Month: November 2009

Do Journalists Conference Too Much about Journalism?

by Craig Fehrman, posted in All History is Local History, The Media

[New Haven Advocate]

It’s shaping up to be a busy (and alt-weekly-ish) day around here. In this week’s New Haven Advocate, I’ve got a short piece that previews this weekend’s big journalism conference at Yale. (Full program here [.pdf].) The conference lineup looks great, but it also looks a lot like the one that presided at Harvard just two weeks ago, and in my preview I speculate on whether we’ve reached some kind of metamedia tipping point.

I realize there’s an easy irony here, what with me only adding to the oversaturation, but there’s also a larger context I couldn’t really get to in the paper. Yale’s conference is being funded by the school’s Knight Law and Media program, which is itself funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. One of the conference’s speakers is Paul Bass, who edits the hyperlocal New Haven Independent. Bass’s site now has six full-time and six part-time reporters, and together they break more stories than the New Haven Register. Bass keeps innovating, too: in June he launched a second spinoff, the Valley-Independent Sentinel, with a $500,000 grant from none other than the Knight Foundation.

Here are two more numbers to consider: $570,000 and $315,000. Those are the salaries, respectively, for Pro Publica editor Paul Steiger and Texas Tribune editor Evan Smith, and both organizations have received large grants from the Knight Foundation. Now, one more number: $60,000. That’s what the Chi-Town Daily News, a hyperlocal site similar to Bass’s, needed to raise in order to make it to the end of 2009, when several of its grants would have renewed. The Daily News didn’t make it, even though its previous funding sources included . . . the Knight Foundation.

My point here isn’t to highlight the pervasive generosity of the Knight Foundation (though that’s certainly a worthwhile point). Instead, it’s simply that, right now, at least, the pool of nonprofit news money remains a small one, and paying for one good thing means not paying for another.

Speaking in Dialects

by Craig Fehrman, posted in TV and Movies

[x-posted at The Rumpus]

Tim Monich has five times as many IMDB credits as Jason Schwartzman, but we know for whom Brooklyn tolls. This week’s New Yorker profile of Monich won’t change that, of course, but it does offer a riveting look at the world of Hollywood dialect coaches.

Movie accents are one of those things we don’t notice until they go bad, but, as Alec Wilkinson reports, Monich has worked with tons of stars, including Hilary Swank in Amelia and Matt Damon in Invictus. Whatever the role, Monich can rely on his incredible archive of sound recordings—more than six thousand of them, all filed in boxes bearing names like “USA A-H” (American dialects, Alabama to Hawaii).

The world of elite dialect coaching, as you might guess, is a small one; Monich received his start from a student-of-a-student-of-a-student of the man who provided the inspiration for Henry Higgins. (The New Yorker identifies Higgins as the Pygmalion character, but here, at The Rumpus, we’re on fine terms with My Fair Lady.) Thankfully, Wilkinson walks us through the entire process, showing how, under Monich’s aegis, Brad Pitt perfected the speeches memorialized this summer in the Inglourious Basterds trailer. Sooooun gud?

It’s all accessible––Wilkinson spares us any IPA or epiglottal consonants––and it’s all fascinating. Where else will you hear Gerard Butler compare Speak with Distinction to Ulysses? In fact, the whole thing recalls Rebecca Mead’s great 2003 profile of Jaime Pressly, “The Almost-It Girl.” (Like the Monich piece, it sits behind a subscription wall; what’s with The New Yorker burying its best Hollywood-from-the-margins stories?)

But there’s one key difference between Wilkinson’s profile and just about any other piece of Hollywood journalism, and I think it imbues the profile with much of its oomph. In no other story quoting so many celebrities—and Pitt/Damon/Swank are only the start—do they all talk about one relatively average guy. It becomes a weird, inverted world where Leo and Liam rub elbows with Monich and the regular folks he interviewed while building his archive. For a moment, or maybe just for an unruly vowel, the actor-viewer relationship reverses.

In Which I Accidentally Answer My Own Question

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books

Last Friday, in a short essay for The Millions, I tried to call attention to an egregiously overlooked essay by Lewis Hyde on copyright and the Founding Fathers. I spent most of the time summarizing and quoting from Hyde, but did try to end on an original point:

Since December 13, 2005, when Hyde published it on the Social Science Research Network under a Creative Commons license, “Frames from the Framers” has been downloaded only 746 times. . . . [W]hile the Founders’ ideas still hold relevance, they do so in a much different media landscape, and these differences should play a part in any discussion. “Frames from the Framers” is part of Hyde’s book-in-progress, so its ideas will get their due soon enough. Still, it says some timely things in richly historical ways. Hyde’s essay deserves attention now—not least because its own reception offers one more thing to consider in our ongoing debate about individuals, intellectual property, and the circulation of ideas.

Well, Hyde’s is now the second-most popular essay at the SSRN. This is thanks in large part to the Internet taste-makers at Boing Boing; it also shows one way our “media landscape” now circulates ideas.

I’m going to stop before I give myself a meta-headache.