NPR Fresh Air
January 2012
“What these guys realize is that you can dig up all of this negative information, but if it’s coming from a Romney press release about Gingrich, let’s say, it’s going to have a lot less gravity with people than if it comes out in a newspaper like The New York Times or it comes out on MSNBC or CNN. So a lot of what the opposition research is about is getting the information to reporters, getting them to report it, and putting the imprimatur of an objective outlet around it. So this is the warfare that’s going on between these campaigns.”
—Joe Hagan on how opposition researchers use the media to influence negative ads.
“I consider the first 20 performances just learning the piece. Think about it this way: If you think about a pianist who plays a Schubert sonata through his whole lifetime — if you listen to Rubenstein or Horowitz playing their repertoire later in their life, you understand the richness with which they play that music, and how differently they must have played it when they were younger. … I think it’s only after about 20 performances that we begin to understand what the dynamic structure of the piece is.”
—Philip Glass on repetition. Philip Glass on repetition.
“The distinction between the messaging that is coming out of political campaigns and their Super-PACs and what’s going on in the press is getting more and more blurred.”
—Joe Hagan on the relationship between the press and campaign strategists.
Media Diet?
I gave a talk at my college newspaper last night about interviewing and ethics. A lot of the people at the talk had questions relating to journalism careers and social media. I sent them a list of links this morning and thought I would share them here too. Does anyone have any other ones to suggest?
Helpful Sites:
I use Media Gazer to keep on top of media stories (a good way to learn about job openings is to read about when people have moved on…) I also have a twitter search for ‘public media’ AND ‘jobs.’ You can substitute ‘newspaper’ or ‘magazine’ for public media, obviously. @nprjobs posts all of the npr-related jobs. Lots of people post about jobs on Twitter so follow journalists you admire and you’ll start to see some job postings.
Atlantic Wire: Media Diet is a good resource for finding out what other journalists are reading:
I keep Twitter keyword trackers (in Tweetdeck) and Google News Alerts for keywords associated with my show. If you have a beat, creating a keyword tracker for your beat + Philadelphia will result in many helpful tips.
This is a cool site from the WSJ which just shows you top headlines. You can change the order (I think the WSJ is first because they made it.)
CJR tracks media stories. A good overview of what’s going on in the biz.
This is just a *really* nice way to display clips online.
If you use any other sites, please let me know. Obviously, this is just a sampling to get them started. (Many were freshman and eager to get involved in journalism.)
“I think our show avoids that because it has a slow pace, and it lasts for a drawn out amount of time. It’s not edit-edit-edit, scene shift scene shift. It’s a genuine conversation. I think it’s the opposite of Twitter in that sense. But, preparing for the guests brings about a sense of too much information. We walk around feeling like we’ve been totally overloaded. The producers and I often joke about the stuff we’ve learned and the things we’ll never remember.”
—Terry Gross, in an interview with BrightestYoungThings, talking about Fresh Air and informational overload.
Play
On that one quote about what Stew encountered when he went to Europe, what country was he in? Just thought I'd ask, because I lived in Germany for 4 years from 2006-2009 and it wasn't like that at all. When I was in Germany, it was a bit of a mix between the 80's and now. But I enjoyed living in Germany all the same. :)
It was Germany and also the Netherlands but he was there pre-Internet. I think early 90s.
“I have a friend who reads the obituaries looking for fresh widowers before someone else gets to them. And all she requires is a penis and a pulse.”
—Hilma Wolitzer’s finely observed comedy of manners follows the romantic misadventures of recently widowed 62-year-old Edward Schuyler, who reenters the dating pool with a splash.
“They would assume immediately that you were from the hood. And the hood, in their mind, was a compilation of every single cop show, action movie that they’d ever seen in their lives. All these things were expected of us, like we would be great dancers. You would go to a discotheque and people would immediately form like a circle around us. And I’m like, ‘I’m not going to do anything worth watching. Stop looking at me. Just let me dance and not be looked at.’”
—Stew, On What Was Projected Onto Him When He Went To Europe
“You can’t explain why you like something. The bigger question for me was always to the people asking me to explain. [I’d say], ‘Why don’t you want to hear this?’ I love finding out why people don’t love things. And if you ask people why they don’t like things, particularly when they get into this sort of culture box, you find out that they’re not liking things because of what people are going to think about them, and not because of what the things actually sound like.”
—Stew, on how people like music or don’t like music because they think other people think they should like or dislike it.
