator. Does he make one last push in an attempt to surmount long odds, using whatever methods are expedient, at the risk of marring his reputation even if he wins? Or does he look beyond this election, distance himself from some of the campaign tactics he previously disavowed but now employs, and ask history to remember him as he was before this run for the White House?
That’s a choice only McCain can make — but if he want to keep pushing for the presidency, he needs to take advantage of tonight’s debate, even though the debate alone is highly unlikely to make the difference.
McCain has spent the past few days pushing an economic plan that he bills as new, even though much of it simply reflects the core of the Republican economic agenda of the past decade or so. But it sounds new enough to most people that McCain should keep going back to it as often as possible in the debate.
He needs to do tonight what Obama did in the first debate: present concrete ideas in clear, simple language. If McCain did no more than adopt Obama’s answering style of a simple preface followed by three or four numbered points, he would be way ahead of his performance in the past debates and well on his way to quashing the notion that his campaign has run out of ideas and can’t come up with a credible alternative to Obama’s proposals. Now that McCain has a relatively coherent plan — for the purposes of the election it doesn’t really matter whether it will work as economic policy or not — he needs to push it and push it and push it.
Obama could choose to play defense tonight, seeking long-term victory by simply avoiding errors in the debate. If he can, though, Obama should use the debate to keep McCain off-balance. McCain’s best ammo for the debate is his “new” economic plan, but pushing it as strongly as he will need to leaves McCain vulnerable to Obama coming out with a strong presentation of his own domestic policy plans.
Both candidates would be unwise to even address the attacks their campaigns have made on each other in the past two weeks. It makes for dull television and seems not to play well with undecided voters in this election.
The debate starts at 6 p.m. Pacific time, 9 p.m. Eastern. On nearly everywhere. Ostensibly the topic is domestic policy, but both candidates are likely to direct their answers where they want to go.
* * *
Parting Shots: I’m no economist, but there’s one idea both Obama and McCain have suggested recently that even I know is foolish in the extreme. That idea is the proposal to offer tax relief to people withdrawing money early from their 401Ks and other retirement savings accounts, and it’s dumb on two levels. First, for many people this will serve merely to enable them to put off reckoning with their overextended lifestyle, giving them a way to spend money they previously had reluctantly saved. When that money is gone, what good will it have done them? Second, at a time when investors only worsen the economic downturn when they withdraw their money from the market, this proposal would give many more people a tax incentive to do just that. It doesn’t make any sense.
