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Sep

18

Do you contribute to or deplete your political party’s brain power?

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Politics Extra has the test for you to figure out the answer to that question with this site, MyBrain Trainer Challenge.

Me? I am too dumb to even understand my results.  But I can tell you one thing – my reaction time at 8pm on a school night after being awake since 6:15am and doing who knows how many errands and phone calls and appointments and reading and loads of laundry and cooking and cleaning and making kids do homework and, oh, blogging – totally and unequivocally sucks.

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By Jill Miller Zimon at 7:58 pm September 18th, 2007 in Politics | Comments Off 

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Sep

18

How is it that in Ohio, candidate believes that gay would “eclipse every other important issue”?

Filed Under Blogging, Elections, Government, Media, Ohio, Politics, Scandal, Statehouse | 10 Comments

I could be wrong, one-dimensional nature of blogs and all, but I think Jerid is giving me guff on Buckeye State Blog for not playing harder when it comes to certain issues. Or maybe for not playing at all (and maybe that’s my guilt coming through – this blog moving has taken a lot out of me and I’m definitely not going after the issues or incidents that more naturally give way to argumentation or discussion). Even Bill Sloat wanted to know, on The Daily Bellwether, why I didn’t expect to find myself sleuthing the anonymous comment that outed Wood County Commissioner Tim Brown (to whom I apologize because my first post about the story named him as “Tom” – oy).

Well – the final paragraph in this Daily Briefing item by Columbus Dispatch senior political editor Joe Hallett, which starts out as a brief about and is headlined to indicate that it addresses Randy Gardner’s choice not to run for Paul Gillmor’s seat in the OH-5, is exactly why I haven’t been going after the anonymous commenter or pounding the fact that the comment appeared on the excellent Ohio Daily Blog.

It’s this very last line, a quote from Tim Brown:

Brown acknowledged his sexual orientation publicly over the weekend, telling The Blade of Toledo: “Quite frankly, if I were in the race for Congress this would eclipse every other important issue.”

If Brown’s assertion about how his being gay would eclipse every other important issue in an Ohio congressional race doesn’t make you sick to your stomach, and isn’t truly the one piece of information in the entire Daily Briefing post that you remember or that made you realize you were even awake, then you too are focusing on all the wrong things.

This Toledo Blade columnn, hattip to Lisa Renee ad Glass City Jungle for flagging it, is the kind of discussion we should be having.

And, as I explained in this follow-up comment, it makes me irate that Brown feels that the amount of money a candidate must raise to be in a congressional race prohibits him from running as a gay, Republican candidate.  I assume he believes this because he does not believe that he could count on the usual financial supporters to still support him, now that he is out.

WE are Ohioans.  How can we let this be? Why? To what end? Can it possibly benefit us, in the short-term or long-term?

People can do whatever they want with their money.  Support whomever they want, based on whatever criteria they want. But the fact that a prospective candidate feels that he can’t be a candidate because 1) it costs a lot of money and 2) people in his political party won’t give that quantity of money to a gay man, no matter how able, completely baffles, angers and saddens me.

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By Jill Miller Zimon at 3:47 pm September 18th, 2007 in Blogging, Elections, Government, Media, Ohio, Politics, Scandal, Statehouse | 10 Comments 

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Sep

18

NYT free? big deal – WSJ will go the same way

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That’s the word on the street at the Goldman Sachs XVI Communacopia Conference:

Murdoch gave his strongest statements to date the WSJ.com will go free following the purchase. He says they haven’t made up their mind completely, but that the company doesn’t feel it would hurt subscription revenues and that any lost revenue would be more than made up from increased readership and search engine traffic.

For those of us who’ve gotten around subscriptions for months, years and longer, let me repeat myself and add to my SEO value: big deal. (Here’s a post on the liberation of the NYT’s online content.)

What’s far more interesting is: who can give a good graph on Communacopia? This year is its 16th. And I cannot find a word about it, beyond announcements of who is presenting there and this template for 2006′s attendees to watch webinars.

All you business folk out there – what’s the Goldman Sachs Communacopia Conference and why doesn’t it have a Wikipedia entry?

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By Jill Miller Zimon at 12:59 pm September 18th, 2007 in Media | 7 Comments 

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Sep

18

Diversity among news disseminators, where art thou?

Filed Under Media | 13 Comments

When The Plain Dealer‘s editor, Susan Goldberg apologized, right or wrong, for a cartoon by Jeff Darcy that centered on the shotgun death of a 12 year old in Cleveland, one comment she made referenced the lack of diversity in the Plain Dealer’s newsroom. The child was African-American.

This Poynter column expands on that tip of the iceberg realization and discusses at length some possible underlying connections to that lack of diversity.

“Collectively, the people running our journalism and mass-comm programs don’t look much like America, and they don’t even look a lot like their own student bodies, which are now pretty much two-to-one female,” Tom Kunkel, dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, wrote in a report last month. “Like the media industries, we’ve got to work harder and smarter on this problem. That means everything from better mentoring of female and minority faculty to cultivating media interest among students of color when they’re still in our elementary and secondary schools. We simply need more talent in the pipeline.”

Remember the geography lesson where you had to learn the difference between the mouth and the source of a river? In regard to this issue of diversity, both ends need work.

Further legitimization, encouragement and promotion of citizen journalism would be one way for both ends to bulk up.

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By Jill Miller Zimon at 10:12 am September 18th, 2007 in Media | 13 Comments 

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